Art - Gilchrist - We Cannot Say What The Human Is, NGC, 2021

We Cannot Say What the Human Is:
The Problem of Anthropology in Adorno’s

Philosophy of Art
Kylie Gilchrist
The whole futile body was suffused by transparency. Little by

little the body turned into light. Its blood into a beam. Its
limbs froze in an unintelligible movement. And the man was
no more than a sign among the constellations.
—Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, quoted in Theodor W.
Adorno, “Schubert”
In 1965 Theodor W. Adorno and Arnold Gehlen held a debate on German

national radio, titled “Is Sociology a Science of Man?” 1 Given Adorno’s Marx-
ism and Gehlen’s conservatism, conflict was expected. Yet the discussion was
amicable, as both agreed that there is no such thing as “pre-cultural human nature”
(SWM, 226). They further concurred that, as a result, humans have adapted to,
and depend on, social institutions that organize and restrict human freedom.
I am grateful to Cooper Francis, Peter Osborne, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful com-
ments on earlier versions of this article. Warmest thanks are also owed to Franziska Aigner and Isabell
Dahms for their generous translation assistance.
1. This interview was recorded by Südwestfunk; broadcast on Sender Freies Berlin on February 3,
1965, and on Norddeutscher Rundfunk on March 21, 1965; and published as “Theodor W. Adorno und
Arnold Gehlen: Ist die Soziologie eine Wissenschaft vom Menschen? Ein Streitgespräch,” translated by
Franziska Aigner (hereafter cited as SWM).
New German Critique 142, Vol. 48, No. 1, February 2021
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-8732159 © 2021 by New German Critique, Inc.
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72 Adorno’s Philosophy of Art
Adorno and Gehlen did diverge, however, on the anthropological basis of

this condition. Throughout the debate Adorno criticized Gehlen for affirming
coercive institutions as a necessity of human nature. Based on his thesis that the
human is an undetermined, hence “deficient” animal distinguished by its lack
of evolutionary instincts, Gehlen believed that human survival depended on the
supplement of social institutions, justifying institutional norms on anthropo-
logical grounds. While Adorno agreed that historical circumstance determines
human beings, he interpreted this premise to mean that social institutions, far
from anthropological necessities, are responsible for dehumanizing humans
within capitalist conditions. To Adorno, sociology cannot be a “pure anthro-
pology” because understanding it thus would be to define the human on
the basis of its destructive sociohistorical conditions (SWM, 226). Precisely
because humans lack “pre-cultural . . . nature” and are open to history, Adorno
insisted that it is “impossible” to “say what the human is” (SWM, 226, 228).2
Through this debate a key tension in Adorno’s thought emerges.
If Adorno asserts that the human is a fundamentally “historical being”
(geschichtliches Wesen), how can he simultaneously claim that the human’s his-
toricity is not an anthropological determinant (SWM, 227)? Without an
anthropology, how can Adorno also insist on, as he told Gehlen, an “idea of
objective happiness and objective despair” that depends on granting humans
full “responsibility and self-determination” (SWM, 250)? Adorno’s position
is paradoxical because, while Gehlen asserts his anthropological foundations,
Adorno refutes them. This results in the irony of Gehlen calling Adorno an
“anthropological-utopian” thinker (SWM, 250).
The ambiguous status of philosophical anthropology in Adorno’s
thought is the topic of the present article.3 Could Adorno, vehement critic of
anthropocentrism and traditional humanisms, be an “anthropological-utopian”
thinker? Swaths of evidence suggest not, aligning Adorno with the antihuman-
ist sentiments of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. In one characteristically
cranky instance, he snubbed the German Humanist Union’s membership invi-
tation by stating that “I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been
2. This statement appears again in Adorno, Negative Dialectics: “We cannot say what man is”
(trans. Ashton, 124; hereafter cited as ND).
3. Contra French and Anglo-American cultural anthropology, the German school of Philosophical
Anthropology examines the relationship between humans and nature, and human differences from ani-
mal, organic, and inorganic nature. I use Philosophical Anthropology to reference this tradition; when
discussing philosophical reflection on anthropology generally, I use philosophical anthropology in
lowercase.

Kylie Gilchrist 73
called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself ‘humanist.’” 4
Adorno’s rejection of humanism was motivated by his belief that this
ideology—grounded in Enlightenment ideals of linear progress and secular
reason—advances a social order increasingly inhospitable to human beings.
Humanism’s destructive tendencies are furthermore not limited to bourgeois
philosophy—which, as Andrew Feenberg argues, Adorno and his Frankfurt
School colleagues were among the first to grasp.5 Rather, these tendencies are
equally pervasive within Marxist thought, where the horizon of social transfor-
mation traditionally contained a philosophy of human progress fueling the
domination and destruction of nature. Critiquing Marxist humanism for
undercutting its emancipatory aims, Adorno enjoined humans to remember
the “nature within the [human] subject” and seek peaceful coexistence with
human and nonhuman others.6
Yet as the Adorno-Gehlen debate suggests, Adorno’s apparent repudia-
tion of humanism is riven with ambiguity. How can Adorno assert that the
human is historical—meaning that it is determined by society and lacks any
invariant essence—and that society’s historical tendency toward dehumaniza-
tion can be critiqued for destroying human potential? These positions would
not necessarily be opposed if Adorno admitted a negative human essence
(i.e., defined the human by its capacity to change over time) or assumed a
pure historicism (i.e., defined the human as a historical contingency relative
to any other). But Adorno refuses both positions, insisting that we cannot say
what the human is (SWM, 228; ND, 124).
This ambiguity is newly relevant because, despite Adorno’s evident rejec-
tion of anthropological thinking, second- and third-generation critical theorists
have reestablished the first generation’s critique of philosophies of progress on
anthropological grounds. Axel Honneth’s recent work on reification, for exam-
ple, develops Adorno’s notion of mimesis into an anthropological claim for the
human’s intrinsic rationality; Jürgen Habermas has similarly brushed up
against philosophical anthropology in theorizing the ethics of genetic engi-
neering.7 As Charles Taylor argues, the “unbearably problematic” notion of
4. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 169.

5. Feenberg, Philosophy of Praxis, 152.
6. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 32 (hereafter cited as DE).
7. See Honneth et al., Reification; and Habermas, The Future of Human Nature. Habermas’s rela-
tion to philosophical anthropology is debated. Max Pensky argues that the linguistic theory of inter-
subjective action developed in Knowledge and Human Interests constitutes an “anti-naturalist turn”
through which Habermas intends to resist what the latter identifies as a “pessimistic philosophical
anthropology” in both Gehlen and Adorno (“Natural History,” 250). Yet Jean-Philippe Deranty out-

“human nature” does not void the necessity of addressing it in light of moder-
nity’s social, technical, and environmental challenges.8 Responding to what we
might call this “need” for philosophical anthropology in their 1980 book
Social Action and Human Nature, Honneth and Hans Joas argue that a theo-
retical account of the basic needs and limits of the human’s embodied existence
is required to critique society when it infringes on these boundaries.9 As the
human’s historical changeability leaves it vulnerable to dehumanizing social
processes, social philosophy is tasked with investigating the “unchanging pre-
conditions of human changeableness” as the normative basis for a more just
social order.10 Their argument is aligned with feminist, ecological, and other
social movements that claim the human’s embodied condition as a necessary
site of theoretical and political concern.11 To formulate tools for a social cri-
tique grounded in human embodiment and needs, Honneth and Joas deploy
resources from Philosophical Anthropology—the tradition against which
Adorno maintained an abiding opposition, as his debate with Gehlen evinces.
This seemingly paradoxical situation warrants an investigation of
anthropology’s status in Adorno’s own thought. Closer study reveals that
Adorno’s refusal to answer the problem posed by philosophical anthropology
structures his philosophy in important ways. To substantiate this claim, I first
demonstrate how, as a philosophical crisis motivated new concern with anthro-
pology, Adorno maintained an epistemologically grounded agnosticism about
the human that led him to reflect the dialectical anthropology of his Frankfurt
School colleagues through his procedure of negative dialectics. I next examine
how Adorno undertakes this negative-dialectical reflection on anthropology in
Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, where mimesis operates as a
quasi-anthropological principle of the human’s historical potential. I then
argue that Adorno cannot sustain this critical project within the terms of
anthropology, motivating his turn to the philosophy of art. Finally, I contend
that Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory contains a potentially nonanthropological
model for human historicity, with which Adorno attempts to dissolve the tra-
ditional opposition between nature and history while providing a critical diag-
lines how, prior to The Future of Human Nature’s explicitly “philosophical-anthropological line,” crit-
ics including Michael Theunissen reproved Habermas’s “theory of knowledge-constitutive interests”
for turning sociohistorically specific “forms of human interaction” into transcendental, hence anthro-
pological, precepts (Beyond Communication, 156–57).
8. Taylor, foreword, vii.
9. Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 2–3.
10. Leo Kofler, Der asketische Eros, quoted in Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 7.
11. Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 1–2.

Kylie Gilchrist 75
nostic for social processes of dehumanization. Yet Adorno’s complex efforts to

think human historicity outside anthropology ultimately leave anthropological
precepts unexamined, allowing a certain figure of the human to implicitly
structure Adorno’s philosophy of art.
While relatively underaddressed in English-language scholarship, Ador-
no’s relation to humanism and anthropology has concerned several studies
and warrants new attention in light of the human’s timely—perhaps also
fashionable—status in recent cultural discourse. In a 1985 article Stefan
Breuer refuted Adorno’s anti-anthropological self-understanding by arguing
that a negative-dialectical anthropology implicitly organizes his social philos-
ophy.12 Dennis Johannssen has since expanded and nuanced Breuer’s reading
through two detailed studies from 2013 and 2018. Both locate Adorno’s rela-
tion to anthropology within a genealogy of twentieth-century discourses
around the human and convincingly demonstrate that Adorno’s epistemology
underlies his wholesale refusal of anthropology.13 To Adorno, Johannssen
argues, “there is no proper object of theoretical anthropology, neither human
essence nor its historical openness and changeability.” 14 I concur with Johanns-
sen’s assessment and, to the extent that my argument draws on the anthropol-
ogy problematic’s intellectual history, I recapitulate some of the context that
Johannssen has drawn out. Yet I focus on tracing how Adorno’s response to
this problematic is mediated through concepts of mimesis and art. Doing so
enables a step beyond Johannssen’s charge that Adorno, in refusing anthropol-
ogy as a theoretical object, fails to “address the way in which nature and history
relate to each other within the concept of man.” 15 Rather, I argue, Adorno indi-
rectly problematized the imbrication of nature and history at the site of the
human by reflecting on it through conceptual models developed most fully in
his philosophy of art. By tracing Adorno’s implicit critical engagement with
philosophical anthropology into his philosophy of art, I further address the
potentials and limitations of his refusal to confront the problematic directly.
A final preliminary is needed to clarify why indeed Adorno’s philosophy
of art is the site of investigation, while his relevant text is titled Aesthetic
Theory. As Peter Osborne’s work on contemporary art has done much to
uncover and correct, the conflation of aesthetics and art belies a protracted
12. Breuer, “Adorno’s Anthropology,” 15.

13. See Johannssen, “Toward a Negative Anthropology”; and Johannssen, “Humanism and
Anthropology.”
14. Johannssen, “Toward a Negative Anthropology,” para. 22.

terminological confusion.16 Attributing this confusion to the reception of

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, Osborne recovers the
distinction between Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgement and critical judg-
ments on specific works of art.17 Kant’s aesthetic encompasses the element of
sensibility in cognition without itself producing knowledge; critique, further-
more, refers to the analysis of a structure of judgment and not the critical eval-
uation of an artwork’s merits. While artworks have irreducibly aesthetic
dimensions, the aesthetic is far too broad to address what is critically and phil-
osophically significant about art: the historically and sociopolitically mediated
truth content that is given, in part, through a work’s sensible presentation.18
More capable of contending with art in its ontological specificity and con-
temporary critical relevance, Osborne argues, is the philosophy of art inaugu-
rated by the Jena Romantics, systematized in G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lec-
tures on Fine Art and inverted into the paratactic antisystem of Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory.19 This discourse is concerned with art as a sensuous expres-
sion of philosophical truth and, furthermore, unlike the ahistorical lens of
transcendental philosophy, as an articulation of social structures and histori-
cal actuality. While Adorno’s concept of art involves aesthetic sensibility, it
focuses on art’s capacity to convey historical truth by shattering the illusions
of hypostasized subjectivity. Osborne underscores this point by locating in
Aesthetic Theory the resources to elucidate the art-aesthetic distinction, yet
he notes that the text “is itself on occasion not exempt from this terminological
confusion,” as registered by its very title.20 Endeavoring to clarify Adorno’s
slippage, I maintain that the philosophy of art, not aesthetics, is the terrain of
Adorno’s engagement with the philosophical anthropology problematic.
Positions on Philosophical Anthropology

Adorno maintained his willful silence on philosophical anthropology in a
moment when the topic was the site of, and answer to, a philosophical crisis.
At the twentieth century’s turn, the rising tides of historicism and the natural,
social, and cultural sciences confronted philosophy with the limits of human
understanding and the finitude of the human’s natural existence. No longer
could metaphysics or the real course of history ensure the rational meaning
of being human. With philosophy’s traditional authority undermined, philos-
16. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 37–46.

17. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 38–43; see also Osborne, “Art beyond Aesthetics,” 657–58.
18. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 38–43; see also Osborne, “Art beyond Aesthetics,” 659–60.
19. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 10, 43–46, 51–53.
20. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 10, 218n25.

Kylie Gilchrist 77
ophers experienced what Herbert Schnädelbach termed an “identity-crisis” in

their disciplinary vocation and self-understanding as human.21
Three major responses to this identity crisis are evident. The German
school of Philosophical Anthropology—initiated by Max Scheler and Hel-
muth Plessner and continued by Gehlen—reconceptualized the human as an
animal distinguished by its capacity to change over time while remaining
human. This position was introduced via Scheler’s thesis of “world-openness,”
which argues that humans possess the unique capacity to break from the “vital
impulse” (Lebensdrang) animating all life forms, and to experience them-
selves and the world objectively.22 Through this ability to be simultaneously
within and outside the natural world, Scheler believed, the human evolves by
freely shaping “that infinitely plastic segment of his nature.” 23 Plessner
advanced an analogous notion of “excentric positionality,” and slightly later
Gehlen characterized the human in terms of a capacity for action resulting
from their unspecialized, “deficient” condition.24 Despite significant differ-
ences in their thought, as detailed by Joachim Fischer’s study of Philosophical
Anthropology’s “core identity,” the thinkers agreed on the human’s defining
ability to transcend, while remaining within, the givenness of biological exis-
tence.25 Philosophical Anthropology’s reconceptualization of the human as a
unique kind of animal recentered anthropos on new philosophical and quasi-
scientific grounds, warding off the antihumanist tendencies of scientism and
historicism.
Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology proposed the second
response, seeking to destroy traditional concepts of human essence and recover
a more fundamental inquiry into the basic structures of existence. Where Phil-
osophical Anthropology defines human essence as the openness to history,
Heidegger charged, it conceives this essence as a property predicated of a sub-
ject, and hence an object. This approach predetermines human existence
according to classical notions of the animal rationale and the Christian theo-
logical concept of transcendence, while continuing to conceal what is truly
21. Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 224.

22. Honenberger, Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology, 11.
23. Scheler, Philosophical Perspectives, 101.
24. Fischer, “Exploring the Core Identity of Philosophical Anthropology,” 160–62.
25. Scheler follows an eidetic theory of essences; Plessner and Gehlen share a sociobiological
approach, wherein Plessner emphasizes expression and the phenomenology of individual experience
and Gehlen a theory of human action and institutions. Their politics were opposed, however, with Pless-
ner aligned with the Frankfurt School against Gehlen’s conservatism. See Fischer, “Exploring the Core
Identity of Philosophical Anthropology,” 163–68; and Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human
Nature, 48–59, 70–90.

essential.26 This concealment, Heidegger wrote in Being and Time with a nod
to Georg Lukács, is an underlying cause of human reification.27 Rejecting Phil-
osophical Anthropology’s metaphysical tendencies, Heidegger redefined
human essence as the potentiality for Being, which lies outside and preexists
beings themselves.28 To Heidegger, the human is not historical by virtue of an
essential property but because Being is historical, and human Dasein is the
entity characterized by its openness to Being.
Heidegger registers this displacement of philosophical anthropology’s
traditional concepts with the term Dasein, referring not to the human as a
sociobiological entity but to its ontological structure of Being-in-the-world.29
Anthropology’s status in Being and Time is ambiguous, by Heidegger’s own
admission, as the text proceeds from the standpoint of specifically human
Dasein and thus provided critics like Adorno with fodder to frame fundamen-
tal ontology as a clandestine philosophical anthropology.30 By the time of his
rebuttal to Jean-Paul Sartre in “Letter on Humanism,” however, Heidegger
explicitly repudiated this anthropological residue. Commentators including
Reiner Schürmann and Michel Haar have convincingly argued that this shift,
rather than breaking with his early work, “radicalizes” Being and Time’s con-
cern with the Being of human Dasein.31 This continuity, Haar argues, evinces
Heidegger’s “intrinsically” historical notion of the human, from which follow
two main consequences.32 First, the philosophical subject becomes one among
multiple possible epochal modes of Being and loses the privilege of transhis-
torical sovereignty. Second, and more problematic, is the separation of human
Dasein from the embodied dimensions of human existence, and with these, the
manner in which the human is conditioned by needs as well as sexual, racial,
and other differences.33 Consequently, while Heidegger’s position contains a
critique of dehumanization in attempting to retrieve the fundaments of
human existence from metaphysical obfuscation, it potentially comes at the
expense of the human’s somatic condition.
The third position arises from the Frankfurt School, which posits a dia-
lectical anthropology grounded in the Marxian notion of the human as “the
26. Heidegger, Being and Time, 74–75.

27. Heidegger, Being and Time, 72.
28. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 248–49.
29. Heidegger, Being and Time, 72, 274.
30. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 242–43, 249–51.
31. Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 60; Schürmann, “Heidegger’s Being and Time,” 58.
32. Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 148.
33. Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, xxiii–xxxv, 176–87.

Kylie Gilchrist 79
ensemble of the social relations.” 34 As Martin Jay demonstrates, figures includ-

ing Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm followed Karl
Marx’s notion of “real humanism” in conceiving the human not as abstract
essence but as shaped by social relations of production.35 As the human spe-
cies’ potential for universality and freedom resides in its capacity to produce
itself and its objects of need by transforming nature, human potentials are not
innate properties but historical possibilities. These thinkers are also aligned by
their critique of idealism and rejection of identity between concept and object,
essence and appearance.36 The distance between the human’s social appearance
and historical potential enables critical theory to measure humans against the
unfulfilled promises of universality, freedom, and happiness that are expressed
in suffering and needs, and thereby critique society for blocking the realization
of human species being.
Within this shared frame, however, Frankfurt School positions on anthro-
pology were split by a tension between their sociohistorical analyses of the
human condition and objective claims on human potential. As Johannssen has
detailed, Marcuse and Horkheimer occupied two opposing poles: Marcuse
was willing to ground the human’s possibility for happiness in psychosomatic
drives; Horkheimer insisted that anthropology could only be thought nega-
tively because of the human’s fundamental historicity.37 Yet even Horkheimer
admitted that the historical existence of human suffering, desires, and needs
prohibited the complete denial of a “constant human nature.” 38 This tension
proved progressively difficult to resolve after the Russian Revolution’s failures
convinced Frankfurt School thinkers that history could no longer guarantee
the realization of human potentials, necessitating concessions to a minimal
anthropology.
In this field of debate, Adorno stands out for his refusal to directly
engage. Explicit remarks on anthropology appear throughout The Jargon of
Authenticity and again in Negative Dialectics, in the form of screeds against
Philosophical Anthropology and Heidegger regardless of their substantial dif-
ferences.39 Against these adversaries, Adorno maintains that the human and its
34. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 145.

35. Jay, “Frankfurt School’s Critique of Marxist Humanism,” 292. Jay further notes the important
role that psychoanalysis plays in the Frankfurt School’s engagement with anthropology.
36. Jay, “Frankfurt School’s Critique of Marxist Humanism,” 296.
37. Johannssen, “Humanism and Anthropology,” 1259–61.
38. Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology,” 175.
39. “Function of the Concept of Existence” in Negative Dialectics contains a condensed version of
Adorno’s critiques (ND, 122–24).

historical changeability are entirely sociohistorically mediated. As he articu-

lates in Negative Dialectics, historical changeability is a historical condition
and cannot be conceptualized in abstract or invariant terms (ND, 124). Nor
can the human subject be dissolved to mitigate the problems of metaphysical
humanism, as Heidegger attempts to do, because the subject is a historically
necessary locus of critical reflection and resistance.40 However, Adorno also
insists on a notion of human potential. “We cannot say what man is,” he says,
because to “decipher the human essence by the way it is now would sabotage its
possibility” (ND, 124). The ambiguity of his debate with Gehlen here comes to
the fore: how can he speak of human possibility while refusing any definition of
the human? This ambiguity appears as a purposeful agnosticism in light of a
comment in Adorno’s 1931 lecture “The Actuality of Philosophy,” an early
programmatic statement on his philosophical project and critique of Heideg-
gerian ontology. Here Adorno says, “I will not decide whether a particular con-
ception of man and being lies at the base of my theory, but I do deny the neces-
sity of resorting to this conception.” 41 This suspended judgment is conspicuous
for a philosopher whose critical procedure typically heightens conceptual con-
tradictions to an extreme, irresolvable tension.
In the historical context sketched above, Adorno’s anthropological
agnosticism reflects his refusal to accept anthropology as the necessary alter-
native to a philosophy of history—thus maintaining the tension facing critical
theory’s dialectical anthropology. This tension, to Adorno, should not be
resolved but, rather, subjected to philosophical interpretation. Adorno’s
1965–66 lecture course on negative dialectics argues as such by proposing
that the “theoretical question” of why a truly “revolutionary practice . . . did
not” and “could not” happen “belongs . . . to a dialectical anthropology
which is assuredly no small part of the problem of philosophy in our time.” 42
Referencing Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” this commentary indicates that
philosophy failed to transform social reality because it advocated a praxis
that perpetuated the spell of false progress.43 Consequently, Adorno claims,
Marx’s attempt to move from philosophical interpretation to praxis requires a
renewed interpretation of false praxis, via critical reflection that is itself a
“practical act.” 44 This interpretative practice is negative dialectics: Adorno’s
philosophical procedure that is programmatically sketched in “The Actuality
40. ND, 174–75. See also Adorno, “On Subject and Object.”
41. Adorno, “Actuality of Philosophy,” 132 (hereafter cited as AP).
42. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 46.
43. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 44–54.
44. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 48.

Kylie Gilchrist 81
of Philosophy” and pursued to fullest maturity in his late work, furnishing the
critical mode through which Adorno confronts the anthropological problem-
atic at increasing remove.
Human, All Too Human: Adorno’s Negative-Dialectical Anthropology

As argued in Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s 1966 summa on the topic, this pro-
cedure of thinking aims to access a kernel of truth in a social reality turned
entirely false (ND, 3–4). Philosophy failed to provide a truly rational interpre-
tation of the world, Adorno asserts, because its efforts to grasp the real as a
totality have become an objective illusion obscuring the antagonism between
humans and nature, subject and object, universal and particular (ND, 3–4).
Adorno seeks to correct this situation by restricting the excesses of metaphys-
ics with an epistemological critique. In Negative Dialectics, he pursues this
project by reversing Kant’s claim that subjects constitute objects of knowledge
(which include human subjects) while retaining the subject as the necessary site
of philosophical experience. Objects require the subject’s conceptual media-
tion yet gain priority as the irreducibly material and particular element of
thought (ND, 183–86). With this revision of post-Kantian epistemology, Neg-
ative Dialectics’ gambit is that a mode of thinking conscious of its own limita-
tions could break through the intensifying self-domination of exchange society.
Negative-dialectical thinking involves three modes of subject-object
relations in cognition whose terminology warrants explication (ND, 148–51).
First is identity thinking, which abstracts from particular objects and represses
qualities falling outside the object’s general concept. Identity thinking fuels
the domination of nature by instrumental rationality and the reification of
human second nature through the social principle of exchange. Second is uto-
pian or, in Gillian Rose’s terms, rational identity, the reconciliation of concept
and object as mutually mediated and differentiated.45 Rational identity would
actualize the “utopian element” that persists as a “striking and secret”—that is,
historical and necessary—relation between an object and its unactualized idea
(ND, 150–51). Yet as this utopian idea is abstracted and distorted by socially
enforced identity thinking, it cannot be known without qualitative social trans-
formation. In the present, rational identity can be gleaned only in what Adorno
describes as the “cavities between what things claim to be and what they are,” as
“negative signs” of the utopian idea (ND, 150). The latter encapsulates the third
mode of nonidentity, defined as the cryptographic difference between prag-
45. Rose, Melancholy Science, 58.

matic and utopian identity. In describing nonidentity as the “secret telos of

identification,” as Iain Macdonald has argued, Adorno inverts the privilege
that philosophy has traditionally granted to actuality, and in fact converges
with Heidegger by “defend[ing] a version of absolute potentiality as available
within our own, human experience of what is.” 46 Nonidentity preserves the
possibility of transformation as a material element within the existing world.
Negative-dialectical thought works by confronting identity thinking’s
repressive operations with nonidentity, potentially enabling a nondominating
and truer mode of knowledge (ND, 149). Where the Hegelian dialectic synthe-
sizes more concrete concepts through negation, negative dialectics reflects on a
contradictory constellation of concepts such that the concepts dissolve in a non-
affirmative, determinate negation. This procedure elicits a philosophical expe-
rience of the truth of objects that cannot be entirely grasped by subjective con-
cepts and leads to new conceptual configurations of the negated terms (ND,
148–51, 405–8).
This sketch of negative dialectics substantiates the epistemological refu-
tation of philosophical anthropology that Johannssen identifies in Adorno’s
thought. If the object partly transcends conceptual knowledge, human subjects
could not fully conceptualize themselves as human. Johannssen demonstrates
how Adorno’s revised Kantianism underlies this position: Adorno locates a
notion of human nature or essence in the realm of ideas, where it cannot be
an object of possible experience and, as such, is not directly accessible to cog-
nitive knowledge.47 Nor can human essence be considered ontological because,
as Adorno asserts in “The Idea of Natural History,” nature itself is historically
mediated “all the way down” and has no prior stratum of existence.48 We can
then understand Adorno’s claim that we cannot say what the human is to be
the epistemological consequence of a historical situation whereby anthropo-
centric philosophy has hypostatized human subjectivity by believing the sub-
ject to be fully constitutive of its objects of knowledge. Given that the human is
a specific kind of object that is also a subject, anthropological claims to human
self-knowledge would, as identity thinking, repress the human’s nonidentical
objectivity, and hence the potential to be and become human. Negative-
dialectical reflection on anthropology would, by contrast, insist on the mutual
mediation of the human as subject and object in the constitution of knowledge,
as well as the irreducible particularity of the human’s objective condition. To
46. ND, 149; Macdonald, “‘What Is, Is More Than It Is,’” 32.
48. Adorno, “Idea of Natural History,” 117 (hereafter cited as NH).

Kylie Gilchrist 83
Adorno, human self-knowledge can, then, be only partly gleaned through crit-
ical interpretation of the human’s historically mediated objectivity.
When historical phenomena are reflected on negative dialectically, this
procedure reveals that which appears natural, qua invariant essence, as histor-
ical, and that which appears historical as natural, qua eternal transience. This
effect is what Adorno terms Naturgeschichte—or natural history—and is, fol-
lowing Susan Buck-Morss, negative dialectics’ “essential mechanism” as a
critical procedure.49 Drawing on Lukács’s theory of second nature and Walter
Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama (more appropriately known as
Trauerspiel), Adorno’s “Idea of Natural History” first articulated the concept
as a materialist rebuttal to Heidegger’s ontological notion of historicity (NH,
118–21). As Adorno defines it in terms he later quotes in Negative Dialectics,
natural history is a “perspective” that would “comprehend historical being in
its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural
being, or . . . nature as an historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in
itself as nature” (NH, 117; ND, 359). Max Pensky has described natural his-
tory as a “research protocol”—part concept, part methodology—entailing
both a “changed perspective” that reveals what once appeared as natural or
mythic fate to be the contingent “second nature” of historical circumstance
and an “alternative logic of historiography” that enables a partial recovery
and resignification of unrealized potentials latent in the sedimentation of his-
tory, which is equally the unfolding of natural transience.50
With this conceptual scaffold, Adorno’s investment in the philosophical
anthropology problematic emerges more clearly. Although Adorno considers
philosophical anthropology epistemologically impossible in an antagonistic,
exchange-based society, it is philosophically and politically significant because
it is implicated in philosophy’s failure to actualize itself in the transition to
praxis. To Adorno, this failure partly results from philosophers’ acceptance
of the false alternative between the philosophy of history and philosophical
anthropology, which led some of his contemporaries to develop positive theo-
ries of human potential. Philosophical anthropology is, then, in need of a phil-
osophical interpretation that would reveal the intertwining of nature and
history—a perspective enabled by Adorno’s concept of natural history. By
reflecting negative dialectically on the human as it exists in society, Adorno
seeks to dissolve the false identity between humans as they exist and the idea
of the human while preserving the utopian kernel of the human’s potential.
49. Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, 58.

50. Pensky, “Natural History,” 229, 233–34.

The Human Is What It Is Not

In Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia Adorno attempts a
negative-dialectical interpretation of philosophical anthropology. Dialectic of
Enlightenment, written with Horkheimer between 1939 and 1944, is explic-
itly described as a work of “dialectical anthropology” that addresses “why
humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind
of barbarism” (DE, xiv, xix). The authors answer this problem by sketching
the anthropogenesis, or historical becoming, of the human species in social
actuality.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s anthropogenesis narrative is not intended as a
universal history of humanity. Rather, as Massimiliano Tomba has shown, it
“problematiz[es] a specific pathway of Western civilization”—that defined by
the Kantian transcendental subject and its social counterpart of the bourgeois
individual.51 The authors seek to present this trajectory as contingent and open
to unrealized possibilities through a Nietzschean revaluation of Enlightenment
principles, revealing values like rationality and freedom to be rooted in the irra-
tional domination of internal and external nature by specific interests of power
(DE, 36). Contrary to critics like Habermas, however, Adorno’s method does
not capitulate to Nietzschean relativism, as its critique is grounded in the ratio-
nality of social actuality’s unrealized potential.
Dialectic of Enlightenment centers on the Enlightenment’s constitutive
tension between freedom and domination, extrapolating it into a narrative of
the human species’ primeval history. The text roots the freedom of self-
conscious subjects to spontaneous bodily impulse and human civilization’s
domination of nature to self-preservative instinct. The human organism devel-
ops through individuation driven by the dialectic of mimesis and rationality:
mimesis engenders reason, the organ of history and freedom, whereby
human individuals gain self-consciousness and the capacity to produce their
own possibilities.52 Yet as reason enables humans to abstract from and control
inner and outer nature, it also leads progressively rationalized society to sacri-
fice the individual and its openness to the new for the reproduction of the spe-
cies, progressively leading to stasis (DE, 148–49).
In tracing the truly utopian idea of the actual human’s concept to the
event of Kantian Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer explain how
Kant’s proposal for a humanity freed from self-incurred immaturity sought
to universalize the capacity for self-reflective reason. Reason would be an end
51. Tomba, “Adorno’s Account,” 35.

52. See, e.g., the Odysseus narrative in DE, 35–62.

Kylie Gilchrist 85
in itself, rather than a means of self-preservation, whose “idea of true univer-

sality” would “resolve the conflict between pure and empirical reason” to rec-
oncile humanity in the “conscious solidarity of the whole” (DE, 65). Yet the
Enlightenment’s potential is missed, Adorno and Horkheimer show, and not
least because Kant’s implicit philosophical anthropology mistakenly identifies
the multiplicity of empirical humans with the transcendental subject. This
abstraction masks the social circumstances wherein the “bearers of one and
the same reason” are “in real opposition to each other” (DE, 65). When philos-
ophy fails to adequately reflect on this contradiction, the concept of Enlighten-
ment humanity is universalized on purely instrumental grounds within capital-
ist society; and reason is conjoined to this society’s elementary principle of the
commodity form. Just as exchange society abstracts objects from their use
value, it also abstracts reason from its objective content and transforms it into
the drive for self-preservation. The protohistorical antagonism between human
individuals and nature is reproduced between individuals, qua “natural”
beings, and a society that is increasingly independent of human agents.53 Soci-
ety as second nature progressively prevails over humans, attenuating the indi-
vidual’s capacity for freedom and happiness.
This narrative substantiates Adorno’s critique of progress: the utopian
potential of a universally free and rational humanity is contained within its
idea, but blocked by the actual social circumstances that masquerade as prog-
ress. As Adorno says in his essay “Progress,” “Progress would be the very
establishment of humanity in the first place, whose prospect opens up in the
face of its extinction.” 54 Yet while Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that the
human’s present state is contingent, not fated by invariant nature, and open to
transformation, it also refuses to reduce the historical potential of becoming
human to meaningless aberration, as their reading of the unrealized potential
contained in Kantian Enlightenment attests. Here the ambiguity of Adorno’s
negative-dialectical anthropology comes to the fore: if Adorno intends to main-
tain the fragile promise of human potential without a philosophy of history, is
he required to admit a minimal anthropology?
Minima Moralia, Adorno’s second text with a “social and anthropologi-
cal scope,” addresses this question by conceptualizing the human only as what
is not, or not yet, human.55 First published in German in 1951, Minima Mor-
53. This development is evident in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in
DE, 94–136.
54. Adorno, “Progress,” 128.
55. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 18 (hereafter cited as MM).

alia emerged from notes drafted since the 1930s, including parts of Adorno’s
provisional “Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie,” and was primarily written
between 1944 and 1947.56 Where Dialectic of Enlightenment discusses how
humans have become the way they are, Minima Moralia offers an ethnography
of the new human constituted in the fully administered world. The text begins
at a point when the process outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment has reified
life such that society all but preponderates over humans, who verge on reenter-
ing a “natural” state of stasis and mythic capture. As indicated by its subtitle,
Reflections from Damaged Life, Minima Moralia seeks to identify vestiges of
the potential to be truly human remaining within the somatic impulses of indi-
vidual experience—a bodily resistance that is itself uncertain.
In presenting the dehumanized state of actual humans, Minima Moralia
walks the tightrope of maintaining that the human’s openness to history—
hence also to its potential to become human—is itself a historical condition,
while refusing both invariant anthropology and pure historicism. On the one
hand, as Adorno writes in Minima Moralia’s “Novissimum organum,” the indi-
vidual is purely “the reflection of the social process” (MM, 229). Those who
decry the “‘mechanization’ of man,” Adorno alleges, uphold the ideological
notion that industrial society deforms a preexisting, unreified human essence
(MM, 229). Against them, Adorno maintains that “there is no substratum
beneath such ‘deformations,’ no ontic interior on which social mechanisms
merely act externally.” 57 To Adorno, precisely because humans lack an anthro-
pological “substratum,” their quantitative assimilation to the exchange princi-
ple drives a qualitative change in human constitution. This change is described,
in one instance, as the “bourgeois principle” of “competition” moving from the
“objectivity of the social process” into the human “composition of . . . jostling
atoms” and “as if into anthropology” (MM, 27). In this image, Minima Moralia
displays the chiasmus and mutual cancellation of nature and history: the human
individual’s capacity for spontaneous self-reflexive thought is reduced to the
preprogrammed reflexes of biological specimen (MM, 231). Here the ahistori-
cal assumptions of philosophical anthropology appear as symptoms of the cap-
italist form of life, which has produced an “invariance” in humans that,
Adorno says, “probably exists only in a society based on exploitation.” 58
56. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 389.

57. MM, 229. Minima Moralia’s section “Novissimum organum” investigates this transition by
transposing Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital into anthropology. When read along-
side Adorno’s “Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” this passage indicates an Adorno concerned
less with mourning the bourgeois individual’s death than with investigating a new social subject capable
of resisting contemporary forms of capitalism.
58. Adorno, “Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” 462.

Kylie Gilchrist 87
Yet if the human has no substratum grounding its potentials, how can
Adorno critique these anthropological transformations for progressively elim-
inating the human? Minima Moralia wagers that, despite advanced reification,
a sufficiently “dim awareness” of exchange society’s “perverse quid pro quo”
remains somatically embedded in human individuals such that they can expe-
rience the truth of their false state (MM, 15). As Adorno writes: “Someone
who has been offended, slighted, has an illumination as vivid as when agoniz-
ing pain lights up one’s own body. . . . He was wronged; from this he deduces a
claim to right and must at the same time reject it, for what he desires can only be
given in freedom. In such distress he who is rebuffed becomes human” (MM,
164; italics mine). Minima Moralia seeks to locate such resistance to dehuman-
ization by “scrutiniz[ing]” human life in its “estranged form” through micro-
logical interpretations of human deformations (MM, 15). Honneth has inci-
sively interpreted Adorno’s micrology as a “depth hermeneutic” for the
pathologies of capitalism, through which social reality is hyperbolized such
that suffering and unmet needs can be read as signs of resistance to the socially
imposed identity principle, and hence as nonidentical gestures toward the
unfulfilled ideal of rational identity.59 Taking influence from the psychoana-
lytic symptom and Marxian commodity form, Adorno reads embodied suffer-
ing as signs of dehumanization that do not require a positive definition of the
human.
If the human can be conceptualized only at the point of its resistance to
society’s totalizing imposition of the human’s concept, this suggests that the
human inheres in its nonidentity, or the not-(yet)-human. Yet as the not-(yet)-
human cannot be assimilated to the concept of actual humans, it is progres-
sively repressed and eliminated by exchange society’s enforcement of the iden-
tity principle. With this analysis, we can then find in Adorno’s notion of the
human’s “historical being” two, perhaps conflicting, senses: first, the human
changes across history; second, the human is open to the historical possibilities
of other modes of existence that emerge in encounters with the nonidentical.
With this dual understanding of human historicity, Adorno’s negative-
dialectical anthropology can be grasped as an attempt to preserve human open-
ness to qualitative historical transformation within the historical changes inev-
itable from the passage of time. Social processes of dehumanization should be
understood not as a reduction of the already human to an inhuman state but as a
reduction of the not-(yet)-human’s potential to become truly human—a poten-
tial whose fulfillment could be positively realized only in utopian transforma-
59. Honneth, “Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life,” 56.

tion. Minima Moralia’s “Sur l’eau” provides an oblique sketch of this transfor-
mation, which by definition cannot be imaged directly. A reconciled society,
Adorno says, would tire of “development and, out of freedom, leave possibili-
ties unused,” allowing alternate possibilities to enter the present without being
repressed for the sake of social self-preservation (MM, 156). The sketch con-
cludes with an image of an animal—“rien faire comme une bête, lying on
water”—prompting the question of whether we can even speak of reconcilia-
tion in terms of the human (MM, 157).
If we understand Adorno’s notion of human potential as something that
negatively persists in the nonidentical relation between actual humans and the
not-(yet)-human, it might seem that mimesis is his anthropological principle
par excellence. As described in Dialectic of Enlightenment, mimesis is the
principle of affinity between two nonidentical entities, enabling resemblance
to and understanding of an other without imposing conceptual identity onto it
(DE, 7). Adorno himself nearly goes as far as defining the human in terms of
mimesis by stating in Minima Moralia: “Anything that does not wish to wither
should rather take on itself the stigma of the inauthentic. For it lives on the
mimetic heritage. The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human
being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings” (MM,
154). The human’s mimetic heritage thus “links” human actuality and potenti-
ality to preserve the not-(yet)-human in a dehumanizing social context.
Yet in light of Adorno’s anthropological diagnoses in Dialectic of
Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, micrology fails to offer a nonanthropo-
logical diagnostic of dehumanization, and mimesis cannot sustain itself on
quasi-anthropological ground. This is because the texts show humans to be
set on an irreversible historical trajectory in which they are so far reduced
as to become identical to their merely biological existence. In this context,
the human’s resistant capacity, and hence its historical possibility, is progres-
sively eliminated. If the human can become human only by imitating other
humans who are rendered inhuman by the social context, then the human
fully cancels itself out. The human’s historicality—as its capacity to change
over time—eliminates its historicality—as its openness to the historical
potentials of becoming human. How can Adorno then conceptualize the
human in terms of its capacity for nonidentical resistance without defining
this resistant capacity as an anthropological principle?
Sidestepping this contradiction has in fact enabled Honneth to revive
philosophical anthropology as the basis for social critique. His recent work
on reification relies on Adorno’s statement, made in Minima Moralia immedi-

Kylie Gilchrist 89
ately after the passage cited above, that mimesis is the “primal form of love”
(MM, 154). Repurposing Adorno’s claim, Honneth uses the concept of mim-
etic affinity to substantiate his position that mutual recognition between
humans is a primary anthropological tendency, while misrecognition is a fre-
quently violent consequence of exchange-based societies.60 Yet by attending
closely to Adorno’s language, we can see that mimesis is more appropriately
understood as a link to the human—one that does not define humans anthropo-
logically but indicates something that exists outside the human, yet without
which the human could not be human. How the human can retain this link to
the mimetic heritage in a totally inhuman social context is, then, an open ques-
tion. Rather than simply resolve this problem by positing a negative anthropol-
ogy of mimesis, Adorno displaces it, in its full contradictory complexity, into
his philosophy of art.
Philosophical Anthropology Migrates into Art

In Adorno’s posthumous magnum opus Aesthetic Theory, art is presented as
modernity’s “refuge for mimetic comportment.” 61 Through its capacity to
express philosophical truth in mediated and negative form, Adorno believed,
art could continue conveying the experience of human suffering and potential
within a near-totally inhuman world. As the following discussion argues, art
thus provides Adorno with a model for critiquing society’s tendency to elimi-
nate human historicity yet without making direct claims on philosophical
anthropology or the philosophy of history. Far from abandoning his argument
with anthropological thinking, Adorno’s move to the philosophy of art
responds to anthropology’s key problems on new ground.
Where Adorno’s attempt to critique dehumanization while maintaining
his epistemological ban on anthropology fails, the philosophy of art offers an
alternative because it is another route to knowledge that partly evades the dom-
inating effects of identity thinking. As Adorno states in his 1964–65 lecture
series History and Freedom, it is “through the medium of aesthetics [that]
questions concerning the philosophy of history and even metaphysics become
legible.” 62 The conflation of art and aesthetics is, in this instance, productive, as
it signals that art’s ability to communicate philosophical truths arises from its
sensuous, somatic character. Adorno is concerned not with sensibility tout
court, however, but with its capacity to convey conceptual and historical con-
60. Honneth et al., Reification, 45–46, 57, 62–63.

61. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 73 (hereafter cited as AT).
62. Adorno, History and Freedom, 125.

tent in art. Because artworks communicate through nonconceptual expression,

they can articulate in negative form an object’s concrete particularity that is
suppressed by the drive to identity. Art maintains this precarious access to phil-
osophical truth in a world dominated by exchange society’s illusions because of
its own illusory nature: in a false world, only the false can convey the true.
The object that communicates itself through art is, more specifically, the
empirical human subject formed through the antagonistic dialectic of mimesis
and rationality. In Adorno’s words, “Artworks, by molding themselves to the
subject through their organization, recapitulat[e] the way the subject origi-
nated, how it wrested itself free” (AT, 154). As artworks “reverberate with
the protohistory of subjectivity,” they express the residue of what was repressed
for the human subject’s putative emancipation while gesturing toward its unre-
alized possibilities (AT, 154). This residue is, specifically, the mimetic heritage
through which progressively dehumanized, not-(yet)-humans are linked to the
potentially human. Art, Adorno says, is the “organ of mimesis since the mim-
etic taboo” instituted by mimesis’s mutation into rationality (AT, 152). Yet art is
not a pure reserve of primeval unity prior to the subject’s diremption but a
“modification of mimesis” that reflects mimesis’s progressive attenuation
through its interchange with rationality by inverting and enacting this dialectic
on itself (AT, 155).
Adorno presages this turn to the philosophy of art in Dialectic of Enlight-
enment, where mimesis emerges as the central category of archaic nature in
human prehistory. His account of mimesis developed through readings of cul-
tural anthropology, including Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss’s work on
magic and Roger Caillois’s study of animal mimicry.63 While Adorno adopts
Caillois’s thought that mimesis is motivated by the drive for assimilation, he
refuses the French surrealist’s investment in the mimetic subject’s dissolution
into its other. Rather, Adorno is concerned with the dialectical process whereby
mimesis combines with rationality through the progressive evolution of magi-
cal, mythic, and scientific techniques of controlling nature. Art, in its modern,
autonomous form, emerges as the counterpart of this rationalizing process and
shelters, through artistic illusion, the mimetic correspondences inherited from
society’s animate and magical past. As the Enlightenment’s bourgeois individ-
ual achieves formal emancipation, art in turn attempts to free itself from
instrumental rationality through the purposeless activity of l’art pour l’art,
while its mathematical formalism also mimetically adapts to society’s rational
techniques. Art’s critique of society turns inward as the mimesis-rationality
63. Hulatt, “Reason, Mimesis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno,” 137–38.

Kylie Gilchrist 91
dialectic intensifies, reflected in avant-gardist efforts to negate art’s separation

from life. After the avant-garde’s failed emancipation attempt renders art crit-
ically self-conscious of its false freedom, modern art radicalizes this insight in
progressively nominalistic and self-destructive efforts to annihilate art itself
through techniques of dissonance, incoherence, and aleatory sequences.
Artworks not only are mimetic of the subject’s history but also commu-
nicate this history to humans through the mimetic character of artistic experi-
ence. Art’s mimetic quality echoes “what was experienced as a new and terri-
ble event” within the realm of magic: the “appearance of the whole in the
particular,” where subjects are confronted with an object that exceeds its con-
cept (DE, 14). Modern art enacts this experience in reconfigured form by elic-
iting a “shudder,” in Adorno’s terms, in which “mimetic comportment react[s]
mimetically to abstractness” as the formal expression of the subject’s progres-
sive reification (AT, 29). Through this violent interruption of self-sufficient sub-
jectivity, such artistic experience awakens momentary consciousness of unful-
filled potentials that persist in the object. In Adorno’s words, “The shudder
feels the potential as if it were actual” (AT, 333). The utopic horizon of this
remembrance is the hope that “liberated humanity would . . . inherit its histor-
ical legacy free of guilt,” by elaborating unfulfilled potentials without sacrific-
ing alterity for the self-preservation of the whole (AT, 55).
As Aesthetic Theory extends the account of art’s formation initiated in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, it develops at its core a fully fledged yet antisyste-
matic concept of mimesis. Adorno presents at least seven dimensions of the
concept.64 Mimesis is sympathetic, as a mode of resemblance that approaches
the truth content of particular objects by “assimilat[ing]” itself to an other
without “subordinating” it through conceptual domination (AT, 437). It is
expressive, recalling the word’s capacity to convey an idea prior to the diremp-
tion of sign and signification. Through mimesis, “what is objective, subjectively
mediated, speaks” in a manner analogous to the “expression of living crea-
tures” in “pain” (AT, 152–53). It is affective, producing a simultaneously emo-
tive and receptive experience that manifests sometimes violently, and some-
times in happiness and love (AT, 447). It is somatic, described as the
“physiologically primordial form of spirit” whose heritage reaches “into the
biological dimension” where mimesis was “vestigially maintained” (AT, 155,
435). It is concrete, as a particular relation between particulars, yet one that
also links the individual to the whole. Through mimesis, Adorno says, “every
64. Andreas Huyssen identifies five dimensions of mimesis in “Of Mice and Mimesis,” 66–67; this
analysis builds on his interpretation.

idiosyncrasy lives from collective forces of which it is unconscious” (AT, 56). It

is rational or utopian: as a nonconceptual relation that responds to “the telos of
knowledge,” mimesis links objects that are deformed by identity thinking to
what they ideally could be (AT, 74).
Mimesis is, finally, historical, as is evident in its progressive evolution
through techniques of magic, myth, and art. Because mimesis has a history
and always manifests in concretely historical form, it cannot be understood as
an essential property of human nature. Yet its historicity is also subject to
structurally analogous problems as that of the human: mimesis progressively
combines with rationality and manifests in increasingly attenuated forms. If
mimesis mirrors human historicity in the dual senses of change over time and
openness to history, what enables this quasi-anthropological principle to sus-
tain these two conflicting dimensions and thus sidestep the pitfalls of Adorno’s
negative-dialectical anthropology?
It is mimesis’s imbrication with the Bilderverbot, or ban on graven
images, that enables it to model and communicate human historicity. When
mimetic expression conveys historical truths, it refuses to represent its object
through determinate concepts and images and instead becomes like the object,
expressing particular truth content that escapes imagistic representation. As
Gertrude Koch shows in arguing for Adorno’s relevance to film studies, this
aniconic dimension evolves through mimesis’s progressive rationalization in
the Dialectic of Enlightenment narrative: emerging in animism, where taboos
partly preserve the dead in images that wield magical power, it becomes the
refusal of images of the divine. Adorno’s notion of the Bilderverbot, per Koch,
is not, strictly speaking, a sign of Adorno’s theological underpinnings but rather
an idea “influenced by debates on motifs in Jewish mysticism” and “applied by
Critical Theory” to gain a “regulatory effect” in Adorno’s philosophy of art.65
For Adorno, the Bilderverbot marks a passage toward modernity as the basis of
critical, demythologizing thought—and similarly, underlies autonomous art’s
critical separation from society.66 Adorno himself describes the Bilderverbot
as “thought’s enlightening intent,” claiming that “materialism brought that ban
into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured” (ND, 205,
207). Modern art realizes the Bilderverbot’s critical function in its “imageless”
character: artworks, Adorno says, “do not contain replicas” or “fulfill the
requirements of Platonic archetypes” (AT, 383). Rather, they are the “objecti-
vations of images” that reveal the illusory character of their timeless presenta-
tion while transmitting an experience of the truth negatively contained in social
65. Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” 218.

66. Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” 219–20.

Kylie Gilchrist 93
appearances (AT, 383). Understood in this light, the Bilderverbot is the basis
on which art cancels out the illusion that the human as given in actuality is nat-
ural, necessary, and true while holding open a link to other possibilities of
the human.
If the ban on images preserves a moment in time without falsely eternal-
izing what has passed away, it furthermore has a temporal character enabling
Adorno’s theory of the artwork to integrate the two notions of historicity that
cancel each other out in his negative-dialectical anthropology: that of the pas-
sage of time, and historical possibility. It is the Bilderverbot, as Koch’s analysis
shows, that reveals the artwork’s fundamentally temporal character through its
imbrication in the “temporal problem . . . of duration and death.” 67 The art-
work’s temporal character is further evident in Adorno’s discussion of modern
art’s relation to the temporal experience of modernity, defined by the dialectic
of the new as the ever-same. As Adorno recounts, building on Benjamin’s the-
orization of modernity, this dialectic arises with the contradictorily conjoined
phenomena of Baudelairian modernité, which demands artworks posit them-
selves as a qualitative break with the past, and capitalist modernization, intro-
ducing the homogeneous time of abstract labor and the commodity form. As a
result, Adorno says, the “category of the new” emerged “in conjunction with
the question whether anything new had ever existed” (AT, 28). This paradox
is immanent in the structure of modern artworks and mirrors the tendency
toward a static human anthropology in advanced capitalist society. Where art-
works posit themselves as new, their claim immediately reveals itself as an illu-
sion because the qualitatively new would break through modernity’s endlessly
self-reproducing dialectic of emancipation through self-domination. Barring
this, art can posit newness only as an illusion and, in truth, mere novelty—
thus presenting its contradictory state of eternal transience. As Adorno says,
“Artworks’ paradoxical nature, stasis, negates itself” (AT, 242). Through this
immanent critique of the stasis of the new, artworks dissolve the illusion of
human invariance in a critique of exchange society’s dehumanizing effects.
The artwork is structured by this distinct ability to objectivate the tran-
sience that is the natural-historical existence of all things, such that art’s very
concept is paradoxically defined by its inherent lack of essential or invariant
definition. Referring to Benjamin’s figure of the dialectical image, Adorno
writes that “artworks are the persistence of the transient. . . . To experience
art means to become conscious of its immanent process as an instant at a stand-
still” (AT, 117). Adorno’s evocation of Benjamin registers the influence of the
latter’s theory of origins (Ursprung), or the continuous and partial becoming of
67. Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” 215.

history within the present. As established in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”

to Benjamin’s work on Trauerspiel, the history revealed by the origin is not a
factual description of how a phenomenon came to be or a definition of timeless
essence. Rather, it allows a work to be grasped in its temporal character and
within the continuum of history—in Benjamin’s words, as its “essential
being,” which is “the past and subsequent history of this being.” 68 Criticism,
as the philosophical reflection on art, can reconstruct this past and future his-
tory within a constellation of historical images—where truth, in Benjamin’s
words, is “bodied forth in the dance of represented ideas.” 69
Building on Benjamin’s notions of origin and constellation, Adorno defines
art’s concept as a “historically changing constellation” that is “at every point
indicated by what art once was, but . . . legitimated only by what art became
with regard to what it wants to, and perhaps can, become” (AT, 2–3). Further-
more, maintaining its allegiance to the Bilderverbot, the artwork as “constella-
tion” is “a cryptogram of the historical essence of reality, not its copy” (AT,
381). In Adorno’s interpretation, however, Benjamin’s theologically inflected
notion of the idea or essence of a phenomenon becomes what Buck-Morss has
called its “historically specific social content” and requires the mediation of a
subject who can reflect on this content as its object.70 As Adorno proposes
when discussing Benjamin’s theory in “The Actuality of Philosophy,” constel-
lations “do not lie organically ready in history” but “must be produced by
human beings and are legitimated in the last analysis alone by the fact that real-
ity crystalizes about them” (AP, 131). Artworks, to Adorno, concretize the
emphatic truth of a moment as well as its passing away, and communicate this
truth to humans through the subject’s reflection on objects that partly exceed
subjective concepts. In this capacity, the artwork models the potential of
human openness to history as something that is itself historical and ephemeral.
Alfred Schmidt has lent credence to this claim by proposing that Ador-
no’s theory of the artwork’s constellatory structure, most prominent in his early
music writings, is the basis of his “programmatic idea of ‘an art of real human-
ism’” centering on “the human’s qualitative changeability.” 71 Schmidt’s argu-
ment likely alludes to Adorno’s 1928 essay “Schubert,” which extols the com-
poser’s music for its rousing presentation of “the promise of what one day we
ourselves will be.” 72 That this promise inheres in the human’s historical poten-
tial is announced by the article’s opening epigraph from Louis Aragon’s Paris
68. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 47.

69. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 29.
70. Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, 94–95.
71. Schmidt, “Adorno,” 657.
72. Adorno, “Schubert (1928),” 14.

Kylie Gilchrist 95
Peasant, reproduced as the epigraph to this article: “And the man was no more
than a sign among the constellations.” 73 As Johannssen has discussed, Ador-
no’s position is aligned with that of his colleague Ulrich Sonnemann, who
wrote his book Negative Anthropologie in the same period as Adorno’s nega-
tive dialectics lectures.74 Acknowledging this coincidence in Negative Dialec-
tics, Adorno attributes it to “a compulsion in the thing itself,” indicating his
belief in an objective need to critically address the philosophical anthropology
problematic.75 Adorno apparently approved of Sonnemann’s response to this
problem, stating in his 1969 review of Negative Anthropologie that “what the
human is [in Sonnemann’s] conception of anthropology rightly becomes a neg-
ative determination; the humane is to be opened only ‘from its denial and
absence.’” 76 While Sonnemann’s positively developed negative anthropology
is closely aligned with Adorno’s effort to conceptualize the human in terms of
what resists the reduction of its potential to become human, Adorno takes this
negative logic further. Restricting anthropology’s problems to the philosophy
of art, Adorno attempts to elaborate a nonanthropological model for human
historicity that enables a critical diagnostic for the progressive reification and
repression of the not-(yet)-human. In this way, Adorno’s philosophy of art aims
to serve the need for philosophical anthropology, without an anthropology as
such.
A Corrective to Philosophical Anthropology?

Does Adorno’s displacement of the problem of philosophical anthropology
offer an alternative to the pitfalls of anthropological thinking? Returning to
the debates sketched above, Heidegger’s effort to think human potentiality out-
side the terms of anthropology offers a valuable comparison. While both repu-
diate Philosophical Anthropology’s project for resubstantializing an ahistori-
cal notion of the human, Adorno rejects Heidegger’s weakening of the human
subject’s critical capacity, his suppression of human embodiment, and abstrac-
tion of historicity into a general ontological structure. To what extent are these
critiques warranted and successful?
With the concept of natural history, Adorno does address the concrete
conditions of human embodiment that Heidegger tends to eliminate from
Dasein’s historical existence. As Haar argues, Heidegger reinforces the split
73. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, quoted in Adorno, “Schubert,” 7, 7n6.

74. Johannssen, “Toward a Negative Anthropology,” paras. 23–29; “Humanism and Anthropol-
ogy,” 1262–65.
75. This quote is excluded from E. B. Ashton’s English translation. For the German, see Adorno,
Negative Dialektik, 9; for the translation, Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Redmond.
76. Adorno, “Zu Ulrich Sonnemanns Negativer Anthropologie,” 263; my translation.

within the human’s doubly natural and historical existence by separating human
Dasein from its somatic, animal life.77 Heidegger’s concept of earth, intro-
duced after Being and Time, could open space for conceptualizing the inter-
connections of the human’s historical and nonhistorical aspects of existence.78
However, as Haar’s reading demonstrates, Heidegger overlooks this potential
insight by considering Dasein’s historicality a transhistorical condition, “con-
tributing to the forgetting of the Earth” and, consequently, of the embod-
ied condition of human beings.79 Before any comprehensive analysis of
Heidegger’s work, Adorno’s “Idea of Natural History” grasps how this onto-
logization of history risks turning history into the myth of a first nature (NH,
115–16). Contra Heidegger, Adorno’s philosophical method begins with the
material suffering and needs of human and nonhuman life, attending to
embodiment as a key philosophical and political concern, and thus responding
to the “need” underlying Honneth and Joas’s resuscitations of philosophical
anthropology.
At the same time, Adorno’s corrective of Heidegger founders on one of
philosophical anthropology’s key problems: the fixing of the human in the fig-
ure of the subject. As Adorno insists from “The Actuality of Philosophy” to
Negative Dialectics, his notion of constellations requires the subject as the site
of conceptual mediation and experience (AP, 131; ND, 9–10). While the sub-
ject is the historical consequence of abstraction and exchange society, it is also
the historically necessary locus of negative-dialectical reflection and, through
this capacity, preserves the Enlightenment’s unrealized promise of universal
humanity. The promise of artistic experience is furthermore that the subject
can grasp its own somatic, embodied objectivity by encountering something
that exceeds the possibility of purely conceptual cognition. Through its violent
interruption of the illusion of identity, the artwork negatively prefigures a rec-
onciled relationship between subject and object, defined as the “state of differ-
entiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each
other.” 80 The problem, however, is that although the subject is considered a his-
torical development of the Enlightenment, Adorno conceives it from the van-
tage of consciousness and experience rather than as a structure of social consti-
tution. By privileging a critical consciousness that is bound to a specific
pathway of European Enlightenment and its intensifying dialectic of freedom

78. Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 179–81.
80. Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” 247.

Kylie Gilchrist 97
through self-domination, Adorno can identify an escape only in the nondomi-

nating mode of relation attained in artistic experience.81
By tracing Adorno’s displacements of the problem of philosophical
anthropology into the philosophy of art, we then find the consistent problem
of a subject that tries to, yet cannot, dissolve itself within the terms of subject
and object. Indeed, Adorno’s attempts to break through the “riddle” figure of
the human subject appear as complex acrobatics to retain it by reworking its
epistemological categories (AP, 127). Adorno himself acknowledges his
ambivalent attachment to this figure when noting that his consistent insistence
on the subject elicited suspicions among critics that “a concept of man, a blue-
print of Being [Entwurf des Daseins]” lay under his own thought yet was left
“clouded” by his lack of explicit discussion (AP, 132). But he defended the
vagueness of his position as intentional, using his epistemological ban on
anthropology to claim a methodologically valid agnosticism. To reiterate
Adorno’s statement in “The Actuality of Philosophy”: “I will not decide
whether a particular conception of man and being lies at the base of my theory,
but I do deny the necessity of resorting to this conception” (AP, 132). Refusing
the necessity of a philosophical anthropology drives Adorno to devise a nonan-
thropological model of human historicity in his philosophy of art. However,
his refusal to decide whether a particular “blueprint of Being” underlies his
theory of constellations also blocks him from interrogating his own implicitly
held model of the human.
Fully considering the subject as a historical effect of Enlightenment
modernity would enable a reevaluation of the extreme impasse and elimination
of human historicity forecasted by Adorno in Minima Moralia, as well as the
theorization of newly emergent modes of subjectivity and subjectivization.
Even prior to a new look toward the future, however, stands the question of
modernity’s geographic scope—a topic astutely addressed by Aamir Mufti’s
effort to stretch and translate Adorno’s critical framework to postcolonial
South Asia in his book Enlightenment in the Colony.82 If Enlightenment is to
be understood as a “human phenomenon,” Mufti argues, then it must “also be
81. For a discussion of the limitations of Adorno’s epistemology, see Osborne, “Reproach of
Abstraction,” 21–22.
82. Another recent critical encounter with Adorno’s Eurocentric limitations is offered by Lloyd,
Under Representation. Where Mufti endeavors to expand Adorno’s critical framework beyond Ador-
no’s limitations, Lloyd interrogates the role of post-Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy in constructing
and regulating racial hierarchies. In Lloyd’s reading, which examines the potential coarticulation of
Adorno’s Bilderverbot and Spivak’s figure of the subaltern, Adorno figures as a crux in this tradition’s
exhaustion and potential overcoming.

considered . . . as simply an event and process in human history rather than in

Western history alone.” 83 Adorno’s intransigent suspicion of Enlightenment
“progress,” articulated from the standpoint of immanent critique, Mufti
argues, is no less pertinent to those who experience the dialectic of the Enlight-
enment from the other side of the “imperial divide.” 84 While Adorno’s atten-
tion did not often turn to the situation of the colonized, Mufti points to one such
instance in Minima Moralia’s “Savages are not better humans.” 85 Underlying
the fragment’s “famously provocative title,” Mufti identifies a perceptive and
cautionary warning against romanticizing the “postwar figure of the anticolo-
nial insurgent . . . within an ultimately unaltered and Eurocentric history of
the realization of Man.” 86 Although Adorno thus extended his dialectical cri-
tique of progress beyond Europe’s borders, he could not recognize either the
multiplicity of experience or, in Mufti’s words, the “emergence of an antago-
nistic and exilic ‘historical memory’ not reducible to that of the principled
Western critic of the West.” 87 This failure is perhaps most acute in his infamous
critique of jazz—which, as Harry Cooper has argued, should not simply be
excused as a critique of jazz’s incorporation into the administered world.
Rather, Cooper shows, Adorno fails to register expressions of historical expe-
rience within the genre’s multiple and heterogeneous modes because he consid-
ers jazz one-dimensionally and according to the conventions of European clas-
sical music.88
In contrast to Adorno, Heidegger’s head-on confrontation with the prob-
lem of philosophical anthropology has nourished multiple trajectories in con-
temporary efforts to interrogate and deconstruct the human qua subject, from
Foucault’s archaeology of the human as an effect of historical epistemes to
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s probing of the subaltern others shadowing uni-
versalist discourses of rational subjectivity. In Kant and the Problem of Meta-
physics, Heidegger recapitulates Kant’s critique of metaphysica specialis to
reveal how Kant mistakenly limits the fundamental questions of philosophy—
what can I know, what should I do, and what may I hope—to anthropology by
grounding them in the question “What is the human being?” 89 In Heidegger’s
analysis, Kant’s mistake facilitates Scheler’s incoherent and misplaced project
83. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 24.

85. The title of the aphorism in German reads “Die Wilden sind nicht bessere Menschen” (Mufti,
Enlightenment in the Colony, 21, 266n37). E. F. N. Jephcott’s translation renders it “Savages are not
more noble” (MM, 52–53).
86. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 21–22.
88. Cooper, “On ‘Über Jazz,’” 109–16.
89. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, sec. 36.

Kylie Gilchrist 99
to develop, on philosophical grounds, a quasi-scientific definition of the human

as a biological, social, and psychological being.90 By retracing the steps of
Kant’s inquiry, Heidegger instead seeks to show that philosophy’s questions
are more fundamentally rooted in Dasein’s essence as temporality and fini-
tude.91 While one may object to Heidegger’s concern with authenticity and ori-
gins, as well as his marginalization of human embodiment, his questioning
does illuminate how the potentials of existence are reduced and obscured by
the imposition of a certain figure of being human.
Adorno’s blind spot leaves behind the task of recuperating the insights of
his philosophy of art from his implicit fixation on a “blueprint” of the human. It
would also be necessary to redress the latent progressivism contained in Ador-
no’s dialectic of the human and not-(yet)-human by eliminating the anticipa-
tory “yet.” By insisting on Adorno’s explicit refusal of anthropological models,
given sustenance by the Bilderverbot, his concept of mimesis could, then, offer
a productive theory of human historicity according to which the human is con-
stituted through its relations to what it is not, which enable the human to be
otherwise. With these correctives at a minimum, Adorno’s philosophy of art
could offer both a diagnostic of dehumanization and a potentially sustaining
link to the not-human that takes on new critical and constructive force when
considered in light of a worldwide archive of modernism’s histories. This
archive is very much in the spotlight today, fueled by a boom in global art his-
tories alongside contemporary art’s span across global markets. Not only does
the global condition of the contemporary enable this geographically expanded
purview, but, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, drawing on Arjun Appadurai,
new reflection on modernity and modernism “at large” is crucial to the “gene-
alogy of the global, which did not spring from the head of post–Cold War cap-
italism.” 92 At the same time, as Huyssen also identifies in repudiating the mod-
ernist distinction between high and low, art itself is unequivocally not the sole
site of human historicity, and whether it continues to be one at all was put into
question by Adorno himself prior to his more contemporary interlocutors.93
The mimetic force sustained in art continually strains beyond it, and this
remains true to the extent that art remains at least minimally vital today.
Kylie Gilchrist is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Visual
Studies at the University of Manchester.

92. Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” 192.
93. Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” 199–205.

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We Cannot Say What the Human Is:

The Problem of Anthropology in Adorno’s

The whole futile body was suffused by transparency. Little by

In 1965 Theodor W. Adorno and Arnold Gehlen held a debate on German

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Adorno and Gehlen did diverge, however, on the anthropological basis of

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4. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 169.

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nostic for social processes of dehumanization. Yet Adorno’s complex efforts to

12. Breuer, “Adorno’s Anthropology,” 15.

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terminological confusion.16 Attributing this confusion to the reception of

Positions on Philosophical Anthropology

16. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 37–46.

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ophers experienced what Herbert Schnädelbach termed an “identity-crisis” in

21. Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 224.

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26. Heidegger, Being and Time, 74–75.

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ensemble of the social relations.” 34 As Martin Jay demonstrates, ﬁgures includ-

34. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 145.

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historical changeability are entirely sociohistorically mediated. As he articu-

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Human, All Too Human: Adorno’s Negative-Dialectical Anthropology

45. Rose, Melancholy Science, 58.

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matic and utopian identity. In describing nonidentity as the “secret telos of

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49. Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, 58.

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The Human Is What It Is Not

51. Tomba, “Adorno’s Account,” 35.

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in itself, rather than a means of self-preservation, whose “idea of true univer-

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56. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 389.

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59. Honneth, “Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life,” 56.

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Philosophical Anthropology Migrates into Art

60. Honneth et al., Reiﬁcation, 45–46, 57, 62–63.

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tent in art. Because artworks communicate through nonconceptual expression,

63. Hulatt, “Reason, Mimesis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno,” 137–38.

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dialectic intensiﬁes, reﬂected in avant-gardist efforts to negate art’s separation

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idiosyncrasy lives from collective forces of which it is unconscious” (AT, 56). It

65. Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” 218.

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67. Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” 215.

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history within the present. As established in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”

68. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 47.

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A Corrective to Philosophical Anthropology?

73. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, quoted in Adorno, “Schubert,” 7, 7n6.

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