Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness

187 Pages·2021·1.41 MB·English

by  Vangelis Giannakakis

Negative
Dialectics and Event
Continental Philosophy and
the History of Thought
Series Editors: Christian Lotz, Michigan State University, and Antonio
Calcagno, University of Western Ontario
Advisory Board: Smaranda Aldea, Amy Allen, Silvia Benso, Jeffrey
Bloechl, Andrew Cutrofello, Marguerite La Caze, Christina M.
Gschwandtner, Dermot Moran, Ann Murphy, Michael Naas, Eric Nelson,
Marjolein Oele, Mariana Ortega, Elena Pulcini, Alan Schrift, Anthony
Steinbock, Brad Stone
The Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought series seeks to
augment and amplify scholarship in continental philosophy by exploring its
rich and complex relationships to figures, schools of thought, and philosophical
movements that are crucial for its evolution and development. A historical focus
allows potential authors to uncover important but understudied thinkers and ideas
that were nonetheless foundational for various continental schools of thought.
Furthermore, critical scholarship on the histories of continental philosophy will
also help re-position, challenge, and even overturn dominant interpretations of
established, well-known philosophical views while refining and re-interpreting
them in light of new historical discoveries and textual analyses. The series seeks
to publish carefully edited collections and high-quality monographs that present
the best of scholarship in continental philosophy and its histories.
Titles in series:
Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical
Adequacy of Consciousness, by Vangelis Giannakakis
Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, edited by
Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman
Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World, by
Ian H. Angus
Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt, by Lawrence S. Stepelevich
Negative Dialectics
and Event
Nonidentity, Culture, and
the Historical Adequacy
of Consciousness
Vangelis Giannakakis
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Giannakakis, Vangelis, 1982– author.
Title: Negative dialectics and event : nonidentity, culture, and the
historical adequacy of consciousness / Vangelis Giannakakis.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Series: Continental
philosophy and the history of thought | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “This book studies the concept of
‘event’ as it relates to Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy and critical
social theory”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021043269 (print) | LCCN 2021043270 (ebook) | ISBN
9781793638861 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793638878 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Events (Philosophy) | Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. |
Critical theory. | Dialectic.
Classification: LCC B105.E7 G53 2022 (print) | LCC B105.E7 (ebook) | DDC
111—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043269
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043270
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Foreword vii
Permissions xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Prologue xv
PART I: PHILOSOPHY AND THE CONCEPT OF
NONIDENTITY 1
1 Negative Dialectics and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness 3
PART II: POLITICS AND THE NOTION OF EVENT 35
2 Adorno, Badiou, and the Politics of Breaking Out 37
3 May 1968 and Adorno: Theoretical Refractions in the Time of
Revolt 61
PART III: SOCIETY, CULTURAL CRITICISM, AND
HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 83
4 The Relevance of the Theory of Pseudo-Culture 85
5 The Erosion of Historical Consciousness and the New Old
Barbarism 101
Epilogue 125
v
vi Contents
Bibliography 127
Index 143
About the Author 149
Foreword
Brian O’Connor
“The bad is not the worst, for seldom can it deceive: the middling is far worse,
so many it good believe,” sings the proverb quoted by Richard Wagner. The
better state, apparently, is one in which false hope is utterly absent. We over-
come baseless optimism by recognizing the complete horror of whatever state
of affairs we are trying to manage. Recognition of the “bad” will bring an end
to consolatory deceptions. Theodor W. Adorno picks up this thought through
a line he takes from F. H. Bradley: “Where everything is bad, it must be good
to know the worst.” It is not always certain whether Adorno’s primary worry
is the bad or the fear of being deceived, a state of mind that gives distinc-
tive form to social interpretation. A strategy of hyper-suspicion is justifiable,
though, if the world is fully suspect.
The distinction between appearance and reality structures the critical
imaginary. In its ancient form, the idea behind this division is that the true
arrangement of the world is not easily visible from various standpoints, rang-
ing from the everyday to the scientific. The reality witnessed and portrayed
by the philosopher is the true one, while its opposite, appearance, is either
“mere” appearance or, worse, false. Following from that idea is the claim
that the “mere” is of no great significance. It is taken as obvious that “truth,”
as represented by reality, commands human loyalty, even if it is not always
especially welcome or easy to gain.
The notion that appearance might also be false, as opposed to inferior, is
quite another step. Here we are required to believe that appearance has set out
to mislead us. In the old metaphysics, truth and reality implied some superior
and notionally existing space. The philosophical mind could contemplatively
flip itself into that space. As it stands, this classical framework does not trans-
late into the needs of critical theory, the concern of which is social appear-
ance. There, truth is found in the knowledge of what is bad about appearance
rather than in some space beyond experience. The goodness that is claimed
by deceiving appearance—for example, that it can guarantee the best forms
of freedom or the fulfillment of any given life—is false. That much is certain.
Possession of this truth means standing on the side of reality. Appearance is
vii
viii Foreword
false, then, not simply in wrongly making claims on our lives as though it
were “true.” It is bad: it wants us to deny whatever could be genuinely and
not just apparently good. Philosophical methodologies that prevent us from
accessing reality are therefore false as well, even if perfectly accurate within
their own terms of reference. They set out criteria of true knowledge only to
leave us within the space of appearance. What cannot be made visible through
those methodologies they dismiss as fancy. That is precisely where their bad-
ness lies: they deceive. We might say in response to the austere critical per-
spective that it is possible to be deceived and yet to live happily and well. A
major strand of critical theory, of course, denies this view. “Wrong life cannot
be lived rightly,” Adorno declares.
At the same time, what ought to replace the wrong life of appearance,
Adorno and others maintain, need not be overprescribed. That is because, for
critical theory, one of the evils of deceiving appearance is that it narrows what
we take to be possible. It satisfies itself that no alternative is worthwhile. To
avoid that constriction, we must sketch out pictures of a brighter world drawn
from what we can only currently imagine. The possibility of as yet unantici-
pated possibilities is the reward of overcoming appearance.
Rather famously, this way of situating social criticism has led to the question
of whether the very idea of critical theory is a performative self-contradiction.
If the world is utterly bad, meaning that all within it is contaminated by the
needs of that self-perpetuating world, then perceptions of its badness should
not actually be possible. Those perceptions, it is argued, would if true be free
of the supposedly totalitarian world. This charge, however, does not stick. A
perfectly reasonable case for the defense is that the badness of the world does
not preclude knowledge of its badness because it is not actually threatened by
that knowledge. Those moments of truth, those ambiguities, which the world
of regulated appearances fails to encompass, are little more than evanescent
glimpses beyond the social totality.
Social criticism, then, has little efficacy: the power to point the finger is
not the same as persuasion and certainly not a likely vehicle of social change.
This idea has led some to the recommendation that radical criticism should
moderate its ambitions. It ought to index criticism to the likelihood of suc-
cess, to become realistic according to currently imaginable modalities of
social transformation. Is that a fair demand? Vangelis Giannakakis’s Negative
Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of
Consciousness provides a challenging new set of ideas for how that demand
might be met and rejected. It unflinchingly acknowledges the hold of the
system over possibility, reflecting ruefully and frankly on those apparently
momentous opportunities for social transformation that simply faded away.
What at various points in recent history looked like a pivotal event, giving
rise to emancipating new norms, was absorbed into the already-existing state
Foreword ix
of affairs or was safely ignored. Giannakakis’s study explores that process in
order to find some avenues past it. It marshals many overlooked parts of the
critical tradition to develop some ideas of how effective revolutionary action
might be developed. Although Adorno is the primary site, Alain Badiou’s
notion of event firmly asserts itself in the book’s effort to discover possibility
in the midst of the apparent inevitabilities of the historical process.
Negative Dialectics and Event leaves us with a huge number of fascinat-
ing new issues. Among the most intriguing is the question of whether social
change might be, in a particular sense, a matter of chance. What else, really, is
left when all there is is the bad, a social totality that has secured itself against
critical and potentially transformative knowledge? Adorno’s critical subject
is an accidental survivor. Badiou’s events cannot be deduced from any ongo-
ing historical process: they are richly singular. They may endeavor to make
themselves necessary once initiated, creating the retroactive foundations for
what they sought to become. History in the philosophical—that is, idealist
and Marxist—sense is attenuated. It gives us no reliable clue to what hap-
pens next. This situation underlines the difficulty of radical social change: it
sits on norms that have, in a sense, yet to arrive. In this regard, it faces the
charge of irrationalism: the revolutionary actor must be willing to take up
processes for which their social formation has barely prepared them. They
must literally take a chance. However, as Giannakakis’s book demonstrates
through its exemplary study of the critical landscape, this is not blind chance.
It is an historically sensitive response, one requiring a capacity—by no means
guaranteed—to see those thinly visible possibilities for justice. Each actor
must interpret what they are, finding grounds that will allow others to glimpse
beyond the present, beyond appearance. What is absent from the process is
the belief that there is some pre-delineated path of process inscribed in his-
tory. Not only is that a philosophical obsolescence, but it also leaves subjects
with too little.
Giannakakis has provided critical theory with a kind of rethinking that
does justice to its insights, acknowledges its numerous advances, but is not
beholden to it. The renewal of critical theory has been delayed for too long by
the tendency of some to insist that the original models are perfectly adequate
to changing times, as though those models are not historically informed.
A failure of imagination has led others to claim that critical theory in the
sense of interest to this book is inherently unworkable. In designing new,
safer—success indexed, indeed—forms of criticism, they have also opted for
something more than the middling: the efficacy of what is already available
to us (communicative reason) and the ideology that the addition of a little
more humanity to already-existing social institutions can bring about the only
form of freedom worth having. Negative Dialectics and Event shows us why
neither anachronism nor renunciation is necessary.