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

Materie zertrümmert, und das Kaninchen geht nicht in Stellvertretung sondern
verkannt als bloßes Exemplar durch die Passion des Laboratoriums. 232
In enlightened thought, the particularity of the object is no longer essential; what matters
is only that it exemplify a general concept. Thus the signification and the thing signified
(sense and reference) come apart. Similarly, the relation between the signifier and the
signified (between the term and its sense, the concept), becomes seen as arbitrary; the
signifier is no longer a symbol but rather a mere sign. The process of establishing ever
greater distance from nature thus corresponds to the growth of distance between thought
and object.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, the model that conceives of thought as classification
into general categories has become the dominating model because it is the most efficient
for the sake of controlling nature. The principle driving the progress of rationality, from
its beginnings in mimesis to its enlightened stage, is the idea that grasping everything
conceptually will put an end to humanity’s fears. Eventually, nothing is allowed to
escape; everything comes to be seen as in-principle knowable and controllable, and thus
devoid of that mysterious quality that once made the world unpredictable and threatening.
232 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), 6-7:
Magic requires specific representation. What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy,
is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place of the god. The substitution
which takes place in sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic. Even though the hind which
was offered up for the daughter, the lamb for the firstborn, necessarily still had qualities of its
own, it already represented the genus. It manifested the arbitrariness of the specimen. But the
sanctity of the hic et nunc, the uniqueness of the chosen victim which coincides with its
representative status, distinguishes it radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange.
Science puts an end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which is a
sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universal fungibility. An atom is
smashed not as a representative but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of
the laboratory is seen not as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar.
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