Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 00:59:40 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: Identity and adorno


these recent postings on identity mark a shift, and to some degree a
welcome one.

i am not in a position to comment on their realtion to the article on
the zapatistas in wild-cat (not
having seen it), nor on the discussion on the zapatistas, which others
no doubt will elaborate on.

i would like to make a few short comments on the mention of adorno in
this context, a mention which
thankfully is not as dismissive as previous ones i have seen whilst
reading stuff here.

bill and john are right to say that for adorno that the critique of the
law of identity is pivotal for
adorno, and i would also add that in my view no more full and complex
critique of that 'law' have i
read anywhere else.

however:

is it not the case that adorno's critique is an elaboration of the
critique of the law of
non-contradiction, which is a  founding principle of empiricism or
claims to empirical truth?  this would seem to me to not sit very easily
with the claims advanced by others here that the discovery of 'new
subjects' is not a discovery (as i have phrased such claims), but rather
based on research, etc.

secondly, on the more serious point of the repressive force of
objectivism, the ways in which, as
davie suggested:

"if every attempt to understand something new involved relating it to an
already existing concept, then
precisely that which was new in it would never be comprehended."

this it seemed to me to be an unecessarily pared back (and
self-satisfying) version of the complexity of adorno's position
on the insufficiency of the relation between 'idea' and 'the object to
which that idea is said to refer',
because not only was adorno at great pains to sustain that exactly that
insufficiency as the space of
freedom, but he explicitly states, time and time again, that this is the
space wherein the
'preponderance of the object' breaks through its objectifications AND
subjectivisations into material
'flux'. adorno's work is first and foremost a critique of subjective
reason, and one which understands full well that such a critique
cannot/should not be undertaken as the defense of objectivity.

in short, adorno was at great pains to refuse the naming of attributes
here in this space of irreducible tension - the 'new', if you will, has
the power to break through so long as it is not cast back into the terms
of EITHER the
transendeantal subject OR the reified object.  i also think that readers
of adorno would be hard
pressed to conclude that his writings constitute anything less than a
systematic and complex argument
for the desubjectivation of philosophy - as they are too regarding that
which poses itself as objective
(as truth whose ostensible origin lies in the methods of identity
politics, namely empiricism, positivism
and the like) which he shows convincingly to be simply another series of
steps in the tortuous and
repressive advance of SUBJECTIVE REASON.

the warnings from adorno are, for me, all to clear - and it has been in
part with adorno's warnings in
mind that i have tried to call into question what seems to me to be
another step in the ossification
(eradication) of the space of tension between the subjective and
objective, another attempt at
'classification', a 'new' one, but for all that 'classification' and the
attribution of an identity.  a new
orthodoxy has been born.  i do not say this lightly, or sarcastically,
but with the deepest sense of loss.

angela mitropoulos




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