Adorno and International Political Thought

‘To lend a voice to suffering is a condition for all truth’

Overview

Mainstream international ethics – attempt to ‘fix’ global problems Ethical reflection prompted by global suffering, but this

suffering often forgotten in the generalised, rational response

Critical alternatives Poststructural international political thought (IPT) Frankfurt School critical theory (Adorno)

Immanent critique Hope

Trauma and poststructural IPT

Powerful critique of marginalisation of emotion in mainstream international ethics

We should refuse the forgetting of trauma

Jenny Edkins (Aberystwyth) States – silence those who have suffered to allow

‘politics as usual’ to continue Edkins: we must ‘encircle again and again the site’ of

the trauma – resist depoliticisation Trauma time: ‘we cannot remember [trauma] as

something that took place in time, because this would neutralise it’

Trauma and poststructural IPT

Problem with Edkins’ approach Placing trauma time outside linear historical

time discourages a working through of traumatic events that would attend to their situation in time and place

How can we make links to those historical/structural conditions that facilitated the traumatic losses?

Adorno and suffering

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969)

Immanent critique: enlightening Enlightenment the Enlightenment project has been usurped by an

obsession with universality and instrumental rationality; ‘progress’ has brought new means of enslavement rather than the promised liberation

Negative dialectics: preserve the non-identical (that which can’t be subsumed under universal concepts – e.g., emotion, particular human experience)

Adorno and suffering

Immanent critique Resist forgetting

Need fora for telling the truth about the past, for reflection on particular suffering, for self critique – this can bring ‘a healing awareness’

Abhors detachment with which atrocities of the Holocaust were discussed a decade later

‘All of us today also recognise a readiness to deny or belittle what happened—however difficult it is to conceive that people are not ashamed to argue that it was surely at most only five million Jews, and not six million, who were killed…’ (Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’)

Adorno and suffering

Immanent critique Reflect on antecedents of suffering

Search for some sort of truth E.g., What objective social conditions facilitated

the turn to fascism in Germany? Economic insecurity, need to conform to status quo,

stifling culture industry, dissonance between promise and reality of democracy

NB Adorno’s immanent critique is a negative exercise – no positive prescriptions for change

Education towards critical self-reflection

Adorno and suffering

Hope Important counterbalance to immanent critique Again, a negative move – preserving hope in

the face of bleakness, inspiring continued social criticism and praxis

Where does he find hope? ‘Fugitive ethical events’ (Jay Bernstein) – experience

of happiness or love Art – express that which is beyond words,

facilitate working through suffering, preserve hope

Conclusion

The situation of traumatic experience outside historical time hinders critique and prevents working through

Adorno highlights the relation between the particular and the universal in social critique

Although he doesn’t prescribe ‘solutions’, he gestures towards a different way of being in the world, an approach that:

‘discerns and experiences the good, the true, and the beautiful through their deformations—as the negation of the latter and as real in this negation. It pursues freedom and happiness in a repressive and oppressive society without ideologically denying this repression and oppression. It pursues the life of a critical intellect…’ (Weber Nicholsen and Shapiro)