#red kant

[stones-ready]

As Adorno argued, in Kant’s philosophy the non-identical and the identical vie with each other. Insofar as the empirical subject that does the sensing of appearances in time and space is subordinate to replicating the transcendental subject that guarantees universality and necessity, Kant’s philosophy is based on an identity philosophy. This, as we have seen, involves the empirical subject internalizing the rules of the system and amplifying to a fantasy degree their own agency within that system (of exchange) which fundamentally condemns them to reproducing their own subordination. This is one of the secret meaning of Kant’s tautological philosophical structure, for capital of course, with its abstract demand for accumulation, is one giant tautology, as Marx’s formula for the circulation of capital (M-C-M* , money-commodity-more moenty) demonstrates. Kant wants to account for how new knowledge can be produced, but he does so within the horizon of capital. Capitalism, as I have suggested elsewhere, creates subjectless subjects, that is subjects who in a doomed attempt to win back the very agency they have given up internalize the objectifying logic of the social relationships that foreclose a priori on their activity according to the imperatives of capital. Its emblematic image is the subject in the marketplace, carrying, as Marx puts it, their social relationship in their pocket, in the form of money, which gives them an agency completely on the terms that ensure their subordination to the system that hollows out any more authentic (collective) agency.

Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique

[stones-ready]

The conceptual-perceptual synthesis of experience under conceptuality denotes for Adorno not objective knowledge as it did for Kant, but the exercise of power and domination. However, Adorno rejects entirely philosophies such as Bergson, a “hater of the rigid general concept” who collapsed into a “cult of irrational immediacy”. Our conceptual life cannot be cast off anymore than our social and mediated relations can. For concepts are the accumulated heritage of our social relations and are immense resources which we cannot do without. But what also accumulates inside those concepts is the coercive history of our social relationships, which under capitalism is concealed by the apparent identity between concept and the thing or abstract referent. The task for Adorno is to give the concept a “turn towards non-identity” and this is the “hinge of negative dialectics”. As Adorno argues: Insight into the constitutive character of the non conceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection. Adorno’s mode of reflection, negative dialectics, becomes a liberating critical practice unleashed against capitalist conceptuality.

Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique