The end (and persistence) of subjectivity: Lukács with Adorno, Adorno with Lukács

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper revisits Lukács’s and Adorno’s analyses of reification to articulate a diagnosis that accounts both for its tendencies towards authoritarianism and its emancipatory potentials. Despite their divergences, Lukács’s conception of the proletariat as ‘identical subject-object of history’ and Adorno’s diagnosis of ‘the end of psychology’ in the authoritarian masses seem to converge on a similar outcome. Through opposite paths, they both culminate in the elimination of the subject-object distinction, leading the critique of reification to a political impasse. However, this alternative is rooted in partial interpretations of Lukács’s and Adorno’s arguments. As I contend, one can reconstruct Lukács’s analysis in a way that portrays emancipatory subjectivity not as hostile to otherness but as driven by the material limits of reification, or what Adorno termed the non-identical. Correspondingly, in light of Lukács, Adorno’s diagnosis can be read in a way that the end of psychology, far from negating the possibility of emancipation, serves as its driving force.