On the Secret of Justice

Adorno on Becoming Human

The secret of justice in love is the annulment of all rights, to which love mutely points

Adorno, Minima Moralia

The way in which we respond to injury may offer a chance to elaborate an ethical perspective and even become human. Adorno takes up this point in various ways. He seems to be talking about private ethics in the following quotation from Minima Moralia, but there are wider political implications to what he writes.

Someone who has been offended, slighted, has an illumination as vivid as when agonizing pain lights up one’s own body. He becomes aware that in the innermost blindness of love, that must remain oblivious, lives a demand not to be blind. He was wronged; from this he deduced a claim to right and must at the same time reject it, for what he desires can only be given in freedom. In such distress he who is rebuffed becomes human.

A claim that “in such distress he who is rebuffed becomes human” might seem to rationalize injury or to praise its virtues. But I think neither Adorno nor Levinas is engaged in such praise. Rather, they accept the inevitability of injury, along with a moral predicament that emerges as a consequence of being injured. Over and against those who would claim that ethics is the prerogative of the powerful, one might counter that only from the view point of the injured can a certain conception of responsibility be understood. What will be the response to injury, and will we, in the language of a cautionary political slogan on the left, “become the evil that we deplore”? If as Adorno remarks, “in the innermost blindness of love… lives a demand not to be blinded”, then the blindness of love would seem to correspond to the primacy of enthrallment, to the fact that from the outset we are implicated in a mode of relationality that cannot be fully thematized, subject to reflection, and cognitively known. This mode of relationality, definitionally blind, makes us vulnerable to betrayal and to error. We could wish ourselves to be wholly perspicacious beings. But that would be to disavow infancy, dependency, relationality, primary impressionability; it would be the wish to eradicate all the active and structuring traces of our psychological formations and to dwell in the pretense of being fully knowing, self possessed adults. Indeed, we would be the kind of beings who, by definition could not be in love, blind and blinded, vulnerable to devastation, subject to enthrallment. If we were to respond to injury by claiming we have a “right” not to be so treated, we would be treating the other’s love as an entitlement rather than a gift. Being a gift, it carries the insuperable quality of gratuitousness. It is in Adorno’s language, a gift given from freedom.

But is the alternative contract or freedom? Or, just as no contract can guarantee us love, might it be equally mistaken to conclude that love is therefore given in a radically free sense? Indeed, the unfreedom at the heart of love does not belong to contract. After all the love of the other will, of necessity, be blind even in its knowingness. That we compelled in love means that we are, in part, unknowing about why we love as we do and why we invariably exercise bad judgment. Very often what we call “love” involves being compelled by our own opacity, our own places of unknowingness, and, indeed, our own injury (which is why, Melanie Klein will insist that fantasies of reparation structure love). In the passage above, however, Adorno traces a movement in which one is compelled to claim a right not to be rebuffed and resists making the claim at the same time. It is possible to read this as a paralyzing contradiction, but I think that this is not what he means to imply. Rather, it is a model of ethical capaciousness, which understands the pull of the claim and resists that pull at the same time, providing a certain ambivalent gesture as the action of ethics itself. One seeks to preserve oneself against the injuriousness of the other, but if one were successful at walling oneself off from injury, one would become inhuman. In this sense we make a mistake when we take “self-preservation” to be the essence of the human, unless we accordingly claim that the “inhuman” is constitutive of the human. One of the problems with insisting on self-preservation as the basis of ethics is that it becomes a pure ethics of the self, if not a form of moral narcissism. Persisting in the vacillation between wanting to claim a right against such injury and resisting that claim, one “becomes human”.

As you can see, “becoming human” is no simple task, and it is not always clear when or if one arrives. To be human seems to mean being in a predicament that one cannot solve. In fact, Adorno makes clear that he cannot define the human for us. If the human is anything, it seems to be a double movement, one in which we assert moral norms at the same time as we question the authority by which we make that assertion. In his final lecture on morality, Adorno writes, “ We need to hold fast to moral norms, to self-criticism, to the question of right and wrong and at the same time to a sense of fallibility fehlbarkeit of the authority that has the confidence to undertake such self-criticism” (PMP 169). Immediately after, he states that, although he seems to be talking about morality, he is also articulating the meaning of the human:

            “I am reluctant to use the term “humanity” at this juncture since it is one of the expressions that reify and hence falsify crucial issues merely by speaking of them When the founders of the Humanist Union invited me to become a member, I replied that ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself ‘humanist.’” So if I am to use the term here then an indispensable part of a humanity that reflects on itself is that we should not allow ourselves to be diverted. There has to be an element of unswerving persistence unbeirrbarkeit, of holding fast to what we think we have learnt from experience, and on the other hand, we need an element not just of self-criticism, but of criticism of that unyielding, inexorable something (an jenem Starren und Unerbitttlichen), that sets itself up in us. In other words, what is needed above all is that consciousness of our own fallibility.”

Elena:

I’d like to look at this text from Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. To look at this particular text not at J. Butler or Adorno, both of whom I do not have enough knowledge of to work with. I have also not read the whole book yet so when I do a lot of things may become clearer about the “positions” taken here. 

1. The secret of justice in love is the annulment of all rights, to which love mutely points.

One of the difficulties in a statement like this one is that it is talking about different spheres and different moments within processes of human life but apparently mixing them together making them difficult to understand.

In a beautiful statement like the one above are we talking about the justice in love in a marriage or in society? And are we talking about rights within the marriage or within society? Or are we talking about love beyond rights? Or rights beyond love?

Are we talking about the individual’s freedom to love and not be constrained by laws or are we talking about LOVE and the possibility of COMPASSION beyond rights?

Could we talk about a personal sphere of laws? That is, conditions under which any individual human being responds to and in violating, would tend to destroy themselves? Laws that any state would need to protect to guarantee an individual’s life?

Are not all individual human beings under particular conditions to maintain their own life? If any such individual denied to take food, water or move he should shortly die.

This raises various questions. One, that each human being independent of what ever society he happens to belong to, is under certain laws to be able to remain alive. The right to live is probably the one right that has been agreed to in the majority of constitutions.

If we were to be truly human about this right, wouldn’t we have to agree that if a human being needs to eat, drink and move to remain alive, each should have a right to food? He should have a right to receive food if he doesn’t have the land to produce it and other’s have claimed ownership on the piece of land that would have had to be allotted to him to preserve his right to live and therefore, to eat? How have we conditioned the structures of society in such a way that people can only submit to others people’s conditions to be able to eat?

The danger of language is that almost any statement can be used for or against any human being at any point in time as long as we continue to view an individual or a group of individuals as having more objective human rights than other individuals and as long as we don’t agree on the objectivity of particular human rights and the criminality of any person, state, or nation that acts against them. To become truly human we cannot deny other people’s humanity. To stop the inhumanity, we need to act humanly in every sphere of our lives.

That of course means stopping wars for what is a war but the pretense of a few that they have the power to impose themselves on other people’s will? That if other people do not comply, they will be exterminated? And is this not the actual question in all contracts? That if people don’t comply they will be sacked or banned?

Is the issue in the social contract not the fact that if people are not willing to be submitted they will be condemned to isolation by not giving them jobs because the way things have been set up and the status quo today works, is such that without submission, people are left out of the System? The mechanisms in the developed and undeveloped nations are different and I would question if they are any more human in the developed nations than in the underdeveloped ones because what has happened in the developed nations is that the power of a few over the human rights of the many has so overpowered their life that the state has had to become a welfare state to keep its members alive because the status quo itself is such that people do not have a right to work and make their own living but a right to submit and accept the status of beggars in their own house.

What has happened in these developed nations is that the few “inalienable rights” have been granted to the privileged and these have used the state not to guarantee the rights of all people but to submit all people to their rights. The State should never allow anyone to trespass anyone else’s human rights. If the state never allows for human rights to be trespassed, all other “rights” cannot be threatening to any human being. The State is responsible for guaranteeing the laws and in nations in which the laws have been so manipulated to act against the people, it is not surprising that the people are running towards cults to look for protection only to find that Cults are the epitomy of the same abuse, not only on their physical capacity to work but on their spiritual freedom to be. It is the possibility of physical survival what is threatened by the social status quo but it is the possibility of human survival what is threatened in cults and both are working parallel to each other in present society. The ingredients of today’s cults were taken from the developed nation’s status quo.

When we look at a statement like this one:

“The secret of justice in love is the annulment of all rights, to which love mutely points”

we must be extremely careful about the context it is talking about and for all I know, J. Butler actually has a similar understanding in the rest of her book that I don’t have access to at the moment.

It is statements like this one what are being used against the masses of people to pretend that they do not counteract the tremendous injustices and absurdities of the present status quo and look for all forms of self-healing to bear the abominable social conditions.

Laws exist to protect the majority from the immorality of the few and when the immoral majority or few take the reigns of the laws and use them to justify each and all their inhumanity, humanity has entered a cancerigenous process that promises inhumanity to reign. Real democracy is NOT the rule of the majority over the few, real democracy is the rule of human laws over ALL and anyone who acts against anyone else’s humanity is a criminal.

Rights can be “annulled” when human love is the law, but promulgating such annullement when inhumanity reigns, is carte blanche for that inhumanity. 
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