Against merely remembering and resisting civilization's barbarities

"Hitler has imposed a new categorical imperative upon humanity in the state of their unfreedom: to arrange their thinking and conduct, so that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen again. This imperative is as unmanageable vis-à-vis its foundation as the given fact formerly was to the Kantian one. To treat it discursively would be heinous: in it the moment of the supplementary in what is moral can be bodily felt. Bodily, because it is the abhorrence, become practical, of the unbearable physical pain inflicted on individuals, even after individuality, as an intellectual form of reflection, is on the point of disappearing. Only in the unvarnished materialistic motive does morality survive."

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond.

Affect is important but Adorno rejects conceptual (and even poetic) thought. He remains a Romanticist, within the concept/sensibility split.

He had earlier lain responsibility for the Shoah at the feet of the Enlightenment itself. German culture was conceptual, theoretical, legislating; it was also Romanticist, insisting on 'reason's other'.

Others have long been insisting on all the 'others' of a modern 'Western' culture famed for some principles (like the equal liberty of the French revolution, which has Biblical as well as Enlightenment roots) but often acting like a Pharaoh. To non-Europeans, to women, and of course once again to Jews (and various groups accorded pariah status or regarded as internal threats to the latently fascist 'social body' ideologized at the height of colonialist imperialism and then realized in the Shoah.

Romanticism's extreme forms rejected science, as the Gnostic Marcion once rejected law and justice. So philosophy too is opposed. A work of thinking done in words, its models are both poetic and mathematical, deductive and imaginative. It develops out of the history of ideas propositions it calls 'truths'. They are knowledge if they represent facts about some things somewhere, whether or not they involve matters that concern us. They are revelatory, iconic, when they greatly do. Clarity is a virtue. There are truths. Images and stories present realities; only statements can be correct or incorrect. We follow some, as commands, authorizing conduct, prohibiting crimes. We struggle, work, to make sense of experience ('history'), most clearly and usefully in developing theories.

A mind that remembers or studies history and will not theorize is conservative. And powerless.

Theory without history leads to 'totalitarianism'? Many believe that today. The Jewish world, especially in America, now largely does.

It is a romantic idea, English and German.

It is no accident that after 1933 philosophy in Europe became centered in France. German left-liberals, of which Adorno was one, gave up on the paradigm of the French Revolution, seeking a new one in a image of thought that is essentially negative. The question now would not be how to further equal liberty through reason but only how to avoid massacres.

The right, and liberals of the right, says this everywhere.

If they are right, politics is only resistance.

A left politics was never only resistance. It often leads from resistance to the 'revolutionary' formulation of new possibilities, which develop, often, in practice, in the course of struggles.

With socialism dead, and the nationalist project all that remained of the modern republican one, the only confident political projects remained utopian, liberating and destructive both. Yet the left is motivated by a principled belief in a better world.

The left, wherever it exists, refuses the logic that says that utopian desire can only lead to evil, therefore we can only protest, resist, hope. Yes, we do oppose governmentally organized crimes and massacres. And yes, we do side with the victims. We also side with the poor.

We have not forgotten the ideals of 1789. This separates the left proper from the timid and impotent liberal left, which earlier kowtowed to neoliberalism, and the liberal right. Everyone opposes massacres, at least the ones affecting his friends.

We are the poor, the plebeians, who not only say, you may not kill us, but more than that. We may be still inspired by the struggles of 1942, but we have not forgotten the ideals of 1789.

Hitler's greatest posthumous victory may be that most people now have.

Then there is no alternative to the modern system of capital, nation-states, prisons, biomedical governmentality, and permanent war.

Does this mean we should be fighting fascism with the ideals of 1789? The "anti-Communists" of the liberal right said, loudly, forcibly, no you may not. Not that. That way is tyranny, "totalitarianism." Is that true necessarily?

No, for this reason: a participatory democratic society is possible, and the state "socialist" (state capitalist: state as managing capital in a dictatorship over the proletariat that figured the people as only waged slaves) debacle was a failure of the democratic tendencies that dominated the workers' and popular movements in the 19th C., which were divided between a more conservative model of social democracy that was complicit with colonialism and its models of 'development' (this was, not the thought of Marx, but ‘Marxism’ as developed by German Social Democracy and then Leninism) and the self-organizing 'anarchism' expressed in the Paris Commune of 1871.

We need conceptual determination, a saying of what is the case in situations even while open to Being and sense; the mathematical, legislation, governance and law (for antinomian conclusions follow) cannot be avoided, lest mannerist postures become obscurantisms. The only possible antinomian anarchism is 'messianic': law will eventually not be abolished, but rendered inoperative. (Marx extended this idea to that of labor, which factories had rendered an extreme form of the disciplinary, and is distinct from the more creative activity capitalist society relegates to art). Then it will be studied, as the occasions for its enforcement have passed but are remembered.

To not collaborate in the murder of distant others with remote controls, which modern technological and bureaucratic capitalism made possible, it may help to have loved some of them in the flesh or see images of slaughter, but I need not share their lived experience to know what we should not do or allow to be done, as art can facilitate, never sufficiently; it may be enough to know certain general truths.

Adorno gives us an apology for cultivating our experience of the Grand Museum Abyss.
If, for those liberated and surviving, we had only arrived thus far, it would not be enough.
It is not enough to stop what is happening now.