Adorno and International
Political Thought
‘To lend a voice to suffering is a condition
for all truth’
Overview
 Mainstream international ethics – attempt to ‘fix’
global problems

Ethical reflection prompted by global suffering, but this
suffering often forgotten in the generalised, rational
response
 Critical alternatives
 Poststructural international political thought (IPT)
 Frankfurt School critical theory (Adorno)
 Immanent critique
 Hope
Trauma and poststructural IPT
 Powerful critique of marginalisation of emotion in
mainstream international ethics
 We should refuse the forgetting
of trauma
 Jenny Edkins (Aberystwyth)
 States – silence those who have suffered to allow
‘politics as usual’ to continue
 Edkins: we must ‘encircle again and again the site’ of
the trauma – resist depoliticisation
 Trauma time: ‘we cannot remember [trauma] as
something that took place in time, because this would
neutralise it’
Trauma and poststructural IPT
 Problem with Edkins’ approach


Placing trauma time outside linear historical
time discourages a working through of
traumatic events that would attend to their
situation in time and place
How can we make links to those
historical/structural conditions that facilitated
the traumatic losses?
Adorno and suffering
 Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969)
 Immanent critique: enlightening Enlightenment
 the Enlightenment project has been usurped by an
obsession with universality and instrumental rationality;
‘progress’ has brought new means of enslavement
rather than the promised liberation
 Negative dialectics: preserve the non-identical (that
which can’t be subsumed under universal concepts –
e.g., emotion, particular human experience)
Adorno and suffering
 Immanent critique
 Resist forgetting


Need fora for telling the truth about the past, for
reflection on particular suffering, for self critique –
this can bring ‘a healing awareness’
Abhors detachment with which atrocities of the
Holocaust were discussed a decade later
 ‘All of us today also recognise a readiness to deny or
belittle what happened—however difficult it is to
conceive that people are not ashamed to argue that
it was surely at most only five million Jews, and not
six million, who were killed…’ (Adorno, ‘What Does
Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’)
Adorno and suffering
 Immanent critique

Reflect on antecedents of suffering


Search for some sort of truth
E.g., What objective social conditions facilitated
the turn to fascism in Germany?
 Economic insecurity, need to conform to status quo,
stifling culture industry, dissonance between promise
and reality of democracy


NB Adorno’s immanent critique is a negative
exercise – no positive prescriptions for change
Education towards critical self-reflection
Adorno and suffering
 Hope
 Important counterbalance to immanent critique
 Again, a negative move – preserving hope in
the face of bleakness, inspiring continued
social criticism and praxis
 Where does he find hope?


‘Fugitive ethical events’ (Jay Bernstein) – experience
of happiness or love
Art – express that which is beyond words,
facilitate working through suffering, preserve
hope
Conclusion
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The situation of traumatic experience outside historical
time hinders critique and prevents working through
Adorno highlights the relation between the particular
and the universal in social critique
Although he doesn’t prescribe ‘solutions’, he gestures
towards a different way of being in the world, an
approach that:
 ‘discerns and experiences the good, the true, and the
beautiful through their deformations—as the negation
of the latter and as real in this negation. It pursues
freedom and happiness in a repressive and
oppressive society without ideologically denying this
repression and oppression. It pursues the life of a
critical intellect…’ (Weber Nicholsen and Shapiro)