Post‐aesthetic ethics: a critical discussion of Theodor Adorno's theory of artistic non‐identity

Abstract

Thought in the area of post‐Kantian ethics has largely concentrated upon moves within poststructuralism to break with the subject of consciousness by recourse to an arbitrary flux of perspectival fragments of knowledge. Against these relativising tendencies stand the responses of Theodor Adorno and Jacques Lacan to this crisis in ethical thought. Both theorists make claims for a new 'categorical imperative' based upon a deconstructive critique of the transcendental subject which, nevertheless, insists upon the preservation of an alternative notion of subjectivity grounded in genuine individual experience. For Adorno, Auschwitz issues in the demand for a morality in which reason is mediated by the somatic experience of suffering. For Lacan, universal morality must be grounded in the reconfiguration of desire which instantiates a mediating split in subjective judgement. Michelle Holmes's aim is to lay groundwork for a dialogue between the ethics of Adorno, formulated through his aesthetic theory, and Lacan, formulated through his theories of desire. While Adorno's socio‐historical critiques of artistic and cultural production within modern capitalism and Lacan's psychoanalytic critiques of subjectivity may appear to place them within opposing fields of inquiry, it is her contention that this apparent incompatibility is reflective of a wider split within the humanities and social sciences which obscures the mutuality of their interests.