Under total inhumanity, withdrawal from society doubles as complicity and privilege

Evidence

Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the casual, amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, in that the concessions made to the interlocutor debase him once more in the person of speaker … For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. … He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest … His own distance from business at large is a luxury which only that business confers. This is why the very movement of withdrawal bears features of what it negates. It is forced to develop a coldness indistinguishable from that of the bourgeois … Adorno saw the only responsible course' in this situation as being to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 419

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno’s concept of the intellectual’s responsible ‘inviolable isolation’ is defined via the aphorism’s thesis-antithesis structure.
• DEEPTHINKING: The opposed aphorisms jointly specify a no-exit position: sociability debases the other, aloofness reproduces bourgeois coldness — a genuinely irresolvable dialectic of the intellectual’s conduct.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School material on the culture industry and to Adorno’s late essays on thawing reified language.