Critical Theory's Foundation in the Theories of Freud and Marx By

Critical Theory’s Foundation in the Theories of Freud and Marx How to Read Adorno’s, and Butler’s Critique of Dialectics as Being Similar

by Philip Højme

Student number: 11105259

Universiteit van Amsterdam

08/08/2017

Research Master’s Thesis

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Josef Früchtl

Second Reader: Dr. Stefan Niklas

Word count: ≈ 21.000

Abstract: It has been suggested that Adorno’s and Butler’s critical theories could be understood as being similar, and it is the aim of this thesis to highlight certain similar aspects between their usage of Freud and Marx. A focus which is chosen due to critical theory generally being indebted to these two theories. By first outlining Butler’s critique of the gender/sex distinction, followed by a critique of this ‘undialectical critique of dialectics’ a critique which suggests that such a critique would be better formulated as the negative dialectics posited by Adorno. It is posited how Butler should be read in a dialectical favorable light. This is followed by an explanation on Adorno’s negative dialectics, and usage of Freud and Marx in two texts. After which comes an uncovering of Butler’s utilization of Psychoanalysis and Marxism, and how this shares strong similarities with Adorno’s. These similarities thus come to provide yet another argument for reading Adorno’s, and Butler’s critical theories of society as being similar, in addition to the claim that Butler’s critique of the gender/sex distinction is similar to Adorno’s negative dialectics. By positing these similarities, together with the critique of Butler’s criticism of gender binarity, this thesis come provide yet another assertion for reading Adorno and Butler as conduction a similar emancipatory enterprise.

Contents

Introduction ...... 3 Gender Trouble - A Critique of the Dialectics of Sex and Gender ...... 4 The Nonidentity of Herculine Barbine ...... 7 The Performance of Drag ...... 9 Subject trouble, an Immanent Critique of Dialectics ...... 10 Materiality, On the Similarities in Adorno and Butler ...... 12 A Dialectical Reading of Butler ...... 15 Adorno, a Negative Dialectics ...... 16 Negative Dialectics ...... 17 Negative Dialectics, and the Principle of Nonidentity ...... 19 Constellations ...... 27 Marx and Freud ...... 29 Negative Dialectics, as a Critical Theory ...... 36 Similarities in Adorno and Butler...... 36 A Psychoanalytic Mode of Thinking? ...... 37 A Marxist Mode of Thinking? ...... 43 Concluding on the Similarities Found in Adorno and Butler ...... 44 Gender Constellations ...... 48 Works Cited ...... 53

Introduction What is gender? 1 When I came to reread Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, leaving this book the first time around after finishing my Bachelor degree, it left me with a renewed interest in this question. Issues of this kind have intrigued me for quite some time, and what shall be attempted in this thesis is a coupling of; a particular interest of mine in Psychoanalysis, with the allure which the theories of The Frankfurt School seem to have gained on me during my studies. The primary interest which was elicited in me, which prompted me to undertake this thesis, was a concern with similarities that I kept finding between Butler’s Gender Trouble, and the general project of The Frankfurt School - in particular with Adorno’s reformulation of dialectics as being negative (as opposed to positive in the sense Hegel had thought of it). Marcel Stoetzler (2005) and Carrie L. Hull (1997) thus came to provide me with a possible re-reading of Butler, to reinterpret the critique of dialectics that was given in Gender Trouble in an way more lenient towards Adorno’s philosophical project in Negative Dialectics. However, seeing how my interest is more psychoanalytic inclined than Hull’s, and Stoetzler’s arguments which seemed to be guided towards an interpretation of Butler’s undialectical critique of dialectics more in line with Adorno’s. This raised my interest for the role which Psychoanalysis and Marxism play in both the works of Adorno and Butler. Thus, by seeing how Psychoanalysis and Marxism were neglected in both Stoetzler’s and Hull’s interpretation of Butler, this thesis attempts to expand on this.

In the following paragraph, I will provide a rough outline of the structure of this thesis. The first chapter seeks to provide a general overview of Butler’s main argument in Gender Trouble, follow by an overview of Stoetzler and Hull’s critical interpretation of Butler’s critique of dialectics. This is followed by a lengthy chapter on Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics, divided into a first and second part. The former will have a more explanatory feel to it, as it will outline the theoretical concept of negative dialectics and to some extent its historical development. Whereas the latter part is an examination of

1 I would like to note that I intend not to use any gendered pronouns (he, she, his, hers, and so on) in this paper. Doing so is a stylistic choice, as an attempt to write in a gender-neutral language. A point, not so much made as a part of the argument this paper seeks to suggest, instead it is more an act of trying to escape the normative gender constellations which suggest a particular usage of he, or she. Moreover, I hope the reader will receive this as an honest effort to bring a bit of the theory which this thesis deals with into the ‘matter’ of the thesis itself. So that the thesis describes a theory, which also works back on the thesis.

Adorno’s usage of Psychoanalysis and Marxism in analyzing the fascist leader, and The Cultural Industry. In the third and last chapter, will explore some of the similarities which are to be found in Adorno’s and Butler’s usage of Psychoanalysis and Marxism - as frames of references for their critical analysis of society.

Gender Trouble - A Critique of the Dialectics of Sex and Gender The general outline of Judith Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble which this chapter seeks to provide. Come to serve as a way of introducing a critical reevaluation of Butler’s project in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, has provided by Marcel Stoetzler (2005) and Carrie L. Hull (1997). Butler’s general project in Gender Trouble can be summed up as an attempt at collapsing the distinction between sex and gender, an attempt to show that they are both social constructions. What is important regarding the argument of this book, is how Butler comes to critique de Beauvoir’s claim: that one is not born as a woman, but rather becomes a woman 2. While Butler does not contend the fact that woman is something that one becomes, Butler does criticize the dialectical distinction between sex and gender which Butler suggests is to be found in the works of de Beauvoir. Butler formulates this at the beginning of Gender Trouble as: “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender … the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.” (Butler, 1990, p. 7) By revealing that the categories of gender and sex are not part of the same constellation (to use terminology borrowed from Adorno) Butler shows that de Beauvoir was wrong in claiming that gender follows from sex, and in claiming sex to be naturally constituted. In addition to this Butler asserts that “sex by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.” (Ibid. p. 8) Hence, if sex was gender all along, how does this fit with the fact that Butler shows de Beauvoir’ error in claiming that gender follows from sex?

This question is answered by Butler’s collapsing of the sex/gender distinction in de Beauvoir. Together with the stipulation that the unnaturalness3 of gender and sex, means that there is not any correct way of being ‘gendered’ or ‘sexed.' In other words, Butler is suggesting that the category of gender does not follow from the sex of a person, or vice versa. These two claims are paramount to Butler’s project in Gender Trouble since they comprise the

2 See; Butler, 1990, p. 8, and de Beauvoir, 1973, p. 301. 3 See; Salih, 2002, p. 46, and Butler, 1987, p. 35.

fundament of the stage on which Butler will create gender trouble. What this means is simply that if we are to follow Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble, we need to collapse the unnatural distinction between sex and gender. Moreover, we are to understand gender and sex as constructions created by a certain society (however this does not necessarily mean that they are consciously constructed).

At the beginning of the first chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler examines the subjects of gender/sex. Butler begins by undermining the “presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism.” (Ibid. p. 4). This is done by pointing out the “fragmentation within feminism and the paradoxical opposition to feminism from ‘women’ whom feminism claims to represent.” (Ibid. p. 4) By providing this undermining of second wave feminism, Butler has efficiently disrupted (normative) feminist discourse enough to create the possibility of a reformulation of the project of feminism. Feminism is no longer thought of as claiming a universality to the category of woman, instead, it is to collapse the distinction which is so naturalized, between sex and gender.

Butler’s criticism of de Beauvoir means that the category of woman is no longer to be conceived of as being pre-discursive. Instead, it is a becoming; a performance, an act played out against the backdrop of culturally enforced heteronormativity. As an opposition to this position, Butler introduces another prominent thinker within feminist theory, Luce Irigaray. Butler sides with Irigaray and argues that women are “the subject which is not one.” (Ibid. p. 10) Butler, as Irigaray, posits an interpretation of the female gender, in which female is not understood as the negation, or lack of maleness (or male attributes) as it is in de Beauvoir. Leading Butler to claim that the subject for de Beauvoir was “always already masculine,” (Ibid. p. 11) meaning that for de Beauvoir the female body was understood as “restricted to its body.” (Ibid. p, 11) In other words; gender follows from sex, and a woman’s gender follows from the bodily reality of a woman’s sex, in the same way as a real man is only a man if equipped with a (erect) penis. Butler thus comes to suggest that de Beauvoir is perpetuating a phallocentric understanding of the categories of sex and gender, a point which shall be expanded upon later. For now, what is important is the critique which Butler levels against Irigaray when writing that:

“the power of her analysis [Irigaray’s] is undercut precisely by its globalizing reach … Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist

signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism.” (Ibid. 1990, p. 13)

What Butler is pointing towards here is that the dichotomic thought inherent in much of feminist discourse; that women are either understood as the negation (de Beauvoir) or as that which is not (Irigaray). Both of these theories come to claim to a certain universal nature of the category of women. What Butler is hinting at here the fact that both, de Beauvoir and Irigaray, were using tactics employed by the masculine signified economy, to explain the category of women. This economy can best be described as an economy in which, the production of gender is signified by ‘male,' and “that she is not the sex she is designed to be, but, rather, the masculine sex encore (and en corps) parading the mode of otherness.” (Ibid. p. 12) Meaning that the feminist thoughts of de Beauvoir which Irigaray claimed mimicked a phallocentric economy, and the universal nature of both de Beauvoir’s, and Irigaray’s, notion ’woman,' both fail in providing a critique of gender which are freed from using tactics also employed by that which they critique. What Butler is criticizing, in de Beauvoir, is “the dialectic of master-slave [in de Beauvoir] … [which] prefigures what Irigaray will later describe as the masculine signifying economy that includes both the existential subject and its Other.” (Ibid. p. 12) While Irigaray’s critique of the masculine signifying economy in de Beauvoir is taken to be a valid criticism. Butler comes to regard Irigaray as being undercut by the globalizing reach which the argument against de Beauvoir is taken to imply. If women are the gender which is not (as Irigaray claims), then women are still conceived as a unified concept of every non-male. Using Nietzsche’s claim from On the Genealogy of Morals4 Butler comes to propose that: “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its result.” (Ibid. p. 25)

To sum this up, Butler’s general claim can be said to be a rejection of the notion that gender, or sex for that matter, exists outside of the expressions which are taken to posit the naturalness or pre-discursive nature of gender and sex. Butler thus builds on Irigaray’s critique of de Beauvoir, by not only claiming that women are ‘that which is not’ but that gender/sex is ‘that which is not.' In other words, this distinction is suggested to be nonexistent pre-discursive notions.

4 Nietzsche, 1969, p. 45.

The Nonidentity of Herculine Barbine The case history of Herculine Barbine (see Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbine) is taken up by Butler as an example of how the category of sex was in fact gender all along. In Butler’s reinterpretation of Barbine’s refusal to conform to the gender/sex categories, this refusal is taken to, “[reveal] the instability of those categories.” (Salih, 2002, p. 49) Hence, Butler comes to regard Foucault’s reading of the case of Herculine Barbine as showing that: the medical discourse (a discourse which is normative, thus implicitly heterosexual) of sex and gender cannot comprehend a hermaphrodite as being both sexes at the same time. Hence this discourse must allocate a hermaphrodite a place in one of the two binary categories; in other words, either as male, or as female, but being both is not impermissible. This reading of Herculine Barbine differs from Foucault’s, which describes Barbine’s childhood as a “happy limbo of a non-identity.” (Foucault, 1980, p. xiii) Instead Butler’s interpretation of the case history of Barbine comes to be an example of how the law produces its own outside. Expanding on this Butler writes that:

“Whether ‘before’ the law as a multiplicitous sexuality or ‘outside’ the law as an unnatural transgression, those positionings are invariably ‘inside’ a discourse which produces sexuality and then conceals that production through a configuring of a courageous and rebellious sexuality ‘outside’ of the text itself.” (Butler, 1990, p. 99)

Hence the law, which permits and represses, comes to be formative both of the permitted inside, and of the repressed outside. In other words, for Butler, the binary notion of male and female as the only tolerable categories comes to create the impossibility of the existence of hermaphrodites. In Butler’s words “Foucault proposes an ontology of accidental attributes that exposes the postulation of identity as a culturally restricted principle of order and hierarchy, a regulatory fiction.” (Ibid, p. 24) Thus, what for Foucault seemed like (a happy) nonidentity, meaning that Barbine was nonidentical with both of the binary gender categories, is in Butler produced by a repressive society. Thus, Barbine was conceived (by Foucault) as being free, in the sense of being able to choose between both categories. This ‘happy limbo’ is in Butler’s reading more akin to an illusion since Barbine’s identity (or nonidentity if you will) is a product, a product of the law which excluded it from the realm of possibilities in the first place. Butler argues that the regulation which bars Barbine from acquiring a (binary) gender in the first place, does, in fact, create the possibility for Barbine

to be thought of at all as being neither of the binary gender categories. Suggesting that the law creates its own outside, its own negation. An interesting question that thus arises here when taking Adorno’s negative dialectics into account is: to what extent can this gender be said to be acquired by an identity or a nonidentity? To answer this question, it seems necessary to further elaborate on Stoetzler’s comment on this. Stoetzler argues that Butler is attempting to read Foucault’s interpretation against itself, by way of using the lack of attention to the historical situation in which the production of gender takes place:

“[Foucault]explicitly takes a stand against emancipatory or liberationist models of sexuality … because they … does not acknowledge the historical production of ‘sex’ as a category … Where feminist analysis takes … the binary restriction on gender, as its point of departure, Foucault understands his own project to be an inquiry into how the category of ‘sex’ and sexual difference are constructed within discourse as necessary features of bodily identity.” (Ibid. p. 95-96)

What Butler is suggesting is that Foucault is, in fact, romanticizing the freedom which Barbine enjoys before being subjected, by the judicial system (the law), to dress, and exercise the rights of men5. Butler also stipulates that Foucault is positing Barbine’s hermaphroditism as a utopian and unrestricted sexuality prior to any regulatory law. However, for Butler, the law is always prior to any conception of gender or sex. Hence in Butler’s critical rereading of the happy limbo of Barbine, a nonidentity that comes to be interpreted as a sexuality which is at once both shows the “ambivalent structure of its production,” (Ibid. p. 99) and the “historically specific formation of sexuality.” (Ibid. p. 100) This means that the ambivalence which is found between Barbine’s lived life and the law of binary genders (which is enforced by a heteronormative society) is specific to a historical form of envisioned sexuality, gender, and sex.

Reinterpreting Butler’s critique of Foucault, Stoetzler suggests that “Herculine’s suicide demonstrates that the dream of non-identity, in a dialectical sense a product of identitarian society itself, is ‘impossible’ within the framework of that same society.” (Stoetzler, 2005, p. 352) This reinterpretation, which is using insights taken from Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics, seems to suggest that Butler’s refusal of the Foucauldian utopian notion of the ‘happy limbo’ is itself a strange argument. Strange since this argument might lead to the

5 Butler, 1990, s. 98.

belief that we are only to suppose subversion from within a “positivist and ‘realist’ ” (Ibid. p. 353) onlook on present-day reality. What this means this that we should only dream what is plausible, and not of what could be true if we were to transcend the restrictions of normativity. Butler’s claim is in Stoetzler’s view a far-cry from the conception of a critical theory which was conceived of by The Frankfurt School. Stoetzler seems to be suggesting that Butler’s refusal of a utopia is itself a case of a critique never reaching out from the grips of what it seeks to critique. Stoetzler is reading Butler’s argument against itself, as Butler did with Foucault. Paraphrased Stoetzler is saying that: if we are only to dream that which seems to be plausible from within a normative point of view, then to what extent does this become more of an accepting of the status quo, and less of a theory critical of the status quo?

This leads Stoetzler to suggest a reading of Butler’s critique of Foucault that might be more open to the dialectical suggestion that “the contradictions intrinsic to modern society enable thinking and imagining transcending that form of society.” (Ibid. p. 353) In such a reading, Butler’s dismissal of Foucault, along the lines of the dismissal of de Beauvoir, comes to be situated in Butler’s rejection of any form of dialectical approach. In other words: “Butler praised Foucault here [in Subjects of Desires] as a critical inheritor of Hegel in words strongly evocative of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, while in Gender Trouble Butler came to bury Foucault for the very same reasons.” (Ibid. p. 354) In the following, we shall quickly explore the notion of drag, as an example of subversion of gender categories, before moving on to a clarification of Stoetzler’s paper: Subject Trouble Judith Butler and Dialectics, and its reinterpretation of Butler. This clarification will be made in relation to the Butler’s critique of both de Beauvoir, and the subsequent acceptance of Irigaray’s claim: that Hegelian dialectics is phallocentric. A point which Butler did not accept in Subjects of Desire.

The Performance of Drag Butler stipulates the performance of drag as an instance of subversion of gender categories, a point which is further elaborated on in Bodies That Matter. This possibility for subversion leads Butler to suggest that:

“Occasionally in his analysis of Herculine, Foucault subscribes to a prediscursive multiplicity of bodily forces that break through the surface of the body to disrupt the regulating practices of cultural coherence imposed upon that body by a power regime, understood as a vicissitude of ‘history’.” (Butler, 1990, p. 130)

It is this pre-discursive multiplicity which Butler refutes by arguing that gender is a mere performance of certain intelligible (or unintelligible) styles of identities. What this means is that for Butler “the organizing principle of identity … are performative … fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.” (Ibid. p. 136) Such an understanding of the nature of identity formation makes it possible for Butler to claim that the performance of drag (but not in all cases) can be an act which has the possibility of subverting hegemonic gender categories. For Butler, this means that the performance of drag could disrupt the (normative) stable categories of gender. These acts show the repetitive nature and reinforced styling of gender categories. Though it should be mentioned that it is also possible for a drag performance to reinforce gender categories, as Sara Salih points out is the case with “Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie … and we might also add the more recent film Mrs Doubtfire.” (Salih, 2002, p. 66-67) In both of these films the performance of drag is a repetition of normative gender categories, and hence these performances come to reinforce the heterosexual matrix of gender categories, instead of revealing the inner contradiction of this matrix. Butler, in Bodies That Matter, writes of the former of these film that, “I would be reticent to call them [Victor, Victoria (1982), Tootsie (1982), and Some Like It Hot (1959)] subversive.” (Butler, 2011, p. 85) Even if Butler is arguing against an interpretation of drag which equates it with misogyny, it seems important to note in passing that such a critique has been leveled against it by “Marilyn Frye and Janice Raymond.” (Ibid. p. 86) Leaving this discussion aside, we shall instead proceed to Stoetzler’s critique of Butler’s Gender Trouble.

Subject trouble, an Immanent Critique of Dialectics As already mentioned Stoetzler provides a highly interesting critique of Butler’s Gender Trouble. A critique which will be outlined and explored in this section. What Stoetzler is interested in is Butler’s break with dialectics in Gender Trouble: “[Butler here] rejected … any form of Hegelian dialectics with reference to Luce Irigaray’s (1985) claim that it is ‘phallogocentric’.” (Stoetzler, 2005, p. 344) A refusal which according to Stoetzler is based on certain misconceptions (by Butler and Irigaray alike) of de Beauvoir’s argument in The Second Sex:

“first, she [Butler] suggests that de Beauvoir presupposed that a ‘natural body’ actually exists, pre-existing the ‘historical’ body; second, she falsely identifies the ‘natural’ with the ‘sexed’ and the ‘historical’ with the ‘gendered’ body.” (Ibid. p. 349)

This division is perceived when talking about ‘biological’ or ‘cultural’ bodies, where the ‘biological’ is ‘sexed,’ and the ‘cultural’ is ‘gendered.' Regarding such a division Stoetzler extrapolates that it is founded on a misunderstanding of de Beauvoir's argument, that one is not born as a woman but rather becomes a woman. For Stoetzler, Butler’s reading of de Beauvoir “implies that an un-gendered natural body only subsequently ‘becomes a woman’.” (Ibid. p. 349) This misrepresentation is a distortion of de Beauvoir’s original point, wherein ’becoming’ was a notion loaded with dialectical ambiguity. Butler refuses de Beauvoir’s claim, and asks the Nietzschean question: Who is this subject which becomes? Only to answer that, “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender.” (Butler, 1990, p. 25) This reply is shaped by the Nietzschean claim that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing,” (Nietzsche, 1969, p. 45) Butler’s misreading of de Beauvoir’s ‘becoming’ is thus hinged on the insistence on de Beauvoir arguing for a prediscursive body onto which gender is inscribed. This prediscursive body is that which Butler ‘falsely identifies’ with being ‘sexed’ (having a sex), as opposed to being ‘gendered’ (having a gender). What is important in this regard is that these two misconceptions of de Beauvoir’s, the de-dialecticizing of ‘becoming’ and the identification of an argument for a prediscursive body, is what leads Butler (in Stoetzler’s view) to ask questions regarding the acquisition of gender and sex which “de Beauvoir would [not] have needed to find unsettling.” (Stoetzler, 2005, p. 349) Stoetzler proposes that Butler’s rejection of dialectics, as being phallogocentric, is based on an unsupported claim which Butler rejected in Subjects of Desire. This earlier rejection of the phallogocentric nature of dialectics is what brings about Stoetzler’s proposal that Butler should be read ‘backward’. Meaning that one is to read Gender Trouble first, and then proceed to read Subjects of Desires. Stoetzler’s main point is thus that Butler’s anti- dialectical project could be read in a more dialectical favorable light, by reading her backward. Butler’s question who is this I that becomes? Is itself an issue that “makes sense only when the dialectical interpenetration of being and becoming is given up.” (Ibid. p. 354) Interpenetration here is taken to mean that being is already always a becoming and vice versa. This criticism of Butler’s reading of de Beauvoir raises the question: if Butler’s critique

of dialectics is based on a misreading of de Beauvoir, how are we then to salvage, or understand, this critique in a way that is more favorable towards dialectics?

What is meant here is simply a question of what is left for us in Butler’s project now that it has been shown to be based on a misrepresentation. Luckily for us, Stoetzler suggests Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as a critique of dialectics which resembles Butler’s general project, while also being favorable to the dialectical enterprise. Stoetzler can thus be understood as hinting at the possibility for a reinterpretation of Butler’s critique as an immanent critique of dialectics, instead of an ‘anti-dialectical’ critique of dialectics. A point which is summarized by Stoetzler in this quote:

“Butler in Gender Trouble accuses the dialectical tradition (represented by de Beauvoir) for not being dialectical enough … While authors in the tradition of dialectical critical theory (such as Adorno) understand dialectics as an emancipatory, critical, dynamic and open way of thinking (much like Butler herself in Subjects of Desire), Butler in Gender Trouble refers with the same term to a closed and mechanical way of thinking which the former would find to be undialectical and inadequate to understanding social and cultural practices in an antagonistic society.” (Ibid. p. 357)

The critique of dialectics which Stoetzler posits Butler is partaking in in Gender Trouble is suggested as being a undialectical critique. However, as we shall see it is also possible to reinterpret Butler’s critique, so it becomes possible to se similarities between this book and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.

Materiality, On the Similarities in Adorno and Butler Before concluding this chapter, it seems prudent to explore an earlier critique of Butler which was delivered by Carrie L. Hull in: The Need in Thinking, Materiality in Theodor W. Adorno and Judith Butler. This article describes certain similarities between Adorno and Butler, but where Stoetzler was mainly concerned with Gender Trouble, Hull is concerned with Butler’s Bodies That Matter. Though this book is an elaboration on Gender Trouble, Butler’s general proposition remains unchanged (at least the changes are small enough as not to warrant a further elaboration of them). Hull extrapolates two important arguments in Butler: Firstly, Butler is taken to insist “that there is no access to matter prior to its conceptualization in thought and language.” (Hull, 1997, p. 22), and secondly, that

“mediation will of necessity entail partial formation or construction of reality.” (Ibid. p. 23) Regarding the first of these two points, Hull suggests that Butler’s claim that there are no genders outside of the cultural instigated gender is resembling Adorno’s argument: “that thought or language can never equate to what it is an effort to describe, its object.“ (Ibid. p. 22). In other words, Butler is suggesting that there is no gender prior to a discourse. The second point where Hull posits parallels which between the writings of Adorno and Butler is that both of them claim that language/discourse is formative of reality, but with slight deviations in their respective arguments. For Butler “discourse or language … is never purely ideal; it is not simply a reflection of prior reality because it will actually shape the materiality it supposedly mirrors.” (Ibid. p. 23) While Adorno would agree with this claim, it would be “with significant qualifications” (Ibid. p. 23) writes Hull. Hull argues that Adorno’s critique of Hegelian dialectics means that for Adorno “thought has an ʻaffirmativeʼ substance, that it can constitute reality.” (Ibid. p. 23) This claim goes well with Adorno own postulate, in Negative Dialectics, that “The test of the turn to nonidentity is its performance; if it remained declarative, it would be revoking itself.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 154-155) Meaning for Adorno that nonidentity affirms itself. Hull exemplifies this point by stressing that “[Adorno’s] ʻIt is soʼ has an obvious parallel with Butlerʼs ʻItʼs a girl!ʼ.” (Hull, 1997, p. 24) The clear parallel between these two statements is in the sense that both claims; ‘it is so,' and ‘it’s a girl,' are affirmations of identity. Meaning that the statements affirm the identity of the object, it thus constitutes reality – as opposed to just describing it. What seems important to take from this resemblance is the degree to which Butler could be interpreted as echoing Adorno. In the sense that both Adorno and Butler seems to suggest that interpellation, the hailing of a person, comes to affirm identity.

Another similarity which Hull posits between these two thinkers is a parallel which can be drawn between Butler's insistence on the fact that, "the man or woman who resists the norms of heterosexuality via homosexual or bisexual practice has had their rebellion defined in terms of that heterosexuality." (Ibid. p. 24) Moreover, Adorno's description of identity thinking as: "When identity thinking is aware of otherness, it can only imagine it in terms of absolute contradiction." (Ibid. p. 24) This similarity which Hull stipulates can be formulated as: Identity is already structured as either permitted (in Butler’s case this would be within a

male/female dichotomy) or abjected6 (A term borrowed from Julia Kristeva’s Power of Horror [1982], in this case it comes to mean an identity located in a realm comprised of socially unintelligible identities, outside of the margins of society.) Hull’s insistence on the similarity between Butler’s and Adorno’s view on the role of thought and language, makes Butler’s claim to a realm of unintelligible ‘sexed,’ or ’gendered’ identities an original contribution to the feminist discourse. Before concluding this chapter, it would seem sensible to quickly summarize Butler’s discussion on the role the law plays in society, as the role of the law in this Lacanian sense in important for Butler who describes Lacan’s position regarding gendered subjects as being one in which:

“The masculine ‘subject’ is a fictive construction produced by the law that prohibits incest and forces an infinite displacement of a heterosexualizing desire. The feminine is never a mark of the subject … Rather, the feminine is the signification of lack, signified by the Symbolic.” (Butler, 1990, p. 27)

The question which Butler raises based on Lacan’s claim can be phrased as whether there are any categories to be found before an instigation of the law. In this regard, Butler’s claim that there is no ‘doer behind the deed’ becomes vital once again. As this stipulation makes it such that it is impossible to postulate anything prior to the law. The following quote by Butler should hopefully elicit this point:

“If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is ‘before,’ ‘outside,’ or ‘beyond’ power is a cultural impossibility and a politically impractical dream, one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself.” (Ibid. p. 30)

In this way, Butler argues (using Lacanian Psychoanalysis mixed with the Foucauldian claim that sexuality and power coincide – thus there can be no ‘before’ the law7) that the materialistic position regarding sex/gender is an ‘impractical impossibility.' However, where Butler suggests that there is nothing before the law, Adorno would argue something

6 ”What is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain "ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game.” Kristeva, 2nd Essay, 1982, p. 3. 7 Butler, 1990, p. 29.

different. According to Hull Adorno would instead postulate “that the abject outside maintains a distinctness owing directly to its objectivity.” (Hull, 1997, p. 25)

A Dialectical Reading of Butler By outlining Butler’s general argument in Gender Trouble, I have hoped to provide a basis on which the reader could come to terms with the critique leveled, by Stoetzler and Hull, against the argument of Gender Trouble. Both argued for a more dialectical inclined reading of Butler. A reading which will not attempt to reconcile the ambiguities in de Beauvoir’s notion of becoming a woman (as Butler attempts in Gender Trouble). Instead, it would also “[adopt the] typical double-figure of dialectical social criticism: the illusion of sex as a substance is real only to the extent that it is acted out – ‘performed’ – on the stage of everyday life.” (Stoetzler, 2005, p. 348) Stoetzler here seems to suggest that Butler’s argument for the illusionary status of sex must itself be played out against the backdrop of a heteronormative society and the binary notions of gender (and sex). A claim, which I think, would not be refuted by Butler, as we shall see later. This means that the unreal nature of binary sexes is itself conditioned on the seemingly natural notion of these in everyday life. This is also posited by Hull who writes that for Butler: “[the word] vagina means girl because penis means boy, and vice versa.” (Hull 1997, p. 23) An Adornian reading of this act of naming would interpret this dichotomy in an analogous way to Butler’s claim: that these sexed categories are not natural. In Adorno’s conception of a negative dialectic (which shall be explained in the coming chapter) this equation of the object (penis, vagina) to its concept (boy, girl) leaves a reminder, a something, which cannot be subsumed or described. Thus, the boy is not identical to the penis, as the girl is not identical to the vagina, “sex was gender all along, but gender never is fully identical to sex.” (Stoetzler, 2005, p. 348) By claiming this, Butler’s argument comes to resemble Adorno’s claim regarding the unsubsumable reminder. This reminder is what is the nonidentity of identity and nonidentity.

Adorno, a Negative Dialectics This chapter deals with Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics. First will be a brief biographic introduction, followed by an explanation of negative dialectics – both as a critique of Kant’s, and Hegel’s dialectics. Together with an account of the theoretical developments that led Adorno to posit a negative dialectics – the latter will provide examples of Adorno’s use of Psychoanalysis and Marxist theory, as examples of two theoretical frameworks for carrying out a philosophical critique.

Adorno was a prominent member of what is known as the Frankfurt School (also called The Institute). This was a group of scholars was based loosely around The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The goal of The Institute was to promote Marxist studies in Germany8, and later under the guidance of Horkheimer primary in relation to social theory. It is therefore hardly any surprise to the reader that The Institute was forced to shut down, and it members went into exile during the 1930’s with the rise of Nazism in Germany and the subsequent war. Adorno was at the beginning reluctant to join The Institute but returned to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a chair at the philosophy department. Before returning to Germany from the US, Adorno had become more and more important for The Institute during the 1930s and 40’s. While more can easily be said of Adorno’s role as a part of The Frankfurt School, this would be outside of the scope of this thesis (see instead i.e. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Adorno, or Müller-Doohm [2005]). What is important regarding Adorno’s assimilation with The Institute is the fact that, while in exile, Adorno wrote the Dialectics of Enlightenment, together with Max Horkheimer, (who was the director of The Institute, a position which Adorno would later come to hold): who was another prominent member of the Frankfurt School. This book became widely influential within, and outside of The Institute and came to be formative of its view on culture and society. Another important book published by Adorno was Negative Dialectics. The particularities of the history of this book is quite interesting, but for our purpose it shall serve just to mention that it was supposed to be published with Max Horkheimer, but because of their exile - and the rise of fascism in Europe in the 30’s and 40’s, Adorno and

8 Corradetti, http://www.iep.utm.edu/frankfur/

Horkheimer decided to write Dialectics of the Enlightenment instead of what was to become Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.

The primary source of this chapter will be Negative Dialectics, as it is widely regarded as Adorno’s theoretical masterpiece. While often described as; hard to read, and as riddled with contradictions, this book is the culmination of Adorno’s thinking. A book in which Adorno’s writing culminates in the creation of a new brand of dialectics – one which is construed negatively (meaning a reversal of the earlier dialectics of Hegel). It has however been necessary, due to limitations on the scope of this chapter to focus on certain aspects of this book. This chapter shall thus be limited in regards to the concepts and arguments used from Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.

The first part of this chapter; which is entitled Negative Dialectics is an account of Adorno’s conception of dialectics, which is opposed both to Hegelian and Kantian dialectics. Followed by an account of the development and theoretical groundwork of Adorno’s dialectic. In the second part of this chapter on Marx and Freud we will examine Adorno’s usage of, their theories as methods for conducting philosophical investigations into the nature of concepts.

Negative Dialectics The following is an attempt at an elaboration of Adorno’s conception of a negative dialectics, its connection to the earlier theory of a logic of disintegration, and Adorno’s reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s theory of constellations. The primary goal of this first part is to explain Adorno’s negative dialectics and its connection to what Adorno calls the principle of nonidentity. Together with a theoretical grounding of earlier concepts which helped Adorno develop this dialectic. At the beginning of Negative Dialectics Adorno suggests that “philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 3) A claim which is best understood as a comment on what Adorno thinks is the purpose of philosophy9. It is a comment on the fact that philosophy; has either gotten stuck in metaphysical thoughts, or in phenomenological thoughts on the nature of the ‘Other.’ Instead Adorno cclaim that we are not to be limited by a phenomenological description of the world, nor by a transcendental description (which seeks to transcend and reach a unified whole. Andrew Bowie explains this as:

9 A reference to Marx’ 11th thesis on Feuerbach (1845): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” – Marx, Theses On Feuerbach, 1969.

“What Adorno seeks in philosophy are ways of transcending the world as it presents itself to us in specific historical circumstances, where the pressure of those circumstances can blind people to more humane alternatives.” (Bowie, 2013, p. 23)

These alternatives, which Bowie attributes to Adorno, are the emancipatory possibility for a world transcending philosophy. A philosophy of this kind would not accept the world as it is given. Instead, it would seek “not to philosophize about concrete things; [instead] we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 33) A point which might be said to fit with Butler’s project in Gender Trouble, where the goal is to philosophize one’s way out of the heteronormative conception of gendered and sexed categories.

Adorno’s whole conception of a negative dialectics rests upon the notion of a prior conception of a logic of disintegration. The connection between both of these notions is described as: “ ‘the principle of nonidentity’, which Adorno was to develop with increasing richness, [and which] became the foundation of his philosophy, that is, of ‘negative dialectics’.“ (Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 63) The principle of nonidentity, which is to be understood as Adorno’s break with Hegelian dialectics, is Adorno’s suggestion of the nonidentity of identity, and of nonidentity, a point which will be developed later. Chronologically the conception of a logic of disintegration was developed long before negative dialectics, as it is an elaboration on a logic of disintegration which had been suggested by Benjamin. In the following I will elicit Adorno’s notion of a negative dialectics by referencing to his critique of; primarily; Hegel and to some extent Kant. The attentive reader might note that Adorno also criticizes Husserl, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard in Negative Dialectics. This critique, while interesting from a theoretical point of view, is outside of the scope of this thesis. While it might be claimed that this limitation might construe the theoretical investigation towards a certain interpretation, the phenomenological aspects of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics are taken to have little importance for the project of this thesis. As our concern is mainly with dialectics, and the usage of Marxism and Psychoanalysis.

Negative Dialectics, and the Principle of Nonidentity Adorno in Negative Dialectics describes Hegelian dialectics as claiming, together with Marxist dialectics that the negation of negation is a positive. However, where Marx argues that: “The capitalist mode of appropriation … is the negation of negation.” (Marx, 2013, p. 535) Hegelian dialectics is often described as “Hegel’s dialectics follows a thesis-antithesis- synthesis pattern” (Maybee, Winter 2016). Adorno opposed these two notions of dialectics, and instead claimed that “to negate a negation does not bring about its reversal.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 159) In its place, Adorno suggests that “what is negated is negative until it has passed. This is the decisive break with Hegel [and Marx].” (Adorno, 1973, p. 160). Adorno is here positing that the difference between, on the one hand, negative dialectics, and on the other Hegelian dialectics, is a difference in their claim to either being positive or negative. A difference in the sense that the negative dialectics which Adorno comes to suggest is to be thought of as being purely negative (i.e. the negation of negation is negative), whereas the Hegelian dialectics, is conceived as being positive (the negation of negation is positive). To put this in different words; since negative dialectics follows another logic than the Hegelian dialectics, it comes to a radically different conclusion regarding concepts and objects. To understand this development of the logic implied in dialectics, and how Adorno comes to break with Hegelian dialectics, it is necessary to trace dialectics back to how it was envisioned by Kant, as Hegel’s dialectics was a critique of Kant. This shall be done in a simplified way so as only to provide an outline on which to understand Hegel’s dialectics in its historical context.

Another reason for returning to Kant is that Adorno “uses Kant to criticize Hegel and Hegel to criticize Kant.” (Jarvis, 1998, p. 152) Hence we should be able to shed valuable light on the tradition of dialectics and the development of it. A tradition which Adorno critiques and expands upon in Negative Dialectics. While Adorno’s negative dialectics differs from the analytic theories of that time (e.g. mathematical logic, formal logic), Adorno’s theory does engage which a certain kind of logic, as Alison Stone writes: “[Adorno] does engage with an alternative tradition in logic which Kant and Hegel developed.” (Cook et al. 2008, p. 47) This is a logic which takes contradictions as its beginnings, and from these engages with oppositions to elicit truth. It is a logic used by both Kant and Hegel, and before these, in the dialectic developed by Socrates and the greek philosophers. Socratic dialectics shall only mention in passing here, to position dialectics within a historical, philosophical tradition.

This notion of dialectic was a method of presentation were Socrates attempted, by way of example, to show the contradictions of the opponent’s argument10.

Kant in his writings distinguished between two kinds of logic: general and transcendental logic. Of which we shall only be concerned with the latter, as this is the logic which Hegel critiques, and which Adorno then salvages and uses against Hegel. In Kantian terms, transcendental logic is a mode of inquiry which; “tries to identify which concepts structure any thinking at all about objects.” (Ibid. p. 48) Or if one wishes to hear it from Kant:

“Whatever the content of our cognition may be, and however it may be related to the object, the general though to be sure only negative condition of all of our judgments whatsoever is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgments in themselves are nothing.” (Kant 1998, 279)

Meaning that for Kant some concepts are a priori (e.g. causality, substance, unity) and that these concepts are paramount for us to be able to experience objects at all11. These concepts comprise the knowledge which Kant claim is how objects are thought12. This is a knowledge which is opposed to what is known empirically (a posteriori). Kant can thus be said to operate with two distinct kinds of knowledge: a priori and a posteriori. This means that for Kant understanding becomes doing, an act done to the empirical data which we receive. It is impossible to have any knowledge without this knowledge being structured in some way. And a priori concepts make it possible for us to have meaningful judgments about sense data, as opposed to having to guess an object’s meaning every time it is encountered. Based on such judgments we can identify concepts with their objects. This is to say that, if one has the right judgments to go with an identification, one can make a correct identification. In this regard, it should be noted that Kant distinguishes between; form – which is how an object is given to us through our understanding, while matter is how an object is given to us by our senses13. The latter a fact which is not lost on Butler in Bodies That Matter when claiming that: “This unsettling of ‘matter’ [by way of critical inquiry] can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways for bodies to matter.” (Butler, 2011, p. 6) What Butler is hinting at here is the possibility of creating new objects, or ways for bodies to (be)

10 Maybee, Winter 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/ 11 Cook et al. 2008, p. 48. 12 Bennett, 1974, p. 16. 13 Cook et al. 2000, p. 16.

matter(ed), or sensed. This point besides, the following will provide an account of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s transcendental logic.

While Hegel did, in fact, accept Kant’s claim that experiences are actively structured into basic categories, Hegel did, however, maintain that these categories must be deductible (a posteriori), and thus they cannot be a priori as Kant argued14. Hegelian thought can roughly be said to be based on a disagreement with the Kantian understanding of the separateness of form and matter15. What this means is that for Hegel “causality is not just a category in terms of which we must think, but a basic principle that organizes all mind-independent things into causal relations.” (Cook et al. 2008, p. 49) What is important for Hegel is that categories build on each other in a three-stage model. A model which is constituted by: “abstraction or understanding – where we begin with a certain category; dialectic – where this category generates or turns into its opposite; and the speculative stage – which reconciles the first two categories.” (Ibid. p. 49) In other words, the three-part dialectics of Hegel which is often summarized to students as, thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

As already pointed out Adorno disagrees with Hegel on the matter of whether, or not, the negation of negation is positive or negative. This does however not mean that Adorno shies away from dialectics. Instead, Adorno conceives of dialectics as a way of criticizing a dominant social/historical Anschauung. By placing an emphasis on the historical situation Adorno comes to have has more in common with the Marxist interpretation of importance of context, than with the Hegelian notion of history:

“[Regarding] history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of human freedom … And he views it to be a central task for philosophy to comprehend its place in the unfolding of history ... Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom.” (Little, Summer 2017)

This stands in sharp contrast to both Kant’s and Hegel’s dialectics, which was more concerned with the basic categories of understanding than with the historical context of the social. The second difference between Adorno’s and Hegel’s dialectics can be boiled down to the way in which they respectively confront the notion of reconciliation; “In Hegel,

14 Cook et al. 2008, p. 49. 15 Adorno, 1973, p. 144.

reconciliation occurs whenever a second category proves to be essentially the same as the first.” (Cook et al. 2008, p. 52-53) This understanding of reconciliation differs from Adorno’s, who would propose that there is still something in the second category which cannot be identical with the first category – hence for Adorno there is always something which will escape a reconciliation, i.e. the nonidentity of identity and nonidentity, a reminder. Regarding this Stone uses an example of the reconciliation between nature and culture which occurs both in Adorno and in Hegel. For Hegel, contradictions become reconciled when “enquiry establish nature as essentially rational.” (Ibid. p. 53) Opposed to this Adorno suggests that “our thinking depends on and grows out of impulses that are not wholly rational.” (Ibid. p. 53) Meaning that in Adorno’s reconciliation rationality never eclipsed irrationality, or, enlightenment has never surpassed myth (it simply reverted into it). Once again, this points us towards the fact that where Hegelian dialectics are constructed as positive - in the sense that it reconciles contradictions. This is not the dialectics envisioned by Adorno, instead this dialectics is far more negative. But Hegel’s thesis-antithesis- synthesis does share some similarities with Adorno negative dialectics. This might be the similarity between Adorno’s reconciliation and the Hegelian notion of sublimation (Aufheben). In Hegel, something new comes out of what was prior without actually destroying the previous. An example of this could be Adorno’s description of the relationship between nature and culture in Dialectics of Enlightenment. Here, Adorno comes to posit that the nature which the enlightenment seeks to surpass, comes back as enlightenment thought itself. Meaning that the wish for progress is, in fact, itself a part of human nature. Adorno writes that: “Enlightenment consummates and abolishes itself when the closest practical objectives reveal themselves to be the most distant goal already attained.” (Adorno, 1947, p. 33) This movement of negating itself, which the enlightenment comes to perform in Adorno, is somewhat similar to the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Instead of following Hegelian dialectics zealously, Adorno accepts that there are some things which cannot be excluded, that neither can be reconciled with either of the dialectical poles. Meaning that in Adorno’s dialectics, there is some part of the concept of nature which escapes nature’s inherent rationality, meaning that some part of nature escapes scientific rationalizing. Adorno is seemingly accepting a paradoxical idea, namely that every concept holds within it something which is non-identical to its concept. Adorno comes to interpret

the Hegelian reconciliation as being anti-dialectic, and as resembling mathematical logic. Instead of this logic Adorno posits, a logic of disintegration which is described as:

“To equate the negation of negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification; it is the formal principle in its purest form. What thus wins out in the inmost core of dialectics is the anti-dialectical principle: that traditional logic which, more arithmetico, takes minus times minus for a plus. It was borrowed from that very mathematics to which Hegel reacts so idiosyncratically elsewhere.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 158)

We will return to this later, for now we will content ourselves with how Adorno in Negative Dialectics highlights two important points that explain what negative dialectics is. Firstly, it is a mode of philosophical inquiry, and secondly, it is a critique of the idealistic dialectics found in both Kant and Hegel. Adorno once stated that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz16, as a rejection of the possibilities present in the profoundly positive notions of dialectics as we saw it in Hegelian dialectics. This point was made by Zoltán Tarr who writes that “in the dialectics of Hegel and Marx, the negation of the negation results in a position on a higher level. After Auschwitz, this is no longer possible.” (Tarr, 1977, p. 146) Auschwitz for Adorno was the ultimate proof of how progress reverts into barbarianism, thus foreclosing the possibility of a positive dialectics, as Hegel had envisioned. Meaning that the negative dialectics Adorno comes to formulate must be embedded within the context it seeks to examine. What is important for Adorno is that this new mode of critique is immanent, meaning that it is a critique which criticizes a context from within. Critique in this sense would be a critical self-reflection which would have to work its way out of its context – or as Adorno writes: “The only way out of the dialectical context of immanence is by that context itself. Dialectics is critical reflection upon that context.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 141) This means that it is impossible in Adorno’s view to take philosophy out of the context which surrounds it. Paraphrasing this; philosophy is always already situated in, and engaged with, a certain historical context. Thus, Adorno’s negative dialectics is a decisive break with Hegelian idealism. A break that comes in the form of Adorno’s “rejection of ‘identity’ in favor of ‘nonidentity’.” (Sherman, 2016, p. 353)

16 Adorno, 1997, p. 34.

Any such thinking, which speculates of a primacy allocated to the object is precisely the thinking which Adorno turns on its head when positing that the goal of negative dialectics is “To change this direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward non-identity.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 12) This means that any claim to an identity, or unity, between concepts and objects, are ignoring their differences. Ignoring the differences in the sense that they are positing universality where none is to be found. To put this in other words, the identity of a concept and an object, can only be stipulated if their inherent differences (their nonidentity) are ignored. An example of this might be a sentence like: this ‘dog’ is a dog. If this ‘dog’ is to be a part of the general conception of what it is to be a dog, we have already established that ‘dog’ is identical to the universal concept of dog. Here Adorno comes to say that it is in the contradiction between a particular (‘dog’) and a universal (dog) that the nonidentity of both concepts comes to be revealed. Negative dialectics can be said to be “the consistent sense of nonidentity.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 5) In other words, “nonidentity is the secret telos of identification.” (Ibid. p. 149) Identity in this sense can never be a universal identity, but must always only a particular identity. Meaning that ‘dog’ cannot be fathomed by the universal category of dog. By claiming that this ‘dog’ is a part of what we take to be the general conception of dog, we lose knowledge of the fact that this ‘dog’ is this dog. This is, of course, a simplistic way of paraphrasing Adorno’s critique of identity thinking. However, it highlights the fact that what Adorno’s critique of identity thinking is criticizing is the equation between a concept and its object:

“To define identity as the correspondence of the thing-in-itself to its concept is hubris; but the ideal of identity must not simply be discarded. Living in the rebuke that the thing is not identical with the concept is the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing. This is how the sense of nonidentity contains identity.” (Ibid. p. 149)

By realizing that concepts are not the totality of their object, and vice versa, Adorno comes to suggest that we opt for nonidentity thinking instead of identity thinking. What Adorno is grasping at here, reaching towards, has been expressed as the “repressed truth of the ‘ineffable’ that represented the utterly untrue in Hegel’s eyes.” (Jarvis, 2007, p. 181) An example of identity and nonidentity can be found in Adorno’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of exchange value. Here Adorno argues that the barter principle is in effect an identification made between a product (use) and currency (exchange):

“The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle of identification … It is through barter that nonidentical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical.” (Ibid. p. 146)

This criticism of the barter principle, as an identifying principle of thought allows us to realize that it is the principle itself which is nonidentical with reality. By way of an immanent critique of the barter principle, we come to realize its transgressions against the principle of equality17. Thus, we have come to realize the non-identical aspect of the barter principle – by unmasking its ideal of “free and just barter” (Ibid. p. 147) as its inner contradiction. Returning shortly to Hegel, who suggested that an identity was to be found in the synthesis between identity and nonidentity. This is opposed to Adorno’s notion of nonidentity, where nonidentity was not obtained through a synthesis, but instead through provoking the revelation of the nonidentity of concepts and their objects. Where Hegelian dialectics saw a possibility for achieving systemic completion, this possibility is nonexistent in the dialectics of Adorno18. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we can have (direct) access to the nonidentical. According to Adorno, we can: “have access to the nonidentical via conceptual criticisms of false identifications.” (Zuidervaart, Winter 2015) However, to see such a conceptual criticism, and to become aware of this false identification, we often need a kick off to see other possibilities. Such a kick off could e.g. some performances of drag, or other of what Butler came to call subversive performances. Drag, in the sense of a kickoff, would then be an act which shows other possible ways of being gendered. Meaning that a drag performance, as a subversive act, would posit the possibility of genders to be rethought, reformulated, and renewed. Hence there must be an experience that suggests the false identity of naturalized concepts, prior to any criticism of these. Negative dialectics is hence to be conceived of as a method (in the broadest sense of the word, being a method that is dynamic and changing/changeable) that can stimulate these kinds of conceptual criticisms by showing what is nonidentical of a perceived identity.

17 Adorno, 1973, p. 190. 18 Buck-Morss, 1977, p 63.

Logic of Disintegration This logic was the theoretical backbone of Adorno’s writings in the thirties19, and in an attempt to keep this explanation concise this part will draw heavily on the secondary literature of Susan Buck-Morss’ book The Origin of Negative Dialectics. It might be the case that there are other interpretations of how, or even whether the earlier Adorno’s conception of a logic of disintegration could even be equated as strongly with Adorno’s latter conception of a negative dialectics as Buck-Morss equates it. This is however taken to have little influence on our current purposes, as this account is primarily aimed at showing where Adorno’s negative dialectics developed from, its roots. Adorno explains this connection as:

“Its motion [a dialectics no longer reconcilable with that of Hegel] does not tend to the identity in the difference between each object and its concept; instead, it is suspicious of all identity. Its logic is one of disintegration: of a disintegration of the prepared and objectified form of the concepts which the cognitive subject faces, primarily and directly. Their identity with the subject is untruth.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 145)

This logic is for Adorno one which is inherent in bourgeois society, a logic that can be exemplified by the splitting of academic disciplines; i.e. theology from philosophy, or chemistry from physics. This specialization for Adorno illustrates a reproduction of the present way of production20, a reproduction of the division of labor, of specialization and rationalization of society. Adorno thus came to propose the necessity of applying this logic to itself, meaning that the goal of philosophy was to show that the truth inherent in capitalist (bourgeois) society were untrue (nonidentical with itself). Or as Buck-Morss describes it, Adorno called for “a liquidation of idealism from within.” (Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 64)

Another important thing to notice here is how Adorno is indebted to the writings of Walter Benjamin. As Buck-Morss points out: Adorno’s conception of a logic of disintegration was inspired by the early works of Benjamin21. Adorno came to borrow Benjamin’s notion that the utmost importance for philosophy is that it should carry out its criticism from within its context. And that such a project could only be achieved by using capitalism’s inherent logic

19 Buck-Morss, 1977, p 63. 20 Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 64. 21 Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 64.

(a logic of disintegration) against itself, as a way to break “out of bourgeois idealism.” (Ibid. p. 66) This act of breaking out can only be realized by an immanent critique, a mode of critique, or inquiry which was the to become a pillar in Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics. Hence Adorno came to regard truth to be found in the object, the material, but not without being aided by a subject; meaning that truth needs the subjective experience to be released by a kickoff22. This release can be understood as an action undertaken by using an immanent critique as a starting point. Thus, for Adorno, the material truth of an object is to be found in a subjects working its way out through the fogged glasses of bourgeois idealism, identity thinking.

The subject is appropriated by Adorno as a way of realizing what is true in the object. Here Adorno returns to Kant, but reinterpret his “individual, spontaneous, knowing subject” (Ibid. p. 82) against the grain. This new interpretation is one in which the nonidentity of the subject, and of the object, becomes the core tenet of Adorno's twist on Kant. Turning Kant’s notions into their contradictions, Adorno insists on the primacy of nonidentity over identity. An insistence that led Adorno to the realization that an individual will always be nonidentical with its pronounced identity, and that there is always something which escapes an identification. Even though identity is needed if the individual is to be non-identical to itself; the subject cannot escape the predicament of not being identical with its identity. In other words, for Adorno, there is an importance placed upon that which is; unconventional, nonconformist or queer.

Constellations Another concept which Adorno borrows from Benjamin is the theory of constellations23, and this notion is introduced as a way to gain insights into the uniqueness of an object. Here it is important to note that concepts for Adorno always enter into a constellation with other concepts, and hence they are equally determined by and determines other concepts. A group of concepts hence enters into a constellation which form an object. However, Adorno also suggests that we cannot have any exhaustive understanding of the constellation of an object, in this sense, Adorno breaks with the Hegelian conception of a range of concepts24. Meaning that for Adorno we can only know a concept’s constellation within a certain context, and this

22 Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 81. 23 “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars” - Benjamin 1985, p. 34. 24 Cook, 2008, p. 58.

context is how we come to see a concept. Hence there is no systemic completion for Adorno, instead, we can only see constellations and posit new possible constellation that might become. What becomes important in Adorno’s conception of this, is how an concept (of knowledge) enters into a constellation with its historical self (past-self), how it has changed to become what it is now, and lastly how it can (possibly) become something else entirely (future-self). This point which almost seems to echo Butler’s conception of the possibility for new conceptions of sex and gender, also account for the changeability of the meaning of an object. However, while Adorno borrows the term constellations from Benjamin, Adorno also breaks with Benjamin’s conception in notable ways. As has been indicated by Simon Jarvis, in Adorno a Critical Introduction, that Adorno breaks with Benjamin on two occasions; firstly, Adorno criticizes Benjamin’s thinking for being classificatory25 - in the sense that Benjamin is interested in which stars compose a constellation instead of what these stars are in themselves. Secondly, Jarvis claims that Adorno criticizes Benjamin for being too metaphysical in his thinking. Adorno does this by appealing to Max Weber’s “refusal to provide summary definitions for concepts which were historical” (Jarvis, 1998, p. 176, also see Adorno, 1973, p. 164-166) opposed to Benjamins attempt to provide such definitions. Adorno’s point seems to be that Benjamin’s project of classifying and ordering concepts into metaphysical constellations is a flawed way of thinking, due to an incorrect focus on their perceived identity. Instead, Adorno takes each object as being constructed from a constellation of prior historical conceptions. And Adorno breaks with Benjamin’s refusal to look at the separate stars in a constellation, by claiming that each star is itself a constellation of previous meaning. In Adorno’s account, Benjamin ignores the socio-historical nature of concepts that make up constellations. For Adorno a summary definition of a concept as Benjamin would have it, becomes an impossibility – a point which is highlighted when Adorno declares that:

“The unifying moment survives without a negation of negation, but also without delivering itself to abstraction as a supreme principle. It survives because there is no step-by-step progression from the concepts to a more general cover concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. The constellation illuminates the

25 Jarvis, 1998, p. 176.

specific side of the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 162)

But where does this claim leave us? It leaves us with a reinterpretation of Benjamin’s constellations which can be used to illuminate the historical process that shaped certain concepts. For Adorno, constellations are the way in which different concepts are interconnected, how they have a reciprocal impact on one another, but also how the past influences present contexts. A possible problem with this account, as pointed out by Stone is that “constellations can never exhaustively grasp an object because … their histories … are unfinished, [and] ever ongoing.” (Cook et al. 2008, p. 60) This problem is not of greater concern for us as this objection seems arbitrary – as it points out as a problematic fact that which Adorno was trying to achieve with reinterpreting Benjamin’s constellation. Adorno attempts to create an account of the historical aspect of the development of concepts. This means that for Adorno: “Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 163) For Adorno, to grasp an object in its constellation means to have a description of those concepts and the historical developments which are interconnected with the current object, in its current form.

To sum up, Adorno develops and expands on Benjamin's conception of constellations by transforming it from being “a unique, legible figure, which cannot easily be undone.” (Gilloch, 2002, p. 70) Into a term which is an ever-changing part of the socio-historical progress, situated in contexts, and always nonidentical with itself. This is achieved because of Adorno’s refusal to understand constellations as anything but a model, which describes a certain historical present. Instead, Adorno substitutes the universal aspects of Benjamin’s with a more socio-historical inclined account. What Adorno takes from Benjamin is that constellations are a mode, which can, be used to gain new insights into the reality of objects (but only within their current context).

Marx and Freud After having offered an outline of Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics, the following will provide two examples of how Adorno uses; on the one hand, Marxist, and on the other Freudian theory. This outline attempt to illuminate how Adorno uses these two theories to show the inner contradictions in society to conduct a negative dialectics. Both theories are used as a way of releasing the truth concealed by respectively; fascist propaganda, and by

The Cultural Industry. The reader is taken to have a basic understanding of both Marx’s, and of Freud’s writings, as their theories will only be explained if necessary in terms of clarifying Adorno’s usage of that theory. In particular, we shall be concerned with Marx’s theory of value creation, and the writings of the late Freud, primarily the book Civilization and its Discontents. Though Marxist and Freudian theory is usually thought incompatible26 Adorno attempts to consolidate these two different theories, to let their contradictions illuminate on the other, a mode of conducting an analysis which was used by most of The Frankfurt School. Adorno is accordingly able to release the inner truth of the “sociohistorical particularity” (Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 97) in Freudian theory, and “the psychological determinants of social conditions” (Ibid.) in Marxism. By allowing these two contradicting theories to work out of each other, Adorno achieves the goal of circumventing the law of the excluded middle (there is only opposition, in a dialectical sense, the middle is excluded). By circumventing this, it is now possible for Adorno to show the nonidentical in both of these theories. The psychological aspects of psychoanalysis come to bring out the nonidentical in Marxism, and vice versa. Bock-Morss explains this as:

“Adorno’s dialectical argumentation was to break apart the apparently identical by means of specific differentiation, a second was the reverse of this principle: to juxtapose seemingly unrelated, unidentical elements, revealing the configuration in which they congealed or converged.” (Ibid. p. 99)

Adorno constructs constellations in two maneuvers27: one being a conceptual move, and the other analytical. The analytical part of this maneuver uses Marxist and Freudian interpretations, where Adorno allows each of these theories to illuminate the other, as a way of isolating hidden elements of a phenomenon. Whereas the conceptual part has to do with the constellation which concepts enter into, and how a given constellation comes to be conceptualized by its components.

Freud Adorno in Freudian Theory of the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda uses Psychoanalysis to examine the role and nature of the fascist leader. To examine this Adorno primarily uses the Freudian notion of libidinal nature/power and the pleasure principle. It is already clear at

26 Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 97. 27 Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 101.

the beginning of this text how Adorno is positioning similarities between Freud and Marx, when it is claimed that:

"According to Freud, the problem of mass psychology is closely related to the new type of psychological affliction so characteristic of the era which for socio- economic reasons witnesses the decline of the individual and his subsequent weakness." (Adorno, 1982, p. 120)

In this paper, Adorno is specifically interested in how Freud would have explained the “transformation of individuals into a mass.” (Ibid. p. 121) Adorno comes to suggest that the fascist leader uses the libidinal energy of the individuals, as a way to transform individuals into a coherent mass. Elaborating on this Adorno does not describe any new qualities (new in the sense of not having been there before). Instead Adorno describes how old qualities, which were concealed before this analysis are made manifest in the bond between the audience/follower and the leader. This bond is in the case of fascist propaganda manifesting itself as a bond between brothers in arms28, a bond which Adorno claim has the structure of an unconscious homosexual love (and perhaps it is also of an incestual nature, seeing how it is between brothers in arms. For Adorno the taboo against homosexuality, as described by Butler, comes to have its latent and repressed energy directed towards the fascist cause). By claiming that the libidinal energy in fascism is mostly unconscious for the followers, Adorno comes to reveal the sexual nature of fascist ideology. The sexual energy which is repressed in fascism come to resurface as an energy which the leader directs towards a political end. This energy cannot be a conscious energy as “there is too little in the content of fascist ideology that could be loved.” (Ibid. p. 123) This leads Adorno to an analysis of fascist propaganda that exposes the unconscious truth of fascist ideology, which is built on false premises. Adorno is positing that fascist ideology, through a redirection of libidinal energies, enables the fascist leader to convert the capacity for universal love in the follower into a love for the cause. By inhibiting this (universal) love’s unconditional nature, The libidinal energy of the follower is “moulded into obedience.” (Ibid. p. 123) An obedience that can be used to any end which the leader might desire. Moreover, this is also what binds the followers to

28 Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 123.

each other, and the leader. The follower thus comes to identify with the cause and to internalize the leader, a mechanism which Freud calls identification29.

Adorno also accounts for how the notion of narcissism comes to have a significant role in how the followers end up identifying with the leader. This claim is based on Freud's theory of desire, and how the desire to internalize an object is formative of an identification. This is a point which we shall return later when dealing with Butler’s writings on the same topic, for now it seems sensible to limit our inquiry to Adorno’s claim that:

“the primitively narcissistic aspect of identification as an act of devouring, of making the beloved object part of oneself, may provide us with a clue to the fact that the modern leader image sometimes seems to be the enlargement of the subject's own personality.” (Ibid. p. 125)

Not only does this act of loving an idealization of one’s self create an identification with the object of desire, but it also “gratifies the follower's twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself.” (Ibid. p. 127) This act of submission is for Adorno achieved by the fact that the leader is portraying both qualities of the Übermensch30, while also being a great little man31. By doing so, it becomes possible for the follower to both idealizes the leader, as having those aspects which in the follower creates ambivalence, and as being a man who is similar to the follower. Hence the leader can be both identical to the follower and nonidentical to the follower at the same time. Using identification Adorno comes to show that the nonidentical in both follower and leader, and hence the inner contradictions of fascism is laid bare by this analysis. Lastly, we shall quickly examine Adorno’s example of Goebbels’ as being a mastermind of propaganda as an example of this. Adorno comes to posit that this portraying of Goebbels does itself “[call] for psychoanalytic [an] explanation.” (Ibid. p. 132) Thus Goebbels seemingly skillful usage of propaganda is claimed to be a ruse, and Adorno instead suggests that this is actually to be accounted for because of Goebbels hidden resemblance to the listeners. Hence Goebbel’s success does not boil down to his genius, but instead to his averageness32. This psychoanalytically informed analysis of the

29 Buck-Morss, 1977, p. 124-125. 30 “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome … man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.” Nietzsche, 1976, p.124. [Overman is in this the English translation of Übermensch] 31 Meaning that the leader is also portraying qualities which is shared with the follower. 32 T. W. Adorno, 1982, p. 132.

propaganda employed by Goebbels’ shows the depth of Adorno’s analysis. By this I mean to point to the extend to which Adorno comes to reveal the fact that: what at first seemed like a skillful agitator (Goebbels) was, in fact more alike to the followers who was addressed. We have here seen an example of how Adorno uses Psychoanalysis to kick off a critique which uses a concept’s own logic against itself to show how the skillful agitator was, in fact, akin to the follower. Moreover, we have also seen how Adorno came to conclude that the transformation of an individual into a follower (a mass) could be explained by the Freudian theory of identification.

Marx As an example of how Adorno uses Marxist theory the most widely regarded examples is probably the chapter on The Cultural Industry, which is found in Dialectics of Enlightenment. Before elaborating on Adorno’s critique of modern culture, and in particular the critique leveled against mass culture, a short introduction the Marxist theories of alienation and commodification seems in order. Gerald A. Cohen, in Karl Marx’s Theory of History A Defense, describes how alienation and commodification play out in regards to commodity fetishism, a concept important for Adorno. Cohen explains that through fetishizing commodities members of society came to be reduced to consumers, and in particular the workers came to be alienated from the production. Alienation in this sense means how producers and consumers came to lose any direct relation to each other. Instead what is left after such an alienation is a kind of semi-direct relation through an exchange in which both parties are consumers. This is opposed to an exchange which Marx posits as prior to, in which all exchanges was conducted between producers. This new semi-direct relationship between consumers is what Marx called the commodification of products. Meaning that since the products no longer have a use-value, instead products comes to have an exchange value33.

Adorno’s critique of The Cultural Industry is primarily based on the Marxist idea “that the basis on which technology is gaining power over society is the power of those whose economic position in society is strongest.” (Adorno, 2002, p. 95) This means that Adorno’s diagnosis of present day culture is that the progress of technology has compelled The Cultural Industry to become an economic power. The technology that has made mass

33 Cohen, 2000, p. 119-122.

produced culture possible also transformed culture from being valued based on its usability to being valued based on its exchangeability. This for Adorno comes to bear in the fact that:

“Anyone who does not conform [to this new situation in which culture is measured by its exchange value] is condemned to an economic impotence which is prolonged in the intellectual powerlessness of the eccentric loner. Disconnected from the mainstream, he is easily convicted of inadequacy” (Ibid. p. 106)

By not conforming to the economic logic of The Cultural Industry an artist is not able to be recognized as anything else than what Adorno calls the eccentric loner. By commodifing art, The Cultural Industry changes the relationship between the artist and the audience. Instead of being based largely on use-value it has now become a fetishized relationship where art is now in itself a value. This change in the function of art is for Adorno what enables The Cultural Industry to monopolize what is to be conceived of as art. In a world where the average worker is alienated from labor, and thus comes to value the brand over the product, even the bohemian bastion of artistic creativity has now become corrupted with the poison of (late) capitalist logic. The Cultural Industry has successfully reproduced the exchange- value relationship of labor in late capitalism. Moreover, by pretending that there are different choices in regards to the mass produced art (different styles) the consumer is presented with only the semblance of real differences. Adorno writes that: “The advantages and disadvantages debated by enthusiasts serve only to perpetuate the appearance of competition and choice. It is no different with the offerings of Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer.” (Ibid. p. 97) Furthering on this point, Adorno comes to claim that The Cultural Industry can not afford to allow the consumer anything that does not have an exchange value (as this would undermine The Cultural Industry and its implied capitalist logic). The Cultural Industry is thus seeking to normalize the tragedy of late-capitalist society, exemplified by the perceived truth of idioms such as; what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or, if you work hard, you can become whatever you want. What these sayings have in common is the fact that in our mass produced culture certain ideas are perpetuated as truths, they are hence normalized and believed to contain a truth. Instead, these two idioms are actually not true, as some things might in fact not be deadly, but they will never the less leave you in a worse condition, and that, no matter how hard one tries, some things will be out of reach.

These ideas perpetuated as truths are what in Marx was termed ideologies, a concept which comes in many shapes and sizes. Raymond Geuss in The Idea of a Critical Theory describes three kinds of ideology: Descriptive, Pejorative, and Positive. The second which resembles Adorno’s notion of critical theory, and Geuss describes this notion of ideology as one in which “Ideology is [conceived of as]… false consciousness.” (Geuss, 1999, p. 12) Whereas ideology in the third sense is “a desideratum for a particular society … but the ideology is something to be constructed,” (Ibid. p. 23) meaning that ideology comes to be a positive description – rather than something to be critiqued, it comes to be created for society (e.g., how Lenin argued for a vanguard, to lead the proletariat.) Situated in between these two notions is the first, and the more neutral notion of ideology – the descriptive one: “ ‘ideology’ in the first sense will just refer to one of the ‘parts’ into which the socio-cultural system of a human group can be divided for convenient study.” (Ibid. p. 5) It is hence only in the second sense of ideology that Adorno’s use of the word can be situated. As the term which is used to criticize false beliefs, by showing that ideology can only function if these are taken to be true. Since The Culture Industry cannot afford to show its untruths as being anything but true, it will continue to perpetuate the illusion of choice - an illusion that boils down to simple choices, between a Ford and a Crysler. The Cultural Industry can only allow a continuation of the outside world – “the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself.” (Adorno, 2002, p. 109), and even though art is often the promise of something new, or different: “The culture industry endlessly cheats it consumers out of what it endlessly promises.” (Ibid. p. 111) Instead of providing the promised possibility for change, art instead alienates the consumer from real life because the Cultural Industry's “Amusement [will] always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display.” (Ibid. p. 116) To sum up, Adorno’s claim can be exemplified in that:

“the cheapness of massproduced luxury articles, and its complement, universal fraud, are changing the commodity character of art itself. That character is not new: it is the fact that art now dutifully admits to being a commodity, abjures its autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumer goods, that has the charm of novelty.” (Ibid. p. 127)

What this short explanation of Adorno’s diagnosis of the Culture Industry has attempted to show, is how Adorno makes use of Marxist economic theory to distill the problematic nature connected with the emergence of mass produced art. Moreover, as before with the Freudian

analysis, Adorno have shown an inner contradiction in The Cultural Industry, a truth previously hidden from the audience.

Negative Dialectics, as a Critical Theory In summary, this chapter has attempted to describe the theoretical foundation of Adorno’s conception of dialectics. This dialectic was shown to differ from classical Hegelian dialectics in significant ways, and we saw how negative dialectics was a continuation of Adorno’s previous work on a logic of disintegration, together with the theory of constellations. After this, we looked at two examples of Adorno’s mode of philosophical inquiry; utilizing Marxist and Freudian insights to prompt the revelation of inner contradictions in fascist propaganda and The Cultural Industry. Firstly, were the inherent contradictions within fascist propaganda, here Adorno relied on Freudian Psychoanalysis and used these to highlight a contradiction hidden within fascist propaganda, that the leader is both portrayed as a Übermensch, and as a great little man. Secondly, was the example of how Adorno (and Horkheimer) in Dialectics of Enlightenment, showed the inner contradictions within The Cultural Industry. It should thus be clear how Adorno’s theory of a profoundly negative dialectics developed in broad strokes, its development, and how Adorno came to criticizes prior conceptions of dialectics from within dialectics. Together with how Adorno in two instances used this practice of analyzing to elicit a hidden truth.

Similarities in Adorno and Butler In this chapter, I shall attempt to elaborate on certain similarities, and a single dissimilarity, which is to be found between the works of Adorno and Butler. In the first chapter, we examined Butler’s general proposition in Gender Trouble followed by a certain branch of critique that has been levelled against the main argument of this book by Stoetzler and Hull. This critique can be reformulated as positing that Butlers project in Gender Trouble relies on a misreading of Simone de Beauvoir’s well-known claim in The Second Sex: that one is not born a woman. This misconception, which culminates in Butler’s famous answer to the question of who is the doer behind the deed34, is in Stoetzler critique taken to be an answer to a question that was never asked by de Beauvoir. In the second chapter, we examined the theory of negative dialectics as formulated by Adorno in Negative Dialectics, and saw two

34 Stoetzler, 2005, p. 350.

examples of Adorno’s usage of both Psychoanalytic- and Marxist theory. What this chapter will content itself with is an elaboration on the similarities which are to be found between Adorno’s, and Butler’s usage of Psychoanalysis and Marxism. But before getting to the heart of the matter, I shall first wish to delimit the scope of this chapter. For our purpose, we shall content ourselves with dwelling into their similar usage of primarily Psychoanalysis and Marxist theory. Before proceeding with this elaboration, it also seems necessary to explain this emphasis on the role that (Freudian) Psychoanalysis and Marxism has in both Adorno and Butler. It has been suggested, by various authors, that both The Frankfurt School in general and Adorno in particular, was influenced by the writings of Freud (Lamb-Books [2013], Lee [2014], or, Dahmer [2012]). In addition to this, it is hardly a secret that all members of The Frankfurt School had strong ties with theoretical Marxism (Wiggershaus, 2007, and Jefferies, 2016). This chapter is thus dedicated to elaborating on the similarities that are to be found in Adorno’s, and Butler’s respective writings, and how they use these theories as a way of structuring their analysing of various aspects of society. The reason for this emphasis is that it is neglected in both Stoetzler and Hull, and while their respective critiques of Butler was examined at the beginning of this thesis, I wish to elaborate on these similarities. This is done out of a wish to further the claim that these two thinkers have much in common, even though Butler’s project in Gender Trouble was a critique of the dialectical tradition.

A Psychoanalytic Mode of Thinking? “Adorno had adopted the psychoanalytic mode of thinking early on; so, his philosophical and sociological writings, as well as his theories on music and literature, are interwoven with Freudian concepts and theses.” (Dahmer, 2012, p. 101) It is therefore important to point out that the earlier examination of Adorno’s usage of Psychoanalysis in, Freudian Theory of the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, is just one of the examples of Adorno’s usage of, a Psychoanalytic mode of thinking. Adorno uses such a mode of thinking as a way to bypass sociology’s problematic relationship with a psychological view of individuals. What this means is that for sociology the individual is always, in relation to certain structures of power/law. Whereas the focal point of psychology (here also taken to encompass Psychoanalysis) is the individual taken without accounting for these outside structures. This point is described by Dahmer who writes that:

“The divergent viewpoints of sociology and psychology (that is to say, of social theory and psychoanalysis) derive from the inherent ambiguity, the protean character of their common object, that is of the socialized individuals, whose inner structure and relations to one another both sciences seek to fathom.” (Ibid. p. 102)

Butler on the other hand, though critical of Freud’s view on homosexuality, uses another variant of psychoanalytic informed thinking. This is a mode of thinking which I wish to expand on in the following, by conducting a close reading of Butler’s chapter: Freud and the Melancholia of Gender (Butler, 1990, p. 57-65). Butler in this chapter reconstructs the Freudian claim that melancholia plays a significant role in ego-formation, and thus in the formation of identity. By arguing that both Irigaray and Kristeva belittle the role which melancholia plays in “denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame,” (Ibid. p. 57) Butler comes to posit, the Freudian notions of identification as being crucial in the formation of identity. Identification is a crucial aspect in that it plays a part in the internalization of the other35, and thus in the formation of an identity. This structure is not only formative of a person’s character, but is also vital in the establishment of gendered identities. This is argued by suggesting that it is the taboo against incest “initiates a loss of a love-object for the ego and that this ego recuperates from this loss through the internalization of the tabooed object of desire.” (Ibid. p. 58) Hence the child must “choose not only between the two object choices [mother and father], but the two sexual dispositions, masculine and feminine.” (Ibid. p. 59) In answering to why a boy would normally choose a heterosexual cathexis (meaning to internalize the father), Butler comes to the somewhat surprising answers that: this is not chosen based on a fear of the father’s retribution. Instead, it is a culturally sanctioned “fear of ‘feminization’ associated within heterosexual cultures with male homosexuality” (Ibid. p. 59) which underpins the choice. We thus come to see how Butler’s analysis switches the focal point, from an individually focused psychological emphasis, onto a more sociological inclined one (now considering the role society plays in the formation of the individual). Butler thus comes to posit a usage of Psychoanalysis which is more akin to that of the latter Freud (who wrote Civilization and Its Discontent), than similar to the earlier Freud (who placed prominence on individuals understood has removed from societies sphere of influence).

35 Butler, 1990, p. 58.

Before we continue with this close reading of Butler, it seems crucial to posit an early similarity between Adorno and Butler, as this similarity will be important to keep in mind as this chapter continues. Important as one of the closest relations we are to see between Adorno’s, and Butler’s, use of psychoanalysis comes to be their shared usage of the notion of identification. As shown in the earlier chapter on Adorno’s usage of Freud who also tried to merge the individual primacy in Psychoanalysis, with the more societal inclined analysis provided by Marx. Dahmer describes this opposition between these two analyses as they “are competing to monopolize explanation of the history of the social world.” (Dahmer, 2012, p. 103) Contrary to this opposition Adorno in the study of the Freudian Theory of the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, tried to develop this opposition into a productive one. Adorno, as Butler in Gender Trouble, used the notion of identification to exemplify the behavior of the masses, in particular regarding mass following of a fascist leader. Moreover, like Butler, Adorno came to conclude that libidinal energies and their suppression are vital in the creation of identity. However, whereas Adorno examined the establishment of the identity of a group, Butler considered the creation of individual gendered identities. Butler also reviewed the important notion in the classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory of primary bisexuality36. Which in Butler’s representation of Freud comes to mean that the taboo against homosexuality, coupled with a taboo against incest, works so that the taboo against homosexuality first limits legitimate from illegitimate sexual dispositions. After which the taboo against incest makes the child internalize the lost-love-object parent which then becomes a formative part of the child’s identity. In other words, both of these taboos for Freud (Butler suggests) comes to initiate a process of melancholic identification with the lost love-object, a melancholia which is formative of identity. The ban on homosexuality is thus far more punitive (and hence prior to), the taboo against incest, in the sense that the former decides which genders are legitimate. Whereas the latter taboo ‘only’ restricts by excluding certain kinship-relations from the realm of permitted sexual partners, Butler describes this entire process as:

“if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that

36 See Freud; Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), or Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).

proves to be formative of identity … dispositions are not primarily sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture.” (Butler, 1990, p. 63-64)

As we have just seen Butler’s conclusion, on the culturally imposed nature of sexual disposition in Freudian Psychoanalysis, closely resembles Adorno’s usage of Psychoanalysis. A point which is to be elaborated on in the following by suggesting two ideas: firstly, how both Adorno and Butler are engaging in the same kind of analysis, of the relationship between the individual and society. Secondly, that even the slight dissimilarity which can be found in their interpretation of the Oedipal complex can be understood as being based on inner ambiguities within Psychoanalysis itself. Meaning that is not to be overcome, but it is worked through, and with, as an ambiguity that can be a part of producing a new social truth.

Elaborating on the role of Psychoanalysis and Marxism played for The Frankfurt School Nan-Nan Lee writes that: “The institute sought to incorporate Freudian theory into its Critical Theory of society in order to supplement the Marxist analyses of objective conditions of society with a subjective theory of human motivation.” (Lee, 2014, p. 311) Lee describes Adorno’s critique of revisionist Psychoanalysis and traces it back to the attempt made by The Institute to merge Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. Lee is suggesting that Adorno’s critique of revisionist Psychoanalysis was also a break with the former member of The Institute, Eric Fromm. Enlarging on this break Lee writes that:

“Even though the revisionists, especially Fromm, develop a critical theory of society, they do not accept the central claim made by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents: that civilization is both oppressive and repressive; whereas Adorno and the Institute of Social Research do.” (Ibid. p. 322)

This point, which is one of Lee’s concluding remarks, is important as it shows a crucial similarity between Adorno and Butler. A similarity in their mutual insistence on the repressiveness of society. Where Butler claimed hetero-normative society as being repressive of what this society has constituted as ‘Other.' Adorno saw society as being repressive at its core, towards its object. In a feminist interpretaion this comes to mean that: “we can recognize, therefore, that the imposition of identity by the subject (privileged males) on the object (Other) is a violent act” (Anderson, 2004, p. 93)

A second point which also seems important to make concerns the original title of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontent - Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. This title conveys an important fact more clearly than the English title. This being the fact that culture came to be an important aspect in the works of the late Freud. A point which is somewhat lost in the English translation. This point, which seems germane to mention in passing appears to suggest that for the later Freud the cultural aspects of Psychoanalysis came to play a greater role than it had had earlier, a point which is echoed by Adorno who suggests that:

“The superego, the locus of conscience, not merely represents what is socially tabooed as being intrinsically evil but also irrationally combines the ancient dread of physical annihilation with the much later fear of being expelled from the social community which has come to encircle us in the place of nature.” (Adorno, 1967, p. 71)

In this quote, we see how Adorno stipulates an intersection between the two spheres, individual and society. This means that the individual’s fear of social exclusion comes to play a vital role in how that individual will react to socially sanctioned regulations; e.g. enforced heterosexuality, legitimate sexual dispositions or what is to count as a good life. However, also in a sense dialectically, how societal regulations come to be shaped by the manner in which individuals comes to internalize these regulations and act them out. Adorno is thus suggesting that these regulations come to be regulated themselves by becoming subjected to their (the regulations) own effect. This shares certain similarities with Butler’s claim that:

“The melancholia of gender identification which ‘answers’ the Oedipal dilemma must be understood, then, as the internalization of an interior moral directive which gains its structure and energy from an externally enforced taboo.” (Butler, 1990, p. 64)

This is a point which is developed further when, on the same page, it is reformulated as: “the law both produces sexuality in the form of ‘dispositions’ and appears disingenuously at a later point in time to transform these ostensibly ‘natural’ dispositions into culturally acceptable structures of exogamic kinship.” (Ibid. p. 64) Butler is here positing that gender identity is being produced, and reinforced by its own structure. A claim which strongly resembles Adorno’s suggestion that the antagonism between society and the individual comes to play out, not as an opposition, but instead as a dialectical relation where one part

can never completely be collapsed into the other, instead they come to build on each other, in a dialectical way where they never come to equate the other.

Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents posits three-quarters from which human suffering is derived; “from our own body … from the outer world … and finally from our relations with other men. The unhappiness which has this last origin we find perhaps more painful than any other.” (Freud, 1947, p. 28) Hence Freud can be read as claiming that the exclusion from society, or the exclusion by one’s peers is the most terrible of pains for a human. An insight which proves to be of importance for both Adorno and Butler. Important since it points to the social nature of humans, as a source from which each of us both experience pleasures and pains. An example of this might be the exclusion of Erich Fromm, first from The Institute, followed by attacks against Fromm’s theories by Adorno37. The main rebuttal of Fromm was aimed at the call for “human productivity, love and sanity.” (Jefferies, 2016, p. 292) In its place, Adorno and Horkheimer argued for the orthodox Freudian reading where “we are not free either of our biological instincts, nor can we escape determination and domination by the social order.” (Ibid. p. 293) Freud describes how “happiness is a problem of the economics of the libido in each individual,” (Freud, 1947. p. 40) this insight comes to mean that happiness is achieved, or barred depending on the character of the individual. In Adorno, libidinal energies came to play a significant part in the creation of a mass following. Particular in Adorno’s examination of the authoritarian personality, wherein it came to be suggested that the leader molds the libidinal energies of the follower, and directs them towards the cause. Butler, on the other hand, suggested that the libido appears in relations to sexual dispositions, and comes to ask whether the primary bisexuality posited by Freud is “an unconscious libidinal organization.” (Butler, 1990, p. 60) Leading Butler to a discussion of the status of these posited sexual disposition, as being natural or rather being an identification with a lost love-object. As mentioned before one of the similarities which were shown between Adorno and Butler points to a certain answer to this question. An interpretation in which identification comes out on top, and which rejects Freud’s argument of these dispositions being natural. A similarity in how both Adorno and Butler uses the concept of libidinal energies to inform on the construction of identities.

37 “Fromm’s growing distaste for Freudian orthodoxy led to a clash between him and Adorno and Horkheimer that led to his dismissal from the Institute in 1939.” Jefferies, 2016, p. 292.

Another similarity which is of interest is Adorno’s, and Butler’s, interpretation of the role which the Oedipus complex plays in the formation of individual identity (and plays in this sense is a clever use of words, as it comes to reveal how the Oedipus complex is played out against the backdrop of normative society). Benjamin Lamb-Books describes Adorno and Horkheimer’s view on the role of the Oedipus complex in Dialectics of Enlightenment as: “[Adorno and Horkheimer] think that the Oedipus complex is good at one thing: creating nonauthoritarian individuals.” (Lamb-Books, 2013, p. 45) This is contrasted by Butler who argues that for Freud the Oedipus complex

“is thus instrumental in the successful consolidation of masculinity and femininity … The resolution of the Oedipal complex affects gender identification through not only the incest taboo, but, prior to that, the taboo against homosexuality.” (Butler, 1990, p. 62-63)

This apparent dissimilarity seems not easily resolved, and for now, we shall leave it unresolved. What has been attempted in this part was to show how Adorno’s and Butler’s usage of Psychoanalytic concepts and theories share certain similarities, which link their writings together with a mutual insistence on the role which the social aspect comes to occupy in the formation of individual identities.

A Marxist Mode of Thinking? It should hardly come as any surprise to anyone slightly informed about The Frankfurt School that Marxism played a key role in its research. And to limit the scope of it shall only be elaborated on when this needed as a point of reference to Butler’s usage of Marxism. To claim that Butler is a Marxist would be an overstatement, and it would instead seem more accurate to argue that Butler’s thoughts are to some extent inspired by some of the insights of Marx. However, as Butler mentions Marx at the beginning of Gender Trouble, the claim that Butler’s thoughts are to some extent inspired by Marxism should seem uncontroversial. Here Butler writes that: “As such, the critical point of departure [for feminism] is the historical present, as Marx put it. And the task is to formulate within this constituted frame a critique of the categories of identity.” (Ibid. p. 5) This kind of endeavor, which Butler seems to consider Gender Trouble to be a contribution to, is thus clearly situated within a tradition of critique, a tradition highly informed by Marxism. This is a point which can also be supported when Butler concludes the first chapter of Gender Trouble with this statement:

“To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity, a move which has been a part of cultural critique at least since Marx, is a task that now takes on the added burden of showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered, admits of possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by various reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies.“ (Ibid. p. 33)

This shares certain similarities with Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) usage of Marxist insights. For who, Marxist theory offered a way of immanently critiquing capitalist society. So as we in the former tried to decipher a Psychoanalytic mode of thought, we will now attempt to decipher a certain Marxist mode of thought present in both Adorno and Butler. In Bodies That Matter Butler coins Marx, and writes “that the reproduction of the species will be articulated as the reproduction of relations of reproduction … [this] requires and produces a normative heterosexuality in its service.” (Butler, 2011, p. 123) In other words, Butler here suggests that the human species goal, of reproduction, creates and reinforces normativity heterosexuality. This formulation of the politics of reproduction serves as a point de depart for a critique of the economy of reproduction/sexuality. This critique, which is based on analysis of literary works, relies both on Psychoanalysis (a point which we will skip) and “the historically specific constraints of sexuality and race which produced this text [Nella Larsen, Quicksand, 1929].” (Ibid. p. 128) Here Butler offers us an example of an analysis of a specific historical situation, one which suggests itself as yet another similarity between Adorno and Butler. This point is further articulated by Rolf Wiggershaus who writes that: “[Adorno] declared his belief in the Marxist theory that consciousness was determined by social existence.” (Wiggeshaus, 2007, p. 82) What this is meant to show is how Adorno and Butler hold similar views on the role of the historical situation plays, and Butler’s insistence on reading literature out of the specific historical context which produced it come to have a Adornian connotation to it.

Concluding on the Similarities Found in Adorno and Butler This chapter has attempted to highlight similarities between; the general project of Adorno and that of Butler. This was done by positioning five similarities and one dissimilarity between them. Firstly, by showing that Butler’s emphasis on the culturally imposed nature of gender resembles Adorno’s claim to the repressive nature of society. Meaning that they both share the view that society, or culture, enforce its will on individuals by way of

prescribing what is to count as identity (and what is marginalized becomes a nonidentity). Secondly, I have wished to show how Adorno and Butler share in their insistences on analyzing from the historical present. A point which comes to shine in Adorno and Horkheimer’s conception of the Culture Industry, and again in Butler’s analysis of Quicksand by Nella Larsen. In addition to this, the third point comes to add to the second. Here both thinkers used Psychoanalysis to analyze the relationship between individuals and society. This is both seen in Adorno’s analysis of, Freudian Theory of the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, and in Butler’s claim that the taboo against homosexuality and incest is created by an “externally enforced taboo.” (Butler, 1990, p. 64) Whereas Butler stipulates that heterosexual society enforces a taboo against homosexuality, Adorno sees the fascist leader as repressing the homosexual love between brothers in arms. The fourth similarity was found in Adorno’s, and Butler’s ability to elicit the hidden contradictions within normative society. In other words, their ability to show the problematic nature of the status quo of society, by interpreting the existent culture in new ways. The fifth and last, but chronologically first, was Adorno’s, and Butler’s usage of the Freudian notion of identification. Here we saw how their analysis came to bear a strong resemblance to each other, as both came to see identification as a pillar in the formation of identities.

Lastly, we found a dissimilarity in Adorno’s, and Butler’s interpretation of the role of the Oedipal complex. Where, according to Lamb-Books, Adorno and Horkheimer came to interpret the Oedipus complex’s role in the formation of individual identity as being formative in creating nonauthoritarian individuals. Butler interprets the Oedipus complex far more negatively, meaning that for Butler the role which is played by the Oedipus complex is as being “instrumental in the successful consolidation of masculinity and femininity.” (Ibid. p. 62) While this is a clear dissimilarity, I claimed it was, in fact, an inner ambiguity inherent in psychoanalytic theory. In the following, I shall expand on my view that this dissimilarity is not a point of contention. Instead, it is an inherent ambiguity in Psychoanalysis - a tension which is productive. Productive in the sense that it adds a possible layer to an interpretation, thus lending the interpretation the possibility for seeing its own outside, through its inherent negation. This tension hence come to provide a kick off for an interpretation which is critical from within itself.

Randall Halle (1995) posits that Adorno and Horkheimer’s understanding of the homosexual in The Dialectics of Enlightenment was “Within the Oedipal framework … [and]

explained homosexuality as originating in castration anxiety. Fear of castration at the hands of the father as a result of desiring the mother resulted in the child shifting desire onto the father.” (Halle, 1995, p. 304-305) Leading Halle to suggest that for Adorno (and Horkheimer) the homosexual desire comes about due to a repression of an original heterosexual desire. This is what leads to the conclusion that the fascist follower has a homosexual disposition, while the individual whom will not be repressed as a heterosexual disposition - a point of contention for Halle. Whereas we have seen Butler negating this claim, positing instead that it is the “fear of ‘feminization’ associated within heterosexual cultures with male homosexuality.” (Butler, 1990, p. 59) Butler here conducts what Halle claims to be lacking in Adorno and Horkheimer interpretation: “In this understanding, homosexual desire appeared as inherently repressible - the desire which cannot be named. There was no discussion of the social component of repression.” (Halle, 1995, p. 304) I will, in short, suggest that such a discussion is to be found in Butler and that if we read Butler as remedying Adorno’s shortcoming, we also come to see how Adorno’s, and Butler’s different interpretation of the Oedipal complex is more akin than should have been thought at first sight. Halle stipulates that for Adorno the homosexual is an effect of the fear of castration, hence a fear of repression. However, if we instead interpret the Oedipal complex as Butler does, it becomes possible to see normative heterosexuality not as a fear of repression, but instead as a fear of becoming the ‘Other’.

Moreover, in such an interpretation Halle’s argument against Adorno would no longer hold, as heterosexuality is no longer driven by a fear of the paternal might, but instead by the fear of being marginalized as the ‘Other’. But this, being marginalized as an ‘Other’, is also akin to the one who switches its object of desire out of fear of castration. For what is castration if not also an allocation of Otherness? In the sense that it takes away the signifier (the phallus in Lacan), thus allocating otherness or lack in its place. To give a hint at an answer to this question I shall first need to explain in short on a single aspect of the psychoanalytic theory of Otto Gross, an Austrian psychoanalyst. For Gross, there are two important drives related to sexuality, “the drive for self and the drive for sexuality, and between these two would lie the pathologizing inner conflict.” (Gross, 2012, p. 287). These two drives are for Gross best understood as, in the case of the first; a drive towards autonomy – a will to power. While the latter is a drive to subordinate to normative standards of social life:

“the conflict between two pairs of antagonists: on the one side, not allowing oneself be raped and not wanting to rape [drive for self], and, on the other, the felt determination of the most insurmountable drive as raping and being raped [drive for sexuality].” (Ibid. p. 265.)

What is of importance for us regarding this insight made by Gross, which resembles Adorno’s claim that “gratifies the follower's twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself,” (Adorno, 1982, p. 127) is the fact that the dissimilarity between Adorno and Butler seems to boil down to an opposition in their reading of the Oedipal complex. Whereas Butler posits this complex as being repressive in the sense that it forces hetero-normativity on individuals. The Oedipal complex is in Adorno’s reading instrumental in creating nonauthoritarian individuals (simply put Adorno understands homosexuality as subordination). But as is suggested by Gross there is also an inner tension in both drives, so that each comes to contain its own contradiction. If Adorno’s reading now both posits the Oedipal complex as being instrumental in; both a desire to not be repressed, together with a desire for not repressing. Adorno also confirms Freud’s general proposition in Civilization and Its Discontent: that society is always already repressive. While Butler’s reading suggests that the individual now both wants to be repressed and wants to repress others. This tension, which is only resolvable if we read both parallel and with each other, means that the Butlerian reading of the repressive nature of the Oedipal complex can only be resolved by Adorno’s reading of the possibility for individualization in the repressive nature posited by Butler’s reading. And vice versa is Adorno’s reading only possible if we also posit Butler’s reading of the repressive nature of the complex. In other words, Adorno’s claim that the nonauthoritarian individual overcomes the repression of the father has an inner contradiction: namely that this individual comes to repress by perpetuating heteronormative society. And vice versa about Butler’s claim, that the Oedipal drama enforces heteronormativity, which comes with an inner tension: that foreclosure of new gendered possibilities is only to be understood against the backdrop of heteronormativity. Thus, Adorno’s reading shows the untruth in Butler’s, in the same way as Butler’s show the untruth in Adorno’s.

This chapter has shown some significant similarities between Adorno and Butler. By positing these similarities, I hope that the reader will have gained an understanding for how Butler could be reinterpreted not only in a dialectical way, as was suggested by Stoetzler and

Hull in the first chapter. But also, how Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, can be envisioned to be situated within the scope of the project that was envisioned by The Frankfurt School. It was also suggested that their different reading of the Oedipal complex could be understood as being based on an inherent tension in Psychoanalysis, a tension that plays out between the individual and society. A tension which originally led The Institute to their attempt at fusing Marxism and Psychoanalysis, and which later came to be important for Butler in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.

Gender Constellations When Adorno took up Benjamin’s notion of constellations as a way of understanding the identity of objects, it would seem that a note was struck. This conception, so simple, still managed to illuminate so vividly the claim which Adorno intended to make in Negative Dialectics: that every concept is made up by its historical context, together with the implied understanding that it need not be this way. This groundbreaking claim resonance with the claim made by Butler: that gender identities are merely constructions of a (patriarchal) culture. Before returning to the similarities which I have shown there is to be found in Adorno’s, and Butler’s particular usage of Psychoanalysis and Marxism, a short elaboration in the elephant in the room seems in order. This proverbial elephant being how Adorno’s constellations and Butler’s (constructed) gender identities resemble each other in important ways. Adorno describes a constellation as: “[constellations represent] from without what the concept has cut away within: the ‘more’ which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being.” (Adorno, 1973, p. 162) Meaning that for Adorno the theory of constellations is supposed to hint at the nonidentical aspect of any concept. To give an example of this one might think of Butler’s argument regarding the act of drag in Gender Trouble.

Butler in Gender Trouble posits that the act of drag, “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.” (Butler, 1990, p. 137) By interpreting the performance of drag in such way, Butler comes to stipulate that: through this is playing within what could be called the constellation of normative gender identities. Drag as a performance reveals the nonidentical in the presumed stable identities of male and female (and the subsequent conceptions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’). Or to use Butler’s description of this: “gender parody [drag] reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.” (Ibid. p. 138) I take Butler’s

claim in regard to without an origin, to mean that: gender cannot be said to have any objective origin. However, as we have seen this is not to say that the structure of gender, which has come to resemble a natural pre-discursive truth, does not get introduced from nowhere. Instead, we should seek to find such beginning in the interplay between individual and society. An interplay which both Adorno, and Butler elaborate on using Psychoanalysis and Marxism.

As we saw in the third chapter Adorno’s, and Butler’s usage of these two traditions resembled each other in noticeable ways. Mainly, in how both used the same theories in their analysis of; in Adorno’s case fascism, and in Butler’s gender. Moreover, while it might be claimed that Butler in Gender Trouble was highly critical of any dialectical thinking, I have hoped to have shown how it might be possible to reconcile Adorno and Butler in the following ways. First of all, how their shared insistence on the role that Psychoanalysis plays in the formation of the identities of individuals, in relation to a normative structure provided by society, comes to be informative of both their analyses. Where Adorno concluded that the libidinal molding by the fascist leader is formative of the follower’s internalization of the cause, and subsequent identification it. Butler concluded that the taboo of the desired parent, an externally enforced taboo, came to be formative in the identity formation of the child, and its previous internalization of either hetero- or, homosexual desires. Thus, it seems that for both Adorno, and Butler Psychoanalytic theories informs on the formation of identities by explaining how society can naturalize its logic on individuals. This led us to the second resembles which was examined in the third chapter. This being the resemblance found between: the cultural construction of gender and the historical context of any constellation. Here it is important to remember that Butler never speaks of gender as being in a constellation, I shall thus wish to expand further on this similarity. As a starting point for this it seems prudent to quote Butler in stating that:

“Gender ought not to be constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.” (Ibid. p. 140)

In the same way, a concept comes to resemble itself through the constellation in which it is already always conceived as being constituted by. This means that a concept, say man (male), comes to be constituted by all those other concepts which are part of the

‘constellation’ man (male). In the same way, as the little dipper is constituted by the stars of which it is comprised. However, while the constellation of stars in the night sky is a fairly permanent, the constellations which make up abstract concepts (i.e. justice, female or, male) are much more unstable.

In the second chapter, I examined Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics, and the idea of constellations, together with how Psychoanalysis and Marxism played a vital role in Adorno’s writings. Here negative dialectics was explained as a critique of Hegelian dialectics, or a reversal, such that the negation of the negation come to be negative as opposed to positive as it was for both Hegel and Marx. This means that for Adorno the philosophical quest for truth or certain knowledge must be abandoned. However, instead of leaving philosophical inquiry decimated, and relegated to a nihilistic enterprise, Adorno salvages philosophy by claiming its goal to be that of providing an immanent negative critique. The two examples of this were: Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of The Cultural Industry, and Adorno’s analysis of the fascist leader. A critique which seems to be useful once again with the rise of nationalism in Europe and the election of Trump. This point besides, the goal of the second chapter was to provide the theoretical grounding of some key notions of Adorno’s work. This project played out on the background of the first chapter, wherein Butler’s project in Gender Trouble was examined together with Stoetzler’s and Hull’s critique of this. Hence, the first chapter was an attempt to provide an outline first, Butler’s project in Gender Trouble, and secondly, to posit the notion that Butler’s project could be interpreted as a dialectical critique of dialectics, due to a resemblance with Adorno’s project in Negative Dialectics. Whereas Stoetzler and Hull attempted to fit Butler project into Adorno’s negative dialectics, I have sought to expand on the similarities that are to be found between Adorno and Butler. In the, neglected aspects of their usage of Psychoanalysis and Marxist theory.

The importance which I place on both Adorno’s and Butler’s usage of Psychoanalysis and Marxism boils down to their common enterprise, that of providing a critical theory of identity politics. Stuart Jefferies describes how Horkheimer, upon becoming the director of The Institute in the 1930’s, “transformed it from a Marxist institute into a multidisciplinary, psychoanalytic inclined and revisionist Marxist one.” (Jefferies, 2016, p. 36-37) What has also been described by Rolf Wiggershaus as: “[Adorno] considered Freudian Psychoanalysis as an empirical science of the unconscious which was capable of filling in the outlines provided by transcendental philosophy.” (Wiggershaus, 1994, p. 82) It is within this

framework of; a multidisciplinary, psychoanalytic inclined and ‘Marxist’ one, that I also see Butler’s writings as also being situated. By letting the psychoanalytic emphasis on the psychology of the individual work with, and being work on by, the Marxist primacy of the historical context, both Adorno and Butler is able to reinterpret and illuminate the nonidentical of the concepts which they seek to provide a critical theory of. This is what Adorno comes to call the nonidentity of identity and nonidentity, which resembles Butler’s: “[the] ‘I’, invariably associated with its gender, is nevertheless a point of agency never fully identifiable with its gender.” (Butler, 1990, p. 143) This claim by Butler at the end of Gender Trouble I take to resemble Adorno’s insistence on the fact that, in Renée Heberle’s words:

“the critical issue is not who or which social identity can know truth, but how truths that always already exist for us in the social world can be unlocked through constellations and how that interpretation can be transformed into new social meanings.” (Heberle, 2006, p. 227)

For both Adorno and Butler Psychoanalysis and Marxism is a vital part of the tools used to unlock these truths of the social world. Moreover, through this unlocking of the social world, both thinkers came to interpret their present in a way that allowed for it to be envisioned anew. The negative dialectics formulated by Adorno is, as Stoetzler argued, possible to merge with the project of Butler. For if we read Butler’s undialectical alternatively as a dialectical critique, we can read Gender Trouble as being a part of the project envisioned by The Frankfurt School theorists. A critique which is dialectical “in that it explicitly connects questions about the ‘inherent’ truth or falsity of a form of consciousness with questions about its history, origin, and function in society.” (Geuss, 1999, p. 22) Such a reading would broaden the emancipatory quality of critical theory while allowing for the interpretive notion of philosophy developed by Adorno to work its way out of society’s own contradictions. This would enable us to understand Butler’s notion of the performativity of drag, as being a reshaping of the constellation of genders, whatever the historical understand of this concept might be. I hope that my attempt, to highlight Adorno’s and Butler’s shared theoretical background in both Psychoanalysis and Marxism, has provided an account of how their respective works can be read as sharing in the same tradition, this being critical theory. And how it might be possible for the reader now to understand in which sense their separate theories actually share in the same traditions of analyzing society.

In summary, we have seen how Adorno’s and Butler’s two enterprises came to have a strong resemblance, not only if both were read as providing a dialectical critique of dialectics, but also when considering their theoretical grounding in Psychoanalysis and Marxism. In particular, how both Adorno and Butler try to utilize these two theories to show the falsity of commonly held beliefs, be it Goebbel’s genius, or the naturalness of gender. In addition to this is the fact that for both societies function as a repression of individuals, but also that for both this repression enables a kick-off from which it attempts a critical analysis. “Butler's work, like Adorno's, addresses the disjunction between an ideal subject and the real conditions that such a subject faces ... freedom within certain socially constructed parameters.” (Herberle, 2006, p. 284) This disjunction, between the real and the ideal, is in a sense exactly where Psychoanalysis and Marxism clash, and where both Adorno and Butler comes to make this tension into a productive one. Hence, it is this the merging of these two theories which binds Adorno’s, and Butler’s projects together in a shared sense, in which both provide a critical theory of society.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda. Edited by A. Arato and E.Gebhardt (eds). Continuum, 1982.

—. "Sociology and Psychology." New Left Review, November-December 1967: 67-80.

—. "Sociology and Psychology." New Left Review, January-February 1968: 79-97.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enligthenment Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2002.

Adorno, Theordor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. Routledge, 1973.

Anderson, Cheryl. Women, Ideology and Violence: The Construction of Gender in the Book of covenant and Deueronomic Law. T&T Clark, 2004.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by E. M. Parshley. Vintage, 1973.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osbourne. Verso, 1985.

Bennett, Jonathan. Kant's Dialectic. Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Bowie, Andrew. Adorno and the ends of philosophy. Polity Press, 2013.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics. The Harvester Press Limited, 1977.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. Routledge, 2011.

—. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

—. Subjects of Desire. Columbia University Press, 1999.

—. "Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex." Yale French Studies 72, 1986: 35-41.

Cook, Deborah, ed. Theodor Adorno Key Concepts. Acumen Publishing Limited., 2008.

Coole, Diana. "Negativity and Politics - Dionysus and dialectics from Kant to poststructuralism." (Routledge) 2000.

Corradetti, Claudio. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. n.d. http://www.iep.utm.edu/frankfur/ (accessed July 26, 2017).

Dahmer, Helmut. "Adorno’s view of psychoanalysis." Thesis Eleven, 2012: 97–109.

Foucault, Michel. Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite. Pantheon Books, 1980.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontent. Translated by Joan Riviere. Hograth Press, 1947.

—. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 7, Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vintage Classics, 2001.

—. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud, Sigmund, trans. James Strachey, Basic Books, 1962.

Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Gilloch, Graeme. Walter Benjamin Critical Constellations. Polity Press, 2002.

Gross, Otto. Selected Works 1901-1920. Translated by Lois L. Madison. Mindpiece, 2012.

Halle, Randall. "Between Marxism and Psychoanalysis." Journal of Homosexuality, 1995: 295-317.

Heberle, Renée. Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.

Howie, Gillian. "Nonidentity, Negative Experience and the Pre-Reflective Cogito." European Journal of Philosophy, 2012: 590-607.

Hull, Carrie L. "The need in thinking, Materiality in Theodor W. Adorno and Judith Butler." Radical Philosophy, August 1997: 22-35.

Jarvis, Simon. Adorno A Critical Introduction. Polity Press, 1998.

Jarvis, Simon, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Routledge, 2007.

Jefferies, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss The Lives of the Frankfurt School. Verso, 2016.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Allen W. Wood Poul Guyer. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Kristeva, Julia. Power of Horror. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982.

Lamb-Books, Benjamin. "Adorno and Horkheimer's collective psychology: On psychoanalytic social explanations." Thesis Eleven, 2013: 40-54.

Lee, Nan-Nan. "Sublimated or castrated psychoanalysis? Adorno's critique of the revisionist psychoanalysis: An introduction to 'The Revisionist Psychoanalysis'." Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2014: 309– 338.

Little, Daniel. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Summer 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/history/ (accessed July 26, 2017).

Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Vol. vol. I & II. Wordworth, 2013.

—. Theses On Feuerbach. Translated by W. Lough. Progress Publishers, 1969.

Maybee, Julie E. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Winter 2016. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/hegel-dialectics/ (accessed July 26, 2017).

Nietzche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage, 1969.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by ann Walter Kauf. Penguin Books, 1976.

O'Connor, Brian. Adorno. Routledge, 2013.

Rose, Gillian. The Melancholy Science - An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. The MacMillan Press, 1978.

Salih, Sara. Routlegde Critical Thinkers. Routlegde, 2002.

Sherman, David. "Adorno's Negative Dialectics." Philosophy Compass, 11, 7, 2016: 353-363.

Stoetzler, Marcel. "Subject trouble Judith Butler and dialectics." Philosophy and Social Criticism , vol. 31 no. 3, 2005: 343–368.

Tar, Zoltán. The Frankfurt School The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1977.

Wiggeshaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School - Its History, Theories and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Polity Press, 2007.

Zuidervaart, Lambert. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Theodor W. Adorno. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Winter ed. 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/adorno/ (accessed February 24, 2017).