Modernism/modernity

Rabota jest rabota,rabota jest vsegda.

—Bulat Okutschawa

Of all that has worked toward, furthered, and offered its services to National Socialism; of all that made it what it was; and of all that survives it without the most immediate horror, the most banal, self-evident and, therefore, most easily forgotten could also be the most effective. It is something that cannot primarily and in every instance be considered fascistic; something that has a very long and, many would say, venerable, mythological, theological, and philosophical prehistory; and in this history, especially in its most recent segment, it is what has been conceived of as a determination of man’s essence. This banal, self-evident, and even still today widely presumed human factor is work. Work did not only organize what in fascism was crude violence and authority. The wish for work as the form of a remunerated life did not only aid Hitler’s party in its ascent to power. This party did not only present itself as a labor party. Nor was it alone capital (according to Marx’s handy formula, money that breeds itself, this self-producing and self-working capital) that paved the way for the Nazi clique. The call to work—to work on the country, work in industry, to work on the “people” and for the “people” of workers, to work on arms, to work with fist and brow, to work against everything and everyone who was said to be hostile or merely foreign to the work of the people—this call to work pervaded and determined [End Page 23] the entire ideological, social, and political organization of the fascist epoch. And, in turn, work—working out, working through, and working off (Verarbeitung, Durcharbeitung, Aufarbeitung) —became the watchword for the atonement of guilt and the settlement of debts. Work, finally, comes to define the task that must be met by congresses for enlightenment and demystification. The meaning of this enlightenment and demystification, however, does not lie in mere working but, rather, in ceasing to carry on fascistically determined work. It lies in working through this work—and that also means in stopping or, at least, repeatedly interrupting it, to work off work, this work, its pre- and posthistory, the history of this work and history itself insofar as it determines itself as work. It lies in working through what work meant and what it demanded, in working out what it still means and demands. It lies in the imperative of work and in clarifying the work of this imperative: the opening up and disclosure of a dimension in which work stops and gives pause, desists and is ex-posed (aussetzt). As long as we do not clarify what work means for National Socialism and what National Socialism as an institution of work itself means, we cannot understand what this institution is beyond a political and ideological phenomenon of a past—yet how and to what extent “past”?—epoch. Nor can we clarify what work against fascism would mean and what we, for example, do—and whether “we” in fact “do” it—when we analyze some elements of this institution.

The question about the work of fascism and about the endogenous fascism of work should not be posed solely for the sake of historical clarity. It is not only a historical or academic question. It is also a question about the structure of history, especially about the structure of what, from the perspective of work, the past and the future might mean and demand. Thus it is also a political question, one that, in principle, concerns the structure of present-day and future institutions—political, economic, juridical, and scientific. In his lecture “What Does It Mean: Working off the Past?” (“Was heisst: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit”), a lecture that up to this day, twenty-five years after its publication, is not obsolete, Adorno aired the suspicion that the formula of “working off” tended to serve the “unconscious, but not all that unconscious, defense against guilt” and, consequently, to perpetuate injustice. ¹ The defense function is thus designated as one of the constitutive elements of work in...