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

accordance with which social reality comes to be ordered does not actually manage to
dominate nature; rather, it results in the recurrent and ever more threatening external
“return” of repressed nature. Human civilization becomes trapped in self-defeating
cycles of violent outbursts aimed at expunging nature and its representatives, in
conditions where the destruction of nature is actually doomed to fail because the
system—i.e., the social order structured as paranoid symptom—is formed precisely so
that threatening nature returns “from without.” And, moreover, the whole social system
is created as a projective denial of repressed nature; it is an inverse image, a negation, of
the repressed wish for nature, and this means that, in fact, the logic by which the social
system is ordered is in a sense determined by the very nature the destruction of which is
the system’s raison d’être. Finally, the instinctual energy that motivates and drives the
self-defeating irrational attempts to destroy nature itself originates in repressed nature.
The “barbaric” social order of paranoid civilization does not actually succeed in
dominating nature but is rather itself dominated by the nature it is obsessed to repress.
The historical events that Adorno and Horkheimer interpret as the conflict leading
to pathology (the stage of intolerable frustration) and the onset of illness proper
(regression and the return of nature) actually run against the actualization of humanity’s
domination of nature. As efficient causes, they bring about the opposite effect: the blind
and unconscious determination of the social order by nature through the pathological
negation of nature in projection. This means that the historical periods that correspond to
the onset and progression of pathology cannot be understood as teleological components
of an overarching history of civilization whose basic tendency is the expansion and
entrenchment of the domination of nature, and the fact that Adorno and Horkheimer find
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