Adorno, Ferenczi, and a new “categorical imperative after Auschwitz”

Abstract

Theodor W. Adorno's mature thought can be characterized by the attempt to articulate what he calls a “new categorical imperative after Auschwitz.” By this, Adorno means that theory and praxis must be organized in such a way that the Holocaust does not repeat itself. This article argues that Sándor Ferenczi’s metapsychology is key to understanding Adorno’s attempt to rethink the nature of precisely such a new categorical imperative. One of the key themes of Adorno’s entire corpus is the problem of the “identification with the aggressor” – an idea that originates with Ferenzci rather than, as is commonly thought, Anna Freud. The Ferenczian dimension of Adorno’s thinking becomes particularly clear in Adorno’s thoughts on the question of freedom. In this context, Adorno engages in a psychoanalytically informed critique of the philosophy of freedom and a speculative philosophical critique of psychoanalysis. The fashioning of a “new categorical imperative” after Auschwitz entails a form of education directed towards a new form of Mündigkeit, one oriented towards contradiction, resistance, and a steadfast refusal to “identify with the aggressor.”

Key words:

• Adorno
• Ferenczi
• identification with the aggressor
• autonomy
• the Holocaust

Notes

1 As the intellectual historian, Enzo Traverso (2003), has argued:

The guillotine, the abattoir, the Fordist factory, and rational administration, along with racism, eugenics, the massacres of the colonial wars and those of World War I had already fashioned the social universe and the mental landscape in which the Final Solution would be conceived and set in motion. All those elements combined to create the technological, ideological, and cultural premises for that Final Solution, by constructing an anthropological context in which Auschwitz became a possibility. These elements lay at the heart of Western civilization and had been deployed in the Europe of industrial capitalism, in the age of classic liberalism. (p. 151)

2 This is the significance of Beckett’s Endgame for Adorno: it explores precisely the “meaning of meaninglessness.” See Adorno, T. W. (1991). Trying to understand Endgame. In S.W. Nicholsen (Trans.), Notes to literature (Vol. I, pp. 241–276). New York: Columbia University Press.

3 The following paragraphs are drawn from a forthcoming article entitled “Crisis and critique” for a special issue of the Spanish journal Constelacions on the “Horizon of the crisis.”

4 As one of Adorno’s important interlocutors, Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1987), explains:

Unlike the bourgeois democracies which developed in England, France, Holland and Belgium, modem Germany, because its bourgeois revolution of 1848 had failed, sustained a mixed regime of feudal landed aristocracy and industrial plutocracy, the two merging by frequent intermarriage. Up to 1918, under the rule of the Kaiser, the industrial magnates, the landed aristocracy, the head of the Army and the top bureaucracy constituted the closely-knit ruling system of Germany. After the military defeat of 1918 the Weimar Republic which emerged from the collapse of the old regime appeared to inaugurate a democratic epoch, but when the Republic was hit by the disasters of the slump of the 1930s the pre-revolutionary powers reasserted themselves and, uniting with the broad masses of the Nazis, were able to create the Hitler regime. (p. 52)

5 This Ferenczian dimension has, to my mind, so far been underestimated in the secondary literature.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samir Gandesha

Samir Gandesha has been a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (1995–97) and an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the Universität Potsdam (2001–2002). He is currently associate professor in the Department of the Humanities and the director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work has appeared in a wide range of journals including Political Theory, New German Critique, Constellations, Logos, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Discipline Filosofiche, Estudios Politicos, Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, Radical Philosophy, and Constelaciones: Revista de Teoria Critica. He is coeditor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and philosophical investigations (Stanford, 2012), and coeditor with Johan Hartle of Spell of capital: Reification and spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Aesthetic Marx (Bloomsbury Press, 2017). He regularly contributes to popular publications such as openDemocracy, Canadian Dimension, the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail. In the spring of 2017, he was the Liu Boming visiting scholar in philosophy at the University of Nanjing and visiting lecturer at Suzhou University of Science and Technology in China. In January 2019 he was visiting fellow at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, and in February 2019 he was visiting lecturer at Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas – FFLCH-USP (Universidade de São Paulo). He is currently editing a book entitled Spectres of fascism (Pluto Press), coediting (with Peyman Vahabzadeh) Beyond phenomenology and critique: Essays in honour of Ian Angus (Arbeiter Ring), and preparing a manuscript on the “neoliberal personality.”