Noel’s Reviews > Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life > Status Update

full well whom they do and whom they do not intend to murder. If the equality of all who have human shape were demanded as an ideal instead of being assumed as a fact, it would not greatly help. Abstract utopia is all too compatible with the most insidious tendencies of society. That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality. The technique of the concentration camp is to make the prisoners like their guards, the murdered, murderers. The racial difference is raised to an absolute so that it can be abolished absolutely, if only in the sense that nothing that is different survives. An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences. Politics that are still seriously concerned with such a society ought not, therefore, propound the abstract equality of men even as an idea. Instead, they should point to the bad equality today, the identity of those with interests in films and in weapons, and conceive the better state as one in which people could be different without fear. To assure the black that he is exactly like the white man, while he obviously is not, is secretly to wrong him still further. He is benevolently humiliated by the application of a standard by which, under the pressure of the system, he must necessarily be found wanting, and to satisfy which would in any case be a doubtful achievement. The spokesmen of unitary tolerance are, accordingly, always ready to turn intolerantly on any group that remains refractory: intransigent enthusiasm for blacks does not exclude outrage at Jewish uncouthness. The melting-pot was introduced by unbridled industrial capitalism. The thought of being cast into it conjures up martyrdom, not democracy.

There’s no explanation of which such “differences” are structurally produced. What’s more, Adorno bizarrely equates the demand for equal treatment with totalitarianism. (Although really, everything = totalitarianism for Adorno.)

If he'd been more direct he could have written this passage specifically about his own assimilated Jewish family in the Weimar Republic; they had become the good normative Christian Germans and this didn't get them off the "to murder" list. Is he right to extend that example to every liberal society and every piece of rhetoric about equality? We all hope he's wrong about that part. I remember getting depressed reading Adorno because of this universal pessimism.

Still, in this passage isn't his point to mistrust the models of equality created by dominant groups, not to blame the original demand for equality? It seems a pretty good idea to look under the hood of political rhetoric to check if someone really means "White" when they say "equal" or "American", and the desire to be allowed to be "different without fear" instead of assimilated is a sympathetic one.

Uvrón, I do agree with your points, I just think Adorno is being irresponsible not to distinguish between different kinds of difference. Naturalizing “difference” (especially in the time and place he was writing, pre-Civil Rights America), just means hiding the historical and social power relations that produce it. The “emancipated society” of “difference”—as apparently fixed and immutable—that Adorno describes, seems to me even more horrible than the alternative.

Yes, there is an irresponsible vagueness here, I agree with that. One reader could imagine his ideal society as open-minded cosmopolitanism and another could imagine a caste system; unless he goes on to unpack “reconciliation of differences” he hasn’t done nearly enough to articulate what this alternative actually is.