Plamen Andreev

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.