Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics “after Auschwitz”

Abstract

The Drowned and the Saved In Negative Dialectics Theodor W. Adorno opens the second section, Medi tations and Metaphysics, with this declaration: A new categorical impera tive has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.1 Although up to this juncture Adorno has offered no concrete policy proposals or action-oriented political recommendations, he has been building a reflective critique of atemporal reason, and hence he has been providing immanently good reasons for us to transform our usual habits of thought and action. The demand to arrange our thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, in this context, therefore already includes a highly elaborated specification of the form of reasoning that Adorno thinks is capable of respond ing to the exigencies of an event like Auschwitz. This specification involves a rearrangement of the relation between universal and particular whereby cer tain objects and events can become orientational for rationality generally; it also involves a contention that, specifically, the sufferings of others are among those particulars that have remained unacknowledged by universalistic rea son and that thus deserve to become orientational for ethical reflection.