Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis in Adorno

and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment

Steven Helmling
Given the ubiquity of the phrase immanent critique in Theodor
Adornos oeuvre, both early and late, it is surprising that what Adorno might
have meant by it has received such perfunctory attention from commenta-
tors, most of whom treat it as a self-evident premise to dispose of on the
way to weightier matters.
1
Yet in this phrase, Adorno comes as close as he
does anywhere to naming something like a programmatic ambition for his
work, its distinctive method as well as its more comprehensive aims. The
accomplishment it proposes is meant not only to distinguish Adornos work
(and that of his Frankfurt School colleagues) from the conventional critical
1. Most valuable for my purposes have been Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Nega-
tive Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (Sussex:
Harvester Press, 1977), 6669 (especially useful in delimiting some crucial differences
between Adorno and Horkheimer); Robert Hullot-Kentor, Introduction to Adornos Idea
of Natural History, Telos 60 (1984): 1057; and J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchant-
ment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8790. For a special-
ized argument for immanent critique as a method at once of interpretation and of aesthetic
evaluation, see Christopher Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno
and Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 13643.
boundary 2 32:3, 2005. Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press.
98 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
practices of his era, but to model a riskier, more comprehensive range of
critical effort, and thus to challenge criticism-as-usual to enlarge its scope,
to take on greater burdens, to aim, even at the price of failure, at ever-more
daunting tasks. Adorno means to bring critique itself into the critical cross-
hairs, to enlarge or arouse the very self-consciousnesseven the bad con-
scienceof critique, and he means the consequences to bear not merely
on the kinds of objects critique might target, or the kinds or method or scope
of the arguments it might mount, but on the very writing practice in which
critique performs itself, in which it accomplishes as much of its program as
it manages to deliver on.
So rather than take immanent critique as a given, I want in this
essay to try to focus fault lines and contradictions in Adornos theory and
practice of immanent critique that seem to me suggestive and illuminating
for the antithetical or dialectical uses to which Adorno turns it, or, better,
allows or suffers it to turn his writing. I aimto set the performative contradic-
tion (as Jrgen Habermas calls it) of Adornos immanent critique in relation
to other constructions (Walter Benjamins) and/or critiques (Georg Lukcss,
Habermass) of it, in ways that I think illuminate from a novel angle all these
gures and the issues at stake in their disagreements over what critique is
and how it should conduct itself. I mean to expound Adornos immanent cri-
tique as not only a critical program but also a performative one, that is, a
reexive self-consciousness about his own writing practice as well, and thus
a considerable motivation of the air and drama that are so distinctive to the
energetic carriage of his dialectical sentences.
Since, in what follows, I want to foreground the implication of Adornos
writing practice as enactment of the varied ambitions connoted by the
phrase immanent critique, it is with some chagrin that I report that I can-
not read Adorno in German without a trot. In writing about Adorno, I have
tried to subject knotty passages to readings as detailed as I can make them
but which nevertheless do not claim to be offering a specically stylistic
response; if I have shied away from quoting the German, it is precisely in
order not to seemto make such claims. I have been careful, in the process of
composition, to consult the German when it has seemed prudent; and when
the German has raised doubts about my argument, I have backed off, or
sought a different way of pursuing my point. I amtrying to say that I amwary
of the pitfalls my poor German lays for me, and have done my cautious best
to avoid them. That said, I think that in an increasingly global culture, critical
discourse must increasingly relyindeed, it had better admit the extent to
which it always has reliedon translations. (Even our most enviably polyglot
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 99
colleaguesGeorge Steiner, Paul de Man, Fredric Jamesonmust rely on
translations for the Koran, Orhan Pamuk, Dostoyevsky, The Tale of Genji . . .)
And I think it would be a shame if critics stimulated by work from all over
the planet felt disqualied from comment on anything in languages in which
they lack literary competence. In resolving to write on Adorno, I have had
to overcome considerable hesitation, but my keen interest in him, and my
conviction that I could illuminate problems that others had overlooked, have
obviously gotten the better of my scruples.
Immanent critique, then: by this usage, Adorno clearly intends to do
more than merely take sides in the long contention over what critique is, or
should, or can, be. Rather, he means his own practice to enact a critique of
the debate itself, and to model larger possibilities and challenges beyond it.
A chronic ambition of critique has been to get outside the critical object, to
achieve objectivity about it, or critical distance fromit. Both in its Kantian
and its Marxist senses, critique has turned on issues of inside/outside; and
the pursuit of the inside track has largely belonged to hermeneutic, as
opposed to critique. Hermeneutic sanctions the interpreters sympathy,
or even identity with the objectprecisely the stance critique rejects as
imperiling objectivity. As usual, when confronted with a dichotomy in our cul-
tures way of conceptualizing its problems, Adorno takes the dichotomy itself
as an ideological problem or woundhis code word is chorismos (Greek
separation)that his own critical labor will attempt to overcome or heal.
Hence his immanent critique, which encodes the ambition to get the criti-
cal subject inside what we might then no longer so simply be able to call
critiques object; Adorno frequently contrasts it with external critique,
critique from outside, or even, if rarely, transcendent critique.
2
Adornos
most sustained contrast of immanent with transcendent criticism comes
in the peroration of the 1949 essay Cultural Criticism and Society (it is this
peroration that rises to the climax of To write poetry after Auschwitz is bar-
2. See especially Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 33; and Theodor W. Adorno, Kants Critique of Pure
Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 20.
Twice, Adorno characterizes his own work as metacritiquein the subtitle to his book
on Husserl (Against Epistemology: A Metacritique), and in the opening section, on Kant,
of Part III of Negative Dialectics (A Metacritique of Practical Reason). In both cases, the
word amounts to a kind of sarcasmat the expense of philosophical systems founded on the
premise that certain problems can be bracketed off from, or declared to be transcenden-
tal to, others. Adorno affronts these transcendent critiques by dilating to encompass,
and thus reintroduce, all that Husserl and Kant have tried to exclude. In this application,
there appears a family resemblance of immanent critique with deconstruction.
100 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
baric): The alternativeseither calling culture as a whole into question
from outside under the general notion of ideology, or confronting it with the
norms which it itself has crystallizedcannot be accepted by critical theory.
To insist on the choice between immanence and transcendence is to revert
to the traditional logic criticized in Hegels polemic against Kant. . . . The
position transcending culture is in a certain sense presupposed by dialectics
as the consciousness which does succumb in advance to the fetishization of
the intellectual sphere. Whereas, says Adorno, dialectics means intransi-
gence toward all reication
3
in particular, the spurious harmony of what
he elsewhere calls, in condemnation of Lukcs, Extorted Reconciliation
4
(observe how, as the passage develops, immanent criticism and dialectics
begin to operate as functionally convertible terms):
[Immanent criticism] pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of
the task itself. In such antinomies criticismperceives those of society.
A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which
resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one
which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contra-
dictions, . . . in its innermost structure. Confronted with this kind of
work, the verdict mere ideology loses its meaning. At the same
time, however, immanent criticism holds in evidence that the mind
has always been under a spell. On its own it is unable to resolve the
contradictions under which it labours. Even the most radical reec-
tion of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains
only reection, without altering the existence to which its failure bears
witness. Hence immanent criticism cannot take comfort in its own
idea. It can neither be vain enough to believe that it can liberate the
mind directly . . . nor nave enough to believe that uninching immer-
sion in the object will inevitably lead to truth by virtue of the logic of
things. . . . The less the dialectical method can today presuppose
the Hegelian identity of subject and object, the more it is obliged to
be mindful of the duality of the moments. . . . The very opposition
between knowledge which penetrates from without and that which
bores from within becomes suspect to the dialectical method, which
sees in it a symptom of precisely that reication which the dialectic is
obliged to accuse. . . . No theory, not even that which is true, is safe
3. Adorno, Prisms, 31.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 1 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 21640.
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 101
from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous
[i.e., immanent] relation to the object. Dialectics must guard against
this no less than against enthrallment in the cultural object. It can sub-
scribe neither to the cult of the mind nor to hatred of it. The dialectical
critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate.
Only then does he do justice to his object and to himself.
5
If the very opposition between knowledge which penetrates from without
and that which bores from within is itself a symptom of the problem, then
the logic of that aporia requires a method that aspires to do both, and the
insolubility of the task is not its disqualication but an attestation of its
necessity. Adornos practice thus assumes for immanent critique burdens
both critical and hermeneutic: making each immanent to the other and, at
the same time, making each the others critique.
And thereby Adorno implies as well an ideological critique of each
of critique and of hermeneuticas usually practiced: critiques distance
from the object now appears as not an objectivity to be striven for but
an alienation to be overcome; while hermeneutics inwardness with the
object, attesting the interpreters sympathy with the interpreted text (a moti-
vation extending through belles lettres appreciation back to biblical exege-
sis), now appears as an ideological entrapment that critique must struggle,
however vainly, to breach. (Immanent critique, then, is critique of critique,
and not merely in the sense of autocritique.) At stake, needless to say,
is not the critics mere decision in advance between two menu items, two
kinds of critique, internal and external. Adornos premise is that all critique is
from insideinside of history, of economy, of culture, politics, ideology
and that external critique is ideologically deluded, or self-blinded, or self-
trivializing, if it supposes that it has gotten, or can or should get, outside
the determinations of the social. Immanent critique, then, is less a program
that critique should aspire to than a predicament that critique must try not
to inch from.
An immanent critique thus conceived incurs complex burdensand
since Adorno resists generalization, let us begin with consideration of a par-
ticular instance: a section of Negative Dialectics that proposes an immanent
critique of Heideggerian ontology. Adorno concedes that the Spirit in our
age has a legitimate ontological need, to which Heidegger and others are
offering, so to speak, an imaginary [i.e., ideological] solution. His imma-
nent critique means to interpret the genuine (and symptomatic) need or
5. Adorno, Prisms, 3233.
102 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
problem as well as to expose the ideological mystication of the proposed
solution. We have no power over the philosophy of Being if we reject it gen-
erally, from outside, instead of taking it on in its own structureturning its
own force against it. Thus critique must confront not merely Heideggers
own thought movements but all the philosophical concepts and systems
that precede and surround Heidegger. The thought movement that con-
gealed in them, Adorno explains, must be reliquied, its validity traced, in
repetition.
6
Let us unpack some of this. What is congealed must be reliquied:
this guration is frequent in discussions of ideology and reication, and not
just in Adorno; indeed, we nd it in Hegel himself. (Observe the contrast with
reactionaries, who typically gure the disgraced world as soft or liquid,
in need of an order to stiffen or harden it.) Adorno typically gures rei-
cation as a hardening or freezing or rigidifying, which a de-reifying critique
seeks to undoto soften, thaw, loosen or, in his gure here, reliquify. As a
program, however, this is more easily proposed than executed. The critical
object must be reliquied, its validity traced, in repetition. Observe rst that
this is a critique concerned as much to validate what is valid in its object as
to discredit or expose what is not. But the real trouble is repetition, a word
in all critical usages (including Adornos) virtually always connoting ideol-
ogy itself, everything that forecloses the (utopian) promise of future deliver-
ance from the fated repetition of the past. As partor as momentof its
effort to reliquify the ideological rigidities it suffers, immanent critique must
repeat these rigidities, which is to say, must suffer, indeed, inict, the fate
of repetition upon itself deliberately. Adorno is Hegels disciple in holding
that the past cannot be merely disowned, or gotten outside of: escaping
its cycle of repetition requires a working-through that confronts, immanently,
all the horror of what we would escape. So solving a problem requires, rst,
the evocation of the problem, in all its problematicalness. We cannot over-
come ideology without a full acknowledgmentand more: a full experience,
in the writing, in the readingof the power of ideology.
As writing, thereforeand Adorno never lets a reader (or a critic)
forget that critique is, by reason of its written-ness, ineluctably, a kind of
writingcritique must labor as mightily to evoke its object as to sublate or
move beyond it. And hence the unhappy consciousness imperative that
is palpable in every word Adorno ever wrote. For a dramatic shorthand,
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,
1973), 97.
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 103
we might call it the after-Auschwitz imperative, keeping in mind that this
intellectual-affective imperative of Adornos writing long predates Auschwitz
itself. (One way of registering the angst of Dialectic of Enlightenment might
be the reminder that the moment of its composition was, literally, during-
Auschwitz.) What I am trying to stress here is the place of affect both in
Adornos theory of critique and in his practice of it. Adornos insistence on
the labor of conceptualization also involves a labor of what I will call here
affectualizationthe labor of apprehending our ideological condition not
only (to recall Hegel again) as thought but also as feelingwith the caveat
that Adorno refuses the conventional antithesis, or as he would rather call it,
the ideological chorismos, between concept and affect: he wants (and this,
too, is part of the problemhis immanent critique means both to repeat and
to reliquify, part of the breach he wants to close, the wound he wants to
heal, even if doing so must begin by reopening it) to make affects concep-
tual, and to make the concept affective, to overcome the chorismos by which
Enlightenment has, in separating thought from feeling, impoverished both.
Only thus can the wound, and the healing (if any: at any rate, the need for
it), be made concrete.
This ambition puts large demands on the writing of critique: the critic
must be a writer of peculiar brilliance to meet them. (This is partly why com-
mentary on Dialectic of Enlightenment discounts the coauthorship of Hork-
heimer, and so often lapses, faute de mieux, into treating the book as if
Adorno were its [sole] author.) It also makes for a nished text that will be
peculiarly challenging, peculiarly difcult, for its readera text whose self-
conscious expressive difculty is motivated by the historical, cultural, social,
and political difculties of its subject matter, difculties it must repeat, must
evoke as inescapable preliminary to any other hoped-for transitive (reliqui-
fying) effect upon them. And that imperative, familiar in our period from
the great radical innovations of modernism, incurs the dangers that Lukcs
reprehends as the ideology of modernism: that to repeat the problem
will be merely to replicate it, so that the radical new work will present merely
a symptom of the problem rather than a critical negation of it. Hence the
subtext, lifelong, of the debates between Lukcs and Adorno over the mer-
its of realism versus modernism. For Lukcs, a Joyce or a Proust is merely
an example of bourgeois decadence, not, in any useful way, an anatomist
or critic of it. For Adorno, a Kafka or a Beckett has a critical value far out-
stripping any more conventionally conceived critique, because they make
the contemporary predicament and its anguish real, or perhaps we had
better say concretethey convey its objectivity. Adorno praises the plays
104 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
of Beckett precisely because they arouse the anxiety that existentialism
only talks about
7
and they do so without offering any narrative resolution,
such as would be, for Lukcs, the sine qua non of any critical prospect of
release from the predicaments they portray: the failure of any such enact-
ment is what makes them, for Lukcs, merely symptomatic of the bourgeois
ideology, and to that extent, ideological themselves. For Adorno, any such
narrative release could be only imaginary release, and hence itself not
merely ideological but virtually the epitome of ideology as such. It is not
merely that Lukcs and Adorno disagree on what is critical and what is ideo-
logical: it is that precisely what determines the question for one determines
it the other way for the other.
Lukcs cannot have approved of Dialectic of Enlightenmenteither
as a set of theses (assuming such could be extorted from its motivatedly
anti-thetic prose) or as a piece of rhetoric, or writing. Dialectic of Enlight-
enment violates the norms established for critique in the century and more
preceding it as radically as Ulysses violates the norms of realist ction. It
avows a historicizing and dialectical consciousness, but builds itself around
binary pairsOdysseus as bourgeois, myth as Enlightenmentthat would
seem to be staged as anything but: asserted, rather, as transhistorically or
unhistorically homogeneous, as well as equivalent or fungible in a way to
eschew the need, even foreclose the possibility, of their dialectical media-
tion, let alone negation or sublation, altogether. They conjoin historically dis-
junct pairs but in a way to dispense with, even to preempt or foreclose, any
narrative leading fromone to the other: conjoin them, that is, in what Adorno
elsewhere calls a constellation, a term and practice with obvious afni-
ties to cubist collage, Eisensteins montage, Pounds ideogram, Joyces
epiphany, and other modernist devices in which Lukcs sees only symp-
toms of bourgeois decadence.
If Lukcs refrains from spelling this out, a more recent gure, namely
Habermas, epigone of the Frankfurt School generally and protg of Adorno
in particular, has done something close to it for him. In Lecture V of The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas warns that Dialectic of
Enlightenment risks incurring the sin it avowedly condemns, namely, elabo-
rating and enforcing the myth/Enlightenment binary so insistently as to
threaten a lapse into a mythic thinking of the very kind the book charges
against Enlightenment itself. (Habermas is concerned lest the gains of mo-
7. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 2 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 90.
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 105
dernity be lost in the crossre between antimodern reactionaries on the
Right and postmodern radicals on the Left; he more charitably concedes
Adorno and Horkheimers commitment to reason in the interviews, roughly
contemporaneous with Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, collected as
Autonomy and Solidarity.)
8
But Habermas argues that to the extent that
Enlightenment is critique, Horkheimer and Adorno undercut their own criti-
cal project, as well as the modern project at large, and that Dialectic of
Enlightenment is therefore entoiled in what Habermas thrice calls a perfor-
mative contradiction
9
a contradiction, he argues, that vitiates the whole
project.
I am arguing the contrary here, that just this performative contradic-
tion is what gives Dialectic of Enlightenment its force and its weird power. If
Habermas puts the stress on the contradiction, I want to put it on the perfor-
mativity. The point of the performativity is precisely to perform that histori-
cally specic contradiction, a contradiction, Adorno would say, not merely
incidental to a particular critical rhetoric but a contradiction objectively
there in the cultural predicament the critique means, immanently, to take on,
to suffer or repeat as well as to negate or reliquify. And an irony, or dialec-
tic, that might seem to vindicate the book against Habermas is that Haber-
mass indictment itself can contrive to do no other than repeat the offense it
protestsfor consider: according to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Enlighten-
ment denounces every precedent episteme as myth. Repeating that ges-
ture, Dialectic of Enlightenment denounces Enlightenment as myth. And
now, here is Habermas, denouncing Dialectic of Enlightenment as myth
(PDM, 125, 127). Habermas usually makes Adorno and Horkheimers unfor-
tunate fall into myth sound unwitting, but not alwaysand indeed, his brief
against the paradox of Dialectic of Enlightenment is compounded by the
reection that it is not unconscious: Adorno was quite aware of this per-
formative contradiction (PDM, 119). What is further ironic is the question
of Habermass own awareness of his own implication in the tangle. It is
like an Escher drawing, a fractal-recursive, self-replicating structure into
which Habermass reading has conducted itself despite itselfwhich attests
that Dialectic of Enlightenment has indeed tapped some objective sys-
temic virus, so to speak, or structural meme, so pervasively active and self-
8. Jrgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews, ed. Peter Dews (London:
Verso, 1986), 98, 15455.
9. Jrgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 119, 127, 185; for the same charge leveled at Derrida,
see 197. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PDM.
106 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
activating in the sociocultural DNA of Enlightenmenta.k.a. modernity, late
capitalism, the administered worldthat neither Horkheimer and Adornos
own critique of Enlightenment nor Habermass critique of their critique can
quarantine the infection inside a boundary or secure itself safely outside
the zone of contamination. Thus the Horkheimer/Adorno QED: the absence
of any way to get outside the ideological dilemmas of Enlightenment
and/as myth.
Habermas, I should point out, never quite charges mythical think-
ing, in those words, against Horkheimer and Adorno; rather, he makes
the case implicitly, but unmistakably, via a kind of guilt by association, in
the section of the essay assimilating Dialectic of Enlightenment to Nietz-
sches cynical consciousness and his fundamentally aesthetic attitude,
by which Habermas means, la Kierkegaard, Nietzsches abrogation from
questions of truth or falsity (PDM, 11926). (Compare Habermass open-
ing paragraph, which places Dialectic of Enlightenment among the black
books of Nietzsche, de Sade, and other dark writers of the bourgeoi-
sie, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville [PDM, 106].) On the
truth/falsity score, Habermas scrupulously maintains a distinction between
Dialectic of Enlightenment and Nietzsche, but the distinction turns on the
paradox produced by the books adherence, cynical consciousness not-
withstanding, to the truth-claim: and precisely thata cynical truth-claim
is, I take it, what produces the performative contradiction Habermas pro-
tests. But even more ironically, the allegedly cynical consciousness of
Dialectic of Enlightenmentthe fact that Adorno was quite aware of this
performative contradictionwould seem to be, for Habermas, all that can
redeem the book from a wholesale lapse into navely mythic thinking.
NowI hasten to grant the power of Habermass critique of Dialectic of
Enlightenmenthe puts that case as well as it can be putbut: Horkheimer
and, especially, Adorno as exemplars of cynical reason? That seems to me
a judgment so wrongheaded as to approach the perverse. Peter Sloterdijks
diagnosis of Adornos sensitive critique, and his prescription (at need) of
a dose of cheekiness, seems to me much closer to the mark; indeed, his
formulathat Adorno tried, by a conceptual balancing act, to construe a
knowledge that would not be power
10
seems to me to capture both the
forlornness and the deance of Adornos refusal of every variety of cynical
consciousness. Which is to say that Sloterdijks formula praises Adorno rele-
10. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1987), xxxv.
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 107
vantlyand it is praise, not the cynical unmasking it could be mistaken for.
(Compare Lutz Niethammers asperities regarding the will to powerless-
ness of Adorno and other modern intellectuals.)
11
That Sloterdijk himself
elects to ght the ght with satire and laughterkynicismrather than,
la Adorno, from the position of unhappy consciousness, might be read
as variously qualifying his praise, but I do not see how it could be taken to
undo it. That Habermas, on the other hand, can nd for Dialectic of Enlight-
enment no better alternative than the either/or of nave myth versus cynical
consciousness, cannot see that the book aspires, quite the reverse of cyni-
cally, to open a utopian alternative to that binary, seems to me an index in
Habermas of a surprising limitation.
12
Pace Habermas, I would put it that Dialectic of Enlightenment s bril-
liance is to have sustained a fertile and high-voltage rhetoric not despite,
but precisely because of, the contradictoriness of what seem initially quite
ahistorical, undialectical, even mythical conjunctions. The measure of its
success is howeffectually it manages to communicate those contradictions.
And by communicate I here mean to evoke not the model of transmission
of message from sender to receiver but the ambition of the text to make the
pain of all this contradiction common, a kind of ideological communion of
suffering that, Adorno insinuates, is as close to a binding agent, a legitimate
solidarity, as our alienated culture may presently allowus. The need to lend
a voice to suffering, as he elsewhere puts it, is the condition of all truth.
13
The level of affectthe after- [or during-] Auschwitz anger and fear that
is the specic felt or lived unhappy consciousness of Dialectic of Enlight-
enmentremains potent throughout, and this affective or moral difculty
attests, expresses, the philosophical, political, social, cultural (etc.) difcul-
ties the book protests. Dialectic of Enlightenment is a text in which all the dif-
ferent kinds of difculty motivate, indeed, overdetermine each other; hence
the difculty of the text is irreducible, and by design: it cannot, it should not,
11. Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire, trans. Patrick Camiller (NewYork: Verso, 1992), 13842.
12. For a scathing critique of Habermas on this score, see Robert Hullot-Kentor, Back to
Adorno, Telos 81 (1989): 914. If Hullot-Kentor argues that Habermas misses the point
of the immanence of Adornos immanent critique, Axel Honneth takes the opposite
tack, sidestepping immanent critique altogether to argue for the transcending or disclos-
ing poweri.e., critique of the type Habermas should approveof Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment ; see Axel Honneth, The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialectic
of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism, Constellations 7, no. 1
(2000): 11627.
13. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 1718.
108 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
be rendered lucid by any paraphrase or commentary. And this un-lucidity
has the further specic textual effect (or affect) of feeling, in the reading,
always a direct function of the general apprehension of contradiction as the
motivation of the writing. It is the very point of Adornos immanent critique
that we are not merely shown this contradiction or that, but that we feel
contradictoriness, feel, indeed, what Adorno elsewhere calls the Objectivity
of Contradiction
14
in our very experience of the reading throughout. Contra-
diction is realized, or concretized, in its very concept, and as feeling: a model
of the labor of conceptualization and the labor of affectualization, as well
as the chorismos of the ideological will to separate them, to diminish the
force, to numb the pain, of eachall concretized or evenwhy not?con-
stellated in the medium of Adornos writing practice.
The power and contradictoriness of this effect, or affect, are what
entitle Adornos immanent critique to call itself dialectical. In fact, in one
place (in his immanent critique of Edmund Husserl), Adorno makes explicit
the connectionindeed, the virtual convertibilityof these terms: Dialec-
tics very procedure is immanent critique. It does not so much oppose
[Husserlian] phenomenology with a position or model external and alien to
phenomenology, as it pushes the phenomenological model, with the latters
own force, to where the latter cannot afford to go. Dialectic exacts the truth
from it through the confession of its own untruth.
15
Immanent critique, that
is, repeats Husserls phenomenological model, and its untruthbut
with the effect of not merely repeating the untruth but forcing a critical
confession from the untruth itself. The problematic implicit here of the
mere repetition of the Husserlian symptom versus its reliquied critical
negation is made explicit on a later page: Dialectics is the quest to see
the new in the old instead of just the old in the new. As it mediates the new,
so it also preserves the old as the mediated. If it were to proceed accord-
ing to the schema of sheer ow and indiscriminate vitality (Lebendigkeit ),
then it would degrade itself to a replica of the amorphous structure of nature,
which it should not sanction through mimicry, but surpass through cogni-
tion. Dialectic gives its own to the old as reied and consolidated, which dia-
lectic can move only by releasing the force of its own weight.
16
Dialectics,
a.k.a. immanent critique, must not sanction through mimicry, but surpass
through cognition: this usefully enlarges the repeat and reliquify motif,
14. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 15153.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 1982), 5.
16. Adorno, Against Epistemology, 3839.
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 109
but more to my present point is the preemption of the Lukcs complaint
in the warning lest critique degrade itself . . . to a replica of . . . nature
(this last, the signier here of the naturalizations of the cultural that are
the specic work and effect of ideology as such, the mystifying will to sanc-
tion through mimicry). The point I want to bring outand it is a cautionary
oneis the liability of immanent [or dialectical] critique to such dangers:
because it must repeat in order to reliquify or surpass, it must per-
force risk approaching a replica[tion] or mimicry of its ideological object.
It must risk appearing as an example or symptom, as Lukcs charged, or
as itself mythical, as Habermas warned. It cannot contest what Dialectic
of Enlightenment calls the power of repetition over reality
17
without risking
the danger of succumbing to it, or at least of appearing to. Which, for critique
as a kind of writing, means something in the realm of the critical like the
property the German philosophical tradition ambiguously or polysemously
denominates, in the realmof the aesthetic, as Scheinappearance or illu-
sion: the artful contrivance, variously concealing its own art or, in modern
times, more critically baring its own device(s), whereby any composition,
whether of art or of critique, hesitates between the aesthetic as ideology
and (Adornos burden in Aesthetic Theory) the aesthetic as bearer of truth.
So immanent critique must pursue, in the writing, and less as pre-
scription than as inevitable burden, a strategy of something like what Dialec-
tic of Enlightenment seems to indict: mimesis. This word signals one of the
most unstable, most conictedwhy not say most dialectical?motifs in
the book.
18
For most of us, the words primary association will probably be
with Aristotles Poeticsthe mirror held up to naturebut this is an associa-
tion Dialectic of Enlightenment studiously avoids. In the Horkheimer/Adorno
text, mimesis is primarily a synecdoche for the mythic and even premythic
habitus of archaic consciousness and the proto-Enlightenment attempt, at
rst to propitiate nature, then to dominate it, by means of sympathetic
magic. (This context, opening Aristotles mimesis to its archaic foretime,
can quite eclipse its sequels in the more familiar and more recent cultural
past of Europe, and, indeed, I suspect Horkheimer and Adorno mean to
estrange or defamiliarize those meanings, so complicit in the ideology of
the aesthetic in the West, and thereby to expose the degree to which West-
17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cum-
ming (New York: Continuum, 1988), 12.
18. For the most interesting discussion of Adornos mimesis I know, see Fredric Jame-
son, Late Marxism (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 6369, 1015. See also Hullot-
Kentor, Introduction to Adornos Idea of Natural History, 1078.
110 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
ern aesthetics, having retrojected its own detached, alienated, enlightened,
instrumentalized purposesthe emotional self-management of cathar-
sisback on Aristotle, has distorted its reading of him ever since.)
Mimesis thus reoriented to the consciousness of before Aris-
totlethat is, to the thematics evoked in Dialectic of Enlightenment by way
of such terms as [sympathetic] magic, ritual, myth, as well as mimesis
itself, and via allusion, to the gure of Odysseus and the Sirenssumma-
rizes a complex of devices and practices, indeed ruses, akin to the Nietz-
schean imaginary and to the Marxist and modernist senses of ideology. To
that extent, mimesis would seem to gure as a virtual epitome of what
immanent critique aims to subvert. But as we have seen, immanent cri-
tique itself must repeat its object, must incur the risk of replicating it or
mimicking itand to that extent, mimesis is critiques own most potent, if
also most treacherous, device: indeed, the potency and the treachery must
be its very condition. If ideological mimesis is the problem or danger, the
solution or program involves a mimesis that I will here call dialectical
in justication of which I might cite the analogy with Benjamins usage of
image and, or against, dialectical image, a usage Adorno expounds in
numerous places.
19
With Sloterdijk again in mind, we might say that dia-
lectical mimesis enacts a kind of satirical parody, but with affects of angst
and rage rather than the Sloterdijkian cynical or cheeky (Bergsonian)
laughter of mockery. (Readers familiar with Michael Cahns rich essay Sub-
versive Mimesis will recognize a family resemblance between his refunc-
tioning of Adornos mimesis and mine here.
20
Cahn pursues the argument
with much more grounding in and reference to philosophy than I could do,
and his discussion aims to illuminate Adornos aesthetic theoryor indeed
his Aesthetic Theoryrather than, as I hope to do here, Adornos writing
practice and the difculties it poses for readers.)
My suggestion now is that we take Dialectic of Enlightenment itself
as a test or probe of this dialectical mimesis I am proposing. We may take
the book as a kind of historical narrative, and therefore, like (presumably)
any historical analysis or explanation, to that extent a dialectical mimesis of
Western history or civilization itself. But a more concrete grasp of the texts
19. For our present point, see especially Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction
of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989), 54.
20. Michael Cahn, Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse of
Critique, in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, ed. Mihai Spariosu, vol. 1 (Philadelphia and
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), 2764.
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 111
ambitions may be allowed by considering its relation to a precedent textu-
alization of that ambitionand it is my suggestion here that we consider
Dialectic of Enlightenment for a moment as if it were a parodic rescript of
Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. Notice I said as ifor I might use the old
Hegelian/Marxist (and Adorno) word, objectively: the point being that the
resonances are signicant, whether Adorno and Horkheimer intended them
or not, although I will go on the record with my conviction that they did. How-
ever that may be, the resonances are there, simply as part of the vast social
and historical fact Horkheimer and Adorno mean to confrontwhich turns
out to entail, besides Hegel himself, the whole debased Hegelian aftermath
in the conventions or ideology of historicist explanation in the bourgeois age,
from fascisms reactionary fantasias of racialist agon, through the progres-
sive or meliorist story of liberalism, to its revolutionary variants extending
to ofcial Soviet orthodoxies of dialectical materialism (diamat, in the
neologistic party-speak Adorno so loathed) and the providential historical
happy endings they were fashioned to underwrite.
The afnities of Dialectic of Enlightenment with Phenomenology of
Spirit are numerous and suggestive. Both books were written in a moment
of crisis perceived by their authors as world-historical, and both aim to diag-
nose and even to prescribe for the cultural pathologies, extending back into
an immemorial foretime, of their respective cultural moments. The table of
contents of Dialectic of Enlightenment discloses a narrative and historical
arc broadly similar to Hegels, orchestrating a passage from Greek antiquity
to the period of the Enlightenment proper, and thence to the present-day
moment at the height of World War II in which Horkheimer and Adorno are
writing. This historicizing organization, the antique and modern instances
chosen for elaboration, and the proportions allotted to them, all invite us to
take Dialectic of Enlightenment as a production, albeit on a smaller scale,
on the model of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. Horkheimer and Adorno
renew Hegels terminology and supplement it with newer onesMarxist,
Nietzschean, Weberian, Freudianthat have emerged since Hegel; but
their account of the devolution of philosophy into a mere handmaiden of
(positivist) science, and the attendant reication of thinking as instrumen-
talized to serve the purposes of scientic and technological rationaliza-
tion, is recognizably a continuation of Hegels story, although, of course, an
ironic one: a nightmare sequel to an overture (a terminal overture, Hegel
had supposed) that, in Hegels enthusiastic afatus, had promised a con-
siderably happier nale. Indeed, this issueoptimism versus pessimism
was the mid-century toposmarks the fundamental dissent or contradic-
112 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
tion or negation that Horkheimer and Adornos unhappy [critical] con-
sciousness operates on Hegel. Hegel diagnosed unhappy consciousness
and prescribed for it in ways anticipating the morale-management counsels
of Nietzsche and WilliamJames, in the faith that modernity would eventually
enable a universal happy consciousness. The textual effect or affect of
Dialectic of Enlightenment joins the darker tone of Sigmund Freud, Oswald
Spengler, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, and many other moderns whose drift,
especially post-1914, is that the current situation and prospects are grim.
(Dialectic of Enlightenment thereby not only contravenes the bien-pensant
liberal hopes of the day but dees the ofcial party-line optimism of
the Soviet bloc, the Stalinist Comintern of that period, in which defeatism
could be a capital [thought-] crime.)
But Dialectic of Enlightenment enacts a more corrosive dialecti-
cal mimesis of Hegel-and-after on the level of narrative itself. The book
organizes its argument around binary pairs that link disjunct historical phe-
nomenamost saliently, myth/Enlightenment and Odysseus/bour-
geois. These binaries initially seemthe conventional constituents of a famil-
iar modernizing historicism, but they turn out to act in the book not as
opposed (historical) pairs but as virtual transhistorical equations or (to make
the ideological baggage more explicit) identities: in the latter instance,
exposing nineteenth-century philologys fetishization of the Homeric pro-
tagonist as universal hero; in the former, deconstructing (if youll permit
the anachronism) the binary terms of Enlightenments own self-constituting
ancients/moderns narrative. Both work to activate the downside, as it were,
of equivalence or exchange logic: in the one case, offering a dialecti-
cal image/mimesis of the equivalence that bourgeois modernity wants to
embrace; in the second, enforcing an equivalence it seeks to disown. And
in both cases, and in many other instances passim, we get not the his-
torical narrative that mediates the development from one to the other but
a sequence of nonnarrative juxtapositionswhat Adorno probably learned
from Benjamin to call constellationsenforcing the point that the narra-
tive of progress has not only stalled but now (1944) looks to have been a
deception or ruse of history all along, insofar as it has masked historys
chronic steady-state or (the same thing?) cycle of repetition, blocking our
recognition that the history we are living out is not a narrative of progress,
reason, and freedom, but a stasis, or even a regress, of violence and domi-
nation. Recall here Benjamins aphorism that every document of civilization
is also a document of barbarism. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the progres-
sive world story becomes the failure of the narrative to realize not only its
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 113
thematic or programmatic telos, human liberation, but, more fundamentally,
its generic or formal constitutive sine qua non, narrativity itself.
J. M. Bernstein coolly scorns this way of reading Dialectic of Enlight-
enment, summoning earlier scholars, from Susan Buck-Morss to Robert
Hullot-Kentor, to his aid, citing, however, passages that do not, at least to my
reading eye, quite make his case for him.
21
Bernstein wants to see the critical
force of Dialectic of Enlightenment as trained not on Enlightenments histori-
cist narrative investments but rather on the conceptual dualism underlying
themand to that extent his reading can be brought to square with mine.
Where Bernstein seems to me to misplace the emphasis is in the assump-
tion that in the face of an apparent dichotomy in Adorno, a readers task is to
decide on one side or the other; my own experience learning to read Adorno
is that he is almost always looking for ways to reinforce the dichotomy, to
exploit its dichotomousnessits contradictorinessto critical (i.e., dialec-
tical) effect. I would, rather, put it that Dialectic of Enlightenment expresses
its critique of the Wests detemporalized, nonnarrative, conceptual dual-
ism by deconcealing the petrication or standstill that dualism wreaks
on its own narrative categories: that in Adorno, the horns of the dichotomy
are mobilized precisely in order to im-mobilize each other, to perform the
ways in which our cultures fundamental contradictions, and their ideologi-
cal denial, can disclose themselves only in the conditionor the dialectical
mimesisof dialectic at a standstill: conceptual dualities arresting, freez-
ing, petrifying the very narrative progress and movement they were meant
to release.
Dialectic at a standstill: that watchword of Benjamins is often cited
by Adorno as evocation of the modern conditionand hence another moti-
vation for the failed narrativity of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as dialecti-
cal mimesis of the stalled or arrested dialectic of history itself. Recall, to
begin with, that in Hegel, dialectic is ineluctably temporalized, historicized,
narrativized. Hence a (large) degree of commutativity between narrative
and dialectic in the ideological constellation Dialectic of Enlightenment con-
structs: if the Enlightenment narrative is rendered non- or even antinarra-
tively, the conventions of dialectic are likewise contravened in usages pro-
vocatively non- or antidialectical. If binaries like myth/Enlightenment or
Odysseus/bourgeois elide narrativity and history, they equally elide dia-
lectic, for the conjoined terms are rather identied than mediated, dedif-
ferentiated as we now say, as if the point is their essential homogeneity
21. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 8486; see esp. 86n18.
114 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
rather than their qualitative, mutually negating differences. And likewise for
the other kind of binary the book mobilizes, the kind that conjoins contem-
poraneous pairs, like de Sade and Kant, or anti-Semitism and Hollywood.
In our present-day academic subculture, this would already be a politically
incorrect enough way of putting it; in 1944, with Stalins assassins patrolling
the globe for class enemies, it was a provocation of potentially dire conse-
quence (recall the fate of Trotsky [August 1940] just a few years before the
publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment [May 1944]).
Part of my point in summarizing the aims of Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment in these terms is to foreground how very different is Horkheimer and
Adornos (in)version of Hegel from Marxs. Marx claimed to have turned
Hegel right-side up, putting his idealist headstand squarely back where it
belongs, on its materialist feetbut Marxs gure owns that he and Hegel
are talking about the same biped, and the same conguration of posture
(vertical) and mobility (ambulatory). In Marx, as in Hegel, we have a forward-
moving story, an indisputably narrative dynamic; the coloration of particu-
lar episodes and themes varies between the twothe story of alienation,
of Aufhebung, of human beings rendered thing-like, but achieving the self-
consciousness of the fr Sich in the endbut the happiness of the provi-
dential ending and the kinetic momentum of the whole progress to it are
macrofeatures that Hegel and Marx have too much in common to allowthem
to appear as anything other than variants of a shared set of themes and
(more fundamentally) of presuppositions regarding the use of historical nar-
rative in works of social interpretation, explanation, diagnosis, and critique.
Dialectic of Enlightenment asserts its own place in the array by way of
a much more radical refunctioning of its terms and its operationsmost tell-
ingly, in the extent to which the Horkheimer/Adorno retelling of the Enlight-
enment/Hegelian/Marxist metanarrative is so little narrative in its effect.
Granted Marxs boast, that he had inverted Hegels story (stood it on its
head/feet), he still narrated it according to storytelling conventions recog-
nizably of the same type, bearing marked family resemblances, to Hegels
own. Horkheimer and Adornos narrative is much more ambiguously nar-
rative; it does not so much tell the story as elaborate chosen moments or
images (dialectical images?) fromit; it presupposes the readers knowledge
of the storys basic narrative, and turns the energy thus released from nar-
ration to eliciting resonances and potencies undeveloped in the narratives
earlier versions. Though the narrative interest of the precedent story nec-
essarily prolongs itself in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the narrative impulse is
clearly subordinate to the interpretive; and to that extent the book stands to
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 115
Hegel-and-Marx in a relation in some ways like that of Midrash to Torah. But
that analogy needs qualication, to the extent that both scripture and com-
mentary minimize affect: the biblical narratives are terse as if precisely to
purge affective or aesthetic power, textual effect or affect. (On the theory
that the Torah narratives are prose synopses of originally much longer, and
more libidinally invested, oral narratives, intended precisely to deprive those
bardic narratives of the affective power pagans associated with divine inspi-
ration [the Muses], we might speculate that biblical narratives estrange-
ments of narrative effects or affects anticipate the Republics expulsion of
the poets.)
By contrast, the affective program I have ascribed to Horkheimer
and Adorno here, to arouse Enlightenment to its chronically suppressed
fear, to disturb Enlightenments tranquility of mind, to arouse Enlighten-
ments bad conscience, adds to the mode of Midrashic exposition an emo-
tionalism, a labor of affectualization, absent in the precursor text(s); here
the analogy that comes to mind is Aeschyluss sensationalizing reconstitu-
tion of Homeric epos, in which the familiar epic story need not be retold
the audience already knows the plotso that the hypnagogic work of the
choral song can concentrate instead on a stroboscopic activation of the
storys most horric associations, as when the Chorus in the Agamem-
non is beset by images from the curse-of-Atreus story (a boiling pot of
infant limbs! a mighty eet becalmed at sea! a princesss lovely neck bared
to the sacricial knife!) so elliptically, but also so obsessively, as to moti-
vate the elision of their collectively known narrative context as a collec-
tive effort to repress collective anxieties that are recurring with the force of
nightmare. (Compare the similar impulse in a more contemporary instance,
Christopher Logues operatic workouts on the Iliad.) The nobility of the
Homeric grand style, idealized since antiquity, has much to do with what
Horkheimer and Adorno indict as its narrative composure;
22
Aeschyluss
rescript (and Logues) represses the narrative the better to distill from its
imageries the panic Homers composure composesand however delib-
erately, Horkheimer and Adorno seem to me to stand in some such rela-
tion to Hegel, or at least to that side of him they most deplore, his Panglos-
sian, happy-consciousness, theodicy-mongering optimism. The intrusion,
into the quasi- or even mock-Hegelian habitus of Dialectic of Enlightenment,
of de Sade and Nietzsche, anti-Semitism and Hollywood, motivates this
gesture.
22. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7880.
116 boundary 2 / Fall 2005
In doing so (again), Dialectic of Enlightenment projects a panorama
of catastrophe that mobilizes Marx as readily as Hegel, and without miti-
gating the force of its anti-Enlightenment indictments against either. But par-
ticular or party ideological provocations aside, Dialectic of Enlightenment
means to present a vision of global cultural catastrophe that challenges the
competing received partisan scenarios. It is addressed to readers of good
willat least, potentially, of all ideological stripes. To loyal communists, it
says that their party-line optimism is fraudulent, that the revolution under
Stalin partakes of a barbarism every bit as savage as the alternatives. To
right-wingers short of outright fascism, conservatives like, say, Spengler, it
offers something like a dialectical mimesis of The Decline of the West, but
one in which the catastrophe appears as present, not future, and is attended
by anguish rather than the paradoxically anodyne knowingness typical of
early-modern cultural despair reactionaries of the Spengler type. Most
complicatedly, it addresses liberals and non-Stalinist leftists, inheritors and
stewards of the Enlightenment tradition, whose received viewof the catas-
trophethat the bad guys, the forces of darkness, are winningthey affront
by diagnosing the failures and shortcomings of the good guys themselves,
of Enlightenment itself. In their account of Enlightenments devolution or
regression into barbarism, via positivism, scientism, identity-thinking, anti-
theorism, and literal-mindedness of all kinds, they enact the failure of the
Enlightenment narrative not only to achieve its narrative telos but also to
maintain its dialectical ethoswhether or not it is still telling itself that pro-
gressive or revolutionary story, or (as in the USSR) fetishizing the word
dialectic itself. They narrate the failure of the Enlightenment narrative to
achieve narrativity, as well as the failure of Enlightenment dialectic to be dia-
lectical. As if dialectic itself could be subject to negationand not deter-
minate negation, the kind that alters quality, but an annihilation, that is
reduction ad nihil, to zero, that, in the terms of Horkheimer and Adornos
indictment of Enlightenment, liquidates quality altogether, and therefore
dialectic itself, leaving only the bad innity of the merely quantitative, the
domain in which the logic of equivalence/exchange has its limited but lethal
validity. This, as Dialectic of Enlightenment projects it, is the irony, or indeed
the peculiar dialectic, of the dialectic of Enlightenment.
Horkheimer and Adornos evocation of the failure is the most potent
such book of the mid-century period, a period peculiarly rich in efforts at
cultural diagnosisand I include here everything from prewar works such
as Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents and Spenglers Decline of the
West to such postwar productions as Norman O. Browns Life Against
Helmling / Immanent Critique and Dialectical Mimesis 117
Death, Herbert Marcuses Eros and Civilization, and Erich Fromms Flight
from Freedom. Dialectic of Enlightenment remains an epitome of critical
unhappy consciousness, fully answering to the angst, rage, and despair
of the during-Auschwitz ordeal and, prophetically, to the after-Auschwitz
prolongation, in which the fact that the killing at Auschwitz had ceased
offered so little comfort in view of the prospect of global murder opened by
the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1944 introduc-
tion, Horkheimer and Adorno explain that all rhetorics of afrmation are by
now so compromised as to make afrmation itself a liea premise that all
but forecloses any possibility of the utopian in the book itself. Yet the book
has its hints of utopian hopea hope indissociable from a sense of the dia-
lectic simply as the historically unforeseeable but capable of horror as well
as blessings: not at all the providential stand-in for God, deus ex machina
all too familiarized in progressive and revolutionary storytelling. Against all
optimisms from Hegel to Stalin and beyond, Horkheimer and Adorno de-
conceal a historical dialectic leading to catastrophe rather than reconcilia-
tion, an Absolute of despair rather than exaltation, a Golgotha of the Spirit or
slaughterbench of history more literal and more atrocious than any Hegel
could ever have imagined, projected indeed as the apparent liquidation of
dialectic itself. This is, in 1944, the lookthe dialectical mimesisof the
dialectic very specically of Enlightenment.