What the feeling in the quote above describes, is an impossibility to distance oneself from the event, to reduce and abstract the victims to “statistics” (364) — something that, as we might realize, has happened by now. The eschatological claim that sacrifices are necessary to attain the Good has long lost its validity, which also means that the evidentness of the new imperative, “that Auschwitz will not repeat itself” cannot be treated from a discursive distance,

for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum — bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive only that morality survives (365).

The somatic (bodily) proximity to suffering corrects the bourgeois coldness, its emotional distance, that had rendered the catastrophe possible, the coldness of “at least it’s not happening to me”. To expose oneself (mentally) to the suffering of others humanizes the victims and makes us aware that while the suffering of Auschwitz might be over, there is still suffering in this world, and that by profiting from it, we are just as guilty as the ones who have profited from the evictions and expropriations that went along with the Shoah (say, from inhumane conditions in certain factories nowadays thanks to which certain products become affordable).

Adorno complements this correction of an approximation towards the victims with a distancing, namely the distancing from oneself. The individual that overestimates its own importance in the world does so at the expense of others and in its fear of death it easily falls into an inhumane social-darwinistic mind-set. Looking at oneself from the outside can offer us a new perspective where we overcome the inherent selfishness of our ordinary conceptions of morality:

“What does it really matter?” is a line we like to associate with bourgeois callousness, but it is the line most likely to make the individual aware, without dread, of the insignificance of his existence. The inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one’s distance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human part, the very part resisted by its ideologists (363).

The subject that doesn’t want to die due to its will to self-preservation will arrive at the conclusion that it does not need to die in seemingly objective proofs of the immortality of the soul or the absolute subject. Driving instructors teach us that we’ll steer wherever we look at and hence to avoid the tree we have to stop looking at it. Thought, if it doesn’t reflect on its inherently desire-driven structure, will magically wield us the results we secretly wish for. And the more the thinking mind suppresses this initiating urge, its fear of death, the more authoritarian its urges to control the world become, leading to the instrumental reason that directly lead us to the monstrosities of WWII (this is the primary topic of the Dialectics of Enlightenment). But that does not mean that we should give up on thought altogether, neither can we give up on our primal desire to live; instead, we need to bring this inherently intentional moment of thought to light (here’s the Freudian lesson), leading to a “self reflection of thinking”, which is “a thinking against itself” (365). The pressing question is, though, if such a turn will lead to the self-dissolution of thought or not. It can only escape the current crisis, if human beings can decrease their distance to the others and increase the distance to themselves.

Auschwitz was not the exception, it was the rule; the difference is that Auschwitz couldn’t adorn its suffering with reasons like honor, national spirit, power, a divine plan or profit — they all turn out to be chimaeras, excuses. No suffering has sense, ever. It does not follow an economical logic, where one’s negative is another one’s positive, where the negative is justified if the positive surmounts it. This means that physical suffering inherently makes for an underlying metaphysical suffering that has essentially and irrevocably become obvious with the Shoah, which was the most painful manifestation of a “permanent catastrophe” (320). The solution thus lies not in the past, in a lost notion of authenticity, but in a future where suffering is not. Understanding the necessity of this connection is crucial to see why Adorno’s text is so precarious.