What Barbarism Is?
Adorno’s Aesthetics and the Philosophy of History Robert Hullot-Kentor Professor of Visual and Critical Studies School of Visual Arts, New York Adorno’s thinking revolves centrally around the question of barbarism, how it is that social progress in the control of nature leaves an ancient barbarism behind while producing a second barbarism. But, however important Adorno’s thinking may now seem to us, the idea of barbarism does not strike a nerve here. To take a detail: Where European law, for instance, may charge an individual with ‘acts of barbarism,’ American law only refers to a lack of ‘civility’. Or, more broadly, where Europeans think of their own history as struck through with a barbarian past in the collapse of Rome, the American sense of history stops short, currently in any case, at a tea party. Is it possible, however, in a moment when Eric Hobsbawm is hardly alone among Europeans in writing compellingly on the ‘rebarbarization’ of history that the idea of barbarism could be
