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Malignant Normality and the Dilemma of Resistance:
Honoring Minima Moralia
Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Normality is death. (§ 561)
Malignant normality: an inhumane social actuality that is “presented as normal,
all-encompassing, and unalterable.” (Lee 2017, xv), a term originally coined by Roberty
Jay Lifton for Auschwitz. But as Adorno says, “wherever the momentum of [the logic of
history] carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity.” And so, normality is death.
One of the many forms of death is the attening of the structure of the mind.
Adorno calls this the mutilation of the subject. The destruction of the dierence
between truth and lies by the Trump regime, for instance (Lifton).
If normality is death, terror sustains and enforces it. Adorno speaks of the
abolition of the distinction between sleeping and waking. Terror generates dreams that
are no dierent from nightmares: in 1934 Charlotte Beradt records a dreamer testifying
to the destruction of the dierence between interior and exterior. In his dream, the
dreamer says “I looked around, horried, and all the dwellings around, as far as the
eye can see, no longer have walls.” (1966, 25; my translation). The distinction between
reality and nightmare is eliminated along with walls. Individual nightmare and collec-
tive malignancy are two sides of the same thing.
All-encompassing terror creates the sense that the malignant normality is indeed
all-encompassing and inescapable: “just the way things are.” Language – the capacity to
articulate experience and to think about it – falls victim to this terror, mutilating itself.
In 1933 a woman dreams that in her sleep she speaks a language she does not know, “so
that I won’t understand myself and so no one can understand me, in case I say some-
thing about the state, because that is of course forbidden and has to be reported.” (Beradt
1966, 56; my translation). Currently, we struggle to make meaning with corporate-speak,
a facsimile of language that defeats meaning at every turn.
Language and the attened mind cooperate to create versions of denial, main-
taining the semblance of normality in a malignant situation, from the “doubling”
(Lifton) in which a special personality is created to allow sta to endure the malignant
normality of Auschwitz, to the corporate insistence on “deniability”. Stanley Cohen
details some of the ways language can be perverted into accounts that serve to justify or
excuse and thereby deny atrocities: It can be used to deny responsibility for the actions,
to deny that injury was done, to deny that victims are victims and not perpetrators, to
condemn those who condemn the atrocities, and to appeal to alleged higher ends that
would justify the actions (2001, 60-61).
The terror of malignant normality induces not only the sense that it is
all-encompassing, but the sense that it is unalterable – and dangerous to even think that
it could be otherwise. In this situation, Cohen remarks, the question may be not so much
why we resort to denial but why do we ever not do so? (2001, 248). With Minima Moralia
in mind, we may pose the same question about resistance: The question is not so much how
entanglement in malignant normality comes about but how it is ever possible to resist it?
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Resistance must be possible, for malignant normality’s claim to constitute the
totality of reality is not tenable. It is an illusion propagated by the forces of malignancy;
an absolute totality is a contradiction in terms. Resistance would consist in the mutilated
subject’s struggle for self-reection on its own entanglement in malignant normality –
reection from, in Adorno’s formulation, the “perspective of redemption” which would
“displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent
and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light” (§ 153).
But here is the dilemma of resistance: it is virtually impossible to disentangle
oneself enough to achieve a standpoint removed “even by a hair’s breadth” (§ 153)
from what is, and whatever is gained in the struggle will necessarily be distorted by the
status quo, the all-encompassing malignant normality from which it has been wrested.
Anything gained in that struggle will be not something abstract and pure but merely the
humble, contingent, confused, naive pain of a subject sensing betrayal.
Rather than the perspective of ‘redemption’ – in these days a suspect word - we
might speak of something akin to it: the mutilated subject’s struggle for a perspective
animated by ‘moral injury’, a term hitherto used for the anguish of combat veterans
suering from the betrayal of their moral values. Moral injury, with its experience of
outrage and shame, acknowledges the world as indigent and distorted from the perspec-
tive of what would have been “right”, resisting a malignant normality by acknowledg-
ing damaged life.
Beradt, Charlotte. 1966. Das Dritte Reich des Traums.
Munich: Nymphenburger.
Cohen, Stanley. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about
Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge (UK): Polity.
Lee, Bandy (ed.). 2017. The Dangerous Case of Donald
Trump, foreword by Robert Jay Lifton. New
York: St. Martin’s.
Biography
Acknowledgements
Notes
1
Based on my “Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Malignant
Normality and the Dilemmas of Resistance,” in
Critical Theory: Past, Present, Future, edited by
Anders Bartonek and Sven-Olov (2021, Wallenstein,
Stockholm: Soedertoern).
Unless otherwise indicated, quotations come
from the NLB edition of Minima Moralia (1974),
translated by E.F.N. Jephcott.
References
Shierry Weber Nicholsen is a psychoanalyst in
private practice in Seattle. She is the translator of
Adorno’s Notes to Literature and Hegel:Three Studies,
and the author of Exact Imagination, Late Work: On
Adorno’s Aesthetics. She is currently working on a
bookon moral injury.
