Thoughts from Abroad: Theodor Adorno as Postcolonial Theorist

Abstract

This article shows that the work of the German Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno offers a surprisingly rich resource for postcolonial theory. Adorno's work addresses the world outside Europe more often than one might expect. But it is not so much what Adorno thinks as how he thinks that makes him a postcolonialist. Adorno's philosophy of negative dialectics tracks particular phenomena to the totality of which they are a part. Everything, from the most innocuous details of everyday life to the Holocaust and imperialism, is linked to the world‐encircling, thought‐frustrating and violence‐inducing system of capitalism. But Adorno's characteristic negativity also makes him sensitive to that system's fallibility and its vulnerability to alternatives. The article therefore touches on the normative dimensions of Adorno's moral philosophy. Adorno's work commands attention because of its dialectical style of thinking, its consequent focus on capitalism's intrinsic violence, its belief that effective political action presupposes introspection and a moral capacity for empathy with others' suffering, and its attractive conviction that these aptitudes can be enabled by aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the essay concludes with a reading of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace. This article seeks to show that an Adornian postcolonial criticism is as concerned with the gratuitous longevity of capitalism and imperialism as it is inspired by the prospect of erecting a more just and egalitarian social order.

Notes

¹ There have been several efforts to use Adorno in postcolonial theory. Though they differ on key questions, all of them focus on the theoretical question of Adorno's attitude towards Enlightenment and modernity (Ganguly 2002; Lazarus 1999: 1–8; Patke 2002; Varadharajan 1995).

² I refer here to Adorno's books In Search of Wagner (2005) and The Stars Come Down to Earth (1994).

³ The translation here, from the first book of Virgil's Aeneid, is by Cecil Day‐Lewis (1954: 23), though Day‐Lewis opted for ‘transience’ instead of ‘mortality’.

⁴ David Attwell (2002) has discussed the controversies about the book's ‘racism’. Louis Tremaine applauds Coetzee's novels for portraying characters ‘in the act of trying to imagine lives radically different from their own’ (2003: 597).

⁵ Two exceptions to this neglect are Thomas Y. Levin (1985) and Asha Varadharajan (2007).