2021, issue 2

Conciliation ”Out of Sheer Egoism”

Rolando Vitali

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Krisis 41 (2): 109-111.

10.21827/krisis.41.2.38279

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 dierent 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 aect 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 eec-

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 aairs” (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 understoodas an ontological substance: both

only emerge within the dialectical process, i.e. as moments of the social totality. That

1102021, issue 2

is why “he who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize

its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its

most hidden recesses” (“Dedication”). Yet, not only do both the concept of nonidentity

and that of the individual share a common (and indelible) moment of immediacy, but

“the substance of the contradiction between universal and particular is that individual-

ity is not yet – and that, therefore, it is bad wherever established” (2004, 151). Dominion

is rst and foremost described as the false identication with totality of the irreducible

individual – i.e. the forced subsumption of the qualitative non-identical particularity

under the dominion of the universal – and not as the class violence of the few exerted

over the many. In this sense it is qualitative particularity, and not the collective subject,

that can allow the possibility of a reconciled totality to emerge.

Adorno is well aware that both contradictions cannot be resolved on a purely

theoretical level: only true praxis would be capable of resolving them. However, since

the necessary presupposition of praxis – i.e. subjectivity – is in both cases unveiled as a

product of the false totality, then praxis primarily means critical self-reection: this alone

can set free the nonidentity within the falseness of identity. Theory and praxis thus over-

turn into one another: the only possible praxis seems to be theoretical self-reection,

able to reveal nonidentity within the false identity.

To face this dialectical paradox, we might do well to address it dialectically:

this Sackgasse can be considered as both true and false at the same time. True, insofar

as it conceptually deduces the objective impossibility of “true praxis” from the con-

tradictions within which all forms of individuation (both singular and collective) are

entangled; false, insofar as from the untruth of praxis in the given conditions it deduces

its impossibility as praxis. The recognition of its moment of untruth does not necessarily

imply its integral falseness. Individual resistance can become true even if it is codeter-

mined by the dynamic of political economy. Even more so, the collective struggles of

the subaltern classes – such as those for better working conditions – are not reducible

to a corporatist defense of particular interests. In fact, both would require overcoming

our current mode of production to be truly fullled. Even in their untruthfulness, both

individual distress and collective needs include a moment of truth that points beyond

their particularity. Is it then that true universality can be envisioned by following dia-

lectically the particular need – both individual and collective – to its most radical con-

sequences? As Engels wrote to Marx with regard to Stirner, the “egoistic man is bound

to become communist out of sheer egoism” (Engels 1982, 12), just as the working class

can overcome class society only out of sheer self-interest.

1112021, issue 2

Rolando Vitali has studied philosophy at the

Universities of Bologna and Berlin. Between 2017

and 2017 he has been fellow in residence at the

Nietzsche-Kolleg in Weimar and in 2019 research

fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici

in Naples. At the Friedrich Schiller Universität in

Jena, in partnership with the University of Bologna,

he has discussed his doctoral thesis entitled Macht

und Form - Individualität und ästhetische Kathegorien

in der Philosophie Nietzsches. He writes regularly

on Italian newspapers such as Alias, the cultural

supplement of Il Manifesto. His interests focus on

German philosophy and culture, modern aesthetics

and Frankfurt’s critical theory.

Biography

Adorno, Theodor W. 2003. “Reflections on Class

Theory.” In Can One Live after Auschwitz?,

edited by Rolf Tiedemann translated by

Rodney Livingstone and others. Stanford:

Stanford University Press.

Adorno, Theodor W. 2004. Negative Dialectic. London:

Routledge.

Engels, Friedrich. 1982. “Letter of Friedrich Engels

to Karl Marx, 19 November 1844.” In Friedrich

Engels and Karl Marx, Marx & Engels Collected

Works. Vol. 38. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

References