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First published in Studies in Social and Political Thought 18, 2010.

First published in Studies in Social and Political Thought 18, 2010.

The paper begins by comparing Adorno's and Foucault's accounts of the normalizing practices that socialize individuals, integrating them into Western societies. In this context, I argue that the animus against socialism can be read as an expression of profound anxiety about the existing socialization of reproduction in the West. In fact, Adorno and Foucault contend that really existing socialization has contained our political imagination to the point where even our ideas about alternatives only conjure up more of the same. Yet Adorno and Foucault do outline what radical social change might look like. Since Foucault linked radical change to the development of a specifically socialist art of government, but offered few clues about what this might mean, the paper also explores Adorno's work to put more flesh on the idea of a socialist art of government.

Draws upon a Marxist reading of Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1973), to present a view of Adorno's cognitive utopia that differs from those of J.M. Bernstein & Yvonne Sherratt. Bernstein's, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2001) is reviewed to argue that his reading of Adorno's nonidentity fails to appreciate the speculative moment in Adorno's thinking that is oriented toward possibility. Differences between Bernstein's & Sherratt's arguments are explored, along with the status of the object in Adorno's negative dialectics; the speculative moment that exists in Adorno's description of unrealized possibilities that exist in damaged life; the use of concepts to transcend concepts; & "naming" as the "identificatory" dimension of nonidentity thinking. The promise of something other than what now exists is both "wrested from reality by negating it" & "the only form in which truth appears." This explains Adorno's claim that the only philosophy that could be practiced in the face of despair is "the attempt to contemplate all things as thy would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.". Adapted from the source document.

Examines Jurgen Habermas's distinction between system & lifeworld, which he bases on Durkheim's differentiation between system integration & social integration. With his system/lifeworld dichotomy, Habermas also suggests an antinomy between the sphere of unfreedom (ie, necessity) & that of freedom, between the sphere of labor & that of leisure, & between the sphere of manual work & that of mental work. It is contended that Habermas's differentiation between system & lifeworld is founded upon binarisms, such as those enumerated above, binarisms that ought to be deconstructed. Once deconstructed, Habermas's arguments about the intrinsic constraints to reification can be challenged as well. References. K. Coddon