Perhaps you would be better served by thinking about what Adorno says, rather than instantly identifying with his target, and then abjecting that identification in the form of weak sarcasm?
Very well: let's consider in detail what Adorno is saying in the passage you have quoted.
They confirmed their mutual understanding on a higher level by excluding one who did not pronounce the same credo they repeated to one another.
The purpose of the credo is not so much to express a belief - the content of the credo need not be believable, or sincerely believed by those who express it - as to function as a schibboleth. It is a question of pronunciation. Moreover, the person who is to be excluded is not necessarily identified by an
inability to pronounce the credo, but simply by the fact that they do not participate in the rite of public repetition.
This rite of repetition therefore serves two purposes. The first is performative reinforcement of the creed itself, reinstating it as an object of shared commitment. The second is purification of the body of believers (or creed-sayers). Pronunciation of the creed provides a criterion for selecting the one to be excluded, and the function of this exclusion is to elevate the "mutual understanding" of those who remain: the very act of exclusion binds them together as a group, refining and consolidating their identity.
What Adorno is saying here is somewhat of a sociological truism, but let's continue:
What they fought for on a spiritual and intellectual plane they marked down as their ethos, as if it elevated the inner rank of a person to follow the teachings of higher ideals, as if there were nothing written in the New Testament against the Pharisees.
Here the subjective knotting of "spiritual and intellectual" polemics and inner "ethos" is named as Pharisaism. What is a Pharisee? Within the Christian tradition, a Pharisee is one for whom there exists a system of "inner rank", of lower and higher persons distinguished by the quality of their ethos and the consistency with which they observe its demands. The Pharisee has a clear notion of what it is to be good, and strives to adhere to that notion in his own conduct. The sinner justified by grace knows that his own ethos is irrevocably compromised, and that his conduct brings him to condemnation before the law.
The sinner's first problem is one of weak observance of the law: what he calls evil, he does, and what he calls good he does not do. His second problem is one of ethical disorientation: what he calls evil and what he calls good are confused with each other, so that even his best efforts inevitably lead him into error. By the Pharisee's standards, the sinner is not a moral success. He would be a better person, a person of higher spiritual rank, if he attended to "the teachings of higher ideals", acquiring an ethos in which good and evil were clearly discernible in all cases, and fought for those ideals, both within himself and against others who did not live up to them.
What is written in the New Testament against the Pharisees is that they are hypocrites and vipers. Why? There are two reasons. Firstly, the Pharisee is often a hypocrite, unable to maintain his own standard of moral success and self-deceiving in the account he gives himself of his own conduct. Even if his conduct is really impeccable, however, his ethical rectitude is accomplished at the cost of a shutting down of situational awareness: he knows what is "right" in all conceivable situations, but the range of situations he is actually able to conceive of, the range of ethical demands he is imaginatively able to entertain, is fatally narrow. So long as he treads in the path of righteousness as he understands it, he is able to be "good"; but he has little empathy for the lives of others, and is apt to behave cynically and selfishly if he is thrown out of his usual moral routine. (The novels of Iris Murdoch are full of illustrations of Pharisaism undone in this way).
Secondly, the Pharisee is a viper, because his battle with himself to control his own conduct is invariably confused with a battle against others: he strikes venomously and compulsively against those who do not display the virtues he esteems, as if they represented a terrifying threat to his own integrity. The Pharisee is never solely concerned with his own goodness. When he evaluates the spiritual rank of others, and finds them wanting, he finds that their very proximity to him places his own moral elevation in jeopardy. They must be reformed, or blasted into nothingness.
Adorno's Pharisees are polemicists, immaterial warriors on "a spiritual and intellectual plane". Intellectual combat is essential to the maintenance of their own fragile inner peace. The little victories that they win on that plane serve to reassure them of the purity of their ethos, to uphold the elevation of their inner rank. They are always better people, in their own minds, than those they defeat.
Even forty years later, a pensioned bishop walked out of the conference of a Protestant academy because a guest lecturer expressed doubt about the contemporary possibility of sacred music. He too had been warned against, and dispensed from, having dealings with people who do not toe the line; as though critical thought had no objective foundation but was a subjective deviation.
This example neatly condenses the character of the Pharisee that I have just given. It is well understood that the "subjective deviation" against which he takes up arms is his own. Here Adorno also brings in "doubt" and "critical thought", both of which might potentially have some "objective foundation": that is, they might arise from awareness of some aspect of the situation that the Pharisee has suppressed within his own awareness. The doubter, or critical thinker, is not the person weak in belief, but the person who has noticed something with which his former beliefs were incompatible. The critical line of thought is the one which attends to this something, even at the risk of ethical disorientation. The Pharisee is someone who cannot tolerate any such risk.
People of his nature combine the tendency that Borchardt called a putting-themselves-in-the-right with the fear of reflecting their reflections - as they didn't completely believe in themselves... Heretics baptized this circle "The Authentic Ones."
"The fear of reflecting their reflections" is a very Adorno-ish way of describing the intersubjective mechanism whereby the proximity of someone who seems to me to be ethically compromised causes me to fear for my own ethical integrity. I fear that they reflect badly on me, and that I will come to reflect my own "bad" reflection. (This, interestingly, is a major theme in the lyrics of Xasthur: the mirror that shows me the falsity of everything I believe about myself, that reflects me as deformed, grotesque, a parody of my ideal self. It is a distorting mirror, but one that truly shows me my own "loss and inner distortion").
Adorno's final flourish is to adopt the "heretics"' name for the circle of Pharisees, "The Authentic Ones". What ultimately characterises the Pharisee is an overweening concern for authenticity: a fear that one is not really what one "is", that one is not wholly credible even to oneself. Only what is authentic has the right to exist; therefore the existence of everything that can be suspected of inauthenticity is in peril. (Badiou calls this the destructive passion for the real, which seeks to purify reality of everything inauthentic in order to arrive, finally, at the true life, the occluded substrate of dependable reality). The repentant sinner, by comparison, submits to the unconditional heteronomy of grace, no longer demanding of himself that he satisfy his own ethical conscience but recognising himself as justified through faith, and delivered to the subjective unbinding of hope and charity. But I doubt that is Adorno's conclusion.
Have I understood the passage correctly? Is there anything you would add to, or substract from, my account of it?
Further: could you now explain to me precisely what it has to do with Badiou and "Badiouvians"? Can you show, for example, that Badiou's
Ethics expresses an essentially Pharisaical conception of righteousness?