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

CHAPTER 5:
A FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION OF DIALEKTIK DER AUFKLÄRUNG
Now we need to take into account the second component of Adorno’s ontology of
antagonism: that is, the global heteronomy of the social order due to society’s mediation
by nature. This chapter, and the one that follows, are mainly concerned with explaining
the meaning of this mediation. Since the mediation of society by nature is the main topic
of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, I proceed by first offering an
interpretation of this text.
In this work, Horkheimer and Adorno diagnose the modern social order, and the
form of rationality prevalent in it, as pathological—and not just in any sense but rather
specifically in terms of a “return of nature,” or, as Horkheimer calls it in his Eclipse of
Reason, a “revenge of nature.” This phenomenon corresponds to Freud’s category of the
“return of the repressed.” In order to understand Horkheimer and Adorno’s diagnosis of
the pathologies of the modern world, it is essential to understand Freud’s notion of the
return of the repressed as well as how the notion might be applicable to society and
civilization as a whole.
In psychoanalytic theory, the return of the repressed corresponds to the creation of
symptoms in psychological illness, be it in neurosis or psychosis. My central interpretive
claim is that Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis of the enlightenment’s pathology
corresponds in detail to the Freudian conception of the paranoid form of psychosis. If I
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