“The essay as form,” Adorno (1984: 160) writes in The Authoritarian Personality, seeks to understand concepts as they “are already unconsciously named in language.” This is not exactly philology since it is only in pressing the given meanings further than their given sense that they can be grasped reflectively. The intention, then, in this essay, written between November 9, 2016, and November 9, 2017, is to enunciate what authoritarianism has come to mean in the wake of the American presidential election of Donald Trump. The point made is that domination is self-destruction, now immediately so, and that its metric is cognizable in a critical understanding of the received idea of “real time.” Following an introduction titled “Undercount Nation,” the essay proceeds in six sections: (I) Studies in Prejudice, Primordial Restitution, Interpretation neither Stringent nor Arbitrary; (2) Savage Beating, Get Even for What?, The Use of Humankind; (3) The Authoritarian Personality, Is It Fascism?, Transcendental Deduction of Psychoanalysis; (4) The Uninterpretation of Dreams; (5) Primitive Thread of Human History; and (6) Historical Trend: Real Time. The essay as a whole is a commentary on Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality.
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