ABSTRACT
To sum up, the ethical drift of post-constructionist social theory and the case for an affirmative biopolitics do not seem the best direction for laying the grounds of a critical humanism. To sum up, Theodor W. Adorno provides important theoretical and methodological insights in the direction of a critical humanism. His position is close to post-constructionist critiques of realism and constructionism yet it is at the same time at odds with all those features of the ontological turn in social theory which are prone to capture by the neoliberal problematization of nature and human agency. The relationship between politics and ethics has always been controversial. Only in the secularizing Europe of the seventeenth century the idea emerges of a neat distinction between what is effectually compulsory and what is morally required. This chapter draws on recent inquiries of Giorgio Agamben into the paradigm of operativity that lies at the core of the nested problematization and the current politics of ontology.
