The violence of the concept

In his Negative Dialectics (1981) Theodor Adorno brings out the innermost connection between the logical operation of the concept and the operation of the law: that of the logic of subsumption which subsumes the heterogeneous multiplicity of phenomena under the unitary concept, denuding the non-identical sensuousness of the singular phenomenon and its eventive eruption in and from the midst of the world. The concept is, then, the metaphysical paradigm of the law; its violence consists in its denial of the event of phenomenality, which always is singular, under the regime of constituted phenomenality. The event, arising in the midst of the world, is, then, not of the world: it sets the world apart from itself, from its given ground, and renders the world non-co-incident with what now exceeds it. The violence of the separation with which the event flares up – the incendiary fire that separates the unity of the ground – is qualitatively different from the violence of the law. This is why Schelling makes a distinction between fire and fire: the former annihilates without atonement, and the latter atones and consummates without annihilation; or, as between the two kinds of violence that Walter Benjamin speaks of: there is a violence that is ‘bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood’ (Benjamin 1986: 297); the former the mythic violence of the law, and the latter the messianic-divine violence of exception without sovereignty. The denial of the other – the singular, that which exceeds the blood-life of the existent, the heterogeneous and the irreducible outside the law – gives rise to what Reiner Schürmann calls ‘hegemony’, the order of constituted phenomenality, where singulars are dialectically reduced to the particular instantiations of the universal. Dialectic that works through ‘mediation’ and ‘reconciliation’, between the universal and the particular, is the enemy of the event: it violently denies the future eruption (or, the eruption of the future) by pre-giving all phenomena a necessary law of movement.