Lamentation et resistance: la non-résignation de la philosophie et le “triste savoir” d’Adorno face à la Catastrophe

This article takes its point of departure from the historical event of Auschwitz and the troubling question, posed by Adorno’s project of negative dialectics, of how to philosophize ‘after’. As is clear from Adorno’s question, he does not regard Auschwitz from within an objective, historical, materialist framework (of the sort alluded to above); the mass destruction of human life transformed Adorno’s understanding of philosophy’s inherent sense: Thinking discovers its sense, not in questions of meaning and significance, which are offensive to the victims of senseless violence, but in expressing the affect of – and for – their suffering. The expression of suffering recasts philosophy as lament, but this is not mere despair, since Adorno’s philosophy is also a form of resistance. This article focuses on the ethical dimension contained in philosophy as both lament and resistance, relating it to the Jewish ethical tradition that it identifies in Adorno’s negative approach. It show that, for philosophy, a reorientation after Auschwitz is only possible through such ethics: of resistance or non-resignation. In this reading of Adorno, Ombrosi claims that philosophy after Auschwitz is and must be primarily an ethical resistance to evil; not only to absolute evil, but also to the more sinister and hidden evils implied in “the incessant identity of everything” or the “relentless course of things.” Adorno’s ethics, free of precepts but sustained by minima moralia is an ethics of minimal and negative acts that go against the current, that are moral precisely because of their act of opposition, interruption, or refusal; because of their specific way of saying “no” and resisting.