The Philosophy of the Limit

Drucilla Cornell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415902397
• eBook ISBN: 9781134711130
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In The Philosophy of the Limit Drucilla Cornell examines the relationship of deconstruction to questions of ethics, justice and legal interpretation. She argues that renaming deconstruction "the philosophy of the limit" will allow us to be more precise about what deconstruction actually is philosophically and hence to articulate more clearly its significance for law. Cornell's focus on the importance of the limit and the centrality of the gender hierarchy allows her to offer a view of jurisprudence different from both the critical social theory and analytic jurisprudence.

1

The Ethical Message of Negative Dialectics

The need to let suffering speak is the condition of all truth.

—Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

1. Introduction

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno critiques Hegel for betraying the most radical implications of his own dialectic in the name of a comprehensive, encircling totality. This critique, the ethical dimension of which I hope to reveal, gestures toward a deconstruction, which is nevertheless an appropriation, of Schopenhauer’s ethic of pity. In referring to Adorno’s project, I use the word “ethical” deliberately. Adorno’s suspicion of the normalizing effect inherent in the generalization of one behavioral system of “rules” led him away from the attempt to determine a morality and toward a more properly ethical conception of the relationship with the Other. For my purposes, “morality” designates any attempt to spell out how one determines a “right way to behave,” behavioral norms which, once determined, can be translated into a system of rules. The ethical relation, a term which I contrast with morality, focuses instead on the kind of person one must become in order to develop a nonviolative relationship to the Other. The concern of the ethical relation, in other words, is a way of being in the world that spans divergent value systems and allows us to criticize the repressive aspects of competing moral systems

In his critique of Kant, for example, Adorno addresses the mode of subjection he associates with the Kantian subject of morality. He critiques the kind of person we are called upon to become if we are to do our moral duty under his own interpretation of Kant’s categorical imperative. Like the early Hegel, Adorno is concerned with the ethical relationship in general. Adorno seeks to uncover just how one engages with the other in a nonviolative manner so that the Hegelian aspiration to reciprocal symmetry and mutual codetermination can be achieved. He argues that a truly nonviolative relationship to the other is foiled by what he calls the dialectic of Enlightenment which, for him, subsumes the Kantian theory of the subject of morality.

In the story that Adorno tells in Negative Dialectics,¹ the Kantian subject, as a being of the flesh, falls prey to the endless striving to subjugate his own impulses and thus to secure the possibility of moral action. Reason is geared solely to the preservation of the subject, equated here with consciousness; because of Kant’s separation of consciousness from the flesh, the subject is pitted against the object, which includes that aspect of the subject conceived empirically. Conceived in this way, the subject-object relationship necessarily gives rise to the master-slave dialectic. The master-slave dialectic is played out in our relations to nature, taken here to mean both against the external world of things, and against our internal “nature” as physical, sexual beings. Ultimately, the master-slave dialectic takes its toll. The thinking subject’s striving for mastery turns against itself. The part of our humanness that is “natural”—sexual desire, our longing for warmth and comfort—succumbs to a rationality whose mission is to drive into submission an essential part of what we are. The subject itself becomes objectified, an object among other objects. Relations between human beings degenerate into manipulative interaction, the goal of which is to master the other. Relations of reciprocal symmetry and mutual co-determination, in Hegel’s sense, are thwarted, if not completely destroyed.

As I hope to show, Adorno makes the point that without the recovery of a playful innocence achieved through the reconnection with the Other in oneself, one cannot become a human being capable of nonviolative relations to the Other. In this sense, his dialectic of “natural” history is “directive”; it calls on us to “be” differently in our relationship to the Other. The emphasis on the “natural,” desiring subject, the importance in Adorno’s theory of the dissolution of rigid ego dictates, the suspicion of the normalizing impulse in the call to duty, are anti-Kantian, at least on the traditional reading of Kant; but these emphases do not make Adorno’s message anti-ethical. Adorno denies that the ethical must be based on the will to limitation and control rather than on the desire for fulfillment. He holds, rather, that the will to limitation, in the call to do one’s duty, itself replicates the master-slave dialectic and eventually undermines the possibility of a nonrepressive basis for Kant’s own understanding of the importance of goodwill in relations to others.²

The young Hegel was also specifically concerned with the “repressive” aspects of Kantian morality and, more generally, with the havoc unleashed by the Enlightenment’s radical divide between subject and object, mind and nature, and body and soul. Hegel’s system aims to reveal the state of reconciliation underlying a social fabric violently torn asunder. Adorno challenges Hegel on the grounds that Hegel’s system turns against the very dialectical reciprocity and mutual codetermination he sought to reveal as the truth of reality. According to Adorno, Hegel’s system replicates the selfsame violent relationship to the Other which it purports to overcome. Hegelianism becomes a form of imperialism over the object. Adorno rebels against Hegel’s ontological identification of meaning and being as an imposed unity. Nonidentity denies that a concept is ever fully adequate to its object. Yet Adorno remains an immanent critic of Hegelianism.

By taking Adorno’s Hegelianism seriously we can win back a degree of freedom within Adorno’s own categories. Without keeping his Hegelianism in mind, it is all too easy to misinterpret Adorno’s “philosophy of redemption” and his dialectic of reconciliation in such a way as to miss its ethical aspiration. If we consider Adorno’s statement that “the idea of reconcilement forbids the positive positing of reconcilement as a concept”³ within the context of his attempt to put Hegel’s categories in motion from the inside, we can decipher what Adorno means and does not mean by that statement. As I have already suggested, Adorno argues that the Hegelian reconciliation of the dichotomies in a totalizing system turns against the mutual codetermination Hegel purports to show as the truth of all reality. In Hegel’s Logic, the transcendental categories such as Being and Essence are unfolded in their reciprocal determinations against what they are not—to be something determinate is to be something in distinction to what it is not. The determinations of the categories ultimately are uncovered as reciprocally codetermined in the unfolding of the Absolute Idea. The deconstruction of the philosophy of substance and of constituted essences in the Logic shows us how the boundaries which give us the appearance of the existence of atomic entities yield to the reality of mutual codetermination, the dialectical permeation of purportedly opposite categories. The philosophy of substance which asserts that an entity can be understood on its own is exposed as a fallacy. Instead, the relata are shown to be internally interrelated, first negatively, in their contrastive relationship with that which yields their self-definition, and then “positively,” as the “belonging together” in and through which the relata become what they are.

The gathering together of the multifold in the logos culminates in the self-recognition of Reason in Being. The awareness that the self-conscious subject comes home in and through the relationship to otherness is what Michael Theneuissen has called “communicative freedom.” Communicative freedom is the truth of the belonging together of the relata. Communicative freedom, in other words, is the coincidence of love and freedom in which “one part experiences the other not as boundary but as the condition for its own realization.”⁴ Under the circumstances of communicative freedom “reality would have found its substantive ‘truth’ and thus become fully real … everything would be related to such an extent that the relata would not retain their separateness.”⁵ Under Theunissen’s interpretation, which is also the one I adopt, the full integration of the relata is what Hegel means by Absolute Knowledge or “self-recognition in absolute otherness.”

For Adorno, communicative freedom cannot be thought of as the unification of the relata into a comprehensive totality without violating the coincidence of love and freedom. The “belonging together” of the relata in conditions of freedom can only be realized if the difference from the Other is maintained in a dialectical interaction that does not yield to the ontological unity of meaning and being. Hegel’s tendency to turn Geist into a deified subjectivity undermines the freedom to be in a relation of reciprocity to otherness because the status of the Other as Other is ultimately denied. Yet “communicative freedom” is not simply rejected, it is redefined within Adorno’s deconstruction of the truth of interrelatedness as the Geist that encompasses both self and other. For Adorno, Hegel’s Logic exhibits a tension between his brilliantly executed deconstruction of the metaphysics of substances (a perspective marked by the indifference and unrelatedness of elements) and the metaphysics of constituted essences (a perspective marked by the subordination of elements to dominant categories), on the one hand, and his tendency to reintroduce substance in the form of a reified Spirit, the imposed unity of subject and object, on the other. As Adorno remarks, “The reconciled state would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien, if the proximity it is granted remains what is distant and beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one’s own.”⁶

“Reconciliation,” as I will use the term in this essay, is Adorno’s redefinition of communicative freedom as the state beyond the heterogeneous as absolute otherness and beyond that which is captured by the Hegelian Concept. Reconciliation is the art of disunion that allows things to exist in their difference and in their affinity. Adorno, then, is a philosopher of reconciliation in a very specific sense. His defense of a reconciled state is presented in the name of the plural and of the different. Relations of reciprocal symmetry can only come into existence if the Other remains unassimilated. Once the unification of the relata into a comprehensive totality can no longer be conceptualized as the Concept returning to itself in an eternal present, the ideal of reconciliation can be shown or disclosed but not conceptualized.

The “philosophy of redemption” is the counterpole to Adorno’s assertion that “the whole is false.”⁷ The “normative standard” of communicative freedom cannot be conceptualized as the truth of an already-achieved reality. The ideal’s critical power lies precisely in its capacity to reveal the world as distorted and indigent in comparison with the reconciled state. It should be emphasized, however, that Adorno in Negative Dialectics denies that we can conceive of reconciliation; but this denial is not the same as Schopenhauer’s insistence on the transcendental disjuncture between reality and utopia. That disjuncture renders the dream of reconciliation as an illusion of the desiring individual, an illusion that those who pierce the veil of Maya leave behind. Schopenhauer’s message is clear: we can only find peace by forsaking the futile striving of those who seek to be at home in the world. Adorno’s aspiration is the opposite. In his view it is only by developing perspectives which illuminate our state of homelessness that we can begin to glimpse through the cracks and the crevices what it would be to be at home in the world. These redemptive perspectives displace and estrange the world so that we are made aware that we are in exile. This exercise, however, is not intended simply to teach us to forsake the world. Through the development of redemptive perspectives we can resist “consummate negativity” without, on the other hand, perpetuating the myth of the ever-the-same, or, put in popular language, the myth that there is “nothing new under the sun.” Determinate negation, in Adorno, becomes the form in which every claim to identity conceals its non-identity: the illusion of identity is destroyed, and with it the so-called realist perspective⁸ which assumes that social life cannot be radically transformed. According to Adorno, in a corrupt world one can only teach the good life through immanent critique of the form of moralistic self-righteous subjectivity itself. Yet in his dedication to Minima Moralia, Adorno nevertheless justifies his reliance on aphorisms against Hegel’s own dismissive gesture toward them precisely because aphorisms allow for the expression of subjectivity, even if that subjectivity takes on the voice of the isolated individual.

In his relation to the subject Hegel does not respect the demand that he otherwise passionately upholds: to be in the matter and not always beyond it, or to penetrate into the innermost content of the matter. As today the subject is vanishing, aphorisms take upon themselves the duty to consider the evanescent itself as essential. They insist in opposition to Hegel’s practice and yet in accordance with his thought on negativity: “the life of the mind only attains its truth when discovering itself in absolute desolation.”⁹

The unalleviated consciousness of negativity holds fast to the possibility of a different future. As Adorno remarks, “What would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is.”¹⁰ He is in earnest when he argues that his melancholy science should be placed in the region of philosophy devoted to the teaching of the good life.

I have already indicated that there are several ethical dimensions in Adorno’s work. Each can be understood as an aspect of the critique of totality on which negative dialectics is premised. The first is the revelation of the “more-than-this” in nonidentity. The presentation of the “more-than-this” serves as a corrective to realist and conventionalist ethics with their shared impulse to enclose us in our form of life or language game. Adorno appeals to nonidentity to undermine what I call the ideology of lesser expectations. The second dimension lies in the redefinition of communicative freedom as the content of the utopian vision of reconciliation. The third is expressed in the critique of the Kantian subject of morality. For Adorno, a moral subject which does not know itself as a desiring, natural being will not recover the compassion for others that can serve as a non-repressive basis for moral intuition and, more specifically, of the goodwill. The critique of the Kantian subject of ethics emerges from the dialectic of natural history. To separate the dimensions of Adorno’s message in the way I have just done is admittedly artificial, but it is necessary to decode his own ethical message.

The redefinition of communicative freedom, the dialectic of natural history, and the unle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: What Is Postmodernity Anyway?
• 1. The Ethical Message of Negative Dialectics
• 2. The “Postmodern” Challenge to the Ideal of Community
• 3. The Ethical Significance of the Chiffonnier
• 4. The Good, the Right, and the Possibility of Legal Interpretation
• 5. The Relevance of Time to the Relationship between the Philosophy of the Limit and Systems Theory: The Call to Judicial Responsibility
• 6. The Violence of the Masquerade: Law Dressed Up as Justice
• Conclusion: “The Ethical, Political, Juridical Significance of the End of Man”
• Notes
• Index