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

alone, seemingly for its own sake. 268 The rise of intolerable conflict can thus be traced
back to the point at which the principle of exchange’s role in determining social life
became total 269 and the further entrenchment of relations of exchange became its only
justification.
(2) Regression: In psychoanalytic theory, when frustration reaches intolerable
dimensions, the psyche first tries to change the external world in order to solve the
conflict, but, if this proves impossible, a number of reactions can take place—for
instance, through a re-organization of leading component instincts, or sublimation, or
perversion, or regression, etc. The first significant thing that happened when humanity
was faced with intolerable frustration in the realm of social reality, according to
Horkheimer and Adorno, was that the attempt actually to change the social order so that it
may afford some satisfaction to human beings—a satisfaction of the old wishes for
happiness and freedom—failed, and we can correlate this failure specifically with the
failure of a truly Marxist revolution to occur and take hold. Since the external world
whose structure had become a cause of intolerable frustration was not changed, cathexes
were removed from external reality and attached to the ego, producing megalomania. As
I have discussed already at length in chapter 5, Adorno claims that the philosophical
systems of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century express the megalomania resulting
268 According to Adorno, this is the point at which the domination of capitalist relations over the
structure of social life becomes “objectively irrational.” See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 343. See English translation by E.B. Ashton in
Negative Dialectics (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 349.
269 Another way to put this would be to say that the moment of intolerable frustration coincides
with the development that makes the commodity structure dominant over social life as a whole. See chapter
4 for a detailed analysis of the total determining role of the principle of exchange in advanced capitalist
society.
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