The Secret of Justice II Transforming aggression

I've placed the same text below assuming you've already read it but it would be good to read it again before exploring it if it's not too fresh. 

Elena

Another aspect worth exploring about this text is that of what not reacting violently to aggression can CREATE for such acts are truly creative ones.

One way to approach this is by asking questions:

Do you feel the energy that is produced in you when you’re insulted? Ignored?

What would you need to do with that energy to not react equally aggressive?

In willing yourself to stop a negative reaction towards the offender, what processes take place in your inner world?

How would you separate yourself from the I in you that has been offended and that wishes to offend the other person?

Does that energy have consequences both in your inner world and the surrounding world?

Does that energy have a power of its own to lighten up your inner world? What would it show about yourself? Where would it take you were you to hold it and suffer it and not spill it out in an immediate reaction?

Where would it take the person that offended you if you turn the other cheek?

Does his aggression turn back on himself and gives him the experience of shame that will then prompt him to apologize?

Will he or she try to abuse you even more deeply because you didn’t react as violently as he was unconsciously expecting? Consciously expecting?

Will that energy open roads within yourself to remember all the times that you yourself have acted with the same energy against others?

Will reacting with the same aggression simply protect your ego from seeing your own self and justify that you’ve simply been wronged and that you’ll isolate yourself from such individuals and the whole world if necessary?
Where would the understanding that you have yourself acted like that to those who you judge worthy of such offenses and unworthy of your love lead you to?
How do those scenarios lead to greater separation between people?

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.”