What is a "Properly Political" Genealogy of Auschwitz?

• In Event: Reading Arendt: Language, Law, Politics

Abstract

Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno both attempted provisional genealogies of fascism and the Holocaust, while living in exile.  Both thinkers would return to the Holocaust in later writings.  The two thinkers had important overlaps and a shared intellectual archive. Yet their different attempts to speak about the death camps has garnered quite different receptions.  Most significantly, Arendt’s analysis in Origins of Totalitarianism (and other writings) is often presented as properly political whereas Adorno’s, both in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-authored with Max Horkheimer) and in his later writings, is seen as anything but political.  When read charitably, by placing Adorno next to Emmanuel Levinas and Emil Fackenheim, his intervention is classified as ethical-philosophical.  When read uncharitably (and that is often), Adorno’s reflections on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are interpreted as depoliticizing, ahistorical renderings that can’t properly differentiate between fascism and Hollywood and, worse, even engage in victim-blaming.  In this talk, I’d like to revisit comparatively Arendt’s and Adorno’s attempts to grapple with naming some conditions of possibility for the Holocaust, in order to ask how the distinction between ethics and politics is cast in the scholarly reception of their accounts.  At stake in this distinction, amid many things, is a profound ambivalence about either particularizing or universalizing “the Jew” after the Holocaust.  I also suggest that asking what we want from “politics” and/or “ethics” in these two thinkers’ work, and what role “the Jew,” as either particular or universal, is to play in how we assess that issue, has a particular weight at this moment, when a number of recent scholarly public reflections in long-form journalism have specifically turned to both Arendt and Adorno, and their analyses of totalitarianism, to either warn, diagnose, or otherwise illuminate the current American political situation under Donald Trump.

Author

• Larisa Reznik, Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies