ND Reading Guide

ND Guide Pages 209-294

Interest in Freedom Split 213-215
The antinomics of freedom in Kant, just like the dialectics of freedom in Hegel, form an essential philosophical moment; after them academic philosophy, at least, swore by the idol of a higher realm beyond empiricism. The intelligible freedom of individuals is praised, so that one can hold the empirical ones even more ruthlessly accountable, to better curb them by the prospect of a metaphysically justified punishment. The alliance of the doctrine of freedom and repressive praxis distances philosophy ever further from genuine insight into the freedom and unfreedom of living beings. It approximates, anachronistically, that faded sublimity which Hegel diagnosed as the misery of philosophy. Because however the particular science -- that of criminal justice is exemplary -- cannot handle the question concerning freedom and must reveal its own incompetence, it seeks assistance precisely from the philosophy which through its bad and abstract opposition to scientivism cannot provide such assistance. Where science hopes for the decision on what it finds irresolvable from philosophy, it receives from the latter only the solace of the humdrum world-view. In it individual scientists orient then themselves according to taste and, one must fear, according to their own psychological drive-structure. The relationship to the complex of freedom and determinism is delivered helter-skelter over to irrationality, oscillating between inconclusive, more or less empirical specific findings and dogmatic generalities.

Why on Earth would Adorno want to dig up a crusty old philosopher like Immanuel Kant, the Ur-thinker of the classical bourgeois Enlightenment? Because, suggests Adorno, the antinomies and aporias which Kant grappled with are still very much with us today, in the form of the legal and juridical structures of late capitalism, and its corresponding ideologies of "freedom", "opportunity" and all the other pro-capitalist buzzwords in the neoliberal pantheon. In this sense, the antinomies of freedom in Kant are the Ur-forms of legal structures, just as the dialectics of freedom in Hegel are the Ur-form of structures of the state; both are powerfully relevant to contemporary environmental and workers' rights struggles, as well as to the ongoing construction of the European Union, the world's first multinational superstate. What Adorno is doing here is bracketing the central political event of the late 18th century, namely the American and French Revolutions, and the ensuing explosion of nationalisms, nation-states and struggles for national sovereignty this would spark in semi-peripheral Europe (including the German and Italian principalities, not yet organized into nation-states) and colonial Latin America, large swathes of which would rebel against the dominion Spain and Portugal. Though these revolutions carried the banner of human freedom, their practical effect was to create the first autonomous national capitalisms in world history, i.e. to create a world-market comprised of national capitalisms. Adorno then ties this to the whole issue of science and scientific thinking, i.e. the Marxian category of the forces of production, and identifies one of the key strands of Enlightenment ideology, namely the ideology of positivistic, self-evident reason - best exemplified by the ringing invocation of the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” etc. Some more equal than others, as the continuation of slavery in the post-revolutionary US goes to show, but Adorno's point is that such an appeal to the reason or will of the people, however fraudulent in practice, is vastly different from the royal or religious decrees of previous societies, and needs to be analyzed, understood, and thereby transcended.

Freedom and Organized Society 217-221
The more freedom the subject, and the community of subjects, ascribes to itself, the greater its responsibility, and before the latter it fails in a bourgeois life, whose praxis has never vouchsafed the undiminished autonomy to subjects which it was accorded in theory. That is why it must feel guilty. Subjects become aware of the limits of their freedom as their own membership in nature, ultimately as their powerlessness in view of the society become autonomous before them. The universality of the concept of freedom, however, in which the oppressed also participate, recoils against domination as a model of freedom. In reaction to this, those who are privileged with freedom delight in discerning that others would not yet be mature enough for freedom. They rationalize this, revealingly enough, as natural causality. Subjects are not only fused with their own corporeality, but even in that which is psychological, painstakingly separated from the immediate world of the bodily by reflection, a thorough-going nomothetism prevails.

One of the primary antinomies of freedom is the problem of its self-definition: freedom over what, and to do what, precisely? Adorno notes that capitalism secularizes the doctrine of original sin or some sort of fall from primal grace into consciousness into the insufficiency of subjects at large in the total system, their inability to concretely control or change anything around them, simply because other subjects, organized into strange, compulsory collectivities known as "corporations", create the institutions and objects which individual subjects confront all the time (if you doubt this is so, just think about the immensely complex network of people who produced the hardware and software for the computer you write or network on). Freedom in late capitalism works this way: Microsoft is free to ignore what lots of other people do, but most people who work on PCs are not free to ignore Microsoft's products. Adorno pushes this insight still further, by noting that this unfreedom which lurks amidst the official freedom of the marketplace is itself bounded by a kind of "nature", here understood ironically, as the nomothetism or congealed juridical infrastructure which has acquired the density of a natural ecology (i.e. which has largely taken the place of nature). This is actually a fundamental experience of the global proletariat, namely the fact that working in chip fabs, with computers, in service industries, etc. is very different from the Fordist factory, which often enough involved manual labor, exposure to the elements (drafty buildings, working outdoors), and contact with raw materials (coal, steel, water, etc.). Customer service, not sheer kinetic energy, is the hallmark of global capitalism, and it's significant that one of the fundamental tendencies of capitalist ideology is the attempt to cordon off this customer service as a management prerogative, as opposed to something which affects non-supervisory workers, who are customers, too.

The Supplementary [Hinzutretende] 226-230
The supplementary is possessed of an aspect which is irrational according to rationalistic ground-rules. It denies the Cartesian dualism of res extensa [Latin: extended substance] and res cogitans [Latin: thinking substance], in which the supplementary, as something mental, is lumped together with the res cogitans [Latin: thinking substance], without consideration of its difference from the thought. The supplementary is an impulse, the rudiment of a phase, in which the dualism of the extra- and intramental was not thoroughly nailed down, neither to be bridged as volition nor an ontological ultimate. The concept of the will is also touched by this, which has the so-called facts of consciousness as its content, which are simultaneously purely descriptive, and not only such; this lies hidden in the transition of the will into praxis. The impulse, intramental and somatic in one, drives beyond the sphere of consciousness, which it nevertheless belongs to. With it, freedom reaches deep into experience; this animates its concept as one of a condition, which would be so little blind nature as suppressed nature. Its phantasm, which reason does not allow to be withered by any proof of causal interdependence, is that of a reconciliation of Spirit and nature. It is not so alien to reason as it seems under the aspect of its Kantian equation with the will; it does not fall from the heavens. It appears as something simply and purely other to the philosophical reflection, because the will, reduced to the pure practical reason, is an abstraction. The supplementary is the name for what was stamped out of that abstraction; without it the will would not be real at all. It flashes like a bolt of lightning between the poles of something long past, which has become almost unrecognizable, and that which it one day could be. True praxis, the epitome of acts which would satisfy the idea of freedom, requires indeed full theoretical consciousness.

It's important to stress that Adorno's notion of the supplementary differs significantly from Derrida's notion of the supplement, in the sense that the former is primarily a subjective phenomenon, the material excess, surplus or residue of subjective reflection and activity which exceeds the object, which cannot be reduced to the marketing of goods and the production of commodities: the daydreams of line workers on the assembly line; the motif of leisure in mass-cultural advertisements which contradicts the insanity of continual profit maximization; or just the pre-political insight of workers that the system does not really benefit them, an insight which has not yet become the active affiliation into trade unions or political activity. Derrida's concept, by contrast, is largely objective, the notion of a significatory structure of dissemination, which constantly glides away from its own meanings, is in constant (i.e. resignifying) movement, something which inevitably runs into some rather serious aporias (namely, the inability of deconstruction to theorize the post-national cultural and theoretical structures it did so much to pave the way for). What enables Adorno to effortlessly surpass the structuralisms and post-structuralisms alike is his cognition of the historicity of the supplementary: "it does not fall from the heavens". Rather, it is the non-identity of what rationality, the organized cognitions of subjects compelled to struggle for their survival in a hostile marketplace, excludes, glosses over, or otherwise shies away from. This is also the place of the concrete possibility, the "bolt of lightning" between the past and the future, as opposed to the seamless, telecommunicatory shuttling of messages typical of deconstruction. That is, Adorno's telnet dialectics asks us to think through the messages, something deconstruction is not equipped to handle.

Dialectical Determination of the Will 240-241
Self-evidence is the hallmark of what is civilized: good is what is one, immutable, identical. What does not fit into this, the whole legacy of the pre-logical natural moment, turns immediately into evil, as abstract as the principle of its opposite. Bourgeois evil is the post-existence of that which is older, subjugated, not entirely subjugated. It is however not unconditionally evil, any more than its violent counterpart. Solely the consciousness, which reflects the moments as far and as consistently as they are accessible to it, can render judgements each time over this. Actually there is no other authority for correct praxis and for the good itself than the most advanced state of theory.

An interesting moment, when Adorno manages to pack the entirety of the Nietzschean critique of morality into a few sentences, sidestepping the truly tiresome invective of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche is all too theological the same way that the post-structuralists are all too structuralist) by pinpointing one of the fundamental aporias of the Enlightenment: the necessity of stamping what came before it as the Dark Ages (they were hardly that, of course), in order to justify the domination of the marketplace. What was a revolutionary advance in the 1790s had become a circus farce by the 1990s, of course, as the neoliberals of Eastern Europe frothed at the mouth about the horrors of Stalin while trashing their inherited industrial base for the sake of neoliberal orthodoxy and fresh IMF credits (a.k.a. market Stalinism). Fortunately for Eastern Europe, the EU stepped in with discounted loans, cheap credit and guaranteed export markets, unceremoniously muscling aside the IMF like the barrier on the expansion of the productive forces this latter has indeed become. Note that in other passages of ND, Adorno gives Nietzsche a great deal of credit for having the gumption to raise the issue of historical thinking and the geneology of ideological structures, even if the latter didn't come up with very compelling answers; here, though, Adorno decisively surpasses Nietzsche, by explicitly positing theory (rather than philosophy) as the necessary corrective on praxis.

Contemplation 242-243
Marx received the thesis of the primacy of practical reason from Kant and German idealism and sharpened it into the demand to transform the world instead of merely interpreting it. He thereby underwrote the program of absolute control of nature, something Ur-bourgeois. The real model of the identity-principle breaks through, which dialectical materialism disputes as such, the effort, by which the subject makes what is dissimilar to it similar. However while turning that which is immanently real to the concept inside out, Marx is preparing a recoil. The telos of the long overdue praxis, according to him, was the abolition of its primacy in the form which dominated bourgeois society through and through. Contemplation would be possible without inhumanity, just as soon as the productive forces were unfettered to the point that human beings were no longer devoured by a praxis, which scarcity extorts from them and which then automatizes itself in them. What is bad in contemplation to this day, which contents itself to this side of praxis, as Aristoteles was the first to develop it for the summum bonum [Latin: highest good], was that it became a piece of narrow-minded praxis precisely due to its indifference towards the transformation of the world: that it became a method and instrumentalized. The possible reduction of labor to a minimum ought to radically influence the concept of praxis.

This wondrous meditation decodes the natural-historical quotient in Marx's early writing, and then ties it to Marx's own thorough-going self-critique in Capital, namely the identification of natural history as social history, and the social history of capitalism as a disguised natural history. Contemplation is a code-word, in other words, for an emancipated labor-time, which would be capable of cognizing its own historical position and cultural valence and thereby escaping the toils of a naturalized social history. Put another way, leisure time is a radical and necessary social demand, the prerequisite of a civilized society, something which informs the practice of the mighty EU unions, which have significantly reduced the duration of the work-week. This affects theory, too, in the sense that concepts are there to make our lives easier, not more difficult; they are tools, designed to unlock other concepts and mediations, and to sustain and develop the critical consciousness of solidarity. Where they become an end in themselves, they go astray, freezing into dogmas, rituals or a simple defense of the status quo.

Self-experience of Freedom and Unfreedom 258-262
The subject needs only to pose the inescapable alternative of the freedom or unfreedom of the will, and it is already lost. Each drastic thesis is false. That of determinism and that of freedom coincide in their innermost core. Both proclaim identity. Through the reduction to pure spontaneity, the empirical subjects are subjected to the same law, which expands itself into the category of causality of determinism. Free human beings would perhaps also be emancipated from the will; surely only in a free society would individuals be free. Along with external repression, the inner one would disappear, probably after a long interim period and under the permanent threat of regression. If the philosophical tradition, in the Spirit of repression, confounded freedom and responsibility, then this latter would pass over into the fearless, active participation of every individual: in a whole, which would no longer institutionally harden the participation, in which however they would have real consequences. The antinomy between the determination of the individuated and the social responsibility which contradicts it is no false usage of concepts but real, the moral form of the irreconcilability of universal and particular. That even Hitler and his monsters, according to all psychological insight, are slaves of their earliest childhood, products of mutilation, and that nevertheless the few, which were able to be caught, ought not to be allowed to go free, if the atrocity is not to repeat itself into the indefinite future, which the unconscious of the masses thereby justifies, in that no ray of light fell from the heavens -- this is not to be glossed over by jury-rigged constructions such as a utilitarian necessity, which quarrels with reason. What is individuated befalls humanity only when the entire sphere of individuation, including its moral aspect, is seen through as an epiphenomenon. At times the total society, out of the despair of its condition, represents the freedom, against individuals, which goes into protest in their unfreedom. On the other hand, in the epoch of universal social oppression the picture of freedom against society lives only in the torn-apart, maimed traits of the individuated. Where this hides away each time in history, is not decreed for once and for all. Freedom becomes concrete in the changing forms of repression: in resistance against these.

Even if freedom isn't something which can be defined in and of itself, that doesn't mean the concept is worthless or meaningless. Rather, the thesis that you are either free or unfree must itself be questioned: free in what sense? To do what? In relation to whom? Adorno ties this to the specific antinomy of the post-WW II situation, namely the problem of rendering justice to the crimes of WW II. The only answer is, there are no good answers here; the only true act of justice would have been to stop those crimes before they could even have been committed. That said, even a qualified justice is better than none at all, to the extent that it represents an instance or moment of resistance to the decidedly non-juridical totality; an insight which Adorno ties in to the concrete forms of resistance in the subject. Another way of putting the same conundrum is, justice is too important to be left to the judges and lawyers; it must be reflected upon, and put into practice by the entire society, or else it is no justice at all.

On the Crisis of Causality 262-266
Causality has withdrawn as it were into the totality; in the midst of its system it becomes indistinguishable. The more its concept, under scientific mandate, dilutes itself to abstraction, the less the simultaneous threads of the universally socialized society, which are condensed to an extreme, permit one condition to be traced back with evidence to others. Each one hangs together horizontally as vertically with all others, tinctures all, is tinctured by all. The latest doctrine in which enlightenment employed causality as a decisive political weapon, the Marxist one of superstructure and infrastructure, lags almost innocently behind a condition, in which the apparatuses of production, distribution and domination, as well as economic and social relations and ideologies are inextricably interwoven, and in which living human beings have turned into bits of ideology. Where these latter are no longer added to the existent as something justifying or complementary, but pass over into the appearance [Schein], that what is, would be inescapable and thereby legitimated, the critique which operates with the unequivocal causal relation of superstructure and infrastructure aims wide of the mark. In the total society everything is equally close to the midpoint; it is as transparent, its apologetics as threadbare, as those who see through it, who die out. Critique could portray, in every administration building and every airport, to what extent the infrastructure has become its own superstructure. For this it needs on the one hand the physiognomics of the total condition and of the extended individual data, on the other hand the analysis of economic structural transformations; no longer the derivation of an ideology, which is not at all available as something independent or even with its own truth-claim, out of its causal conditions.

Here Adorno pushes the notion of causality in the direction of post-structuralism and the work of Foucault. But where the latter tended, at their outermost limits, to freeze post-structural structures in place as a set of antinomies - Foucault's epistemes of knowledge, which are never quite power, and archeologies of power, which are never quite knowledge, and neither of which ever quite rises to the concrete level of the social domination exercised by corporations and their bought-off governments over the working-class, even though something like this is implicit in the radical micropolitics of gender which was the vital nerve of Foucault's critique (it's no accident that the later queer theory of the later 1980s and 1990s, especially Eve Sedgewick and Judith Butler, would actually push beyond these antinomies and thereby converge with Adorno; had Foucault lived longer, he most likely would've made the Frankfurt turn himself). It's worth noting the subtlety and delicacy by which Adorno sets the Eastern bloc orthodoxy, of revolutionary productive forces and reactionary relations of production, in motion towards Western bloc consumerism, and specifically the element of architecture; Adorno in fact calls for a very specific critique of the thing, informed first of all by the total condition of the consumer culture and its latest manifestations, and the economic structures driving such. To analyze an airport, for example, one would have to analyze the constellation of the rise of the aerospace sector on the one hand (e.g. the industrial policies which gave rise to Airbus and Boeing, the Godzilla and King Kong of the aerospace biz), as well as things like mass tourism, jet travel and overnight delivery services. Finally, Adorno's call for a new kind of critique of infrastructural superstructures powerfully anticipates both Fredric Jameson's epochal reading of the Bonaventura Hotel in the 1984 essay, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as well as Pierre Bourdieu's sophisticated mapping techniques of the habitus and field.

Causality as Bane 266-267
Causality is nothing other however than the natural-rootedness of humanity, which the latter perpetuates as domination over nature. If the subject once comes to know the moment of its equality with nature, then it would no longer turn nature into what resembles itself. That is the secret and inverted truth-content of idealism. For the more thoroughly the subject, according to idealistic custom, makes nature the same as itself, the further it distances itself from all equality with it. Affinity is the razor's edge of dialectical enlightenment. It recoils into delusion, the nonconceptual execution from outside, as soon as it completely cuts through the affinity. No truth without the latter: this is what idealism caricatured in identity-philosophy. Consciousness knows as much about its other as it is similar to the latter, not by canceling itself out along with the similarity. Objectivity as the residue after the subtraction of the subject is a mere aping. It is the schemata, unconscious to itself, to which the subject reduces its other. The less it tolerates the affinity to things, the more ruthlessly it identifies. But even affinity is no positive ontological individual determination. If it turns into an intuition, into an immediate, empathically cognized truth, then it is ground up as an archaicism by the dialectic of the enlightenment, as warmed-over mythos; in accordance with the mythology which reproduces itself out of pure reason, with domination. Affinity is no remainder, which cognition would hold in its hands after the mandatory leveling [Gleichschaltung] of identification-schemata of the categorical apparatus, but rather their determinate negation. Causality is reflected upon in such critique. In it thinking consummates the mimicry of the bane of things, which it cast around these, on the threshold of a sympathy, which would cause the bane to vanish. The subjectivity of causality has an elective affinity to objects, as the premonition of what the subject caused them to experience.

This passage sets the baleful spell or bane, the objective pressure or weight of the world, to borrow a recent title by Bourdieu, exerted by the totality on the individual subjects it oppresses, in motion towards natural history, by means of the intermediary concept of the affinity, a kind of similarity or relatedness which does automatically transform the objects in question into identical copies of each other. To the extent that the affinity between the concept and the thing allows the non-identity of the latter to be accessed, in a nonviolent way, it is progressive; Adorno immediately warns us, however, that this access-point is not to be fetishized in its own right, as the immediate intuition of or substitute for the non-identity itself. Rather, it is the product of the negation of the thing, i.e. you have to think it all the way through and come out the other side, and thereby know the worst, as Jameson put it, in order to be in a position to think the best. Though the notion of a subjective sympathy or freely-chosen solidarity is something which will return at the end of ND, for now it's enough to note the tenacity and rigor with which Adorno distinguishes this sympathy from the mythologies of late capitalist society, which run the gamut from the Third Way ideologies of British sociologist Anthony Giddens, who wasted no time making his peace with Britain's dim-witted, semi-peripheral capitalism (we're talking about a bourgeoisie so stupid, they can't even produce a decent laptop computer) instead of fighting the good fight with Pierre Bourdieu and the Continental comrades.

Depersonalization and Existential Ontology 275-277
The cognition of what consciousness became, under the sacrifice of its living aspect, has a reciprocal power: egoity has always been so thingly. In the core of the subject dwell objective conditions, which it must deny for the sake of the unconditionality of its domination and which are its own. The subject ought to get rid of these. The prerequisite of its identity is the end of the identity-compulsion. In existential ontology this appears only distortedly. Nothing however is intellectually relevant any longer, which does not press into the zone of depersonalization and its dialectic; schizophrenia is the truth in the philosophy of history about the subject. In Heidegger that zone, which he touches, turns unnoticed into a parable of the administered world, and complementarily into the despairing rigidified determination of subjectivity. Solely its critique would find its object, which he, under the name of destruction, reserves to the history of philosophy. The anti-metaphysical Freud's doctrine of the id is closer to the metaphysical critique of the subject than Heidegger's metaphysics, which wishes to be none. If the role, the heteronomy ordained by autonomy, is the most recent objective form of the unhappy consciousness, then conversely there is no happiness, except where the self is not itself. If, under the unbearable pressure which weighs on it, it falls schizophrenically back into the condition of dissociation and ambiguity, which the subject historically escaped from, then the dissolution of the subject is at the same time the ephemeral and condemned picture of a possible subject. Once its freedom commanded mythos to halt, then it would emancipate itself, as from the ultimate mythos, from itself. Utopia would be the non-identity of the subject without sacrifice.

The moment of truth of the schizophrenic subject of late capitalism, constantly torn between a virulent mass-culture predicated on constant consumption, and the reality of class oppression (the fact that most people work in dreary, miserably underpaid service-sector jobs, and never see the full value of their labor, which is appropriated by the silicon rentiers of Wall Street, Tokyo and Frankfurt) is its material or thingly nature, the fact that it isn't something which is actually indigenous to subjects, but is forced upon people, i.e. is the reflex of the total system. Adorno points out that Freud's theory of the Id, of unconscious bodily drives which strive for a satisfaction which is always frustrated in reality, are truer to the reality of that subject - which is bombarded with the images and logos of commodities it almost never gets to enjoy - than Heidegger's dubious ontologization of scarcity, as something somehow ennobling or purifying. It should be noted that Adorno is also quite critical of Freud, and elsewhere points out the flaws in the Freudian theory, i.e. its inability to comprehend economic necessity or the consumer culture, and its tendency to freeze the aporias of the desiring (i.e. mass-cultural) subject into eternal verities, most famously, as Eros and Thanatos (really, the Central European version of the late 19th century Victorian positivistic ideology of Energy vs. Entropy, so crucial to the narratives of Henry James). Remarkably, Adorno anticipates thirty years of micropolitics, by insisting that the resistance against such freezing or cultural-ideological repression, must take place within the grounds of the subject itself; as damaged as subjects are, they themselves must step up to the plate and comprehend their own entanglement in the dominating mythos, and thereby move in the direction of some collective solidarity which could transcend this.

The Universal and Individual in Moral Philosophy 277-281
How much aggression hitherto lies in freedom, becomes visible whenever human beings act as if they are free in the midst of the universal unfreedom. So little however would the individuated frantically protect the old particularity in a state of freedom – individuality is as much the product of pressure as the power-center, which resists it – so little would that condition be compatible with the contemporary concept of the collective. That in the countries which today monopolize the name of socialism, an immediate collectivism is commanded as the subordination of the individual to society, gives the lie to their socialism and reinforces the antagonism. The weakness of the ego through a socialized society, which unremittingly drives human beings together and, literally and figuratively, makes them incapable of being alone, manifests itself in the complaints about isolation no less than in the truly unbearable coldness which spreads everywhere along with the expanding exchange-relationship, and which is merely prolonged by the authoritarian and ruthless regimentation of the alleged peoples' democracies against the needs of their subjects. That a union of free human beings would have to continually gang themselves up, belongs in the conceptual realm of maneuvers, of marching, flag-waving, orations of leaders. They thrive only so long as society irrationally wishes to cobble together its compulsory members; objectively they are not needed. Collectivism and individualism complete one another in what is false.

This passage nicely anticipates Heiner Mueller's critique of the autarkic cadre capitalism of the former Eastern Germany, namely that one of the most terrible effects of the one-party-state was that it crippled the ability of individuals to be alone. Everything had to be collectivized and collective, a.k.a. approved by a tiny elite of self-selected Party officials, accountable to noone except another bunch of self-selected Party officials in Moscow. The result was a society where you weren't supposed to think for yourself or disobey the authorities - exactly like the Western bloc which the East was supposedly an alternative to. In reality, the Eastern bloc states had zip to do with genuine socialism or a humane society; they had certain socialist features, i.e. socialized medical insurance, public housing programs, egalitarian wage distribution, and so forth, but were at their heart essentially variations of monopoly capitalism - what Mueller called state capitalism amidst a scarcity of capital. The Eastern bloc elites never tired of denouncing the Frankfurt School as the petit bourgeois running dogs of capital, but when the Berlin Wall was torn down, those same elites didn't miss a beat in scrambling to turn their power and privilege into ownership rights over the cream of the Eastern bloc industrial base during the massive privatizations of 1989-93, making themselves filthy rich in the process, and letting everything else go hang. Adorno's intent isn't to single out the Eastern bloc elites as especially vicious or worthless, but to insist that they became identical with the Western bloc they claimed to oppose, so long ago.

On the Condition of Freedom 281-283
Moral questions are stringent not in their dreadful parody, sexual repression, but in sentences like: torture ought to be abolished; concentration camps ought not to exist, while all this continues in Africa and Asia and is only repressed because civilized humanity is as inhuman as ever against those which it shamelessly brands as uncivilized. If a moral philosopher seized these lines and exulted, at having finally caught up with the critics of morality -- in that these, too, cite the values comfortably proclaimed by moral philosophers -- then the definitive conclusion would be false. The sentences are true as impulse, when they register, that somewhere torture is occurring. They may not be rationalized; as an abstract principle they would end up immediately in the bad infinity of their derivation and validity. The critique of morality is applicable to the transposition of the logic of consistency onto the behavior of human beings; that is where the stringent logic of consistency becomes the organ of unfreedom. The impulse, the naked physical fear and the feeling of solidarity with, in Brecht's words, tormentable bodies, which is immanent to moral behavior, would be denied by attempts at ruthless rationalization; what is most urgent would once more become contemplative, the mockery of its own urgency. The distinction of theory and praxis involves theoretically, that praxis can no more be purely reduced to theory than chôris [Greek: separately] from it. Both are not to be glued together into a synthesis. That which is undivided lives solely in the extremes, in the spontaneous impulse which, impatient with the argument, does not wish to permit the horror to continue, and in the theoretical consciousness unterrorized by any functionary, which discerns why it nonetheless goes unforeseeably on. This contradiction alone is, in sight of the real powerlessness of all individuals, the staging-grounds of morality today.

One of the main objections against Adorno is that, as a Central European intellectual, he had nothing to say to the global processes of revolution, resistance and revolt in the Third World. This just isn't so, as the above passage goes to show; here, Adorno's meditation on the antinomies of ethics has the most surprising resonances with Sartre's remobilizing ethics of engagement, of an open and avowed solidarity with the great colonial revolutions and resistance movements, which does not speak on behalf of those movements, but creates a space where their message can be heard. This leads to the extraordinary cognition, that the utopian moment of morality is not its proscriptive moment, which judges over a specific phenomenon, but is the staging-grounds of genuine historical contradictions, which must be analyzed and comprehended in their own right. Put another way, dialectics may well begin with a moral judgement, but it can never end there, but must push beyond morality into the historical situation which cries out for moral judgements, while simultaneously relativizing, displacing or otherwise compromising that judgement. Put another way, even the most rigorous morality just isn't moral enough to do justice to the concrete historical contradiction.

Truth-content of the Doctrine of the Intelligible 292-294
Neuroses are the pillars of society; they frustrate the better possibilities of human beings and thereby what is objectively better, which might be brought about by humanity. They tendentially dam up the instincts, which press beyond the false condition, into narcissism, which satisfies itself in the false condition. This is a hinge in the mechanism of evil: weaknesses, which are mistaken if possible for strengths. In the end the intelligible character would be the crippled rational will. What by contrast would count in it as the higher, the more sublime, what is not ruined by what is inferior, is essentially its own neediness, the inability to transform what is humiliating: failure, stylized as an end in itself. Nevertheless there is nothing better amongst human beings than that character; the possibility of being different from what one is, even though all are locked up in their self and thereby locked away even from their self. The glaring flaw of the Kantian doctrine, that which is elusive or abstract in the intelligible character, also has a touch of the truth of the ban on the graven image, which post-Kantian philosophy, Marx included, extended to all concepts of what is positive. As the possibility of the subject, the intelligible character is, like freedom, something becoming, not anything existent. It would be betrayed, the moment it was incorporated into the existent by description, even by the most cautious one. In the right condition everything would be, as in the Jewish theologoumenon [Greek: theology], only the tiniest bit different than what it is, but not the slightest thing can be imagined, as how it would then be. In spite of this the intelligible character can be spoken of only to the extent it does not hover abstractly and powerlessly over the existent, but really keeps arising in the guilty context of such, and is realized by this latter. The contradiction of freedom and determinism is not, as the self-understanding of the critique of reason would like, one between the theoretical positions of dogmatism and skepticism, but one of the self-experience of the subject, now free, now unfree. Under the aspect of freedom they are non-identical with themselves, because the subject is hardly one yet, and indeed precisely by virtue of its instauration as a subject: the self is what is inhuman.

Neuroses may seem a quaint, archaic feature of 19th century or early 20th century society, but what Adorno has in mind is the subjective violence which is done to the individuals of the total system, and the ways in which they are deceived into channeling their potential resistance to the total system into the destructive tendencies of the total system. Here Adorno takes the lesson to heart of one of the great failures of Freud's theory of the psyche, namely its tendency to fetishize the self, a.k.a. the ego, as an all-controlling or unified subjectivity, which necessarily displaces or organizes the business of repressing a hopelessly malevolent Id - a pretty grim view of human nature, actually, as an unending continuum of frustration, resentment and potential violence. Adorno's corrective on Freud's insight is that this is merely how subjects are constituted in capitalism; a free society would not think or act that way, and the very fact that there are moments which contradict the total system (visible in great works of art, seismic political events, and the turning-points in our own personal history as much as the history of regions, nations and multinational zones) go to show that all is not lost, that there is still a world (or indeed, worlds upon worlds) to win. Adorno traces this thought back to theology and forwards to some future space of a socialist society, setting prehistory in motion towards posthistory, a motif which will acquire great importance in the later sections of ND.