Petrified life Adorno and Agamben
Alastair Morgan

In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, Adorno maintained that ‘the form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently today’ is ‘the question whether it is still possible to live’.1 Such a question is speculative, since the possibility of life is taken to have migrated to the margins of human experience. For Adorno, life in postwar capitalist societies was a life that ‘does not live’.2

The contemporary philosopher who has most insistently taken up this theme of a dissolution or destruction of experience in late modernity, encapsulated by Auschwitz, is Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s work on bare life, Auschwitz and the decay of experience displays a number of affinities with Adorno’s critical project. They share both an account of damaged or bare life in modernity as an empty space in which power can produce and effect responses, and an attempt to delineate forms of critical subjectivity which do not rely on vital notions of desire. Both Agamben and Adorno want to recuperate a concept of ‘life that does not live’, which, as a form of life in which something like a bare life cannot be isolated, provides a position for a critical subjectivity. The shared normative structure of these philosophies lies in their attempt to trace this position immanently, within the delineation of the features of a damaged life. Adorno poses it as a ‘new categorical imperative’: humans must attempt to ‘arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself’.3

This new categorical imperative becomes a meeting point for metaphysics and politics in the attempt speculatively to construct, through the immanent degradation of life, the possibility of a life that could transcend such immanence. Such a metaphysical project hinges upon a constellation of modal concepts – possibility, potentiality and exigency – and the ways in which they relate to the concept of life. For Adorno, it involved a return of metaphysics to materialism. In this article, I consider these three modal concepts in Adorno, and Agamben’s work. Both Agamben and Adorno are concerned with a form of experience that is not a sovereign transgression of the bounds of the actual, but instead holds itself in reserve in relation to any project of liberation, whether this be configured in terms of a bursting of the bonds of reified existence through desire, or an affirmation of a life beyond the human. Both thinkers also attempt to resist the nihilistic tendencies of an intrinsically negative thought, through a refusal to embrace pure negativity as such.

This nihilism is a temptation intrinsic to the concept of a ‘life that does not live’: the temptation to emphasize in the denial of life a means beyond life. Such a formulation has a dialectical air about it, but ultimately, if it is thought without mediation, it becomes a simple identification with the forms of power that have produced such a situation. It becomes so because it affirms the site of bare life as the route through which, and by which, redemption occurs. It is an affirmation of the redemptive value of extreme degradation. Adorno introduces an element of this in his embrace of a denial of life as a form of freedom, but then withdraws it:

one might well compare this situation to that of the philosophy of late antiquity, in which, in response to the same question (the possibility of life), people fell back on expedients such as ataraxy, that is, the deadening of all affects, just to be capable of living at all.… I would say that even this standpoint, although it emphatically embraces the idea of the freedom of the individual, nevertheless has a moment of narrow mindedness in the sense that it renders absolute the entrapment of human beings by the totality, and thus sees no other possibility than to submit.4

My purpose in reading Agamben and Adorno together on this question is to try and resist the proximity to Adorno of many of Agamben’s positions. The article traces three main differences between Adorno’s and Agamben’s thinking of the speculative experience of life – differences that arise from the extreme proximity in their theories of possibility, potentiality and exigency.5 These three main differences concern: (1) Agamben’s emphasis on a Heideggerian concept of pure possibility as the opening of experience, as opposed to Adorno’s Aristotelian conception of potentiality; (2) Agamben’s metaphysics of Being versus Adorno’s materialist metaphysics; (3) Agamben’s pure philosophy of redemption, in distinction from Adorno’s secular, negative philosophy of redemption (a philosophy that dissolves into theology, as opposed to an inverse theology).

My supplementary thesis is that an adequate way of thinking the political and the normative as intrinsically linked to metaphysical experience can only be developed once the trajectory of Adorno’s account is differentiated from certain tendencies within it that have become apparent through its similarities with some of Agamben’s writing. Agamben thus functions as an evil demon here. He represents the temptation to read Adorno in a way that can only lead us astray. This is a genuine temptation, not least in so far as the convergences between their thought suggest that they might offer a common alternative to a (Nietzschean–Bergsonian–) Deleuzean metaphysics of life. Adorno’s and Agamben’s work differs from Deleuze’s in two main ways. First, it is a thinking of life that centres on the human, rather than life beyond the human. Second, it continues to rely on concepts of potentiality/possibility, in contrast to a conception of the virtual that attempts to destroy the concept of possibility as it has been traditionally thought. My comparison of the different modal concepts at play in Adorno’s and Agamben’s work is part of an attempt to construct a framework for thinking the relation between metaphysics and life that continues to deploy the concept of possibility.

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