ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the fascist violence brought forth by the uncontrollable economic disasters of capitalist production, the “impaired life” knows that it cannot extricate itself from entanglement in the contradictions of bourgeois individuality whose irrevocable decomposition it has recognized. The fascist terror does not only reveal the airtight coerciveness of highly industrialized class societies, it also injures the subjectivity of the theoretician and reinforces the class barriers to his ability of theoretical perception. Detachment from the criteria finally drove T. W. Adorno, in conflict with the student movement, into complicity with the ruling powers which he himself hardly saw through. The controversy was by no means only related to the issue of private abstention from political practice; the inability of Adorno’s theory to deal with the question of organization pointed at objective shortcomings of this theory regarding the epistemologically and sociologically central category of social praxis.
