Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Arendt and Adorno

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface..........................................................................................................................................................viiContributors.....................................................................................................................................................ix1. Understanding Political Modernity: Rereading Arendt and Adorno in Comparative Perspective LARS RENSMANN AND SAMIR GANDESHA...................................12. Arendt and Adorno: The Elusiveness of the Particular and the Benjaminian Moment SEYLA BENHABIB...............................................................313. Political Modernism: The New, Revolution, and Civil Disobedience in Arendt and Adorno J. M. BERNSTEIN........................................................564. From the Critique of Identity to Plurality in Politics: Reconsidering Adorno and Arendt DANA VILLA...........................................................785. Passion Lost, Passion Regained: How Arendt's Anthropology Intersects with Adorno's Theory of the Subject DIETER THOMÄ...................................1056. Grounding Cosmopolitics: Rethinking Crimes Against Humanity and Global Political Theory with Arendt and Adorno LARS RENSMANN.................................1297. Debating Human Rights, Law, and Subjectivity: Arendt, Adorno, and Critical Theory ROBERT FINE................................................................1548. Blindness and Insight: The Conceptual Jew in Adorno and Arendt's Post-Holocaust Reflections on the Antisemitic Question JONATHAN JUDAKEN.....................1739. The Paralysis of Judgment: Arendt and Adorno on Antisemitism and the Modern Condition JULIA SCHULZE WESSEL AND LARS RENSMANN.................................19710. Theorists in Exile: Adorno's and Arendt's Reflections on the Place of the Intellectual DIRK AUER............................................................22911. Homeless Philosophy: The Exile of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Exile in Arendt and Adorno SAMIR GANDESHA................................................247Notes............................................................................................................................................................281Index............................................................................................................................................................347

Chapter One

Rereading Arendt and Adorno in Comparative Perspective

LARS RENSMANN AND SAMIR GANDESHA

Sapere aude: Unlikely Intellectual and Philosophical Encounters

Having experienced the fate of exile in the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno reflected directly on that century's atrocities and wars, and they continue to bear ghostly witness to the twenty-first century's ensuing dislocations. Moving beyond typical disciplinary borders, few thinkers have had a more lasting influence on critical debates on the social and political dimensions of "modernity" and its myriad crises. Although they have had a highly fraught reception, there can be little doubt that Arendt's and Adorno's overall impact on the social sciences and the humanities, political and social philosophy in particular, is profound. They shared similar life experiences, intellectual origins, and even theoretical interests in light of the catastrophes they faced. Moreover, they were perhaps the most uncompromising, nonconformist public intellectuals of their day, engendering distinct modes of public criticism.

Shaped by the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic and their German Jewish backgrounds, both Arendt and Adorno were forced into exile by the Nazi regime and found refuge in the United States. Along with Hugo von Hofmannstahl and Gershom Scholem, they were among the first to recognize the brilliance of Walter Benjamin. After Benjamin's terrible death in Portbou in Catalonia, both went on to edit landmark collections of his writings: Adorno edited Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften in German and Arendt the volume Illuminations for Schocken Books in English. They both returned to Germany a few years after the Holocaust. Arendt visited frequently thereafter, and Adorno, who first prepared his return in the immediate aftermath of the war, stayed for good as of 1949. Arendt and Adorno hence became critical observers of post-totalitarian Europe and engaged critically with its public discourse. In such public engagements, the Kantian spirit, its insistence on sapere aude, "daring to know" or the courage to think for oneself, is what pervades Adorno's and Arendt's activities as intellectuals. In contrast to Georg Lukács, for example, whose book on the intellectual roots of National Socialism, The Destruction of Reason, as Adorno remarked, confirmed little more than "the destruction of his own reason" at the behest of an ever more exacting Communist party line, Adorno—like Arendt—insisted on political and intellectual independence. Indeed, at times Adorno seemed to insist upon independence from politics itself, which, understood dialectically, was not without political significance. As a consequence, Adorno was attacked not just from the Right, but also from the Left—as he alludes to in the preface to his magnum opus, "The author is prepared for the attacks to which Negative Dialectics will expose him. He feels no rancour and does not begrudge the joy in those of either camp who will proclaim that they knew it all the time and now he was confessing." Adorno was, of course, also criticized for his supposedly mandarin attitude to popular culture, jazz in particular, and his less than sanguine estimation of the prospects for working-class politics—that is, his calling into question the "official optimism" of the Left. The quintessential dismissal of Adorno was, perhaps unsurprisingly, articulated by Lukács himself. The latter stated that insofar as they had placed any possible hope for social transformation in neither party nor class, but rather in what the Hungarian philosopher regarded as a "nihilistic" modernism, Horkheimer and Adorno had fatefully taken up residence in "Grand Hotel Abyss" which Lukács originally describes in The Destruction of Reason as "a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered." From the Right, Adorno had to endure a scarcely veiled antisemitism in Adenauerian Germany upon his return in 1949. And, of course, he was held directly responsible for the student uprisings of 1968, which is ironic given Adorno's undeniable ambivalence vis-à-vis the students' movement.

Like Adorno, Arendt earned much scorn from Left and Right alike. The Left objected to Arendt's apparent glorification of an ancient conception of political action grounded in the fifth-century Athenian polis. More important, Arendt's distinction between "politics" and the "social"—and her undeniable preference for questions relating to the former and her devaluation of the latter—did not sit comfortably with the Left. At the same time, the Right bridled at her critical diagnosis of actually existing...