The Unconscious of Critique: Adorno and Deleuze as Readers of Kant and Freud

This article challenges the view that Adorno and Deleuze represent antithetical positions, arguing that both share the goal of harnessing the unconscious as a resource for critique. To reconstruct and relate their accounts, it looks beyond Freud to their readings of Kant. It shows that both thinkers appropriate psychoanalysis to actualize latent potentials within the “Copernican turn,” thereby rethinking critique. Adorno locates this potential in reason, transforming the thing-in-itself into a thinking of nonidentity. To this end, he politicizes Freud’s theory of symptom interpretation by reading suffering as an index of social pathologies. Deleuze, by contrast, focuses on sensibility, reworking Freud’s theory of the death drive to radicalize Kantian aesthetics into a productive thinking that unfolds desire. The article concludes by historicizing these accounts—Adorno in relation to fascism and the culture industry, Deleuze in relation to May ’68—and evaluates the contemporary significance of the unconscious for social criticism.