The first part of this thesis contained a critical review of the most well-known mainstream and critical strands of international ethics. I now move on to deepen and consolidate that critique by exposing its roots in an alternative tradition of thought, the tradition of early Frankfurt School critical theory, and pointing towards a more appropriate, positive response to suffering.
I begin with Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment, which informs much of what I had to say in Part One about the tendency towards abstract universalism and instrumentalism in liberal, and to a lesser extent, Habermasian thought. Adorno’s thought contains some echoes of the
poststructural emphasis on the importance of concrete particularity, the profoundly personal nature of lived suffering. A fuller appreciation of suffering serves as an important corrective to tendencies towards universality, abstraction, instrumentalism and an over-developed sense of progress that characterise liberal and Habermasian thought. The reductive instrumental
rationality of Enlightenment thought delivers repression in the name of freedom and shuts down social critique. Suffering plays a central role in Adorno’s challenge to this tradition. It grounds a negative dialectics, which seeks to cling to the particular and the non-identical in an attempt to challenge the instrumentalism of Enlightenment thought. However, Adorno also refuses to succumb to the solipsist tendencies of poststructuralism whose fragmentary approach rejects broader social categories. Instead, he asserts the importance of mediation between subject and object, thought and being, particular and universal. The purpose of negative dialectics is to
98 preserve space, within the totalising impact of Enlightenment thought, for a metaphysics of hope, a conception of promise that can operate as a counter to bleak reality in order to guard against despair and inaction.
Adorno, famously, did little to flesh out what this kind of hope or promise might look like, though some fragmentary ideas can be gleaned from his writings on art and education. However, other writers have drawn on Adorno’s legacy in ways that move his approach forward. In
Chapter Four I consider one of these thinkers, Gillian Rose. There are strong overlaps between Rose and Adorno’s work. As in Adorno’s writings, Rose’s thought is rooted in an acute
awareness of suffering and a refusal to take refuge in simple answers and generalities (as in modern ethics) or in resignation and exclusive particularity (as in much poststructural thought). However, in contrast with Adorno’s work, Rose’s main adversary is postmodernism. Rose is annihilatingly critical of postmodern thought, arguing that its refusal to negotiate binary oppositions is an avoidance of the work of social theory, which requires a constant struggle to know and understand. Rose points to the (historical and existential) trauma inherent in so much of human experience, and argues that unless these traumas are worked through, they can exert profound societal damage. For Rose, the process of working through involves inaugurated mourning, which entails a struggle to know and to be known. She juxtaposes this concept of mourning against the postmodern tendency to take refuge in melancholy, refusing to work through trauma for fear of domesticating the real. Rose maintains that endless melancholy depoliticises. Traumatic experiences must be worked through in order to facilitate constructive political engagement, so as to avoid the political withdrawal or search for revenge that is so often
99 the legacy of trauma. The relationship between particular suffering and the broader political and social order, then, is a dialectical one.
In chapter five, I support Rose and Adorno’s arguments, and draw out some of their potential implications for dealing with trauma and violence, through an engagement with literature on the concrete historical experience of trauma and world politics. I argue that the disasters of
modernity—political violence, extreme poverty, displacement—engender unspeakable suffering for countless millions and that any analysis of global society cannot ignore the category of trauma. A more nuanced understanding of trauma enhances our understanding of world politics, pointing to the contingency of social arrangements and to the dangers of unhealed trauma, and also challenges us to think and respond differently to suffering. I examine two broad responses to trauma: acting out and working through. Individuals and communities who act out
repetitively relive their traumatic experience(s), trapped in the past that so deeply wounded them. In order to make sense of their experience, they take refuge in meaning-making narratives,
painting the world in simplistic terms of good and evil and, at times, finding purpose in a search for revenge. Acting out in response to trauma is euporia, the easy way. Working through, in contrast, requires struggle: unflinching, painful reflection on the particular traumatic experience and on the wider implications for society. It involves reflection on the particular to illuminate broader social processes and gradually enables constructive political reengagement. In Rose’s terms, working through involves knowing and being known; the being known requires that narratives of suffering are attended to and learned from—a defiant rejection of the solipsistic individualism of so much of modern society.
100 Overall, I point to a different way of thinking about violence and suffering. I advocate a return to critical theory in the tradition of the early Frankfurt School: social theory that looks beyond immediate problems to the historical, social, and psychological processes that preceded them and seeks a deeper, critical understanding before rushing forward with quick-fix solutions. I
advocate the creation of public fora for critical self-reflection and discussion, but of a different kind to that advocated by Habermasian theorists. Rather than adversarial debate with rational consensus (Habermas) or understanding (Benhabib) as its goal, I argue that what is needed is an opportunity for stories to be told and, above all, listened to, so that they might challenge those closely-held beliefs and practices that damage ourselves and others. Such an approach does not reject the notion of moral progress, but perceives its fragility and maintains that a notion of progress is more useful as a counter to distressing reality than as the perceived inevitable result of following good guidelines for living. Nor does it reject reason, although it refuses to accept an instrumental rationality that seeks measurable, generalisable solutions to easily-identifiable problems. Theory in this tradition has a speculative Hegelian core: it takes concepts such as universality and particularity, public and private, identity and difference, and attempts to hold them together in thought and practice, seeking to understand how they are mediated by one another. Where Habermasian critical theory effectively reinforces the traditional hierarchies of binary opposites in Western metaphysics, privileging abstract universals over particulars, and poststructuralism privileges the previously neglected side of the pair, emphasising the particular over the universal, a speculative critical theory insists upon the negotiation of both, interrogating the ways in which they illuminate each other whilst also acknowledging their refusal of the other. Above all, it does not take refuge in ‘the cowardice of abstract thought’ that ‘shuns the sensuous
101 present in monkish fashion’,1 but attends to suffering, creating space for giving voice to bodily and psychological pain.2 This attention to concrete particularity helps us to understand more general societal processes in turn, providing a comprehensive analysis of society and gesturing to possibilities for its transformation.
1 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion III, trans. E. B. Spiers and J. B. Sanderson (New York: The Humanities Press, 1962), p. 101, cited in Adorno, ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, p. 78. 2 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 203.
102