‘The Strength Even to Comprehend the Incomprehensible’: Rereading Adorno in the Age of Authoritarian Resurgence

This article reappraises Theodor W. Adorno’s call for ‘working through the past’ as an ethical practice in the wake of Auschwitz, and as a prescriptive model for rebuilding the collective, by situating Adorno’s 1959 lecture ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’ and 1966 lecture ‘Education after Auschwitz’ in the totality of his corpus. Adorno’s reflections reveal the effort to build a positive political project in the wake of catastrophe, but its ethical demands on present generations complicate any practical proposal to address the past. Heralding contemporary transitional justice theory and practice in important ways, fruitful tensions in his lectures reveal the inherent difficulty of reckoning with past wrongs: rebuilding ethical life in the wake of Auschwitz presupposes the impossibility of a foundational metaphysics; understanding and overcoming past wrongs runs the risk of trivializing and relativizing them; and history should be understood as the unfolding of constellations of given conditions.