CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

epression and domination for their own sake without thereby promoting survival. Under
these circumstances, the process of repression and domination has become irrational. 144
Moreover, on the basis of psychoanalytic theory, Horkheimer and Adorno take it
that instinctual drives are not weakened by extreme repression but are rather strengthened
and rendered pathological. As repression and self-renunciation become stronger, the
demands for gratification of the instincts also become stronger. But social praxis in
modern capitalist society fails to offer any outlet for the satisfaction of pleasure instincts.
This state of affairs leads to an ever-growing unconscious resentment against civilization
and institutionalized rational structures that enforce repression. The modern individual
thus has a great reservoir of pent-up repression and latent aggression ready to explode at
any opportunity. This instinctual reservoir finds outlets in the modern world in
movements based on ideologies of nationalism, ethnic prejudice, fascism, and war.
Repressed nature thus “returns” in outbursts of destruction of human beings, of the
natural world, and ultimately of civilization itself. Thus, for Adorno, the excesses of
violence and even the ecological crises of the modern world are not accidental to
modernity but are rather based on the very psycho-dynamics on which the modern order
is built. 145
144 This does not mean that human civilization was reconciled to human needs and rationality was
not problematic before levels of repression exceeded what is necessary for survival. Civilization and
rationality were from the beginning based on psycho-dynamics that demanded renunciation from the
individual, and that made possible the increase in repression that has characterized the development of
Western civilization. The problem of extreme repression in modern civilization has its seeds in the very
dynamics by which civilization developed. However, the current state of repression is not a necessary
development from those dynamics. I give a detailed interpretation of the pathological levels of repression
in modern society and the relation between this outcome and the necessary dynamics of civilization in
general in chapters 5-6.
145 Adorno and other members of the early Institut für Sozialforschung carried a number of studies
on what they took to be the authoritarian irrationalism of modern society to support their claim that the
dynamics of the modern social order are essentially fascist, and to argue that the recurrent outburst of
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