2 Weighty Objects on Adorno’S Kant-Freud Interpretation

joel whitebook 2 Weighty Objects On Adorno’s Kant-Freud Interpretation I Adorno was vehemently anti-Hegelian. He was also one of the most thoroughly Hegelian thinkers of the century. He was anti-Hegelian insofar as he opposed final closure – reconciliation or Aufhebung –in philosophical inquiry. His opposition was based on combined theoretical and anthropological considerations concerning what might be called the anthropogenesis of the concept. Adorno believed that conceptual thinking arose out of the need for adaptation – for mastering inner and outer nature – and because of that always carried the seeds of domination within it. As Western rationality developed from its inception in pre-Socratic philosophy through the creation of mod- ern science and technology, that potential in fact became realized on a global scale. With Hegel’s system, Adorno argued domination in the material sphere was reflected by domination in the conceptual sphere. The totalitarianism of the system – where the whole swal- lows up the parts – was the counterpart of the overt totalitarianism of fascism and the velvet-gloved totalitarianism of the culture in- dustry. For this reason, Adorno rejected the Hegelian system – and systematizing thought in general – as well as any impulse toward a final synthesis, and he asserted the right of the nonidentical against them. At the same time, and for the same reason, Adorno relentlessly adhered to the movement of the Hegelian dialectic detached from the system. He never rested content with given conceptual synthesis but always found the negative within it, so that the dialectical movement would recommence immediately. This was dialectics without end. Adorno often had more solutions available to him than he was 51 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 52 joel whitebook willing to make use of, but his commitment to the untruth of the whole and the priority of the negative compelled him to end his ar- guments with aporias rather than with less conflicted conclusions. This is the case in Negative Dialectics, where Adorno brings Kant and Freud into confrontation with one another. There, Adorno bril- liantly (and repetitiously) elucidates the same aporia from innumer- able angles but never gets beyond it. My claim is that the concept of sublimation would have allowed him to get beyond this situation. And although he implicitly makes use of the concept he cannot em- brace it; sublimation apparently lacks the requisite negativity and comes too close to a Hegelian notion of reconciliation – which, in contemporary society, for Adorno, always means false reconciliation. Adorno is not the only one who is suspicious of the concept of sublimation. Among psychoanalytic theorists and philosophers who write about psychoanalysis, it has generally fallen into disfavor. Though this decline has taken place for a number of reasons, one is central. Sublimation has always smacked of a certain sentimental- ization or spiritualistic mystification that backtracks from Freud’s courageous materialism. Its critics charge that it represents a flight from his tough-minded critique of the hypocrisy of bourgeois moral- ity and of philosophical and aesthetic idealism into a more reassuring and uplifting view of human nature. It threatens, so they charge, to defuse his explosive claim that we are not masters in our own psy- chical households but are largely motivated by powerful forces that work behind our backs. The concern about the spiritualizing dangers of a theory of sublimation is well taken. But it ignores another, if less publicized, Freudian insight; namely, that the products of Spirit are most successful precisely when they remain closely connected with the subterranean layers of the human mind. Yet whatever the difficulties psychoanalysis cannot do without a theory of sublimation. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere,1 only such a theory – or an alternative theory that performs the same conceptual work – can safeguard psychoanalysis from conceptual and practi- cal self-cannibalization. Psychoanalysis offers an account of cultural achievements, including the achievements of psychoanalytic theory and practice itself, in terms of the genetic conditions out of which they emerge. By itself, however, a genetic approach cannot avoid the genetic fallacy, that is, avoid reducing a cultural object to the conditions of its becoming. To avoid this reductionism, it must be Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Weighty Objects 53 supplemented by another approach, which, moving in the opposite direction, explains the process by which genetic material undergoes a change of function and achieves a degree of freedom that transforms it into something else. “There is,” as Loewald has observed, “a vast difference between, on the one hand deriving something from its origins and antecedents, thus reconstructing its structure and function- ing, and, on the other hand, reducing some now extant structure to its original rudiments, as though no development had taken place.”2 Thus, regarding psychoanalysis itself, without a concept of the analyst’s sublimation,3 one cannot explain how, given its origins in unconscious instinctual life, his or her analyzing activity surpasses the products of the analyst’s drives and unconscious to any significant degree. If it did not, the activity of analyzing would, in principle, be indistinguishable from – and therefore be swallowed up by – its object domain. We would be confronted with a form of biological monism or monistic materialism in which the ego of the analyst was sim- ply one natural object among many.4 For example, psychoanalytic theories about theories of infantile sexuality would be on the same epistemological level as those infantile theories themselves, which is to say, they would be drive-related fantasies. And analytic inter- pretations of transference would be on the same conceptual level as the patients’ associations. They would, in other words, be solely the products of the analysts’ transference to the patient.5 If this were so, psychoanalytic theory and practice would be deprived of all claims to legitimacy. Let me be clear: I am not maintaining that psychoanalysis requires a full-blown separation of the transcendental from the empirical – which by now we know is unattainable. I am only arguing that, for the concept of legitimacy to have any legitimacy, there must be a “good enough” distinction between the level of theoretical reflection and the theory itself.6 Because of its genetic approach and the profound dilemmas this raises, psychoanalysis has been particularly attractive to many of the historicizing theorists of postmodernism. Indeed, by introduc- ing the concepts of transference and the unconscious, it has pro- vided new ammunition for what is often understood as Nietzschean geneticism.7 As we have seen, when psychoanalysis is stripped of a theory of sublimation, the genetic point of view becomes totalized. With such a totalization thus eradicating the distinction between Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 54 joel whitebook the realm of objects and the realm of reflection – between questions of fact, quid facti, and questions of legitimacy or validity, quid juris – without a trace. And this is precisely what the more radical postmodernists are after. Indeed, in the wake of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Foucault, a broad ge- nealogical turn has taken place in which the philosophy of science is often replaced by the anthropology, sociology, economics or politics, including the gender politics, of science. As the theoretical heirs of Marxism – a fact which is generally denied – these strategies aim to reduce theories to the various pretheoretical interests that produced them. However, like psychoanalytic reductionism, it is structurally impossible for this sort of interest-positivism to elucidate the validity of its own claims. To be sure, pre-Kuhnian analytic philosophy of science was basically Kantian and tended to repress the question of genesis altogether.8 Questions of genesis were typically relegated to the inconsequential “realm of discovery,” as opposed to “realm of validity,” and the question of how the two realms might be related was rarely addressed. The post-Kuhnian theorists of science, on the other hand, often with stubborn disregard for the problem of self-reference, tend to elevate genesis into the whole story, thus losing sight of the question of validity. Both approaches are equally one-sided. The real task is to elucidate the relation between genesis and validity.9 That would require investigating how genetic material – whether it be economic, psychosexual, sociological, political, or what have you – with all its historical contingency and particu- larity, gets transformed into cultural objects that can claim the type of value appropriate to their particular domain. Again, though it is radically undeveloped, the concept of sublimation is a marker for that elucidation. The task is especially pressing, for today we are all, in one way or another, post-Nietzscheans. That is, in some sense, we accept the contingent origins of our epistemological, normative, and aesthetic structures. We have learned that no cultural object – a theory, a sonata, a mathematical proof, a piece of legislation, a socialized ego – is immaculately conceived. They all emerge out of “the slime of his- tory,” as Sartre put it. Furthermore, one would be hard pressed today to find a contemporary philosopher defending

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