Adorno holds that eliminating death is the crucial test of utopian consciousness

Evidence

In view of the injustice ‘which death does to every single individual’, ‘surrendering to the inevitable … becomes its recommendation’. This afflicts every utopia which ‘enlists the services of theology’ in hopes of overcoming death while treating theology as something which ‘has to be kept out of sight’. In view of the ‘universally’ practised distancing from utopia - ‘“Oh, that’s just utopian; oh, that’s possible only in the Land of Cockaigne. [And in fact,] that shouldn’t [exist] at all”’ - Adorno’s notion that death is ‘avoidable and criticizable, or at any rate the precise opposite of what thinking should actually identify with’, leads to the denial of the wish that all suffering be overcome. Against this, Adorno takes the view that ‘the question about the elimination of death is indeed the crucial point’, something which he argues ‘can be ascertained very easily’: 47 Améry 1994, p. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1518

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier notes on silence as positive presence and on utopia as socially critical theory’s refuge — both treat death/darkness as that which utopian thinking must face rather than ennoble. — connects to: A materialist utopian philosophy must reckon with death and sacrifice to survive. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 262; Utopia neutralizes death by making every present ontologically complete — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 276; Utopia conquers death by fully realizing the unobjectified core of existence — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 277 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from ‘death is avoidable and criticizable’ to treating elimination of death as the crucial point is a genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion — death is normally the unassailable ground of all tragic realism, and Adorno makes it the measure of whether thought has escaped identification with the existing.