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In this essay, I set out to show how Freud plays a crucial role in shaping the ethical thought of one of the most influential social critics of this century Theodor Adorno. The American legal-theorist, Drucilla Cornell (1987) describes Adorno's ethics as “a non-violative relationship to the other,” which has as its aim “a way of being in the world that spans divergent value systems and allows us to criticize the repressive aspects of competing moral systems” (pp. 5-6). While Cornell situates this ethics in terms of Adorno's lifelong engagement with the philosophy of Hegel, I would like to suggest Freud as the other major source for the ethical impetus behind Adorno's thought. Freud's work, especially the idea of the work of mourning, offers us an invaluable context for understanding the two related concepts that lie at the heart of Adorno's ethics: self-relinquishment [Entäuerung] and mimesis (a letting be of the object). While Freud gives Adorno a powerful set of concepts with which to disrupt the unconscious forces that undergird the subject's violent attitude toward the object, Adorno, in his turn, enhances our appreciation of the powerful ethical impulse at work in psychoanalysis. It is in this sense that I feel justified in speaking of Adorno's Freudian ethics.
Throughout Negative Dialectics, Adorno (1966) portrays the subject as desperately holding onto the objects of its environment. The subject is driven by a compulsion to steadfastly possess these objects A fear motivates this compulsion. “Men are afraid that in losing this magic”—here the “magic” being that of complete identification—