No Sex Please, We're the Grand Hotel Abyss, Or: Why Sexuality Seems to Trouble Horkheimer and Adorno

New York Journal of Sociology, 2008, Vol. 1, pp. 1-24 NY JS WHAT HAPPENS TO COUNTESS GESCHWITZ? REVISITING HOMOSEXUALITY IN HORKHEIMER AND ADORNO Kevin S. Amidon * Iowa State University In the philosophical and culture-critical works of Theodor Adorno and Max Hork- heimer, the concept of homosexuality exists almost always in close textual relation to fascist domination. This is because they cannot see homosexual persons as exist- ing outside the dominating discourses of the nineteenth-century bourgeois legal and psychiatric explication of homosexuality. This issue throws the stakes of ethical reflection in Critical Theory into high relief, especially since feminist thinkers including Judith Butler have recently provided a highly positive rereading of Adorno’s ethics. A close reading of Adorno’s exploration of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu further demon- strates the labile ethical and philosophical status of homosexuality in Critical Theory. * Kevin S. Amidon ([email protected]) teaches German Studies in the Iowa State University Department of World Languages and Cultures, 3102 Pearson Hall, Ames, IA, 50011, USA. © 2008 Kevin S. Amidon. 2 New York Journal of Sociology, 2008, Vol. 1 If we are to act ethically…we must avow error as constitutive of who we are. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself The work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory – and particularly the individual and collaborative efforts of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, who formed its center over more than three decades – shows such diversity of method and focus that many of its most sig- nificant scholars and critics apply to it the term “interdisciplinary” with substantial justification and without irony (Benhabib, Bonss, and McCole 1993). Horkheimer and Adorno would doubtless have been gratified at this stream of reception of their work, for they indeed sought and developed an embedded critique of the inherent problems of the control and instrumentalization of knowledge through academic and scientific discipline from the inception of the concept of Critical Theory itself in the mid-1930s. Nonetheless this interdisciplinarity sometimes took such heterodox form that readers and scholars cannot help but come to contradictory conclusions about the theories and ar- guments propagated by the many members of the school. These fric- tions in the school’s reception are further exacerbated by the ongoing – and sometimes increasing – disciplinary divisions that separate the fields with the greatest interest in the Frankfurt School’s work: sociology, philosophy, cultural and literary studies, and musicology. Fur- thermore, the established historical and critical narratives of the school’s development, written by scholars including Martin Jay, Susan Buck-Morss, and Rolf Wiggershaus, have provided generations of scholars with such a thorough introduction to the school’s work that they have reached the level of orthodoxy. Thus as rich as the Frankfurt School’s legacy remains for scholars and critics in numerous fields, new work on it must navigate carefully around these many disciplinary investments, established orthodoxies, and standing controversies. A growing stream of recent work in sociology and cultural studies has attempted to make sense of a particularly troublesome sphere of Amidon 3 the Frankfurt School’s interest: its approach to the multifarious social and psychological aspects of sexuality. Sexuality complicates the historical and intellectual legacy of the school for many reasons. Some of the work of several early and important members certainly takes sexuality as its main critical focus. These members, however, were not the inner circle (Horkheimer and Adorno), but rather (in the 1930s and 1940s) Erich Fromm and (in the 1940s and later) Herbert Marcuse, both of whom came into conflict with Horkheimer and Adorno for the potentially redemptive aspects of their analyses of the erotics of culture and society (Halle 1995; Dannecker 1997; Wheatland 2004; Worrell 2006). These conflicts sometimes leave readers with a sense that Horkheimer and Adorno could be curiously prudish, despite the fact that one need not do more than scratch the surface of their work to discover extensive reflection on sex and sexuality. Some of their own close colleagues feared even that they might be seen as liber- tines: Leo Lowenthal’s first reaction to the manuscript of Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE) in 1944 was that it “may create the impression that the program of free love is proclaimed” (Quoted in Schmidt 2007: 58). The second excursus in DoE, which analyzes the writings of the Marquis de Sade, is of course only the most proximate cause of such concerns (an issue trenchantly explored in Comay 2006). Nonetheless recent scholarship that reevaluates the influence of Freudian psycho- analysis on Horkheimer and Adorno reinforces the sense that their phi- losophically generated abstraction of libidinal and erotic drives casts attention away from the diverse lives of individuals in the service of theoretical totalization (Halle 1995). Their choice to maintain a high- bourgeois style of dress and domestic life and thereby to reject prole- tarian or radical trappings, heightened the sense of some critics (especially in the later 1960s) that too much deployment of authority lay behind their critique of the authoritarian. The infamous “bared-breasts incident” in Adorno’s lecture hall in Frankfurt in 1968 (recently reread brilliantly in Lee 2006) has long been the central symbolic moment of this tension. It is in the inner circle’s interpretation and representation of homosexuality that their residual prudishness seems most dramatically displayed. The few places in their work where they directly address the 4 New York Journal of Sociology, 2008, Vol. 1 concept “homosexuality” indeed do read almost hair-raisingly, which has occasioned reasoned critique in recent scholarship (Halle 1995; Rycenga 2002). DoE contains the concept four times (though Halle and Rycenga miss the later two). The first two sit in close proximity in the sixth section of the “Elements of Antisemitism,” where a circuitous argument links “homosexual aggression” to antisemitic violence. The first statement is surprisingly direct, and found in a sentence that must rank among the very shortest in DoE: “The forbidden thing transmuted into aggression is mostly of homosexual character” (Adorno and Hork- heimer 1988: 201).1 This argument is glossed further with specific – and typically biologically-inflected – reference to Freud’s theorization of projection as the correlative of the weakness of defense mecha- nisms oriented toward repressed elements of the ego: “under the pressure of dammed-up homosexual aggression the psyche’s mecha- nism forgets its most recent phylogenetic achievement, self- awareness, and experiences that aggression as the enemy in the world, the better to be able to confront it” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1988: 202). A first reading of this passage indeed raises the concern, as Halle and Rycenga emphasize, that Horkheimer and Adorno inter- pret homosexuality entirely through Freudian categories. And one need not dig deep in the extensive documents of the inner circle’s activity in the 1940s to find evidence that Horkheimer, at least, chose to stick to Freudian orthodoxy rather than accept Fromm’s views (Jay 1996; Dannecker 1997). This problem in fact seems redoubled in the second passage, for there seems to be no homosexuality without repressed Oedipal aggression. The remaining two references to homosexuality in DoE are found in the final passage of the work, the extended and heterodox series of fragmentary “Notes and Sketches” that represent the authors’ attempt to begin to construct an “anthropology” – that typically German variety of philosophical reflection on the characteristics and typology of the human that has little to do with the Anglo-American academic disci- 1 Unless otherwise indicated in the references, all translations are by the author. Amidon 5 pline that appropriated the moniker (Schmidt 1998). Remarkably, the two longest of these fragments contain reflections on homosexuality, and both make even more overt the links that Horkheimer and Adorno posit between repressed homosexuality and fascism. The title of the first and longest, “Human and Animal,” points directly at its German anthropological spirit. The other is a remarkable text called “Interest in the Body.” Both have drawn notice in the growing literature on sex, sexuality, and gender in the Frankfurt School, but not for the deployment of the concept of homosexuality in them (Franks 2006: 205; Lee 2006: 116). Perhaps the most eye-popping statement about homosexuality in all of Critical Theory is the one in “Human and Animal,” which is suffused with gendered and politically charged language diffi- cult to render in English: “He [Mann] becomes woman [Weib], who looks upon domination [Herrschaft]. Everyone in the fascist collective, with its teams and work camps, is from tender youth on a prisoner in solitary confinement; it breeds homosexuality” (Adorno and Hork- heimer 1988: 269). The passage on homosexuality in “Interest in the Body” reverses the focus, concentrating not on the power of fascism but on the ways it embraces and transfigures the repressions and re- sentments of its own victims. In the bleak intellectual ocean of DoE, with its breaking waves that seem to scour the veneer of liberation from all human motivation to reveal a violent and dominating core, this passage towers high. In it, the powerless, resentful, and manipu- lated lower members of a dominating society – victims or collaborators as they may be – are necessarily homosexual and paranoid: “Such enmity of the lowest for their own withered life, to which these homosexual and paranoid people themselves relate through murderous as- sault – this enmity, so carefully raised and nourished by the temporal and spiritual higher-ups, was always an indispensible instrument of the art of government” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1988: 249). Halle, Dannecker, and Rycenga have analyzed the few other passages of similar import in Adorno’s work in the decades after the publication of DoE.

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