movements and linked to the fulfilment of ’68 came to fruition as a
nightmare in the century’s totalitarian regimes. The idea of dialectical
identity, the identity of the real and the rational, is in fact a terrifying
idea that only comes about through the destruction of the life of what
is different, and the annihilation of the pulsating proliferation of sin-
gularities. And in fact Adorno had foreseen this outcome.
In Minima Moralia, Adorno wrote: ‘The whole is the false’ (50), revers-
ing the Hegelian affirmation, but staying within the dialectical sphere
that becomes, in Adorno, the negative dialectic. Hegelian truth is the rela-
tion of the unity between the subject, the motor of the historical process,
and the world that becomes Spirit through historical appropriation and
reveals its ideal being. To remain in the sphere of Hegelian thought, to
the extent that he is concerned with method and style, Adorno recog-
nized that in history there is no overcoming, no conciliation, no totality
to be realized and, we can say, no truth. Historical totality is not, as Hegel
pretends, the wholeness of the true, but the wholeness of the false.
In this way, the problem of the truth is suspended in the anticipa-
tion of an answer that probably is not located inside history. The
finality of realization and of overcoming remains a non-realized
finality; to turn it into the core of human activity means fating it to
interminable torment. Twentieth-century history is, in effect, the reve-
lation of the fact that the tension toward a totality missed its goal, or
achieved it uniquely in the form of totalitarianism.*****Philosophy which, with Hegel, had promised to realize itself and thence
to die missed the moment of its realization. Now we must bring it back
to life, but by asking it another question. Philosophy can no longer
promise its death-realization in a pacified world; instead it must
propose itself as the thinking of singularity in a world in which totality
is definitively and inevitably the negation of the human.
Adorno said, the whole is the false, but his reversal is Hegelian, like any
reversal: the dialectic of the false and the true lingers in the Hegelian con-
ceptual domain, and little by little we need to get out of this sphere.
Reversing a sphere makes no sense since we always find ourselves faced
with the same sphere; the only thing to do with it is to dissolve it, to mol-
ecularize it, to draw from it a proliferation of singular slivers.
Adorno upset the notion of subject to the point of taking it to its far
limit, to the point of abandoning it and of thinking the individual. We
have to go farther and we have to think singularity. This is how weWhy is Anti-Oedipusthe Book of the ’68 Movement? 819780230_221192_09_cha08.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 81