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

esults in the radical creation of social rather than individual reality, but it stills influences
(thought it does not exhaust) the individual’s reality because the individual’s outer world
is formed in relation to the public, social world. All of these descriptions of Castoriadis’s
notion of the radical social imaginary correspond well to the layer of reality to which
Adorno and Horkheimer assign the pathology of paranoia, the layer of a ‘subterranean,’
‘natural’ element in the constitution and historical development of civilization. I thus
want to borrow the notion of the ‘social imaginary’ from Castoriadis in order to talk
about Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis of the modern social order as pathological
without presupposing a supra-individual or transcendental subject but rather only a
contingently constituted repository of symbolic meanings that orders social reality and
thereby influences individuals’ reality as well, without fully determining it.
With respect to modern society, Castoriadis claims, like Adorno and Horkheimer,
that the defining characteristic of the modern social imaginary is an instrumental relation
of domination toward nature. Adorno and Horkheimer would agree, but would moreover
add that the social imaginary’s antagonism with nature has reached the stage of
regression, repression proper, and disease, and has as a result of pathology spawn a
delusional eidos or form as the ontological principle that structures our society and all
aspects of culture, as well as the prevalent and socially sanctioned forms of thought. The
structure of the closed and totalitarian system thus corresponds not only to the abstract
structure of socially prevalent and sanctioned modes of rationality but also to the
ontological structure of social reality and all institutional spheres of society in general, as
they all emerge from the same pathological social imaginary. Modern society is the
pathological symptom of civilized, enlightened, paranoid humanity.
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