Abstract
Adorno’s commitment to anti-foundationalism generates a concern over how his
ethically normative appraisals of social phenomena can be founded. Drawing on
both Kohlmann and Bernstein’s account, I produce a new reading which contends somatic impulses are capable of bearing intrinsically normative epistemic and moral content. This entails a new way of understanding Adorno’s contention that Auschwitz produced a new categorical imperative. Working with Bernstein’s account, I claim that Auschwitz makes manifest the hostility of the instrumentalization of reason to the somatic grounds of reason. One’s mimetic identification with the victims of Auschwitz arouses a self-preserving desire to intercede in and re-orient the progress of reason itself, for the sake of one’s own somatic integrity.
In closing, I claim – contra Zuidervaart – that this reading allows us to place the
ethical as primary in Adorno, without reducing the political to it.
ethically normative appraisals of social phenomena can be founded. Drawing on
both Kohlmann and Bernstein’s account, I produce a new reading which contends somatic impulses are capable of bearing intrinsically normative epistemic and moral content. This entails a new way of understanding Adorno’s contention that Auschwitz produced a new categorical imperative. Working with Bernstein’s account, I claim that Auschwitz makes manifest the hostility of the instrumentalization of reason to the somatic grounds of reason. One’s mimetic identification with the victims of Auschwitz arouses a self-preserving desire to intercede in and re-orient the progress of reason itself, for the sake of one’s own somatic integrity.
In closing, I claim – contra Zuidervaart – that this reading allows us to place the
ethical as primary in Adorno, without reducing the political to it.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 676-695 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | International Journal of Philosophical Studies |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 1 Jul 2014 |