2 - Utopian Memory

Summary

There seems to be a fundamental difference between public apathy toward past communal trauma and being morbidly obsessed with such events. Anyone attempting to come to terms with the incommensurability of representation with regard to trauma has inevitably to address this difference. Ultimately, apathy towards the past provides the motivation for the self-indulgent question of ‘Why bother caring?’ to be posed, while critical distance encourages us to ask ‘What does it really matter?’ The latter is a question Theodor W. Adorno discusses in Negative Dialectics, but contrary to the belief that questions posed in this way are a sign of bourgeois indifference, he points out that this type of question turns one into a spectator and as such it effectively brings to our attention the inhuman aspect of human existence. In what seemingly appears to be a paradoxical proposition, Adorno announces that the inhuman inheres in the human and it is here where negative dialectics begins. That is, he does not just advance the importance of being a spectator for critical selfreflection; rather the point he makes is that the authenticity of thinking comes from thinking against itself.

When Adorno puts forward in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ his now well-cited dictum that to ‘write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ he is not suggesting we give up on culture altogether (although he is certainly suspicious of political art); instead he brings to our attention the problem of re-presenting the wound of traumatic events and the difficulty any concept of the ‘inhuman’ poses for humanism per se.