arrive at the recognition of Deleuze and Guattari and of Anti-Oedipusas
the book that interprets the ’68 movement.
Note well that this book does not interpret the consciousness that
’68 had of itself, which was entirely internal to the Hegelian field. In
fact, it interprets this dynamic that carried ’68 beyond its conscious-
ness, leading ’68 to cause the explosion of the sphere in which it had
developed and had been conceived and represented. Anti-Oedipus
works out this movement by abandoning the totalitarian frame within
which the twentieth-century social consciousness was determined.’68 as refrain (ritornello)Adorno had already indicated the collapse of the Hegelian edifice, adopt-
ing the perspective of the individual particularity, and not of the becom-
ing of subjectivity.
‘History does nothing, does not “possess vast wealth”, does not “fight
battles”! It is a man, rather, the real, living man who does all that, who
does possess and fight,’ wrote Marx and Engels in The Holy Family(cited
by Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 304). And Adorno wrote: ‘To this day his-
tory lacks any total subject, however construable. Its substrate is the func-
tional connection of real individual subjects’ (Negative Dialectics, 304).
Dialectical thought instead attributes to history a demiurgic power,
independent of real subjects, almost as if the dialectic were the truth of
these real processes, stripped of its elements of concrete individuality.
Dialectical thought projects the shadow of history onto the real facts of
the human mind, onto the perception of time, onto activity, onto the
building of relations.History is equipped with those qualities because society’s law of
motion has for thousands of years been abstracting from its individual
subjects, degrading them to mere executors, mere partners in social
wealth and social struggle. The debasement was as real as the fact that
on the other hand there would be nothing without individuals and
their spontaneities. (Negative Dialectics, 304)Adorno says here that historical totality is not the Hegelian revela-
tion of truth, but instead the affirmation of an absolute lie.No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but
there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It
ends in the total menace which organized mankind posed to orga-82 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_09_cha08.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 82