Adorno Faces Feminism: Interiority, or Modern Power and the Liquidation of Private Life

Abstract

Theodor Adorno is not the theorist who first comes to mind as offering analytical principles for developing a theory of the public sphere. Perhaps this is mostly because Habermas built his own theory of the public sphere as noninstrumentalizable in opposition to a Horkheimer and Adorno whom he characterized as steeped in instrumental reason,1 or because Adorno’s philosophy predominantly worries over the disappearance of the individual. The problem could also be that Adorno is understood to be the theorist who would update Marxism for a post—World War II perspective, and Marxist theory itself—as it relegates the state to the dustbin of history—is famously insufficient for thinking about the political, or that Adorno was alleged by his biographers (including some of his own students) to have been opposed to the student movement of the sixties,2 or that Adorno was hesitant—even discouraging or pessimistic—about advocating praxis.3 In addition, Theodor Adorno’s work has not attracted a slew of feminist interest. The reasons for this are multiple as well, and I touch on them below, but they mostly concern the trajectory of subjectivity that Adorno attributes to the bourgeois age as it dovetails with the patriarchal domination of nature.