Adorno, Red Army Faction, and Constituent Power: Sovereign Crime in Democracies

• In Event: Theorizing Resistance, Rebellion, and Refusal

Abstract

What ought to be done when the sovereign is engaged in crimes against humanity? In a liberal democratic system? When that sovereign is popular and assured of re-election? West Germany in the 1960's faced a crisis of legitimacy among its youth. Its government and military were riddled with ex-Nazis and its foreign policy supporting the US in Vietnam and nuclear weapons in Europe were seen as criminal. Horrified at the complicity of their parents in the Holocaust, Red Army Faction (RAF) was formed. Adorno, critic of the student movement and their increasingly violent protests, had a one exception to his rejection of political violence in his lectures on Politics and Freedom, the 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. This paper puts in conversation those two historical bodies of work with contemporary works on constituent power by Oran Doyle, John Grant, Andreas Kalyvas, Hjalte Lokdam, and William Scheuerman to create a theory of just rebellion that attempts to answer in a very different way the present problem of the rise of populism. Most work on RAF focuses on them as terrorists or their historical context rather than seriously engaging their thought. Adorno's moment of support for political violence is overshadowed by the rest of his ouevre. The works on constituent power provide an underpinning that can bridge these two sources into creating a theory of just rebellion against a liberal democratic order where the sovereign is believed to be undermining democratic institutions or is engaged in supporting crimes against humanity abroad while enjoying broad support at home– a very different approach to confronting the question of modern populism.

Author

• Kevin James McGinnis, CUNY Graduate Center