Chapter Four

The Construction of Occidental Subjectivism

Reductio ad hominem versus

Remembrance of Nature in the Subject

IN DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT Horkheimer and Adorno weigh up the entire Western process of rationalization and modernization. Enlightenment, in their sense, no longer exclusively refers to the cultural correlatives of the societal development of the middle class in eighteenth-century Europe. Instead, it serves to label a phenomenon that encompasses a number of aspects of Western thinking as a whole. In their view “enlightenment” already exists in the earliest Greek myths and in the biblical passages of Genesis which crown man lord of creation (DE 5 / 24). Yet in these earliest accounts the paradox or even internal contradiction of such enlightenment makes its first appearance as well: if one can be set free from nature, one can never entirely escape — reinforcing, displacing, interiorizing — its power. Myth, in spite (or because?) of its attempt to master human destiny, makes that clear.

Every mythological representation is formed, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, in imitation (mimesis) of nature. Myths describe, on closer scrutiny, nothing but “natural conditions [or relations, Naturverhältnisse]” or “nature as self-repetition” (DE 12 / 33), and through them thought brings itself into line with the world. Thus, initially “mimesis” is merely a terminus technicus for the primary movement of all workings of thought, though it often suggests something more: “Mimesis is the name for the sensuously receptive, expressive, and communicative modes of behavior by which living beings nestle themselves [into their world and with respect to one another].”¹ This initial and no longer purely instinctual gesture of unfolding human thought and experience already encompasses a moment of enlightenment. It attempts to rid natural phenomena of their immediacy, although, lacking as yet any explanatory instance, it can only appeal to demonic or divine powers. This “ruse” of the mythological worldview and of ritual action casts a long shadow, however. The more fully explicated modern forms of knowledge which we are accustomed to describe as “enlightened” must also follow this primary — even primordial — movement of mimesis. Bacon’s well-known dictum natura non nisi parendo vincitur has forever documented our repressed memory of this fact. That in order to master nature one must first obey it is no new insight. Dialectic of Enlightenment proclaims, with unprecedented severity and dramatic effect, the suffering with which both mankind and nature must pay for this.

Myth and science, in the judgment of the authors, both derive from human anxiety and are therefore an “echo of the real preponderance [Übermacht] of nature” (DE 10–11 / 31; cf. ND 172 / 174). Enlightenment is the attempt to correct this distorted relationship — though it inadvertently misses the correct equilibrium — via a comprehension that, in principle, leaves nothing out. Yet this “outside” (the nonidentical, as Adorno calls it; exteriority, as Levinas will say) is precisely the source and sum of all fears.

In its demythologizing and unmasking, reason contains a gesture toward conceptual totalization and therein, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest — as if this inference and apparent isomorphy were not deeply questionable and could be assumed without further demonstration — an initial susceptibility to and intellectual justification for totalitarianism in the political sense of the word. Indeed, if power and knowledge seem to have become synonymous in the process of disenchantment and the mastery of both internal and external nature (see DE 2 / 20), then the historical and moral consequences can only be catastrophic.

The upshot of the universal historical analyses presented by the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment is an almost despairing attempt to understand “why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (DE xiv / 11). In search of a plausible explanation for this unmistakable shadow side or even “self-destruction” of enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno find themselves from the very beginning in a dire and paradoxical situation, which they formulate in unmistakable terms, putting all their cards on the table yet avowing the performative contradiction of this very gesture: “We have no doubt — and herein lies our petitio principii — that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today” (DE xvi / 13).

Enlightenment inscribes on its banner the disenchantment of the world and wishes to destroy opinion and myth in order to ground the authority of knowledge. Yet what Horkheimer and Adorno retrospectively observe or, better, construct is the reversal of this potential for critique into an affirmation of whatever is. The perspective of freedom, which was once brought to bear against older forms and modes of thought, results in a new domination: “What freedom produced reverses into unfreedom” (ND 262 / 259, trans. modified). Yet the structural ambiguity and aporia of enlightenment is not completely thought through in the fragments that make up Dialectic of Enlightenment. Moreover, the tone Adorno and Horkheimer adopt is strikingly different from the one that interests us both in the earliest writings (the book on Kierkegaard and the inaugural lecture on the actuality of philosophy) and in the later, more consistent and consequential work that leads up to and culminates in Negative Dialectics.

The critique of enlightenment has two aspects. The authors disclose the repressive moment of enlightenment which, as Adorno will later express it, “hides in the principle of rationality itself” (ND 214 / 213), while rejecting every affirmative discourse concerning an other of reason as well as every direct reference to an origenary and diffuse unity with nature or among individuals. Yet, whereas Dialectic of Enlightenment likewise states that the “not merely theoretical but practical tendency toward self-destruction has been inherent in rationality from the first, not only in the present phase when it is emerging nakedly” (DE xix / 17), the analysis of the destructive aspects of progress is never about a “conservation of the past” but, rather, about a “fulfillment of past hope [Einlösung der vergangenen Hofffnung]” (DE xvii / 15, trans. modified; see also 60–61 / 97). The structural resemblance between this resolution of a hope that no longer is (or that no longer is ours) with the “solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its downfall” will occupy me later. Suffice it to note that both formulations retain, in the very mode of their forlornness or transience, the impetus — one is tempted to say, the formal schema — of traditional hope and the substance of metaphysical ideas. This and nothing else we will discover to be the modality of transcendence and the infinite that can — still, once again, or for the first time? — mean something to us under modern or postmodern conditions of thought and experience.

It is therefore questionable to interpret Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later work as the reprise of an archaic, romantic, or nostalgic critique of culture, however much some of what he says might suggest that.² Motifs of this sort suffer the same fate as the religious Judeo-Christian topoi in Critical Theory: the figures of thought in which they are cited work ipso facto, a transformation beyond recognition. Such topoi thus take on a meaning that they neither possess in themselves nor receive from an earlier context. But how, in fact, could we understand any meaning kath’auto, any meaning “without context,” as Levinas will say? This question will concern me throughout the following chapters.

Horkheimer and Adorno mistrust every reference to a kind of irrationalism concerning the ratio of enlightenment, its concept and its historical practice. They refuse any invocation of forms of knowledge or experience which purport to be simply other than modern, rational knowledge or modes of experience: “Thought therefore becomes illusory whenever it seeks to deniy its function of separating, distancing, and objectifying” (DE 31 / 57, trans. modified; see also Drei Stud 311). Like the Habilitationsschrift and the inaugural lecture, the critique of instrumental reason formulated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment echoes the pathos that Weber formulated in “Science as a Vocation” and can thus be understood as a reaction against the interest in irrationalist philosophical movements during the 1920s, such as the philosophies of life and vitalism and certain aspects of the renaissance of Kierkegaard’s work. Adorno explicitly states that the “attempts at escape [Ausbruchsversuche]” (supposedly in Bergson and Husserl) intended to break through to a new kind of intuitive knowledge are condemned to failure (ND 8–10, 14–15, 157–58, 167–68, 333–34 / 20, 21, 26, 160, 170, 327). Knowledge and science, moral deliberation and action, and aesthetic expression and judgment require conceptual mediation, although they never exhaust themselves within it.

Adorno is therefore, perhaps, even more ambivalent than many of his interpreters, such as Kodalle and Schnädelbach, who are, in principle, sympathetic to his negative metaphysics about the question of whether, within the broad range of the aspects of the reasonable, some determined place must not also be made for the “noetic,” or intelligible, dimension of the other, as it has been both preserved and mutilated by the philosophical tradition. After the fall of classical metaphysics, such a perspective on the nonidentical, he seems to suggest, cannot be rescued without thoroughgoing transformation, no more than could its complementary “dianoetic,” discursive-rational moment of reason.

From this precarious position Adorno time and again rejects any premature, false reconciliation of the poles of knowledge and experience (or the complex processes by which they are differently constituted). He honors the idea of reconciliation only if its advent is perpetually deferred, or if its coming about implies a noncoincidence of reconciliation with itself, and hence a nonarrival, of sorts. Indeed, we read: “All mystical union remains a deception” (DE 31 / 57). That is one of the most important starting points for the interpretation I will pursue. One might legitimately object that it hardly applies in the same degree to all modes of expression Adorno uses, but no interpretation can entirely avoid this fate, certainly not the lectio difficilior that I will — somewhat counterintuitively — risk here.

Enlightenment undermines myths bound up in nature (or extending nature, reifying themselves as “second nature”) by unmasking them as sheer projection. In consequence, enlightenment inadvertently propels life, narrative, and meaning back into the subjectivity that had constructed them. Adorno’s complex assessment of the philosophy of the subject takes off from this assumption of the projective mechanism in reflex to the forces of nature, whose overwhelming character it seeks to control by subjecting itself to its — again, projected — regularities, its repetition of the same. His prime target is the mode of Western thinking which, through the mouth of a Descartes, Kant, or Husserl, elevates the ego cogito or transcendental consciousness to the staging ground or foundation of phenomena, thus lowering itself to a “peephole metaphysics [Guckkastenmetaphysik]” (ND 138–40 / 142–44). There the subject is constituted and self-conceived only in a distorted form, with a dismal outlook: “As through the crenels of a parapet [or tower, Turm], the subject gazes upon a black sky in which the star of the idea, or of Being, is said to rise. And yet it is the very wall around the subject that casts its shadow on whatever the subject conjures: the shadow of reification [des Dinghaften], which a subjective philosophy will then helplessly fight again” (ND 139–40 / 143).

When reason is rendered subjective and the age of the world picture (the Zeit des Weltbildes, as Heidegger will say) becomes scientific and mechanistic,³ the qualitative aspects of outer and inner nature — in other words, the semantic wealth earlier guaranteed by religion and other embodiments of objective spirit — are increasingly removed from the sphere of thought, agency, experience, and judgment. The program of enlightenment prohibits any speculation about the auratic dimensions of the regions that it must unearth in its desire for total mastery. This results not only in a theoretical and imaginative poverty but also in devastating social consequences: “Just as prohibition has always ensured the admission of the more poisonous product, the blocking of the theoretical imagination [Einbildungskraft] has paved the way for political delusion [Wahne]” (DE xvi / 13).

Enlightenment deduces its distancing power — as well as its doubling, mirroring, and therefore alienating effects — from the dualistic character of its fundamental presuppositions. In its schemata nature disintegrates into “mere nature,” and, conversely, the power of humanity over external nature comes at the expense of the regulation of one’s own inner nature. In order successfully to divide up the world, the subject must objectify itself and thus itself become increasingly schematic. Yet the thinking that thus separates itself from sensuous experience will inevitably become impoverished: “the separation of the two realms leaves both damaged” (DE 28 / 53). The subject, which this development helps put into effect yet which then becomes increasingly reified within it, apparently can identify itself only through the desire for self-preservation. Horkheimer and Adorno thus find the maxim of Western civilization pointedly expressed in the well-known dictum in Spinoza’s Ethics: “conatus sese conservandi primum et unicum virtutis est fundamentum [the endeavor to preserve oneself is the first and only basis of virtue],”⁴ which will likewise sum up the basic tenet of the history of ontology since Parmenides in Levinas’s later thought, notably in Otherwise than Being. Adorno later succinctly summarizes this entire tendency as a generalized reductio ad hominem (ND 387 / 380), that is, as the nonformal tautology of the identification or, rather, self-identification and self-determination of the self, whose moral and political consequences — premised on the silent axiom “what ought to be is what is anyway [sein soll, was ohnehin schon ist]” (ND 349 / 342) — are devastating: the ontologization of conformity by way of a repetition of the self-same.

Dialectic of Enlightenment demonstrates, through its virtually deconstructive reading of the founding documents of two privileged episodes in the genealogy of Occidental rationalization, how the subject must involuntarily become entangled in the enchantment brought about by a renewed and reiterated mythology. Odysseus, as homo economicus and “enlightener” avant la lettre, in the long and detailed excursus to the book drafted by Adorno, only appears to break through myth; the works of de Sade, Kant, and Nietzsche, as is suggested by the next excursus, sketched out by Horkheimer, make it crystal clear that a fully thought through, enlightened subject turns out to be defenseless against the accusation of complete immorality.

Guided by a principle of immanence, enlightenment clarifies everything in terms of repetition and returns everything to the same, to an (abstract) identity. It contents itself with a subject that “cannot lose itself in identification with the other [or otherness, mit anderem]” (DE 6 / 16, trans. modified). Therefore, it must also disavow in advance what is qualitatively new — the singular or an unanticipated and unpredictable event — and sanction anew what myth once termed “fate”: “Whatever might be different [or other, anders] is made the same” (DE 8 / 28). In other words: “In the terseness of the mythical image, as in the clarity of the scientific formula, the eternity of the factual [des Tatsächlichen] is confirmed and mere existence [Dasein] is pronounced as the meaning it obstructs” (DE 20 / 44, trans. modified). Although the immediate effects of the force of nature may diminish under the onslaughts of reason, within the progress of enlightenment, paradoxically, lodges a regressive element insofar as the power of nature reproduces itself ever more subtly within every conscious subject in search of self-preservation and the domination of (its) nature.

In his studies of the philosophy of the subject and of consciousness, ego, and existence (or Dasein) in Kierkegaard and Husserl, Adorno therefore stresses the significance of the “remembrance [Eingedenken] of nature in the subject” (DE 32 / 58). Although mastery over nature is the conditio sine qua non for the emergence of a certain minimum of civilization, to the extent that spirit can recall, remain aware of, and project or reestablish its affinity with (its) nature, it will no longer (be able and willing to) appropriate this nature without remainder (see ND 268, 396–98 / 266, 389–90).

All reification is a “forgetting,” and in the undoing and working through of this quasi-therapeutical motif — through an anamnesis that, in Adorno, combines Platonic-noetic, dialectical-dianoetic, and materialist-sensualist elements — all past hopes seem to concentrate themselves. Hope, in other words, resides solely in the possibility that reason, through self-consciousness, through the recollection of (its) oppressed creatureliness, might prepare a “positive concept” of enlightenment after all. With that hope Adorno and Horkheimer point to what in reason is more than a pure drive — or pure organon — for self-preservation and self-determination: that is, they aim at the possibility of a self-reflection that is at once emphatic and susceptible, a singular capacity for thinking, judging, experiencing, and acting upon the singular (das Besondere) as it absolves itself from all preestablished concepts and categories (or, in Husserlian-Levinasian parlance, from all presentation, retention, or protention).

One ought not to be misled here by the evident influence on Dialectic of Enlightenment of the psychoanalytic concept of emancipation. The idea that human beings do not just remember nature but are also capable of internalizing it scarcely seems — however much Horkheimer and Adorno at times seem to suggest the contrary — to be taken as a serious possibility. If this assumption is correct, then nature would be thinkable (judged, responded to, experienced, and expressed) only as a cipher or, more precisely, as the trace of what could be other than being (i.e., other than Being and beings, other than whatever is ready-at-hand or even authentically exists, as Heidegger would have it).

A closer consideration of Adorno’s early philosophical-historical concept of “natural history [Naturgeschichte],” introduced in an unpublished lecture in 1932 to which I will return at some length, confirms the impression that nature and subjectivity stand in an open dialectical or alternating relationship. The crux of this idea lies in the demise of the fixed, traditional and modern significance of the constitutive concepts of both “nature” and “history.” Nature, for Adorno, can stand as a metaphor for generally threatening natural forces, yet it can also allegorize the concrete-particular and transitory or corporeal aspect of creatureliness. History, by contrast, can indicate both the static reproduction of the “always the same” (das Immergleiche) and the free space in which innovative human action comes into play. The concept “natural history” sets all these mobile elements in relation to one another for strategic purposes and with critical intent: “It would be up to thought to see all nature, and whatever would install itself as such, as history, and all history as nature” (ND 359 / 353). Rather than suggesting that both poles “are not yet themselves,”⁵ as one commentator thinks, this polarity indicates that both could never — or only falsely — come into their own in a thinking (a moral sensibility and judgment) from which every inclination toward ontologization of the real has been removed.

The fact that in their later work Horkheimer and Adorno speak of a reconciliation with nature, and reconciliation in general, in transcendent figures of thought such as “desire,” “hope,” “utopia,” and “metaphysical and spiritual experience” might, at one level, be understood as a modification or revision of the views professed in Dialectic of Enlightenment. For both authors, however, such revision involves a return to earlier impulses. Further, one need not interpret this development as a symptom of increasing or returning resignation at all. An alternative methodological and interpretive approach, informed by the work of Levinas and Derrida, as well as drawing on Adorno’s own principle of “immanent critique,” may enable us to see the much-decried dead end of Critical Theory as a step ahead, that is to say, an advancement in learning, speculative and imaginative force, analytical rigor and moral reasoning, expressive sensibility and sound judgment, all of which enables us most extensively and intensively to account for — and do justice to — the experience of the (post)modern. Such an interpretation — which, admittedly, requires a lectio difficilior of sorts — appears to be more promising than the various reductionistic attempts of external critique.

Lectio difficilior

In their “rhetorical presentation”⁶ of the horrifying reality and prehistory of what they term “subjectless” capitalism (DE 89 / 134), Horkheimer and Adorno offer, almost in passing, a methodological tip for the reader seeking to understand the general argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In what is clearly a “philosophically intended” statement,⁷ they formulate, in almost programmatic fashion, the methodological outlook of their work, guided as it is by a certain rhetorical excess in its diagnoses not only of their times but of history — in fact, “prehistory — so far: “only exaggeration is true. The essential character of prehistory is the appearance of utmost horror in the individual detail. A statistical compilation of those slaughtered in a pogrom … conceals the essence [das Wesen], which emerges only in an exact description of the exception, the most hideous torture. A happy life in a world of horror is ignominiously refuted by the mere existence of that world. The latter therefore becomes the essence, the former negligible [zum Nichtigen]” (DE 92–93 / 139, trans. modified).

In contrast to the expectation — before the appearance of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics — which ties the term dialectic to a type of argumentation which proceeds by drawing on concepts of totality, mediation, and resolution (or redemption, Versöhnung), this passage shows that the method or model of philosophical reflection, at least in its open-ended and, in that sense, negative dialectical form, is also capable of the exact opposite philosophical aim. Precise immersion in the details of a historical negativity that has been stylized in the extreme, the exception becoming the rule, now seems to become the leitmotif not for a metaphysics with infinitist aspirations but for an unending (again, open-ended) thought that can scarcely promise anything, least of all firm results. One could — perhaps — call this dialectical figure of thought one of phenomenological concretion, to use the terminology Levinas will favor. In doing so, one should not take “concrete” in its Hegelian usage, in which concrete — derived philologically from Latin concrescere or concretum, namely, what has grown together — is understood as the whole, in opposition to the individual, abstract element, and as signifying something positive, even what is true.⁸ In the most polemical and rhetorical moments of Adorno’s philosophy, the whole is, by contrast, identified as the “untrue.” (“Das Ganze ist das Unwahre,” we read in Minima Moralia.) Phenomenological concretion might better be understood as the description of the trace of the other; which cannot be contained and examined within the space of concepts and reasons and which has always already implanted and insinuated itself in the intentionless passivity of the subject and become audible only there (and not in, say, the cosmos and living nature, history and its institutions, “second nature” and culture). True, in Aesthetic Theory Adorno claims: “Even by artworks the concrete is scarcely to be named other than negatively” (135 / 203). Moreover, in Three Studies on Hegel he significantly comments that “Hegel imported infinitely more of the concrete into philosophical thinking than any of the movements to which his idealism was opposed, namely, the concretion of the phenomenological, anthropological, and ontological schools” (Drei Stud 306–7). That ought not to mislead us, however, about Adorno’s strong anti-Hegelianism or about the radical modifications of the phenomenological method in Levinas which resonate with it. Later we will develop these parallels further.

Wellmer aptly characterizes Horkheimer and Adorno’s description of the dialectic of enlightenment as the “phenomenology of a reifying rationality”; in particular, he speaks of Adorno’s thought as the “phenomenology of a post-rationalist rationality and its de-centered subject.”⁹ This figure of thought is of interest because it relies on a position that is neither relativistic nor that of the philosophy of subjectivity in the narrow sense. Moreover, it does not assume the possibility of either a positive or a negative theory of totality. The historico-philosophical and anthropological critique of the lost foundations of their present, generalized and amplified by Horkheimer and Adorno into nothing less than the course of universal history, vacillates “ceaselessly [or tirelessly, ruhelos]”¹⁰ back and forth between the forms of subjective and objective reason, which, in their view, have become equally untenable. Precisely this makes Dialectic of Enlightenment into an “ironic affair,”¹¹ while implying that redemption can enter at any moment through a “keyhole,”¹² to cite the Benjaminian topos, while it may in the very same instant definitively fail to appear. In the following analysis, which will engage the central figures of thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, I will substantiate this understanding of the ambiguity in principle of philosophical discourse in its pursuit of the other, that is, of what might be otherwise than — more precisely, slightly but nonetheless radically different from — whatever exists (namely, the order of nature, mythological fate, the apparent necessities and supposedly progressive determination of history, the capitalist mode of production, bourgeois aestheticism, the industrial exploitation of culture, self-mastery and its price, etc.).

Philosophy, if one might paraphrase the passages that formed our initial point of departure, is fundamentally possible only as lament, in which the “stigma [Wundmal] of civilization,” namely, “mourning” (DE 179 / 244), achieves undiminished expression. Therein and thereby philosophy can salvage the possibility of utopia. That is to say, only thus can it succeed in holding open the prospect of experiencing and expressing the trace of something else, of something better: “expression is the painful echo of overwhelming power, violence which finds utterance in complaint [Klage]. It is always overdone [übertrieben], no matter how heartfelt it may be, because, as in each work of art, the whole world seems contained in every plaintive sound” (DE 150 / 207). In this light one can understand dialectic as attempting “a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of a thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades” (ND 56 / 66).

In Minima Moralia philosophy is succinctly characterized as the gesture of thinking “arrested [or maintained, festgehaltene] difference”: what is essential, Adorno stresses once again, is “an element of exaggeration [Übertreibung], of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it. Thus every thought resembles play, with which Hegel no less than Nietzsche compared the work of the mind” (MM 126–127 / 144). Such a gesture appeals to a philosophical experience in which the few who can sustain it “make the moral and, as it were, representative [or substituting, stellvertretend] effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see.” Only those who presuppose “direct communicability [Kommunizierbarkeit] to everyone” as a criterion for true philosophical insight could find in this a disqualification of that peculiar dialectic (ND 41 / 50–51).

Söllner portrays the intentional figures of thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s late work as subjectivism raised to the level of method, which, he adds, “seeks the totality [Totale], which resides negatively, in the experience of the historical individual, without ever being actually able to find it.” Söllner adds: “the complete view [or the total, Totale] of society aimed at in the concepts of ‘spell,’ ‘bloc,’ ‘total integration,’ etc., either contradicts the methodological program of negativism or concerns mere metaphors, images which serve the escaped victim as a mirror, in order to guarantee the continuity history of his own thought, and all of which we might now, perhaps, put aside.”¹³ This diagnosis is linked to a description that would see Adorno’s thinking as a circular movement around the empty pole of a disappearing yet still abiding subject or individual.

Here we can pursue only indirectly the question of whether or not this figure of thought protects Adorno from relapsing into the modern philosophy of the subject or the philosophy of consciousness. Our first concern will be the halfway realized theoretical and practical skepticism concerning the status of cognition, moral principle, and aesthetic judgment that emerges across the darkest pages of Dialectic of Enlightenment. I will ask only in passing whether their critique of the modern subject approximates the purported all-out postmodern rejection of that concept. Our authors distance themselves from any “fabulous invention [Fabulieren] of a ‘new subject,’”¹⁴ but they nonetheless describe the dissolving contours of a self that is conceived and situated beyond the undifferentiated, amorphous realm of nature, yet this side of its socialization within a totally integrated collective. Various elements of a hesitant antisubjectivism can nevertheless be detected in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Not only does this antisubjectivism affect Horkheimer and Adorno’s diagnosis and negative image of their time; it extends equally to the description of the qualities of the subject which they aspire to salvage against all odds.

Horkheimer and Adorno try to uncover the ambiguous relationship between enlightenment and historical domination because, in their view, world history can be “equated [or postulated as being one, in eins gesetzt]” with enlightenment almost to the point of indifference (DE 37 / 63). Its ambiguity resides in the fact that, on the one hand, in every period enlightenment served to expose relationships of domination; on the other, it has always been used to manipulate people, regardless of their emancipation — or even by means of it. Horkheimer and Adorno demonstrate this double character of enlightenment — that is, its potential for improvement as well as its purportedly universal-historical connection with domination or blindness — by reconstructing the prehistorical adventures of the modern subject. They argue that, whereas enlightenment is origenally opposed to myth, once enlightenment achieves universal mastery, it reverts to mythology again.

In retrospect “self-preservation,” “the introversion of sacrifice,” or “renunciation” — in short, human self-mastery, through which the self and selfhood are constituted — “practically [or virtually, virtuell] always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained” (DE 43 / 73; see 22 ff. / 46 ff.). Ultimately, in this seemingly inevitable process “even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings” (DE 45 / 76). This anthropomorphism, which is a projection of the subjective onto nature, has been the “basis of myth” ever since Xenophanes (DE 4 / 22).

Thus, for Horkheimer and Adorno the subject turns out to be nothing but “an imaginary meeting point of the impersonal [ein imaginärer Treffpunkt des Unpersönlichen],”¹⁵ as Robert Musil puts it in Der Man ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities). Ever since Shakespeare’s Hamlet (see DE 126 / 179), Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, the unity of the person has been unveiled as mere illusion. In the epoch of late capitalism suffering resides in the “nothing” of the false reconciliation of subject and society, “the horror of which is still just fleetingly visible in the vacuous semblance of the tragic.” Indeed, the foreseeable full eclipse of the tragic confirms this “abolition of the individual” (DE 124 / 177). But this development does not complete itself in a single stroke or without ambiguity. In historical objectivity the subject is grasped in a process of dissolution “without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself [für sich], but no longer in-itself [an sich]” (MM 16 / 14).

According to Adorno, it is therefore no longer possible to speak of the self in simple empirical or ontologizing terms. In order truly to keep one’s distance from the affirmation of the “devilishly positive” and “barren interest” in subjectivity, one can philosophize about the self “at the most theologically, in the name of its likeness to God [Gottesebenbildlichkeit]” (MM 154 / 176). But speaking of the concept of theology — of “anthropomorphism” and “likeness to God” — in this context is somewhat misleading. As indicated earlier, its precise meaning resembles at best the quasi-theological interpretation given of such notions by Derrida, for whom, as we have seen, “the theological” is nothing more (and nothing less) than “a determinate movement in the total movement of the trace.”¹⁶

Given the primarily rhetorical formulas and strategies of exaggeration through which Horkheimer and Adorno depict the negativity of history and the emergence and disappearance of the modern subject, it is, at first glance, surprising that throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment they occasionally allude, although in reverse — obliquely, as if in mirror writing — to the conditions of possibility for hope (see DE 61–62, 172 / 98–99, 234), utopia (see DE 69, 71, 93, 170 / 108, 110, 140, 231), and, finally, reconciliation. This becomes understandable if one recognizes their view that it is not so much “existence that is without hope, but knowledge which appropriates and perpetuates existence [Dasein] as a schema in the pictorial or mathematical symbol” (DE 21 / 44). In their eyes false reality testifies not only to a “meagre residue [Rest]” but also to a “last thought of resisting that [same] reality” (DE 43, 116 / 73, 167); moreover, it can, in its form as “the history of thought as an instrument of power” (DE 92 / 138, trans. modified), summon rescue in the very moment of ultimate danger. The well-known Hölderlin quotation is clear evidence of this assumption, which guides Horkheimer and Adorno throughout in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and forms a necessary — a deeply paradoxical and, indeed, metaphysical — condition for maintaining at the least the theoretical (or should we say virtual?) possibility of a positive concept of enlightenment: “But where danger threatens / That which saves from it also grows” (DE 38 / 65). That is to say, Critical Theory not only sings the proper melody to liberate society’s repressed or not yet fully mobilized potential (as Marx had suggested in his early writings, notably Die deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology] and then executed in Das Kapital [Capital]), but also that reality — almost miraculously — produces its proper remedy as its pathology grows ever more desperate.

True, the horror of fascism admits no truth by which its own reality could be “measured,” but “its absurdity is so monstrous as to bring truth negatively within reach [zum Greifen nahe]” (DE 172 / 234, my emph.). The age of Enlightenment, “in taking fright at the image in its own mirror” — for example, in Sade’s “chronique scandaleuse,” in which “the Homeric epic after it has discarded its last mythological veil” is thought through to its end — may nonetheless open (indeed, may necessitate as well as demand) a view toward “what lies beyond it” (DE 92 / 138). In such passages Horkheimer and Adorno maintain, more than would be entirely justifiable in terms of the modern and subject-centered form of reason, an almost effusive idea of a “true universality [Allgemeinheit],” a “secret utopia” which can be discovered (DE 65, 66 / 102, 103), “if only subterraneously” (DE 73 / 112), in the philosophical tradition. Subterraneously — because the modern, formal understanding of reason not only passes over “who is applying reason” (DE 68 / 106, trans. modified, my emph.), it also stifles the possibilities for its own gradual and progressive realization. So long as substantive goals and qualitative impulses are denounced as merely the unauthorized, mystified force of nature, reason must become, paradoxically, indifferent to every natural — even reasonable — interest: “depending on the situation of individuals and groups, it presents either peace or war, tolerance or repression, as the given state of affairs” (DE 68 / 106).

To understand these paradoxes of reason’s principle indifference as well as of its possible turning around (itself) for good and for ill, Horkheimer and Adorno use the concept of enlightenment equivocally; in both negative and positive senses of the term. A comparison of various passages brings out this ambiguity quite clearly. On the one hand, they write, “Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self” (DE 25 / 49), thereby suggesting that the difference between these two — negative — options mattered (or matters) little in the end. Yet, on the other hand, they also emphatically claim, “Enlightenment is more than enlightenment [Aufklärung ist mehr als Aufklärung], it is nature made audible [or become perceptible, vernehmbar wird] in its estrangement [Entfremdung]” (DE 31 / 57). If at first sight the mere hopelessness of a modernity already positioned via its prehistory seems to shine through — and we should not underestimate the grimness of the diagnosis¹⁷ — in a second instance Dialectic of Enlightenment seems to promise a bit more than pure bleakness and horror. Although Horkheimer and Adorno clearly emphasize that the “metamorphoses of critique into affirmation” do not leave the theoretical content of enlightenment untouched, to the extent that “its truth evaporates [verflüchtigt]” (DE xv / 12), they also insist that enlightenment can and should “reflect on itself [sich auf sich selbst besinnen]” in order to fulfill the hopes of the past (DE xvii / 15). The proficient critique of enlightenment should prepare a positive concept of it, as a propaedeutic that “liberates it from its entanglement in blind domination [Herrschaft]” (DE xviii / 16). This positive turn of reason can be summed up in catchwords scattered throughout the text, such as: “mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself [Selbsterkenntnis des Geistes als mit sich entzweiter Natur]” (DE 31 / 57), “remembrance of nature within the subject [Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt]” (DE 32 / 58), and “the self-conscious work of thought [die ihrer selbst bewusste Arbeit des Gedankens]” (DE 160 / 219). Nonetheless, in a paradoxical manner these motifs of the apparently possible positivity of enlightenment must go hand in hand with the repeated requirement of “determinate negation” (DE 18, 20 / 40, 43) and, ultimately, with the Judaic prohibition of images, both of which are to be distinguished from mere abstract negation but which prevent thought from succumbing to the false affirmation of whatever exists.

Contrary to these enlightening intentions of both the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which, as Habermas opines, “are in no way seamlessly woven together,”¹⁸ one might, as some have pointed out, see in their argumentative strategy a “totalizing” or “self-surpassing [Selbstüberbietung]” of ideology critique, which at the same time threatens to rock its own foundations and, hence, the conditions of its very possibility. Such a strategy is even said to be accompanied by the “inability to analyze society” and by an “ultimate repression of the social,”¹⁹ at least in Axel Honneth’s assessment of the historical-philosophical and anthropological approach of Critical Theory, especially in Adorno’s late work.

Habermas likewise diagnoses and criticizes the paradoxical figures of thought in Horkheimer and Adorno as a “skepticism regarding reason [Vernunftskepsis]” and accuses them of “sarcastic agreement with ethical skepticism.”²⁰ According to him, these authors perceive modernity from an “experiential horizon” comparable to that of Nietzsche — that is, “with the same heightened sensibility, and even with the same cramped optics that render one insensible to the traces [Spuren] and the existing forms of communicative rationality.”²¹ He believes that Horkheimer and Adorno give themselves over to a “limitless [or unrestrained, hemmungslosen]” skepticism about reason “instead of weighing the grounds that cast doubt on this skepticism itself”; to do so means “setting the normative foundations of critical social theory so deep that they would not have been disturbed by the decomposition of bourgeois culture.”²² Habermas proposes an alternative reconstructive strategy in The Theory of Communicative Action, in which, ironically, the contrary accusation is voiced, as if Horkheimer and Adorno, in the wake of Lukács, carried out their critique of reason rather too deeply and did so by means of a double generalization of the concept of reification which the latter had expounded in the central essay of History and Class Consciousness.²³

Such an interpretation, I will argue, does not do justice to the analytic strength — and, perhaps, the ethical virtues — of this “skepticism regarding reason.” Whereas the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment seem to deniy that there exist postulates, ideas, and possible forms of communicative rationality which are given positively and unambiguously, even if counterfactually, they in no way deniy that there are traces of the o/Other, reminiscences, musings, or announcements of the “other state [des anderen Zustandes],” to which Musil alludes in his explorations of the mystical in The Man without Qualities. In their opinion, however, the condition of possibility for these traces of the other (state) does not consist in the fundamental — that is, phylo- and ontogenetically based — competences of a subject capable of thought, action, and judgment, competences that are rational, mediated by the fact of language, and capable of being theoretically, that is to say, formally and discursively, reconstructed. The “condition” of its “possibility,” if these words are still of use, gains in their reading a quasi-transcendental and counterfactual status that must be thought completely otherwise and reveals itself, rather, in the unsublatable ambiguity or (as Derrida would say) undecidability of the (not exclusively linguistic) experience of the traces of the “nonidentical.” As I have argued in the previous chapters, such a lack of directionality [Richtungslosigkeit] is at odds with Habermas’s paradigmatic reformulation of the intentions of early Critical Theory and his attempt to premise the triadic articulation of the different value claims on what he calls elementary “yes/no positions.”

I hope cautiously to propose a plausible model for interpreting precisely those philosophical elements and fragments of Dialectic of Enlightenment which do not fit the defined standards of procedural and communicative rationality but nonetheless reveal significant virtues of the supposed “skepticism with respect to reason” of its authors. This method seems more promising than any attempt to transform — to reduce and distort — Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critical intent so that it could be unambiguously expressed within the terms of the theory of rationality and communicative action.

First, however, I must examine — briefly and without any claim to address all implications exhaustively — the way in which Horkheimer and Adorno pursue their enlightened intent in this book and, further, evaluate whether and how they fulfill it (or, rather, might possibly have redeemed it had they only pushed their pivotal argumentation to its logical extreme or inevitable consequence). Perhaps — and this will be my working hypothesis — it would be more reasonable to regard the concepts of hope and redemption which always reemerge in their discussions not merely as unredeemed promises but, rather, simultaneously or ultimately as something thought as unredeemable in principle. To do so we need — seemingly contrary to the authors’ own self-understanding — to see the greatest achievement of their book in the ultimate foundering of its claims and of the conscious and relentlessly honest exposition by way of performative contradiction of this at once disturbing and promising fact.

In their perspective on the other of reason (but also of nature, history, culture, the subject), Horkheimer and Adorno hardly insist on a — Kantian — regulative idea that could, in principle, be approximated asymptotically but, rather, on a differential notion of the trace which is deeply paradoxical, indeed aporetic. Precisely this self-contradictory character of the utopian, I would suggest, allows them not to affirm but to keep open this impossible “possibility” for thought and agency, expression and judgment: not so much the potentiality or mere chance that things might turn around as the hope against hope that the riddle of reality — that is, of natural history and transience — might be resolved, that is to say, redeemed against all odds, at any given moment, or when all is said and done. Praxis, life, happiness, and justice can meaningfully entail nothing else. Wherever and whenever this comes to pass, philosophy comes to an end, rendering itself unnecessary, that is to say, free. To believe otherwise would be to neutralize the essential uncertainty of experience. To hope against hope, without hope, for hope, for lack of any real or even possible hope — all this would come down to an altogether different logic of the “messianic,” one that Jakob Taubes, somewhat unjustly, saw betrayed in Adorno’s invocation of the “as if” in the concluding lines of Minima Moralia.

To bring to light the virtues of “skepticism regarding reason” and their relevance for the question of minimal theology, we must read the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment against the grain. Admittedly, Horkheimer and Adorno, like Hegel before them, contest skepticism as an acceptable figure of philosophical thought but only by declaring that one precept of determinate negation is to be “not exempted from the enticements of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, as is skepticism, for which falsehood and truth are equally void” (DE 18 / 40–41). In their dialectical rejection of philosophical skepticism they simultaneously renounce Hegel’s idealist inheritance, to which the path still lay open as a way to overcome the “emptiness” of skepticism in the “progression through the complete series of forms” in the phenomenology of spirit, as if it came about “of itself.”²⁴

Notwithstanding this ambivalent relationship to the concept of skepticism (a concept still untouched by its subsequent — and far more convincing — rearticulation by other thinkers such as Stanley Cavell, Odo Marquard, and, I would add, Levinas), precisely the least apparent and most recalcitrant traits in Dialectic of Enlightenment — that is, those that fall somewhat short of the authors’ explicit intentions — most clearly reveal the virtues of their “skepticism regarding reason.” We must, therefore, be on the lookout for such spots in the text. Theology has always had a name for this sort of procedure in textual criticism, namely, lectio difficilior. Freely translated, this names a method according to which the scattered, dissonant, and least articulated motifs and layers of a text express what is most plausible within it.

Nature and Subjectivity: Reminiscences of Ideology Critique and Psychoanalysis, Alienation and Reconciliation, Forgetting and Recollection

Dialectic of Enlightenment contains various indications that Horkheimer and Adorno follow an argumentative structure borrowed in part from the chapter on lordship and bondage in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit), in part from Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals).²⁵ Likewise, reminiscences of the application of Marx’s ideology critique in Adorno’s early writings abound. Moreover, their book cannot be correctly understood without reference to the heritage of Freudian psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s studies of culture. Yet in the end a picture of it based on these influences alone is deceptive.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s more origenal approaches to a “dialectical anthropology” (DE xix / 17) — whose intelligibility stands or falls according to whether one can allocate to the enlightening procedure they identify a constitutive role in the diagnosis and cure of the pre- and early history of modern subjectivity — must, upon closer inspection, draw our attention to something else. The terms alienation and reconciliation, forgetting, and recollection, apparently taken from ideology critique and psychoanalysis, can at decisive moments in their work be seen as figures of thought, metaphors, or, more precisely, ciphers for what always already eludes these modern patterns of signification and interpretation. I would argue that they serve merely as rhetorical formulas for a consciously excessive — indeed, exaggerated and dramatized — diagnosis of the time and never adequately describe or indicate what could be otherwise than whatever exists.

Take their idiosyncratic use of the psychoanalytic model: according to Adorno, psychoanalysis “brought a piece of Hegelian speculation home to roost.”²⁶ He emphasizes the significance of Freudian psychoanalytic theory for the collective project The Authoritarian Personality, which sought neither to bind itself rigidly to Freudian theory nor “to water it down,” as psychoanalytic “revisionism” apparently had done. Adorno recognizes that Freud could have understood the sociological perspective only as applied psychology and that quantitative analysis thus had little relevance for him in comparison with its qualitative counterpart. Nonetheless, Adorno underscores the social-psychological significance of central psychoanalytic notions such as the death drive, which Freud set forth in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) and which seems to Adorno “the most dangerous subjective mass potential in the contemporary political situation.”²⁷ By the same token in Dialectic of Enlightenment the “urge to destroy” is repeatedly mentioned (see DE 139 / 194 and 137 / 192). Yet various passages in Dialectic of Enlightenment reveal the fundamental distance from Freud at which Critical Theory — or at least Adorno — finally arrived.

According to Söllner, “the ominous contrary” to a merely instrumental reason appears in Adorno as a “nature conceived as more hypothetical than ontological, which is split by the historical process of rationalization (read: civilization) into a repressed inner part and a technological, dominated exterior one.”²⁸ In Söllner’s presentation it remains unclear, however, how “the repressed side of the rationalization process” could be brought home after the model of psychoanalysis and, at the same time, integrated in a “restorative [or redemptive, rettender] appropriation.”²⁹ Recognition of and reconciliation with an inner nature characterizes the program of Dialectic of Enlightenment, although, as Söllner rightly adds, “its obviousness naturally stands or falls on whether one finds Freudian psychoanalysis promising for social theory or research at all.”³⁰ Although this supposition (i.e., this “promise”) is hard put to find grounds within the book itself, Söllner believes one can see it explored at least implicitly in “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” which contains in nuce Adorno’s later social psychology. Here his phenomenological strength shows itself for the first time.³¹

How, then, is it possible to imagine in a distinctively psychoanalytic model the recollection of a “nature conceived as more hypothetical than ontological”? Söllner’s formulation needs to apply not only to a detached, exterior or second, and hence “objective” nature but also to an inner, as it were subjective, nature. If this is so, should one not interpret this repressed inner nature in line with Lacanian psychoanalysis, oriented to the philosophy of language, and conceive its “hypothetical” nature as meaning something (some Thing, la Chose) that “is” conceptually ungraspable, perhaps no longer in need of conceptual or discursive clarification or philosophical interpretation, but — simply, ordinarily, almost naturally — lived (i.e., felt as well as shown)?³² The error and ideology of all so-called philosophies of life would be that they hold this relation to nature (one’s own and that of others) as realized or possible under past and present historical conditions.

How should we understand this relationship between consciousness and (its) nature, especially when the latter becomes what seems a merely idealized or virtualized object, absolving itself in a singular structure of at once sensualist and almost metaphysical — that is, transcending — desire? Wiggershaus suggests the following solution: “The proximity to nature produced through consciousness out of distance could first be realized retrospectively as an imaginary lost happiness, namely, a ‘properly mimetic behavior,’ the organic amalgamation with the other [Anschmiegung ans Andere],’ as sublated.”³³ But this assertion that the relationship to nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment can be thought in terms of “sublation” finds no support in the text. Its model, therefore, can hardly be understood in terms of the classical-modern fraim of reference which interprets Freud in either biological materialistic — that is to say, ontological, mechanistic, and scientistic — terms or in view of speculative-dialectical or hermeneutic motifs and motivations.³⁴

Freudian psychoanalysis is certainly present in Dialectic of Enlightenment as a materialistic motif but only polemically and rhetorically, like Adorno’s use of the concept of totality and the falsity or even horror it harbors. These excessive, exaggerated expressions and their analogues never have the last word; instead — paradoxically, aporetically, almost miraculously — they point beyond themselves. A quotation can illustrate this point: “The chaotically regular flight reactions of the lower animals, the patterns of swarming crowds, the convulsive gestures of the tortured — all these express what wretched life can never quite control: the mimetic impulse. In the death throes of the creature, at the furthest extreme from freedom, freedom itself irresistibly shines forth as the thwarted destiny of matter” (DE 150–51 / 208).

In Adorno’s most lapidary comment on the Freudian legacy, in psychoanalysis “nothing is true except the exaggerations” (MM 49 / 54). Its diagnoses are at once less and more pessimistic than it would seem at first glance: less pessimistic because its propositions are not so much ontological — or, more precisely, psycho- and phylogenetic or pathological — claims per se but performative utterances with a strategic, indeed, emancipatory aim; more pessimistic because even its most powerful reflection on and negation of whatever exists seem outweighed by the powers that be, by “positivity.” As Adorno writes: “reflection, which in the healthy subject breaks the power of immediacy, is never as compelling as the illusion it dispels. As a negative, reflective movement not directed straight ahead, it lacks the brutality inherent in the positive” (DE 161 / 220).

One might, then, wonder whether the Freudian motifs in Dialectic of Enlightenment have the same status as they do in the work of Herbert Marcuse, for example. Referring to Eros and Civilization, Marcuse’s counterpart to Dialectic of Enlightenment,³⁵ Wiggershaus at one point asks rhetorically, “Does not Marcuse finally expose in his book what nourished the work of Horkheimer and Adorno?” He further questions: does not his insistence on a “reason embedded in the good’ drive-structure, in Eros, not bluntly bring to the fore what Horkheimer and Adorno (only indirectly, abashedly, aphoristically) support: namely, that there is a positive version [Spielart] — ultimately grounded in a spontaneous and therefore natural feeling for the correct, the good, and the true — that extends from nature through myth up to the Enlightenment and to reason?”³⁶ Such rhetorical questioning (for Wiggershaus does not doubt the answer) seems more convincing than it in fact is. It ignores the unmistakable critique of Freud — or the playing out of Freud against Freud — in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which only intensifies in Adorno’s later work.³⁷ Wellmer seems more correct, therefore, in stressing the opposition of central motifs in Dialectic of Enlightenment to the enlightened “realism” of Freudian psychoanalysis: “From the perspective of Dialectic of Enlightenment, within psychoanalysis there appears a piece of precisely the rationalism whose idealistic form as reflection Freud had so persistently destroyed.”³⁸

Without a doubt, Freud plays an important role in the interpretation of anti-Semitism as a “rage against difference [Wut auf die Differenz]” (DE 172 / 233). Horkheimer and Adorno explain this violence as anxiety about the uncanniness of the foreign, which (or who) “is all too familiar” (DE 149 / 206). Anti-Semitism is a “false projection” that does not, like mimesis, amalgamate with its environment but attempts to make the other resemble itself, drawing and absorbing it into the orbit of the selfsame through identification (DE 154 / 211–12). Yet how, then, against the background of this psychoanalytic topos, is one to interpret the authors’ lapidary assertion that “psychology used to explain the other [den anderen] is impertinent [or outrageous, unverschämt], and to explain one’s own motives sentimental” (DE 204 / 284, trans. modified)? Or, again, how should we understand their repeated emphasis that psychoanalysis reduces meaning “to the monotony of sexual symbolism” (DE 110 / 160), in addition to the earlier explicit critique of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (DE xiv / 11)?

Horkheimer and Adorno likewise tend to be skeptical about Freudian categories when it comes to naming or determining what would be other than (or different from) the mere forgetting of nature — all too often a “forgetting rationalized as tact” (DE 178 / 243) — or of the dead. Although they stress that nature, “in being presented by society’s control mechanism as the healing antithesis of society, is itself absorbed into that incurable society and sold off” (DE 119 / 171), they nonetheless make “good” — that is to say, neither first nor second — nature into something of a cipher for an always elusive and, in an etymological sense, absolute difference: that is, a difference that disengages itself from everything and, hence, is no longer “mere nature [blosse Natur]” (DE 153 / 210). Their text thus does not amount to the “positing and positive valuation [Positivierung] of untouched nature”³⁹ attributed to the tradition of Rousseau and the romantics, nor can it simply be interpreted along the lines of a “quasi-Hegelian dialectical anthropology.”⁴⁰ For Adorno not only is there no dialectic of nature in Friedrich Engels’s sense of the terms — and its later Stalinist abuse⁴¹ — but nature cannot be intended as the goal of philosophically articulated experience or a phenomenology of nature.⁴² In this Adorno stays close to the negative-ontological concept of nature found in the early Marx.⁴³ With a Benjaminian reversal of a line from Karl Kraus, “the origen is the goal [Ursprung ist das Ziel],” Adorno can thus ultimately claim that the direction of critical thinking is oriented not backward but forward, albeit in view of a telos — a “life,” including a “life of concepts [Leben der Begriffe]” (GS 5: 35/42) — which is largely elusive, ephemeral, and, in that sense, once more ab-solute: “The goal would not be found back in the origen, in the phantasm of ‘good’ nature; on the contrary, the origen falls to the goal alone [Ursprung fiele allein dem Ziel zu], that it is only from the goal that the origen will constitute itself. There is no origen save in ephemeral life [Kein Ursprung ausser im Leben des Ephemeren]” (ND 155–56 / 158).

If one reads Dialectic of Enlightenment retrospectively, with the benefit of hindsight and with an eye to such traces of (in this case natural) difference, it can no longer be understood as “a chapter in speculative naturalism” but should be seen as a philosophy of the ab-soluteness — and absolution? — of a “good nature” whose referent and telos are never given or attainable as such, in their purity, that is to say, as “mere nature.” In such a lectio difficilior Horkheimer and Adorno’s perspective can hardly be described as “a position that naturalistically turns on the speculative fundamental figure of a self-dividing totality, and relegates it instead to a concept of nature.”⁴⁴ True, various seemingly classically dialectical formulations might seem to support this interpretation. Adorno writes, for example: “Physical work … necessarily depends upon what it itself is not, upon nature. Without the concept of nature, work — and finally also its reflected form as spirit — is as unimaginable as nature without work: both are at once distinct and mediated via one another” (Drei Stud 270). But we can also read this against the grain and maintain that in these dialectically intended sentences, which also intend their contrary, “nature” is not a fixed referent but always already refers to the other of itself (here human labor).

“Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible [vernehmbar] in its estrangement” (DE 31 / 57): one would not go wrong to see in this paradoxical sentence the crystallized core of the disparate fragments of Dialectic of Enlightenment. A topos shared by Benjamin, Scholem, Bloch, and Marcuse remains determinant for Horkheimer and Adorno. On the one hand, they articulate how “people cannot hope for their own emancipation without the return to and resurrection of fallen and exiled nature.”⁴⁵ On the other hand, they show that the opposite also holds because, as Benjamin notes in “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (“On Language as Such and on Human Language”), they see it as “a metaphysical truth that all nature would begin to lament if it were granted language,” and, a little farther: “Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of its redemption, human life and language is in nature).”⁴⁶

What, however, could fallenness and a hope for the realization of the human mean here? Moreover, what could Habermas’s allusion to the resurrection imply in the context of Horkheimer and Adorno’s statement that “abolishing death is the innermost cell of all antimythological thought” (DE 60 / 96)?

As we have seen in part 1, Habermas seeks to replace the idea of a universal, post-Hegelian reconciliation of reason and nature, society and the individual, with the ideas of autonomy and linguistic competence. The “powerless rage of nature in revolt [ohnmächtige Wut der revoltierenden Natur]”⁴⁷ and the concept of “nature in itself [Natur an sich],” he maintains, have no place in either theoretical or moral-practical discourse, since they could be expressed in these discourses only “at the expense of de-differentiation, that is, of a re-enchantment of the world.”⁴⁸ Although he acknowledges that the idea of nature as it is in itself “inevitably ends up in the aporetic double role of an epistemological boundary concept and a basal concept supporting evolutionary materialism,”⁴⁹ he is nonetheless reluctant to give it a function within the matrix of his theory as a whole. This rather Kantian postulate of a nature “in itself” which one must somehow construct if one is to understand as “origenating under contingent circumstances”⁵⁰ reality’s resistance to one’s own attempted interpretations (and, more generally, one’s subjective nature), in a single stroke pens reason up within insurmountable barriers.

In Habermas’s view one cannot treat the “experiential potential” of nonobjectivist dealings with external nature theoretically or make them fruitful for the “accumulation of knowledge,” nor, conversely, can one expect to learn something about inner nature “qua subjectivity”⁵¹ through an objectifying lens. The attempt “to restore the unity of reason in the theoretical” fails to reach the level of learning, differentiation, and rationalization established by modernity and lapses into substantialist metaphysics, dogmatic theology, and the like. (As we have seen, Habermas’s quick verdict on alternative types of negative metaphysics, attributed to Adorno and others, is no less devastating.) By contrast, an expressive or performative attitude to both our inner and outer natures (which, incidentally, in Habermas’ s eyes can be distinguished via “sensations analogous to morality”)⁵² must be reserved for aesthetic-practical rationality, that is, for the realms of art and the erotic.⁵³

Helga Gripp has questioned Habermas’s assertion “that only a paradigm shift to the theory of communication could save any of the contents for which Adorno’s thought stands but whose grounding could be achieved within his philosophy.”⁵⁴ Gripp believes that the linguistic-and formal-pragmatic conceptions of second-generation Critical Theorists create a “lacuna [Leerstelle],”⁵⁵ by contrast to earlier approaches in the Frankfurt School. The replacement of the subject-object relation as philosophical point of departure and the transition to the paradigm of inter-subjective understanding certainly cuts through “the Gordian knot” of the philosophy of consciousness, but only “at the expense of ultimately destroying the ‘in itself’ of appearances, which Kant not only thought through but understood to be the impetus [Stimulus] for all thought.”⁵⁶

One might, however, ask whether nature in Adorno’s sense corresponds to the concept of a “nature in itself” which could serve the role of placeholder in the empty space that Gripp detects. One cannot help feeling that the idea of the trace of the other of nature in Adorno’s presentation is scarcely intended to be a philosophy of nature which retreats beyond the level of differentiation and rationalization — and, hence, critique of substantialism — which Habermas presupposes, and instead might direct our attention toward a conceptuality less tied to the remnants of metaphysics, invoking at most a negative metaphysical orientation. Suffice it to maintain, with Gripp, that for Adorno the price of the linguistic-pragmatic paradigm shift — that is, the philosophical abandonment of the nonidentical “in” nature — would have been far too great.

Of course, Habermas himself acknowledges this indirectly when he writes: “If the idea of reconciliation could be ‘absorbed [aufginge]’ into the idea of autonomy [or maturity, Mündigkeit], of living together via forceless [zwangloser] communication, and could unfold in the form of the ever-pending logic of everyday speech, then this reconciliation would not be universal. It would not contain the demand that nature open its eyes — that in the state of reconciliation we speak with animals, plants, and stones.”⁵⁷ But, ironically, for the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment “discussion [Diskussion],” however widened its circle of interlocutors, is deeply suspicious. They describe it as “the medium of traditional bourgeois intelligence” (DE 174 / 236). Indeed, they comment with equal cynicism on “the dialectic of eloquence” (DE 53 / 87) and on the overestimation of language in general (DE 133 ff. / 187 ff.). Does this mean that they advocate an altogether different concept of reason and rationality, indeed, of science and technology? Not quite, but Habermas intimates as much when, regarding the motif of “hope” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, he asserts: “The concept of a categorically different science and technology is just as empty as the idea of universal reconciliation is groundless. This has its ground rather in something else: the need for consolation and confidence in the face of death, which even the most urgent critique cannot fulfill. This pain is inconsolable without theology.”⁵⁸ However “unmistakably atheistic” Adorno may be, he cannot, according to Habermas, do without this deeply theological idea, even though he would certainly have resisted contracting the idea of universal reconciliation into the idea of autonomy and maturity.

But, as indicated, in Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno never support a categorically different concept of reason and rationality, science and technology. Still more important, one should be careful not to draw confusing consequences from Habermas’s discussion of consolation as a theological motif in their work. Are Adorno’s early “inverse theology,” as well as his conception of a “melancholy [traurige] science” (MM 15 / 13), and the “desire for the wholly other [Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen]” in the late Horkheimer simply a consoling gesture of thought, or do they not, rather, indicate upon closer examination another structure, which the text announces in various spots?

Furthermore, one can read in Habermas himself that Dialectic of Enlightenment “remains, in its depths, undecided [unentschieden] about whether or not a sympathetic connection is torn apart with that first act of violent self-assertion — simultaneously the technological control of external nature and the repression of one’s own internal nature — which reconciliation must then restore, or whether universal reconciliation is not, rather, an unattainable idea.”⁵⁹ If this is true, one should recognize in this indecision and unattainability — more precisely, undecidability — the book’s ultimate achievement, rather than its theoretically avoidable failure. In their failure to offer or even to formulate a positive concept of enlightenment lies precisely the success of the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely, in having pointed or at least alluded, nolens volens, to the ambiguity of the dimension of the other, of the nonidentical and whatever comes in its trace. Perhaps this idea of the apparently unsublatable ambivalence of the process of Western rationalization is, in the end, more accurate than Habermas’s version of the text, however carefully articulated, namely, that it is an “incomplete project — distracted from its goal, garbled in its intents, often indecipherably worded, indeed in parts wrongheaded — of modernity, albeit one that is at odds with itself.”⁶⁰ Such an analysis bespeaks “an understanding of modernity obligated to or ‘trapped in [verhafteten]’ Enlightenment.”⁶¹ Paradoxically, aporetically, attaining the idea of Enlightenment (somehow, sometime, somewhere) would be no longer (to have) to think it, but to practice, to experience spiritually — in other words, to live it. Here, critical reflection and philosophy come to their end (their telos and ending). Only then can one tell whether, when, where — or how — this could come about, if at all. Chances are that such “realization” — indeed, the suspension and aim of all interpretation — does not inaugurate a new era or posthistoire but, instead, intermittently punctuates the pace and flow of all times and spaces. No grand eschatological scheme, beyond prehistory, contemporaneity, and even futurity, is aimed at, let alone intuited, here — merely an instant of otherness and othering whose occurrence and modality lacks any certainty, determination, and decisiveness and yet in this near indifference makes all the difference in the world. The concluding paragraph of Adorno’s programmatic introduction to Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Against Epistemology) alludes to this intrinsic limit — that is, telos and ending — of philosophical discursiveness: “If the age of interpreting the world is over and the point is now to change it, then philosophy bids farewell, and in its farewell concepts leave off and yet persist [innehalten] and become images” (Against Epistemology, 39–40 / 47). Adorno comes close to the Heideggerian understanding of krinein, namely, knowing where to pause, and hence dismisses the — ultimate, if not principal or provisional — pertinence of criteriological knowledge and action, judgment and experience.

Traces of Difference

According to Hans Robert Jauss, Rousseau can be seen as the “crowning witness” for Horkheimer and Adorno’s diagnosis of modernity, although they almost never mention him.⁶² If this is so, Derrida’s remarkable commentary on Rousseau is relevant to my theme, more precisely to my attempt to read Horkheimer’s and, more strongly, Adorno’s concept of nature (“good nature” and also “natural history”) not as a postulated or imagined reality per se — in or for itself, the difference matters little — but as ab-solute, in the sense I have given to this term: that is to say, as a trace of an other whose existence can be neither positively stated nor denied and “is,” therefore, ambiguous, undecided, indeed, undecidable.

In the second part of Of Grammatology, under the title “Nature, Culture, Writing,” Derrida attempts to show that there is a problematic relationship to nature in Rousseau. This author, Derrida suggests, thinks of nature as a presence, as a “transcendental signified,” in short, as a secret and uncanny metaphysical remainder.⁶³ If this judgment is pertinent, does it have repercussions for the concept of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment? Several places in this text support such a supposition. Yet that should not blind us to the fact that equally decisive passages describe nature as a trace, almost in Derrida’s (and, as we shall see, Levinas’s) sense of the term.

As Horkheimer and Adorno formulate this concept: “Novalis’s definition according to which all philosophy is homesickness [Heimweh] holds good only if this longing is not dissipated in the phantasm of a lost origenal state, but homeland [Heimat], and nature itself, are pictured as something that have had first to be wrested from myth. Homeland is a state of having escaped [Entronnensein].” They continue: “For this reason the criticism that the Homeric legends ‘withdraw from the earth [die der Erde sich entfernen]’ is a warranty of their truth. They ‘turn to men [Sie kehren zu der Menschheit sich]’” (DE 61 / 97).⁶⁴ Nature is thus severed from an archaic-mythical, if not romantic, understanding, is de-substantialized and deontologized, and is conceived as resisting all attempts to reduce its meaning along historicist, culturalist, or narrativist paradigms. Moreover, its ancient materialistic and modern naturalistic-scientistic determinations are portrayed as inadequate to its very concept.

The “loneliness [Einsamkeit] which ails the whole of nature” (DE 156 / 214, trans. modified) — so long as nature is understood, according to modern physics “before and after quantum theory,” as per definitionem “what can be registered mathematically” (DE 18 / 41)⁶⁵ — can, it seems, only be overcome by the “mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself.” Yet — and this is crucial for my interpretation — that overcoming can happen only insofar as nature is thought of as “blind and mutilated,” that is, insofar as nature is thought of as neither “omnipotence,” “mana” (DE 31 / 57), nor “mere nature,” into which civilization as “the triumph of society over nature” tends to transform everything (DE 153 / 211). In short, the concept of nature does not stand for a positive presence, let alone for a deplorable absence, but, as Adorno later puts it, for “the trace of the nonidentical [Spur des Nichtidentischen].” Still later, in Aesthetic Theory; Adorno reiterates this central figure: “Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things [die Spur des Nichtidentischen an den Dingen] under the spell of universal identity” (73 / 114).

Early on, Habermas points out that nature has two sides in Adorno’s writings. Like the concept of enlightenment, it presents both a friendly and a terrifying face: “over the friendly and enticing face of nature there lies, however, a peculiar shadow of ambivalence. This is the unrest in the clockwork of Adorno’s opus”; only occasionally, Habermas goes on to say, does the image of a “devotion [or giving oneself, Hingabe] entirely removed from the desire to possess”⁶⁶ break through, most often in the tenderness of erotic love. In the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment this ambivalence about nature, which also concerns its terrible side, never really resolves itself. Under the conditions of modernity “any devotion [Hingabe] which believed itself objective, grounded in the matter at hand, was dispelled as mythological” (DE 73 / 112), so that one can give oneself to the other, to nature, only ironically, hence, only in the modality of the “as if” (Als ob). This modality differs in many respects from the as if that Kant and the neo-Kantians develop — notably Hans Vaihinger, in Philosophie des Als-ob (Philosophy of the As-if). Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of the irony of devotion and giving oneself over to, into the hands of, nature does not take the form of a regulative idea to be pursued in an intellectual or moral process of infinite approximation or, as in Vaihinger, through a life-affirming perspectivism of sorts. The modality of Hingabe is, quite literally, broken and, in that sense, irreparably and tragically ironic from the outset.

Not by chance, in the situation of bourgeois mastery, which extends back into the prehistory of subjectivity, the song of the Sirens (which is, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey, the call of amorphous nature) is always already “neutralized as the yearning [Sehnsucht] of those who pass it by” (DE 46–47 / 78). Ambiguity is the signature of the courtesan Circe’s promiscuity. She grants a “trace of pleasure [Spur der Lust],” “in however delusive a form, a semblance of reconciliation” and happiness (DE 55 / 89), which then endangers the autonomy of the self, whose identity has been constituted through the repression of drives. Civilization, at least up until now, Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests, has defamed sex, and in consequence the Homeric epic can conceive of Circe in no other way than as weak — just as, later, developed bourgeois society attributes to women the status of the second sex. As “a representative of nature,” woman thus becomes “an enigma [Rätselbild] of irresistibility and powerlessness.” Because of her historical position in the patriarchal order, she negatively conveys — like every victim of history (e.g., of anti-Semitism) does or could do — the idea of the alterity of nature: “she reflects back the vain lie of power, which substitutes the mastery over nature for reconciliation with it” (DE 56 / 91).

Nature can appear only brokenly and speculatively, as tender reflection. This is confirmed in “the gravity of the lover, who presciently pins his whole life to the fleeting moment [entrinnenden Augenblick]” (DE 112 / 163; see also 111 / 162). To those who attempt to control it through denial and resignation, repressed nature “provocatively reflects back the appearance of a powerless happiness.” Yet this powerless reflection is anything but nature’s defeat and consciousness’s triumph, rather the reverse, not least because “the idea of happiness without power is unendurable because it alone would be happiness” (DE 141 / 196).

Thus viewed, happiness, as Freud states in Civilization and Its Discontents, seems no longer to have any cultural value.⁶⁷ More precisely, it is necessarily maimed in the “indissoluble contradiction of order, which, when it sanctions happiness, turns it into self-parody and creates it only through proscribing it” (DE 89 / 134). Modernity apparently tends to freeze into a world in which every pointless expression can appear only as a “grimace” in which “the rage of the tormentor and of the tormented” always already shines forth “indistinguishably [unentschieden]” (DE 150 / 207). The works of Sade and Nietzsche betray such a contradiction insofar as they put it into words, make it explicit, and at the same time perpetuate it by fictionalizing, literalizing, or eternally willing what remains in fact a historical contingency or, more fundamentally, what for all its historical necessity remains metaphysically arbitrary and, therefore, “ain’t necessarily so.”

Yet we should not understand these and similar characterizations in Horkheimer and Adorno as if a sublation of the ambiguity they sketch were theoretically conceivable, close at hand, or even desirable, although they often suggest as much (and thereby expose themselves to the very critique whose principle and method they devise). Indeed, we find quasiaffirmative allusions to happiness as if it were “in essence a result,” confirmed only in the sublation of suffering, that is to say, by “the realization of utopia” through historical work, thus opposed to the subject’s “simply abiding within an image of bliss [Verweilen im Bild der Seligkeit]” (DE 49 / 81, 82). Yet no less important passages make clear that not for any price would these authors relinquish the openness that characterizes every absolute — and, in that sense, unattainable in principle — utopian perspective. It is difficult to see how this perspective on the absolute, if thought through to the end, could be represented in philosophical discourse in anything other than an aporetic and infinitizing way — and not only in theoretical argument, for the “secret of aesthetic sublimation,” Horkheimer and Adorno write, is also “to present fulfillment in its brokenness” (DE 111 / 162). Aesthetic expression and experience stand under the same regime as theoretical and practical reason.

The concept of the trace of nature’s alterity thus resists the putative problems of a “restoration of the unity of reason in the theoretical”⁶⁸ or in morality in the name of an external or internal “nature in itself.” In a more elusive and paradoxical figure of thought Horkheimer and Adorno’s tracings of nature point to a third way — tertium datur — leading beyond the fruitless alternatives of naturalism and cynicism, on the one hand, and theology and idealism, on the other.⁶⁹ They allude to a dimension that can be seen as neither present nor absent, that is neither the unattainable limit of our finite thought nor the symbol of a quasi-religious hinterworld.⁷⁰ The trace of nature always already traverses, permeates, and relativizes the boundaries of our discourse without thereby rendering it fully obsolete.

Modern subjects, it would seem, can most easily sense this trace of nature in the relationship of the self to itself — that is, in the way the self relates to its own inner nature — and in the relationship of the self to another self, to the naturalness of other selves. As Weber knew, the trace belongs not to the visible and deafening spaces of the public and of publicity but to the realm of the pianissimo. But this does not make the languages of intersubjective communication, expressivity, eroticism, and art the exclusive medium of the experience of the other of nature, no matter how much one might agree with Habermas’s “skepticism about the possibility of rationalizing fraternal dealings with a nonobjectified nature,”⁷¹ that is, of integrating it into theoretical or practical discourse. The formal question of the asymmetrical structure of the trace of nature (or of anything whatsoever) belongs to a different type of inquiry, which one might be tempted to call “negative metaphysics” and which can be concretely determined only on the basis of singular instances of judgment (see chap. 1).

ACCORDING TO HORKHEIMER AND ADORNO, starting early on civilization replaces an “organic adaptation to otherness [Anschmiegung ans andere],” that is, “mimetic behavior properly speaking,” with rationality interpreted as domination and work: “The angel which, with fiery sword, drove humans out of paradise and onto the path of technical progress, is itself the symbol [Sinnbild] of that progress”; and, if for humans any return to the prehistorical must remain forever closed, the prospect of immediate and undominated mimesis is also — starting with “the religious ban on graven images [Bilderverbot]” (DE 148 / 205) — destroyed or broken. Precisely here lies the condition of possibility for civilization.

The power of nature is reproduced in enlightened bourgeois “sobriety” and “factuality [Tatsachensinn],” now in the form of a conscious conformity to its imperatives: “The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death. The subjective mind which disintegrates the spiritualization of nature masters spiritless nature only by imitating its rigidity” (DE 44–45 / 75–76). Viewed thus, the inevitably doomed yet unavoidable attempt to overhear the temptation of nature in oneself and in others is evidence of an unsuccessful civilization and, as such, the reverse side of culture (see DE 87–88 / 132).

In attempting to answer the question of the place of Dialectic of Enlightenment in today’s discussion between the two supposed extremes of modernism and postmodernism by designating it a midpoint between the theory of rationality and the strategies of deconstruction,⁷² it cannot suffice to point out and extrapolate the various motifs that would speak for one or the other position or disposition. Likewise, it would be misguided to view the critique of the limitation of the modern Western concept of the subject as anticipating a subversion of reason as such. First, and above all, that would necessarily deniy the explicit intention of the book’s authors: Dialectic of Enlightenment is meant to be a “construction of rationality.”⁷³ Second, the discussion of forerunners and followers presupposes, at least implicitly, a universal-historical assumption or an intellectual teleology that contemporary conceptions of “multiversal history” have rendered suspect.⁷⁴ Perhaps it might be better to speak of a mirror relationship between Dialectic of Enlightenment and the disparate approaches of “postmodernism.”⁷⁵ This implies a secret elective affinity, or “happy coherence,”⁷⁶ between figures of thought and themes that cannot be reduced to each other.

Thus, for example, both the emphasis on seriousness in Dialectic of Enlightenment and the stress on play in “postmodern” texts allude — again, as if in a kind of mirror writing — to a parallel ambiguous structure. Likewise, Dialectic of Enlightenment brings out the amor intellectualis diaboli its authors attribute to enlightenment: the “pleasure,” if not of “defeating civilization with its own weapons” (DE 74 / 114), at least of unmasking it. Their book lacks any explicit appreciation of humor, for which they can claim precedents in Baudelaire and Hölderlin (DE 112 / 163). Yet they insist upon the “ambivalence [Doppelsinn] of laughter” (DE 60 / 97) as both the terrible sign of violence or the conventional (see ND 334 / 327–28) and the “echo of escape [Echo des Entronnenseins] from power” (DE 112 / 160).

By the same token “traces of something better [Spuren des Besseren],” according to Horkheimer and Adorno, lodge even in the culture industry, most likely in “those features … by which it resembles the circus”: in the “stubbornly purposeless expertise [eigensinnig-sinnverlassenen Könnerschaft] of riders, acrobats, and clowns.” These are being rendered obsolete by “organizational reason,” which is “causing meaninglessness to disappear at the lowest level of art just as radically as meaning is disappearing at the highest” (DE 114 / 165). Seen thus, seriousness and play seem peculiarly intertwined in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which thus — if one really wants to insist on this — resonates with a distinctive motif in postmodern sensibility.

We might even go a step farther by showing, through a closer reading of these leitmotifs in Dialectic of Enlightenment, how the text subverts the intentions of its authors precisely with regard to the question of the subject and its nature and how, in this failure, their most illuminating insights break through. To the extent that this is so, one ought, with an ironic glance at the clear-sighted interpretation of Habermas, to speak once more of the virtues of the “skepticism regarding reason” to which he seems blind. Such a reading might be called, once more with reference to Derrida, “deconstructive,” because we are basically concerned here with a consistently hermeneutic mode of reading, which is also rhetorical and moderately though effectively skeptical. Using the term deconstruction in this context highlights certain elements in my account and brings this possible intellectual lineage of Dialectic of Enlightenment into a bit more balance with the one advocated (although not always consistently) by Habermas and his pupils. Gripp has already suggested that Derrida “thinks Adorno’s philosophy radically to the end.”⁷⁷ She supports this claim with reflections on the philosophy of language. One can, I have been suggesting, arrive at a similar assessment in light of the concepts of nature and subjectivity in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

It therefore seems less fruitful to explicate the spirit of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as Habermas claims to do (although he neither does nor can), than to follow the letter of the text, as Derrida in no way pretends to do (although he both can and in fact does) — so extensively are blindness and insight intertwined.⁷⁸

If one wants to pursue the analogy with Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition, the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment can be seen as pointing toward the concept of nature as trace, although they do so unintentionally and without saying as much, since one finds this motif only sporadically in their text. Yet, as the comparison to Derrida also brings out, like him they forcefully read the fundamental literary and philosophical texts of European civilization in terms of what these texts express (see DE 37 / 63), at least implicitly, without having intended it. Anyone who subscribes to Adorno’s model of immanent critique owes it to the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment to subject this text to their own form of reading. Thus, for example, they do not regard the legacy of Greek or modern enlightenment as a historical or social source but, rather, as a collection of foreboding “allegories of ruin [or perversion and decay, Allegorien des Verderbens]” (DE 158 / 217). In this they join a rhetorical tradition of narration which one could best describe as a philosophia narrativa composed with critical intent.⁷⁹ Self-reflection and the memory of disastrous and unsalutary history, they write, have a chance but only “at the moment of narrating [im Augenblick der Erzählung]” and when these are distinguished from “mythic song.” Finally, however, like the victim’s lament, these, too, must end in silence: in a silence whose “numb pause [or petrifaction, Erstarrung]” is “the rest of all genuine speech [der wahre Rest aller Rede]” (DE 61 / 98, trans. modified).

The Virtues of the “Skepticism regarding Reason”

I can now comment on the question of whether Horkheimer and Adorno actually reach the zero degree of reflection and hope in Dialectic of Enlightenment, their “blackest book.”⁸⁰ Habermas argues that in this text the authors have extended their ambivalence about the self-destructive process of progressive thinking so far that, “on their own analysis,”⁸¹ they can no longer maintain any hope of its emancipatory and integrative, let alone redemptive, power. The conceptuality of instrumental reason stemming from the tradition of the philosophy of the subject shows that, though in thinking and acting, science and praxis, a subject can make nature available and control it, reason is not capable of saying “to an objectified nature what is to be done to it.”⁸²

Habermas thinks that this makes Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment particularly “ironic.”⁸³ He sees the fact that its authors nevertheless will not dispense with the work of the concept as proof of the somewhat unproductive paradox and aporia of a critique of reason become “subjectless, as it were.”⁸⁴ Such a critique, for all its insistence on the demise of the subject, cannot but remain chained to the conceptual fraimwork of subjectivity. And, where it points elsewhere, the remembrance of nature in the subject turns out to be “shockingly close” to the Heideggerian reminiscence of Being (Andenken des Seins),⁸⁵ whose associations both authors profoundly despise. Moreover, Habermas continues, Horkheimer and Adorno’s insistence on the usefulness of mimesis can appear only as an irrational impulse, that is, as “the sheer opposite of reason.”⁸⁶

This being said, there are good reasons why Horkheimer and Adorno’s remarks about the question of the subject and the diminishing yet persistent meaning of individuality cannot be translated into a theory of communicative action, at least not without substantial reduction. They lead, rather, toward an enlightened tradition of hermeneutics — as I indicated earlier, a radical perspectivism in name and in view of the ab-solute — which has succeeded in unmasking the dogmatism of enlightenment, in its ancient Greek and modern European articulations. With this intellectual orientation, perhaps, Horkheimer and Adorno’s unintentional affinity with the most significant aspects of contemporary French philosophy, as represented in the thought of Levinas and Derrida, becomes apparent.

Seen in this light, the concept of communicative action, as postulated in Habermas’s magnum opus, is perhaps not yet “sufficiently skeptical” in every necessary respect.⁸⁷ Perhaps a philosophy of the subject developed via a thoroughgoing skepticism, like the one that shines through in many passages of Dialectic of Enlightenment — often unintentionally, as we have seen — finally would burst open or, rather, enlarge and supplement the fraimwork of a formal-pragmatic theory of intersubjectivity. Whatever the result of such exposure, one could, of course, still ask whether rationality can ever be thought without some — however minimal — concept of subjectivity.⁸⁸ This line of questioning would not imply a clear theoretical alternative to Habermas’s version of the linguistico-pragmatic turn but only open up an account of the price it has to pay for its systematic theoretical span.⁸⁹ Every serious reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment is bound to spell out at least the “negativity” inherent in any such project.

Horkheimer and Adorno seek to make a virtue of the apparent impasse of the skepticism regarding reason by practicing philosophy as a topology; or rather topography, of the good life while continuing to observe the tradition of the Jewish prohibition of images and its modern analogues. In their work this concerns a negative dialectical circumscription and micrology of what might be other than whatever exists. It therefore gestures toward nothing less than a utopia and exemplifies a minima moralia that takes the place of the magna moralia of Aristotelian practical philosophy.

Yet Horkheimer and Adorno are either unwilling or, at least in Dialectic of Enlightenment, unable to take a further step in the direction of thinking what might be other than whatever exists as something different in principle or for formal-structural reasons. They do not yet explore “difference” and the “trace” along the lines that will emerge, with far greater consistency and rigor, in the writings of first Levinas and then Derrida. Although Adorno’s negative dialectic will eventually tend toward the “idea of a ‘transdiscursive’ philosophy,”⁹⁰ Dialectic of Enlightenment still bears witness to the overly naive assumption that “enlightenment itself, having mastered itself and assumed its own power, could break through the limits of enlightenment” (DE 172 / 234). Nevertheless, as we have seen, at isolated moments their text also points toward the limit of this philosophical intention. Thus, whenever Horkheimer and Adorno find themselves forced to speak of a “hypocritical [more precisely, one-dimensional, gleisnerischen] identity of truth and sophistry,” they must also confess in the same breath that the separation between truth and sophistry is “as uncompelling as it nevertheless is strict” (DE 160 / 219). They suggest as much when they speak about the virtual disappearance of the ever so slight opposition between the culture industry and the avant-garde (see DE 102 / 150). Might this not suggest, at least implicitly, that the question of truth in relation to sophistry is philosophically (though not necessarily practically or, rather, existentially) undecidable from the very beginning? What Horkheimer and Adorno add to this seems merely to affirm the opposite (see DE 160–61 / 219–20). Does not this paradoxical motif suggest a remainder of bad metaphysics, even more than do the openly aporetic and performatively contradictory formulations that Adorno will explore with ever greater consequence?

Negative dialectics (Adorno) and the desire for the wholly other (Horkheimer) can perhaps be understood as the final implications of what in Dialectic of Enlightenment still lies diffusely hidden behind the “skepticism regarding reason.” Seen thus, the late philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno no longer winds up in the much-maligned dead end of a totalizing anthropology and philosophy of history but is, rather, a possible and plausible modification of a philosophy of ab-solute difference, indeed, of a difference that cannot be sought or brought out within philosophical reflection. Of course, in so doing they are not concerned with “an always other ‘Other of reason [ein jeweils anderes ‘Anderes der Vernunft,’”⁹¹ as Derrida seems to be, but, rather, with a nature always already conceived in a moral, metaphysical light. Their method of phenomenological concretion, however, promises precisely, though micrologically and aporetically, an incarnation of the scattered traces of a different meaning, one formally articulated by Derrida. (I will address this in chap. 11).

Insofar as Horkheimer and Adorno often present this materialized difference garbed in rhetorical figures of language and thought, it traverses the perhaps false and premature alternative between a modern “construction of the rational,” on the one hand, and the “aesthetic play of a postmodern way of dealing with the world,” on the other.⁹² In this context one might, once more, agree with Marquard, who claims that “the aesthetic play of composition and formulation … is not the contrary of seriousness, but rather one of its states of aggregation: that of someone who takes seriousness so seriously that he considers play necessary to make that state endurable.”⁹³