Adorno and Extreme Evil

04 Hammer (jr/d) 15/5/00 12:17 pm Page 75
Espen Hammer
Adorno and extreme evil
Abstract By comparing Adorno’s conception of evil with those of Kant

and Levinas, it is argued that the commitment to a notion of materialist
transcendence, which Adorno introduces as a philosophical response to
Auschwitz, is compatible with an equally strong commitment to philo-
sophical modernity and autonomy. Whereas Kant’s moral theology, on the
one hand, proceeds in a too immanent fashion, and Levinas’s heterology,
on the other, in seeking to explode ontology, denies the conditions of
thought’s rational responsiveness, Adorno succeeds in combining the quest
for radical otherness with an idealist interpretation of modernity.
Key words Adorno · Auschwitz · evil · Kant · Levinas · metaphysics ·
modernity · moral theology · transcendence
Roberto Benigni’s recent film Life is Beautiful tells the story of a Jewish
father in Auschwitz who saves his son from the gas chambers by con-
tinuously fooling him to think that it is all just one vast practical joke.
By successfully imagining the horrors of the extermination camp as
taking place on a stage, as being the object of laughter and even reluc-
tant joy (as if he witnessed not brutal guards and perpetrators but a
group of stand-up comedians doing their sets), the boy gains strength
and courage – and survives. What saves him is the complete theatrical-
ization of evil: the performance of an epoché, to use Husserl’s expres-
sion, whereby objective reality is staunchly denied. Within the history of
cinematic dramatizations of the Holocaust, Benigni’s feel-good movie
stands out as perhaps the most naive and therefore most inadequate
attempt to depict life (and death) in Auschwitz. What caused my unease
was not the implicit claim that denial itself is an understandable response
to evil (then this is something that Primo Levi and others have reported
to be a fact about the camps), but rather the notion that doing so actually
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 26 no 4 • pp. 75–93

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Copyright © 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (4)
works, and without remainder: Auschwitz will disappear if only we close
our eyes and laugh hard enough.
Another and more sympathetic way of viewing the film would be to
see it as commenting on us – the spectators, the inhabitants of the post-
Auschwitz world – when, as Adorno points out, the sheer sense of con-
tinuity, of going on, undoubtedly calls for a certain theatricalization of
horror, or what he in the final chapter of Negative Dialectics refers to as
‘bourgeois coldness’.1 For the writer of the chapter on the culture indus-
try in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, bourgeois coldness may manifest
itself as the coldness of laughter,2 yet, more generally, it may also mean
the coldness of untransformed culture itself, including philosophy,
which, according to Adorno, has failed to respond properly to the sense
that the world after Auschwitz, both morally, theologically, politically
and philosophically, is radically different from the previous one. The
event of Auschwitz demands a commitment to Enlightenment ideals (to
human rights, formal democracy, constitutionalism and so on), yet it
also requires a radical self-critique of that same culture within which
those ideals have been sought and implemented. In order to understand
better how he works this double movement, I want to look closer at
Adorno’s conditional defense of Kant’s moral theology, and in particu-
lar the invocation of a transfigured conception of transcendence as a way
of confronting the claim for radical immanence represented by
Auschwitz and post-Auschwitz culture. By briefly comparing Adorno’s
materialistic inscription of transcendence to Levinas’s structurally
similar conception of transcendent infinity (which is also conceived of
as an ethically informed response to the violence of war and totali-
tarianism), I shall argue that Adorno offers a way of reclaiming tran-
scendence which dialectically seeks to complete the Enlightenment
project of self-reassurance, the drive to realize idealism and autonomy,
rather than debunking it. If this is at all conceivable, then the conjecture
will be that Adorno’s project provides resources for carving out a con-
ceptual space beyond the sterile opposition between post-metaphysical
immanentism and ultra-metaphysical transcendentism which today
seems to dominate contemporary ‘continental’ debates in moral and
political theory.
I
Adorno’s vision of extreme or radical moral evil,3 which takes its in-
spiration from Hegel’s dialectic of absolute freedom and death in the
Phenomenology of Spirit, is, when indexed to the event of Auschwitz
(or similar events for which Auschwitz might be seen as emblematic),
as simple as it is terrifying.4 Given the condition of a totalized
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Hammer: Adorno and extreme evil
enlightenment that Horkheimer and Adorno analyze in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, i.e. of a compulsory repetition of the same that has taken
on mythical proportions and become destiny, genocide is equivalent to
the effectuation of a total reduction of the individuality of the individual
– of the principium individuationis – to its generic concept.5 Thus
Adorno characterizes genocide as ‘absolute integration’, a process
whereby ‘the last, the poorest possession left to the individual is expro-
priated’.6 When the death of the individual, which then is accomplished,
or about to be accomplished (indeed pure identity is death), is perceived
and treated as entirely indistinguishable from the death of any other
member of one’s own arbitrary category (and therefore as completely
exchangeable), it thereby becomes a matter of sheer indifference. In
Hegel’s famous expression, the death of an individual reduced to pure
identity and devoid of all substance is ‘thus the coldest and meanest of
deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or
swallowing a mouthful of water’.7 Since on this account the grounds for
identifying the sufferers (and hence for assessing their worth) were
conceived of in total independence of the actual person in view,
strictly speaking the immediately affected victims of the administrated
mass killings were not, Adorno argues, individuals, but specimens, i.e.
samples or instances of a class, genus, or whole, where only the universal
counted as ground for assessment.8
Now the idea that ‘it was no longer an individual who died, but a
specimen’9 seems disturbingly ambiguous as between meaning that the
victims were treated as if they were not unique and irreplaceable indi-
viduals (such that one important form of resistance would be to protect
one’s sense of being a unique person) and meaning that the Endlösung
implied that the perpetrators succeeded in eradicating every possible per-
spective, including both the first-person perspective and the perspective
of later generations, from which the victims could be viewed in terms of
any other characteristic but their corresponding generic concept (i.e.
their strict identity with other victims). From what we know about the
Holocaust, the first interpretation, which we may call a perspectivist
conception, seems prone (like Benigni) to make us underestimate the
efficiency of mechanisms of depersonalization in the camps and is in-
consistent, moreover, with Adorno’s emphasis on the absoluteness of
integration (his stress on the absence of any remainder); the second,
which we may call a realist conception, is consistent with the absolute-
ness claim but is almost unbearably provocative, since it seems to call
into question our deep-seated intuition that those who died, even though
they were not considered as such by the perpetrators, were indeed singu-
lar human beings with a unique and unexchangeable history and iden-
tity. Furthermore, the realist interpretation grotesquely obscures the
self-evidence with which most of us morally condemn the perpetrators,
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for what is there to condemn if no individual died? Would not the realist
thesis exemplify precisely the terrible arrogation of philosophy (in all its
idealist permutations) that Adorno elsewhere persistently seeks to
undo?10
One possible way of continuing to engage with Adorno on this point
consists in once more recalling its Hegelian inspiration. Adorno does opt
for a claim to absoluteness or universality – not the absoluteness of meta-
physical realism, though, but the absoluteness of Hegelian or idealist
determination. By that I mean a determination that – although on its
own terms it can be shown to be radically incoherent or self-stultifying
(and hence self-defeating) and thus requiring, as we shall see, a supple-
ment – does pose (however abstractly and violently) a claim to concep-
tually exhaust the worldhood of the world: the extermination camp is a
world unto itself – a world of pure evil – but this could not be seen for
what it is, namely a claim, or, as Hegel would say, an appearance, i.e.
something not necessarily true or beyond reproach an sich, unless one
could also show that this world is illegitimately dirempted between uni-
versal and particular, or between specimen and suffering individual.
Auschwitz ironically realizes Hegel’s claim for absoluteness on the part
of each formation of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit: it
presents a world of immanence, paradoxically devoid of exteriority,
where neither past nor future can be said to exist. And yet, since the pure
absorption of non-identity is unthinkable – its negativity would not be
recognizable – we are required morally and philosophically to take full
account of the concrete suffering of the individual, which for Adorno,
as we shall see, calls for a materialist turn. Adorno’s position thus
anxiously locates itself somewhere in between the perspectivist and
the realist thesis. Its aim, it seems, is to avoid both the Scylla of disre-
garding the consequences of totalitarian practices for the individual and
the Charybdis of being unable to account for the non-identity of the
victim.
Adorno’s claim that death in (and even after) Auschwitz has become
meaningless as a result of the absence of an epic continuity in life, an
absence which itself is caused by mechanisms of depersonalization, rein-
forces the seriousness with which he wants to emphasize that the indi-
vidual in the camps was threatened in its innermost core, and that to
think otherwise would be hideously to fail to do justice to the experi-
ences of the victims. This comes out particularly well in his critique of
Heidegger.11 As opposed to Heidegger’s heroic conception of death,
according to which an authentic Sein zum Tode is a way of relating to
one’s own death or nothingness as one of a possibility for radical indi-
viduation, for resolutely taking over the whole of one’s own Dasein,
what Adorno confronts us with is the idea that death has become void
of all meaning and incapable of functioning as a resource of meaning,
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because strictly speaking there is no ‘whole of Dasein’, no sufficient
continuity and ego-identity, left for death to possibly be my death.12 In
quoting the SS guard’s remark to one of the inmates in Auschwitz that
is mentioned by Eugen Kogon in his Der SS-Staat – ‘Tomorrow you’ll
be wiggling skyward as smoke from this chimney’13 – his point seems
not only to emphasize the satanic transformation of transcendent
meaning into immanent and radical non-meaning, but to illustrate the
indifference and replaceability of each individual life that is the flipside
of the industrialized mass-murder itself. In Auschwitz, biological death
is nothing but the deprived life in extremis, which means that death is
no longer the worst to be feared; it would only be the worst if life were
the highest good, but when all possibility and indeed the very possibility
of possibility seems absent from the suffering individual’s life, then life
itself – projected onto a context of pure immanence – seems inseparable
from death. And again, the less life is lived (in terms of an epic conti-
nuity), the more incomprehensible death becomes.
According to Adorno, the comprehensive guilt-context with which
the event of Auschwitz has left modernity turns all forms of affirmative
metaphysical or theological stances, in an attempt to counter the loss of
meaning, into a mockery of the victims: ‘After Auschwitz there is no
word tinged from high, not even a theological one, that has any right
unless it underwent a transformation.’14 Qua historical phenomenon,
however, Auschwitz has not only changed the ultimate conditions under
which we may grasp our existence; it has also in effect countered the
Judeo-Christian and Platonic privileging of the immutable over the
transitory. If imprisonment in self-preservation is equivalent to im-
prisonment in immanence and hence the immutable, then affirming
immutability, even as a transcendent value, would mean perpetuating the
claim for radical immanence. From Adorno’s perspective, contemporary
‘post-metaphysical’ (hermeneutic, pragmatist, linguistic) philosophy is in
this respect reacting adequately insofar as it seeks to resist all meta-
physical hypostatizations and to defend the historicity and finitude of
meaning and truth. Yet Adorno’s challenge is that post-metaphysical
philosophy is not post-metaphysical enough. By discarding immutabil-
ity and transcendence but without questioning the claim for radical
immanence itself, a claim Auschwitz irretrievably has shown to have
failed, it is not sufficiently alive to ways of thinking transcendence that
would escape the charge of being affirmative. Adorno can therefore say
that ‘The advocates of metaphysics’ in the Judeo-Christian or Platonic
sense of transcendence ‘argue in unison with the pragmatism they hold
in contempt, with the pragmatism that dissolves metaphysics a priori’.15
For Adorno, the historically indexed fact that the quest for a totally
disenchanted and radical immanence has failed on its own terms engen-
ders the need for a rethinking of metaphysics (ein Nachdenken über
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Metaphysik). Such a rethinking, however, would not be aiming at a
rehabilitation of a metaphysics of the immutable. Its claim would rather
be for a metaphysics of that which escapes or transcends immutability,
namely the transitory and mobile. Put differently, metaphysics rethought
would mean materialism.
Attesting to the need to defend particularity, Adorno refers the
motive of materialism to the inescapable ‘bodily sensation’ of practical
abhorrence at the ‘unbearable physical agony’16 to which individuals in
the camps were exposed. A moral vocabulary which from the outset
excluded all reference to the mimetic acknowledgment of actual suffer-
ing as irrelevant to moral assessment would be a vocabulary which
would have failed to respond properly to this sensation. Responding
properly means for Adorno to confront rationalized and disenchanted
morality with its incompleteness – an incompleteness in need of a
materialist supplement. But in the endeavor to be responsive to the
‘metaphysical deficit’ of contemporary culture and philosophy, in ad-
dition to his call for a metaphysical and materialist reinterpretation of
moral imperatives as such, Adorno also conducts an immanent critique
(or perhaps I should rather say a qualified defense) of Kant’s moral
theology, a critique to which I now want to turn.
II
In his reading of Kant, Adorno repeatedly expresses the view that tran-
scendental idealism represents the philosophical articulation of what he
otherwise calls identitarian thinking. By restricting possible experience
to the exploration of the empirical world under laws, and by hyposta-
tizing a set of self-ascribed, formal principles of thought according to
which that experience of lawfulness is made possible, Kant’s epistem-
ology legislates radical immanence and immutability as the condition for
knowledge. As an epitome of all forms of reification, thought, as con-
ceived in the first Critique, is a priori indexed to its self-maintained iden-
tity with the object, whereas the particularity of the object – its
historicity, integrity, non-identity and relation to other objects – gets
reduced to a set of ahistorical, categorical abstractions. Behind the tran-
scendental apperception’s abstractive claims to necessity and universal-
ity, the marks of its absolute functionality, stands for Adorno the naked
will to self-preservation: ‘The definition of the transcendental as that
which is necessary, a definition added to functionality and generality,
expresses the principle of the self-preservation of the species. It provides
a legal basis for abstraction, which we cannot do without, for abstrac-
tion is the medium of self-preserving reason.’17
Whereas the faculty of understanding is constitutive of objective
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knowledge, reason, defined as the capacity to reduce, by means of logical
inference, a manifold of judgments to ‘the smallest number of principles
(universal conditions) and thereby to achieve in it the highest possible
unity’,18 does not produce objective knowledge. Reason seeks the uncon-
ditioned condition of everything that is conditioned; it can therefore
immanently serve a heuristic purpose; but since all it does is to infer from
principles or propositions whose objective validity has not as such been
questioned, its categorical, hypothetical and disjunctive inferences
(which respectively offer the logical framework of each of the rational-
ist discourses of Metaphysica specialis (Psychologia rationalis, Cos-
mologia rationalis and Theologia rationalis) may also be used
transcendently. If so, however, they yield nothing but illusion (Schein)
the identification and critique of which is the task of the transcendental
dialectic. Our inherent tendency to employ reason in a transcendent
sense must be curbed by reminding ourselves of the conditions of pos-
sible knowledge, which, as we have seen, is extensionally equivalent to
demonstrating a priori that only the understanding is capable of yield-
ing objective knowledge.
The message of the first Critique, then, the critique of pure reason
and the investigation of theoretical knowledge, is one of immanence tri-
umphing over transcendence. In Adorno’s angry phrases it means the
triumph of ‘narrow selfrighteousness’ and ‘the idyll of the petty bour-
geois’ over any part of cognition or experience that does not bow to the
demands of abstraction.19 Moreover, since this hegemonic relation by
Kant is interpreted not as a historical achievement but as an absolute or
a priori predicament, Adorno, in order to characterize the Kantian
diremption between the mundus intelligibilis and the mundus sensibilis,
uses the term ‘block‘ (or even more tellingly: ‘a system of stop signals’).20
The ban on experiencing the non-identical, the transcendent, is in his
view terroristic. The greatness of Kant’s philosophy, though, is that
Kant, implicitly at least, seems to have been aware, Adorno suggests, of
the totalitarian implications of the first Critique, but without seeking to
overcome the diremption between immanence and transcendence.
Why? When turning to practical philosophy, Kant discovers what
Adorno calls the ‘unthinkability of despair’.21 At stake here is Kant’s
realization that strictly universalist, rationalized morality, if projected
onto the order of pure immanence prescribed by the understanding in
the first Critique, would be self-canceling, the occasion of unrelieved and
unconditional despair, and that it therefore calls for the postulation of
an order that transcends that of the understanding. The operative
assumption is that Kant’s universalism, which focuses on self-resolved
duty as the commitment to act out of respect for the law as law, requires
that happiness, including incentives based on the striving for self-
realization or attachments to concrete others, must be excluded from the
82
set of morally praiseworthy motivations. As Kant argues in the Critique
of Practical Reason, a good person may seek to make himself worthy of
happiness but should not seek happiness as such. In Habermas’s neo-
Kantian discourse ethics, the logic of moral reason and the logic of
ethical reason – the universalist logic of what is morally acceptable for
all considered as free and equal and the particularist logic of ethical self-
realization and fulfilment – are a priori held apart as incommensurable
forms of discourse; the two are quasi-transcendentally divided, and there
simply can be no match between them. A notorious problem that arises
for such a theory is the extreme difficulty of accounting for moral moti-
vation. Indeed, moral motivation, if shorn of all empirical inclination,
stands in danger of draining cognitive morality of some of its most
precious resources: love, compassion, forgiveness, sacrifice, etc., which
Habermas interprets as belonging to the arena of non-cognitive partic-
ularism. In the dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason, upon dis-
cussing the concept of the summum bonum (defined as happiness in
proportion with the morality of the agent who is thereby rendered
worthy of it22), Kant acknowledges the diremption of worthiness to be
happy and happiness as a diremption, and therefore as two domains that
while actually (de facto) being separated (in the moral order of this
world), in fact speculatively (de jure) belong together. Although a good
person cannot expect or demand happiness, a life in which it would
make no sense even to hope that virtue one day will be rewarded (or at
least that the question of reward is not wholly left to chance), would be
a life in which the interests of pure practical reason of bringing about
the unity of the moral and the natural world which is speculatively
contained in the concept of the summum bonum would be radically dis-
satisfied. A world in which the wicked continuously prospers and the
virtuous victim continuously suffers (a world well realized in Auschwitz)
would seem so deformed and depraved (our sense of it as even counting
as a moral world would be so weakened) that acting justly would seem
entirely in vain, if not mad or irrational; indeed, it would seem to have
no purpose whatsoever.23 In order therefore to safeguard practical
reason from despair, Kant argues that practical reason’s interest in the
summum bonum can only be satisfied by postulating the existence of an
intelligible world in which the morally worthy, now considered immor-
tal, may hope to achieve happiness in an order prescribed by a benevo-
lent God.
As opposed to Hegel’s more cheerful belief that the diremption
between virtue and happiness can be overcome (if not in reality, then at
least in thought), the significance of Kant for Adorno, as I have already
intimated, consists in his insistence on the aporetic character of this
diremption. In the chapter on ‘Morality’ in the Phenomenology of
Spirit, Hegel roughly argues that Kantian moral philosophy generates
83
antinomies which stem from the incompatibility of the requirement that
an action be motivated by duty alone if it is to possess moral worth, with
the conditions of the possibility of agency. To the extent that pursuing
any determinate end is necessarily to act from something other than pure
duty, and where this other can only be particular interests, desires or
inclinations of the agent, the attempt to protect one’s sense of purity as
a moral agent prevents one from acting at all. The pietist alienation of
moral agents exclusively concerned with their interior life from concrete
concerns and attachments in a socio-historical setting needs to be over-
come in a moral order based on mutual recognition and confession of
guilt.24 Adorno’s complaint against Hegel, however, is that post-
Auschwitz culture (with regard to the camps) indeed has no place or role
to assign to the logic of confession and forgiveness. The Holocaust
cannot be compensated for. It cannot be integrated dialectically as the
self-overcoming of culture’s own extreme self-estrangement. Its specific
form of evil remains beyond dialectics. Morally, Auschwitz means the
prevailing of injustice: injustice wins. But since no reforms or actions in
themselves will ever do justice to the dead, it means that post-Auschwitz
moderns have to accept the diremption of ethical life as being of a strictly
aporetic nature. It means that all ‘passages to affirmation’25 must be dis-
dained.
III
Although Adorno praises Kant for having uncovered the aporetic struc-
ture of the diremption between moral worth and happiness, he refuses
to adopt the hypostatization of the opposition between the mundus
intelligibilis and the mundus sensibilis. For as Hegel argues, on the
Kantian construction, the achievement of happiness in deserved pro-
portion to virtue can never be but a matter of sheer moral luck. Since
the immanentist logic of the understanding legislates for all possible
experience, the postulated instruments of the summum bonum (God and
the immortality of the soul) are located in a beyond which blinds us to
the historically produced limitations of experience implied by the logic
of the understanding. The consequence of this is that Kant, who rejects
softening the distinction between the sensible world of the understand-
ing and the intelligible world of reason, fails to see that it is precisely the
unflinching rejection of such an option that forces the harmonization of
the sensible and the intelligible, duty and happiness, into a transcendent
and unreachable beyond. However, if such a harmonization transcen-
dentally is unthinkable within history (although radically denied by the
course of history), then the unthinkability of despair which drove Kant
to theologically supplement his moral doctrine indeed seems to return
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us to despair. The disdaining of affirmation must therefore be thought
of not as the work of implicitly affirming the understanding’s require-
ment that the sensible and the intelligible can only be harmonized in a
purely intelligible (and hence imaginary) world, thus accepting the
unmitigated hegemony of the understanding, but as the self-negation or
unworking of the understanding itself. The concept of the intelligible
must in other words be reinterpreted as that which is hidden from the
disfigurative operations of the finite mind.
Within the framework of Kantian philosophy, the fundamental
assumption that knowledge has limits, or conditions, produces the sense
that something – Kant calls it variously the thing-in-itself, noumena or
simply X – necessarily escapes these conditions. To hope against reason
means for Adorno to redeem the claim for externality contained in
Kant’s distinction between the conditions of the order of things as they
appear and the conditions of the order of things as they are in them-
selves – not by following Kant in a priori abandoning the possibility of
experiential transcendence, nor by following Hegel in dialectically
seeking to sublate the distinction between the two orders, but by ma-
terialistically reinscribing the transcendent as a moment of possible
experience in which we figure ourselves as allowing a release of nature
from our limited holds. To adequately respond to the ‘metaphysical
need’ arising from the immanence for which Auschwitz stands as the
consummation, thought has to be conceived of as capable of being
answerable to an objectivity ‘beyond all making’.26 Adorno calls such
an experience metaphysical. Contained as a promise of happiness in
Proustian forms of involuntary remembrance or other types of sudden
disruptions of the continuity of time-experience, it may occur, he sug-
gests, as the experience of the proper and unique in connection with
certain village names. The sense he invokes is that of a fulfilment of one’s
very existence occasioned by nothing but the emphatic particularity of
a single experience (or set of experiences). In order to reinforce its excep-
tionality and perhaps even impossibility, Adorno here explicitly draws
on biblical formulations. At its most materialistic, he argues, ‘material-
ism comes to agree with theology. Its great desire would be the resur-
rection of the flesh, a desire utterly foreign to idealism, the realm of the
absolute spirit.’27
While echoing Kant’s postulate of immortality, Adorno’s hope for a
transfigured body is not that of an indefinite temporal extension of the
individual mind in a sphere beyond the senses (which in effect would
reproduce the fateful juxtaposition of the sensible and the intelligible),
but of a transfiguration of the temporality of compulsive repetition itself,
such that what is now only an abstract potentiality in the existing con-
figuration of what is, can become real. Of course, as Kant would be the
first to remind us, the intelligibility of such a metaphysical experience
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does not mean that it refers to, or is of, an object which is empirically
real. The child in Proust, Adorno immediately adds, is mistaken: no
village is going to accomplish the promise contained in its name. The
experience of the transcendent can offer only a semblance of transcen-
dence, yet this semblance, as Kant also knew, is, however transitory, a
necessary semblance (or illusion). Escaping the aporetic duality of the
imaginary and the real, it is a semblance which arises out of the double
impossibility opened up by Kant’s theory of the intelligible: that on the
one hand, agents are imprisoned in the bad infinity of immanence, and
on the other, the vision of transcendence inevitably reproduces the ideal-
istic assumptions (the separation of the sensual and intellectual realms)
in favor of the block. But then the question becomes: how can the res-
cuing urge (Begierde des Rettens), or drive towards redemption, which
underlies the sense of the unthinkability of despair, be elicited in prac-
tices that are entitled to be viewed as more binding than the epiphanic
occasions of Proustian remembrance?
For Adorno, the production and reception of aesthetic semblance,
particularly in the form of modernist art practices, is the paradigmatic
way in which the materialist transformation of metaphysical illusion can
be sustained. As a species of necessary semblance, and therefore both
‘objective’ and illusory, art promises non-semblance.28 Contesting the
understanding’s concepts of possibility and potentiality, the advanced
modern work of art, Adorno argues, is capable of transcending – albeit
negatively, by revealing rifts in the negative totality – what are imma-
nently taken to be the parameters of possible experience. All of Adorno’s
late efforts to provide an aesthetic theory culminate in the thesis that the
work of art can present a semblant particular as if real, i.e. as if calling
for a radical transfiguration of the horizon of empirical intelligibility.
The work’s ethical implication then amounts to the offering of an antici-
pation of a redeemed ethical life – one through which the diremption of
abstract universality and indigent particular, virtue and happiness, can
be ascertained for what it is, namely the expression of a negative total-
ity for which neither progressive mourning nor repetitious melancholy
can ever constitute the exact right reaction. Adorno’s hope is paradoxi-
cal – a hope that lives on by denying itself the possibility of ever coming
true.
IV
I would now like to leave the terrain of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, the
charting of which would entirely exceed my aspirations in this essay, and
instead turn to another and in many respects surprisingly similar con-
tribution to ‘the problem of evil’, namely that of Emmanuel Levinas.29
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In an article from 1978 entitled ‘Transcendence and Evil’, which
addresses the problem of evil and the question of its possible metaphys-
ical supplement, Levinas, who uses the Book of Job (rather than
Auschwitz)30 as his primary frame of reference for consulting the experi-
ence of unredeemed, unjustifiable suffering, characterizes evil in terms
of the notion of excess.31 In the anguish and being-unto-death caused by
the manifestation or threat of extreme evil (especially in its carnal acute-
ness, in which physical pain expressly signifies the innate corruptibility
of living flesh), what Job encounters, according to Levinas, is the irre-
vocable anonymity (impersonality, indifference and neutrality) of his
own being. Confronted with the agonizing sense of anonymity and
decay, the excessiveness of evil (the conceptual outline of which bears
undeniable traces of his better-known analysis of the il y a) consists in
its capacity to exceed or undermine the boundaries of human identity
itself – ‘a gnawing away of human identity’,32 as Levinas puts it – which
ultimately faces Job with his own nothingness. Thus evil, by erasing all
possible identification, negation and predication, signifies the end of
Job’s world and therefore, philosophically, the end of ontology (defined
as the study of the worldhood of the world as the correlate of intentional
Sinngebung).
As in Adorno’s ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’, the transcendence of
evil is here paradoxically understood as a function of its excess of same-
ness, i.e. of the identitarian order of the Same and of totality which
Levinas in the preface to Totality and Infinity associates with the imma-
nence of war (the antithesis of the opening towards the Other of moral
consciousness). An even more astonishing similarity, however, is that the
experience of evil, the horror of evil, has as its counterpart or reversal
the association with a transcendence that reaffirms one’s being as unique
and exceptional.33 Evil summons Job to the individualizing effects of a
You, a God who eclipses being, and who addresses him as a singular
individual. Since evil is marked by its wholly-otherness (tout-altérité),
however, the Good cannot for Levinas amount to a dialectical reversal
of evil. If it had been such a reversal, then evil could not have been con-
ceptualized as preceding being, in which case evil would have been
located within the realm of immanence. Like Adorno, Levinas is not
seeking to offer a dialectical theodicy à la Hegel. Evil cannot be negated
and overcome dialectically. Levinas’s conception of the reversal draws
rather on the idea of the unthinkability of despair that we have already
encountered in Kant and Adorno: ‘A last reversal of the analysis: evil
strikes me in my horror of evil and thus reveals – or is already – my
association with the Good. The excess of evil by which it is in surplus
to the world is also the impossibility of our accepting it. The experience
of evil would thus also be our waiting for the good – the love of God.’34
How is the modality of the disturbance of the Same by the Other to
87
be thought? What is the proper and original modality of the unto-God
(à-Dieu)? Interestingly, Levinas exposes this problem by turning to
Kant’s notion of a transcendental illusion.35 Again, like Adorno, Levinas
argues that Kant, by distinguishing idea and concept, reason and under-
standing, discovered the need to operate with meanings that escape being
(or transcendence), but that the transcendental ideas are treated pejora-
tively, i.e. in the end as illusory, because Kant’s quasi-scientific criteria
of intelligibility prevent him from assigning to metaphysical desire a
possible object. The task therefore becomes not to return to a set of pre-
critical epistemic claims, which would have amounted to making God
an object of ontology, but, as in Adorno, to ‘dim’ the alternation between
the real and the illusory.36 As opposed to Adorno, however, Levinas does
not propose that we call the third term ‘necessary semblance’. Instead
he employs the Kantian expression (from the third Critique) ‘dis-inter-
ested-ness’ to characterize our waiting for the Good (of God) but
without giving further hints as to exactly why he prefers this particular
term. Now, by disinterested pleasure, Kant is ordinarily taken to mean
an orientation towards an object which is neither empirical (based on
interest) nor moral. In the state of disinterested pleasure it is not the
existence of the object I care for (its actual existence is a matter of indif-
ference to me) but rather the pleasure I take in contemplating the way
it appears to me (its sheer form). In disinterested pleasure I relate to the
object in the modality of the as if: I judge the object without subsuming
it under given concepts, and I do so as if it objectively is purposive in
relation to my cognitive capacity. The beautiful object is therefore a sem-
blance of beauty; it is not in itself, i.e. apart from our cognitive capac-
ity, beautiful (although its integrity is not just arbitrary but necessary),
and again we return to the notion of necessary semblance, which, for
Adorno, as we have seen, serves as one of the key-terms in his Aesthetic
Theory. At this juncture, however, we encounter a deep-seated difference
between Levinas and Adorno.
For Levinas, the claim to necessity in the idea of the infinite is based
on the experience of the authority involved in God’s own call. The
encountering of this authority is by its very nature one for which no
human or human language can ever be held accountable. As Derrida
puts it, ‘It is the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A
pure thought of pure difference.’37 According to Derrida’s quasi-tran-
scendental argument, since it aims at escaping predication and indeed
even rhetoric and language in general, it will necessarily remain just a
dream.38 The existence of a thinking which evades its own conditions is
inconceivable. However, the notion of a pure heterological thought, as
Levinas himself admits, would also violate the freedom of thought to
reflectively construct and obey its own putative norms.39 Devoid of any
element of spontaneity, thought, now outside of the space of concepts,
88
becomes purely receptive. A purely receptive thought, however, would
be a thought that was conceived of as responding not to presences that
can serve as reasons for thought (presences that thought reflectively
could accept or reject according to self-chosen principles), but to pres-
ences that in themselves, without my rational readiness to accept them
as binding, would be little more than simply blind forces, and certainly
neither necessary nor sufficient reasons for affirming or denying a given
proposition. One way of characterizing this move is therefore to say that
Levinas denies or represses precisely those features in terms of which it
is possible to respond rationally to the world: if rational answerability
to the world is rejected, then, as Kant argued against the empiricists, a
gap opens between thought and world. Where Levinas, then, ironically
threatens to confine thought and insulate it from externality by adopt-
ing a variant of transcendental realism, Adorno, by contrast, in develop-
ing the dialectical notion of metaphysical experience, tries importantly
to criticize idealism from within. ‘Dialectics can break the spell of
identification without dogmatically, from without, contrasting it with an
allegedly realistic thesis.’40 For Adorno, metaphysical experience allows
us to experience the antinomy involved in the irreconcilability of the uni-
versal (conceptual reification) and the particular (mimetic appropria-
tion); it acknowledges that our response to the world is necessarily
open-ended and unsatisfiable; but it does not implicate us in an abstract
appeal to some version of pure receptivity, and therefore ipso facto not
in a denial of the idealist project of self-reassurance as such.
V
This has large repercussions for our understanding of Adorno’s stance
towards modernity. As indicated earlier, Adorno would find the wide-
spread intellectual commitment to what Habermas has called post-meta-
physical thinking inadequate in view of the demands conferred on
thought by Auschwitz. Does the rejection of post-metaphysical thinking
obligate himself to some species of anti-modernism? (I leave aside here
some notorious strands of his work, especially the ones dealing with
formal democracy or mass culture, where the overall atmosphere ranges
from an explicit sense of unease to outright rejection, and from which it
may indeed seem as if Adorno is best understood as engaging in a form
of totalizing critique of the achievements of modernity.) Clearly, Adorno
does argue that in order for us even to begin to comprehend Auschwitz,
it is imperative that we place it within the context of modernity, and in
particular the drive described in the Dialectic of Enlightenment towards
the extinction of all forms of otherness. However, from the thesis in that
work that Jewishness had come to function as a return of the repressed
89
which satanically had to be resisted through organized mass-killing – a
thesis which, when combined with the thesis of the dialectic of enlighten-
ment, seems to present a sense of continuity (however hyperbolically
expressed by the Holocaust) between modernity as such and the camps
– he does not draw the conclusion that the project of modernity (if
understood as a radicalized continuation of the Enlightenment) is a lost
cause, but only that it needs rethinking. What Auschwitz calls for is the
revision of culture, not its wholesale dismissal. However, since Haber-
mas takes post-metaphysical thinking (which for him implies the task of
eliciting the normative content of the project of modernity) to involve
the problem of reconstructing the rationality inherent in the three
differentiated value-spheres of modernity (science, morality/law and
art/art-criticism), and since he roughly interprets rationality as the
capacity to relate reflectively to claims for universal validity, at least from
his perspective, Adorno’s questioning of the self-sufficiency of the
process of rationalization in each of these spheres betokens an obvious
disillusionment with the project of modernity. A refusal to embrace the
implications of the notion of post-metaphysical thinking, Habermas
claims, inevitably spells the denial, as it were, of the grammar of mod-
ernity, which is that of an unflinching commitment to rational self-
determination. On this account, such a failure typically manifests itself
in various forms of foundationalism; and, as is well known, Habermas
has suggested that Adorno’s negative dialectics can plausibly be located
within the foundationalist parameters of a quest for a presence for which
thought is not answerable.41 According to Habermas, the appeal to a
notion of metaphysical experience (and in particular the related invoca-
tion of mimesis) demonstrates that Adorno’s project involves the substi-
tution of the quest for self-reassurance (interpreted as rational
self-determination) for a counter-enlightenment position – i.e. one that
locates the source of moral and epistemic authority in a sphere beyond
the grasp or range of reflexivity and conceptual thought.
As I have tried to show, however, such a description seems at best
applicable to a thinker such as Levinas, but not to Adorno. For Adorno,
the only viable corrective to the drive toward immanence, the drive to
realize idealism and disenchantment, which Auschwitz so fundamentally
has called into question, is to continue to criticize that drive. However,
to be persistently engaged in such critical acts of resistance as those rep-
resented by, for example, modernist art practices amounts, at least on
Adorno’s account of them, not to a rejection of the project of rational
self-reassurance but rather to an underwriting of it. Seeking to place the
project of self-reassurance within the wider context of man’s partici-
pation in and dependency upon nature and history does not mean that
one has to debunk the ideal of autonomy; to the contrary, exposing such
dependence and its unintended consequences is itself reflective of a
90
commitment to critical self-consciousness and thus the ideal of indepen-
dence characteristic of philosophical modernism. For Adorno, auto-
nomy, far from being something given (like a god-given self-sufficiency),
is an achievement that essentially consists in recognizing whatever fini-
tude marks subjectivity (nature, history, other subjects) and then assess-
ing whether it should count as decisive. There is no autonomy without
the recognition of heteronomy.
From Adorno’s perspective, therefore, the transformation of culture
called for by the experience of extreme evil is a continuous project – a
modernist critique of modernity.
University of Essex, Department of Philosophy, Colchester, UK
PSC
Notes
1 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New
York: Continuum, 1973), p. 363.
2 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), p. 144: ‘Pleasure always
means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is
shown.’
3 Non-moral evil, such as, for example, the 17th-century earthquake of
Lisbon, which for Voltaire made a mockery of the theodicy of Leibniz, is
essentially distinguished from moral evil by the sense that no agent is to
blame for the pain imposed on its victims; it is strictly a contingent event
of the order of nature (as opposed to the order of freedom). Although often
useful, it should be noted that cases exist of apparent evil in which the
distinction is inapplicable; for example, if a natural catastrophe can be
viewed as caused by humans, or if human works take on the appearance of
a natural catastrophe (like Chernobyl).
4 In his newly published lecture-course on Metaphysik: Begriffe und
Probleme (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), pp. 169–70, Adorno confirms his
indebtedness to Hegel’s analysis of ‘Absolute freedom and terror’ in the
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), pp. 355–63.
5 For Horkheimer and Adorno’s elaborations on the concept of enlighten-
ment, see the Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 3–42.
6 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 362.
7 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 360.
9 ibid.
10 Unfortunately, Adorno often seems to embrace the realist thesis. See, for
example, the following passage in Negative Dialectics, p. 371: ‘What is
destroyed is a nonentity, in itself and perhaps even for itself’ and ‘What
91
death does to the socially condemned can be anticipated biologically on old
people we love; not only their bodies but their egos, all the things that
justified their definition as human, crumble without illness, without violence
from outside’ (emphasis added).
11 See his Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme, pp. 203–4.
12 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 309.
13 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 362. In Metaphysik: Begriffe und
Probleme, Adorno claims that this quote is taken from Eugen Kogon’s Der
SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Berlin: Ullstein,
1947). However, as the editor, Rolf Tiedemann, points out, only a very
similar remark to this appears in Kogon: ‘Einem Juden wurde zugerufen:
“Jetzt ist es 12 Uhr. Um 12.05 Uhr bist du bei Jehova!” Es dauerte keine
fünf Minuten.’
15 ibid., p. 373.
16 ibid., p. 365.
17 ibid., p. 179.
18 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith
(London: Macmillan, 1986), B361.
20 ibid., p. 388.
21 ibid., p. 385.
22 See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indi-
anapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), p. 115: ‘Inasmuch as virtue and
happiness together constitute the possession of the highest good for one
person, and happiness in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a
person and his worthiness to be happy) constitutes that of a possible world,
the highest good means the whole, the perfect good.’
23 Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. George di
Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 58: ‘So
morality has no need of an end for right conduct; on the contrary, the law
that contains the formal condition of the use of freedom in general suffices
to it. Yet an end proceeds from morality just the same; for it cannot possibly
be a matter of indifference to reason how to answer the question, What is
then the result of this right conduct of ours?’
24 Cf. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 411.
26 ibid., p. 376.
27 ibid., p. 207.
28 ibid., pp. 404–5: ‘Art is semblance even at its highest peaks; but its
semblance, the irresistible part of it, is given to it by what is not semblance.
What art, notably the art decried as nihilistic, says in refraining from
judgments is that everything is not just nothing. If it were, whatever is
would be pale, colorless, indifferent. . . . Semblance is a promise of nonsem-
blance.’
29 For an excellent attempt to analyze the ethical relevance of Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1986), one to
92
which I am indebted in writing this essay, see Jay M. Bernstein, ‘Why Rescue
Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics’, in The
Semblance of Subjectivity, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 177–212.
30 Although Levinas does not mention Auschwitz in ‘Transcendence and Evil’,
the closely related analyses of the conditions of ethicality in Otherwise than
Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Boston, MA
and London: Kluwer, 1991) are dedicated to ‘the memory of those who
were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists,
and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of
the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism’. The focus on
Job is here occasioned by the intention of offering comments on Philippe
Nemo’s Job et l’excès du mal (Paris: Grasset, 1978).
31 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Transcendence and Evil’, in Of God Who Comes to
Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998),
pp. 122–34.
32 ibid., p. 127.
33 ibid., p. 130.
34 ibid., p. 131.
35 ibid., p. 123.
36 ibid., p. 124.
37 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 151.
38 ibid.: ‘We say the dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as
language awakens.’
39 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press, 1969), p. 37.
41 See Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. W. M. Hohen-
garten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 28–34, where metaphysi-
cal thinking is characterized as entailing identity thinking, idealism, and a
strong concept of theory.
PSC
Bibliography
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York: Continuum.
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Adorno and Extreme Evil

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04 Hammer (jr/d) 15/5/00 12:17 pm Page 75

Adorno and extreme evil

Abstract By comparing Adorno’s conception of evil with those of Kant

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 26 no 4 • pp. 75–93

University of Essex, Department of Philosophy, Colchester, UK

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