In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Kyle Baasch about his article “Critical Theory in the Flesh: Adorno and Foucault in San Francisco,” from Telos 196 (Fall 2021). An excerpt of the article appears below. In their conversation they discussed how Foucault’s aversion to Marxism relates to his notion of the individual as endlessly transfiguring itself through acts of creative self-invention; how Adorno interprets the freedom of the subject within the context of consumer culture and exchange society; the influence of Adorno’s experience as a heartbroken lover on his conception of happiness, particularly in Minima Moralia; how Adorno’s notion of happiness relates to the conception of harmony that Foucault criticizes; and the extent to which the two thinkers can be put into conversation. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 196 are available for purchase in our online store.
Critical Theory in the Flesh: Adorno and Foucault in San Francisco
Kyle Baasch
The objective dissolution of society is subjectively manifested in the weakening of the erotic urge, no longer able to bind together self-preserving monads, just as if mankind were imitating the physicist’s theory of the exploding universe.
—Theodor Adorno, “Ne cherchez plus mon coeur”[1]
“When one visits a bookshop in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville notes, “and looks at the American books ranged upon the shelves, the number of books seems very great while the number of well-known authors seems, on the contrary, to be very small.”[2] The irrepressible plaint of this emissary of European intellectual culture periodically bubbles to the surface: in America, “the human mind, constantly diverted from the pleasures of imaginative thought and the labors of the intellect, is swayed only by the pursuit of wealth.”[3] American literary preferences are a symptom of this enterprising character. “The Americans have no philosophic school of their own and are very little bothered by all those which divide Europe; they hardly know their names.”[4]
It is not very difficult to imagine Tocqueville’s experience ambling through a bookstore in Jacksonian America, for still today, outside of the few largest American cities, one struggles to hunt down a Penguin edition of The Symposium amid the rows of commercial literature once dismissed by Tocqueville as so many “dim productions of the human mind.”[5] “Nowadays,” Tocqueville proposes in 1840, “we need to force the human mind to study theory.”[6] Something like this has certainly happened; it is increasingly common that Americans are familiar with the name of at least one European philosopher—Michel Foucault—as well as the name of a European philosophical school that they believe to be associated with him: Critical Theory. This must explain why, when visiting a boutique bookshop in Williamsburg or Berkeley, it is often the case that one does not encounter a philosophy section but rather finds a Critical Theory section in its stead, on whose shelves one seldom fails to encounter the entirety of Foucault’s writings. To be sure, Foucault differentiates his own work from the philosophical tradition, represented by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that would have been understood during Foucault’s lifetime as “Critical Theory,” and there is nothing immediately troubling about this misattribution; Foucault’s writings deserve to be read regardless of the shelf on which they are found. But how is it that an intellectual figure with virtually nothing critical to say about the United States has become synonymous some decades later in that same country with social critique? After all, it was in America, according to Didier Eribon, that Foucault “finally achieved reconciliation with himself,” for there he was “happy in the pleasures of the flesh.”[7] Indeed, the central concern that animates Foucault’s philosophy prior to his arrival in California in 1975—the construction of the individual by modern disciplinary technologies of normalization—is not a lived reality in the culture to which he blissfully surrenders himself in San Francisco.
In recent years, critics of Foucault have lamented the fact that Americans—especially American critics of contemporary economic policy who look to Foucault’s 1979 lectures on neoliberalism as a source of inspiration—express “a certain indifference to the historical context that shaped his work.”[8] These detractors draw attention to Foucault’s enthusiasm for the liberal economic discourses that had become hegemonic in the United States by the late 1970s and which were contemporaneously becoming viable as a political avenue for disgruntled ex-socialists in France as well. But perhaps something more insidious than indifference is at stake. Perhaps self-consciously critical Americans do not know what to do with Foucault’s economic allegiances because they cohere so seamlessly with every other aspect of his social theory. An adequate understanding of the spirit of Foucault’s model of social critique requires an awareness of the complex manner in which nominalist philosophical presuppositions, anti-statist political inclinations, and non-normative sexual fantasies ally with American capitalist consumer culture; only this can explain how San Francisco’s underground culture of performative consumerism and nonbinding sexual interactions in the 1970s typifies Foucault’s image of an intransigently critical life.
It is then worth differentiating those philosophical schools that, in Tocqueville’s words, “divide Europe,” and that bleed into one another on the shelves of trendy American bookstores, for the most provocative insights of Critical Theory properly so-called are also shaped by the experiences of its authors in the United States but move in a transversal direction vis-à-vis the work of Foucault. Plainly, Adorno and Foucault witnessed the same thing from contrasting perspectives. Whereas Foucault, a critic of the bureaucratic rationalization of the modern world, was unsurprisingly attracted to the libertarian cultural atmosphere that he witnessed in California, the whole of Adorno’s intellectual comportment is a response to the cultural and intellectual decay that accompanies the marketization of society; Adorno is a critic of precisely the de-individualizing American consumer culture that Foucault found so irresistible some thirty years later. These conflicting reactions to American culture are associated with heterogeneous models of social critique. Foucault’s philosophy, an “enterprise of desubjectivation,” exhorts the reader to take a step back from the visceral psychodrama of lived experience and to treat the body as an impersonal canvas for the experimental production of pleasure; it is a critical theory of the flesh.[9] Adorno’s philosophy, by contrast, is Critical Theory in the flesh.[10] Adorno’s critique of the wrong life emerges out of the corporeal sensations that have no philosophical significance for Foucault: the burning passion that courses through the veins and the harrowing pangs of a fragile heart. These are the moments in which the intrinsically contradictory nature of the social whole confronts the individual as an unbearable problem. Remarkably, the most precise articulation of this connection between the universal and the individual, between the oppressive structure of modern society and the subtle sensitivity of the flesh, occurs in Adorno’s erotic reflections—on sexual experiences in San Francisco.
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1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), p. 168. Translation amended.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 543.
3. Ibid., p. 524.
4. Ibid., p. 493.
5. Ibid., p. 544.
6. Ibid., p. 535.
7. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), p. 316. This claim is made with varying degrees of intensity by all of Foucault’s biographers.
8. Michael C. Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism,” in Foucault and Neoliberalism, ed. Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), pp. 25–26. See also the other contributions to Foucault and Neoliberalism, as well as Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2016).
9. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 31. Translation amended.
10. The specifically Christian concept of “the flesh” (das Fleisch/la chair) occupies a significant position in the later writings of both Adorno and Foucault, but this is beyond the scope of this paper; I invoke the term in its more casual, everyday sense.
