2021, issue 2
Politics of Solitude
Johan Hartle
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DOI Licence
Krisis 41 (2): 65-66.
10.21827/krisis.41.2.38244
652021, issue 2
Politics of Solitude
Johan Hartle
“For intellectuals, unswerving isolation [Einsamkeit] is the only form in which they
can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity. All of the playing along, all of the humanity of
interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity”
(§ 5). This is one of Adorno’s descriptions of damaged life in the fth aphorism of
his Minima Moralia. After having missed the historical moment for redemption and
reconciliation, the intellectual is, somewhat narcissistically, presented as the one who
preserves the universal idea of humanity, which nds itself betrayed by the logic of the
everyday, by the false concreteness of popular culture, and the ctitious reality of ordinary
people. The postulation is, however, not free of bad conscience. In the next aphorism,
entitled “Antithesis”, he suggests the exact opposite: by not participating, the intel -
lectual also demonstrates snobbishness, falsely assuming to be better than ‘regular’ folks.
The general attitude of distance and the loss of social embeddedness reects
the historical experience of exile. Every “intellectual in emigration,” Adorno writes, “is,
without exception, damaged”. Forced to emigrate from Germany under fascism, the
experience of deracination and solitude had fully inscribed itself into the intellectual
disposition of the rst-generation Critical Theorist. This experience of exile following
the historical rupture caused by the failure of the progressive working-class movement
and the rise of fascism, strengthened and transposed the feeling of loss into an epochal
historical perspective.
In this sense, the specic intellectual disposition and the gesture of critique that
Adorno suggests bears a strong historical signature. This connects Adorno’s thought
with various post-colonial perspectives (diaspora philosophy) and even with certain
minority politics (if they are critical about dominant milieus and not merely arming
specic identities); but there are also other, less historically contingent, conditions under
which the situation of the intellectual is characterized by estrangement, distance, and
solitude.Exile and emigration also appear as structural conditions for the position of
the intellectual.
For what, really, is an intellectual? In Adorno’s concept of the intellectual, the
idea of intellectual labor is characterized by various forms of separation, specically
the separation of manual and intellectual labor, and of popular and high culture. In a
functionalist understanding of the intellectual (most famously presented by Antonio
Gramsci: “All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of
intellectuals.”), the intellectual is constituted by her institutional role. In this light (which
is not explicitly present, but neither alien to Adorno’s account) intellectuals are formed
by their position in social institutions (such as universities, museums, concert halls,
theatres, public media etc.). In bourgeois societies, such institutions full general, public,
and potentially universal tasks. Thus, being constituted and subjectivated by such insti-
tutions, also means to represent these ideas, tasks, and societal norms. The intellectual
is, as such, a representative of humanism, and of the ction of bourgeois universalism.
This is where the antinomies of the intellectual, as an embodiment of the norms,
begin. Clearly, no one can possibly embody the universal (not the Sartrean universal
662021, issue 2
intellectual, for sure). But no intellectual can persist without this ction. Living by, and
according to this ction, thus means overcoming the gravity of particular interests,
of lobby groups, specic cultural milieus, lifestyles, and so forth. It is also in this light
that gures of distance, solitude, tactical alienation, and strong aects against “the nice
people, the popular ones, who are friends with all” (§ 3) play a decisive role in Adorno’s
collection of aphorisms.
Ever since the French revolution, so Claude Lefort and others have emphasized,
the idea of democracy (equality, universality) was based on the idea that the throne of
the king had to remain empty. The intellectual, as a personication of this aporetic idea
of universality as an empty seat,has this contradiction inscribed into herself: she cannot
be the esh of universality and thus has to think beyond herself to also leave her own
chair empty for an idea of universality that is yet to come, or is at least postponed. This
is the existential antinomy by which the intellectual lives, the antinomy that is inscribed
into her social role. Distance, estrangement from common life, from popular milieus
and mass culture, the solitude of the intellectual, is unavoidable still. She is diasporic and
in exile.
Such condition bears, however, as all estrangement, a messianic dream of rec-
oncilement: of the intellectual and the people, of the material organization of social life
and the universal claims and promises that bourgeois society have given for the past
250 years. She has to believe in the possibility of real universality and thus has to abstain
from “the toasts of cozy sociability”.
Johan Hartle is the dean of the Academy of Fine
Arts Vienna. He held professorships at the State
University for Arts and Design Karlsruhe, the
Academy of Fine Arts Münster/Westphalia, and the
China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. For several
years he taught philosophy of Arts and Culture at
the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His publications
include:Aesthetic Marx(London: Bloomsbury 2017,
edited, with Samir Gandesha),The Aging of Adorno‘s
Aesthetics(Milan: Mimesis 2021, edited with Samir
Gandesha and Stefano Marino).
Biography
