AEROSOLES PARA EL DEPÓSITO PULMONAR DE GENES

As one of the necessary readings in this context I offer here a ‘post- middle passage’ polemical re-examination, as it were, of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.3 _{I want to engage Adorno/}

Horkheimer’s stringent refusal to look at slavery and colonialism—a refusal which is smoothly but strangely embedded in their radical critique of modernity. Adorno/Horkheimers’ focus is on the European modern subject: their post-Hegelian articulation is a recapitulation of the paradigmatic split between, on the one hand, the active and knowing

3 _{Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklaerung (Frankfurt:}

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human subject of history and, on the other, passive beings clearly distinct from that subject—who figure in the Dialectic as creatures who are able to “give themselves to” life.4 _{The authors position those beings within a}

costly logic of teleological development in favor of aggressive instrumental reason, on a scale of before and after—even though for the

Dialectic, of course, both stages of development have been present in the

world at the same time. The text keeps returning to this radical rejection of instrumental reason as a logic of self-extermination of the human subject without, however, acknowledging the divisive and violent historical separation of the modern orbit in its subjects and un-subjects—or abjects, as it were. It refuses to see that those creatures —who in the Enlightenment’s logic irrationally surrender to life—by no means predate the modern subject but share the subject’s modern orbit in a position of oppressed and abjected by this very subject.

Of course, the raison d’etre of the Dialectic is its epistemological and ethical distance from the Enlightenment as object of their critique. My point here, though, is to argue that the Dialectic for all its skepticism is unable to discern the Enlightenment’s inherent racism. This is present in its prerogative to point to a division between history and prehistory, or between history and outside-history which, even in the Dialectic, figures as a euphemistic and blind abstractum. Thus, the Dialectic’s anthropological drive hides the structural split of colonized people—who lived in the same time-space continuum of modern subjectivity—from any access to enlightened rationality. Instead, it dwells on what it sees as an inner- European conflict between the “light” and dark” sides of Enlightenment’s subject itself, between instrumental reason and an anarchic natural desire for life, which Adorno and Horkheimer, following Freud, want to rescue. By way of a reversed Hegelian logic, the alleged absence of this paradigmatic conflict in the space of the so-called “primitive”—die

Wilden—precisely proves the lack of historicity, which in turn may only

be guaranteed by the autonomous Western subject. This leaves neither an agent nor an addressee among “the primitives” for enlightened human dialogue. The Dialectic, in its abstraction of “natural existence” and its refusal to take modernity’s colonial subjection into account, remains bounded by this logic.

By taking recourse to a mythical perennial humanist contrast between “the human” and “nature”—which is being retold paradigmatically as the

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story of Odysseus’ conquests—the Dialectic implies an essence of modernity that stands in stark contrast to its actual history; the “essence” of the Enlightenment entailed the categorization of a large part of the world’s population as “nature”, as an aggressively sought foundation of the Western human subject’s free self. The Dialectics does not mourn the destruction and annihilation of those “primitives” in the new worlds— which modernity subjected to itself—but contemplates the very Western self subjected to its own instrumental reason. This melancholia reigns the text. Within the mental configurations of the Dialectic, early modernity’s brute optimism—due to the self-possession that the white subject enjoys in Locke’s thinking—appears as Zurichtung, as a negative domestication that keeps being haunted by the effects of its violent suppressions. It is the subject’s obsessive but disparately impossible fiction of self-possession, then, which culminates in fascist annihilation.

My reading wants to foreground the Dialectic’s solipsistic blind spot that lies in its missing recognition of the fact—hidden under Adorno/ Horkheimers’ metaphorical abstractions—that the white subject accumulated cultural, political and economic gains in the process of this however problematic self-domestication, based as it was on the enslavement and colonization of other human beings. This recognition would entail a surrender of their insistence on fascism as the climax of white modernity’s auto-aggression, which finally drowned Europe in an “ocean of violence”, as Adorno and Horkheimer call it. They ignore the foundational “ocean of violence”—the Middle Passage here haunting their text rather uncannily— in which the Western subject chose to drown African people. Modernity’s entirely rational violence of colonialism and slavery—the annihilation of so many of the world’s “possibilities” as Aimé Cesaire called it—only surfaces in the Dialectic as a trace of “the primitives”, which the text does not want to follow lest it might disturb their theses of the Shoah as the “long-in-coming” collapse of civilization.

Why the Dialectic would ground their argument in Odysseus’ myth and read, by way of that allegory, the modern subject as gradually overwhelmed by instrumental reason, instead of addressing colonial history as a foundational moment of modernity? That shift in attention might have clearly shown that, always already, and in a manner constitutive of the Western subject’s luxury of self-recognition and self- domestication, “the instrumental ratio has come fully into its rights”, as the authors phrase it, with slavery and not only in the middle of the Twentieth century with fascism. To forego this context leads the Dialectic

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to rob colonial subjection and abjection of their power to speak of the white subject’s split self from the perspective of its outside.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, the Odyssean genealogy of the Enlightenment becomes an object of rhetorical address by which the subjected self figures as the ground of melancholia; the loss of “life” and “nature” are its own loss, and are read as a violation done by the subject to itself—which has to result in fascism—because the subject cannot successfully dominate the monsters which haunt its reason, because the subject, as it were, can never own itself. Horkheimer/Adorno do not acknowledge that modernity’s split happened in history and that Enlightenment’s abject happened to be world and people which, even in the Dialectic, only appear summarily as “primitives”—a rhetorical reminiscence in passing. However, the text cannot evacuate the absent presence of colonialism and slavery. The passages where the Odyssey becomes the story of Robinson contain, even if just a nod, a reference to one of the foundational narratives of early colonial modernity and, within that nod, the trace of a non-mythological genealogy of the white Western subject. Only in one rather short sentence does this aggressive genealogy surface in the Dialectic; this sentence rather deconstructs the text’s narration in that it ties the oppressive, self-perpetuating logic of the Enlightenment self to slavery. There is an element of radical excess in that sentence, an invitation to rethink the Dialectic’s own argument from a different perspective—which Horkheimer and Adorno immediately refuse. This is the stunning passage in question: “The bourgeois, in its successive incarnations of slave holder, entrepreneur and administrator is the logical subject of Enlightenment.”5 _{Thus, Horkheimer and Adorno}

obviously knew of modernity’s foundations; this intervention of historical contingency into their mythologically grounded narrative might have become the germinal moment for an entirely different genealogy of the subject—the Dialectic, though, after this fleeting evocation, makes a decision to radically abandon the subject’s colonial past. Today’s critical re-writing of the European project needs to reckon with this legacy.

With this rather compressed and condensed reading, I want to make the point that even a radically critical self-reflection of modernity, however much shaken to its foundations by fascism, chose to ignore the split subtext of its own history—the access to which was laid open most obviously in the moment of the Haitian revolution. The absence of this

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moment in Western white self-critical reflection still dominates even postmodern critique, and binds white Western thinking to taking recourse to an innocent modernity, as it were. My reflection, then, might best be described as an archeological project: to protocol—Spiller’s term— modernity’s practices of disappearing its embeddedness in enslavement, which is meant to shift the critical focus very deliberately. In the following I am suggesting what I consider the necessary key moments of this re-focusing.

The Middle Passage as a Point of Departure