In Theodor Adorno’s multifaceted work, there are many references to animals and animal life. Moreover, Adorno makes key arguments featuring animals, animality, and human-animal relations. Just think of the famous dictum of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, highlighting both human solidarity with tortured animals and what their treatment tells us about society: “The rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar” (p. 7). Or consider Adorno’s reflections on zoological gardens, which exhibit the domestication of animals, who suffer more in cages than on the open range, but also the utopian hope that animals may “survive the wrong” that is done to them by humans and “give rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life” (Minima Moralia, p. 115). Anything but marginal in Adorno’s writings, reflections on animals, animality, and the critique of dominant relations between humans, animals, and nature constitute critical components of Adorno’s theorizing, and as such merit a thorough inquiry. Yet only recently, this theme has become subject of some scholarly attention. Until now, however, no theorist has comprehensively discussed Adorno’s perspective on animals and animality and its meaning for his Critical Theory writ large—or its potential impact for contemporary political theory in the Anthropocene.

Caleb J. Basnett’s study makes a threefold novel contribution in these areas. First, Basnett seeks to place animals center stage and address “the neglected role animals play” (p. 3) in Adorno’s writings. Second, Basnett introduces the animal subject into a political conception of Adorno’s Critical Theory. Basnett follows recent studies, without explicitly addressing them, that have turned away from the tiresome lament that Adorno’s work suffers from a “political void” and have begun reconstructing Adorno’s contributions to political theory, from Shannon Mariotti’s Adorno and Democracy (2016) and Gary A. Mullen’s Adorno on Politics after Auschwitz (2016) to Eric Oberle’s Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity (2018). Basnett aspires to “retrieve” a political theory of the subject from Adorno’s work, one that challenges dominant “anthropocentric” theories of politics and “harbors a theory of the aesthetic animal” (p. 3), and attributes central importance to art and human-animal relations. Third, through this theorization of the “aesthetic animal” Basnett aims at recovering promises of “posthuman” subjective possibilities for overcoming violence and domination. Radically redrawing political possibilities through the arts, Basnett argues, an “aesthetic animal would be a subject constituted through an aesthetic education that might bring about a different relation between animal senses … and human reason, one that might trouble this distinction” (p. 13). Moreover, an aesthetic animal may unseat the omnipresent principle of self-preservation that drives and reinforces the human-animal divide. Such a subject would require a profoundly different society in which both relations among humans and human/animal relations have been radically transformed.

With Adorno, Basnett seeks to reevaluate the human/animal distinction and its relationship to morality and politics. In Adorno’s work, he finds a timely resource for responding to what he calls the “Aristotelian problematic,” according to which a human is a “conceptually unique being” (p. 17) that is “divided from and held superior to the animal.” (p. 169). For Basnett, Adorno offers a “critique of the humanist tradition” that can be traced back to Aristotle’s hierarchies. But especially in his writings on aesthetics, Adorno also recovers Aristotle’s hidden promises by providing a “political guide” to the construction of a transformed subject and by emphasizing what is nonidentical to human subjects—while alluding to their stunted animal potentialities. Images of animals hereby mark “the points at which humanity falters … [and] at which the cracks in its veneer become visible and a different set of subjective possibilities are intimated” (p. 12).

The book’s first chapter provides a compelling account of Adorno’s concepts of negative dialectic, immanent critique, thinking in constellations, and nonidentity, through which he “forges a new conceptual relation between particulars” and recovers “non-conceptual dimensions” (p. 53) as possible responses to the Aristotelian problematic. The second chapter reconstructs Adorno’s complex accounts of “humanity,” a concept Adorno uses in multiple ways. “Reconciled humanity” is for Adorno “the possibility of a subject not beholden to self-preservation, violence, and domination” (p. 25). By claiming that Adorno’s “reconciled humanity” cannot really be human, but must be some kind of new animal, one whose “destructive tendencies … have been pacified” through the traumatic struggle for survival (p. 77), however, Basnett eventually pushes his own careful reading of Adorno beyond Adorno. Only the third chapter turns strictly speaking to Adorno, animals, and animality. This chapter does important conceptual work, showing how far Adorno subverts “anthropocentric accounts of the world” (p. 103) still driving dominant political theory.

Like Jonathan Hollingsworth’s 2020 master thesis on Adorno’s Animal Philosophy, Basnett illuminates how Adorno challenges anthropocentric oblivion toward human animality. As the late Deborah Cook observed in her groundbreaking work Adorno on Nature (2011), “our ceaseless attempts to dominate nature reveal that we are as imprisoned in survival instincts as other animals.” Against the backdrop of his concept of natural history, Adorno reminds us that humans are considerably more like animals than they like to admit. In the final chapter, Basnett seeks to flesh out the “politics of an aesthetic animal” by thoroughly engaging with Adorno’s reflections on the redemptive qualities of art. In Adorno’s conception of aesthetic comportment, Basnett argues, the subject is one “for which the relation between mimesis and reason has been radically altered so that reason is no longer the domineering force oriented towards … the interest of self-preservation” (p. 159). Basnett’s aesthetic animal appears as a subject constituted by aesthetic education—and capable of changing the relations between animal senses and human reason through the creative force of art that helps expose blind spots of reason, recover repressed possibilities, and facilitate a turn toward animality.

This intriguing book, however, does not fully live up to its potential. First, we ultimately find too little on the rich topic of Adorno and animals; the reader who expects a comprehensive treatment of the animal theme is somewhat disappointed. Second, Basnett partly stretches selective references to advance his own posthumanist project, leaving at times too little space for ambiguities, nuances, and dialectical tensions in Adorno’s work. While Basnett endorses the notion that in Adorno’s determinate negation of reason and humanity both concepts are not lost but rather “transformed” (p. 98), this insight ultimately falls by the wayside, culminating in a Nietzschean posthumanism that rejects all distinctions between human, nonhuman, and inhuman. Basnett recognizes with Rancière that “humanism is itself a site of political struggle,” yet his “aesthetic animal” tends to displace all opposition between humanity and inhumanity, and to overcome humanist discourse altogether. Consequently, he also opposes what he calls “humanist politics” as the “central point of struggle,” even if he concedes—in distinction from Althusser’s dismissal of humanism as “bourgeois ideology”—that “the politics of the aesthetic animal do not necessarily preclude the use of humanist language for attaining narrower, pragmatic aims” (p. 183f).

To be sure, Basnett persuasively shows with Adorno the extent to which antagonistic anthropocentric distinctions between human and animal are deeply problematic, and that those humanisms that foster these distinctions as proof of human dignity are profoundly misguided. Yet, in Adorno’s view, it is not “human reason” (or “humanism”) in and of itself that “led the world into wars more horrible than had previously been imagined, culminating in the Holocaust and the atomic bomb” (p. 4). Rather, it is the collapse of human reason’s critical potential—reason’s reduction to the logic of objectification and blind domination over humans and animals alike—which helped facilitate the catastrophe of Auschwitz: “Antireason … tends toward the extermination of humanity.” Likewise, “humanity,” Adorno states in Guilt and Defense, “was not exactly highly regarded in the Third Reich” (p. 134). Adorno argues that critical thought has to take up the cause of freedom and hold on to tendencies toward “real humanity” wherever we can find them. Emancipation surely requires, Basnett reminds us, transformed human-animal relations that end human and animal suffering from persecution, exploitation, or in slaughter factories. But it also demands the rejection of any ideology that sacrifices the very idea of reason, and thus loses the conceptual critical resources to call inhumanity and cruelty to animals by their names.

This criticism should not diminish the book’s achievements. Shedding light on a neglected subject, Basnett’s thought-provoking study takes political theory with Adorno into new directions. Paying attention to human animality and human/animal relations, the study helps ignite an overdue debate on Critical Theory’s potential for a political theory that sustains the possibility of a humane society. Adorno may indeed be an apt guide to “our current political juncture and the theorizing of its transformation, as he allows us to see our own animality” (p. 184). Basnett demonstrates that the emergence of a truly global subject emancipated from structures of blind domination will have to include the transformation of human/animal relations, and it is unlikely to come to fruition without such change in the age of the Anthropocene—just as animal well-being may ultimately require a broader transformation of society and the elimination of “violence and domination as such” (p. 173).