Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West

Deborah Cook

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781788730822
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788730808
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period in our history. To assess these resources, it examines the work of two of the twentieth century's more prominent social theorists: Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault. Although Adorno was situated squarely in the Marxist tradition that Foucault would occasionally challenge, Cook demonstrates that their critiques of our current predicament are complementary in important respects. Among other things, they converge in their focus on the historical conditions-economic in Adorno and political in Foucault-that gave rise to the racist and authoritarian tendencies that continue to blight the West. But this book will also show that as Adorno and Foucault plumb the economic and political forces that have shaped our identities, they offer remarkably similar answers to the perennial question: What is to be done?

Chapter 1

The Critical Matrix

Adorno visited Paris several times during the 1950s and 1960s, giving lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne.¹ Yet he never referred (in published work at least) to what would come to be known as poststructuralism or, more specifically, to Foucault.² Yet Foucault referred to the Frankfurt School – or Critical Theory – on a number of occasions. In an important interview conducted in 1978, he told Duccio Trombadori that, once he became acquainted with Critical Theory, he realized that its theorists had already said things that he had ‘been trying to say for many years’. Had he known about their work earlier, there are many things that he ‘would not have needed to say’, and he ‘would have avoided some mistakes’. He might even have been so ‘captivated’ by critical theorists that he ‘wouldn’t have done anything else but comment on them’.³

Although these remarks reveal that Foucault was familiar with Critical Theory, it is not at all clear which works he had read. In his interview with Trombadori, Foucault did mention a book written by lesser known theorists Otto Kirchheimer and Georg Rusche, Punishment and Social Structure, which he cited in Discipline and Punish.⁴ Stating that this book first piqued his interest in Critical Theory, Foucault added, without naming them, that he had read ‘a few of [Max] Horkheimer’s texts’.⁵ Yet he never referred, in this interview or in other published work, to any of Adorno’s work. This is all the more surprising because Foucault once told Martin Jay in a private conversation in 1980 that he saw ‘striking parallels between his own analysis of the disciplinary, carceral society and Adorno’s administered world’.⁶ His only mention of a text written by Adorno seems to have been made in the context of another unpublished conversation where he reportedly told Jürgen Habermas that he admired Dialectic of Enlightenment – a book that Adorno co-authored with Horkheimer.⁷

A few commentators have tried to explore the parallels between the work of Adorno and Foucault that Foucault mentions in his conversation with Jay. To cite two early attempts, Axel Honneth engaged in a brief (and somewhat uncharitable) comparative discussion of Adorno and Foucault, and David Hoy explored some of the affinities between them, though largely in the context of defending Foucault against Habermas.⁸ Their assessments are noteworthy, not just because they are relatively rare in the secondary literature, but because they offer important insights into Adorno’s and Foucault’s work. Still, Adorno’s and Foucault’s lectures had not been published at the time that Honneth and Hoy were writing. Nor had numerous articles, essays and interviews that give a more precise shape to Adorno’s and Foucault’s thought, making possible a more thorough assessment of their ideas.

Benefiting from the publication of many more texts by Adorno and Foucault than were available even a decade ago, this book will begin with an overview of their work. I will show that Adorno and Foucault share similar philosophical backgrounds as I examine some of the thinkers with whom they engaged. This attempt to contextualize Adorno’s and Foucault’s work by situating some of its prominent themes historically within the philosophical tradition will be followed by a discussion of their critical approaches to the study of our present. Beginning with a description of the anti-systematic and provisional character of their work, along with an account of the pivotal role that history plays in it, I shall offer a comparative account of Adorno’s negative dialectics and Foucault’s genealogy that assesses the complementarity of their approaches to critique. I also aim to demonstrate, both here and throughout the book, that Adorno and Foucault address problems that we continue to confront in the twenty-first century while attempting to find viable solutions to them.

INFLUENCES AND THEMES

Some biographers of Adorno and Foucault begin with an ironic nod to Adorno’s and Foucault’s criticisms of the genre of biography. To the extent that this discussion of the thinkers who helped to shape central themes in their work relies on biographical accounts, it will share in the bad faith of these biographers. However, I shall also cite interviews and essays in which Adorno and Foucault name the thinkers who had a significant impact on their work. Among the more important of these is Immanuel Kant. Chapter Five will discuss Kant’s impact on what Foucault calls his ontology of the present, and Adorno an ontology of the wrong state of things. Since this chapter will also show that Adorno and Foucault both situate themselves squarely within the enlightenment tradition that Kant described in his 1784 essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, I shall speak more broadly about Kant’s influence here.

In an essay he dedicated to his early mentor, Siegfried Kracauer (with whom he studied philosophy while a teenager in Frankfurt), Adorno wrote that Kracauer taught him how to read Kant from a social and historical perspective. Kracauer made Kant ‘come alive’ for Adorno because he showed him that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was not just an epistemology but ‘a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read’.⁹ This awakening to the possibility of reading philosophical texts as expressions of the Zeitgeist would have a lasting influence on Adorno.¹⁰ In his reading of Kant, for example, Adorno deciphered Kant’s ahistorical and disembodied transcendental subject as a figure for a society that is ‘unaware of itself’, a society that tries to vindicate its domination of human beings and the rest of the natural world by surreptitiously asserting its primacy.¹¹ In fact, Adorno highlighted a central theme in his own work when he interpreted the transcendental subject as a cipher for the preponderance (Vorrang) of society over individuals.¹²

Adorno became increasingly critical of Kant once he had completed a doctoral thesis under the supervision of the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Cornelius. Nevertheless, when he returned to Germany from the United States after the Second World War, he gave lectures on Kant at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt until his death in 1969.¹³ In some of these lectures he discussed Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but Adorno also devoted an entire section of his magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, to a critical appraisal of Kant’s ideas about freedom and autonomy. As the final chapters in this book will argue, this appraisal informs Adorno’s views about freedom and autonomy under monopoly conditions. But Kant prompted Adorno to scrutinize other philosophical issues as well, including the idea of things-in-themselves and the epistemological relation between subject and object. Although Adorno rejects Kant’s claim that the caesura or block that separates concepts from objects is unbridgeable, Chapter Five will argue that he follows Kant when he refuses to identify objects with concepts.

Foucault’s intellectual relationship with Kant was equally long-lasting. The secondary thesis that he submitted for his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1961 (his primary thesis was published in English under the title History of Madness) was a translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Foucault wrote a long introductory essay for this translation in which he echoed Adorno’s criticisms of Kant’s transcendental subject when he emphasized the subject’s corporeality and its embeddedness in history.¹⁴ David Macey also notes that this essay invokes the death of man – an idea which, following Nietzsche, Foucault linked to the death of God. In what would become a central theme in his later work, Foucault argued, against Kant, that the death of man ‘indicates the impossibility of continuing to think with an abstract notion of Man; the noble notion of an autonomous human subject has been rendered untenable by the discoveries of psychoanalysis, linguistics and Marxism’. Macey prefaces this comment with the observation that the reappearance of the proclamation of the death of man in The Order of Things should remind readers that the ‘philosophical territory’ that Foucault inhabited was ‘marked out by Kant and Nietzsche’.¹⁵

Many commentators have examined Kant’s influence on Foucault. In fact, Colin Koopman makes the contentious remark (contentious because Nietzsche appears just as often) that Kant is the only thinker ‘who appears in all of Foucault’s writings in each of his so-called periods of scholarship and who thus has unbroken central standing in Foucault’s thought from the very beginning of his career right up to the tragic end of his life’.¹⁶ To support their view that Kant is a key interlocutor, commentators (including Koopman) usually mention Foucault’s search for the conditions of the possibility of phenomena such as madness and sexuality, while agreeing with John Rajchman (who was among the first to stress the links between Foucault and Kant) that Foucault’s conception of conditions of possibility differs considerably from Kant’s because Foucault not only purges Kant’s conception ‘of all anthropologism’, he historicizes it when he stresses the utterly contingent emergence of things.¹⁷ Yet this book will reveal that Kant’s influence extends beyond Foucault’s attempts to explore the historical conditions that have shaped individuals in the West. As in Adorno, Kant’s ideas about autonomy inform Foucault’s own critique of our present.

Kant had a pronounced influence on Foucault and Adorno, but it could be argued, somewhat more controversially in the case of Foucault, that Hegel also influenced them. In fact, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics can be read as an extended critique of Hegel. Among other things, Adorno took from Hegel the idea that individuals are deeply affected by historical conditions, but he objected that Hegel went too far when he effectively identified individuals with these conditions. To be sure, when Hegel is read as an expression of the Zeitgeist, he was right in one sense – individuals are submerged under what Adorno often calls ‘the universal’: late capitalist society. Hegel’s idea of absolute spirit – a totality that allows nothing to escape – points to an important dimension of our current plight to the extent that it mirrors ‘the experience of the superior coercive force inherent in everything that exists by virtue of its consolidation under domination’.¹⁸ Yet this idea is also untrue because the social integration of human beings is by no means total. Just as things always elude concepts, human beings remain nonidentical with respect to society. Indeed, the idea of nonidentity, derived from Hegel but wielded against his system, lies at the thematic core of Adorno’s work.

Adorno insists that the ‘need to lend a voice to suffering is an expression of all truth’ (ND 17). He also charges that Hegel (especially in his later work) tended to legitimate the suffering that our subordination to existing conditions has caused. Criticizing Hegel’s ‘theodicy’, Adorno objects that Hegel apologetically takes the side ‘of what exists’, thereby rationalizing human suffering.¹⁹ Furthermore, he rejects Hegel’s view that ‘failure, death and oppression are the inevitable essence of things’ to which individuals must simply submit. Against Hegel, Adorno argues that experiences like these are not just ‘avoidable’ but ‘criticizable’ because the course that history took was by no means a necessary one.²⁰ The domination of human beings over the natural world, over other human beings and over themselves was neither inevitable nor predetermined (ND 321). History’s trajectory could have been changed for the better at any time, and Adorno believes that it can still be changed in such a way that unnecessary suffering is eradicated.²¹

Like Adorno, Foucault also objects that Hegel’s dialectical system ultimately championed identity over nonidentity. Failing to ‘liberate differences’, Hegel’s dialectics suggests instead that differences ‘can always be recaptured’.²² I shall return to this point later, but I want to note here that, in spite of his criticisms of Hegel, Foucault said more than once that Hegel is a philosopher who must be reckoned with. His engagement with Hegel began in the late 1940s while he was a student at the École Normale Supérieure. There he was introduced to Hegel by his professor Jean Hyppolite (the French translator of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and author of a seminal commentary on it). Two decades later, Foucault invited Hyppolite to give a lecture at the University of Tunis (where Foucault taught from 1966–8). In his opening remarks, Foucault introduced his former professor to students and faculty with these words: ‘All philosophical reflection today is a dialogue with Hegel.’²³

Nevertheless, Foucault’s dialogue with Hegel was originally motivated by a concerted attempt to wrest free from his influence. When he succeeded Hyppolite at the Collège de France in 1970, Foucault said in his inaugural lecture that our entire age represents an attempt to escape from Hegel. Yet he also made an important concession: whether it be through logic or epistemology, through Nietzsche or through Marx, we must nonetheless admit that what allows us to think against Hegel may actually owe much to Hegel himself.²⁴ Foucault’s own attempt to escape from Hegel is a case in point. Although he seemed to realize it only towards the end of his life, Foucault linked his critique to the philosophical tradition that includes Hegel because, like Kant, Hegel engaged in ‘a form of reflection’ that ‘takes the form of an ontology of ourselves, of present reality’.²⁵ In fact, Foucault’s dialogue with Hegel takes an intriguing turn at the end of The Hermeneutics of the Subject when he states that ‘the root of the challenge to Western thought’ is: ‘how can there be a subject of knowledge who takes the world as object through a tekhnē, and a subject of self-experience who takes this same world in the radically different form of the place of its test?’ Foucault continues: ‘if this really is the challenge of Western philosophy, you will see why The Phenomenology of Mind is the summit of this philosophy’.²⁶

The following chapter will discuss at length the marked influence that Hegel’s most famous student, Karl Marx, had on both Adorno and Foucault. Throughout his work, Adorno would retain Marx’s interest in the capitalist economy, taking up and developing Marx’s critique of capitalism’s negative impact on human life. Of course, Marx always stressed that capitalism is a thoroughly historical phenomenon. As such, capitalism is constantly changing, if only in response to the crisis tendencies that are endemic to it. Supplementing his philosophical work with empirical social research that he conducted in the United States and Germany from the late 1930s until his death, Adorno sought to revise and update Marx’s critique of capitalism in order to make sense of twentieth-century developments. He also thought it was necessary to supplement Marx with insights gleaned from psychoanalysis to acquire a better understanding of the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

Insisting, with Marx, on the primacy of the economy, Adorno’s thought is thoroughly imbued with Marxist concepts and themes, including Marx’s ideas about the commodity form, exploitation, surplus value, the stratification of society into classes, class consciousness and the antagonisms between forces and relations of production. Yet Adorno did not adopt Marx’s ideas uncritically. Among other things, he charged that Marx’s notions of domina...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: The Critical Matrix
• Chapter 2: Is Power Always Secondary to the Economy?
• Chapter 3: Notes on Individuation
• Chapter 4: Resistance
• Chapter 5: Critique
• Chapter 6: Remarks on Western Reason
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index