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