The individual survives capitalism not through emancipation but as dead, monumentalized ballast.

Evidence

To think that the individual is being liquidated without trace is over-optimistic. For his cursory negation, the abolition of the monad through solidarity, would at the same time prepare the ground for saving the single being, who only in relation to the general becomes particular. The present situation is very different. The disaster does not take the form of a radical elimination of what existed previously; rather the things that history has condemned are dragged along dead, neutralized and impotent as ignominious ballast. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 159

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reversal — liquidation of the individual would be over-optimistic, since the real disaster is the individual preserved as neutralizing ornament — is paradigm-shifting in density.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s docile bodies and to Debord’s spectacle, where the individual persists as display rather than agent. — connects to: The liberal individual was destroyed by capital, not by dictators — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 659
• DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno’s own dialectical position on the individual: neither abolished in solidarity nor autonomously surviving, but persisting as a contradiction.