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

CHAPTER 6:
THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE
THEORY OF SOCIETY AND CRITICAL THOUGHT
Having explained and defended a strictly Freudian interpretation of the dialectic
of enlightenment, I now want to use that interpretation in order to flesh out Adorno’s
conception of society’s inner dynamics, and of critical thought, developed in chapter 4.
My primary aim is to explore how the mediation of the social order by nature
comes together with the social analysis presented in chapters 2-4, which focused on the
mediation of all domains of life by the social totality. I will present my interpretation of
how these forms of mediation intersect by contrasting it with a common but erroneous
reading of Adorno’s conception of how nature mediates the social order. This
interpretation, versions of which can be found in Seyla Benhabib’s, Rolf Wiggerhaus’s,
and Martin Jay’s readings of Adorno, takes the view that Adorno’s conception of how
nature mediates the development of society entails that the process of enlightenment
could not but lead to the descent of civilization into barbarism. This interpretation takes
Adorno’s view of the relation between enlightenment and nature to entail that the
pathologies of modernity are both historically inevitable and inescapable, for they arise
from an element of domination that is a necessary component of the process of
subjectivation and the formation of human societies in general. The idea of a non-
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