Ross Wilson

University of Cambridge

Ross Wilson is Associate Professor of Criticism in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He works on the history, theory, and practice of literary criticism since 1750, on poetry and poetics in the same period, and on philosophical aesthetics and critical theory. He is the author of Subjective Universality in Kant’s Aesthetics (2007), Theodor Adorno (2007; Chinese translation, 2016; Turkish translation, 2023), Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (2013), and Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750–2020 (2023). His work on poetry, literary criticism, and critical theory has been published in English Language History, European Romantic Review, New German Critique, New Literary History, Romanticism, Textual Practice, and many other venues. He is the editor of The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (2009) and Percy Shelley in Context (forthcoming 2024) and is a member of the editorial collective for Romantic Circles Reviews and Receptions. Wilson has served as an elected member of the Delegate Assembly for the Modern Language Association and his work has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the Sir Isaac Newton Trust, and the Crausaz Wordsworth Foundation.

Speaking at the conference

Thursday, 28 September, 11 am, Alma Karlin Hall

Alienation and the Alien: Adorno in the Ferment of Dialectics

Around the middle of the second section of Negative Dialectics, Adorno returns to a motif that characterised his work from its beginnings to the unfinished Aesthetic Theory. Describing the character of a ‘[t]houghtless rationality’ still bedevilled by the archaic threat of nature, Adorno notes that this unhappy relationship has consequences for the theory of alienation itself: ‘Even the theory of alienation, the ferment of dialectics,’ Adorno remarks, ‘confuses the need to approach the heteronomous and thus irrational world–to be “at home everywhere,” as Novalis put it–with the archaic barbarism that the longing subject cannot love what is alien and different, with the craving for incorporation and persecution. If the alien were no longer ostracized, there hardly would be any more alienation’ (Ashton trans., p.172).

This paper examines three elements of this statement as they are further articulated in Adorno’s thinking and, in doing so, suggests a response to the question in the call for papers, ‘Should we propose “in praise of alienation”?’: it is not so much that we might praise alienation, but that we should liberate the alien from alienation – and praise it.

The first element of the statement from Negative Dialectics examined here is the claim that there is a need to approach ‘the heteronomous and thus irrational world’. Why is there such a need and from what other, still more fundamental needs might it arise? The implicit characterisation, by way of the invocation of Novalis, of the expression of this need as Romantic will also be considered, not least in order to determine the historical formation of this part of the constitutively confused theory of alienation.

The second element to be considered is the apparent suggestion that incorporation and persecution are one. How can this be? Surely, if something is incorporated, then it is not persecuted. Yet are incorporation and persecution complements, or, in fact, one and the same? Additionally, here, the historical characterisation of this drive (‘the longing subject’) as archaic and barbarous will be compared to the view that the need to be at home everywhere is a Romantic impulse.

Finally, the paper will assess the fundamental claim that there can be an alien without the menace of alienation or ostracism. Here, I will turn to Adorno’s assertion – one of his boldest and most direct – in Minima Moralia of ‘the better state as one in which people could be different without fear’ (Jephcott trans., p.103). This wish for the neutralisation of alienation and consequent liberation of the alien, however, is substantially nuanced elsewhere in Adorno’s work, especially in his late aesthetics, and the paper will conclude with a reflection on the corrective role played by alienation in the objectivation of artworks as articulated in Aesthetic Theory. What will emerge, therefore, is an account of alienation as neither merely ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ – as neither straightforwardly praiseworthy nor blameable – but, first, as a historical conundrum from which we must exit without, second, eliminating the alien itself along with it.