The Broken Mirror. Selective Indignation and Specularity: between Adorno, La Boétie, and Montaigne

Abstract

This text examines, from an Adornian perspective, the critical use of the emotion of indignation and its role in the crisis of Renaissance humanism by La Boétie and Montaigne. Far from reinforcing a dignitas hominis with a moral and universal vocation, this specular passion, which questions the concept of similarity by sifting it through animality and strangeness, reveals its intrinsic selectivity, that of a socialized division of living beings that only serves to confirm forms of domination, exploitation, and killing.