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

5.4.5 Return of the repressed
The system of delusions, built through paranoid projection, re-creates the world in
such a way that what has been repressed, the extirpation of which is the system’s single
aim—i.e. nature—constantly returns from without.
The return of repressed inner nature 246 is the final cause that Adorno and
Horkheimer ascribe to fascist and proto-fascist movements as well as other expressions of
racism, xenophobia, and intolerance. The more nature is repressed in the self through the
method of projection, the more the menace of nature is re-encountered from without, in
the system of projective delusions that orders the world in which we live. Since the
desire for happiness in nature has been repressed and transformed into the invective to
destroy all threatening nature, which is seen as persecuting civilization from the outside,
the unconscious affective forces of modernity are constantly galvanized in the service of
movements whose goal is to destroy any remnants of the natural, of that which has not
sein mythisches Gewebe ein. Die Geschlossenheit des Immergleichen wird zum Surrogat von
Allmacht. Es ist, als hätte die Schlange, die den ersten Menschen sagte: ihr werdet sein wie Gott,
im Paranoiker ihr Versprechen eingelöst. Er schafft alle nach seinem Bilde.
English translation by Edmund Jephcott in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002),157:
Because paranoiacs perceive the outside world only in so far as it corresponds to their blind
purposes, they can only endlessly repeat their own self, which has been alienated from them as an
abstract mania. This naked schema of power as such, equally overwhelming toward others and
toward a self at odds with itself, seizes whatever comes its way and, wholly disregarding its
peculiarity, incorporates it in its mythic web. The closed system of perpetual sameness becomes a
surrogate for omnipotence. It is as if the serpent which told the first humans ‘Ye shall be as gods’
had kept his promise in the paranoiac. He creates everything in his own image.
246 Here I concentrate on the ‘return’ of inner nature, which is after all the most important element
in Horkheimer and Adorno’s conception of ‘nature.’ However, it is interesting to see that a certain notion
of the ‘return of nature’ can be seen even with respect to outer nature. No matter how much modern
society seeks to keep wild and uncontrollable nature outside—by filling all spaces with human habitats, by
keeping “wild spaces” controlled, by leaving no corner of the earth unexplored, etc—nature’s power is
ultimately uncontrollable, and this point is more visible than ever in the ecological crisis now under way, in
which our civilization’s s ways are dangerously close to bringing about ecological catastrophe. The fury
with which we attempt to dominate nature returns with fury that threatens to destroy us.
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