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

within, and constructs the world as objectively ever more rigid and unfree. The twofold
symptom of paranoia—megalomania and projection—is created to satisfy two demands
that are hardly compatible: (1) the idea that the betrayed bourgeois promises of
happiness and freedom were in fact achieved because the world is structured in
accordance with the fully free and rational transcendental structures of the mind, and (2)
the ever-increasing repression of nature through a projection outward that results in its
“external return,” allowing for inner nature (the repressed wishes of the id) to be vented
against externally projected nature (thus giving a release valve to repression) under the
compulsion to expunge dangerous nature.
The world organized in accordance with the rule of the exchange principle is built
in a way that satisfies (1) and (2). The recurrence of organized fascist violence against
any representatives of nature satisfies (2). On the other hand, the satisfaction of (1)
requires that, regardless of the system’s objective structure, its self-understanding be in
line with the betrayed bourgeois ideas of happiness and freedom. The system has to both
increase the repression of nature (and so work against the possibilities of freedom and
happiness), and present itself in an appearance that upholds precisely the values of
freedom and happiness: Hence the contradiction between the essence and appearance of
society, and hence the “contradiction in the object.”
This two-fold demand on the system that is symptomatic of enlightenment’s
pathology has also the effect of emptying the ostensive ideals of society of meaning.
Even as happiness and freedom are proclaimed as the goals of the social order, the
possibility of fulfilling them in any concrete sense are ever more strongly negated.
Humanity’s wish for happiness is based on an ideal of abandonment in nature and, even if
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