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

Steven Helmling

Given the ubiquity of the phrase ‘‘immanent critique’’ in Theodor

Adorno’s oeuvre, both early and late, it is surprising that what Adorno might
have 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 the
way to weightier matters.

1

Yet in this phrase, Adorno comes as close as he

does anywhere to naming something like a programmatic ambition for his
work, its distinctive method as well as its more comprehensive aims. The
accomplishment 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 differences
between Adorno and Horkheimer); Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘‘Introduction to Adorno’s ‘Idea
of 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 aesthetic
evaluation, see Christopher Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno
and 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 of
critical 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-more
daunting 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 merely
on the kinds of objects critique might target, or the kinds or method or scope
of the arguments it might mount, but on the very writing practice in which
critique performs itself, in which it accomplishes as much of its program as
it manages to deliver on.

So rather than take ‘‘immanent critique’’ as a given, I want in this

essay to try to focus fault lines and contradictions in Adorno’s theory and
practice of immanent critique that seem to me suggestive and illuminating
for 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 relation
to 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 these
figures and the issues at stake in their disagreements over what critique is
and 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, a
reflexive self-consciousness about his own writing practice as well, and thus
a considerable motivation of the flair and drama that are so distinctive to the
energetic carriage of his ‘‘dialectical’’ sentences.

Since, in what follows, I want to foreground the implication of Adorno’s

writing practice as enactment of the varied ambitions connoted by the
phrase ‘‘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 have
tried to subject knotty passages to readings as detailed as I can make them
but which nevertheless do not claim to be offering a specifically ‘‘stylistic’’
response; if I have shied away from quoting the German, it is precisely in
order not to seem to make such claims. I have been careful, in the process of
composition, to consult the German when it has seemed prudent; and when
the German has raised doubts about my argument, I have backed off, or
sought a different way of pursuing my point. I am trying to say that I am wary
of the pitfalls my poor German lays for me, and have done my cautious best
to avoid them. That said, I think that in an increasingly global culture, critical
discourse must increasingly rely—indeed, it had better admit the extent to
which it always has relied—on translations. (Even our most enviably polyglot

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colleagues—George Steiner, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson—must rely on
translations 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 over
the planet felt disqualified from comment on anything in languages in which
they lack ‘‘literary competence.’’ In resolving to write on Adorno, I have had
to overcome considerable hesitation, but my keen interest in him, and my
conviction that I could illuminate problems that others had overlooked, have
obviously gotten the better of my scruples.

‘‘Immanent critique,’’ then: by this usage, Adorno clearly intends to do

more than merely take sides in the long contention over what critique is, or
should, or can, be. Rather, he means his own practice to enact a critique of
the debate itself, and to model larger possibilities and challenges beyond it.
A chronic ambition of critique has been to get outside the critical object, to
achieve ‘‘objectivity’’ about it, or ‘‘critical distance’’ from it. Both in its Kantian
and its Marxist senses, critique has turned on issues of inside/outside; and
the pursuit of the inside track has largely belonged to ‘‘hermeneutic,’’ as
opposed to ‘‘critique.’’ ‘‘Hermeneutic’’ sanctions the interpreter’s sympathy,
or even identity with the object—precisely the stance ‘‘critique’’ rejects as
imperiling objectivity. As usual, when confronted with a dichotomy in our cul-
ture’s way of conceptualizing its problems, Adorno takes the dichotomy itself
as 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 call
critique’s ‘‘object’’; Adorno frequently contrasts it with ‘‘external’’ critique,
critique ‘‘from outside,’’ or even, if rarely, ‘‘transcendent critique.’’

2

Adorno’s

most sustained contrast of ‘‘immanent’’ with ‘‘transcendent’’ criticism comes
in the peroration of the 1949 essay ‘‘Cultural Criticism and Society’’ (it is this
peroration 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 Pure
Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 20.
Twice, Adorno characterizes his own work as ‘‘metacritique’’—in the subtitle to his book
on 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, the
word amounts to a kind of sarcasm at the expense of philosophical systems founded on the
premise 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.

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baric’’): ‘‘The alternatives—either calling culture as a whole into question
from outside under the general notion of ideology, or confronting it with the
norms which it itself has crystallized—cannot be accepted by critical theory.
To insist on the choice between immanence and transcendence is to revert
to the traditional logic criticized in Hegel’s polemic against Kant. . . . The
position transcending culture is in a certain sense presupposed by dialectics
as the consciousness which does succumb in advance to the fetishization of
the intellectual sphere.’’ Whereas, says Adorno, ‘‘dialectics means intransi-
gence toward all reification’’

3

—in particular, the ‘‘spurious harmony’’ of what

he elsewhere calls, in condemnation of Lukács, ‘‘Extorted Reconciliation’’

4

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

[Immanent criticism] pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of
the task itself. In such antinomies criticism perceives those of society.
A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which
resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one
which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contra-
dictions, . . . in its innermost structure. Confronted with this kind of
work, the verdict ‘‘mere ideology’’ loses its meaning. At the same
time, however, immanent criticism holds in evidence that the mind
has always been under a spell. On its own it is unable to resolve the
contradictions under which it labours. Even the most radical reflec-
tion of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains
only reflection, without altering the existence to which its failure bears
witness. Hence immanent criticism cannot take comfort in its own
idea. It can neither be vain enough to believe that it can liberate the
mind directly . . . nor naïve enough to believe that unflinching immer-
sion in the object will inevitably lead to truth by virtue of the logic of
things. . . . The less the dialectical method can today presuppose
the Hegelian identity of subject and object, the more it is obliged to
be mindful of the duality of the moments. . . . The very opposition
between knowledge which penetrates from without and that which
bores from within becomes suspect to the dialectical method, which
sees in it a symptom of precisely that reification which the dialectic is
obliged 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 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 216–40.

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from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous
[i.e., ‘‘immanent’’] relation to the object. Dialectics must guard against
this 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 dialectical
critic 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 without
and that which bores from within’’ is itself a symptom of the problem, then
the logic of that aporia requires a method that aspires to do both, and ‘‘the
insolubility of the task’’ is not its disqualification but an attestation of its
necessity. Adorno’s practice thus assumes for immanent critique burdens
both critical and hermeneutic: making each immanent to the other and, at
the 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 but
an alienation to be overcome; while hermeneutic’s ‘‘inwardness’’ with the
object, 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, two
kinds of critique, internal and external. Adorno’s premise is that all critique is
from ‘‘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 program
that critique should aspire to than a predicament that critique must try not
to flinch from.

An immanent critique thus conceived incurs complex burdens—and

since Adorno resists generalization, let us begin with consideration of a par-
ticular instance: a section of Negative Dialectics that proposes an immanent
critique of Heideggerian ‘‘ontology.’’ Adorno concedes that the Spirit in our
age has a legitimate ‘‘ontological need,’’ to which Heidegger and others are
offering, 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.

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problem as well as to expose the ideological mystification of the proposed
solution. ‘‘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 its
own force against it.’’ Thus critique must confront not merely Heidegger’s
own ‘‘thought movements’’ but all the philosophical concepts and systems
that precede and surround Heidegger. ‘‘The thought movement that con-
gealed in them,’’ Adorno explains, ‘‘must be reliquified, its validity traced, in
repetition.’’

6

Let us unpack some of this. What is ‘‘congealed’’ must be ‘‘reliquified’’:

this figuration is frequent in discussions of ideology and reification, and not
just in Adorno; indeed, we find it in Hegel himself. (Observe the contrast with
reactionaries, 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 critique
seeks to undo—to soften, thaw, loosen or, in his figure here, ‘‘reliquify.’’ As a
program, however, this is more easily proposed than executed. The critical
object ‘‘must be reliquified, its validity traced, in repetition.’’ Observe first that
this is a critique concerned as much to validate what is valid in its object as
to discredit or expose what is not. But the real trouble is repetition, a word
in 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 its
effort to ‘‘reliquify’’ the ideological rigidities it suffers, immanent critique must
‘‘repeat’’ these rigidities, which is to say, must suffer, indeed, inflict, the fate
of repetition upon itself deliberately. Adorno is Hegel’s disciple in holding
that the past cannot be merely disowned, or gotten ‘‘outside’’ of: escaping
its 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 of
writing’’—critique must labor as mightily to evoke its object as to sublate or
move beyond it. And hence the ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ imperative that
is 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.

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we might call it the ‘‘after-Auschwitz’’ imperative, keeping in mind that this
intellectual-affective imperative of Adorno’s writing long predates Auschwitz
itself. (One way of registering the angst of Dialectic of Enlightenment might
be 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 in
Adorno’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 here
affectualization—the labor of apprehending our ideological condition not
only (to recall Hegel again) as thought but also as feeling—with the caveat
that 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’’ and
to ‘‘reliquify,’’ part of the breach he wants to close, the wound he wants to
heal, 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 which
Enlightenment has, in separating thought from feeling, impoverished both.
Only thus can the wound, and the healing (if any: at any rate, the need for
it), be made concrete.

This ambition puts large demands on the writing of critique: the critic

must 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 be
peculiarly 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,’’ must
evoke as inescapable preliminary to any other hoped-for transitive (‘‘reliqui-
fying’’) effect upon them. And that imperative, familiar in our period from
the great radical innovations of modernism, incurs the dangers that Lukács
reprehends as ‘‘the ideology of modernism’’: that to ‘‘repeat ’’ the problem
will be merely to replicate it, so that the radical new work will present merely
a symptom of the problem rather than a critical negation of it. Hence the
subtext, lifelong, of the debates between Lukács and Adorno over the mer-
its of realism versus modernism. For Lukács, a Joyce or a Proust is merely
an example of bourgeois decadence, not, in any useful way, an anatomist
or critic of it. For Adorno, a Kafka or a Beckett has a critical value far out-
stripping any more conventionally conceived critique, because they make
the contemporary predicament and its anguish real, or perhaps we had
better say concrete—they convey its ‘‘objectivity.’’ Adorno praises the plays

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of Beckett precisely because they ‘‘arouse the anxiety that existentialism
only 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 of
release from the predicaments they portray: the failure of any such enact-
ment is what makes them, for Lukács, merely symptomatic of the bourgeois
ideology, and to that extent, ideological themselves. For Adorno, any such
narrative release could be only ‘‘imaginary’’ release, and hence itself not
merely ideological but virtually the epitome of ideology as such. It is not
merely that Lukács and Adorno disagree on what is critical and what is ideo-
logical: it is that precisely what determines the question for one determines
it the other way for the other.

Lukács cannot have approved of Dialectic of Enlightenment—either

as a set of theses (assuming such could be extorted from its motivatedly
anti-thetic prose) or as a piece of rhetoric, or writing. Dialectic of Enlight-
enment violates the norms established for critique in the century and more
preceding it as radically as Ulysses violates the norms of realist fiction. It
avows a historicizing and dialectical consciousness, but builds itself around
binary pairs—Odysseus as bourgeois, myth as Enlightenment—that would
seem to be staged as anything but: asserted, rather, as transhistorically or
unhistorically homogeneous, as well as ‘‘equivalent’’ or fungible in a way to
eschew 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, any
narrative leading from one to the other: conjoin them, that is, in what Adorno
elsewhere 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, namely

Habermas, epigone of the Frankfurt School generally and protégé of Adorno
in particular, has done something close to it for him. In Lecture V of The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas warns that Dialectic of
Enlightenment risks incurring the sin it avowedly condemns, namely, elabo-
rating and enforcing the myth/Enlightenment binary so insistently as to
threaten a lapse into a ‘‘mythic thinking’’ of the very kind the book charges
against Enlightenment itself. (Habermas is concerned lest the gains of mo-

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

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dernity be lost in the crossfire between antimodern reactionaries on the
Right and postmodern radicals on the Left; he more charitably concedes
Adorno and Horkheimer’s commitment to ‘‘reason’’ in the interviews, roughly
contemporaneous with Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, collected as
Autonomy and Solidarity.)

8

But Habermas argues that to the extent that

Enlightenment is critique, Horkheimer and Adorno undercut their own criti-
cal project, as well as the modern project at large, and that Dialectic of
Enlightenment is therefore entoiled in what Habermas thrice calls a ‘‘perfor-
mative contradiction’’

9

—a contradiction, he argues, that vitiates the whole

project.

I am arguing the contrary here, that just this performative contradic-

tion is what gives Dialectic of Enlightenment its force and its weird power. If
Habermas 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 merely
incidental 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 it
protests—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.’’ And
now, 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 brief
against the ‘‘paradox’’ of Dialectic of Enlightenment is compounded by the
reflection that it is not unconscious: ‘‘Adorno was quite aware of this per-
formative contradiction’’ (PDM, 119). What is further ironic is the question
of Habermas’s own awareness of his own implication in the tangle. It is
like an Escher drawing, a fractal-recursive, self-replicating structure into
which Habermas’s reading has conducted itself despite itself—which attests
that 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.

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activating in the sociocultural DNA of Enlightenment—a.k.a. modernity, late
capitalism, the administered world—that neither Horkheimer and Adorno’s
own critique of Enlightenment nor Habermas’s critique of their critique can
quarantine the infection ‘‘inside’’ a boundary or secure itself safely ‘‘outside’’
the zone of contamination. Thus the Horkheimer/Adorno QED: the absence
of 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 makes
the case implicitly, but unmistakably, via a kind of guilt by association, in
the 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 from
questions of truth or falsity (PDM, 119–26). (Compare Habermas’s open-
ing paragraph, which places Dialectic of Enlightenment among the ‘‘black
books’’ of Nietzsche, de Sade, and other ‘‘ ‘dark’ writers of the bourgeoi-
sie, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville’’ [PDM, 106].) On the
truth/falsity score, Habermas scrupulously maintains a distinction between
Dialectic 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’’ of
Dialectic of Enlightenment—the fact that ‘‘Adorno was quite aware of this
performative contradiction’’—would seem to be, for Habermas, all that can
redeem the book from a wholesale lapse into naïvely mythic thinking.

Now I hasten to grant the power of Habermas’s critique of Dialectic of

Enlightenment—he puts that case as well as it can be put—but: Horkheimer
and, especially, Adorno as exemplars of cynical reason? That seems to me
a judgment so wrongheaded as to approach the perverse. Peter Sloterdijk’s
diagnosis of Adorno’s ‘‘sensitive critique,’’ and his prescription (at need) of
a dose of ‘‘cheekiness,’’ seems to me much closer to the mark; indeed, his
formula—that Adorno ‘‘tried, by a conceptual balancing act, to construe a
knowledge that would not be power’’

10

—seems to me to capture both the

forlornness and the defiance of Adorno’s refusal of every variety of cynical
consciousness. 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.

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107

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 himself

elects to fight the fight with satire and laughter—‘‘kynicism’’—rather than,
à la Adorno, from the position of ‘‘unhappy consciousness,’’ might be read
as variously qualifying his praise, but I do not see how it could be taken to
undo 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 cynical
consciousness, 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 in
Habermas 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 quite
ahistorical, undialectical, even ‘‘mythical’’ conjunctions. The measure of its
success is how effectually it manages to communicate those contradictions.
And by ‘‘communicate’’ I here mean to evoke not the model of transmission
of message from sender to receiver but the ambition of the text to make the
pain of all this contradiction common, a kind of ideological communion of
suffering that, Adorno insinuates, is as close to a binding agent, a legitimate
solidarity, as our alienated culture may presently allow us. ‘‘The need to lend
a 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 that
is the specific felt or lived ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ of Dialectic of Enlight-
enment—remains potent throughout, and this affective or moral difficulty
attests, 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; hence
the 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 to
Adorno,’’ Telos 81 (1989): 9–14. If Hullot-Kentor argues that Habermas misses the point
of the ‘‘immanence’’ of Adorno’s ‘‘immanent critique,’’ Axel Honneth takes the opposite
tack, 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 Dialectic
of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism,’’ Constellations 7, no. 1
(2000): 116–27.
13. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17–18.

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be rendered lucid by any paraphrase or commentary. And this un-lucidity
has the further specific ‘‘textual effect’’ (or affect) of feeling, in the reading,
always a direct function of the general apprehension of contradiction as the
motivation of the writing. It is the very point of Adorno’s immanent critique
that we are not merely shown this contradiction or that, but that we feel
contradictoriness, feel, indeed, what Adorno elsewhere calls the ‘‘Objectivity
of Contradiction’’

14

in our very experience of the reading throughout. Contra-

diction is realized, or concretized, in its very concept, and as feeling: a model
of the ‘‘labor of conceptualization’’ and the ‘‘labor of affectualization,’’ as well
as the chorismos of the ideological will to separate them, to diminish the
force, 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 what

entitle Adorno’s immanent critique to call itself ‘‘dialectical.’’ In fact, in one
place (in his immanent critique of Edmund Husserl), Adorno makes explicit
the 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 to
phenomenology, as it pushes the phenomenological model, with the latter’s
own force, to where the latter cannot afford to go. Dialectic exacts the truth
from it through the confession of its own untruth.’’

15

Immanent critique, that

is, ‘‘repeats’’ Husserl’s ‘‘phenomenological model,’’ and its ‘‘untruth’’—but
with the effect of not merely ‘‘repeating’’ the ‘‘untruth’’ but forcing a critical
‘‘confession’’ from the ‘‘untruth’’ itself. The problematic implicit here of the
mere repetition of the Husserlian ‘‘symptom’’ versus its ‘‘reliquified’’ critical
‘‘negation’’ is made explicit on a later page: ‘‘Dialectics is the quest to see
the 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 surpass
through 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.

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109

but more to my present point is the preemption of the Lukács complaint
in the warning lest critique ‘‘degrade itself . . . to a replica of . . . nature’’
(this last, the signifier here of the ‘‘naturalizations’’ of the cultural that are
the 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 cautionary
one—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, or
as itself ‘‘mythical,’’ as Habermas warned. It cannot contest what Dialectic
of Enlightenment calls ‘‘the power of repetition over reality’’

17

without risking

the 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 the
property the German philosophical tradition ambiguously or polysemously
denominates, in the realm of the aesthetic, as ‘‘Schein’’—appearance or illu-
sion: the artful contrivance, variously concealing its own art or, in modern
times, more critically baring its own device(s), whereby any composition,
whether of art or of critique, hesitates between the aesthetic as ideology
and (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 the
most unstable, most conflicted—why not say most ‘‘dialectical’’?—motifs in
the book.

18

For most of us, the word’s primary association will probably be

with Aristotle’s Poetics—the mirror held up to nature—but this is an associa-
tion Dialectic of Enlightenment studiously avoids. In the Horkheimer/Adorno
text, mimesis is primarily a synecdoche for the mythic and even premythic
habitus of archaic consciousness and the proto-Enlightenment attempt, at
first to propitiate nature, then to dominate it, by means of ‘‘sympathetic
magic.’’ (This context, opening Aristotle’s ‘‘mimesis’’ to its archaic foretime,
can quite eclipse its sequels in the more familiar and more recent cultural
past of Europe, and, indeed, I suspect Horkheimer and Adorno mean to
estrange or defamiliarize those meanings, so complicit in the ideology of
the 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.

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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 way
of 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. To
that extent, ‘‘mimesis’’ would seem to figure as a virtual epitome of what
immanent 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, if
also most treacherous, device: indeed, the potency and the treachery must
be its very condition. If ideological ‘‘mimesis’’ is the problem or danger, the
solution 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 in
numerous places.

19

With Sloterdijk again in mind, we might say that ‘‘dia-

lectical mimesis’’ enacts a kind of satirical parody, but with affects of angst
and 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 argument

with much more grounding in and reference to philosophy than I could do,
and his discussion aims to illuminate Adorno’s aesthetic theory—or indeed
his Aesthetic Theory—rather than, as I hope to do here, Adorno’s writing
practice and the difficulties it poses for readers.)

My suggestion now is that we take Dialectic of Enlightenment itself

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

19. For our present point, see especially Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction
of 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 of
Critique,’’ in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, ed. Mihai Spariosu, vol. 1 (Philadelphia and
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), 27–64.

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

111

ambitions may be allowed by considering its relation to a precedent textu-
alization of that ambition—and it is my suggestion here that we consider
Dialectic of Enlightenment for a moment ‘‘as if’’ it were a parodic rescript of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Notice I said ‘‘as if’’—or I might use the old
Hegelian/Marxist (and Adorno) word, objectively : the point being that the
resonances are significant, whether Adorno and Horkheimer intended them
or 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 social
and historical fact Horkheimer and Adorno mean to confront—which turns
out to entail, besides Hegel himself, the whole debased Hegelian aftermath
in 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 extending
to ‘‘official’’ Soviet orthodoxies of ‘‘dialectical materialism’’ (‘‘diamat,’’ in the
neologistic party-speak Adorno so loathed) and the providential historical
happy endings they were fashioned to underwrite.

The affinities of Dialectic of Enlightenment with Phenomenology of

Spirit are numerous and suggestive. Both books were written in a moment
of crisis perceived by their authors as world-historical, and both aim to diag-
nose and even to prescribe for the cultural pathologies, extending back into
an immemorial foretime, of their respective cultural moments. The table of
contents of Dialectic of Enlightenment discloses a narrative and historical
arc broadly similar to Hegel’s, orchestrating a passage from Greek antiquity
to the period of the Enlightenment proper, and thence to the present-day
moment at the height of World War II in which Horkheimer and Adorno are
writing. This historicizing organization, the antique and modern instances
chosen for elaboration, and the proportions allotted to them, all invite us to
take Dialectic of Enlightenment as a production, albeit on a smaller scale,
on the model of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Horkheimer and Adorno
renew Hegel’s terminology and supplement it with newer ones—Marxist,
Nietzschean, Weberian, Freudian—that have emerged since Hegel; but
their 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, an
ironic one: a nightmare sequel to an overture (a terminal overture, Hegel
had 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-

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tion’’ or ‘‘negation’’ that Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘‘unhappy [critical] con-
sciousness’’ operates on Hegel. Hegel diagnosed unhappy consciousness
and prescribed for it in ways anticipating the morale-management counsels
of Nietzsche and William James, in the faith that modernity would eventually
enable a universal ‘‘happy consciousness.’’ The ‘‘textual effect’’ or affect of
Dialectic of Enlightenment joins the darker tone of Sigmund Freud, Oswald
Spengler, 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-pensant
liberal hopes of the day but defies the ‘‘official’’ party-line ‘‘optimism’’ of
the 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 book
organizes 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 as
opposed (historical) pairs but as virtual transhistorical equations or (to make
the 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 permit
the anachronism) the binary terms of Enlightenment’s own self-constituting
ancients/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 to
embrace; in the second, enforcing an equivalence it seeks to disown. And
in both cases, and in many other instances passim, we get not the his-
torical narrative that mediates the development from one to the other but
a sequence of nonnarrative juxtapositions—what Adorno probably learned
from Benjamin to call ‘‘constellations’’—enforcing the point that the narra-
tive of progress has not only stalled but now (1944) looks to have been a
deception or ‘‘ruse of history’’ all along, insofar as it has masked history’s
chronic steady-state or (the same thing?) cycle of ‘‘repetition,’’ blocking our
recognition 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 civilization
is 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

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

113

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 Robert
Hullot-Kentor, to his aid, citing, however, passages that do not, at least to my
reading eye, quite make his case for him.

21

Bernstein wants to see the critical

force of Dialectic of Enlightenment as trained not on Enlightenment’s histori-
cist narrative investments but rather on the ‘‘conceptual dualism’’ underlying
them—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 to
decide on one side or the other; my own experience learning to read Adorno
is that he is almost always looking for ways to reinforce the dichotomy, to
exploit its dichotomousness—its ‘‘contradictoriness’’—to critical (i.e., dialec-
tical) effect. I would, rather, put it that Dialectic of Enlightenment expresses
its critique of the West’s detemporalized, nonnarrative, ‘‘conceptual dual-
ism’’ by deconcealing the petrification or ‘‘standstill’’ that dualism wreaks
on its own narrative categories: that in Adorno, the horns of the dichotomy
are mobilized precisely in order to im -mobilize each other, to perform the
ways in which our culture’s fundamental contradictions, and their ideologi-
cal denial, can disclose themselves only in the condition—or the ‘‘dialectical
mimesis’’—of ‘‘dialectic at a standstill’’: conceptual dualities arresting, freez-
ing, petrifying the very narrative progress and movement they were meant
to release.

‘‘Dialectic at a standstill’’: that watchword of Benjamin’s is often cited

by 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, to
begin with, that in Hegel, dialectic is ineluctably temporalized, historicized,
narrativized. Hence a (large) degree of commutativity between narrative
and 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.

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rather than their qualitative, mutually negating differences. And likewise for
the 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 politically
incorrect enough way of putting it; in 1944, with Stalin’s assassins patrolling
the 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 the
publication 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 and
Adorno’s (in)version of Hegel from Marx’s. Marx claimed to have turned
Hegel right-side up, putting his idealist headstand squarely back where it
belongs, on its materialist feet—but Marx’s figure owns that he and Hegel
are 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 are
macrofeatures that Hegel and Marx have too much in common to allow them
to 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 of

a 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 its
head/feet), he still narrated it according to storytelling conventions recog-
nizably of the same type, bearing marked family resemblances, to Hegel’s
own. Horkheimer and Adorno’s narrative is much more ambiguously nar-
rative; it does not so much tell the story as elaborate chosen moments or
images (dialectical images?) from it; it presupposes the reader’s knowledge
of the story’s basic narrative, and turns the energy thus released from nar-
ration to eliciting resonances and potencies undeveloped in the narrative’s
earlier versions. Though the narrative interest of the precedent ‘‘story’’ nec-
essarily prolongs itself in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the narrative impulse is
clearly subordinate to the interpretive; and to that extent the book stands to

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Hegel-and-Marx in a relation in some ways like that of Midrash to Torah. But
that analogy needs qualification, to the extent that both scripture and com-
mentary minimize affect: the biblical narratives are terse as if precisely to
purge affective or aesthetic power, ‘‘textual effect’’ or affect. (On the theory
that the Torah narratives are prose synopses of originally much longer, and
more libidinally invested, oral narratives, intended precisely to deprive those
bardic 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 of
the poets.)

By contrast, the affective program I have ascribed to Horkheimer

and 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); here
the 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 the
choral song can concentrate instead on a stroboscopic activation of the
story’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 of
infant limbs! a mighty fleet becalmed at sea! a princess’s lovely neck bared
to 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 of
nightmare. (Compare the similar impulse in a more contemporary instance,
Christopher Logue’s operatic workouts on the Iliad.) The nobility of the
Homeric grand style, idealized since antiquity, has much to do with what
Horkheimer and Adorno indict as its ‘‘narrative composure’’;

22

Aeschylus’s

rescript (and Logue’s) represses the narrative the better to distill from its
imageries 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’’ this
gesture.

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

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In doing so (again), Dialectic of Enlightenment projects a panorama

of 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 Enlightenment
means to present a vision of global cultural catastrophe that challenges the
competing received partisan scenarios. It is addressed to readers of good
will—at least, potentially, of all ideological stripes. To loyal communists, it
says that their party-line optimism is fraudulent, that the revolution under
Stalin partakes of a barbarism every bit as savage as the alternatives. To
right-wingers short of outright fascism, conservatives like, say, Spengler, it
offers something like a ‘‘dialectical mimesis’’ of The Decline of the West, but
one in which the catastrophe appears as present, not future, and is attended
by anguish rather than the paradoxically anodyne knowingness typical of
early-modern ‘‘cultural despair’’ reactionaries of the Spengler type. Most
complicatedly, it addresses liberals and non-Stalinist leftists, inheritors and
stewards of the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ tradition, whose received view of the catas-
trophe—that the bad guys, the forces of darkness, are winning—they affront
by diagnosing the failures and shortcomings of the good guys themselves,
of Enlightenment itself. In their account of Enlightenment’s devolution or
regression into barbarism, via positivism, scientism, ‘‘identity-thinking,’’ anti-
theorism, and literal-mindedness of all kinds, they enact the failure of the
Enlightenment narrative not only to achieve its narrative telos but also to
maintain its dialectical ethos—whether or not it is still telling itself that pro-
gressive or revolutionary story, or (as in the USSR) fetishizing the word
dialectic itself. They narrate the failure of the Enlightenment narrative to
achieve 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 is
reduction ad nihil, to zero, that, in the terms of Horkheimer and Adorno’s
indictment of Enlightenment, liquidates ‘‘quality’’ altogether, and therefore
‘‘dialectic’’ itself, leaving only the ‘‘bad infinity’’ of the merely quantitative, the
domain in which the logic of equivalence/exchange has its limited but lethal
validity. This, as Dialectic of Enlightenment projects it, is the irony, or indeed
the peculiar ‘‘dialectic,’’ of the ‘‘dialectic of Enlightenment.’’

Horkheimer and Adorno’s evocation of the failure is the most potent

such book of the mid-century period, a period peculiarly rich in efforts at
cultural diagnosis—and I include here everything from prewar works such
as Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Spengler’s Decline of the
West to such postwar productions as Norman O. Brown’s Life Against

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117

Death, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and Erich Fromm’s Flight
from Freedom. Dialectic of Enlightenment remains an epitome of critical
‘‘unhappy consciousness,’’ fully answering to the angst, rage, and despair
of the ‘‘during-Auschwitz’’ ordeal and, prophetically, to the ‘‘after-Auschwitz’’
prolongation, in which the fact that the killing at Auschwitz had ceased
offered so little comfort in view of the prospect of global murder opened by
the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1944 introduc-
tion, Horkheimer and Adorno explain that all rhetorics of ‘‘affirmation’’ are by
now so compromised as to make affirmation itself a lie—a premise that all
but forecloses any possibility of the utopian in the book itself. Yet the book
has 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 well
as blessings: not at all the providential stand-in for God, deus ex machina
all too familiarized in progressive and revolutionary storytelling. Against all
optimisms 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 Hegel
could ever have imagined, projected indeed as the apparent liquidation of
dialectic itself. This is, in 1944, the look—the ‘‘dialectical mimesis’’—of the
dialectic very specifically of Enlightenment.