The same paradox is at work in the core of the “dialectic of Enlightenment”: although Adorno (and Horkheimer) conceive the catastrophes and barbarisms of the twentieth century as inherent to the project of enlightenment, not as a result of some remainder of preceding barbarism to be abolished by way of bringing “enlightenment as an unfinished project” to its completion, they insist on fighting this excess-consequence of enlightenment by the means of enlightenment itself.
So, again, if enlightenment brought to the end equals regression into barbarism, does this mean that the only concept of enlightenment that we possess is the one which should be constrained, rendered aware of its limitation, or is there another positive notion of enlightenment which already includes this limitation?
There are two basic answers to this inconsistency of Adorno’s critical project: Jürgen Habermas or Lacan. With Habermas, one breaks the deadlock by formulating a positive normative frame of reference.
Through Lacan, one reconceptualizes the “humanity” of the deadlock/limitation as such; in other words, one provides a definition of the “human” which, beyond and above (or, rather, beneath) the previous infinite universal, accentuates the limitation as such: being-human is a specific attitude of finitude, of passivity, of vulnerable exposure. 159
Therein resides, for Butler, the basic paradox: while we should, of course, condemn as “inhuman” all those situations in which our will is violated, thwarted, or under the pressure of an external violence, we should not simply conclude that a positive definition of humanity is the autonomy of will, because there is a kind of passive exposure to an overwhelming Otherness which is the very basis of being-human.
How, then, are we to distinguish the “bad” inhumanity, the violence which crushes our will, from the passivity constitutive of humanity?
At this point, Butler compromises her position, introducing a naive distinction which recalls Herbert Marcuse’s old distinction between “necessary” repression and “surplus” repression:
“of course we can and must invent norms which decide between different forms of being-overwhelmed, by way of drawing a line of distinction between the unavoidable and unsurpassable aspect here and the changeable conditions there”.
What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the “inhuman” in Kant’s transcendental turn.
Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (“the soul is not mortal”) and when a nonpredicate is affirmed (“the soul is nonmortal”). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between “he is not dead” and “he is undead.”
The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” are neither alive nor dead; they are the mon-strous “living dead.” [For a closer elaboration of this distinction, see chapter 3 Tarrying with the Negative 1993. The Lacanian objet petit a also follows the logic of indefinite judgment: one should not say that it isn’t an object, but rather that it is a nonobject, an object that from within undermines/negates objectivity.]
The same goes for inhuman.“He is not human” is not the same as “he is inhuman.” “He is not human” means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely, that he is neither simply human nor simply inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as “humanity,” is inher-ent to being-human.
And perhaps I should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, but since Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the surrounding darkness).
So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, in other words, the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. 159-160