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

any objective appreciation and judgment of the actual facts]. 208 As we learn from
Schreber’s own report of his ideas, the pathological delusions were built into an intricate
theologico-philosophical system, 209 so that the framework of delusion whose goal is to
repress the unacceptable wish becomes the determining principle of how reality as a
whole appears to the paranoid patient in its most fundamental aspects.
It is in part because the repressive framework of delusion becomes the
determining, highest principle ordering reality that an important characteristic of the
system arises: namely, to be impenetrable by rational argument. The system is in fact
created in such a way as to have built-in explanations for, and responses to,
contradictions brought from without, so that the latter are explained always in terms of
the system itself, and the final court of appeal is the determining principle of the system:
its functional role in repressing the unacceptable wish.
Both the systematic character of paranoid delusions and their impenetrability to
contradiction correspond to characteristics that Adorno and Horkheimer ascribe to the
systematic, reified view of reality woven by enlightened rationality: “das diabolisches
System” [the diabolic system]. 210 This system, they say, is characterized by being
“totalitarian,” in the sense that it does not permit contradiction through rational argument,
for, according to enlightenment thought, rationality itself is defined by systematicity and
208 Freud, “Über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia,” in Sigmund Freud:
Gesammelte Werke, Vol. VIII (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1955), 246. Translation modified.
209 Ibid., 254-259. See English translation in “Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical
account of a case of paranoia,” in ed. Strachey, James, The standard edition of the complete psychological
works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), 2397-2402.
210 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 217.
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