CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

The analysis of history in terms of an analysis of its particular inscription in the
body—the feeling, instinctual, habitual body—is the very same form of analysis that
Adorno seeks to uncover with the history of nature. And the aim of this history is to
unearth the archaic in the present—which is the same as to say that it is to uncover the
Herkunft [provenance] of things—and to show that the ‘origin’ of things in this sense is
not a noble, pure, and stable origin, but rather thoroughly permeated with non-rational
elements and bodily, natural determinants.
The second goal of genealogy, as characterized by Foucault, is to show the origin
of things in the sense of their Entstehung. Entstehung, he says, “désigne l’émergence, le
point de surgissement” [designates emergence, the point of arising]. 278 The analysis of
Entstehung looks to clarify a social institution or a concept, for instance, by looking at
how it emerged from the coming together of various elements, some of them purely
accidental, ignoble, and decidedly different from the origin and purpose that we
ordinarily attribute to the object of analysis. A classic example is Nietzsche’s Zur
Genealogie der Moral, where moral European values are traced back to a series of
struggles for power, the ressentiment of the weak, the cunning of the “priestly cast,” etc.;
or Foucault’s genealogy of the prison in Surveiller et Punir, where modern punishment is
traced back to a variety of goals ranging from the demonstration of the sovereign’s power
to the domination of the victim’s ‘soul’ and the normalization of behavior. Foucault
argues that the Entstehungen that genealogy seeks to uncover “ne sont pas les figures
successives d’une même signification; ce sont autant d’effets de substitutions, de
Gallimard), 143.
278 Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” in Dits et Ecrits, vol. II (Paris:
296