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

The first stage of distance that Adorno and Horhkheimer discuss is the stage of
animism. During this stage, human beings tried to control and appease nature through the
magic ritual: “Der Zauberer macht sich Dämonen ähnlich; um sie zu erschrecken oder zu
besänftigen, gebärdet er sich schreckhaft oder sanft.” 227 Sacrifice was an additional
method of control, used to persuade gods, demons, or natural spirits in order cunningly to
get them to act as one wished and to steer nature in the direction one desired. There was
already in this stage a certain distance between subject and object—a distance not present
in primary mimesis—for the magic ritual worked through representation. Something
done to a symbol was expected to cause the action to befall the object or person
symbolized: for instance, using the hairs of a person and doing something to them would
signify what one wanted to happen to the person herself. Sacrifice worked through
symbolic representation also, as the thing sacrificed constituted a symbol for something
else that the god or spirit coveted.
Symbolic representation, because it involves a differentiation between the symbol
and the symbolized, already establishes some distance between subject and object. But
the distance is bridged by the fact that the symbol necessarily refers to a particular
object, and this attachment to the object is not arbitrary but rather guaranteed by the
specific qualities of the symbol, on the one hand, and the symbolized, on the other. The
symbol is conceived as attached to a particular meaning or sense by virtue of its concrete
qualities, thus necessarily and not accidentally or arbitrarily. In turn, the thing
227 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 32. English translation by
Edmund Jephcott in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6: “The
magician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimidating or appeasing gestures.”
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