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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Adorno, the good, ethics of resistance « Previous | |Next »
March 1, 2006

As we have seen in the previous post James Gordon Finlayson argues that Adorno has a problem providing a normative ground (the good) for his ethics of resistance. The problem arises because a cebntral thesis of Adorrno's philosophy is that that we can have no positive conception of the good. Adorno frequently claims that the good (or what he calls variously 'reconciliation', 'redemption', 'happiness' and 'utopia') cannot be thought. To conceive the good life is to falsify it in two ways. First, it is to misconstrue the good life by forming a general concept of it and thus losing sight of the particularity and uniqueness of every individual good life. Secondly, it is literally to make it bad, to transform it into evil by identifying it and making it the same as everything else.

Finlayson observes that there is a promising way in which Adorno attempts to solve the problem of the availability of the good.

In Negative Dialectics Adorno claims that philosophy is essentially concerned to think the ineffable. I use the unprejudicial term 'the ineffable' here to refer to the panoply of Adorno’s various locutions for what escapes conceptual thought: ‘'he other', 'otherness', 'the non-identical' 'the non-conceptual', 'the unrepresentable', 'the inexpressible', 'the unsayable' etc. Adorno hints that a potential for what he calls variously 'emancipation', 'redemption', 'utopia' and ‘reconciliation' --- a kind of hidden good ---resides in what is ineffable, i.e. in whatever cannot be thought by concepts. Philosophy, in aiming at the ineffable, aims at this hidden good. By attempting to think the ineffable, even in the self-conscious awareness of the paradoxical nature of that attempt, succeeds somehow in making available to philosophy a kind of goodness.

I've always puzzled over this aspect of Adorno and I've never been able to grasp it. It's struck me as theological even though I accept the non-conceptual as what escapes the concepts of instrumental reason. I do accept that, in some way, Adorno is obliged to seek a non-discursive or non-conceptual mode of access to the good.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:47 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

I've been thinking a good deal lately about why Adorno is driven to assert that there's a non-conceptual component of cognition. (Though notice that he does not think, as Bergson apparently does, that we can have direct awareness of the non-conceptual -- the non-conceptual can only be approached by means of the conceptual.)

The key move here has to be that conceptualization is identification. I can just about see why identification is the root of all evil -- though even this strikes me somewhat dubious.

But why does Adorno think that all conceptualization is identification? This is simply introduced as an unexamined premise! But why should we be shackled to Aristotle?

So I wonder what Adorno would make of Deleuze, since Deleuze at least promises a theory of concepts which are not identifications. Deleuze is as hostile towards identity-thinking as Adorno is. (I think that what Adorno calls "identity-thinking" and what Deleuze calls "the dogmatic image of thought" are very similar.) But Deleuze seems to provide a picture of concepts in which concepts are, somehow, expressions of difference (??).

And if conceptualization is differentiation, then Adorno is wrong to lead us down the twists and turns of a dialectics that always consumes itself -- a negative dialectics.

It would be intriguing to examine the connection between the premise that all conceptualization is identification, and the premise thar critique is possible only as dialectics. Deleuze's hostility to identity is matched only by his hostility to dialectics and to "the spirit of gravity."

Yet at the same time, there's a striking affinity between Adorno and Deleuze which cannot be ignored.