Steve Helmling - 'Immanent Critique' and 'Dialetical Mimesis' in Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of...

‘‘Immanent Critique’’ and ‘‘Dialectical Mimesis’’ in Adornoand Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Steven Helmling

Given the ubiquity of the phrase ‘‘immanent critique’’ in TheodorAdorno’s oeuvre, both early and late, it is surprising that what Adorno mighthave meant by it has received such perfunctory attention from commenta-tors, most of whom treat it as a self-evident premise to dispose of on theway to weightier matters.1 Yet in this phrase, Adorno comes as close as hedoes anywhere to naming something like a programmatic ambition for hiswork, its distinctive method as well as its more comprehensive aims. Theaccomplishment it proposes is meant not only to distinguish Adorno’s work(and that of his Frankfurt School colleagues) from the conventional critical

1. Most valuable for my purposes have been Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Nega-tive Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (Sussex:Harvester Press, 1977), 66–69 (especially useful in delimiting some crucial differencesbetween Adorno and Horkheimer); Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘‘Introduction to Adorno’s ‘Ideaof Natural History,’ ’’ Telos 60 (1984): 105–7; and J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchant-ment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 87–90. For a special-ized argument for immanent critique as a method at once of interpretation and of aestheticevaluation, see Christopher Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adornoand Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 136–43.

boundary 2 32:3, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

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practices of his era, but to model a riskier, more comprehensive range ofcritical effort, and thus to challenge criticism-as-usual to enlarge its scope,to take on greater burdens, to aim, even at the price of failure, at ever-moredaunting tasks. Adorno means to bring critique itself into the critical cross-hairs, to enlarge or arouse the very self-consciousness—even the ‘‘bad con-science’’—of critique, and he means the consequences to bear not merelyon the kinds of objects critique might target, or the kinds or method or scopeof the arguments it might mount, but on the very writing practice in whichcritique performs itself, in which it accomplishes as much of its program asit manages to deliver on.

So rather than take ‘‘immanent critique’’ as a given, I want in thisessay to try to focus fault lines and contradictions in Adorno’s theory andpractice of immanent critique that seem to me suggestive and illuminatingfor the antithetical or dialectical uses to which Adorno turns it, or, better,allows or suffers it to turn his writing. I aim to set the ‘‘performative contradic-tion’’ (as Jürgen Habermas calls it) of Adorno’s immanent critique in relationto other constructions (Walter Benjamin’s) and/or critiques (Georg Lukács’s,Habermas’s) of it, in ways that I think illuminate from a novel angle all thesefigures and the issues at stake in their disagreements over what critique isand how it should conduct itself. I mean to expound Adorno’s immanent cri-tique as not only a critical program but also a performative one, that is, areflexive self-consciousness about his own writing practice as well, and thusa considerable motivation of the flair and drama that are so distinctive to theenergetic carriage of his ‘‘dialectical’’ sentences.

Since, in what follows, I want to foreground the implication of Adorno’swriting practice as enactment of the varied ambitions connoted by thephrase ‘‘immanent critique,’’ it is with some chagrin that I report that I can-not read Adorno in German without a trot. In writing about Adorno, I havetried to subject knotty passages to readings as detailed as I can make thembut which nevertheless do not claim to be offering a specifically ‘‘stylistic’’response; if I have shied away from quoting the German, it is precisely inorder not to seem to make such claims. I have been careful, in the process ofcomposition, to consult the German when it has seemed prudent; and whenthe German has raised doubts about my argument, I have backed off, orsought a different way of pursuing my point. I am trying to say that I am waryof the pitfalls my poor German lays for me, and have done my cautious bestto avoid them. That said, I think that in an increasingly global culture, criticaldiscourse must increasingly rely—indeed, it had better admit the extent towhich it always has relied—on translations. (Even our most enviably polyglot

Helmling / ‘‘Immanent Critique’’ and ‘‘Dialectical Mimesis’’ 99

colleagues—George Steiner, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson—must rely ontranslations for the Koran, Orhan Pamuk, Dostoyevsky, The Tale of Genji . . .)And I think it would be a shame if critics stimulated by work from all overthe planet felt disqualified from comment on anything in languages in whichthey lack ‘‘literary competence.’’ In resolving to write on Adorno, I have hadto overcome considerable hesitation, but my keen interest in him, and myconviction that I could illuminate problems that others had overlooked, haveobviously gotten the better of my scruples.

‘‘Immanent critique,’’ then: by this usage, Adorno clearly intends to domore than merely take sides in the long contention over what critique is, orshould, or can, be. Rather, he means his own practice to enact a critique ofthe debate itself, and to model larger possibilities and challenges beyond it.A chronic ambition of critique has been to get outside the critical object, toachieve ‘‘objectivity’’ about it, or ‘‘critical distance’’ from it. Both in its Kantianand its Marxist senses, critique has turned on issues of inside/outside; andthe pursuit of the inside track has largely belonged to ‘‘hermeneutic,’’ asopposed to ‘‘critique.’’ ‘‘Hermeneutic’’ sanctions the interpreter’s sympathy,or even identity with the object—precisely the stance ‘‘critique’’ rejects asimperiling objectivity. As usual, when confronted with a dichotomy in our cul-ture’s way of conceptualizing its problems, Adorno takes the dichotomy itselfas an ideological problem or wound—his code word is chorismos (Greek‘‘separation’’)—that his own critical labor will attempt to overcome or heal.Hence his ‘‘immanent critique,’’ which encodes the ambition to get the criti-cal ‘‘subject’’ inside what we might then no longer so simply be able to callcritique’s ‘‘object’’; Adorno frequently contrasts it with ‘‘external’’ critique,critique ‘‘from outside,’’ or even, if rarely, ‘‘transcendent critique.’’2 Adorno’smost sustained contrast of ‘‘immanent’’ with ‘‘transcendent’’ criticism comesin the peroration of the 1949 essay ‘‘Cultural Criticism and Society’’ (it is thisperoration that rises to the climax of ‘‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is bar-

2. See especially Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 33; and Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of PureReason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 20.Twice, Adorno characterizes his own work as ‘‘metacritique’’—in the subtitle to his bookon Husserl (Against Epistemology: A Metacritique), and in the opening section, on Kant,of Part III of Negative Dialectics (‘‘A Metacritique of Practical Reason’’). In both cases, theword amounts to a kind of sarcasm at the expense of philosophical systems founded on thepremise that certain problems can be ‘‘bracketed off’’ from, or declared to be ‘‘transcenden-tal’’ to, others. Adorno affronts these ‘‘transcendent critiques’’ by dilating to encompass,and thus reintroduce, all that Husserl and Kant have tried to exclude. In this application,there appears a family resemblance of ‘‘immanent critique’’ with deconstruction.


baric’’): ‘‘The alternatives—either calling culture as a whole into questionfrom outside under the general notion of ideology, or confronting it with thenorms which it itself has crystallized—cannot be accepted by critical theory.To insist on the choice between immanence and transcendence is to revertto the traditional logic criticized in Hegel’s polemic against Kant. . . . Theposition transcending culture is in a certain sense presupposed by dialecticsas the consciousness which does succumb in advance to the fetishization ofthe intellectual sphere.’’ Whereas, says Adorno, ‘‘dialectics means intransi-gence toward all reification’’3—in particular, the ‘‘spurious harmony’’ of whathe elsewhere calls, in condemnation of Lukács, ‘‘Extorted Reconciliation’’4

(observe how, as the passage develops, immanent criticism and dialecticsbegin to operate as functionally convertible terms):

[Immanent criticism] pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility ofthe task itself. In such antinomies criticism perceives those of society.A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one whichresolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but onewhich expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contra-dictions, . . . in its innermost structure. Confronted with this kind ofwork, the verdict ‘‘mere ideology’’ loses its meaning. At the sametime, however, immanent criticism holds in evidence that the mindhas always been under a spell. On its own it is unable to resolve thecontradictions under which it labours. Even the most radical reflec-tion of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remainsonly reflection, without altering the existence to which its failure bearswitness. Hence immanent criticism cannot take comfort in its ownidea. It can neither be vain enough to believe that it can liberate themind directly . . . nor naïve enough to believe that unflinching immer-sion in the object will inevitably lead to truth by virtue of the logic ofthings. . . . The less the dialectical method can today presupposethe Hegelian identity of subject and object, the more it is obliged tobe mindful of the duality of the moments. . . . The very oppositionbetween knowledge which penetrates from without and that whichbores from within becomes suspect to the dialectical method, whichsees in it a symptom of precisely that reification which the dialectic isobliged to accuse. . . . No theory, not even that which is true, is safe

3. Adorno, Prisms, 31.4. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 1 (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1991), 216–40.


from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous[i.e., ‘‘immanent’’] relation to the object. Dialectics must guard againstthis no less than against enthrallment in the cultural object. It can sub-scribe neither to the cult of the mind nor to hatred of it. The dialecticalcritic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate.Only then does he do justice to his object and to himself.5

If ‘‘the very opposition between knowledge which penetrates from withoutand that which bores from within’’ is itself a symptom of the problem, thenthe logic of that aporia requires a method that aspires to do both, and ‘‘theinsolubility of the task’’ is not its disqualification but an attestation of itsnecessity. Adorno’s practice thus assumes for immanent critique burdensboth critical and hermeneutic: making each immanent to the other and, atthe same time, making each the other’s critique.

And thereby Adorno implies as well an ideological critique of each—of critique and of hermeneutic—as usually practiced: critique’s ‘‘distance’’from the object now appears as not an objectivity to be striven for butan alienation to be overcome; while hermeneutic’s ‘‘inwardness’’ with theobject, attesting the interpreter’s sympathy with the interpreted text (a moti-vation extending through belles lettres ‘‘appreciation’’ back to biblical exege-sis), now appears as an ideological entrapment that critique must struggle,however vainly, to breach. (Immanent critique, then, is critique of critique,and not merely in the sense of autocritique.) At stake, needless to say,is not the critic’s mere decision in advance between two menu items, twokinds of critique, internal and external. Adorno’s premise is that all critique isfrom ‘‘inside’’—inside of history, of economy, of culture, politics, ideology—and that ‘‘external critique’’ is ideologically deluded, or self-blinded, or self-trivializing, if it supposes that it has gotten, or can or should get, ‘‘outside’’the determinations of the social. Immanent critique, then, is less a programthat critique should aspire to than a predicament that critique must try notto flinch from.

An immanent critique thus conceived incurs complex burdens—andsince Adorno resists generalization, let us begin with consideration of a par-ticular instance: a section of Negative Dialectics that proposes an immanentcritique of Heideggerian ‘‘ontology.’’ Adorno concedes that the Spirit in ourage has a legitimate ‘‘ontological need,’’ to which Heidegger and others areoffering, so to speak, ‘‘an imaginary [i.e., ideological] solution.’’ His imma-nent critique means to interpret the genuine (and symptomatic) need or

5. Adorno, Prisms, 32–33.


problem as well as to expose the ideological mystification of the proposedsolution. ‘‘We have no power over the philosophy of Being if we reject it gen-erally, from outside, instead of taking it on in its own structure—turning itsown force against it.’’ Thus critique must confront not merely Heidegger’sown ‘‘thought movements’’ but all the philosophical concepts and systemsthat precede and surround Heidegger. ‘‘The thought movement that con-gealed in them,’’ Adorno explains, ‘‘must be reliquified, its validity traced, inrepetition.’’6

Let us unpack some of this. What is ‘‘congealed’’ must be ‘‘reliquified’’:this figuration is frequent in discussions of ideology and reification, and notjust in Adorno; indeed, we find it in Hegel himself. (Observe the contrast withreactionaries, who typically figure the disgraced world as ‘‘soft’’ or ‘‘liquid,’’in need of an order to ‘‘stiffen’’ or ‘‘harden’’ it.) Adorno typically figures ‘‘reifi-cation’’ as a hardening or freezing or rigidifying, which a de-reifying critiqueseeks to undo—to soften, thaw, loosen or, in his figure here, ‘‘reliquify.’’ As aprogram, however, this is more easily proposed than executed. The criticalobject ‘‘must be reliquified, its validity traced, in repetition.’’ Observe first thatthis is a critique concerned as much to validate what is valid in its object asto discredit or expose what is not. But the real trouble is repetition, a wordin all critical usages (including Adorno’s) virtually always connoting ideol-ogy itself, everything that forecloses the (utopian) promise of future deliver-ance from the fated repetition of the past. As part—or as ‘‘moment’’—of itseffort to ‘‘reliquify’’ the ideological rigidities it suffers, immanent critique must‘‘repeat’’ these rigidities, which is to say, must suffer, indeed, inflict, the fateof repetition upon itself deliberately. Adorno is Hegel’s disciple in holdingthat the past cannot be merely disowned, or gotten ‘‘outside’’ of: escapingits cycle of repetition requires a working-through that confronts, immanently,all the horror of what we would escape. So solving a problem requires, first,the evocation of the problem, in all its problematicalness. We cannot over-come ideology without a full acknowledgment—and more: a full experience,in the writing, in the reading—of the power of ideology.

As writing, therefore—and Adorno never lets a reader (or a critic)forget that critique is, by reason of its written-ness, ineluctably, ‘‘a kind ofwriting’’—critique must labor as mightily to evoke its object as to sublate ormove beyond it. And hence the ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ imperative thatis palpable in every word Adorno ever wrote. For a dramatic shorthand,

6. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,1973), 97.


we might call it the ‘‘after-Auschwitz’’ imperative, keeping in mind that thisintellectual-affective imperative of Adorno’s writing long predates Auschwitzitself. (One way of registering the angst of Dialectic of Enlightenment mightbe the reminder that the moment of its composition was, literally, during-Auschwitz.) What I am trying to stress here is the place of affect both inAdorno’s theory of critique and in his practice of it. Adorno’s insistence on‘‘the labor of conceptualization’’ also involves a labor of what I will call hereaffectualization—the labor of apprehending our ideological condition notonly (to recall Hegel again) as thought but also as feeling—with the caveatthat Adorno refuses the conventional antithesis, or as he would rather call it,the ideological chorismos, between concept and affect: he wants (and this,too, is part of the problem his immanent critique means both to ‘‘repeat’’ andto ‘‘reliquify,’’ part of the breach he wants to close, the wound he wants toheal, even if doing so must begin by reopening it) to make affects concep-tual, and to make the concept affective, to overcome the chorismos by whichEnlightenment has, in separating thought from feeling, impoverished both.Only thus can the wound, and the healing (if any: at any rate, the need forit), be made concrete.

This ambition puts large demands on the writing of critique: the criticmust be a writer of peculiar brilliance to meet them. (This is partly why com-mentary on Dialectic of Enlightenment discounts the coauthorship of Hork-heimer, and so often lapses, faute de mieux, into treating the book ‘‘as if’’Adorno were its [sole] author.) It also makes for a finished text that will bepeculiarly challenging, peculiarly difficult, for its reader—a text whose self-conscious expressive difficulty is motivated by the historical, cultural, social,and political difficulties of its subject matter, difficulties it must ‘‘repeat,’’ mustevoke as inescapable preliminary to any other hoped-for transitive (‘‘reliqui-fying’’) effect upon them. And that imperative, familiar in our period fromthe great radical innovations of modernism, incurs the dangers that Lukácsreprehends as ‘‘the ideology of modernism’’: that to ‘‘repeat ’’ the problemwill be merely to replicate it, so that the radical new work will present merelya symptom of the problem rather than a critical negation of it. Hence thesubtext, lifelong, of the debates between Lukács and Adorno over the mer-its of realism versus modernism. For Lukács, a Joyce or a Proust is merelyan example of bourgeois decadence, not, in any useful way, an anatomistor critic of it. For Adorno, a Kafka or a Beckett has a critical value far out-stripping any more conventionally conceived critique, because they makethe contemporary predicament and its anguish real, or perhaps we hadbetter say concrete—they convey its ‘‘objectivity.’’ Adorno praises the plays


of Beckett precisely because they ‘‘arouse the anxiety that existentialismonly talks about’’7—and they do so without offering any narrative resolution,such as would be, for Lukács, the sine qua non of any critical prospect ofrelease from the predicaments they portray: the failure of any such enact-ment is what makes them, for Lukács, merely symptomatic of the bourgeoisideology, and to that extent, ideological themselves. For Adorno, any suchnarrative release could be only ‘‘imaginary’’ release, and hence itself notmerely ideological but virtually the epitome of ideology as such. It is notmerely that Lukács and Adorno disagree on what is critical and what is ideo-logical: it is that precisely what determines the question for one determinesit the other way for the other.

Lukács cannot have approved of Dialectic of Enlightenment—eitheras a set of theses (assuming such could be extorted from its motivatedlyanti-thetic prose) or as a piece of rhetoric, or writing. Dialectic of Enlight-enment violates the norms established for critique in the century and morepreceding it as radically as Ulysses violates the norms of realist fiction. Itavows a historicizing and dialectical consciousness, but builds itself aroundbinary pairs—Odysseus as bourgeois, myth as Enlightenment—that wouldseem to be staged as anything but: asserted, rather, as transhistorically orunhistorically homogeneous, as well as ‘‘equivalent’’ or fungible in a way toeschew the need, even foreclose the possibility, of their ‘‘dialectical’’ media-tion, let alone negation or sublation, altogether. They conjoin historically dis-junct pairs but in a way to dispense with, even to preempt or foreclose, anynarrative leading from one to the other: conjoin them, that is, in what Adornoelsewhere calls a ‘‘constellation,’’ a term and practice with obvious affini-ties to cubist collage, Eisenstein’s ‘‘montage,’’ Pound’s ‘‘ideogram,’’ Joyce’s‘‘epiphany,’’ and other modernist devices in which Lukács sees only symp-toms of bourgeois decadence.

If Lukács refrains from spelling this out, a more recent figure, namelyHabermas, epigone of the Frankfurt School generally and protégé of Adornoin particular, has done something close to it for him. In Lecture V of ThePhilosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas warns that Dialectic ofEnlightenment risks incurring the sin it avowedly condemns, namely, elabo-rating and enforcing the myth/Enlightenment binary so insistently as tothreaten a lapse into a ‘‘mythic thinking’’ of the very kind the book chargesagainst Enlightenment itself. (Habermas is concerned lest the gains of mo-

7. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 2 (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1992), 90.


dernity be lost in the crossfire between antimodern reactionaries on theRight and postmodern radicals on the Left; he more charitably concedesAdorno and Horkheimer’s commitment to ‘‘reason’’ in the interviews, roughlycontemporaneous with Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, collected asAutonomy and Solidarity.)8 But Habermas argues that to the extent thatEnlightenment is critique, Horkheimer and Adorno undercut their own criti-cal project, as well as the modern project at large, and that Dialectic ofEnlightenment is therefore entoiled in what Habermas thrice calls a ‘‘perfor-mative contradiction’’9—a contradiction, he argues, that vitiates the wholeproject.

I am arguing the contrary here, that just this performative contradic-tion is what gives Dialectic of Enlightenment its force and its weird power. IfHabermas puts the stress on the contradiction, I want to put it on the perfor-mativity. The point of the performativity is precisely to perform that histori-cally specific contradiction, a contradiction, Adorno would say, not merelyincidental to a particular critical rhetoric but a contradiction ‘‘objectively’’there in the cultural predicament the critique means, immanently, to take on,to suffer or ‘‘repeat’’ as well as to negate or ‘‘reliquify.’’ And an irony, or dialec-tic, that might seem to vindicate the book against Habermas is that Haber-mas’s indictment itself can contrive to do no other than ‘‘repeat’’ the offense itprotests—for consider: according to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Enlighten-ment denounces every precedent episteme as ‘‘myth.’’ Repeating that ges-ture, Dialectic of Enlightenment denounces Enlightenment as ‘‘myth.’’ Andnow, here is Habermas, denouncing Dialectic of Enlightenment as ‘‘myth’’(PDM, 125, 127). Habermas usually makes Adorno and Horkheimer’s unfor-tunate fall into myth sound unwitting, but not always—and indeed, his briefagainst the ‘‘paradox’’ of Dialectic of Enlightenment is compounded by thereflection that it is not unconscious: ‘‘Adorno was quite aware of this per-formative contradiction’’ (PDM, 119). What is further ironic is the questionof Habermas’s own awareness of his own implication in the tangle. It islike an Escher drawing, a fractal-recursive, self-replicating structure intowhich Habermas’s reading has conducted itself despite itself—which atteststhat Dialectic of Enlightenment has indeed tapped some ‘‘objective’’ sys-temic virus, so to speak, or structural meme, so pervasively active and self-

8. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews, ed. Peter Dews (London:Verso, 1986), 98, 154–55.9. Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 119, 127, 185; for the same charge leveled at Derrida,see 197. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PDM.


activating in the sociocultural DNA of Enlightenment—a.k.a. modernity, latecapitalism, the administered world—that neither Horkheimer and Adorno’sown critique of Enlightenment nor Habermas’s critique of their critique canquarantine the infection ‘‘inside’’ a boundary or secure itself safely ‘‘outside’’the zone of contamination. Thus the Horkheimer/Adorno QED: the absenceof any way to get ‘‘outside’’ the ideological dilemmas of ‘‘Enlightenment’’and/as ‘‘myth.’’

Habermas, I should point out, never quite charges ‘‘mythical think-ing,’’ in those words, against Horkheimer and Adorno; rather, he makesthe case implicitly, but unmistakably, via a kind of guilt by association, inthe section of the essay assimilating Dialectic of Enlightenment to Nietz-sche’s ‘‘cynical consciousness’’ and his fundamentally ‘‘aesthetic’’ attitude,by which Habermas means, à la Kierkegaard, Nietzsche’s abrogation fromquestions of truth or falsity (PDM, 119–26). (Compare Habermas’s open-ing paragraph, which places Dialectic of Enlightenment among the ‘‘blackbooks’’ of Nietzsche, de Sade, and other ‘‘ ‘dark’ writers of the bourgeoi-sie, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville’’ [PDM, 106].) On thetruth/falsity score, Habermas scrupulously maintains a distinction betweenDialectic of Enlightenment and Nietzsche, but the distinction turns on the‘‘paradox’’ produced by the book’s adherence, cynical consciousness not-withstanding, to the truth-claim: and precisely that—a cynical truth-claim—is, I take it, what produces the ‘‘performative contradiction’’ Habermas pro-tests. But even more ironically, the allegedly ‘‘cynical consciousness’’ ofDialectic of Enlightenment—the fact that ‘‘Adorno was quite aware of thisperformative contradiction’’—would seem to be, for Habermas, all that canredeem the book from a wholesale lapse into naïvely mythic thinking.

Now I hasten to grant the power of Habermas’s critique of Dialectic ofEnlightenment—he puts that case as well as it can be put—but: Horkheimerand, especially, Adorno as exemplars of cynical reason? That seems to mea judgment so wrongheaded as to approach the perverse. Peter Sloterdijk’sdiagnosis of Adorno’s ‘‘sensitive critique,’’ and his prescription (at need) ofa dose of ‘‘cheekiness,’’ seems to me much closer to the mark; indeed, hisformula—that Adorno ‘‘tried, by a conceptual balancing act, to construe aknowledge that would not be power’’10—seems to me to capture both theforlornness and the defiance of Adorno’s refusal of every variety of cynicalconsciousness. Which is to say that Sloterdijk’s formula praises Adorno rele-

10. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1987), xxxv.


vantly—and it is praise, not the cynical ‘‘unmasking’’ it could be mistaken for.(Compare Lutz Niethammer’s asperities regarding the ‘‘will to powerless-ness’’ of Adorno and other modern intellectuals.)11 That Sloterdijk himselfelects to fight the fight with satire and laughter—‘‘kynicism’’—rather than,à la Adorno, from the position of ‘‘unhappy consciousness,’’ might be readas variously qualifying his praise, but I do not see how it could be taken toundo it. That Habermas, on the other hand, can find for Dialectic of Enlight-enment no better alternative than the either/or of naïve myth versus cynicalconsciousness, cannot see that the book aspires, quite the reverse of cyni-cally, to open a utopian alternative to that binary, seems to me an index inHabermas of a surprising limitation.12

Pace Habermas, I would put it that Dialectic of Enlightenment ’s bril-liance is to have sustained a fertile and high-voltage rhetoric not despite,but precisely because of, the contradictoriness of what seem initially quiteahistorical, undialectical, even ‘‘mythical’’ conjunctions. The measure of itssuccess is how effectually it manages to communicate those contradictions.And by ‘‘communicate’’ I here mean to evoke not the model of transmissionof message from sender to receiver but the ambition of the text to make thepain of all this contradiction common, a kind of ideological communion ofsuffering that, Adorno insinuates, is as close to a binding agent, a legitimatesolidarity, as our alienated culture may presently allow us. ‘‘The need to lenda voice to suffering,’’ as he elsewhere puts it, ‘‘is the condition of all truth.’’ 13

The level of affect—the ‘‘after- [or during-] Auschwitz’’ anger and fear thatis the specific felt or lived ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ of Dialectic of Enlight-enment—remains potent throughout, and this affective or moral difficultyattests, expresses, the philosophical, political, social, cultural (etc.) difficul-ties the book protests. Dialectic of Enlightenment is a text in which all the dif-ferent kinds of difficulty motivate, indeed, overdetermine each other; hencethe difficulty of the text is irreducible, and by design: it cannot, it should not,

11. Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1992), 138–42.12. For a scathing critique of Habermas on this score, see Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘‘Back toAdorno,’’ Telos 81 (1989): 9–14. If Hullot-Kentor argues that Habermas misses the pointof the ‘‘immanence’’ of Adorno’s ‘‘immanent critique,’’ Axel Honneth takes the oppositetack, sidestepping immanent critique altogether to argue for the ‘‘transcending’’ or ‘‘disclos-ing’’ power—i.e., critique of the type Habermas should approve—of Dialectic of Enlighten-ment ; see Axel Honneth, ‘‘The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialecticof Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism,’’ Constellations 7, no. 1(2000): 116–27.13. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17–18.


be rendered lucid by any paraphrase or commentary. And this un-lucidityhas the further specific ‘‘textual effect’’ (or affect) of feeling, in the reading,always a direct function of the general apprehension of contradiction as themotivation of the writing. It is the very point of Adorno’s immanent critiquethat we are not merely shown this contradiction or that, but that we feelcontradictoriness, feel, indeed, what Adorno elsewhere calls the ‘‘Objectivityof Contradiction’’14 in our very experience of the reading throughout. Contra-diction is realized, or concretized, in its very concept, and as feeling: a modelof the ‘‘labor of conceptualization’’ and the ‘‘labor of affectualization,’’ as wellas the chorismos of the ideological will to separate them, to diminish theforce, to numb the pain, of each—all concretized or even—why not?—‘‘con-stellated’’ in the medium of Adorno’s writing practice.

The power and contradictoriness of this effect, or affect, are whatentitle Adorno’s immanent critique to call itself ‘‘dialectical.’’ In fact, in oneplace (in his immanent critique of Edmund Husserl), Adorno makes explicitthe connection—indeed, the virtual convertibility—of these terms: ‘‘Dialec-tic’s very procedure is immanent critique. It does not so much oppose[Husserlian] phenomenology with a position or ‘model’ external and alien tophenomenology, as it pushes the phenomenological model, with the latter’sown force, to where the latter cannot afford to go. Dialectic exacts the truthfrom it through the confession of its own untruth.’’ 15 Immanent critique, thatis, ‘‘repeats’’ Husserl’s ‘‘phenomenological model,’’ and its ‘‘untruth’’—butwith the effect of not merely ‘‘repeating’’ the ‘‘untruth’’ but forcing a critical‘‘confession’’ from the ‘‘untruth’’ itself. The problematic implicit here of themere repetition of the Husserlian ‘‘symptom’’ versus its ‘‘reliquified’’ critical‘‘negation’’ is made explicit on a later page: ‘‘Dialectics is the quest to seethe new in the old instead of just the old in the new. As it mediates the new,so it also preserves the old as the mediated. If it were to proceed accord-ing to the schema of sheer flow and indiscriminate vitality (Lebendigkeit ),then it would degrade itself to a replica of the amorphous structure of nature,which it should not sanction through mimicry, but surpass through cogni-tion. Dialectic gives its own to the old as reified and consolidated, which dia-lectic can move only by releasing the force of its own weight.’’ 16 Dialectics,a.k.a. ‘‘immanent critique,’’ must ‘‘not sanction through mimicry, but surpassthrough cognition’’: this usefully enlarges the ‘‘repeat and reliquify’’ motif,

14. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 151–53.15. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Ox-ford: Blackwell, 1982), 5.16. Adorno, Against Epistemology, 38–39.


but more to my present point is the preemption of the Lukács complaintin the warning lest critique ‘‘degrade itself . . . to a replica of . . . nature’’(this last, the signifier here of the ‘‘naturalizations’’ of the cultural that arethe specific work and effect of ideology as such, the mystifying will to ‘‘sanc-tion through mimicry’’). The point I want to bring out—and it is a cautionaryone—is the liability of ‘‘immanent [or ‘‘dialectical’’] critique’’ to such dangers:because it must ‘‘repeat’’ in order to ‘‘reliquify’’ or ‘‘surpass,’’ it must per-force risk approaching a ‘‘replica[tion]’’ or ‘‘mimicry’’ of its ideological object.It must risk appearing as an example or symptom, as Lukács charged, oras itself ‘‘mythical,’’ as Habermas warned. It cannot contest what Dialecticof Enlightenment calls ‘‘the power of repetition over reality’’ 17 without riskingthe danger of succumbing to it, or at least of appearing to. Which, for critique‘‘as a kind of writing,’’ means something in the realm of the critical like theproperty the German philosophical tradition ambiguously or polysemouslydenominates, in the realm of the aesthetic, as ‘‘Schein’’—appearance or illu-sion: the artful contrivance, variously concealing its own art or, in moderntimes, more critically baring its own device(s), whereby any composition,whether of art or of critique, hesitates between the aesthetic as ideologyand (Adorno’s burden in Aesthetic Theory) the aesthetic as bearer of truth.

So immanent critique must pursue, in the writing, and less as pre-scription than as inevitable burden, a strategy of something like what Dialec-tic of Enlightenment seems to indict: ‘‘mimesis.’’ This word signals one of themost unstable, most conflicted—why not say most ‘‘dialectical’’?—motifs inthe book.18 For most of us, the word’s primary association will probably bewith Aristotle’s Poetics—the mirror held up to nature—but this is an associa-tion Dialectic of Enlightenment studiously avoids. In the Horkheimer/Adornotext, mimesis is primarily a synecdoche for the mythic and even premythichabitus of archaic consciousness and the proto-Enlightenment attempt, atfirst to propitiate nature, then to dominate it, by means of ‘‘sympatheticmagic.’’ (This context, opening Aristotle’s ‘‘mimesis’’ to its archaic foretime,can quite eclipse its sequels in the more familiar and more recent culturalpast of Europe, and, indeed, I suspect Horkheimer and Adorno mean toestrange or defamiliarize those meanings, so complicit in the ideology ofthe aesthetic in the West, and thereby to expose the degree to which West-

17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cum-ming (New York: Continuum, 1988), 12.18. For the most interesting discussion of Adorno’s ‘‘mimesis’’ I know, see Fredric Jame-son, Late Marxism (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 63–69, 101–5. See also Hullot-Kentor, ‘‘Introduction to Adorno’s ‘Idea of Natural History,’ ’’ 107–8.


ern aesthetics, having retrojected its own detached, alienated, enlightened,‘‘instrumentalized’’ purposes—the emotional self-management of cathar-sis—back on Aristotle, has distorted its reading of him ever since.)

‘‘Mimesis’’ thus reoriented to the consciousness of ‘‘before Aris-totle’’—that is, to the thematics evoked in Dialectic of Enlightenment by wayof such terms as ‘‘[sympathetic] magic,’’ ‘‘ritual,’’ ‘‘myth,’’ as well as ‘‘mimesis’’itself, and via allusion, to the figure of Odysseus and the Sirens—summa-rizes a complex of devices and practices, indeed ruses, akin to the Nietz-schean imaginary and to the Marxist and modernist senses of ideology. Tothat extent, ‘‘mimesis’’ would seem to figure as a virtual epitome of whatimmanent critique aims to subvert. But as we have seen, immanent cri-tique itself must ‘‘repeat’’ its object, must incur the risk of ‘‘replicating’’ it or‘‘mimicking’’ it—and to that extent, ‘‘mimesis’’ is critique’s own most potent, ifalso most treacherous, device: indeed, the potency and the treachery mustbe its very condition. If ideological ‘‘mimesis’’ is the problem or danger, thesolution or program involves a ‘‘mimesis’’ that I will here call ‘‘dialectical’’—in justification of which I might cite the analogy with Benjamin’s usage of‘‘image’’ and, or against, ‘‘dialectical image,’’ a usage Adorno expounds innumerous places.19 With Sloterdijk again in mind, we might say that ‘‘dia-lectical mimesis’’ enacts a kind of satirical parody, but with affects of angstand rage rather than the Sloterdijkian ‘‘cynical’’ or ‘‘cheeky’’ (Bergsonian)laughter of mockery. (Readers familiar with Michael Cahn’s rich essay ‘‘Sub-versive Mimesis’’ will recognize a family resemblance between his refunc-tioning of Adorno’s ‘‘mimesis’’ and mine here.20 Cahn pursues the argumentwith much more grounding in and reference to philosophy than I could do,and his discussion aims to illuminate Adorno’s aesthetic theory—or indeedhis Aesthetic Theory—rather than, as I hope to do here, Adorno’s writingpractice and the difficulties it poses for readers.)

My suggestion now is that we take Dialectic of Enlightenment itselfas a test or probe of this ‘‘dialectical mimesis’’ I am proposing. We may takethe book as a kind of historical narrative, and therefore, like (presumably)any historical analysis or explanation, to that extent a dialectical mimesis ofWestern history or civilization itself. But a more concrete grasp of the text’s

19. For our present point, see especially Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Constructionof the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989), 54.20. Michael Cahn, ‘‘Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse ofCritique,’’ in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, ed. Mihai Spariosu, vol. 1 (Philadelphia andAmsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), 27–64.


ambitions may be allowed by considering its relation to a precedent textu-alization of that ambition—and it is my suggestion here that we considerDialectic of Enlightenment for a moment ‘‘as if’’ it were a parodic rescript ofHegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Notice I said ‘‘as if’’—or I might use the oldHegelian/Marxist (and Adorno) word, objectively : the point being that theresonances are significant, whether Adorno and Horkheimer intended themor not, although I will go on the record with my conviction that they did. How-ever that may be, the resonances are there, simply as part of the vast socialand historical fact Horkheimer and Adorno mean to confront—which turnsout to entail, besides Hegel himself, the whole debased Hegelian aftermathin the conventions or ideology of historicist explanation in the bourgeois age,from fascism’s reactionary fantasias of racialist agon, through the progres-sive or meliorist story of liberalism, to its revolutionary variants extendingto ‘‘official’’ Soviet orthodoxies of ‘‘dialectical materialism’’ (‘‘diamat,’’ in theneologistic party-speak Adorno so loathed) and the providential historicalhappy endings they were fashioned to underwrite.

The affinities of Dialectic of Enlightenment with Phenomenology ofSpirit are numerous and suggestive. Both books were written in a momentof crisis perceived by their authors as world-historical, and both aim to diag-nose and even to prescribe for the cultural pathologies, extending back intoan immemorial foretime, of their respective cultural moments. The table ofcontents of Dialectic of Enlightenment discloses a narrative and historicalarc broadly similar to Hegel’s, orchestrating a passage from Greek antiquityto the period of the Enlightenment proper, and thence to the present-daymoment at the height of World War II in which Horkheimer and Adorno arewriting. This historicizing organization, the antique and modern instanceschosen for elaboration, and the proportions allotted to them, all invite us totake Dialectic of Enlightenment as a production, albeit on a smaller scale,on the model of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Horkheimer and Adornorenew Hegel’s terminology and supplement it with newer ones—Marxist,Nietzschean, Weberian, Freudian—that have emerged since Hegel; buttheir account of the devolution of philosophy into a mere handmaiden of(positivist) science, and the attendant reification of thinking as instrumen-talized to serve the purposes of scientific and technological ‘‘rationaliza-tion,’’ is recognizably a continuation of Hegel’s story, although, of course, anironic one: a nightmare sequel to an overture (a terminal overture, Hegelhad supposed) that, in Hegel’s enthusiastic afflatus, had promised a con-siderably happier finale. Indeed, this issue—‘‘optimism’’ versus ‘‘pessimism’’was the mid-century topos—marks the fundamental dissent or ‘‘contradic-


tion’’ or ‘‘negation’’ that Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘‘unhappy [critical] con-sciousness’’ operates on Hegel. Hegel diagnosed unhappy consciousnessand prescribed for it in ways anticipating the morale-management counselsof Nietzsche and William James, in the faith that modernity would eventuallyenable a universal ‘‘happy consciousness.’’ The ‘‘textual effect’’ or affect ofDialectic of Enlightenment joins the darker tone of Sigmund Freud, OswaldSpengler, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, and many other moderns whose drift,especially post-1914, is that the current situation and prospects are grim.(Dialectic of Enlightenment thereby not only contravenes the bien-pensantliberal hopes of the day but defies the ‘‘official’’ party-line ‘‘optimism’’ ofthe Soviet bloc, the Stalinist Comintern of that period, in which ‘‘defeatism’’could be a capital [thought-] crime.)

But Dialectic of Enlightenment enacts a more corrosive ‘‘dialecti-cal mimesis’’ of Hegel-and-after on the level of narrative itself. The bookorganizes its argument around binary pairs that link disjunct historical phe-nomena—most saliently, ‘‘myth’’/‘‘Enlightenment’’ and ‘‘Odysseus’’/‘‘bour-geois.’’ These binaries initially seem the conventional constituents of a famil-iar modernizing historicism, but they turn out to act in the book not asopposed (historical) pairs but as virtual transhistorical equations or (to makethe ideological baggage more explicit) ‘‘identities’’: in the latter instance,exposing nineteenth-century philology’s fetishization of the Homeric pro-tagonist as ‘‘universal’’ hero; in the former, deconstructing (if you’ll permitthe anachronism) the binary terms of Enlightenment’s own self-constitutingancients/moderns narrative. Both work to activate the downside, as it were,of ‘‘equivalence’’ or ‘‘exchange’’ logic: in the one case, offering a ‘‘dialecti-cal image/mimesis’’ of the equivalence that bourgeois modernity wants toembrace; in the second, enforcing an equivalence it seeks to disown. Andin both cases, and in many other instances passim, we get not the his-torical narrative that mediates the development from one to the other buta sequence of nonnarrative juxtapositions—what Adorno probably learnedfrom Benjamin to call ‘‘constellations’’—enforcing the point that the narra-tive of progress has not only stalled but now (1944) looks to have been adeception or ‘‘ruse of history’’ all along, insofar as it has masked history’schronic steady-state or (the same thing?) cycle of ‘‘repetition,’’ blocking ourrecognition that the history we are living out is not a narrative of progress,reason, and freedom, but a stasis, or even a regress, of violence and domi-nation. Recall here Benjamin’s aphorism that every document of civilizationis also a document of barbarism. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the progres-sive world story becomes the failure of the narrative to realize not only its


thematic or programmatic telos, human liberation, but, more fundamentally,its generic or formal constitutive sine qua non, narrativity itself.

J. M. Bernstein coolly scorns this way of reading Dialectic of Enlight-enment, summoning earlier scholars, from Susan Buck-Morss to RobertHullot-Kentor, to his aid, citing, however, passages that do not, at least to myreading eye, quite make his case for him.21 Bernstein wants to see the criticalforce of Dialectic of Enlightenment as trained not on Enlightenment’s histori-cist narrative investments but rather on the ‘‘conceptual dualism’’ underlyingthem—and to that extent his reading can be brought to square with mine.Where Bernstein seems to me to misplace the emphasis is in the assump-tion that in the face of an apparent dichotomy in Adorno, a reader’s task is todecide on one side or the other; my own experience learning to read Adornois that he is almost always looking for ways to reinforce the dichotomy, toexploit its dichotomousness—its ‘‘contradictoriness’’—to critical (i.e., dialec-tical) effect. I would, rather, put it that Dialectic of Enlightenment expressesits critique of the West’s detemporalized, nonnarrative, ‘‘conceptual dual-ism’’ by deconcealing the petrification or ‘‘standstill’’ that dualism wreakson its own narrative categories: that in Adorno, the horns of the dichotomyare mobilized precisely in order to im -mobilize each other, to perform theways in which our culture’s fundamental contradictions, and their ideologi-cal denial, can disclose themselves only in the condition—or the ‘‘dialecticalmimesis’’—of ‘‘dialectic at a standstill’’: conceptual dualities arresting, freez-ing, petrifying the very narrative progress and movement they were meantto release.

‘‘Dialectic at a standstill’’: that watchword of Benjamin’s is often citedby Adorno as evocation of the modern condition—and hence another moti-vation for the failed narrativity of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as ‘‘dialecti-cal mimesis’’ of the stalled or arrested dialectic of history itself. Recall, tobegin with, that in Hegel, dialectic is ineluctably temporalized, historicized,narrativized. Hence a (large) degree of commutativity between narrativeand dialectic in the ideological constellation Dialectic of Enlightenment con-structs: if the Enlightenment narrative is rendered non- or even antinarra-tively, the conventions of dialectic are likewise contravened in usages pro-vocatively non- or antidialectical. If binaries like ‘‘myth/Enlightenment’’ or‘‘Odysseus/bourgeois’’ elide narrativity and history, they equally elide dia-lectic, for the conjoined terms are rather identified than mediated, dedif-ferentiated as we now say, as if the point is their ‘‘essential’’ homogeneity

21. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 84–86; see esp. 86n18.


rather than their qualitative, mutually negating differences. And likewise forthe other kind of binary the book mobilizes, the kind that conjoins contem-poraneous pairs, like de Sade and Kant, or anti-Semitism and Hollywood.In our present-day academic subculture, this would already be a politicallyincorrect enough way of putting it; in 1944, with Stalin’s assassins patrollingthe globe for ‘‘class enemies,’’ it was a provocation of potentially dire conse-quence (recall the fate of Trotsky [August 1940] just a few years before thepublication of Dialectic of Enlightenment [May 1944]).

Part of my point in summarizing the aims of Dialectic of Enlighten-ment in these terms is to foreground how very different is Horkheimer andAdorno’s (in)version of Hegel from Marx’s. Marx claimed to have turnedHegel right-side up, putting his idealist headstand squarely back where itbelongs, on its materialist feet—but Marx’s figure owns that he and Hegelare talking about the same biped, and the same configuration of posture(vertical) and mobility (ambulatory). In Marx, as in Hegel, we have a forward-moving story, an indisputably narrative dynamic; the coloration of particu-lar episodes and themes varies between the two—the story of alienation,of Aufhebung, of human beings rendered thing-like, but achieving the self-consciousness of the ‘‘für Sich’’ in the end—but the happiness of the provi-dential ending and the kinetic momentum of the whole progress to it aremacrofeatures that Hegel and Marx have too much in common to allow themto appear as anything other than variants of a shared set of themes and(more fundamentally) of presuppositions regarding the use of historical nar-rative in works of social interpretation, explanation, diagnosis, and critique.

Dialectic of Enlightenment asserts its own place in the array by way ofa much more radical refunctioning of its terms and its operations—most tell-ingly, in the extent to which the Horkheimer/Adorno retelling of the Enlight-enment/Hegelian/Marxist metanarrative is so little narrative in its effect.Granted Marx’s boast, that he had inverted Hegel’s story (stood it on itshead/feet), he still narrated it according to storytelling conventions recog-nizably of the same type, bearing marked family resemblances, to Hegel’sown. Horkheimer and Adorno’s narrative is much more ambiguously nar-rative; it does not so much tell the story as elaborate chosen moments orimages (dialectical images?) from it; it presupposes the reader’s knowledgeof the story’s basic narrative, and turns the energy thus released from nar-ration to eliciting resonances and potencies undeveloped in the narrative’searlier versions. Though the narrative interest of the precedent ‘‘story’’ nec-essarily prolongs itself in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the narrative impulse isclearly subordinate to the interpretive; and to that extent the book stands to


Hegel-and-Marx in a relation in some ways like that of Midrash to Torah. Butthat analogy needs qualification, to the extent that both scripture and com-mentary minimize affect: the biblical narratives are terse as if precisely topurge affective or aesthetic power, ‘‘textual effect’’ or affect. (On the theorythat the Torah narratives are prose synopses of originally much longer, andmore libidinally invested, oral narratives, intended precisely to deprive thosebardic narratives of the affective power pagans associated with divine inspi-ration [the Muses], we might speculate that biblical narrative’s estrange-ments of narrative effects or affects anticipate the Republic ’s expulsion ofthe poets.)

By contrast, the affective program I have ascribed to Horkheimerand Adorno here, to arouse Enlightenment to its chronically suppressed‘‘fear,’’ to disturb Enlightenment’s ‘‘tranquility of mind,’’ to arouse Enlighten-ment’s ‘‘bad conscience,’’ adds to the mode of Midrashic exposition an emo-tionalism, a ‘‘labor of affectualization,’’ absent in the precursor text(s); herethe analogy that comes to mind is Aeschylus’s sensationalizing reconstitu-tion of Homeric epos, in which the familiar epic story need not be retold—the audience already knows the plot—so that the hypnagogic work of thechoral song can concentrate instead on a stroboscopic activation of thestory’s most horrific associations, as when the Chorus in the Agamem-non is beset by images from the curse-of-Atreus story (a boiling pot ofinfant limbs! a mighty fleet becalmed at sea! a princess’s lovely neck baredto the sacrificial knife!) so elliptically, but also so obsessively, as to moti-vate the elision of their collectively known narrative context as a collec-tive effort to repress collective anxieties that are recurring with the force ofnightmare. (Compare the similar impulse in a more contemporary instance,Christopher Logue’s operatic workouts on the Iliad.) The nobility of theHomeric grand style, idealized since antiquity, has much to do with whatHorkheimer and Adorno indict as its ‘‘narrative composure’’;22 Aeschylus’srescript (and Logue’s) represses the narrative the better to distill from itsimageries the panic Homer’s ‘‘composure’’ composes—and however delib-erately, Horkheimer and Adorno seem to me to stand in some such rela-tion to Hegel, or at least to that side of him they most deplore, his Panglos-sian, happy-consciousness, theodicy-mongering ‘‘optimism.’’ The intrusion,into the quasi- or even mock-Hegelian habitus of Dialectic of Enlightenment,of de Sade and Nietzsche, anti-Semitism and Hollywood, ‘‘motivates’’ thisgesture.

22. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 78–80.


In doing so (again), Dialectic of Enlightenment projects a panoramaof catastrophe that mobilizes Marx as readily as Hegel, and without miti-gating the force of its anti-Enlightenment indictments against either. But par-ticular or ‘‘party’’ ideological provocations aside, Dialectic of Enlightenmentmeans to present a vision of global cultural catastrophe that challenges thecompeting received partisan scenarios. It is addressed to readers of goodwill—at least, potentially, of all ideological stripes. To loyal communists, itsays that their party-line optimism is fraudulent, that the revolution underStalin partakes of a barbarism every bit as savage as the alternatives. Toright-wingers short of outright fascism, conservatives like, say, Spengler, itoffers something like a ‘‘dialectical mimesis’’ of The Decline of the West, butone in which the catastrophe appears as present, not future, and is attendedby anguish rather than the paradoxically anodyne knowingness typical ofearly-modern ‘‘cultural despair’’ reactionaries of the Spengler type. Mostcomplicatedly, it addresses liberals and non-Stalinist leftists, inheritors andstewards of the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ tradition, whose received view of the catas-trophe—that the bad guys, the forces of darkness, are winning—they affrontby diagnosing the failures and shortcomings of the good guys themselves,of Enlightenment itself. In their account of Enlightenment’s devolution orregression into barbarism, via positivism, scientism, ‘‘identity-thinking,’’ anti-theorism, and literal-mindedness of all kinds, they enact the failure of theEnlightenment narrative not only to achieve its narrative telos but also tomaintain its dialectical ethos—whether or not it is still telling itself that pro-gressive or revolutionary story, or (as in the USSR) fetishizing the worddialectic itself. They narrate the failure of the Enlightenment narrative toachieve narrativity, as well as the failure of Enlightenment dialectic to be dia-lectical. As if dialectic itself could be subject to ‘‘negation’’—and not ‘‘deter-minate negation,’’ the kind that alters quality, but an annihilation, that isreduction ad nihil, to zero, that, in the terms of Horkheimer and Adorno’sindictment of Enlightenment, liquidates ‘‘quality’’ altogether, and therefore‘‘dialectic’’ itself, leaving only the ‘‘bad infinity’’ of the merely quantitative, thedomain in which the logic of equivalence/exchange has its limited but lethalvalidity. This, as Dialectic of Enlightenment projects it, is the irony, or indeedthe peculiar ‘‘dialectic,’’ of the ‘‘dialectic of Enlightenment.’’

Horkheimer and Adorno’s evocation of the failure is the most potentsuch book of the mid-century period, a period peculiarly rich in efforts atcultural diagnosis—and I include here everything from prewar works suchas Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Spengler’s Decline of theWest to such postwar productions as Norman O. Brown’s Life Against


Death, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and Erich Fromm’s Flightfrom Freedom. Dialectic of Enlightenment remains an epitome of critical‘‘unhappy consciousness,’’ fully answering to the angst, rage, and despairof the ‘‘during-Auschwitz’’ ordeal and, prophetically, to the ‘‘after-Auschwitz’’prolongation, in which the fact that the killing at Auschwitz had ceasedoffered so little comfort in view of the prospect of global murder opened bythe nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1944 introduc-tion, Horkheimer and Adorno explain that all rhetorics of ‘‘affirmation’’ are bynow so compromised as to make affirmation itself a lie—a premise that allbut forecloses any possibility of the utopian in the book itself. Yet the bookhas its hints of utopian hope—a hope indissociable from a sense of the dia-lectic simply as the historically unforeseeable but capable of horror as wellas blessings: not at all the providential stand-in for God, deus ex machinaall too familiarized in progressive and revolutionary storytelling. Against alloptimisms from Hegel to Stalin and beyond, Horkheimer and Adorno de-conceal a historical dialectic leading to catastrophe rather than reconcilia-tion, an Absolute of despair rather than exaltation, a Golgotha of the Spirit or‘‘slaughterbench of history’’ more literal and more atrocious than any Hegelcould ever have imagined, projected indeed as the apparent liquidation ofdialectic itself. This is, in 1944, the look—the ‘‘dialectical mimesis’’—of thedialectic very specifically of Enlightenment.

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