Critical theory and affirmative biopolitics: Nietzsche and the domination of nature in Adorno/Horkheimer

Abstract

The central problem of enlightenment is that it rests on the domination of nature achieved through the separation of human life from other forms of life by means of instrumental rationality and representational thinking. Instead, the true practice of enlightenment calls for an affirmative biopolitics: a politics of life that contributes to the pluralization of inherently singular forms of life. This article argues that such politics requires, first, a cultural memory which recovers the continuity between human life and nature and, second, a form of thought that gives back to language the ability to be like nature. The article closes with a discussion of ‘Culture and need in Nietzsche’ highlighting the difference between Nietzsche’s affirmative biopolitics and critical theory.

Keywords:

• critical theory
• affirmative biopolitics
• enlightenment
• culture
• nature

Acknowledgments

Different versions of this article have been presented at the International Political Science Association Meeting, Santiago de Chile, 12–14 July 2009, and the American Political Science Association Meeting, Toronto, 3–6 September 2009. I thank both audiences for their critical remarks and productive comments. This work is part of a research project financed by the Chilean National Research Grant – Fondecyt (Project Number: 1085238, Nietzsche, Biopolitics and the Future of the Human).

Notes

1. For all citations of Dialectic of Enlightenment, I will refer to both German (1981) and English (2002) editions. In the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer praise Nietzsche, together with Kant and de Sade as those who ‘mercilessly elicited the implications of the Enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 16, 2002, p. XVI). And at the beginning of the ‘Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,’ we read that the late German Romantic interpreters of classical antiquity ‘following on Nietzsche’s early writings’ had already stressed the bourgeois enlightenment element in Homer (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 61, 2002, p. 44). Although both Adorno and Horkheimer seem to be in agreement on this point, Norbert Rath (1987) has convincingly shown that they actually do not share the same views on Nietzsche. Whereas Adorno sees in Nietzsche a thinker that has gone further than Marx thus opening up the challenge of thinking Marx beyond Nietzsche (Horkheimer 1985a, p. 568. Also available in English as Adorno 2001, p. 134). Horkheimer’s general attitude toward Nietzsche is ambivalent. He recognizes the critical potential of Nietzsche’s philosophy but believes that he did not sufficiently take into consideration the problem of society. Given this tension between Adorno and Horkheimer with respect to Nietzsche, Rath speaks of two different images of Nietzsche in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: one reflected in the Excursus I, mainly written by Adorno, and the other reflected in the Excursus II, mainly written by Horkheimer. On the question of the authorship of the different chapters in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, see Habermas (1986) as cited by Rath (1987, p. 87). On the relation between Nietzsche and Marx in critical theory, see in particular Maurer who defines critical theory as a ‘neomarxism crisscrossed by Nietzschean perspectives’ (Maurer 1982, p. 35, Outhwaite 1995).

2. On Nietzsche and the enlightenment tradition, see Owen (2003), Ottmann (1985), Fruechtl (1990, 2004), Bauer (2004), Reschke (2004), Röttges (1972), and Strong (2004). On Nietzsche, Adorno and critical theory, see Pütz (1974, 1978, 1981–1982), Vidal Mayor (2004, 2006), Bauer (1999), Homolka (2005), Liatsos (2001), Maurer (1982), Outhwaite (1995), Rath (1987), and Wiggershaus (2001).

3. On nature as a critical concept, see Wolfe (1991).

4. On the idea of a ‘new enlightenment,’ in Nietzsche, see KSA 11:25[296], 11:26[293], 11:26[298], 11:27[79], 11:27[80], 11:29[40]. On the idea of a ‘great enlightenment,’ see SE 5 and on ‘higher enlightenment,’ see KSA 7:32[83]. See also HAH 26. In the following essay, I rely on the following abbreviations of Nietzsche’s work: KSB = Sämtliche Briefe in Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden (references provide the volume number followed by the relevant letter number and the relevant page); KSA = Sämtliche Schriften, Kritische Studienausgabe in 12 Bänden Colli/Montenari (references provide the volume number followed by the relevant fragment number and any relevant aphorism); SE = Schopenhauer as Educator; A = Antichrist; TI = Twilight of the Idols; HAH = Human all too Human; GS = Gay Science; HL = Second Untimely Consideration; TL = On Truth and Lies in an Extra‐moral Sense; GM = On the Genealogy of Morals; FEI = On the Future of our Educational Institutions; D = Dawn; BGE = Beyond Good and Evil; WB = Wagner in Bayreuth.

5. On the difference between a politics of and over life, see Campbell (2006).

6. According to Karin Bauer, despite all the affinities she sees between Adorno’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies, Adorno’s defense of negative dialectics and Nietzsche’s calls for the affirmation of life, ‘makes visible the gulf dividing their approaches to criticism, philosophy and life’ (1999, pp. 18–19). Accordingly, Bauer holds that whereas in Nietzsche we find an utopian vision of a better future and a ‘new enlightenment’ reflected, for example, in Nietzsche’s idealization of the Übermensch, in Adorno and Horkheimer, their positive notion of enlightenment can always only be articulated in negative terms: ‘It does not develop a positive vision of the future, but rather voices an absence, namely, the absence of enlightenment’s entanglement in domination’ (1999, p. 26, see also pp. 42, 47). The problem with Bauer’s interpretation of affirmation in Nietzsche is that, according to her reading of Adorno, the latter understands it as an affirmation of a given historical and socio‐political reality, rather then the standpoint from which the latter can be overcome. In contrast to Bauer, Peter Pütz’s ‘Nietzsche im Lichte der kritischen Theorie’ emphasizes that Nietzsche and Adorno’s commonalities are expressed not only in their common way of thinking (negatively, critically) but also in their common stylistic expression and writing (aphorism, essays) (1974, p. 186). Pütz stresses Adorno’s objections against Nietzsche as being primarily focused on the latter’s opposition of concepts as stable to nature as chaotic and the priority assigned to life over society. Pütz hypothesizes that Nietzsche would object to Adorno the idea of thought as shifting between contrapositions. I believe that what is at issue in this last point of Pütz, but which remains unarticulated by him, is the difference between dialectical and agonistic thinking.

7. According to Esposito, ‘any thing that lives needs to be thought in the unity of life – means that no part of it can be destroyed in favor of another: every life is a form of life and every form refers to a life. This is neither the content nor the final sense of biopolitics, but is a minimum its presupposition. Whether its meaning will again be disowned in a politics of death or affirmed in a politics of life will depends on the mode in which contemporary thought will follow its traces’ (2008, p. 194).

8. ‘Every attempt to break the natural enslavement (Naturzwang), by breaking nature, enters all the more deeply into that natural enslavement’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 29, 2002, p. 13). Adorno and Horkeimer see these attempts reflected in the course of European civilization: ‘It is as if the final result of civilization were a return to the terrors of nature (furchtbare Natur)’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 134, 2002, p. 113). ‘Civilization is the victory of society over nature which changes everything into bare nature (bloße Natur)’ (‘Elemente des Antisemitismus’ in Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 211, ‘Elements of Anti‐Semitism’ in Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 187). On this point, see also Horkheimer (1967, p. 165).

9. ‘What human beings want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other human beings’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 20, 2002, p. 4).

10. ‘Enlightenment is mythical fear turned radical’ … ‘Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 32, 2002, p. 16).

11. ‘The human being’s domination over itself, which grounds its selfhood is always almost the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken; for the substance which is dominated, suppressed and dissolved by virtue of self‐preservation is none other than that very life as functions of which the achievements of self‐preservation find their sole definition and determination; it is in fact what is to be preserved’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 72, 2002, p. 55).

12. Both Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault point out that totalitarian ideologies have as their final aim ‘the fabrication of mankind’ and, to that end, ‘eliminate individuals for the sake of the species, sacrifice the parts for the sake of the whole’ (Arendt 1973, p. 465). Analogously, Foucault says that: ‘If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers … it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large‐scale phenomena of population’ (Foucault 1990, p. 137). See also Esposito (2008, pp. 110–145).

13. Foucault convincingly shows that this species‐ism is found at the basis of modern state racism, see Foucault (1997, pp. 213–235).

14. ‘With the abandonment of thought, which in its reified (verdinglichten) form of mathematics, machine and organization avenges itself on the human being who have forgotten it, enlightenment has relinquished its own realization’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, pp. 58–59, 2002, p. 41).

15. ‘Through the decision in which spirit acknowledges itself to be domination [Durch die Bescheidung, in der dieser [Geist] als Herrschaft sich bekennt und in Natur zurücknimmt, zergeht ihm der herrschaftliche Anspruch, der ihn gerade der Natur versklavt (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, pp. 39–40)]’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 57).

16. ‘Durch solches Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt, in dessen Vollzug die verkannte Wahrheit aller Kultur beschlossen liegt, ist Aufklärung der Herrschaft überhaupt entgegengestzt’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 58, 2002, p. 40). On the idea of ‘remembrance of nature (Eingedenken der Natur),’ see the contributions of Schmid Noerr (1988) and Schweppenhäuser (1980).

17. ‘Dominant practice and its inescapable alternatives are not threatened by nature, which tends rather to coincide with them, but by the fact that nature is remembered’ (‘Mensch und Tier’ in Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 292; ‘Man and Animal’ in Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 255).

18. For an extensive discussion of this antagonism in Nietzsche, see Lemm (2009, ch. 1).

19. For earlier and later versions of this thesis, see SE 1 and TI ‘Morality’ and ‘Improvers.’

20. I borrow the term ‘counter‐memory’ from Foucault (1971).

21. On the notion of Bildung in both Nietzsche and Adorno, see Bauer (1999, pp. 173–187).

22. See Lemm (2008).

23. This view questions Adorno’s interpretation that Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner’s decadence in The Case of Wagner reflects a denial of the possibility of a positive reevaluation of sickness. On this point in Adorno, see Bauer (1999, p. 169). On decadence and the relation between sickness and health in Nietzsche’s negative and affirmative biopolitics, see also Esposito (2008), ‘Double negation,’ pp. 93–101 and ‘Posthuman,’ pp. 101–109.

24. On the overcoming of sickness by health in Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Bauer writes: ‘It could be argued that Nietzsche, by pointing toward the emergence of the new and profound in the process of enlightenment, thinks more dialectically than the Dialectic, for its pessimistic analysis and its claim of a totalization of enlightenment makes the Dialectic appear, as many critics have pointed out, to abandon dialectical thought itself’ (1999, p. 31).

25. The preservation of a productive tension is also reflected in Nietzsche’s vision of the relation between noble and master morality: ‘Chief point of view: establish distances but create no antithesis’ (KSA 12:10[63]). See also KSA 12:10[59]187.

26. On the notion of second nature in Nietzsche, see Rath (1994, pp. 11–21).

27. See, in comparison, WB 6 (KSA 1, p. 464).

28. Rath also acknowledges the changing meanings of first and second nature in Nietzsche’s texts but does not identify them as a reflection of the antagonism between culture and civilization. Instead, he sees in the at times complementary, at times opposite meanings of first and second nature contradictions which reveal the ‘paradoxical structures of the modern subjects’ (Rath 1994, pp. 21–22) as well as the characteristics of Nietzsche’s philosophical style (p. 15).

29. See in comparison GS 290 where comparable meanings of first and second nature are invoked by Nietzsche to describe what is entailed in giving style to one’s character. For a later version of the double task of culture in Nietzsche, see BGE 262.

30. On the notion of second nature as a new habit, see also FEI 2 (KSA 1, p. 672).

31. As Nietzsche’s writings progress from the middle to the late period of his oeuvre, the rejection of first nature is ever more acutely identified as the degradation of nature reflected in the constitution of the moral subject (see, in particular, GS 1, GS 109, EH ‘Destiny’ 8, KSA 12:10[152]258, and KSA 12:10[153] 259). As Rath points out, Nietzsche’s critique of the resentment against nature coincides with his more general critique of Christian morality (1994, p. 18).

32. See also letter written to Erwin Rhode from in the same period (KSB 6[345], p. 291ff.).

33. See full citation: ‘In thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order thus imaginatively to represent it to themselves – but only in order to determine how it is to be dominated’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 56, 2002, p. 39).

34. The full citation reads as follows: ‘Perennial domination over nature, … is made possible only by the process of forgetfulness. The loss of memory is a transcendental condition for science. All objectification (Verdinglichung) is a forgetting’ (‘Le Prix du Progrès,’ in Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, p. 263, 2002, p. 230). For a recent treatment of the problem of Verdinglichung (objectification or reification), see Honneth (2005).

35. Adorno and Horkheimer see this type of production of images exemplified in Hollywood (1981, p. 103, 2002, p. 84).

36. This problem has also been addressed by Bauer (1999, p. 29).

37. The notion of Anschauungsmetapher has frequently been overlooked, especially in the Anglo‐American reception of Nietzsche, with the exception of Jensen (2009). The reason for this might be related to the translation of this term. It is sometimes translated as ‘intuited metaphor,’ other times as ‘sensuous perception,’ but most often simply as ‘metaphor,’ which makes it impossible to distinguish between Nietzsche’s use of the term Anschauungsmetapher and his use of the term Metapher.

38. For a recent discussion of the notion of pictorial thinking in Nietzsche’s early work, see Reuter (2004).

39. On Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy understood as an art in pursuit of singular truth, see Lemm (2009, c. 6).

40. Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra‐Moral Sense’ has received widely divergent interpretations. For examples of the most influential readings, see Clark (1990, p. 1), Nehamas (1985, pp. 41–44), Pippin (1997, pp. 311–329), Haar (1996, p. 69ff.), Man (1979), and Kofman (1983) as well as Schrift (1985).

41. In HL, Nietzsche alerts us to the harm that monumental history can do when it degenerates into ‘mythical fiction,’ ‘when the impotent and indolent take possession of it and employ it’ (HL 2). Then ‘[m]onumental history deceives by analogies: with seductive similarities it inspires the courageous to foolhardiness and the inspired to fanatism; and when we go on to think of this kind of history in the hands and heads of ungifted egoists and visionary scoundrels, then we see empires destroyed, princes murdered, wars and revolutions launched and the number of historical ‘effects in themselves,’ that is to say, effects without sufficient cause, again augmented’ (HL 2). Nietzsche foresees what Adorno and Horkheimer will later see reflected in the speeches of the dictator and of Nazi propaganda as well as in the products of the culture industry (Horkheimer and Adorno 1981, pp. 141–234, 2002, pp. 120–208).

42. The idea of Anschauungsmetapher in Nietzsche’s early conception of language is thus in many ways comparable to what Adorno will later refer to as ‘constellations’ and ‘the form of the essay’ insofar as both forms of thought and stylistic expressions are measures preventing philosophy from being falling back into metaphysics.

43. For Nietzsche, science itself is just a continuation of the drive for self‐preservation but has nothing to do with truth: ‘Science continues the process through which species constituted themselves …’ (KSA 9:11[156]).

44. For a later version of this idea, see in comparison, a note from the Nachlass written at the time of The Gay Science: ‘What distinguishes the similar (Ähnliche) from the same (Gleichen) is not a matter of degree: rather the similar is something completely different from the same’ (KSA 9:11[166]; KSA 9:11[293]; KSA 9:11[138]; see also KSA 8:23[2]).

45. On this discussion, see also Wolin (2001), Wiggershaus (2001), and Maurer (1982). On the theory of needs in Adorno and Horkheimer respectively, see also Adorno (1972, pp. 392–396) and Horkheimer (1985b, pp. 252–255).