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

Threatening, wild nature is pushed ‘outside’ until, in the final stage, it is basically
annulled through the powers of reason (at least insofar as reason’s self-understanding is
concerned).
Der Furcht wähnt er ledig zu sein, wenn es nichts Unbekanntes mehr gibt. Das
bestimmt die Bahn der Entmythologisierung, der Aufklärung, die das Lebendige
mit dem Unlebendigen ineinssetzt wie der Mythos das Unlebendige mit dem
Lebendigen. Aufklärung ist die radikal gewordene, mythische Angst. Die reine
Immanenz des Positivismus, ihr letztes Produkt, ist nichts anderes als ein
gleichsam universales Tabu. Es darf überhaupt nichts mehr draußen sein, weil die
bloße Vorstellung des Draußen die eigentliche Quelle der Angst ist. 233
The development of enlightenment civilization and enlightenment thought thus
follows definite stages, beginning with primary mimesis, then going through animism,
mythology, and finally resulting in the full-fledged subject-object relation of distance and
manipulation that characterizes the apex of enlightenment.
5.4.2 Fixation
It seems clear from the account in Dialektik der Aufklärung that the promise of
infinite pleasure that was only possible through loss of the self in nature (that is, in
primary mimesis) constitutes a desire that human beings never completely superseded, an
infantile wish whose pull on the self—a pull for disintegration into nature—was never
233 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 38. English translation by
Edmund Jephcott in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 11:
Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has
determined the path of demythologization, of enlightenment, which equates the living with the
nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear
radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form
of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is
the real source of fear.
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