Plamen Andreev

To many of its most authoritative commentators, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment cannot but entail a reductively negative, pessimistic philosophy of history that ties the historical progress of enlightenment rationality with regression and domination so tightly as to undermine its own critical intentions. My thesis contends that a text as self-reflective of its own form of presentation as the Dialectic obviously is could not be read so literally. To remedy this, I offer an interpretive reappraisal of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which places a methodological appreciation of the latter’s distinct style and form of presentation at the centre of understanding its philosophical status and more specifically, its philosophical viability as a form of social critique. I argue that the Dialectic pursues, in the first place, the negative, critical aim of undermining the unreflective perceptions of history and progress through which present society constructs its own self-understanding, and does so not only on the level of philosophical content, but also on the level of linguistic form. The text performatively repeats the conventional tropes, narratives and genres in which the historical self-understanding of enlightenment is embodied, and enacts, on the level of linguistic expression itself, the failure of this self-understanding to deliver on its own promise. I argue that this form of critical textual composition simultaneously implicates its own audience and is aimed at their experience of the text. As such, it is concerned not simply with challenging their rational beliefs, but also and especially at undermining their affective investments to socially prevalent notions of history.

This paper argues that exaggeration, such as Adorno and Horkheimer employ it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is not merely a rhetorical figure, but a practice of thinking mediated in language. I first explicate the notion of exaggeration implicit in Adorno’s conception of thinking, where it figures as a specific use of concepts that ‘over-identifies’ objects with concepts, grasping objects as mediated by an antagonistic social process and emphatically demonstrating the non-identity of concepts and objects ordinarily masked by thinking. Turning to Dialectic of Enlightenment, I argue that Adorno and Horkheimer over-identify social reality with the concept of totality in order to enable an intellectual experience of its aporetic, antagonistic character – the absurdity of being ruled over by a socially produced appearance of ‘nature’ that is at once actuality and illusion. Finally, I argue that exaggeration’s conceptually performative demonstration of absurdity is simultaneously a gesture in defiance of absurdity. I discuss this with references to Hegel, Kafka and Odysseus, whose cunning embrace of myth demonstrates the impossibility of fulfilling its statutes.