2021, issue 2 109
Conciliation ”Out of Sheer Egoism”
Rolando Vitali
In aphorism 97, Adorno states: “The individual owes his crystallization to the forms
of political economy, particularly to those of the urban market. Even as the opponent
of the pressure of socialization he remains the latter’s most particular product and its
likeness”. Particularly resonant today, this observation does not simply declare the dia-
lectical codetermination of the individual by the dynamic of the capitalistic economy
– an awareness present not only in Marx, but even in Hegel before him – it also points
at the contradictions within which even the dierent possible forms of resistance are
entangled in the context of our society. In fact, even “what enables him”, i.e. the indi-
vidual, “to resist […] springs from monadological individual interest and its precipitate,
character” (§ 97). How does this observation aect Adorno’s own political theory as
well as our present struggles?
The rst point to highlight is that Adorno clearly recognizes the social consti-
tution of the individual: the mediated character of its essence makes its objective eec-
tiveness on the political level illusory and misleading. But Adorno does not resort to a
collective subject either. Although Adorno substantially accepts the dialectical material-
ist interpretation of liberal society as a class-based society, he also traces the concept of
class back to bourgeois forms of individuation, stretched between a false totality and an
illusory particularity. In this sense, the concept of class itself is unveiled as an ideological
construct that merely “designates the unity in which particular bourgeois interests are
made real” (2003, 99). Class is a product of the division of labour and of class society
itself. This particularistic origin holds not only for the class of the exploiters, but also for
those of the exploited. As a result, the oppressed “are unable to experience themselves
as a class” and even those among them “who claim the name mean by it for the most
part their own particular interest in the existing state of aairs” (2003, 97). Individuals
and classes are thus equally predetermined by their social embeddedness, which makes
them, at the same time, products and functions of the existing social order. In both cases,
the possibility of resistance stems from individual interest, from the conditions of the
political economy.
Despite the apparent equivalence of the concepts of class and of the individual,
and despite the radical critique of the very presupposition of any form of individual
self-determination (“not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its exis-
tence in the most literal sense. All its content comes from society, or at any rate from
its relation to the object” (§ 97)), Adorno seems to assign an implicit primacy to the
individual: not only because, as we have seen, he explains both the concept of class and
the one of bourgeois, i.e. individualistic, subjectivation as results of modern political
economy, but also because when it comes to challenging the falseness of the totality
Adorno mostly resorts to individual resistance and not to collective organization. It is
only the irreducible nonidentity of the particularity that contradicts and thus resists the
false reconciliation of the totality. However, “individuality” is “not the ultimate either”
(2004, 161) and nonidentity must not be understoodas an ontological substance: both
only emerge within the dialectical process, i.e. as moments of the social totality. That