This article demonstrates how Adorno and Horkheimer’s turn to psychoanalytic concepts like sublimation and intra-psychic conflict strengthened critical theory. The piecemeal collective psychology they produced was used to understand fascism and anti-Semitism. But the full significance of these psychoanalytic explanations was concealed by Adorno, who elsewhere denied the possibility of psychology proper after the death of the individual. Adorno and Horkheimer’s underhanded borrowing from psychoanalysis for social analysis had the effect of filtering collective psychology through (...) the lens of regression. To amend this, the article analyzes psychoanalytic explanations from an interpretive perspective, building upon Jessica Benjamin’s psychoanalytic feminism, to contest the tactics of immanent criticism and to revitalize the project of a less dystopic collective psychology. (shrink)

(2000). ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER'S CONCEPT OF ‘ENLIGHTENMENT’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 521-544. doi: 10.1080/096087800442165.

The literature on Adorno and anti‐Semitism presents a somewhat curious state of affairs. On the one hand, concern with anti‐Semitism is presented as pivotal to his views and major works, at least post‐1940. On the other hand, the account of anti‐Semitism offered by Adorno – and Horkheimer – faces trenchant criticisms for failing to do justice to the complex phenomena at issue. In this Chapter, I re‐examine and re‐evaluate this account. In particular, I argue that they navigate (...) well two central dilemmas intrinsic to any endeavor of making sense of anti‐Semitism and the events for which the name “Auschwitz” stands. (shrink)

From a contemporary perspective, the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers can be considered the last grand modern attempt to offer transcendence, meaning, and religiosity rather than “emancipation” and “truth.” In the very first stage of their work, Adorno and Horkheimer interlaced the goals of Critical Theory with the Marxian revolutionary project. The development of their thought led them to criticize orthodox Marxism and ended in a complete break with that tradition, as they developed a quest for a (...) unique kind religiosity connected with the Gnostic tradition and emanating, to a certain extent, from Judaism. This religiosity offers a reformulated Negative Theology within the framework of what I call “Diasporic philosophy.” In his later work, Horkheimer explicitly presented Critical Theory as a new Jewish theology. Rearticulating Critical Theory is of vital importance today, both for understanding the current historical moment and for going beyond the oppressive dimensions of Critical Pedagogy. This article does not satisfy itself by offering a new reconstruction of Critical Theory; its goal is to offer a blueprint for a Diasporic counter‐education that transcends Critical Pedagogy and goes beyond the emancipatory dimensions of Judaism itself. (shrink)

Adorno and Horkheimer’s legacy is incomplete without reference to their infamous political quietism. To thinkers such as Habermas, this was the unfortunate consequence of their alleged evacuation of reason. Attending to the treatment of Nietzsche in Dialectic of Enlightenment illuminates the distinct irony of such charges. Here, in their most popular book, Nietzsche is presented as precisely that which they praised him for warning against elsewhere: an advocate of cruelty animated by a reactionary morality. I contend that this (...) exaggeration is not accidental, but rather illustrative; the authors present a consciously hyperbolized version of Nietzsche in order to articulate how he made possible his own misappropriation, and to distinguish themselves sharply from Nietzsche given their disagreements about the necessity of reason. Ultimately, however, even though Adorno and Horkheimer performatively differentiate themselves from the nihilism they saw in Nietzsche, their alternative would ironically be subject to precisely the same charges of irrationalism and political aporia that they sought so desperately to avoid. (shrink)

ExcerptA new manifesto for the radical Left is vital, and it is to emerge from whispers, riddles, and aphorisms without lapsing into dogma, pure utopia, or party politics. Its focus will be on practice and action, but will refuse to take command of the future. A new manifesto is, if it is to be all of these things at once, improvisation. These are a few of the basic features and premises of Adorno and Horkheimer's 1956 dialogue, posthumously titled, (...) Towards a New Manifesto. Writing and dialoguing in the wake and in the midst of fascist reign in Western Europe and…. (shrink)

Many well-known works in twentieth-century continental aesthetics, such as Martin Heidegger's “Origin of the Work of Art,” Jacques Derrida's The Truth in Painting, Michel Foucault's “Las Meninas,” and the two most influential Frankfurt School texts on aesthetics, Walter Benjamin's optimistic “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”1 and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's pessimistic “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,”2 treat aesthetics as an occasion for a critique of metaphysics. Hence, it is (...) reasonable to assess these works by reference to whether they retain metaphysical categories, concepts, or methodologies. In this regard, the essays…. (shrink)

본고는 조선예학의 근대성 문제를 호르크하이머의 사회철학 담론에 근거하여 분석하였다. 유가의 禮는 고대로부터 내려오는 전통적이고 종교적인 예를 계승하여 발전시킨 것으로, 공자와 맹자는 예를 仁 속에 내재화하였는데 순자는 예를 외재화하여 법과 연결하였다. 이후 古禮의 복원을 구상한 주자에 의해 『朱子家禮』를 통한 禮制가 성립되었고, 여말선초 신지식인층으로 등장한 신진사대부 세력은 성리학을 도입하면서 이를 현실 속에 구현할 실천윤리로서 예학에 주목하였다. 16세기 초 사림의 등장과 함께 주자예학과 『주자가례』에 대한 실천적 관심이 높아졌고, 이후 예에 대한 사회적 수요의 증대와 성리학의 발달로 예학은 이론과 실천면에서 심오해졌다. 조선 후기에는 家禮를 중심으로 (...) 하는 유교예속이 일반 서민의 생활에까지 광범한 영향을 끼치게 되지만, 한편으로는 왕실이나 사대부가의 전례문제에 대한 빈번한 학문적 논쟁이 정치적 분쟁으로 비화하는 등 부작용도 초래되었다. 호르크하이머의 근대는 신화에서 계몽으로 전이하는 의미이다. 계몽은 신화적 세계로부터 탈피하여 자신의 근대성을 확보하려고 한다. 그러나 신화 또한 (고대에서는) 계몽의 형식을 가지기 때문에 결국 계몽은 다시금 신화의 세계로 복귀한다고 보았다. 조선 사대부들(지식인들)이 벗어나려고 했던 신화의 세계는 바로 고려시대를 점령했던 불교의 사상체계였다. 그들은 새로운 시대를 기획하기 위하여 불교로부터 반드시 벗어나야 한다는 데 동의하였고 역시 새로운 세계관이었던 성리학(계몽)에 주목하였다. 그러나 성리학과 그의 형식으로서의 예학의 거대한 발전은 결국 그들이 그토록 벗어나고자 했던 신화의 세계로 다시 들어가고 말았다. 조선 예학의 발달은 이후 조선후기에 오면서 과도한 형식에 경도되면서 그것을 생산한 지식층인 지배층을 포함한 사회 구성원 전체를 억압하는 부작용 또한 가져왔기 때문이다. (shrink)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of (...) contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory. (shrink)

This article shows how Adorno and Horkheimer’s project of enlighten the enlightenment has as goal to overcome the dialectic of enlightenment and achieve an enlightenment without domination. The rationalization and disenchantment that define enlightenment have turned everything into an object that can be manipulated by human beings. In the administered world it has even come to reduce the human being itself to an object by means of his identification and deindividualization. This is the death of the human being. (...) Enlightenment has ended up in domination, in a totalitarian system. Auschwitz has represented the culmination of this understanding of thinking as identification. To save enlightenment is to avoid this dialectic of enlightenment, to demythologize the rationalizing enlightenment. This allows an open and altruistic thinking, which is non-identifying, alien to the domain and respectful of the individual human being. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a cultural philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and historian of music who, along with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, founded the Frankfurt School. Against Epistemology is one of his most important works.

"Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) was a leading figure in The Frankfurt School, a renowned body of philosophers and social theorists, including Adorno and Marcuse, who examined critically the changes in and development of capitalist society. Much of what has become known as the New Left can be traced back to Horkheimer, his social philosophy and his analysis of contemporary culture." "First published in 1947 Eclipse of Reason is the most lucid and fundamental statement of the Critical Theory put (...) forward by the Frankfurt School, surveying and demonstrating the gradual ascendancy of Reason in Western philosophy, its eventual total application to all spheres of life, and what he considers its present reified domination. It acts as a companion to the classic work that Horkheimer wrote with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo presenta la visión epistémica alternativa expuesta por Adorno y Horkheimer en los “Elementos del antisemitismo”, contenidos en la Dialéctica de la Ilustración, visión que sostiene un acercamiento ensayístico a su objeto de estudio a manera de montaje. El texto está compuesto por siete tesis, interrelacionadas de manera no-determinante, formando una constelación conceptual alrededor del tema. A partir de esta estrategia, los autores se oponen a la forma hegemónica de producción de conocimiento que conciben como sistematizante (...) y totalizante. Haciendo justicia a esta propuesta, mi lectura del texto se ha constituido de la misma manera: desmontando y reagrupando las tesis de tal forma que dan cuenta de nuevas perspectivas interpretativas del fenómeno del antisemitismo, así como de aspectos omitidos en la recepción de la obra de Adorno y Horkheimer.: The present article gives account of the epistemic vision exposed by Adorno and Horkheimer in the “Elements of anti-Semitism”, a text contained in the Dialectics of Enlightenment: the authors introduce a notion of knowledge that sustains an essayistic approach to its object using the strategy of montage. “Elements of anti-Semitism” consists of seven theses, which are interrelated in a non-determinant way, forming a conceptual constellation around the issue. Through this strategy, the authors oppose the system as the hegemonic form of philosophical production, it is conceived by Adorno and Horkheimer annihilating difference ant therefore totalitarian. According to this, my reading of this text tries to do justice to this epistemological proposal by constituting it in the way the authors suggest: the theses were disassembled and re-grouped, in order to give account of new interpretative perspectives on the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, as well as aspects neglected in most of the reception of Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. (shrink)

In this article I re-examine Adorno's and Horkheimer's account of the disenchantment of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment . I argue that they identify disenchantment as a historical process whereby we have come to find natural things meaningless and completely intelligible. However, Adorno and Horkheimer believe that modernity not only rests on disenchantment but also tends to re-enchant nature, because it encourages us to think that its institutions derive from, and are anticipated and prefigured by, nature. (...) I argue that Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory show how constellations and artworks generate an alternative form of reenchantment which is critical of modernity and its domination of nature. This form of re-enchantment finds natural beings to be mysteriously meaningful because they embody histories of immeasurable suffering. This experience engenders guilt and antipathy to human domination over nature. (shrink)

These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s. Max Horkheimer is well known as the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and as a sometime collaborator with Theodor Adorno, especially on their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment. These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s. Included are Horkheimer's inaugural address as director of the Institute, (...) in which he outlines the interdisciplinary research program that would dominate the initial phase of the Frankfurt School, his first full monograph, and a number of other pieces published in the 1930s. The essays, most of which have not appeared in English before, are surprisingly relevant to current post-philosophy debates, notably "On the Problem of Truth," with its focus on pragmatism, and "The Rationalism Debate in Current Philosophy," a sustained critique of the post-Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. Horkheimer's 1933 critique of Kantian ethics, "Materialism and Morality," is of particular interest given the current reaction to the neo-Kantian aspect of Habermas's work. There are also essays relevant to the current foundations debate within Continental philosophy, and the rationality/relativism question is sustained throughout the volume. (shrink)

In one of his many metaphorical turns of phrase – a leitmotif in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity — Jürgen Habermas speaks of the path not taken by modern philosophers, a path that might have led them towards his own intersubjective notion of communicative reason. Habermas is especially critical of his predecessors, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, because, he believes, they repudiated the rational potential in the culture of modernity. Whenever Adorno and Horkheimer heard the (...) word ‘culture’, they apparently reached for their revolvers. By the 1940s, their confidence in modern culture had allegedly succumbed to bitter disillusionment. Indeed, on Habermas's view, the confidence of these early critical theorists had been shaken so badly by the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism that their scepticism finally embraced reason itself, ‘whose standards ideology critique had found already given in bourgeois ideals’. Consequently, Adorno and Horkheimer were forced to call into question their own immanent critique of modernity: ideology critique itself came ‘under suspicion of not producing truths’. These philosophers supposedly had little choice but to render their now suspect critique ‘independent even in relation to its own foundations’. (shrink)

Led by Adorno and Horkheimer’s understanding of the three conceptual orienteers - subject, reason and emancipation - this work attempts to sketch a status that they have attributed to the Enlightenment. Ulysses and Oedipus are here used not only in the way those two authors have done, not only to illustrate dialectical contradictions that this "project" falls into and is marked by, but also in a way that signalize possibilities of different interpretations that have relied upon them. (...) class='Hi'>Adorno and Horkheimer’s "to enlighten the enlightenment about itself" is thus displayed, extended and examined also in the fields of contemporary thought where they have, in different ways, inspired and provoked new generation of Critical theory, and on the other hand, the postmodern authors. (shrink)

Historical convergence and personal relationships -- Critical reason with an emancipatory goal -- Anthropological differences among Tillich, Adorno, and Horkeimer -- Metaphysics and norms in critical social theory -- Religion and critical theory -- Appendix: Translation of Adorno's Entwurf contra Paulum.

After the Second World War, Adorno was politically engaged as a critical public intellectual in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Nonetheless, in the 1960s, a time of active protest against established norms and the underlying socio‐economic and political conditions, he was widely perceived by the protesting activists as adopting an attitude of resignation in blatant contradiction to the aims of his critical social theory. The chapter considers the validity of this accusation. Section 37.1 sets out Adorno's position (...) with regard to the relationship between theory and praxis from the 1950s onwards. Section 37.2 considers the adequacy of his position from the point of view of Critical Social Theory's fundamental concern with radical societal transformation. Contending that Adorno does in effect adopt a stance of resignation vis‐à‐vis radical societal transformation, it draws attention to some questionable elements in his theory that push him toward adopting this stance. It concludes that his theory would benefit from dispensing with them. (shrink)

The paper considers what united and divided Benjamin and Horkheimer-Adorno in terms of their respective confrontations with the question of what it is to articulate the past historically. It presents their shared self-consciousness of the difficult task of responding critically to a problem conceived of as the entanglement of the concept of history with domination. For the problem imbues conceptualization itself and therefore threatens the value of the authoritative statements made in their own critical reflection on it. I (...) show that these thinkers necessarily respond to the problem in confrontation with specific historical contexts: fascism, Soviet communism, German social democracy, and liberal democracy. The challenge they face is how to metabolize thinking in the midst of tendencies that disable it. I compare Benjamin’s solution, the dialectical image, with Horkheimer and Adorno’s solution, the recovery of critical reflection through the fragmentary writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment. (shrink)

Perhaps the gist of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's grand theory of modernity, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), can be summed up as follows: there is no progress without regression. The chapter most forcefully informed by their experiences in Southern California is called “The Culture Industry,” and it “shows the regression of enlightenment to ideology which is graphically expressed in film and radio.”1 This article seeks to contribute a fuller understanding of the term “regression” by placing it in the (...) biographical context of Adorno's friendship with film director and fellow Los Angelino, Fritz Lang. I will discuss three interrelated aspects: “regression”…. (shrink)

As a contribution to a critical yet responsive materialist ethics of environments and animals, I reexamine the significance of nature and animals in the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno. In response to the anthropocentric primacy of intersubjective discourse and recognition in recent figures associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Habermas and Honneth, I argue for the ecological import of the aporetic dialectic of nature and society diagnosed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and (...) class='Hi'>Adorno’s later works. Adorno’s continuing confrontation with the “domination of nature” traces the tensions between the ideological construction and resistance of “nature” as well as the instrumentalization and implicit disruptive promise of sensuous life. It indicates the material and bodily bonds between human and animal happiness and suffering, the ambiguous role of mimesis in domination and emancipation, and the critical prospect of an unforced and non-coercive freedom toward the object and answerability toward socially and historically mediated yet non-identical natural life. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the pessimistic reading of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which suggests reason is ensconced within the domination of myth, misses a key component of the authors' argument. Specifically, it misses the possibility that the liberation from the heteronomy of myth might occur via a critique of myth. Using Owen Hulatt’s reinterpretation of Adorno’s account of the tension between mimesis and self-preservation as a point of orientation, I show that while myth (...) for Horkheimer and Adorno is synonymous with a heteronomous form of life, they simultaneously recognize it as an incomplete but largely untapped mediator of the history of human experience (via language), and thus a promising source of rational self-knowledge. Specifically, myth can illuminate fragments of both the contingent factors that led to human sociality becoming entwined with domination, while also offering momentary reflections of the kinds of life that were relinquished in the drive for instrumentalised survival. I propose that for Horkheimer and Adorno it is myth’s linguistic mediation between a community of speakers and their (often violent and ambiguous) pasts that is unique. It is thus myth’s capacity to offer a meditation on those other possibilities of human existence that presents a renewed chance of enlightenment. (shrink)

“Think of the disaster” is the first injunction of thought when faced with the disaster that struck European Jews during the Shoah. Thinking of the disaster means understanding why the Shoah was able to occur in civilized Europe, moulded by humane reason and the values of progress and enlightenment. It means thinking of a possibility for philosophy’s future. Walter Benjamin, who wrestled with these problems ahead of time, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Emmanuel Levinas had the courage, the (...) strength and the perception—and sometimes simply the desperation—to think about what had happened. Moved by indignation and the desire to testify, they felt the urgent need to address the cries of agony of Auschwitz’s victims in their thinking. (shrink)

When Adorno and Horkheimer constructed in the early forties the critical concept of culture industry they had in mind mainly movies and radio as its main media. Even television broad- casting was not developed enough at that time to be considered as an important player in the scene of mass culture. Nevertheless the critical aspects of their contribution were so strong and well structured that even today they cannot be discarded in a fair evaluation of such an import- (...) ant phenomenon of contemporary culture. However there have been since the time of Adorno and Horkheimer’s criticism many models of mass culture critique that took into account the evolution of the technological devices, from analogical video systems to the more recent developments of digital media. Since the consideration of the latter does not always rely on the maintenance of the aforementioned critical point of view, a criterion guiding the choice of a theoretical approach could be the way in which the relation between artworks and cultural commodities is conceived. According to this criterion the author chooses as an updated counterpoint to Adorno and Horkheimer’s mass culture critique Vilém Flusser’s theory of what he calls “post-history,” especially in its approach on communication, entertainment and art tout court. (shrink)

This paper answers Adorno's question, once asked in a lecture, about whether we, by forbidding the thought of the non-identical, fall in radically completed enlightenment back into the darkest form of mythology. In arguing for this in the question implied observation of enlightenment's fallback, the paper analyses Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of enlightenment and its relapse due to excluding the non-identical, suggesting that emotions and memory represent this non-identical. As the darkest form of mythology Adorno is (...) referring to is not to be understood as a myth itself but actually happened with the Holocaust, the paper then demonstrates how enlightenment, chiefly its exclusion of the non-identical, led to central conditions of the Holocaust that Adorno named ‘Auschwitz’. As enlightenment, according to Adorno, remains in its relapse, the paper finally discusses how his philosophy after Auschwitz advocates for the reintegration of the non-identical, mainly through the recollection of the past and the remembrance of nature within the subject. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer an analysis of the critique of reason developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in three of his most important books: Dialectic of Enlightenment, The critique of instrumental reason and Minima Moralia. Two fundamental questions are posed: Does the thought of the authors set a radical critique? If this is the case, wouldn't it imply a series of meta theorical problems and contradictions? In order to treat these questions, the statement is divided (...) into two parts. The first explores the recurring issues of the critique of reason. In the second, we elaborate a brief reconstruction of two opposite hermeneutics of Horkheimer and Adorno's works: on the one hand, the lecture of Frankfurt School's second generation ; on the other hand, Juan José Sánchez's exposition. Our principal contribution to this debate is to warn Sánchez that, in his justified intention of separating from Habermas and postmodern's reading, he finally weakens the contradictory and negative tone of Adorno and Horkheimer's philosophy.La temática que se aborda en este artículo es la crítica a la razón elaborada por Max Horkheimer y Theodor W. Adorno en tres obras fundamentales: Dialéctica de la Ilustración, Crítica de la razón instrumental y Minima Moralia. Las preguntas que se buscan responder son las siguientes: ¿Constituye el pensamiento conjunto de los autores una crítica radical? Si así fuera, ¿no implicaría una serie de problemas meta teóricos y contradicciones ? El escrito se divide en dos partes. En la primera se abordan los motivos recurrentes de la crítica a la razón. En la segunda, se elabora una sucinta reconstrucción de dos interpretaciones contrapuestas de las obras mencionadas: por un lado, la de los miembros de la segunda generación de la Escuela de Frankfurt, en particular la de Jürgen Habermas y la de Albrecht Wellmer; por otro lado, la del comentarista español Juan José Sánchez. El aporte teórico de este artículo consiste en advertirle a este último autor que, en su justificado afán de distanciarse de la lectura habermasiana y de la postmoderna, termina debilitando el tono contradictorio y negativo de la filosofía conjunta de Adorno y Horkheimer. (shrink)

The question Adorno and Horkheimer leave the reader of the Dialectic of Enlightenment with is: How, finally, are we to supplement the project of the Enlightenment, so that it may attain its libratory potential? As I find Adorno's answers to the question of the proletariat's political failure troubling, in leaving little possibility of reform or hope in concrete terms for continuing successfully in the project of liberation, I intend to provide an alternative narrative of human liberation based (...) on a critical rereading of Adorno and Horkheimer in light of Ren Girard. Specifically, I argue that Girard can provide a model of human liberation that enables the transcendence of the Odyssean disposition to self-sacrifice that Adorno and Horkheimer see as a key to the failures of the proletariat. In Girard's terms, I argue that the strategy of Penelope rather than Odysseus can provide a model for a psychology and praxis of liberation. (shrink)

Habermas’ critical theory is partly an attempt to identify the limitations of critique and emancipation as espoused in the first generation critical theory of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In their attempt to develop an interdisciplinary, reflexive, emancipatory and dialectical reason that is critical towards accepted realities, Horkheimer and Adorno in their monumental work The Dialectic of Enlightenment pictured a world trapped in instrumental rationality. Taking and revolutionizing traditional critical theory, Habermas argues that reason entails both (...) emancipator as well as instrumental possibilities. Through an exposition of Habermas’ critique of Horkheimer and Adorno in his discourse of modernity, this article argues that although Habermas successfully identifies the equation of the rational with the instrumental and offers an emancipator model in return; still he ends up not paying sufficient attention to aesthetic truth. (shrink)

The author attempts at questioning Habermas’ and Honneth’s claim that the linguistic turn within Critical Theory of society represents a way out of the “dead end” of the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, who were unable to formulate an action-theoretic understanding of social conflicts. By presenting a view that Adorno, in his “Negative dialectic”, develops an insight into a crucial characteristic of the conflict nature of modern societies, which eludes the lingustic-pragmatist Critical Theory, the author tries to defend (...) and reactualize Adorno’s perspective. The paper analyzes some key aspects of the original idea of Critical Theory, and the “negativistic turn” that Adorno and Horkheimer made with the writing of “Dialectic of Enlightenment”. Having considered the central arguments of the “Negative Dialectic”, the author presents his understanding of Adorno’s concept of social conflict, which is then being contrasted with Habermas’ understanding of social conflict, formulated in terms of a systemic colonization of the lifeworld. Pointing out the weaknesses of Habermas’ concept, the author aims at sharpening the image of the conflict nature of modern societies that Adorno sketches, concluding that his perspective is able to question the framework of intersubjectivity that Habermas and Honneth take for granted. (shrink)

In recent years, documentary formats have entered prominently into the realm of the culture industry, especially since Hollywood and Netflix started to invest in costly productions addressed to the mainstream. Many of these documentaries claim to show reality in its immediacy (“as it really is”), to reveal that which is obscured, or to critically assess societal evils. They use aesthetic strategies that reinforce the appearance of authenticity, while concealing the mediation of what they represent, and the authoritarian stances they presuppose. (...) This turns them into powerful instruments for diffusing authoritarian and populist ideologies. Their political impact on society, their performative power of opinion-shaping, and their subliminal influence on how we perceive and understand reality call urgently for critical assessment. Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, along with their philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic writings, provide a constructive starting point. This essay aims to mobilize their critical theory of society for the problematization of documentary films in terms of their dialectical relation to society. (shrink)

For Adorno and Horkheimer, rationalism – in fact, a technical rationalism which becomes a rationalism of domination– failed to provide the path to the liberation of man and society. The aftermath, half education of the masses, is not an incomplete education or lack of education, but substantially hostility towards culture and genuine education, decay and involvement of education in individual considerations and benefits, with the contribution of mass dissemination of culture and art. Half education is the spread of (...) culture and art without a living relationship with the consciousness of people, without consequences for their lives. Adorno clarifies that in this context, the relationship between life and production reduces the former into the transitory epiphenomenon of the latter, as life and individual existence are not known in their immediacy, they do not connect directly, but they rather become part of the teaching for of material production. For Ortega y Gasset, a new type of human being has been born, the massman, who becomes isolated, trapped in the irrational feeling that nothing else, apart from his own private welfare, matters, but he also continues to demand as if it were his natural right to do so. Nonetheless, and although he remains an individualist, he does not have real access to the gifts of individuality. Marcuse understands that, ultimately, there is a conflict between production and profit on the one hand and self-determination on the other. As technology spreads its dominance over nature, man conquers man through mass control, diffused through work and culture. In this way, technological rationalism becomes ultimately political rationalism. (shrink)

The events of 1968/69 initiated a dispute between Adorno and Marcuse over the separation of theory and praxis. While Marcuse “stood at the barricades” Adorno sought recluse in the “ivory tower”. Marcuse and German students perceived Adorno’s move as departure from fundamental postulates of critical theory as laid down in Horkheimer’s 1937 essay. Adorno died amidst the process of clarifying his differences with Marcuse and thus the “unlimited discussions” between the two remain unfinished. This paper (...) sets to examine how both Marcuse and Adorno remained dedicated to the unity of theory and praxis, albeit in different ways. I argue that Adorno did not separate theory and praxis; instead, he perceived the gap between critical theory and concrete historical situation. Adorno rejected simple and unreflective translation of theory into praxis. Hence his attempt to recalibrate critical theory. Marcuse’s and Adorno’s differences lie in their different evaluation of the student movement and this evaluation was context related. My second argument is that Marcuse/Adorno disagreement is partly caused by the absence of the two from the concrete historical context. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Was there a linguistic turn in Frankfurt School Critical Theory before Habermas's communications-theoretic one? Might later Wittgenstein and the early Frankfurt School have adopted similar pictures of language? I propose that both questions should be answered affirmatively, focusing on Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason. I argue that, thanks to the picture of language that Horkheimer and Adorno share with (later) Wittgenstein, we can reconstruct their theory in a way that renders it more defensible. Insofar as the human life (...) form and language are inseparable, language can be an inextinguishable reservoir of what Horkheimer called "objective reason." Recognizing this allows us to answer Habermas's critique of Horkheimer and Adorno. Moreover, paying attention to this inseparableness can enable us to engage in disclosing social critique (for example, regarding current debates about sustainability). (shrink)

The main goal of this article is to present Negative Dialectics as a central theme in the Adorno’s thought. In this work Adorno develops the antinomies that there are in the concept of instrumental reason, in order to assert the necessity for a new notion of rationality: a dialectical, negative and materialistic reason, which holds, at the same time, the non identity between subject-object, thought and reality. In this way Philosophy becomes critique of Idealism because this philosophical system (...) defends the “identity thinking” and the irrational society that supports, making a true freedom impossible. Instead of this conception Adorno defines Metaphysics as “negative dialectics” and antisystem, whose method is the analysis of thinking’s models, as a result of his own critical epistemology. (shrink)

This article argues that the discovery of unconscious elements grounding consciousness and its formation processes has favored since Kant a critical vision of the sense of history and a new comprehension of the role of mythology for human consciousnes. The study of this critical movement of reason begins 1) with some discoveries in German Classical Philosophy about the pressupositions of consciousness, which led the subsequent thought 2) to understand history as a “fall”. Schelling’s analysis of the landmarks of the past (...) – ruins, megaliths, archaic texts – shows thus historical consciousness grounded on an immemorial past from which it frees itself by a revelation. 3) The discussion of mythology as an essential phemomenon for historical consciousness leads, according to Schelling, to a litteral or “tautegorical” interpretation of myths, and 4) to an essentially mythological conception of language and meaning in general. 5) Schelling conceptions are then compared with some philosophical thought about history in the 20th century, viz. Husserl’s thesis about the relation between history and consciousness and 6) Adorno and Horkheimer’s thought about the relation between myth and Aufklärung. As a conclusion, 7) Schelling’s idea of a philosophy of identity is compared with Adorno’s conception of the non-identical, specially regarding the comprehension of historical time and its birth, and the European consciousness of colonization and violence. (shrink)

Ever since Kant and Hegel, the notion of autonomy—the idea that we are beholden to no law except one we impose upon ourselves—has been considered the truest philosophical expression of human freedom. But could our commitment to autonomy, as Theodor Adorno asked, be related to the extreme evils that we have witnessed in modernity? In Autonomy after Auschwitz, Martin Shuster explores this difficult question with astonishing theoretical acumen, examining the precise ways autonomy can lead us down a path of (...) evil and how it might be prevented from doing so. Shuster uncovers dangers in the notion of autonomy as it was originally conceived by Kant. Putting Adorno into dialogue with a range of European philosophers, notably Kant, Hegel, Horkheimer, and Habermas—as well as with a variety of contemporary Anglo-American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, and Robert Pippin—he illuminates Adorno’s important revisions to this fraught concept and how his different understanding of autonomous agency, fully articulated, might open up new and positive social and political possibilities. Altogether, Autonomy after Auschwitz is a meditation on modern evil and human agency, one that demonstrates the tremendous ethical stakes at the heart of philosophy. (shrink)

This article revisits the Frankfurt School’s reflections on race, anti-Semitism and fascism, focusing especially on the theory of race implicit in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It argues that this theory has the potential to be developed into a critical functionalist theory of race that avoids both class and race reductionism, offering a thoroughly intersectional competitor to currently dominant philosophies of race. The key to such a theory is the view that racialization plays a functional role in sustaining capitalist exploitation. While (...) class='Hi'>Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the scapegoat function of racialization, I argue that this function, while important, does not exhaust the possible functionalities of racialization and neglects an especially crucial function: the maintenance of a specifically racial form of exploitation. (shrink)