“Half Necessity, Half Accident”: Reading the Abolition of Good Health through Adorno's Concept of “Natural History”

Abstract

The transformation of medication into a proper “market” takes the shape of what has been called “the abolition of good health.” In the interest of branding products and expanding sales, drug companies now are actively engaged in redefining sickness and health. The surprising by-product of this redefinition has been a vigorous discourse on personhood and human nature, in which the drug companies play the role of the critical theorist (redefining as illnesses conditions hitherto thought “natural”), whereas the industry's critics have taken an essentialist and at times even conservative tack (insisting that some diseases have “meaning” and should not be done away with). This paper proposes to think through this puzzling reversal using Theodor W. Adorno's concepts of “natural history,” the “abolition of death,” and the “jargon of authenticity.” It will hope to show that the “abolition” offered by the drug companies is in fact at base a reactionary topos, promising surcease from the effects of a “false praxis” rather than addressing that praxis itself—and, in fact, foreclosing any cognition of the falsity of that praxis.