Adorno and Foucault on Identity and the Nation-State

Daniel Rogers, CUNY Graduate Center

Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault have both been fingered as responsible for identity politics. Of course, such allegations usually come from the shrillest and most myopic critics of the latter, who often clearly have not even read either of the former. Yet how can these allegations arise and persist? I will contend that this is in part due to the inattention in the secondary literature on both to the question of identity, and in part due to a wider scholarly inattention to the relation between identity and the nation-state. Adorno and Foucault had very different intellectual projects, but the critique of identity politics – if avant la lettre – was central to both, and in ways that help us understand the grip of national identity, perhaps the ur-form of political identity in the current sense. Both were centrally concerned with demonstrating and contesting the many forms of domination we moderns are subject to, despite a ubiquitous rhetoric of freedom. And both were deeply Nietzschean thinkers, though Foucault found his bearings in Nietzsche’s genealogical method, while Adorno remained dialectically driven. Both drew heavily from the latter’s historical-ontological analysis of conceptualization and classification, in ways which are directly applicable to a philosophical critique of the nation-state. While Adorno focused more on ideology and thus on the nation, Foucault focused more on practice and thus on the state, but the two thinkers complement each other, as both sides of the hyphen must be weighed in comprehending the nation-state formation. Nietzsche went further in his rhetorical lacerations of nationalism and the nation-state itself than did his two leading twentieth-century epigoni, but their elaborations of his themes are perhaps even more useful for this critique.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 187. Theorizing States and Modernity