Adorno

390 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

as a historical form of the subject that owed its existence to the process
of emancipation of bourgeois society. The individual, he explained
in September 1953 in the Darmstädter Gespräche on ‘Individual and
Organization’, ‘scarcely extends back beyond Montaigne or Hamlet,
certainly no further than the early Italian Renaissance’.^99 This view of
the historical origins of autonomous subjectivity supplied Adorno with
a normative reference point for his critique of the impotence of the
individual in the administered world, but he did not confine himself
to a confrontation between the abstract idea and the sobering reality.^100
Instead, he constructed his critique of the subject as a critique of
society that started out from the predominance of social conditions,
the network of social functions, over human beings. The relationship
between individual and society was like the negative identity of univer-
sal and particular. In his famous radio debate with Arnold Gehlen in
1965 he argued that this was neither an anthropological constant nor a
historical necessity, but the product of a historical and social develop-
ment. Since ‘man is shaped by history, and that means by society, down
to the innermost depths of his psyche’, it follows that the divergence
of individual and society must be capable of an explanation in social
terms.’^101 And this explanation must also hold good for the paradox that
modern industrial societies have witnessed a process of growing indi-
vidualization that leaves less and less room for individualism, difference
and alterity. Here he takes up an idea he had already proposed in the
Minima Moralia: ‘In the midst of standardized, organized human units
the individual persists. He is even protected and gaining monopoly value.
But he is in reality no more than the mere function of his own unique-
ness, an exhibition piece.’^102 Adorno now gave this critical perspective
a radical turn by arguing that the dominant social mechanisms of
integration had undermined the individual. He maintained that the
socially prescribed maxim of the confident, well-integrated person was
unacceptable because ‘it requires of the individual that balancing
of forces that does not exist in society as it is at present constituted.’^103
At the end of this essay, ‘On the Relations between Sociology and
Psychology’, Adorno summed up his thesis of the demise of the indi-
vidual in a hazardous conclusion. He not only claimed that man had
been perverted into a ‘hideous caricature’,^104 but surmised that a kind of
alliance had been formed between the objectively repressive society
and the psychological system of the unconscious. As he put it, ‘the
victory of the id over the ego’ is in tune with ‘the triumph of society
over the individual’.^105
This extreme critique of social change did not prevent him from
postulating as the end point of his theory that ‘the trace of humanity
seems to persist only in the individual in his decline’.^106 This utopian
streak was the background for his emphatic rejoinder to Arnold Gehlen’s
pessimistic anthropology. In their radio debate in 1965, Adorno stated
bluntly: ‘I have a conception of objective happiness and objective