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

So, we have at least partly answered the first question I posed above, namely, to
what entity or function in civilization we could ascribe the creation of a paranoid system:
namely, to the paranoid social imaginary of the modern anonymous collective. Now I
want to return to the second question I posed: in opposition to what standard of
normality do we apprehend enlightened society as pathological?
If the paranoid system just is the form of our world and our reality, as I have
argued, and since we cannot step outside of our social imaginary to consider others, it
follows that we have access to no non-pathological order of reality in opposition to which
our own would stand out as deviant. Even more, it follows that we cannot even think
non-pathologically; we cannot be spared from a paranoid world. But—and this is the
point on which the strength and Adorno and Horkheimer’s conception of the dialectic of
enlightenment hinges—we are able through the right form of thinking to become aware
of the pathological nature of the world that we cannot escape, but which, perhaps one
day, we could come to change on the basis of a new imaginary.
The question of how exactly we are able to gain this knowledge that the world is
pathological without access to a standpoint transcending the world is one that I address in
detail in chapters 6-8, where I discuss the method of ‘natural-historical’ interpretation, so
I will not speak at length about it here. To anticipate, I will only point out that Adorno’s
answer has to do with calling for a form of thought that does not merely reproduce the
form (system) of reality, but that moreover expresses the affective (non-conceptual and
non-logocentric) content in which damaged, projected nature expresses itself. It is
impossible to deduce the pathological character of reality with the formal—that is,
conceptual—structure of reality alone, but it is possible to feel the pathology, and the goal
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