Humanities_DialecticofEnlightenment_1947.txt

DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

.'

....

Cultural Memory
zn

the
Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Philosophical Fragments

MAX HORKHEIMER and
THEODOR W. ADORNO

Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Nom"
Translated by Edmund]ephcott

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD , CALIFORNIA
2002

Dialectic ofEnlightenme1lt: Philosophical Fragments is translated from Volume 5
of Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften: Diakktik derAufkliirrmg u"d
Schriften 1940-195°, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, ©1987 by S. Fishcher
Verlag Gmbl-l, Frankfurt am Main.
Asterisks in rhe text and display material mark edirorial nares created for the

German edirion. They include variant readings and other textual concerns.
They are keyed in the reference marrer section via the number of the page on
which the asterisk appears and the preceding word. Numbered notes are those
created by Horkheimer and Adorno themselves.

English rranslarion ©W02 by rhe Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University
Horkheirner, Max. 1895-1973

[Philosophische Fragmeme. English]

Dialectic of enlightenmem : philosophical ITagments I Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno; edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr ; translated by
Edmund Jephcorr.
p. ern, - (Cui rural memory in the present)
Includes bibliographical references.
IS8N 0-8047-3632 -4 (alk, paper) -ISBN 0-8047 -3633 -2 (pbk: alk. paper)
I. Philosophy. I. Adorno, Theodor W .• 1903-1969. II. Schmid Noerr,
Gunzelin. III . Tide. rv Series.
83279.H8473 P513 2002
193--dC2 .1

Primed in the United Scares of America

Original Priming 2002
Last figure below indicates year of this printing:
II100908070605040302.

'Iypese: ut Sranford University Press in 11113.5 Adobe Garamond '.

2002??oo73

For Friedrich Pollock"

Contents

Preface to the New Edition (1969)

Xl

Preface to the Italian Edition (1962/1966)

xiii

Preface (1944 and 1947)

XIV

The Concept of Enlightenment
Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment

35

Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality

63

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

94

Elements ofAnti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment

137

Notes and Sketches

173

Editor's Afterword

217

The Disappearance ofClass History in "Dialectic of
Enlightenment": A Commentary on the Textual Variants

(1944 and 1947), by Wilfem van Reijen and fan Bransen

248

Notes

253

Preface to the New Edition (I969)

Dialectic of Enlightenment was published in 1947 by Querido in
Amsterdam. The book, which found readers only gradually, has been out
of print for some time. We have been induced to reissue it after more than
twenty years not only by requests from many sides but by the notion that
not a few of the ideas in it are timely now and have largely determined our
later theoretical writings. No one who was not involved in the writing
could easily understand to what extent we both feel responsible for every
sentence. We dictated long stretches together; the Dialectic derives its vital
energy from the tension between the twO intellectual temperaments which
came together in writing it.
We do not stand by everything we said in the book in its original
form. That would be incompatible with a theory which attributes a temporal core to truth instead of contrasring truth as something invariable to
the movement of history. The book was written at a time when the end of
the National Socialist terror was in sight. In not a few places, however, the
formulation is no longer adequate to the reality of today. All the same,
even at that time we did not underestimate the implications of the transition to the administered world.

In a period of political division into immense blocs driven by an
objective tendency to collide, horror has been prolonged. The conflicts in
the third world and the renewed growth of totalitarianism are not mere
historical interludes any more than, according to the Dialectic, fascism was
at that time. Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress
itself, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in face of
the great historical trend.
The development toward total integration identified in the book lu.s

XII

l'rt:f.'11"I' III tlu: I V(lI) I:dilion

been interrupted hut not terminated; il dlll",IIl"11\ III hI' lllll\nllllllatni hy

means of dictators and wars. Our progllosi, I'l"gal'dillg rill" .issoci.ucd l.ipsc
from enlightenmenr into positivism, inro the myth of that which is the
case, and finally of the identity of intelligence and hostility to mind, has
been overwhelmingly confirmed. Our concept of history does not believe
itself elevated above history, but it does not merely chase after information

in the positivist manner. As a critique of philosophy it does not seek to
abandon philosophy itself
From America, where the book was written, we returned to Ger-

many with the conviction that, theoretically and practically. we would be
able to achieve more there than elsewhere. Together with Friedrich
Pollock, to whom the book is dedicated on his seventy-fifth birthday as it
was then on his fiftieth, we built up the Institut fur Sozialforschung once

again. with the idea of taking further the concepts formulated in Dialectic.
In continuing to develop our theory, and in the common experiences connected with it, Gretel Adorno has given us the most valuable assistance, as
she did with the first version.

We have made changes far more sparingly than is usual with re-editions of books dating back several decades" We did not want to retouch
what we had written, not even the obviously inadequate passages. To bring
the text fully up to date with the current situation would have amounted
to nothing less than writing a new book. That what matters today is to
preserve and disseminate freedom, rather than to accelerate, however indirectly, the advance toward the administered world, we have also argued in
our later writings. We have confined ourselves here to correcting misprints
and suchlike matters. This restraint has made the book a piece of documentation; we hope that it is also more.
Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno

Frankfurt am Main, April 1969

Preface to the Italian Edition: (I962/I966)

The German text of Dialectic ofEnlightenment is a fragment. Begun
as early as 1942, during the Second World War, it was supposed to form the

introduction to the theory of society and history we had sketched during
the period of National Socialist rule. It is self-evident that, with regard to
terminology and the scope of the questions investigated, the book is
shaped by the social conditions in which it was written.
In keeping with its theme, our book demonstrates tendencies which
turn cultural progress into its opposite. We attempted to do this on the
basis of social phenomena of the 1930S and 1940S in America. However, to
construct a systematic theory which would do justice to the present economic and political circumstances is a task which, for objective and subjective reasons, we arc unable to perform today. We are therefore happy
that the fragment is appearing in a series devoted predominantly to philosophical questions.
M.H . and T.W .A.

Frankfurt am Main, March 1966

Preface (I944 and I947)

When* we began this work, the first samples of which we dedicate to
Friedrich Pollock, we hoped to be able to present the whole book on his

~Iftieth birthday. Bur the further we proceeded with the task the more we
became aware of the mismatch between it and our own capabilities. What
we had set our to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity,

instead ofentering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of " barharisrn, We underestimated the difficulty of dealing with the subject
because we still placed too much trust in contemporary consciousness.
While we had noted for many years that, in the operations of modern science, the major discoveries are paid for with an increasing" decline of theoretical education, we nevertheless believed that we could follow those

operations to the extent of limiting our work primarily to a critique or a
continuation of specialist theories. Our work was to adhere, at least thematically, to the traditional disciplines: sociology, psychology, and epistemology.
The fragments we have collected here show, however, that we had to
abandon that trust. While attentive cultivation and investigation of the
scientific heritage-especially when positivist new brooms have swept it
away as useless lumber-does represent one moment ofknowledge, in the
present collapse of bourgeois civilization not only the operations but the
purpose of science have become dubious. The tireless self-destruction of
enlightenment hypocritically celebrated by implacable fascists and implemented by pliable expertS in humanity" compels thought to forbid itself
its last remaining innocence regarding the habits and tendencies of the
/-fitK{'/ 'SI. If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned
inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the com-

nuxlh y, the attempt ro trace the sources of this degrad~tion must refuse

Preface (I944 and I941) xv
obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is

rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world
history.
If the only obstacles were those arising from the oblivious instrumentalization of science, thought about social questions could at least

attach itself to tendencies opposed to official science. Those tendencies,
too, however, are caught up in the general process of production. They
have changed no less than the ideology they attacked. They suffer the fate
which has always been reserved for triumphant thought. If it voluntarily
leaves behind its critical element to become a mere means in the service of

an existing order, it involuntarily tends to transform the positive cause it
has espoused into something negative and destructive. The eighteenthcentury philosophy which, defying the funeral pyres for books and peo-

ple. put the fear of death into infamy, joined forces with it under Bonaparte. Finally. the apologetic school of Cornte usurped the succession to
the uncompromising encyclopedistes, extending the hand of friendship* to
all those whom the latter had opposed. Such metamorphoses of critique
.f

into affirmation do not leave theoretical content untouched; its truth

evaporates. Today, however, motorized history is rushing ahead of such
intellectual developments, and the official spokesmen, who have other
concerns, are liquidating the theory to which they owe their place in the
sun" before it has time to prostitute itself completely,"

In reflecting on its own guilt, therefore, thought finds itself deprived
not only of the affirmative reference to science and everyday phenomena
but also of the conceptual language of opposition. No terms are available
which do not tend toward complicity with the prevailing intellectual
trends, and what threadbare language cannot achieve on its own is precisely made good by the social machinery. The censors voluntarily maintained by the film factories to avoid greater costS have their counterparts
in all other departments. The process to which a literary text is subjected,
if not in the automatic foresight of its producer then through the battery
of readers, publishers, adapters, and ghost writers inside and outside the
editorial office, outdoes any censor in its thoroughness. To render their
function entirely superfluous appears, despite all the benevolent reforms,

to be the ambition of the educational system. In the belief that without
strict limitation to the observation of facts and the calculation of probabilities the cognitive mind would be overreceptive to charlatanism and·

XVI

Preface (1944 and 1941)

superstition, that system is preparing arid ground for the greedy acceptance of charlatanism and superstition. Just as prohibition has always
ensured the admission of the poisonous product, the blocking of the theoretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion. Even when

people have not already succumbed to such delusion, they are deprived by
rhe mechanisms of censorship, both the external ones and those implantcd within them, of the means of resisting it.
The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first
matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We

have no doubt-and herein lies our petitio principii-that freedom in
society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have

perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society
with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression"
wh ich is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate. By leaving
consideration of the destructive side of progress to its enemies, thought in
its headlong* rush into pragmatism is forfeiting irs sublating character,
and therefore its relation to truth. In the mysterious willingness of the
technologically educated masses to fall under the spell of any despotism,
in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia, in all this uncornprehcndcd senselessness the weakness of contemporary theoretical underxrunding is evident.
We believe that in these fragments we have contributed to such
uudcrsrauding by showing that the cause of enlightenment's relapse into
mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other
modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in
I he fcar of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself. Both these terms,
cnlighrcnmcnr and truth, are to be understood as pertaining nor merely to
intellectual history but also to current reality. Just as enlightenment expresses the real movement of bourgeois society as a whole from the perspective of the idea embodied in its personalities and institutions, truth
refers 1H1t merely to rational" consciousness but equally to the form it takes
in reality. The loyal son of modern civilization's fear of departing from the

bus. which even in their perception are turned into cliches by the prevailing IIsages ill science, business, and politics, is exactly the same as the
fcar of sodal deviation. Those usages also define the concept of clarity in
.

Preface (I944 and I941) XVII

language and thought to which art, literature, and philosophy must con-

form today. By tabooing any thought which sets out negatively from the
facts and from the prevailing modes of thought as obscure, convoluted,
and preferably foreign, that concept holds mind captive in ever deeper

blindness. It is in the nature of the calamitous situation existing today that
even the most honorable reformer who recommends renewal in threadbare

language reinforces the existing order he seeks to break by taking over its
worn-out categorial apparatus and the pernicious power-philosophy lying
behind it. False clarity is only another name for myth. Myth was always
obscure and luminous at once. It has always been distinguished by its

familiarity and its exemption from the work of concepts.
The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from
social ptogress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the
conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and
the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest
of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers. These powers are taking society's domination over nature
to unimagined heights. While individuals as such are vanishing before the"
apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better
than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase" with the quantity ofgoods allocated to them.•
The materially considerable and socially paltry rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is reflected in the hypocritical propagation of intel-

lect. Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish
when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption
purposes.lI.he flood of precise information and brand-new amusements

make people smarter and more stupid at on~.

-.-

What is at issue here is not culture as a value, as understood by crit-

ics of civilization such as Huxley, Jaspers. and Ortega y Gasser, but the
necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be
totally betrayed. What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the
fulfillment of past hopes. Today, however," the past is being continued as
destruction of the past. If, up to the nineteenth century, respectable education was a privilege paid for by the increased sufferings* of the uneducated, in the twentieth the hygienic factory is bought with the melting
down of all cui rural entities in the gigantic crucible.* That might not even
be so high a price as those defenders of culture believe if the bargain sale

XVIII

Preface (I944 and I941)

of culture did not contribute to converting economic achievements into
their opposite.

Under the given circumstances the gifts of fortune themselves
become clements ofmisfortune. If, in the absence of the social subject, the
volume of goods took the form of so-called overproduction in domestic
economic crises in the preceding period, today, thanks to the enthronement of powerful groups as that social subject, it is producing rhe international threat of fascism: progress is reverting to regression. That the
hygienic factory and everything pertaining to it, Volkswagen* and the

~ports palace, are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in
il.~dr, bur that these things are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological curtain," within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering, does matter, That is the basic premise of our fragments.
The first essay, the theoretical basis of those which follow, seeks to
gain greater understanding of the intertwinement of rationality and social
reality, as well as of the intertwinement, inseparable from the former, of
nature and the mastery of nature. The critique of enlightenment given in
this section is intended to prepare a positive concept of enlightenment
which liberates it from its entanglement in blind domination.

The critical part of the first essay can be broadly summed up in twO
I hescs: Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to my1llOlogy. These theses are worked out in relation to specific subjects in the
I wo cxcurses. The first traces the dialectic of myth and enlightenment in

IIIl' Odyssey, as one of the earliest representative documents of bourgeois
Western civilization. It focuses primarily on the concepts of sacrifice and
renunciation, through which both the difference berween and the unity of
mythical nature and enlightened mastery of nature become apparent. The
second CXClll"SUS is concerned with Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche, whose

works represent the implacable consummation of enlightenment. This
section shows how the subjugation of everything natural to thesovereign
subject culminates in the domination of what is blindly objective and natural. This tendency levels all the antitheses of bourgeois thought, especially that between moral rigor and absolute amorality.
The section "The Culture Industry" shows the regression of enlightl'III11CIH to ideology which is graphically expressed in film and radio. Here,
cllliglHel1ll1cl1t consists primarily in the calculation of effects and in the
technology or production and dissemination; the specific content of the
.

Preface (I944 and I941) XIX
ideology is exhausted in the idolization of the existing order and of the
power by which the technology is controlled. In the discussion of this contradiction the culture industry is taken more seriously than it might itself
wish to be. But because its appeal to its own commercial character, its confession of its diminished truth, has long since become an excuse with
which it evades responsibility for its lies, our analysis is directed at the
claim objectively conrained in its products to be aesthetic formations and
thus representations of truth. It demonstrates" the dire state of society by
the invalidity of that claim. Still more than the others. the section on the
culture industry is fragmentary.*
The discussion, in the form of theses, of "Elements of Anti-

Sernitisrn" deals with the reversion of enlightened civilization to barbarism

in reality. The not merely theoretical but practical tendency toward selfdestruction has been inherent in rationality from the first, not only in the
present phase when it is emerging nakedly. For this reason a philosophical
prehistory of anti-Semitism is sketched. Its "irrationalism" derives from
the nature of the dominanr reason and of the world corresponding to its
image. The "elements" are directly related to empirical research by the
Institute of Social Research," the foundation set up and kept alive by Felix
Wei!, without which not only our studies but the good part of the theoretical work of German emigrants carried forward despite Hitler would
not have been possible. We wrote the first three theses jointly with Leo
Lowenthal, with whom we have collaborated on many scholarly questions
since the first years in Frankfurt.
In the last section we publish notes and sketches which, in part, form
part of the ideas in the preceding sections, without having found a place
in them, and in part deal provisionally with problems of future work.
Most of rhem relate to a dialectical anthropology.*
Los Angeles, California, May I944

The book contains no essential changes to the text completed during the
war. Only the last thesis of "Elements of Anti-Semitism" was added subsequently.
Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno
June I941

The Concept" of Enlightenment

,

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of
thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and
installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with
triumphant calamity. Enlightenment's program was the disenchantment

of the world." It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. Bacon, "the father of experimental philosophy,"l brought these motifs together. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted belief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in

supplying answers. All this, he said, stood in the way of "the happy match
between the mind of man and the nature of things," with the result that
humanity was unable to use its knowledge for the betterment of its condition. Such inventions as had been made-Bacon cites printing, artillery,
and the compass-had been arrived at more by chance than by systematic enquiry into nature. Knowledge obtained through such enquiry would
not only be exempt from the influence of wealth and power but would
establish man as the master of nature:

Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lierh hid in knowledge; wherein many
things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force

command; their spials and inrelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen

and discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions,
but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention,
we should command her by action.i

2

The Concept ofEnlightenment

Although not a mathematician, Bacon well understood the scientific temper which was to come after him. The "happy match" between human
understanding and the nature of things that he envisaged is a patriarchal
one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted
nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavemerit" of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. Just as it serves all

the purposes of the bourgeois economy both in factories and on the battlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins.

Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is as
democratic as the economic system" with which it evolved. Technology is

the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor
images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the
labor of others," capital. The "many things" which, according to Bacon.

knowledge still held in store are themselves mere instruments: the radio as
a sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of
artillery, remote control as a more reliable compass. What human beings
seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and
human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlighten-

ment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Only
thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.
Faced by the present triumph of the factual mentality, Bacon's nominalist
credo would have smacked of metaphysics and would have been convicted of the same vanity for which he criticized scholasticism. Power and

knowledge are synonyrnous.P For Bacon as for Luther, "knowledge that
rendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and
not for fruit or generation." Its concern is not "satisfaction, which men call
."h t a:'
dI The"
I "b" rrut 1, ut operation,
e errecuve proce
ure. e trueend ,scopeor

office of knowledge" does not consist in "any plausible, delectable, reverend or admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effecting
and working, and in discovery of particulars not revealed before, for the
better endowment and help of man's life."4 There shall be neither mystery
nor any desire to reveal mystery.
The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism.
Xenophanes mocked the multiplicity of gods because they resembled their
creators, men, in all their idiosyncrasies and faults, and the latest logic
denounces the words of language, which bear the stamp of impressions, as
counterfeit coin that would be better replaced by neutral counters. The
.

The Concept ofEnlightenment 3
world becomes chaos. and synthesis salvation. No difference is said to exist
berween the totemic animal, the dreams of the spirit-seer," and the absolute
Idea. On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded
meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and
probability. Causality was only the last philosophical concept on which scientific criticism tested its strength, because it alone of the old ideas still
stood in the way of such criticism. the latest secular form of the creative

principle. To define substance and quality, activi ry and suffering, being and
existence in terms appropriate to the time has been a concern of philosophy since Bacon; but science could manage without such categories. They

were left behind as idola tbeatri of the old metaphysics and even in their
time were monuments to entities and powers from prehistory. In that distant time life and death had been interpreted and interwoven in myths.
The categories by which Western philosophy defined its timeless order of
nature marked out the positions which had once been occupied by Ocnus
and Persephone, Ariadne and Nereus. The moment of transition is recorded in the pre-Socratic cosmologies. The moist, the undivided. the air and
fire which they take to be the primal stuff of nature are early rationalizations precipitated ftom the mythical vision. Just as the images ofgeneration
from water and earth, that had come to the Greeks from the Nile, were

converted by these cosmologies into Hylozoic principles and elements, the
whole ambiguous profusion of mythical demons was intellectualized to become the pure form of ontological entities. Even the patriarchal gods of

Olympus were finally assimilated by the philosophical logos as the Platonic
Forms. But the Enlightenment discerned the old powers in the Platonic
and Aristotelian heritage of metaphysics and suppressed the universal categories' claims to truth as superstition. In the authority of universal concepts
the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies

human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals. From now on
matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties. For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion. Once the movement is able to develop unhampered by external
oppression, there is no holding it back. Its own ideas of human rights then
fare no better than the older universals. Any intellectual resistance it encoun ters merely increases its strength.' The reason is that enlightenment
also recognizes itselfin the old myths. No matter which myths are invoked

4

The Concept ofEnlightenment

against it, by being used as arguments they are made to acknowledge the
very principle of corrosive rationality of which enlightenment stands accused. Enlightenment is totalitarian.
Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth." The supernatural, spirits and demons, are taken to be reflections of human beings
who allow themselves to be frightened by natural phenomena. According
to enlightened thinking, the multiplicity of mythical figures can be

reduced to a single common denominator, the subject. Oedipus's answer
to the riddle of the Sphinx-"That being is man"-is repeated indiscriminately as enlightenment's stereotyped message, whether in response to a
piece of objective meaning, a schematic order, a fear of evil powers, or a
hope of salvation. For the Enlightenment. only what can be encompassed
by unity has the status of an existent or an event; irs ideal is the system

from which everything and anything follows. Its rationalist and empiricist
versions do not differ on that point. Although the various schools may
have interpreted its axioms differently, the structure of unitary science has
always been the same. Despite the pluralism of the different fields of '

research, Bacon's postulate of una scientia uniuersalis' is as hostile to any- ~
thing which cannot be connected as Leibniz's mathesis universalis is to discontinuity. The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangemcnt, history to fact, things to matter. For Bacon, too, there was a clear
logical connection, through degrees of generality, linking the highest pr in-

ciples to propositions based on observation. De Maistre mocks him for
harboring this "idolized ladder.?" Formal logic was the high school of uni-

fication. It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world

calculable. The mythologizing equation ~f Forms with numbers in Plato's
last wr iti ngs expresses the longing ofall demythologizing: number became

enlightenment's canon. The same equations govern bourgeois justice and

commodity exchange . "Is not the rule, 'Si inaequalibus aequalia addas,
om n ia erun t inaequalia, [If you add like to unlike you will always end up
with unl ike] an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics? And is there
not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and
arithmetical and geometrical proportion?"? Bourgeois society is ruled by
equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to
.tlmran ql1;UlI iries . For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be
loolVl'd int« numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion ; modern posi.

The Concept ofEnlightenment 5
tivisrn consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parrnen-

ides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed.
But the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products. The scientific calculation of events annuls the account
of them which thought had once given in myth. Myth sought to report,
to name, to tell of origins-but therefore also to narrate, record, explain.
This tendency was reinforced by the recording and collecting of myths.
From a record, they soon became a teaching. Each ritual contains a representation of how things happen and of the specific process which is to be
influenced by magic. In the earliest popular epics this theoretical element
of ritual became autonomous. The myths which the tragic dramatists drew

on were already marked by the discipline and power which Bacon celebrated as the goal. The local spirits and demons had been replaced by
heaven and its hierarchy, the incantatory practices of the magician by the
carefully graduated sacrifice and the labor of enslaved men mediated by
command. The Olympian deities are no longer directly identical with elements, but signify them. In Homer Zeus controls the daytime sky, Apollo
guides the sun; Helios and Eos are already passing over into allegory. The
gods detach themselves from substances to become their quintessence.
From now on, being is split between logos-which, with the advance of
philosophy, contracts to a monad, a mere reference point-and the mass
of things and creatures in the external world. The single distinction
between man's own existence and reality swallows up all others. Without
regard for differences, the world is made subject to man. In this the Jewish
story of creation and the Olympian religion are at one: " ... and let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and

over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that
creepeth upon the earth."!" "0 Zeus, Father Zeus, yours is the dominion
of the heavens; you oversee the works of men, both the wicked and the
just, and the unruly animals, you who uphold righteousness."!' "It is so
ordained that one atones at once, another later; but even should one

escape the doom threatened by the gods, it will surely come to pass one
day, and innocents shall expiate his deed, whether his children or a later
generation."ll Only those who subject themselves utterly pass muster with
the gods. The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of
power as the principle of all relationships. In face of the unity of such reason the distinction between God and man is reduced to an irrelevance, as

6 The Concept ofEnlightenment
reason has steadfastly indicated since the earliest critique of Homer. In

their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike .
• Man's likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly
gaze, in the command.
Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human
beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangertrent from that
over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to
things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that
he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent
that he can make them. Their "in-itself" becomes "for him." In their

transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. Neither

it nor the unity of the subject was presupposed by magical incantation.
The rites of the shaman were directed at the wind, the rain, the snake out-

side or the demon inside the sick person, not at materials or specimens.
The spirit which practiced magic was not single or identical; it changed
with the cult masks which represented the multiplicity of spirits. Magic is
bloody untruth, but in it domination is not yet disclaimed by transforming itselfinto a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves. The
magician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimidating or appeasing gestures. Although his task was impersonation he did
• not claim to be made in the image of the invisible power, as does civilized
man, whose modest hunting ground then shrinks to the unified cosmos,
in which nothing exists but prey. Only when made in such an image does
man attain the identity of the self which cannot be lost in identification
wirh the other but takes possession of itself once and for all as an impen-

etrable mask. It is the identity of mind ahd its correlative, the unity of

nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities. Nature. strippe~ of
qualities, becomes the chaotic stuff of mere classification, and the all-powerful self becomes a mere having, an abstract identity. Magic implies specific representation. What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the
enemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place of
the god. The substitution which rakes place in sacrifice marks a step
toward discursive logic. Even though the hind which was offered up for

rhc daughter, the lamb for the firstborn, necessarily still had qualities of its

own, it already represented the genus. It manifested the arbitrariness of
the specimen. But die sanctity of the hie ct nunc, the uniqueness of the

The Concept ofEnlightenment 7
chosen victim which coincides with its representative status, distinguishes
it radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange. Science puts
an end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which is
a sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universal

fungibiliry. An atom is smashed not as a representative but as a specimen
of matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not
as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar. Because in functional science the differences are so fluid that everything is submerged in
one and the same matter, the scientific object is petrified, whereas the rigid
ritual of former times appears supple in its substitution of one thing for
another. The world of magic still retained differences whose traces have
vanished even in linguistic forrns.!" The manifold affinities between exist-

ing things are supplanted by the single relationship between the subject
who confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational si'gnificance and its accidental bearer. At the magical stage dream and image

were not regarded as mere signs of things but were linked to them by
resemblance or name. The relationship was not one of intention but of
kinship. Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues them

through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object. It
certainly is not founded on the "omnipotence of thought," which the
primitive is supposed to impute to himselflike the neurotic;" there can be

no "over-valuation of psychical acts" in relation to realiry where thought
and realiry are not radically distinguished. The "unshakable confidence in

the possibiliry of controlling the world'"? which Freud anachronistically
attributes to magic applies only to the more realistic form of world domination achieved by the greater astuteness of science. The autonomy of
thought in relation to objects, as manifested in the realiry-adequacy of the
Ego, was a prerequisite for the replacement of the localized practices of the
medicine man by all-embracing industrial technology.*

As a totaliry set out in language and laying claim to a truth which
suppressed the older mythical faith of popular religion, the solar, patriar-

chal myth was itself an enlightenment, fully comparable on that level to
the philosophical one. But now it paid the price. Mythology itself set in
motion the endless process of enlightenment by which, with ineluctable
necessiry, every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating

criticism that it is only a belief, until even the concepts of mind, truth,
and, indeed, enlightenment itself have been reduced to animistic magic.

8 The Concept ofEnlightenment
The principle of the fated necessity which caused the downfall of the
mythical hero, and finally evolved as the logical conclusion from the orac-

ular utterance, not only predominates, refined to the cogency of formal
logic, in every rationalistic system ofWestern philosophy but also presides
over the succession of systems which begins with the hierarchy of the gods
and. in a permanent twilight of the idols , hands down a single identical
content: wrath against those of insufficient righteousness.* Just as myths
, already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles
itself more deeply in mythology. Receiving all its subject matter from
myths, in order to destroy them, it falls as judge under the spell of myth.
It seeks to escape the trial of fate and retribution by itself exacting retribution on that trial. In myths, everything that happens must atone for the
fact of having happened. It is no different in enlightenment: no sooner has
a fact been established than it is rendered insignificant. The doctrine that
action equals reaction continued to maintain the power of repetition over
existence long after humankind had shed the illusion that, by repetition,
it could identify itself with repeated existence and so escape its power. But
the more the illusion of magic vanishes, the more implacably repetition, in
the guise of regularity, imprisons human beings in the cycle now objectif'jed in the laws of nature, to which they believe they owe their security as
free subjects . The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event
as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination,
is that of myth itself. The arid wisdom which acknowledges nothing new
under the sun, because all the pieces in the meaningless game have been

played o lit, all the great thoughts have been thought, all possible discovcrie s Can be construed in advance, and human beings are defined by self-

preservation through adaptation-this barren wisdom merely reproduces
rhc fill1tastic doctrine it rejects: the sanction of fate which, through retribution , incessantly reinstates what always was. Wh:never m ight be differcut is made the same . That is the verdict which critically sets the boundarie s to possible experience. The identity of everything with everything is
bought at the cost that nothing can at the same time be identical to itself.
Enlightcnment dissolves away the injustice of the oLd inequality of
unmcdiated mastery, but at the same time perpetuates it in universal
mcdimion, hy relating every existing thing to every other. It brings about

tilt' sit u atio n li)r which Kicrkcgaard praised his Protestant ethic and which,

in the Iq!,cnd-cyde of Hercules, consriuucs one of the p~imal images of

The Concept ofEnlightenment 9
mythical violence: it amputates the incommensurable. Not merely are
qualities dissolved in thought, but human beings are forced into real conformity. The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for
in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth
are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market. Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own,
different from all others, so that it could all the more surely be made the
same. But because that self never quite fitted the mold, enlightenment
throughout the liberalistic period has always sympathized with social coercion. The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of
each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could
make people into individuals. The horde, a term which doubtless" is to be
found in the Hitler Youth organization, is not a relapse into the old bar-

barism but the triumph of repressive egalitl, the degeneration of the equal-

ity of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals. The fake myth of f~scism
reveals itself as the genuine myth of prehistory, in that the genuine myth
beheld retribution while the false one wreaks it blindly on its victims. Any
attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion. That has been the trajectory of
European civilization. Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment,
stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation. Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes
everything in nature repeatable, and ofindustry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the "herd" (Trupp),

which Hegel" identified as the outcome of enlightenment.
The distance of subject from object, the presupposition of abstraction, is founded on the distance from things which the ruler attains by

means of the ruled. The songs of Homer and the hymns of the Rig lIeckt
date from the time of territorial dominion and its strongholds, when a
warlike race of overlords imposed itself on the defeated indigenous population.!" The supreme god among gods came into being with this civil
world in which the king, as leader of the arms-bearing nobility, tied the
subjugated people" to the land while doctors, soothsayers, artisans, and
traders took care of circulation. With the end of nomadism the social order

is established on the basis of fixed property. Power and labor diverge. A
property owner like Odysseus "controls from a distance a numerous, finely graded personnel of ox herds, shepherds, swineherds, and servants. In

10

The Concept ofEnlightenment

the evening, having looked out from his castle to see the countryside lit up

by a thousand fires, he can go to his rest in peace. He knows that his loyal
servants are watching to keep away wild animals and to drive away thieves
from the enclosures which they are there to protect."18 The generality of
the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere ofthe concept,
is built on the foundation of power in reality. The superseding of the old
diffuse notions of the magical heritage by conceptual unity expresses a
condition of life defined by the freeborn citizen and articulated by command. The self which learned about order and subordination through the
subjugation of the world soon equated truth in general with classifying
thought, without whose fixed distinctions it cannot exist. Along with
mimetic magic it tabooed the knowledge which really apprehends the
object. Irs hatred is directed at the image of the vanquished primevalworld
and its imaginary happiness. The dark, chthonic gods of the original
inhabitants are banished to the hell into which the earth is transformed

under the religions ofIndra and Zeus, with their worship of sun and light.
But heaven and hell were linked. The name Zeus was applied both
to a god of the underworld and to a god of light in cults which did not
exclude each other,"? and the Olympian gods maintained all kinds of commerce with the chthonic deities. In the same way, the good and evil powers, the holy and the unholy, were not unambiguously distinguished. They
were bound together like genesis and decline, life and death, summer and
winter. The murky, undivided entity worshipped as the principle of mana
at the earliest known stages of humanity lived on in the bright world of
the Greek religion. Primal and undifferentiated, it is everything unknown
and alien; it is that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of
things which is more than their immediately perceived existence. What
the primitive experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual substance in

contradistinction to the material world but the complex concate~ation of
nature in contrast to its individual link. * The cry of terror called forth by
the unfamiliar becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the un-

known in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness.
The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force,
made possible by myth no less than by science, springs from human fear,
the expression of which becomes its explanation. This does not mean that
the soul is transposed into nature, as psychologism would have us believe;
mana, the moving spirit. is not a projection but the echo of the real pre.

The Concept ofEnlightenment

II

ponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people. The split
between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to

certain specific places, arises from this preanimism. Even the division of
subject and object is prefigured in it. If the tree is addressed no longer as
simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and
something other than itself, identical and not identical.?" Through the
deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. The concept,
usually defined as the unity of the features ofwhat it subsumes, was rather,
from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is

what it is only by becoming what it is not. This was the primal form of the
objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the
same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and
trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. But this dialectic
remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the
doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself The gods cannot take away
fear from human beings, the petrified cries of whom they bear as their
names. Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer
anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization,
of enlightenment, which equates the living with the nonliving as myth
had equated the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear
radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is
nothing other than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to remain outside. since the mere idea of the "outside" is the real source of fear.

If the revenge of primitive people for a murder committed on a member
of their family could sometimes be assuaged by admitting the murderer
into that family, 11 both the murder and its remedy mean the absorption of
alien blood into one's own, the establishment of immanence. The mythical dualism does not lead outside the circle of existence. The world con-

trolled by mana, and even the worlds of Indian and Greek myth, are issueless and eternally the same. All birth is paid for with death, all fortune
with misfortune. While men and gods may attempt in their short span to
assess their fates by a measure other than blind destiny, existence triumphs
over them in the end. Even their justice, wrested from calamity, bears its
features; it corresponds to the way in which human beings, primitives no
less than Greeks and barbarians, looked upon their world from within a
society of oppression and poverty. Hence, for both mythical and enlight-

J2

The Concept ofEnlightenment

ened justice, guile and atonement, happiness and misfortune, are seen as
the two sides of an equation. Justice gives way to law. The shaman wards
off a danger with its likeness. Equivalence is his instrument; and equiva-

lence regulates punishment and reward within civilization. The imagery of
myths, too, can be traced back without exception to natural conditions.
Just as the constellation Gemini, like all the other symbols ofduality, refers
to the inescapable cycle of nature; JUSt as this cycle itself has its primeval
sign in the symbol of the egg from which those later symbols are sprung,
the Scales (Libra) held by Zeus, which symbolize the justice of the entire
patriarchal world, point back to mere nature. The step from chaos to civilization, in which natural conditions exert their power no longer.directly
hue through the consciousness of human beings. changed nothing in the
principle of equivalence. Indeed, human beings atoned for this very step
by worshipping that to which previously, like all other creatures, they had
been merely subjected. Earlier, fetishes had been subject to the law of
equivalence. Now equivalence itself becomes a fetish. The blindfold over
the eyes ofJustitia means not only that justice brooks no interference but
that it does not originate in freedom.
The teachings of the priests were symbolic in the sense that in them

sign and image coincided. As the hieroglyphs attest, the word originally
also had a pictorial function. This function was transferred to myths. They,
like magic rites, refer to the repetitive cycle of nature. Nature as self-repeinion is the core of the symbolic: an entity or a process which is conceived
as eternal because it is reenacted again and again in the guise of the symhol. I nexhaustibiliry, endless renewal, and the permanence of what they
signifY are not only attributes of all symbols but their true content.
Contrary to the Jewish Genesis, the representations of creation in which
the world emerges from the primal mother, the cow or the egg: are symbolic. The scorn of the ancients for their all-too-human gods left their core
untouched. The essence of the gods is not exhausted by individuality.
They still had about them a quality of mana; they embodied nature as a
universal power. With their preanirnistic traits they intrude into the
enlightenment. Beneath the modest veil of the Olympian cbronique scan-

daleuse the doctrine of the commingling and colliding of elements had
evolved; establishing itself at once as science, it turned the myths into figmcms of f;ulIasy. Wilh the dean separation between sci;nce and poetry

The Concept ofEnlightenment 13
the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended
to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed
among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can
never be restored by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art."

As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know
nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign
itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the

claim to know it. With advancing enlightenment, only authentic works of
art have been able to avoid the mere imitation of what already is. The prevailing antithesis between art and science, which rends the two apart as
areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of culture, finally causes them, through their internal tendencies as exact opposites, to converge. Science, in its neopositivist interpretation, becomes aestheticism, a system of isolated signs devoid of any intention transcending
the system; it becomes the game which mathematicians have long since
proudly declared their activity to be. Meanwhile, art as integral replication
has pledged itself to positivist science, even in its specific techniques. It
becomes, indeed, the world over again, an ideological doubling, a compliant reproduction. The separation of sign and image is inescapable. But if,
with heedless complacency, it is hypostatized over again, then each of the
isolated principles tends toward the destruction of truth.
Philosophy has perceived the chasm opened by this separation as the

relationship between intuition and concept and repeatedly but vainly has
attempted to close it; indeed, philosophy is defined by that attempt.
Usually, however, it has sided with the tendency to which it owes its name.
Plato banished poetry with the same severity with which positivism dismissed the doctrine of Forms. Homer, Plato argued, had procured neither
public nor private reforms through his much-vaunted art, had neither won
a war nor made an invention. We did not know, he said, of any numerous
followers who had honored or loved him. Art had to demonstrate its use-

fulness.F The making of images was proscribed by Plato as it was by the
Jews. Both reason and religion outlaw the principle of magic. Even in its
resigned detachment from existence, as art, it remains dishonorable; those
who practice it become vagrants, latter-day nomads, who find no domicile
among the settled. Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but
mastered through work. Art has in common with magic the postulation of
a special, self-contained sphere removed from the context of profane exis-

14 The Concept ofEnlightenment
tence. Within it special laws prevail. Just as the sorcerer begins the ceremony by marking out from all its surroundings the place in which the
sacred forces are to come into play, each work of art is closed off from real-

ity by its own circumference. The very renunciation of external effects by
which art is distinguished from magical sympathy binds art only more

deeply to the heritage of magic. This renunciation places the pure image
in opposition to corporeal existence, the elements of which the image sublates within itself It is in the nature of the work of art, of aesthetic illusion, to be what was experienced as a new and terrible event in the magic
of primitives: the appearance of the whole in the particular. The work of
art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as

something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura. As
an expression of totality art claims the dignity of the absolute. This has

occasionally led philosophy to rank it higher than conceptual knowledge.
According to Schelling, an begins where knowledge leaves humans in the
lurch. For him art is "the model of science, and wherever art is, there sci-

ence must gO."23 According to his theory the separation of image and sign

"is entirely abolished by each single representation of art."24 The bourgeois
world was rarely amenable to such confidence in art. Where it restricted
knowledge, it generally did so to make room for faith, not art. It was
through faith that the militant religiosity, of the modern age, of Torquemada, Luther, and Mohammed, sought to reconcile spirit and existence. But faith is a privative concept: it is abolished as faith if it does not
continuously assert either its opposition to knowledge or its agreement
with it. In being dependent on the limits set to knowledge, it is itself limited. The attempt made by faith under Protestantism to locate the princi-

ple of truth, which transcends faith and without which faith cannot exist,
directly in the word itself, as in primeval times, and to restore the symbolic
power of the word, was paid for by obedience to the word, but not in its
sacred form. Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend
or its foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that

anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad conscience is second nature to it. The secret awareness of this necessary, inherern flaw. the immanent contradiction that lies in making a profession of

u-concili.uion. is the reason why honesty in believers has always been a
xcnsitiv« and dan~l"roll.s allair, The horrors of fire Jll.d sword. of counter-

The Concept ofEnlightenment 15
Reformation and Reformation, were perpetrated nor as an exaggeration
bur as a realizat ion of the principle of faith . Faith repeatedly shows itself
of the same stamp as the world history it would like to command; i ndeed,
in the modern period it has become that history's preferred means, its special ruse. Nor only is the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century inexorable, as Hegel confirmed; so, too, as none knew better than he, is the
movement of thought itself. The lowest insight, like the highest , contains
the knowledge of its distance from the truth, which makes the apologist a
liar. The paradox of faith degenerates finally into fraud , the myth of the
twentieth century" and faith's irrat ionality into rational organization in the
hands of the utterly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism .
When language first entered history its masters were already priests
and sorcerers. Anyone who affronted the symbols fell prey in the name of
the unearthly powers to the earthly ones, represented by these appointed
organs of society. What preceded that stage is shrouded in darkness.
Wherever it is found in ethnology, the terror from which mana was born
was already sanctioned, at least by the tribal elders. Unidentical, fluid
mana was solidified, violently materialized by men. Soon the sorcerers had
populated every place with its emanations and coordinated the multiplicity of sacred realms with that of sacred rites . With the spirit-world and its
pecul iarities they extended their esoteric knowledge and the ir power. The
sacred essence was transferred to the sorcerers who managed it. In the first
stages of nomadism the members of the tribe still played an independent
part in influencing the course of nature. The men tracked prey while the
women performed tasks which did nor require rigid commands. How
much violence preceded the habituation to even so simple an order cannor be known. In that order the world was already divided into zones of
power and of the profane. The course of natural events as an emanation of
mana had already been elevated to a norm demanding submiss ion. Bur if
the nomadic savage, despite his subjection, could still part icipate in the
magic which defined the limits of that world, and could disguise himself
as his quarry in order to stalk it, in later periods the intercourse with spirirs and the subjection were assigned to different classes of humanity:
power to one side, obedience to the other. The recurring, never-changing
natural processes were drummed into the subjects, either by other tribes
or hy their own cliques, as the rhythm of work, to the beat of the club and :
ihc rod, which reechoed in every barbaric drum, in each monotonous rit-

16 The Concept ofEnlightenment
ual. The symbols take on the expression of the fetish. The repetition of
nature which they signify always manifests itself in later times as the permanence of social compulsion, which the symbols represent. The dread
objectified in the fixed image becomes a sign of the consolidated power of

the privileged. * But general concepts continued to symbolize that power
even when they had shed all pictorial traits. Even the deductive form of
science mirrors hierarchy and compulsion. Just as the first categories represented the organized tribe and its power over the individual, the entire
logical order, with its chains of inference and dependence, the superordination and coordination of concepts, is founded on the corresponding
conditions in social reality, that is, on the division of labor." Of course,
this social character of intellectual forms is not, as Durkheim argues, an
expression of social solidarity but evidence of the impenetrable unity of
society and power. Power confers increased cohesion and strength on the
social whole in which it is established. The division of labor, through
which power manifests itself socially, serves the self-preservation of the
dominated whole. But this necessarily turns the whole, as a whole, and the
operation of its immanent reason, into a means of enforcing the particular interest. Power confronts the individual as the universal, as the reason

which informs reality. The power of all the members of society, to whom
as individuals no other way is open, is constantly summated, through the
division of labor imposed on them, in the realization of the whole, whose

rationality is thereby multiplied over again. What is done to all by the few
always takes the form of the subduing of individuals by the many: the
oppression of society always bears the features of oppression by a collec-

tive. It is this unity of collectivity and power, and not the immediate social
universal, solidarity, which is precipitated in intellectual forms. Through
their claim to universal validity, the philosophical concepts with which

Plato and Aristotle represented the w~ld elevated the conditions which
those concepts justified to the status of true reality. They originated, as
Vieo put it,26 in the marketplace of Athens; they reflected with the same
fidelity the laws of physics, the equality of freeborn citizens, and the inferiority of women, children, and slaves. Language itself endowed what it
expressed, the conditions of domination, with the universality it had
acquired as the means of intercourse in civil society. The metaphysical
emphasis, the sanction by ideas and norms, was no more than a hypostaiiz.uion of' .he rigidity and exclusivity which concepts have necessarily
.

The Concept ofEnlightenment 17
taken on wherever language has consolidated the community of the rulers

for the enforcement of commands. As a means of reinforcing the social
power of language, ideas became more superfluous the more that power

increased, and the language of science put an end to them aI together.
Conscious justification lacked the suggestive power which springs from
dread of the fetish. The unity of collectivity and power now revealed itself

in the generality which faulty content necessarily takes on in language,
whether metaphysical or scientific. The metaphysical apologia at least
betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of
concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what
was powerless of the strength to make irselfheard and merely provided the
existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics. Enlightenment finally devoured not only symbols but also their successors, universal concepts, and left nothing of metaphysics behind except the abstract fear of the collective from which it had
sprung. Concepts in face of enlightenment are like those living on unearned income in face of industrial trusts:" none can feel secure. If logical
positivism still allowed some latitude for probability, ethnological posi-

tivism already equates probability with essence. '''Our vague ideas of
chance and quintessence are pale relics of that far richer notion,"27 that is,
of the magical substance.
Enlightenment as a nominalist tendency stops short before the

nomen, the non-extensive, restricted concept, the proper name. Althouglr"
it cannot be established with certainty whether proper names were originally generic names, as some maintain, the former have not yet shared the
fate of the latter. The substantial ego repudiated by Hume and Mach is not
the same thing as the name. In the Jewish religion, in which the idea of
the patriarchy is heightened to the point of annihilating myth, the link
between name and essence is still acknowledged in the prohibition on
uttering the name of God. The disenchanted world ofJudaism propitiates
magic by negating it in the idea of God. The Jewish religion brooks no

word which might bring solace to the despair of all mortality. It places all
hope in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any
faith which claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion.
Negation. however, is not abstract. The indiscriminate denial of anything
positive. the stereotyped formula of nothingness as used by Buddhism,

[8 The Concept ofEnlightenment
ignores the ban on calling the absolute by its name no less than its opposite, pantheism, or the latter's caricature. bourgeois skepticism. Explanations of the world as nothingness or as the entire cosmos are mythologies,
and the guaranteed paths to redemption sublimated magical practices.
The self-satisfaction of knowing in advance, and the transfiguration of
negativity as redemption, are untrue forms of the resistance to deception.
The right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition. Such observance, "determinate negation,'?" is not exempted from the
enticements of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, as is

skepticism, for which falsehood and truth are equally void. Unlike rigorism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representa-

tions of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are

unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its

power and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a
mere system of signs. With the concept of determinate negation Hegel
gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from
the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulating the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the
system and in history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition and
himself succumbed to mythology.
That fate befell not only his philosophy, as the apotheosis of advanc-

ing thought, but enlightenment itself, in the form of the sober matter-offactness by which it purported to distinguish itself from Hegel and from
metaphysics in general. For enlightenment is totalitarian as only a system
can be. Its untruth does not lie in the analytical method. the reduction to

elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its Romantic enemies
had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the, trial is pre-

judged. When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quantity in an equation, it is made into something long familiar before any
value" has been assigned. Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what
can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the

insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems. In the
preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with

truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mythical. It
equates thought with mathematics. The latter is thereby cut loose, as it
were, turned into an absolute authority. "An infinite world, in this case a

The Concept ofEnlightenment 19
world of idealities, is conceived as one in which objects are not accessible
individually to our cognition in an imperfect and accidental way but are
attained by a rational, systematically unified method which finally ap-

prehends each object-in an infinite progression-fully as its own initself. ... In Galileo's rnathernatization of nature, nature itselfis idealized
on the model of the new mathematics. In modern terms, it becomes a

mathematical manifold."!" Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine. Enlightenrnenr" pushed aside the classical
demand to "think thinking"-Fichte's philosophy is its radical fulfillment-because it distracted philosophers from the command to control
praxis, which Fichre himself had wanted to enforce. Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought. Despite its axiomatic self-limitation, it installed itself as necessary and objective: mathematics made
thought into a thing-a tool, to use its own term. Through this mimesis,
however, in which thought makes the world resemble itself, the actual has
become so much the only concern that even the denial of God falls under
the same judgment as metaphysics. For positivism, which has assumed the

judicial office of enlightened reason, to speculate about intelligible worlds
is no longer merely forbidden but senseless prattle. Positivism-fortunately for it-does not need to be atheistic. since objectified thought cannot even pose the question of the existence of God. The positivist sensor
turns a blind eye to official worship, as a special, knowledge-free zone of
social activity, just as willingly as to art-but never to denial, even when
it has a claim to be knowledge. For the scientific temper, any deviation of

thought from the business of manipulating th~ actual, any stepping outside the jurisdiction of existence, is no less senseless and self-destructive
than it would be for the magician to step outside the magic circle drawn

for his incantation; and in both cases violation of the taboo carries a heavy
price for the offender. The mastery of nature draws the circle in which the
critique of pure reason holds thought spellbound. Kant combined the
doctrine of thought's restlessly toilsome progress toward infinity with
insistence on its insufficiency and eternal limitation. The wisdom he

imparted is oracular: There is no being in the world that knowledge cannot penetrate, but what can be penetrated by knowledge is not being.
Philosophical judgment, according to Kant, aims at the new yet recognizes
nothing new, since it always merely repeats what reason has placed into

20

The Concept ofEnlightenment

objects beforehand. However, this thought, protected within the depart-

ments of science from the dreams of a spirit-seer, * has to pay the price:
world domination over nature turns against the thinking subject itself;
nothing is left of it except that ever-unchanging "I think," which must
accompany all my conceptions. Both subject and object are nullified. The
abstract self, which alone confers the legal right to record and systematize,
is confronted by nothing but abstract material, which has no other property than to be the substrate of that right. The equation of mind and world

is finally resolved, but only in the sense that both sides cancel out. The
reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns the world to
be its own measure. What appears as the triumph of subjectivity, the sub-

jection of all existing things to logical formalism, is bought-with the obedient subordination of reason to what is immediately at hand. To grasp
existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal
relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to
think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only
fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning-this
whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned. Knowledge does not consist
in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the
determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. Instead of such
negation, mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most
abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. The
actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought
makes itself mere tautology. The more completely the machinery of
thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with repro-

ducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never
been able to escape. For mythology had reflected in its forms the essence
of the existing order-cyclical motion, fate, domination of the world as
truth-and had renounced hope. In the terseness of the mythical image,
as in the clarity of the scientific formula, the eternity of the actual is confinned and mere existence is pronounced as the meaning it obstructs. The
world as a gigantic analytical judgment, the only surviving dream of science, is of the same kind as the cosmic myth which linked the alternation
of spring and autumn to the abduction of Persephone. The uniqueness of
the mythical event, which was intended to legitimize the factual one, is a
deception. Originally, the rape of the goddess was directly equated with
rhc dying of nature. It was repeated each autumn, and even the repetition

The Concept ofEnlightenment

21

was not a succession of separate events, but the same one each time. With
the consolidation of temporal consciousness the process was fixed as a
unique event in the past, and ritual assuagement of the terror of death in
each new cycle of seasons was sought in the recourse to the distant past.
But such separation is powerless. The postulation of the single past event
endows the cycle with a quality of inevitability, and the terror radiating
from the ancient event spreads over the whole process as its mere repetition. The subsumption of the actual, whether under mythical prehistory ...
or under mathematical formalism, the symbolic relating of the present to
the mythical event in the rite or to the abstract category in science, makes
the new appear as something predetermined which therefore is really the

old. It is not existence that is without hope, but knowledge which appropriates and perpetuates existence as a schema in the pictorial or mathematical symbol.
In the enlightened world, mythology has permeated the sphere of
the profane. Existence, thoroughly cleansed of demons and their conceptual descendants, takes on, in its gleaming naturalness, the numinous
character which former ages attributed to demons. justified in the guise of
brutal facts as something eternally immune to intervention, the social ...
injustice from which those facts arise is as sacrosanct today as the medicine
man once was under the protection of his gods. Not only is domination
paid for with_the estrangement of human beings from the dominated
objects. but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship
of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the
objectification of mind. Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them.
Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into
things.* On its own account, even in advance of total planning, the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the
behavior of people. Since, with the ending of free exchange, commodities

have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this character has spread like a cataract across the life of society in all its aspects.
The countless agencies of mass production and its culture" impress stan- •
dardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things. statistical elements, successes or failures. Their criterion is self-preservation, successful

or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the

22

The Concept ofEnlightenment

schemata assigned to it. Everything which is different, from the idea to
criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch
from the classroom to the trade union. Yet even the threatening collective
is merely a part of the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the
powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence. Its brutality, which keeps the individual up to the mark, no more represents the true
quality of people than value" represents that of commodities. The demonically distorted form which things and human beings have taken on in the
clear light of unprejudiced knowledge points back to domination, to the
principle which already imparted the qualities of mana to spirits and
deities and trapped the human gaze in the fakery of sorcerers and medicine men. The fatalism by which incomprehensible death was sanctioned
in primeval times has now passed over into utterly comprehensible life.
The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly appeared to humans as
an all-encompassing power has found its counterpart in the panic which
is ready to break out at any moment today: human beings expect the
world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which
they themselves are and over which they are powerless.

Enlightenment's mythic terror springs from a horror of myth. It
detects myth not only in semantically unclarified concepts and words, as
linguistic criticism imagines, but in any human utterance which has no
place in the functional context of self-preservation. Spinozas proposition:
"the endeavor of preserving oneself is the first and only basis of virrue,"32
contains the true maxim of all Western civilization, in which the religious
and philosophical differences of the bourgeoisie are laid to rest. The self
which, after the methodical extirpation of all narural traces as myrhological, was no longer supposed to be either a body or blood or a soul or even
a natural ego but was sublimated into a transcendental or logical subject,
formed the reference point of reason, the legislating authority of action. In
the judgment of enlightenment as of Protestantism, those who entrust
themselves directly to life, without any rational reference to self-preservation, revert to the realm of prehistory. Impulse as such, according to this
view, is as mythical as superstition, and worship of any God not postulated by the self, as aberrant as drunkenness. For both-worship and seLfimmersion in immediate natural existence-progress holds the same fate
in store, II has anathematized the self-forgetfulness both of thought and of

The Concept ofEnlightenment 23
pleasure. In the bourgeois economy the social work of each individual is

mediated by the principle of the self; for some this labor is supposed to
yield increased capital, for others the strength for extra work. But the more
heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division
of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must

mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul. Enlightened

thinking has an answer for this, too: finally, the transcendental subject of
knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of
order, which therefore tun all the more smoothly. Subjectivity has
volatilized itself mro the logic of supposedly optional rules, to gain more
absolute COntrol. Positivism, which finally did not shrink from laying
hands on the idlest fancy of all, thought itself, eliminated the last intervening agency between individual action and the social norm. The technical process, to which the subject has been reified after the eradication of
that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings
of mythical thought as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has
become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus."
Reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigidly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results ofwhich for human beings escape
all calculation. Reason's old ambition to be purely an instrument of purposes has finally been fulfilled. The exclusivity of logical laws stems from
this obdurate adherence to function and ultimately from the compulsive
character of self-preservation. The latter is constantly magnified into the
choice between survival and doom, a choice which is reflected even in the

principle that, of two contradictory propositions, only one can be true and
the other false. The formalism of this principle and the entire logic established around it stem from the opacity and entanglement of interests in a

society in which the maintenance of forms and the preservation of individuals only fortuitously coincide. The expulsion of thought from logic
ratifies in the lecture hall the reification of human beings in factory and
office. In this way the taboo encroaches on the power imposing it, enlightenment on mind, which it itself is. But nature as true self-preservation is
thereby unleashed, in the individual as in the collective fate of crisis and
war, by the process which promised to extirpate it. If unitary knowledge"
is the only norm which theory has left, praxis must be handed over to the

24 The Concept ofEnlightenment
unfettered operations of world history. The self, entirely encompassed by

civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity
which civilization has sought from the first to escape. The oldest fear, that
oflosing one's own name, is being fulftlled. For civilization, purely natural
existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger. Mimetic,
mythical, and metaphysical forms of behavior were successively regarded
as stages of world history which had been left behind, and the idea of
reverting to them held the terror that the self would be changed back into
the mere nature from which it had extricated itselfwith unspeakable exertions and which for that reason filled it with unspeakable dreid. Over the
millennia the living memory of prehistory, of its nomadic period and even
more of the truly prepatriarchal stages, has been expunged from human
consciousness with the most terrible punishments. The enlightened spirit
replaced fire and the wheel by the stigma it attached [Q all irrationality,
which led to perdition. Its hedonism was moderate, extremes being no less
repugnant to enlightenment than to Aristotle. The bourgeois ideal of naturalness is based not on amorphous nature but on the virtue of the middle way. For this ideal, promiscuity and asceticism, superfluity and hunger,
although opposites, are directly identical as powers of disintegration. By
subordinating life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation, the
controlling minority guarantees, with its own security, the continuation of
the whole. From Homer to modernity the ruling spirit has sought to steer
between the Scylla of relapse into simple reproduction and the Charybdis
of unfettered fulfillment; from the first it has mistrusted any guiding star
other than the lesser evil. The German neopagans and administrators of
war fever want to reinstate pleasure." But since, under the work-pressure
of the millennium now ending, pleasure has learned to hate itself in its
totalitarian emancipation it remains mean and mutilated through self-

contempt. * It is still in the grip of the self-preservation inculcated in it by
the reason which has now been deposed. At the turning points ofWestern
civilization, whenever new peoples and classes have more heavily repressed
myth, from the beginnings of the Olympian religion to the Renaissance,
the Reformation, and bourgeois atheism, the fear of unsubdued, threatening nature-a fear resulting from nature's very materialization and objectification-bas been belittled as animist superstition, and the control of
internal and external nature bas been made the absolute purpose of life.
Now that self-preservation 'has been finally automated, reason is dismissed

The Concept ofEnlightenment 25
by those who, as controllers of production, have taken over its inheritance
and fear it in the disinherited. The essence of enlightenment is the choice
between alternatives, and the inescapabiliry of this choice is that of power.
Human beings have always had [Q choose between their subjugation [Q
nature and its subjugation [Q the self With the spread of the bourgeois
commodity economy the dark horizon of myth is illuminated by the sun
of calculating reason, beneath whose icy rays the seeds of the new barbarism are germinating. Under the compulsion of power, human labor has
always led away from myth and, under power, has always fallen back
under its spell.
The intertwinement of myth, power, and labor is preserved in one

of the tales of Homer. Book XII of the Odyssey tells how Odysseus sailed
past the Sirens. Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past. Bur
the hero exposed [Q it has come of age in suffering. In the multitude of
mortal dangers which he has had to endure, the unity of his own life, the
identity of the person, have been hardened. The realms of time have been
separated for him like water, earth, and air. The tide of what has been has
receded from the rock of the presem, and the future lies veiled in cloud on
the horizon. What Odysseus has left: behind him has passed into the world
of shades: so close is the self [Q the primeval myth from whose embrace it

has wrested itself that irs own lived past becomes a mythical prehistory. It
seeks [Q combat this by a fixed order of time. The tripartite division is
intended to liberate the presem moment from the power of the past by
banishing the latter beyond the absolute boundary of the irrecoverable and
placing it, as usable knowledge, in the service of the present. The urge to
rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the material of
progress, has been satisfied only in an, in which even history, as a repre-

sentation of past life, is included. As long as an does not insist on being
treated as knowledge, and thus exclude itself from praxis, it is tolerated by
social praxis in the same way as pleasure. Bur the Sirens' song has not yet
been deprived of power as an. They have knowledge "of all that has ever
happened on this fruitful eanh"33 and especially of what has befallen
Odysseus himself: "For we know all that the Argives and the Trojans suffered on the broad plain of Troy by the will of the gods."34 By directly

invoking the recent past, and with the irresistible promise of pleasure
which their song contains, the Sirens threaten the patriarchal order, which
gives each person back (heir life only in exchange for their full measure of

26 The Concept ofEnlightenment
time . When only unfailing presence of mind wrests survival from nature,

anyone who follows the Sirens' phantasmagoria is lost . If the Sirens know
everything that has happened, they demand the future as i ts pr ice, and
their promise of a happy homecoming is the deception by which the past

entraps a humanity filled with longing. Odysseus has been warned by
Circe, the divinity of regression to animal form, whom he has w ithstood
and who therefore gives him the strength to withstand other powers ofdissolution . But the lure of the Sirens remains overpowering. No one who
hears their song can escape . Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on
itself before the self-the identical , purpose-directed, masculine character
of human beings-was created, and something of this process "is repeated

in every childhood. The effort to hold itself together attends the ego at aU
irs stages , and the temptation to be rid of the ego has always gone handin-hand with the blind determination to preserve it. Narcotic intoxication,

in which the euphoric suspension of the self is expiated by deathlike sleep,
is one of the oldest social transactions mediating between self-preservation
and self-annihilation, an attempt by the self to survive itself. The fear of
losing the self, and suspending with it the boundary between oneself and
other life, the aversion to death and destruction, is twinned with a promise
of joy which has threatened civilization at every moment. The way of civilization has been that of obedience and work, over which fulfillment

sh in es everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power.
Odysseus's idea, equally inimical to his death and to his happiness, shows
awareness of this. He knows only two possibilities of escape . One he prescr ibes to his comrades. He plugs their ears with wax and orders them to
row with all their might. Anyone who wishes to survive must not listen to
the temprarion of the irrecoverable, and is unable to listen onl y if he is
un able to hear. Society has always made sure that this was the case. Workers must look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which
lies to one side . The urge toward d istraction must be grimly subl imated in
redoubled exertions . Thus the workers are made practical. The other possihility Odysseus chooses for himself, the landowner, who has others to
work for him. He listens, but does so while bound helplessly to the mast,
and [he stronger the allurement grows the more tightly he has himself
hound . just as later the bourgeois denied themselves happiness the closer
il drew 10 them with the increase
in [heir own power . Whar he hears has
\,

110 l:llnSCljlJences flU him; he can signal LO his men to un,tie him only by

The Concept ofEnlightenment 27
movements of his head, but it is too late. His comrades, who themselves

cannot hear, know only of the danger of the song, not of its beauty, and
leave him tied to the mast to save both him and themselves. They reproduce the life of the oppressor as a part of their own, while he cannot step
outside his social role. The bonds by which he has irrevocably fettered
himself to praxis at the same time keep the Sirens at a distance from praxis: their lure is .neurralized as a mere object of contemplation, as art. The
fettered man listens to a concert, as immobilized as audiences later, and his

enthusiastic call for liberation goes unheard as applause. In this way the
enjoyment of art and manual work diverge as the primeval world is left
behind. The epic already contains the correct theory. Between the cultur-

al heritage and enforced work there is a precise correlation, and both are
founded on the inescapable compulsion toward the social control of
nature.

,

Measures like those taken on Odysseus's ship in face of the Sirens are
a prescient allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment. Just as the capacity
to be represented is the measure of power, the mightiest person being the
one who can be represented in the most functions, so it is also the vehicle
of both progress and regression. Under the given conditions, exclusion
from work means mutilation, not only for the unemployed but also for
people at the opposite social pole. Those at the top experience the exis-

tence with which they no longer need to concern themselves as a mere
substrate, and are wholly ossified as the selfwhich issues commands. Primitive man experienced the natural thing only as the fugitive object of
desire, "but the lord, who has interposed the bondsman between it and
himself, takes to himself only the dependent aspect of the thing and has
the pure enjoyment of it. The aspect of its independence he leaves to the
bondsman, who works on ir."35 Odysseus is represented in the sphere of
work. Just as he cannot give way to the lure of self-abandonment, as owner
he also forfeits participation in work and finally even control over it, while
his companions, despite their closeness to things, cannot enjoy their work

because it is performed under compulsion, in despair, with their senses
forcibly stopped. The servant is subjugated in body and soul, the master
regresses. No system of domination has so far been able to escape this
price, and the circularity of history in its progress is explained in part by
this debilitation, which is the concomitant of power. Humanity, whose
skills and knowledge become differentiated with the division of labor, is

2l:l The Concept ofEnlightenment
thereby forced back to more primitive anthropological stages, since, with
the technical facilitation of existence, the continuance of domination de-

mands the fixation of instincts by greater repression. Fantasy withers. The
calamity is not that individuals have fallen behind society or its material

production. Where the development of the machine has become that of
the machinery of control, so that technical and social tendencies, always
intertwined, converge in the total encompassing of human beings. those
who have lagged behind represent not only untruth. Adaptation to the

power of progress furthers the progress of power, constantly renewing the
degenerations which prove successful progress. not failed progress, to be
its own antithesis. The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.

This regression is not confined to the experience of the sensuous
world, an experience tied to physical proximity, but also affects the autocratic intellect, which detaches itself from sensuous experience in order to
subjugate it. The standardization of the intellectual function through
which the mastery of the senses is accomplished, the acquiescence of
rhoughr to the production of unanimity. implies an impoverishment of
thought no less than of experience; the separation of the two realms leaves
both damaged. A consequence of the restriction of thought to organization and administration, rehearsed by the those in charge from artful
Odysseus to artless chairmen of the board, is the stupidity which afflicts
rhe great as soon as they have to perform tasks other than the manipulaI ion of the small. Mind becomes in reality the instrument of power and
self· mastery for which bourgeois philosophy has always mistaken it. The
• deafness which has continued to afflict the submissive proletarians since
the myth is matched by the immobility of those in command. The overripeness of society lives on the immaturity of the ruled. The more complex and sensitive the social, economic, and scientific mechanism, to the
operation of which the system of production has long since attuned the
body. the more impoverished are the experiences of which the body is
capable. The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is
transferred by rationalized modes ofwork to the human capacity for experience, which tends to revert to that of amphibians. The regression of the
masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not
already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously
been grasped; it is the new form-.of blindness which supersedes that of van.

The Concept ofEnlightenment 29

..

quished myth. Through the mediation of the total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back
into precisely what the developmental law of society. the principle of the
self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another

through isolation within the compulsively controlled collecriviry, The
rowers, unable to speak to one another, are all harnessed to the same

rhythms. like modern workers in factories, cinemas, and the collective. It
is the concrete conditions of work in society" which enforce conformism-not the conscious influences which additionally render the oppressed stupid and deflect them from the truth. The powerlessness of the
workers is not merely a ruse of the rulers but the logical consequence of
industrial society, into which the efforts to escape it have finally transformed the ancient concept of fate.

This logical necessity, however, is not conclusive. It remains tied to
domination, as both its reflection and its tool. Its truth, therefore, is no less

questionable than Its evidence is inescapable. Thought, however, has
always been equal to the task of concretely demonstrating its own equivocal nature. It is the servant which the master cannot control at will.

Domination, in becoming reified as law and organization, first when
humans formed settlements and later in the commodity economy, has had
to limit itself. The instrument is becoming autonomous: independently of
the will of the rulers," the mediating agency of mind moderates the immediacy of economic injustice." The instruments of power-language,

weapons, anti finally machines-which are intended to hold everyone in
their grasp. must in their turn be grasped by everyone. In this way, the
moment of rationality in domination also asserts itself as something different from it. The thing-like quality of the means, which makes the
means universally available, its "objective validity" for everyone, itself
implies a criticism of the domination from which thought has arisen as its
means. On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself, and machinery mutilates people today, even if
it also feeds them. In the form of machines, however, alienated reason is

moving toward a society which reconciles thought, in its solidification as
an apparatus both material and intellectual, with a liberated living element, and relates it to society itself as its true subject. The particularist
origin and the universal perspective of thought have always been inseparable. Today, with the transformation of the world into industry, the per-

30 The Concept ofEnlightenment
spective of the universal, the social realization of thought, is so fully open
to view that thought is repudiated by the rulers themselves as mere ideology. Ir is a telltale manifestation of the bad conscience of the cliques in
whom economic necessity is finally embodied" that its revelations, from

the "intuitions" of the Fuhrer ro the "dynamic worldview," no longer
acknowledge their own atrocities as necessary consequences of logical regularities, in resolute contrast ro earlier bourgeois apologetics. The mythological lies about "mission" and "fate"'" which they use instead do nor even

express a complete untruth: it is no longer the objective laws of the market which govern the actions of industrialists and drive humanity toward
catastrophe. Rather, the conscious decisions of the company chairmen"
execute capitalism's old law of value, and thus its fate, as resultants no less

compulsive than the blindest price mechanisms. The rulers themselves de
not believe in objective necessity, even if they sometimes call their machinations by that name. They posture as engineers of world history, Only
their subjects accept the existing development, which renders them a

degree more powerless with each prescribed increase in their standard of
living, as inviolably necessary. Now that the livelihood of those still" needed ro operate the machines can be provided with a minimal part of the

working time which the masters of society have at their disposal, the
superfluous remainder, the overwhelming mass of the population, are
trained as additional guards of the system, so that they can be used today
and tomorrow as material for its grand designs. They are kept alive as an
army of unemployed. Their reduction to mere objects of administration,
which preforms every department of modern life right down ro language
and perception, conjures up an illusion of objective necessity before which
they believe themselves powerless. Poverty" as me antithesis between
power and impotence is growing beyond measure, together with the
capacity permanently ro abolish poverty. From the commanding heights
of the economy" ro the latest professional rackets," the tangled mass of
cliques and institutions which ensures the indefinite continuation of the
srarus quo is impenetrable to each individual. Even for a union boss, ro say

nothing of a manager, a proletarian is no more than a superfluous specimen, should he catch his notice at all, while the union boss in rum must

live in terror of his own liquidation.
The absurdity of a state of affairs in which the power of the system
over human beings increases with every step they take away from the

The Concept ofEnlightenment 31
power of nature denounces the reason of the reasonable" society as obsolete. That reason's necessity is illusion, no less than the freedom of the

industrialists, which reveals its ultimately compulsive nature in their

inescapable struggles and pacts. This" illusion, in which utterly enlightened humanity is losing itself, cannot be dispelled by a thinking which, as
an instrument of power, has to choose between command and obedience.
Although unable to escape the entanglement in which it was trapped in

prehistory, that thinking* is nevenheless capable of recognizing the logic
of either/or, of consequence and antinomy, by means of which it emancipated itself radically from nature, as that same nature, unreconciled and
self-estranged. Precisely by virtue of its irresistible logic, thought, in whose
compulsive mechanism nature is reflected and perpetuated, also reflects
itself as a nature oblivious of itself, as a mechanism of compulsion. Of
course, mental representation is only an instrument. In thought, human
beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way
that it can be mastered. Like the material tool which, as a thing, is held

fast as that thing in different siruations and thereby separates the world, as
something chaotic, multiple, and disparate, from that which is known,

single, and identical, so the concept is the idea-tool which fits into things
at the very point from which one can take hold of them. Thought thus
becomes illusory whenever it seeks to deny its function of separating, distancing, and objectifying. All mystical union remains a deception, the
impotently inward trace of the forfeited revolution. But while enlightenment is right in opposing any hypostatization of utopia and in dispassionately denouncing power as division, the split between subject and object,
which it will not allow to be bridged, becomes the index of the untruth
both of itself and of truth. * The proscribing of superstition has always sig-

nified not only the progress of domination but its exposure. Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its
estrangement. In" mind's self-recognition as nature divided from itself,

nature, as in prehistory, is calling to itself, but no longer directly by its supposed name, which, in the guise of mana, means omnipotence, but as
something blind and mutilated. In the mastery of nature, without which
mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists. By modestly confess-

ing itself to be power and thus being taken back into nature, mind rids
itself of the very claim to mastery which had enslaved it to nature.
Although humanity may be unable to interrupt its flight away from neces-

32

The Concept ofEnlightenment

siry and into progress and civilization without forfeiting knowledge itself,
at least it no longer mistakes the ram pans it has constructed against necessity, the institutions and practices of domination which have always
rebounded against society from the subjugation of nature, for guarantors
of the coming freedom. Each advance of civilization has renewed not only
mastery but also the prospect of its alleviation. However, while real history is woven from real suffering, which certainly does not diminish in proportion to the increase in the means of abolishing it, the fulfillment of that
prospect depends on the concept. For not only does the concept, as science, distance human beings from nature, but. as the self-reflection of
thought-which, in the form of science, remains fettered to the blind economic tendency-it enables the distance which perpetuates injustice to be

measured. Through this remembrance of nature within the subject, a~
remembrance which contains the unrecognized truth of all culture,

enlightenment is opposed in principle to power, and even in the time of
Vanini the call to hold back enlightenment was uttered less from fear of
exact science than from hatred of licentious thought, which had escaped
the spell of nature by confessing itself to be nature's own dread of itself
The priests have always avenged mana on any exponent of enlightenment
who propitiated mana by showing fear before the frightening entity which
bore that name, and in their hubris the augurs of enlightenment were at
one with the priests. Enlightenment in its bourgeois form had given itself

IIp to its positivist moment long before Turgor and d'Alernbert. It was
never immune to confusing freedom with the business of self-preservaI inn. The suspension of the concept, whether done in the name ofprogress
or of culture, which had both long since formed a secret alliance against
rrurh, gave free rein to the lie. In a world which merely verified recorded
evidence and preserved thought, debased to the achievement of great
minds, as a kind of superannuated headline, the lie was no longer distinguishable from a truth neutralized as cultural heritage.
But to recognize power even within thought itself as unreconciled
nature would be to relax the necessity which even socialism, in a concession [0 reactionary common sense, prematurely confirmed as eternal." In
declaring necessity the sole basis of the future and banishing mind, in the
hcs; idealist fashion, to the far pinnacle of the superstructure, socialism
dung all roo desperately to the heritage of bourgeois philosophy. The relaI ionship of necessity to the. realm of freedom was therefore treated as

The Concept ofEnlightenment 33
merely quantitative, mechanical, while nature, posited as wholly alien, as
in the earliest mythology, became totalitarian, absorbing socialism along
with freedom. By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of
it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization. By subjecting everything
particular to its discipline, it left the uncornprehended whole free to rebound as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human
beings. But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on
theory's refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to
ossify. It is not the material preconditions of fulfillment, unfettered technology* as such, which make fulfillment uncertain. That is the argument
of sociologists who are trying to devise yet another antidote, even a collectivist one, in order control that anridore.t" The fault lies in a social con-

text which induces blindness. The mythical scientific respect of peoples
for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, finally
becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feds shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history. As the instrument of this
adaptation, as a mere assemblage of means, enlightenment is as destructive as its Romantic enemies claim. It will only fulftll itself if it forswears
its last complicity with them and dares to abolish the false absolute, the
principle of blind power. The spirit of such unyielding theory would be
able to turn back from its goal even the spirit of pitiless progress. Its herald, Bacon. dreamed of the many things "which kings with their treasure
cannot buy, nor with their force command, [of which] their spials and
intelligencers can give no news."* Just as he wished, those things have been
given to the bourgeois, the enlightened heirs of the kings. In multiplying
violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has
also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely Icings
or even the bourgeoisie are sufficient to administrate them: all human
beings are needed. From the power of things they finally learn to forgo
power. Enlightenment consummates and abolishes itself when the closest
practical objectives reveal themselves to be the most distant goal already
attained, and the lands ofwhich "their spials and intelligencers can give no
news"-that is, nature misunderstood by masterful science-are remem bered as those of origin. Today, when Bacon's utopia, in which "we should
command nature in action," has been fulfilled on a telluric scale, the

34 The Concept ofEnlightenment
essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unrnasrered nature is

becoming apparent. It was power itself. Knowledge, in which, for Bacon,
"the sovereignty of man" unquestionably lay hidden, can now devote itself
to dissolving that power. But in face of this possibility enlightenment, in
the service of the present, is turning itself into an outright deception of the
masses.

Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment

Just as the story of the Sirens illustrates the intertwinement of myth

and rational labor, the Odyssey as a whole bears witness to the dialectic of
enlightenment. In its oldest stratum, especially, the epic shows clear links
to myth: the adventures are drawn from popular tradition. Bur as the
Homeric spirit takes over and "organizes" the myths, it comes into contradiction with them. The familiar equation of epic and myth, which in
any case has been undermined by recent classical philology, proves wholly misleading when subjected to philosophical critique. The rwo concepts
diverge. They mark rwo phases of an historical process, which are still visible at the joints where editors have stitched the epic together. The
Homeric discourse creates a universality oflanguage, ifit does not already
presuppose it; it disintegrates the hierarchical order of society through the
exoteric form of its depiction, even and especially when it glorifies that
order. The celebration of the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of
Odysseus is already a nostalgic stylization of what can no longer be celebrated; and the hero of the adventures turns our to be the prototype of
the bourgeois individual, whose concept originates in the unwavering
self-assertion of which the protagonist driven to wander the earth is the
primeval model. Finally, the epic, which in terms of the philosophy of
history is the counterpart of the novel, exhibits features reminiscent of
that genre, and the venerable cosmos of the Homeric world, a world
charged with meaning, reveals itself as an achievement of classifying rea-

36 Excursus I

son, which destroys myth by virtue of the same rational order which is
used to reflect it.

Understanding of the element of bourgeois enlightenment in
Homer has been advanced by the German late-Romantic interpretation of
antiquity based on the early writings of Nietzsche. Like few others since

Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment. He formulated the ambivalent relationship of enlightenment to power. Enlightenment
must be "drummed into the people, so that the priests all rurn into priests
with a bad conscience-and likewise with the state. That is the task of

enlightenment: to show up the pompous behavior of princes and statesmen as a deliberate lie."' However, enlightenment had always been a
means employed by the "great artists of government (Confucius in China.
the Roman Empire, Napoleon, the Papacy, when it was concerned with
power and not just with the world) ... The self-deception of the masses

in this respect-for instance, in all democracies-is highly advantageous:

making people small and governable is hailed as 'progress'!'? As this
twofold character of enlightenment emerged more clearly as a basic motif
of history. its concept, that of advancing thought, was traced back to the
beginning of recorded history. However, whereas Nietzsche's attitude to

enlightenment, and thus to Homer, remained ambivalent: whereas he perceived in enlightenment both the universal movement of sovereign mind.
whose supreme exponent he believed himself to be, and a "nihilistic." lifedenying power, only the second moment was taken over by his pre-fascist
followers and perverted into ideology. This ideology became a blind euloI

gy of blind life, which imposes a praxis by which everything living is suppressed. This is seen in the cultural fascists' attitude to Homer. In the
Homeric depiction of feudal conditions they detect a democratic element,
brand the work a product of seafarers and traders, and condemn the
Ionian epic for its of overly rational discourse and its communication of

the commonplace. Nevertheless. the evil eye of these sympathizers with all
seemingly immediate power, who reject mediation and "liberalism" of any

degree, discerns an element of truth. Connections with reason, liberality.
and middle-class qualities do indeed extend incomparably further back
than is assumed by historians who date the concept of the burgher from
the end of medieval feudalism. In identifying the burgher where earlier
bourgeois humanism had imagined some pristine dawn of culture. which
was taken to legirimize that humanism, the neo-Rornanric reaction

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 37
equates world history with enlightenment. The fashionable ideology,
whose most urgent concern is to liquidate enlightenment, thus pays it
involuntary homage. It is forced to acknowledge enlightened thinking
even in the remotest past. For the bad conscience of present-day devotees
of the archaic it is especially the earliest traces of enlightenment which
threaten to unleash the process they seek to hold back, but which they
themselves obliviously promote.
But a recognition of Homer's anti mythological, enlightened character, his opposition to chthonic mythology, remains untrue because limited. Rudolf Borchardt," for example, the most prominent and therefore the
most impotent of the esoteric apologists of German heavy industry, prematurely breaks off his analysis in the service of repressive ideology. He
fails to perceive that the primal powers he extols themselves represent a
stage of enlightenment. By indiscriminately denouncing the epic as a form
of novel he overlooks what epic and myth actually have in common:
power and exploitation. The ignoble qualities he condemns in the epic,
mediation and circulation, are only a further development of the dubious
nobility he idolizes in myth: naked force. The alleged authenticity of the
archaic, with its principle of blood and sacrifice, is already tainted by the
devious bad conscience of power characteristic of the "national regeneration" today, which uses primeval times for self-advertising. The original
myth itself contains the moment of mendacity which triumphs in the
fraudulent myth of fascism and which the latter imputes to enlightenment. But no work bears more eloquent witness to the intertwinement of
enlightenment and myth than that of Homer, the basic text of European
civilization. In Homer, epic and myth, form and subject matter do not
simply diverge; they conduct an argument. The aesthetic dualism of the
work gives evidence of the historical-philosophical tendency. "The
Apollonian Homer is merely a continuation of the general human artistic
process to which we owe individuation."!
Myths are precipitated in the different strata of Homer's subject matter; but at the same time the reporting of them, the unity imposed 011 the
diffuse legends, traces the path of the subject's flight from the mythical

powers. This is already true, in a profound sense, of the Iliad. The anger
of the mythical son of a goddess against the rational" warrior king and
organizer; the hero's undisciplined inactivity; finally, the enlistment of the
victorious, doomed hero in a cause which is national, Hellenic, and no

38 Excursus I

longer tribal. an allegiance mediated by mythic loyalty to his dead comrade-all these reflect the intertwinement of history and prehistory. The
same development is still more vividly present in the .Odyssey. since it is
closer in form to the picaresque novel. The contrast between the single surviving ego and the multiplicity of fate reflects the antithesis between
enlightenment and myth. The hero's peregrinations from Troy to Ithaca
trace the path of the self through myths. a self infinitely weak in com par- I.
ison to the force of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness. The primeval world is secularized as the space he measures out;
the old demons populate only the distant margins and islands of the civi-

lized Mediterranean, retreating into the forms of rock and cave from
which they had originally sprung in the face of primal dread. The adventures bestow names on each of these places. and the names give rise to a
rational overview of space. The shipwrecked, tremulous navigator anticipates the work of the compass. His powerlessness, leaving no part of the
sea unknown, aims to undermine the ruling powers. But, in the eyes of
the man who has thus come of age, the plain untruth of the myths, the
fact that sea and earth are not acrually populated by demons but are a
magic delusion propagated by traditional popular religion, becomes something merely "aberrant" in contrast to his unambiguous purpose of selfpreservation, of returning to his homeland and fixed property. All the adventures Odysseus survives are dangerous temptations deflecting the self
from the path of its logic. Again and again he gives way to them, experi-

meriting like a novice incapable of learning-sometimes, indeed, out r~f

foolish curiosity, like a mime insatiably trying out roles. "B~t where dangcr threatens / That which saves from it also grows":4 the knowledge which
makes up his identity and enables him to survive has its substance in the
experience of diversity, distraction, disintegration; the knowing survivor is
also the man who exposes himself most daringly to the threat of death,
rhus gaining the hardness and the strength to live. That is the secret under-

lying the conflict between epic and myth: the self does not exist simply in
rigid antithesis to advenrure but takes on its solidity only through this
antithesis, and its unity through the very multiplicity which myth in its

oneness denies. ~ Odysseus, like the heroes of all true novels after him,
dHOWS himself away, so to speak, in order to win himself; he achieves his
estrangement from nature by abandoning himself to nature, trying his
srrcngrh againsl it in all his adventures: ironically, it is implacable nature
·

.

Od;,sseus or Myth and Enlightenment 39
that he now commands, which triumphs on his return home as the implacable judge, avenging the heritage of the very powers he has escaped.
At the Homeric stage, the identity of the self is so much a function of the
nonidentical, of dissociated, unarticulated myths. that it must derive itself
from them. The element which shapes and organizes individuality internally, time, is still so weak that the unity of the adventures remains an outward one, their sequence being formed by the spatial changes of scene, the
succession of sites of local divinities on which the hero is flung by the
storm. Whenever, at later historical stages, the self has again experienced
such weakness, or narration has presupposed it in the reader, the manner
of depicting life has slipped back into the form of successive adventures.
Laboriously and revocably, in the image of the journey, historical time has

detached itself from space, the irrevocable schema of all mythical time.
The faculty by which the self survives adventures, throwing itself
away in order to preserve itself, is cunning. The seafarer Odysseus outwits
the natural deities as the civilized traveler was later to swindle savages,

offering them colored beads for ivory. It is true that Odysseus is only occasionally seen bartering, when gift:s of hospitality are given and received. In
Homer the gift: which accompanies hospitality falls midway between
exchange and sacrifice. Like a sacrificial act it is intended to compensate
for wrongfully spilled blood, whether of the stranger or of settlers defeated by pirates, and represents an oath of truce. At the same time, however,
the gift: to the host anticipates the principle of equivalence: the host

receives really or symbolically the equivalent ~alue of the service he has
performed, while the guest takes away provisions which, in principle, are
intended to enable him to reach home. Even though the host receives no
direct compensation for this, he can expect the same treatment to be given
to him or his kinsmen one day: as a sacrifice to elemental deities the hospitality gift: is at the same time a rudimentary insurance against them. The
extensive but perilous nautical activities of the early Greeks were the pragmatic reason for the custom. Even Poseidon, Odysseus's elemental foe,
thinks in terms of equivalence, constantly complaining that the gift:s
received by Odysseus at the stations of his journey are worth more than his
full share of the spoils of Troy would have been had he been allowed to
carry it home without hindrance from Poseidon. And in Homer this kind
of rationalization can be traced back to the sacrificial acts themselves.

Hecatombs of a certain size are intended to secure the goodwill of partie-

40 Excursus I

ular deities. If exchange represents the secularization of sacrifice, the sacrifice itself, like the magic schema of rational exchange, appears as a human
contrivance intended to control the gods, who are overthrown precisely by
the system created to honor them.f
The moment of fraud in sacrifice is the prototype of Odyssean cunning, just as many of Odysseus's ruses are wrapped up, as it were, in an

o~Tering to natural deities'? The deities are duped not only by the hero but
<1150 by the solar gods. Odysseus's Olympian friends take advantage of
Poseidon's sojourn among the Ethiopians, the backwoodsmen who still
worship him and offer him bloody sacrifices, in order to escort Odysseus
in safety. Even the sacrifice which Poseidon is glad to accept involves
deception: the amorphous sea-god's confinement to a certain locality, the
sacred precinct, also restricts his power, and in exchange for sating himself
on Ethiopian oxen he is denied the opportunity to cool his temper on
Odysseus. All sacrificial acts, deliberately planned by humans, deceive the
god for whom they are performed: by imposing on him the primacy of
human purposes they dissolve away his power, and the fraud against him
passes over seamlessly into that perpetrated by unbelieving priests against

believing congregations. Cunning originates in the cult. Odysseus himself
acts as both victim and priest. By calculating the risk he incurs as victim,
he is able to negate the power to which the risk exposes him. By such bargaining he retrieves the life he has staked. However, deception, cunning,
and rationality do not form a simple antithesis to the archaism of sacrifice.
()nly the moment of fraud in sacrifice, perhaps the innermost reason for

rhe illusory character of myth, is raised to self-consciousness through
Odysseus. The awareness that the symbolic communication with the deity
I hrough sacrifice was not real must have been age-old. The representative

character of sacrifice, glorified by fashionable irrationalists, cannot be sel.?arared from the deification of the sacrificial victim, from the fraudulent

priestly rationalization of murder through the apotheosis of the chosen
victim. Something of this fraud, which elevates the perishable person as
hearer of the divine substance, has always been detectable in the ego,

which owes its existence to the sacrifice of the present moment to the
lururc. Irs substance is as illusory as the immortality of the slaughtered vicrim. Nor without reason was Odysseus regarded by many as a deity,"

r()~ as long as individuals are sacrificed. for as long as the sacrifice
coruuins rhc nnrithesis between collective and individual, deception is

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 41
objectively implicit in it. If the belief in the representative character of sacrifice springs from recollection of the nonoriginal quality of the self, from
irs emergence through the history ofdomination, at the same time, in relation to the fully developed self, this belief becomes untru th: the self is precisely the human being to whom the magic power of representation is no
longer attributed. The formation of the self severs the fluctuating connection with nature which the sacrifice of the self is supposed to establish.
Each sacrifice is a restoration of the past, and is given the lie by the historical reality in which it is performed. The venerable belief in sacrifice is
probably irself a behavior pattern drilled into the subjugated, by which
they reenact against themselves the wrong done to them in order to be able
to bear it. Sacrifice as representative restoration does not reinstate immediate communication, which had been merely interrupted, as present-day
mythologies claim; rather, the institution of sacrifice is itself the mark of
an historical catastrophe, an act of violence done equally to human beings
and to nature. Cunning is nothing other than the subjective continuation
of the objective untruth of sacrifice, which it supersedes. That untruth
may not have been always only untruth. At one stage" of prehistory sacrifices may have possessed a kind of bloody rationality, which even then,
however, could hardly have been separated from the thirst for privilege.
The theory of sacrifice prevalent today relates it to the idea of a collective
body, the tribe, into which the spilled blood of the tribe's sacrificed member is supposed to flow back. While totemism was an ideology even in its
own time, it nevertheless marks a real state in which the dominant reason

required sacrificial victims. It is a state of archaic shortage, in which
human sacrifice can hardly be distinguished from cannibalism. At some
times the numerically increased collective can keep itself alive only by consuming human flesh; perhaps, in some ethnic and social groups, pleasure
was linked in some way to cannibalism. a link to which only the aversion
to human flesh now bears witness. Customs from later times, such as the

uer sacrum, whereby a whole age-group ofyoung men was forced into exile
with accompanying rites at times of hunger, bear clear traces of such barbaric, idealized rationality. Long before the emergence of mythical popular religions, that rationality must have revealed itself as illusory; as systematic hunting provided the tribe with enough animals to make devouring its own members superfluous, it must have been the medicine men
who deluded the shrewd hunters and trappers into believing that people

42 Excursus 1

srill needed ro be consumed." The magic, collecrive interprerarion of sacrifice, which entirely denies rhe rationality of sacrifice, is irs rarionalization; bur rhe srraighrforward assumption of enlighrened thinking rhar

whar today is ideology may once have been truth is too uncritical.'? the
newest ideologies are a mere reprise of the oldest, which long antedatethose hitherto known, in the same way as the development of the class

society refutes the previously sanctioned ideologies. The frequently cited
irrationality of sacrifice is no more than an expression of the fact that the

praxis of sacrifice outlasted its rational necessity, which was replaced by
particular interests. This split between the rational and the irrational

aspects of sacrifice gave cunning a point at which to take hold.
Demythologization always takes the form of the irresistible revelation of
tlie futility and the superfluity of sacrifices.
If the principle of sacrifice was proved transient by its irrationality,
at rhe same time it survives through its rationality. This rationality has
transformed itself, not disappeared. The self wrests itself from dissolution
in blind nature, whose claims are constantly reasserted by sacrifice. But it

still remains trapped in the context of the natural, one living thing seeking to overcome another. Bargaining one's way out of sacrifice by means
of self-preserving rationality is a form of exchange no less than was sacrifice itself The identical, enduring self which springs from the conquest of
sacrifice is itself the product of a hard, petrified sacrificial ritual in which
the human being, by opposing its consciousness to its natural context, celebrates itself. That much is true of the famous stoky in Nordic mythology
I

according to which Odin was hung from a rree as a sacrifice to himself,
and of Klages's thesis that every sacrifice is a sacrifice of the god to the god,
as is sri II apparent in Christology, the monotheistic disguise of myth." The
difference is that the stratum of mythology in which the self manifests
itself as a sacrifice to itself expresses not so much the original conception
of popular religions as the absorption of myth into civilization. In class
society, the self's hostility to sacrifice included a sacrifice of the self, since
it was paid for by a denial of nature in the human being for the sake of
mastery over extrahuman nature and over other human beings. This very
denial, the core of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of proliferating
mythical irrarionaliry: with the denial of nature in human beings, not only

lilt' u(os of rhc external mastery of narure but also the telos of one's own
lilc becomes couluxcd and opaquc. Ar the moment when human beings
.

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 43
cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all the

purposes for which they keep themselves alive-social progress, the
heightening of material and intellectual forces, indeed, consciousness
itself-become void, and the enthronement of the means as the end,

wllich in late capitalism is taking on the character of overt madness, is
already detectable in the earliest history of subjectivity, The human being's
mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves
the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained,
because the substance which is mastered, suppressed, and disintegrated by

self-preservation is nothing other than the living entity, of which the
achievements of self-preservation can only be defined as functions-in
other words, self-preservation destroys the very thing which is to be preserved. The antireason of totalitarian capitalism, whose technique of satisfying needs, in their objectified form determined by domination, makes
the satisfaction of needs impossible and tends toward the extermination of
humanity-this antireason appears prototypically in the hero who escapes

the sacrifice by sacrificing himself. The history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice-in other words, the history of renunciation. All who renounce give away more of their life than is given back to
them, more than the life they preserve. This process unfolds within the
framework of wrong society. In that society everyone is one too many, and
is cheated. But society's predicament" is that the person who escaped the
universal, unequal, and unjust exchange, who did not renounce but
immediately seized the undiminished whole, would thereby lose every-

thing, even the meager residue of oneself granted by self-preservation. All
the superfluous sacrifices are needed: against sacrifice. Even Odysseus is a
sacrificial victim, the self which incessantly suppresses its impulses, [2 and
thus he lets slip his own life, that he saves only to recall it as a path of error.

Nevertheless, he is sacrificed. also, for the abolition of sacrifice. His lordly
renunciation, as a struggle with myth, is representative of a society which
no longer needs renunciation and domination-which masters itself not
in order to do violence to itself and others but for the sake of reconciliation.

The transformation of the sacrificial victim into subjectivity is done
under the aegis of the same cunning which always had its share in sacri-

fice. In the untruth ofguile the deception inherent in sacrifice becomes an

element of character; it becomes the mutilation of the cheat [~r-

-14 Excursus I

Jc-hlagener], whose shifty look still cowers from the blows [Schlagel selfpreservation has brought down on him. This look expresses the relation of
mind to physical strength. The bearer of mind, the one who issues commands-s -as Odysseus almost always appears-is in all cases physically
weaker than the primeval powers with which he has to wrestle for his life,
despite all the reports of his heroic deeds. The occasions when naked bodily strength is celebrated, the fistfighr with the beggar Irus instigated by
illI' Suitors and the drawing of the great bow, are sporting in nature. Selfpreservation and physical strength have diverged: Odysseus's athletic
accomplishments are those of the gentleman who, free of practical cares,
can train himself in lordly self-mastery. Precisely the strength which is
detached from self-preservation benefits self-preservation: in the struggle
with the feeble, gluttonous, undisciplined vagabond or with those who
have basked in idleness, Odysseus inflicts on the stay-at-homes symbolically what organized landowning has long since done to them in reality,
.uid legitimizes himself as a nobleman: But when he encounters primeval
powers which are neither domesticated nor weakened by indolence, he
1:1l.:es a harder test. He can never engage the exotically persisting mythical
powers in physical combat. He has to accept as a given reality the sacrific ial ceremony in which he is repeatedly caught up: he is unable to break
ir . Instead, he makes sacrifice the formal precondition of his own rational
decision. This decision is always carried" out within the terms of the
primeval Judgment on which the sacrificial situation is based. That
the old
I
sacrifice has meanwhile become irrational presents itself to the cleverness
of' 1111' weaker party as the stupidity of ritual, The ritual remains accepred,
ils letter is strictly observed. But its now senseless judgment refutes itself,
since its terms constantly leave scope for evasion. The superiority of nature
in the competitive struggle is repeatedly confirmed by the very mind
which has mastered nature. All bourgeois enlightenment is agreed in its
demand for sobriety, respect for facts, a correct appraisal of relative
mengrh. Wishful thinking is banned. The reason, however, is that all
power iII class society is beset by the gnawing consciousness of its powerII'SSIICSS in face of physical nature and its social successor, the "m an y. Only
deliberate adaptation to it brings nature under the power of the physical-

Iy weaker, The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It

is ilsdf' Ill in~csis: of death. The subjective mind which disintegrates the
spiritualizarion of nature masters spiritless nature only by imitating irs
.

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 45
rigidity, disimegrating itself as animistic. Imitation enters the service of
power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for
human beings. The pattern of Odysseus's guile is mastery of nature by

such adaptation. In the assessment of power relationships that admits
defeat in advance and makes survival virtually dependent on death, the
principle of bourgeois disillusionment, the external schema for the internalization of sacrifice, is already latent, The nimble-witted man survives
only at the cost of his own dream, which he forfeits by disimegrating his
own magic along with that of the powers outside him. He can never have
the whole, he must always be able to wait, to be patient, to renounce; he
may not eat the lotus or the cattle of Hyperion, and when he steers
through the narrows he must include in his calculation the loss of the
companions snatched from the ship by Scylla. He wriggles through-that
is his survival, and all the renown he gains in his own and others' eyes
merely confirms that the honor of heroism is won only by the humbling

of the urge to attain entire, universal, undivided happiness.
The formula for Odysseus's cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is
hers and thereby cheats her. The mythical monsters under whose power he

falls represent, as it were, petrified contracts and legal claims dating from
primeval times. In the developed patriarchal era the earlier popular religion manifests itself in these scattered relics: beneath the Olympian heaven they have become figures of abstract fate, of a necessity remote from
sensuous experience. The fact that it would be impossible to choose any
route other than that between Scylla and Charybdis may be interpreted
rationalistically as the mythical representation of the preponderant power
of sea currents over the little ships of ancient times. But translated into the
objectifying language of myth, it means that the natural relationship
between strength and powerlessness has already taken on the character of
a legal relationship. Scylla and Charybdis have a claim on whatever comes
between their teeth, just as Circe has a right to metamorphose those who
are not immune, or Polyphemus a right to the bodies of his guests. Every
mythical figure is compelled to do the same thing over and over again.
Each of them is constituted by repetition: its failure would mean their end.
They all bear features of the fate which, in the myths of punishment in the
underworld, is meted out by Olympian judgment to Tantalus, Sisyphus,
and the Danaids. They are figures of compulsion: the horrors they com-

46 Excursus I

mit are the curse which has fallen on them. Mythical inevitability is
defined by the equivalence between the curse, the abominable act which
expiates it, and the guilt arising from that act, which reproduces the curse.
All law in history up to now bears the trace of this pattern. In myth each
moment of the cycle pays off the preceding moment and thereby helps to
establish the continuity of guilt as law. Against this Odysseus fights. The
self represents rational universality against the inevitability of fate. But as
it finds the universal and the inevitable already inextricably entwined, its
rarionality necessarily takes a restrictive form, that of an exception. It has
to extricate itself from the legal terms encompassing and threatening it,
rcrrns which, in a sense, are inscribed in every mythical figure. Odysseus
satisfies rhe legal statutes, but in such a way that by conceding their power

he deprives them of it. It is impossible to hear the Sirens and not succumb
to rhem: they cannot be defied. Defiance and beguilement are one and the
same, and whoever defies them is lost to .the very myth he challenges.
Cunning, however, is defiance made rational. Odysseus does not try to
steer a different course to the one past the Sirens' island. Nor does he try
to insist on the superiority of his knowledge and listen freely to the
temptresses, believing his freedom protection enough. He cowers, the ship
takes its preordained, fateful course, and he realizes that however he may

consciously distance himself from nature, as a listener [Horender] he re-

mains under its spell. He complies with th~ contract of his bondage
IHorigkeit] and, bound to the mast, struggles to throw himself into the
arms of the seductresses. But he has found a loophole in the agreemenr,
through which he eludes it while fulfilling its terms. The primeval contract
did not specify whether the mariner sailing past should be bound or
unbound while listening to the song. The use of bonds belongs to a later
era, in which prisoners were not killed straightaway. Technically enlightened, Odysseus acknowledges the archaic supremacy of the song by hav-

in~ himself bound. By yielding to the song of pleasure he thwarts both it
and death. The bound lisrener is drawn to the Sirens like any other. But
he has taken the precaution not to succumb to them even while he succumbs. Despite the power of his desire, which reflects the power of the
demigoddessesthemselves, he cannot go to them, just as his companions
.u the p;lI'S , their ears stopped with wax, are deaf not only to the demigod-

dl·s.~es11tH to the desperate cries of rheir commander. The Sirens have a life
ol their OWIl, bm ill this bourgeois prehistory it has already been jieutral.

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 47
ized as the yearning of those who pass it by. The epic does not say what
happens to the singers once the ship has passed. But in a tragedy this
would have been their last hour, as it was for the Sphinx when Oedipus
solved the riddle, fulfilling her command and thereby causing her down-

fall. For the law of the mythical figures, being that of the stronger, depends
on the impossibility offulfilling their statutes. If they are fulfilled, then the
myths are finished, down to their most distant descendants. Since the happily hapless meeting of Odysseus with the Sirens all songs have ailed; the
whole of western music suffers from the absurdity of song in civilization,
yet the motive force of all art-music is song.
With the dissolution of the contract through its literal fulfilment a
change occurs in the historical situation of language: it begins to pass over
into designation. Mythical fate had been one with the spoken word.
Within the sphere of ideas in which mythical figures executed the unalterable edicts of fate, the distinction between word and object was
unknown. The word was thought to have direct power over the thing,
expression merged with intention. Cunning, however, consists in exploiting the difference. One clings to the word in order to change the thing. In
this way consciousness arises out of intention: in his extremity Odysseus
becomes aware of dualism, as he discovers that an identical word can mean

different things. Since the name Udeis can mean either "hero" or "nobody," the hero is able to break the spell of the name. Unchangeable words
remain formulae for the implacable continuities of nature. In magic their
fixity was intended to challenge that of fate, which it reflected. The opposition between the word and what it imitated was already implicit in
this challenge. At the Homeric stage that opposition became decisive.
Odysseus discovered in words what in fully developed bourgeois society is

called firmalism: their perennial ability to designate is bought at the cost
of distancing themselves from any particular content which fulfills them,
so that they refer from a distance to all possible contents, both to nobody
and to Odysseus himself. From the formalism of mythical names and
statutes, which, indifferent like nature, seek to rule over human beings
and history, emerges nominalism, the prototype of bourgeois thinking.
Self-preserving guile lives on the argument between word and thing.
Odysseus's two contradictory actions in his meeting with Polyphemus, his
obedience to his name and his repudiation of it, are really the same thing.
He declares allegiance to himself by disowning himself as Nobody; he

48 Excursus I

saves his life by making himself disappear. Ihis adaptation to death
through language contains the schema of modern mathema_tics.
--

c

'-"-Cu~~ingasa'me-ans-orexchang~: in whfch~veryth~g i; done cor-

rectly, the contract is fulfilled yet the other party is cheated, points back to
a form of economic activity which is found, if not in mythical prehistory,
at least in early antiquity: the ancient practice of "occasional exchange"
between self-sufficient households. "Surpluses are occasionally exchanged,
but provisions are predominantly produced by the consumers them-

selves."13 The behavior of the adye~~I,lr.e~--9~sseusrecalls that of the par-

oties to th~ occasional exchange. Even in the patheticguiseofthe beggar
'-lhe fe~dal lord be~~f~'ot the oriental merchant!" who returns homewith untold wealth because he has once, against tradition, stepped outside
the confines of the domestic economy and "put to sea." The adventurous

dement in his undertaking is, in economic terms, nothing other tl1:iii" th~

',r~a~i~~;J~p~~thi~o~~~~n -tak~s on in face of the 'prevailing traditio~al
'~conomic forms. this irrationality of reason has been precipitated in cunning, as the adaptation of bourgeois reason to any unreason which confronts it as a stronger power. The lone voyager armed with cunning is

already homo oeconomicus, whom all reasonable people will one day resem-

ble: for this reason the Odyssey is already a Robinsonade. Both these P!"..o~-

typical sh_i~t:.ec.ked_.$ailo..rs_lJlal.<.e__ their weakness-e --that ofthe individual

- ;r;o-hreaks away from the collectiv~=i:h~ir~~ciai strength. Abandoned"to
"[he v~garie~~{ili~-~aves. helplessly cut off. they are f~~~~dby-thei~ is~-I;~
lion into a ruthless pursuit of~~«:.~r:.~tom}~t~cinterest. They embody the
principle of the c;aE.~.alist economy" even before they make use ofariy
~-;'~~keri*__but the'~alvagedgoodstheybring with them to the new venture
idealize the truth that the entrepreneur" has always entered the cqmpetition armed with more than the industry of his hands. Their powerlessness
in face of nature already functions as an ideology for their social predominance. Odysseus's defenselessness against the foaming sea sounds like a
lcguirnation of the enrichment of the voyager at the expense of indigenous
:inh:lbitants. Bourgeoiseconomics late! enshrined thisprinciplein the concept of risk: the possibility of foundering is seen as a moral justification for

-,;rofir.· From the standpoint of the developed exchange society and ~s
--

o·

-_j

_

indiv~tlllals, the advcnrur~s of Odysseus are no more than a depiction of
. lhe risks whi'dlll'lc the path to success, Odysseus lives according to the
;1I1(i('11I principle which originally cousrirurcd hourgeois,society. One had

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 49
to choose between cheating and going under. Fraud was the stigma of reason, which betrayed its particular interest. The universal socialization for
which the globetrotter Odysseus and the solo manufacturer Robinson
Crusoe provide a preliminary sketch was attended from the first by the
absolute loneliness which at the end of the bourgeois era is becoming
overt. Radical socialization means radical alienation. Both Odysseus and
Crusoe deal in rorality: the former measures it out; the latter fabricates it.
They can do so only in total isolation from all other human beings, who
appear to both men only in estranged forms, as enemies or allies, but
always as instruments. things.
One of the first adventures in the nostos* proper does, admittedly,
originate much further back, far beyond even the barbaric age of demon-

ic masks and gods of magic. Ir is the srory of the Lotus-eaters. Whoever
tastes their food is as much in thrall as those who listen to the Sirens' song
or are touched by the wand of Circe. But no harm is done to those who
succumb: "Now it never entered the heads of these natives to kill my
friends."15 They are threatened only by forgetfulness and loss of will. The
curse condemns them to nothing worse than a primal state exempt from

labor and struggle in the "fertile land";" "As soon as each had eaten the
honeyed fruit of the plant, all thoughts of reporting to us or escaping were
banished from his mind. All they now wished for was to stay where they
were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus. and to forget that they
had a home to return to."!" Self-preserving reason cannot permit such an
idyll-reminiscent of the blissinduced by narcotics, by which subordinate
classes have been made capable of enduring the unendurable in ossified
social orders-among its own people. And indeed, it is only an illusion of
bliss, a dull aimless vegetating, as impoverished as the life of animals. At
best, it would be an absence of the awareness of unhappiness. But happiness contains truth within itself It is in essence a result. It unfolds from

suffering removed. The enduring Odysseus is therefore right not to endure
life among the Lotus-eaters. Against them he asserts their own cause, the
realization of utopia through historical work, whereas simply abiding
within an image of bliss deprives them of their strength. But in being
exerted by rationality, by Odysseus, this right is inevitably drawn into the
realm of wrong. His immediate action is one which reasserts domination.
Self-preserving reason can no more tolerate this bliss "near the rim of the
world"!" than the more dangerous form it takes in later stages, The indo-

50 Excursus I

lent defectors are fetched back to the galleys: "I had to use force to bring
them back to the ships, and they wept on the way, but once on board I
dragged them under the benches and left them in irons."'9 Lotus is an oriental food. Its thin-cut slices still playa part in Chinese and Indian cooking. Perhaps the temptation ascribed to it is no other than that of regression to the stage of gathering the fruits of the earth?" and the sea, older
than agriculture, cattle-rearing, or even hunting-older, in short, than

any production. It is hardly an accident that the epic connects the idea of
the life of idleness with the eating of flowers, whereas no such use is asso-ciated with them today. The eating of flowers, as is still customary during
dessert in the East and is known to European children from baking with
rosewater and from candied violets, bears the promise of a state in which
the reproduction of life is independent of conscious self-preservation, the
bliss of satiety uncoupled from the utility of planned nutrition. The memory of the remote and ancient joy which flashes up before the sense of

smell is still inseparable from the extreme proximity of ingestion. It points
back to earliest prehistory. No matter how copious the torments endured
by the people of that time, they cannot conceive of a happiness not nourished by the image of that primal age: "So we left that country and sailed
on sick at heart."21

The next figure on whose shore Odysseus is cast up [venchLtgen]being cast up and being cunning [verschLtgen] are equivalents in Homeris the Cyclops Polyphemus, who wears his single wheel-sized eye.as a trace
of the same primal world: the singleness of the eye suggests the nose and

mouth, more primitive than the symmetry of eyes and ears22 without
which, and the combining of their dual perceptions, no idenrification,
depth, or objectivity is possible. But, compared to the Lotus-eaters. he represents a later, truly barbaric age, one of hunters and shepherds. For
Homer, the definition of barbarism coincides with that of a state in which

no systematic agriculture, and therefore no systematic, time-managing
organization of work and society, has yet been achieved. He calls the
Cyclopes "fierce, uncivilized people"23 because-and his words seem to
contain a secret confession of the guilt of civilizatio-n itself-they "never
lift a hand to plane-or plough but put their trust in Providence. All the
crops they require sp-ring up. unsown and untilled, wheat and barley and

dHF vines whose generous clusters give them wine when ripened for them
hy ihc timely rains."~·l Abundance needs ne law, and civilization's accusa.

/

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 51
tion of anarchy sounds almost like a denunciation of abundance: "The
Cyclopes have no assemblies for the making of laws, nor any settled customs, but live in hollow caverns in the mountain heights, where each man
is lawgiver to his children and his wives, and nobody cares a jot for his
neighbors."25This is already a patriarchal society based on kinship and the
suppression of the physically weaker, but it is not yet organized on the
model of fixed property and its hierarchy; it is the lack of contact between
the cave dwellers which is the true reason for the absence of objective laws
and which calls forth Homer's accusation of their mutual disregard and

their state of savagery. In a later passage, however, the narrator's pragmatic fidelity to his story contradicts his civilized judgment: despite their disregard for one another, the tribe gather round the blinded Polyphemus's
cave when they hear his anguished cry, and only Odysseus's trick with his

name prevents the simpletons from coming to his aid. 26 Stupidity and lawlessness share a common definition: when Homer calls the Cyclops a "lawless-minded monster"27 he does not mean simply that the Cyclops does
not respect the laws of morality but that his thinking itself is lawless,
unsystematic, rhapsodic-as when he is unable to perform the straightforward mental task of working out how his uninvited guests are able to
leave his cave, by clinging underneath the sheep instead of riding on them;
or to decipher the sophistic double meaning in Odysseus's false name.

Polyphemus, although he trusts in the power of the Immortals, is a cannibal; accordingly, he refuses to show reverence for the gods despite his trust
in them: "Stranger, you must be a fool, or must have come from very far
afield"-in later times fools and strangers were less scrupulously distinguished, and ignorance of custom, like all foreignness, was branded
straight away as folly-"to preach to me of fear or reverence for the gods.
We Cyclopes care not a jot for Zeus with his aegis, nor for the rest of the
blessed gods, since we are much stronger than they."28 "We are stronger,"
Odysseus mockingly repofts; but what the giant really meant was: "We are
older." The power of the solar system is acknowledged, but much as a feudallord might acknowledge that of bourgeois wealth, while tacitly regarding himself as more noble and failing to perceive that the wrong done to
him is of the same kind as the wrong he himself represents. The nearby
sea-god Poseidon, Polyphemus's father and Odysseus's enemy, is older than
the universal Zeus in his remote heaven, and the feud between the ele-

mental popular religion and the logocentric religion of laws is fought out,

52 Excursus J

so to speak, on the backs of the subjects. However, the lawless Polyphemus
is not simply the villain he appears to be according to the taboos of civilization and as the giant Goliath appears in the fables of enlightened childhood. In the meager domain in which his self-preservation has taken on
orderly habits, he is not without redeeming traits. When he puts the young
sheep and goats to their mothers' udders, this practical action shows a concern for creaturely life itself, and the famous speech of the blinded
Polyphemus in which he calls the leading ram his friend, asking whether
it is the last to leave the cave because it is grieving for its master's eye, has
a power and poignancy equaled only at the highest point of the Odyssey,

when the homecoming Odysseus is recognized by the old dog Argusdespite the appalling brutality with which the speech ends. The giant's
behavior has not yet been objectified as character. When Odysseus begs for
hospitality he does not reply simply with an expression of savage hatred
but only by refusing to respect a law-which does not yet apply to him. He
says merely that "it would not occur to him"29 to spare Odysseus and his
companions, and it is open to question whether his next question, about
the whereabouts of. Odysseus's ship, is as devious as Odysseus reports it to

be. Boastful and beguiled, the drunken Polyphemus promises Odysseus
gifts of hospitality." and it is only the notion of Odysseus as Nobody that
gives him the malicious idea ofshowing his hospitality by eating the leader
lasr-s -perhaps because he has called nimselfNobody and thus may be con-

sidered nonexistent in terms of the Cyclops's. feeble ~it.31 The physical
crudity of the overpowerful creature is the source of his gullible trust. In
this way the observance of the mythical law, always an injustice to the
judged, also becomes an injustice to the natural power which imposes that
law. Polyphemus and the other monsters mat Odysseus outwits are models for the stupidly litigious devils of the Christian era, right down to Shylock and Mephistopheles. The' giant's stupidity, the basis of his barbaric
brutality as long as his cause prospers, represents something better once it
is overthrown by one who should know better. Odysseus insinuates himself into Polyphemus's trust and thus subverts the captor's right to human
flesh, according to the artful schema whereby the statute is breached in the
observance: "Here.- Cyclops, have some Wine to wash down drat meal of
human flesh, and find out-for yourself what kind of vintage was stored
aJay in our ship's hold,"_n the bearer of culture recommends.

However, rhe adaptation of reason ro its opposite, a s~te of conI

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 53
sciousness in which no firm identity has yet crystallized-represented by
the bungling giant-culminates in the stratagem of the name. This is a
widespread motif in folklore. In the Greek version it is a play on words; in
a single word the name-Odysseus-and the intention-nobody-di -

verge. To modern ears Odysseus and Udeis still sound similar, and it is conceivable that in one of the dialects in which the story of the return to
Ithaca was handed down, the name of the island's king did indeed sound
the same as "nobody." The calculation that, once the deed was done,
Polyphemus would answer "Nobody" when the tribe asked who was to
blame, thus allowing the perpetrator to escape pursuit, is a thin rationalistic screen. In reality, Odysseus, the subject, denies his own identity,
which makes him a subject, and preserves his life by mimicking the amorphous realm. He calls himself nobody because Polyphemus is not a self,
and confusion of the name with the thing prevents the duped barbarian
from escaping the trap: his cry for-retribution remains magically tied to
the name of the one on whom he wants to avenge himself, and this name
condemns the cry to impotence. For by inserting his own intention into
the name, Odysseus has withdrawn it from the magical sphere. But his
self-assertion, as in the entire epic, as in all civilization, is self-repudiation.
Thereby the self is drawn back into the same compulsive circle of natural
connections from which it sought through adaptation to escape. The man
who, for the sake of his own self, calls himself Nobody and manipulates

resemblance to the narural state as a means of controlling nature, gives
way to hubris. The artful Odysseus cannot do otherwise: as he flees, while
still within the sphere controlled by the rock-hurling giant, he not only
mocks Polyphemus but reveals to him his true name and origin, as if the
primeval world still had such power over Odysseus, who always escaped
'only by the skin of his teeth, that he would fear to become Nobody again
if he did not reestablish his own identity by means of the magical word
which rational identity had just superseded. His friends try to restrain him
from the folly of proclaiming his cleverness but do not succeed, and he
narrowly escapes the hurled rocks, while the mention of his name probably brings down on him the hatred of Poseidon-who is hardly presented
as omniscient. The cunning by which the clever man assumes the form of
stupidity reverts to stupidity as soon as he discards that form. That is the
dialectic of eloquence. From antiquity to fascism, Homer has been criticised for garrulousness-both in the hero and in the narrator. But the

54 Excursus I

Ionian has proved himself prophetically superior to Spartans old and new
in his depiction of the doom which the fluency of the sly fox, the middleman, brings down on the latter. The speech which gets the better of physical strength is unable to curb itself. Its spate accompanies the stream of
consciousness, thought itself, like a parody: thought's unwavering autonomy takes on a moment of manic folly when it enters reality as speech, as

if thought and reality were synonymous, whereas the former has power
over the latter only through distance. Such distance, however, is also suffering. For this reason the astute hero is always tempted to ignore the

proverbial wisdom that silence is golden. He is driven objectively by the
fear that, if he does not constantly uphold the fragile advantage the word
has over violence, this advantage will be withdrawn by violence. For the
word knows itself to be weaker than the nature it has duped. By talking
roo much he gives away the principle of violence and injustice underlying

discourse and provokes in the feared adversary the very action he fears.
The mythical compulsion acting on language in prehistory is perpetuated
in the calamity which enlightened language brings on itself. "Udeis," who
compulsively proclaims .himself to be Odysseus, already bears features of
the Jew who. in fear of death, continues to boast of a superiority which
irsclf stems from the fear of death; revenge on the middleman stands not
only at the end of bourgeois society but at its beginning, as the negative

utopia toward which coercive violence tends in all its forms.
Unlike the stories of the escape from myth as an escape from barbaric cannibalism, the magical tale of Circe points hack once more to the
stage of actual magic. Magic disintegrates the self which falls back into its
power and thus into the form of an earlier biological species. The power

which causes the self's dissolution is, again. that of oblivion. With the
fixed order of time, it gains control of the fixed will of the subject, which
is based on that order. Circe seduces Odysseus's men into abandoning
themselves to instinct, with which the animal form assumed by the victims
has always been associated, while Circe has become the prototype of the
courtesan, probably on the strength of the words of Hermes, which take

lin erotic initiatives for granted: "She ~ill shrink from you in terror and
invite you to her bed. Nor must you hesitate to accept the goddess'

f~lvors. "II Circe's signature is ambiguity, and in the story she appears by
turns as~corrupter and helper; ambiguity is expressed even in her lineage:
"\

she is the dauglucr of I Iclios and the granddaughter of Oceanus." In her
.

,

,

.

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 55
the elements of fire and water are not yet separated. and it is this indeterminacy-in contrast to the primacy of a particular aspect of nature,
whether matriarchal or patriarchal-which constitutes the essence of
promiscuity and of the courtesan, reappearing as a watery lunar reflection
even in the gaze of a nineteenth-century prostitute.P The hetaera both
bestows joy and destroys the autonomy of its recipient-that is her ambiguity. But she does not necessarily destroy the recipient himself: she holds

fast to an older form of life.36 Like the Lotus-eaters, Circe does not cause
lethal harm to her guests, and even those she has turned into wild beasts
are peaceable: "Prowling about the place were mountain wolves and lions,
actually the drugged victims of Circe's magic, for they not only refrained
from attacking my men but rose on their hind legs to caress them, with
much wagging of their long tails, like dogs fawning on their master, as he
comes from table, for the tasty bits they know he always brings."37 The
bewitched humans behave in a similar way to the wild animals which listen to the playing of Orpheus. The mythical command [0 which they have
been subjected at the same time liberates the very nature which is suppressed in them. What is revoked by their relapse into myth is myth itself
The suppression of instinct which constitutes them as selves and separates
them from beasts was the introverted form of the repression existing within the hopelessly closed cycle of nature, to which, according to an earlier
theory, the name Circe alludes. But, as the idyll of the Lotus-eaters had
done earlier, the violent magic which recalls them [0 an idealized prehistory not only makes them animals but brings about, in however delusive
a form, a semblance of reconciliation. But because they were once men the

civilizing epic cannot present their fate as anything other tha~ a calamitous lapse, and in Homer's account there is hardly a trace of the pleasure

which went with it. It is all the more emphatically expunged the more civilized the victims themselves are." Odysseus's companions are not turned
into sacred crearures of the wilderness, like earlier guests, bur into squalid
domestic animals, swine. The story of Circe may contain echoes of the
chthonic cult of Demeter, for whom the pig was sacred." But perhaps it
is also the humanoid anatomy of the pig and its nakedness which explain
this motif: as if the same taboo on mingling with the blood of similar
species, which has survived among the Jews, already existed among the
Ionians. Finally, one may think of the prohibition on cannibalism, since,
as in juvenal, the taste of human flesh has repeatedly been compared to

56 Excursus I

that of pigs. At any rate, later civilizations have always liked to apply the
name of pig or swine to anyone whose impulses tended toward other
pleasures than those sanctioned by society for its purposes. Magic and
countermagic in the metamorphoses of Odysseus's companions are linked
to herbs and wine, as intoxication and waking are to the sense of smell,

which is increasingly suppressed and repressed and is closest not only to
sex but to the remembrance of prehistory.t? In the image of the pig, however, rhe joy of scent is distorted into the unfree snuffling" of someone

who has his nose to the ground and has renounced the upright posture. It
is as if, in the ritual to which she subjects the men, the sorceress-courtesan
were reenacting the one to which she herself is repeatedly subjected by
patriarchal society. Like her, women are predisposed, under the pressure of
civilizarion, to adopt its judgment on women and to denigrate sex. In the
conflict between enlightenment and myth, the traces of which are preserved in the epic, the powerful seductress is at the same time weak, obso-

lete, and vulnerable and needs the enslaved beasts as her escort.f As a reprcsentative of nature, woman in bourgeois society has become an enigma
of irresistibiliryv' and powerlessness. Thus she reflects back the vain lie of
power, which substitutes the mastery over nature for reconciliation with it.
Marriage is society's middle way in dealing with this question: woman remains powerless in rhat her power is mediated to her only through
her husband. Somerhing of this is reflected in the defeat of the courtesan-

goddess of rhe Odyssey, while the fully evolved marriage, with Penelope,
more recent in literary terms, represenrs a later stage in the objective struc-

I lire of patriarchal arrangements. With the arrival of Odysseus on Aeaea, *
I he double meaning of the relationship of man to woman, of yearning to
command, already takes on the form of an exchange underpinned by conrracrs. Odysseus resists Circe's magic. And he therefore receives actually
what her magic promises only deceptively to those who fail to resist.

Odysseus sleeps with her. But beforehand he makes her swear a solemn
ourh by rhe blessed gods. The oath-is intended to protect the male from
the mutilation which avenges the ban on promiscuity and male dominariou-s -although that domination, as a permanenr suppression of instinct,

symbolically performs the self-mutilation of the man in any case. Because

of' his resistance to metamorphosis, Circe accuses Odysseus of having "a
hcarr in\[his] breast which norhillg enchanrs.?" But she is also willing to

suluuit 10 the man who has resisted her, the master, the self: "I b~g you
-,

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 57
now to put up your sword and come with me to my bed, so that in love

and sleep we may learn ro trust each other."45 The price she places on the
pleasure she bestows is the condition that pleasure should first have been
spurned; the last hetaera emerges as the first female character. In the transition from legend to hi story she makes a decisive contribution to the
bourgeois chill. Her behavior puts into effect the ban on love which later
became all the more powerful the more love as ideology was obliged to dissimulate the hatred between the competing partners. In the world of
exchange the one who gives more is in the wrong; but the one who loves
is always the one who loves more. While the lover's sacrifice is glorified ,
the making of that sacrifice is jealously enforced. It is precisely in love itself
that the lover is incriminated and punished. The inability ro master himself and others demonstrated by his love is reason enough to deny him fulfillment. With society, loneliness reproduces itself on a wider scale. The
mechanism operates even within the tenderest ramifications of feeling,
until love itself, in order to have contact with another person at all, is
forced to assume such coldness that it shatters at the moment of its real-

ization . Circe 's power, which subjugates men as her slaves, gives way to her
enslavement ro the man who, through renunciation , has refused to submit. The goddess Circe's influence over nature, ascribed to her by the poet,
is reduced to priestly soothsaying and even to clever foresight with regard
ro coming nautical difficulties . This lives on in the caricature of femin ine
wisdom. In the end, the prophecies of the disempowered sorceress regarding the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis merely serve the purposes of male
self-preservation.
How high 4 price was paid for the establishing of orderly arrangements for procreation is hinted at by the obscure passage on the behavior
of Odysseus's friends when Circe had transformed them back into men as
required by her contractual lord. First we read that "they not only became
men again but looked younger and much handsomer and taller than
before ."46 But those who are thus confirmed and strengthened in their
manhood are not happy: "We were so moved that we all wept for happiness. It was a strange sound for those walls to echo."47 The earliest wedding song, the accompaniment of the feast celebrating the rudimentary
marriage which lasts only a year, may have sounded like this. The actual
marriage to Penelope has more in common with it than might be supposed . Harlot and wife arc complementary forms of female self-alienation

58 Excursus I

in the patriarchal world: the wife betrays pleasure to the fixed order of
life and property, while the harlot, as her secret accomplice, brings within the property relationship that which the wife's property rights do not
include-pleasure-by selling it. Circe and Calypso, the courtesans, are
introduced as diligent weavers, thus resembling both mythical powers of
fate and bourgeois housewives." while Penelope, like a harlot, mistrustfully scrutinizes the returning Odysseus to make sure he is not really just
an old beggar or even a god trying his luck. The much-lauded recognition
scene is a truly patrician encounter: "For a long while Penelope, overwhelmed by wonder, sat there without a word. But her eyes were busy, at
one moment resting full on his face, and at the next falling on the ragged
clothes that made him seem a stranger once again.?"? There is no spontaneous upsurge of feeling; she is determined to avoid a mistake, which she
can hardly afford under the weight of the order bearing down on her. This
annoys the young Telernachus, who has not yet fully adapted himself to
his future position yet already feels man enough to admonish his mother.
By reproaching her with obstinacy and hardness, he exactly repeats the
accusation of Circe against Odysseus. If the hetaera makes the patriarchal
world order her own, the monogamous wife is not satisfied even with this
and cannot rest until she has made herself conform to the male character.

In this way the spouses settle their differences. The test she sets Odysseus
concerns the immovable position of the marriage bed which her husband,
as a young man, had constructed around an olive tree, a symbol of the
unity of sex and property. With touching artfulness she refers to this bed
as if it could be moved from the spot, whereupon her husband, "flaring
up" and "rounding on" his wife, proceeds to give a circumstantial account
of his durable amateur handiwork: as a prototypical bourgeois he is. smart

enough to have a hobby. It consists in a resumption of the craft work from
which, within the framework of differentiated property relations, he has
long since been exempted. He enjoys this occupation, as his freedom to
perform superfluous tasks confirms his power over those who have to do
such work in order to live. By this the ingenious Penelope recognizes him,
flartering him with praise of his exceptional intelligence. But her flattery,
which is not-without a [ouch of mockery, is followed, in an abrupt caesura,

hy worls which s~ek the reasorrfor the suffering. of all sp~~ses in the.gods'
envy (if the happiness guaranteed only by marriage, the confirmation of
ihc concepl of" permanence":"? "All our unhappiness is .due to "the gods,

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 59
who couldn't bear to see us share the joys of youth and reach the threshold of old age rogerher,"?' Marriage represents not only the account-bal-

ancing order of the living but also solidarity and steadfastness in face of
death. In it reconciliation grows up around subjugation, just as in history
up to now true humanity has flourished only in conjunction with the barbaric element which is veiled by "humane values." Even if the contract
between the spouses sets aside the old hostility only with difficulty, nevertheless the couple aging in peace merges into the image of Philemon and
Baucis, as the smoke from the sacrificial altar is transmuted into that ris-

ing beneficently from the hearth. Undoubtedly, marriage forms part of the
primal rock of myth at the base of civilization. But its mythic solidity and
permanence jut from myth, as the small island realm rises from the endless sea.

The farthest point reached on the odyssey proper is no such home-

ly refuge. It is Hades. The images which appear to the adventurer in the
first visit to the Underworld" are of matriarchal shades 52 who have been

banished by the religion of light: his own mother, before whom Odysseus
forces himself to maintain a purposive patriarchal hardness, 53 is followed
by heroines from primeval times. The image of the mother, however, is

powerless, blind, and speechless, 54 a phantom, like epic narrative at the
moments when language gives way to images. Sacrificial blood is required
as a pledge of living memory before the shades can speak, breaking free,

however vainly and ephemerally, from mythic muteness. Only when subjectivity masters itself by recognizing the nullity of images does it begin to
share the hope which images vainly promise. The Promised Land for
Odysseus is not the archaic realm of images. Finally, all the images reveal

their true essence as shades in the world of the dead, as illusion. Having
recognized them as dead he dismisses them with the lordly gesture of self-

preservation, banishing them from the sacrifice which he reserves for those
who grant him knowledge which benefits his life. In such knowledge the
power of myth, transposed into mental forms, survives only as imagina-

tion. The realm of the dead, where the disernpowered myths gather, is farthest from his homeland, with which it can communicate only from the

remotest distance. If one follows Kirchhoff in supposing that Odysseus's
visit to the Underworld forms part of the oldest stratum of the epic, composed of actual legends, 55 then this oldest stratum also contains a tendency which-as in the tradition of the journeys to the Underworld of

60 Excursus J

Orpheus and Heracles-most decisively transcends myth. Indeed, the
motif of forcing the gates of hell, of abolishing death, is the innermost cell
of all anti mythological thought. This antimythological element is contained in Teiresias's prophecy of the possible placation of Poseidon. Odysseus is [0 wander ever farther, carrying on his shoulder an oar, until he
reaches a people "who know nothing of the sea and never use salt with
their food."56 When he meets another traveler who refers to the oar on his

shoulder as a "winnowing fan," he will have reached the proper place [0
offer a sacrifice to Poseidon. The core of the prophecy is the mistaking of
the oar for a winnowing fun. This must have struck the Ionian as compellingly comic. However, this comic effect, on which the reconciliation is
made to depend, cannot have been directed at humans but at the wrathful Poseidon. 57 The misunderstanding is meant to amuse the fierce elemental god, in the hope that his anger might be dispersed in laughter.
That would be analogous to the .neighbor's advice in Grimm, explaining
how a mother can rid herself of a changeling: "She should carry the
changeling into the kitchen, set it on the hearth, light the fire and boil
water in two eggshells. That would make the changeling laugh, and if he
laughed then that would make an end of him."58 If laughter up to now"
has been a sign of violence, an outbreak of blind, obdurate nature, it nevertheless contains the opposite element, in that through laughter blind
nature becomes aware of itself as such and thus abjures its destructive vio-

lence. This ambiguity of laughter is closely related ~o that of name; perhaps names are nothing bur petrified laughter, as nicknames still are-the
only ones in which the original act of name-giving still persists. Laughter
is in league with the guilt of subjectivity, bur in the suspension of law

which it announces it also points beyondthat complicity. It promises a
passage to the homeland. It is a yearning for the homeland which sets in
motion the adventures by which subjectivity, the prehistory of which is
narrated' in the Odyssey, escapes the primeval world. The fact thatdespite the fascist lies to the contrary-the concept of homeland is

opposed to myth constitutes the innermost paradox of epic. Precipitated

in the epic is the m~mory ofan historical age in which nomadism gave way
ro settlement, the precondition of any homeland. If the fixed order of
property implicit in settlement is the source of human alienation, in which
uII homesickness and longing spring from a lost primal state, at the same
"\

tim,' ir is toward sertlernenr and fixed property, on which alone, the con.

Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment 61
cept of homeland is based, that all longing and homesickness are directed.
Novalis's definition according to which all philosophy is homesickness
holds good only if this longing is not dissipated in the phantasm of a lost
original state, but homeland. and nature itself, are pictured as something
that have had first to be wrested from myth. Homeland is a state of having escaped. For this reason the criticism that the Homeric legends "withdraw from the earth" is a warranty of their truth. They "turn to men."59
The 'transposition of myths into the novel, as in the adventure story, does

not falsify myth so much as drag it into the sphere of time, exposing the
abyss which separates it from homeland and reconciliation. The vengeance
wreaked by civilization on the primeval world has been terrible, and in this
vengeance, the most horrifying document of which in Homer is to be
found in the account of the mutilation of the goatherd Melanthios, civi-

lization itself resembles the primeval world. It is not in the content of the
deeds reponed that civilization transcends that world. It is in the selfreflection which causes violence to pause at the moment of narrating such
deeds. Speech itself, language as opposed to mythical song, the possibility
of holding fast the past atrocity through memory, is the law of Homeric
escape. Not wirhour reason is the fleeing hero repeatedly introduced as
narrator. The cold detachment of narrative, which describes even the hor-

rible as iffor entertainment, for the first time reveals in all their clarity the
horrors which in song are solemnly confused with fate. But when speech
pauses, the caesura allows the events narrated to be transformed into

something long past, and causes to flash up a semblance of freedom that
civilization has been unable wholly to extinguish ever since. Book)CXII of

the Odyssey describes the punishment meted out by the son of the island's
king to the faithless maidservants who have sunk into harlotry, With an

unmoved composure comparable in its inhumanity only to the impassibilite of the greatest narrative writers of the nineteenth century, the fate of
the hanged victims is described and expressionlessly compared to the

death of birds in a trap; and. as of the numb pause surrounding the narration at this point, it can truly be said that the rest of all speech is silence.
This is followed by a statement reporting that "For a little while their feet
kicked our, but not for very long."6o The exactitude of the description,
which already exhibits the coldness of anatomy and vivisecrion.f keeps a

record, as in a novel. of the twitching of the subjugated women, who,
under the aegis of justice and law, are thrust down into the realm from

62 Excursus 1

which Odysseus the judge has escaped. As a citizen reflecting on the execution, Homer comforts himself and his listeners, who are really readers,

with the certified observation that the kicking did not last long-a

moment, and all was over.62 But after the words "not for long" the inner
flow of the narrative comes to rest. "Not for long?" the narrator asks by
this device, giving the lie to his own composure. In being brought to a
standstill, the report is prevented from forgerting the victims of the execution and lays bare the unspeakably endless torment of the single second in

which the maids fought against death. No echo remains of the words "not
for long" except Cicero's Quo usque tandem ["How much longer (will you
try our patience)?"], which later rhetoricians unwirtingly desecrated by
claiming that patience for themselves. But in the report of the infamous
deed, hope lies in the fact that it is long past. Over the raveled skein of
prehistory, barbarism, and culture, Homer passes the soothing hand of
remembrance, bringing the solace, of "once upon a time." Only as the
novel is the epic transmuted into fairy tale.

Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality

Enlightenment. in Kant's words, is "the human being's emergence

from self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one's own
understanding without direction from another."] "Understanding without
direction from another" is understanding guided by reason. That amounts
to saying that the mind combines its individual cognitions into a system
in accordance with its own internal logic. "Reason has ... as its sole object
the understanding and its effective application. "2 It posits "a certain col-

lective unity as the goal of the activities of the understanding,"3 and this
unity is the system. Reason's rules are instructions for a hierarchical ordering of concepts. For Kant, as for Leibniz and Descartes, rationality consisrs in "processes of ascending to the higher genera and of descending to
the lower species [by which] we obtain the idea of systematic connection
in irs completeness."! The "systematization" of knowledge lies in "the connection of its parts in conformity with a single principle.?" Thinking, as
understood by the Enlightenment, is the process of establishing a unified,
scientific order and of deriving facrual knowledge from principles,
whether these principles are interpreted as arbitrarily posited axioms,
innate ideas, or the highest abstractions. The laws of logic establish the
most universal relationships within the order and define them. Unity lies
ill self-consistency. The principle of contradiction is the system in nuce.
Knowledge consists in subsumprion under principles. It is one with judgmcnt, by which perceptions are incorporated into the system. Any think-

64 Excursus II

ing nor guided by the system is directionless or authoritarian. Reason con-

tributes nothing but the idea of systematic unity, the formal elements of
fixed conceptual relationships. Any substantial objective which might be
pUt forward as a rational insight is, according to the Enlightenment in its
strict sense, delusion, falsehood, "rationalization," no matter what pains
individual philosophers may take to steer us away from this conclusion
and toward a reliance on philanthropic feeling. Reason is "a faculty of
deducing the particular from the universal.I" According to Kant, the
homogeneity of the general and the particular is guaran teed by the "schernarism of pure understanding," by which he means the unconscious activity of the intellectual mechanism which structures perception in accor-

dance with the understanding. The intelligibility which subjective judgment discovers in any matter is imprinted on that matter by the intellect
as an objective quality before it enters the ego. Without such a schematisrn-s -in . short, without the intellectual element in perception-no
impression would conform to the corresponding concept, no category to
the particular example, thought, not to speak of the system toward which
everything is directed, would be devoid of unity. To establish this unity is
the conscious task of science. If "all empirical laws [are] only special deter-

minations of the pure laws of understanding,"? research must always
ensure that the principles are properly linked to the factual judgments.

"This harmony of nature with our cognitive faculty is presupposed a priori by the judgmenr.?" It is the "guiding thread"9 oforganized experience.
The system must be kept in harmony with nature; just as facts are
predicted from the system, so they must confirm it. Facts, however, form
part of praxis; they everywhere characterize the contact of-the individual
subject with nature as social object: experience is always rea! action and

suffering. In physics, to be sure, the perception by which a theory can be
proved is usually reduced to the electrical spark appearing in the experi-

mental apparatus. Its nonapp~arance is generally of no practical consequence; it merely destroys the theory or, at most, the career of the research
,assistant responsible for setting up the experiment, However, laboratory
conditions are the exception. A thinking which fails to maintain agree-

ment between system and perception does not merely violate isolared visu-

al impressions; it conflicts with real praxis. Not only does the expected ev~nr ~ail to occur bur the unexpected happens: the bridge collapses, the
nop (ails, the medicine causes illness. The spark which most conclusively
.

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 65
indicates a lack of systematic thinking, a violation of logic, is not a fleeting perception bur sudden death. The system which enlightenment aims
for is the form of knowledge which most ably deals with the facts, most
effectively assists the subject in mastering nature. The system's principles
ate those of self-preservation. Immaturity amounts to the inability ro survive. The bourgeois in the successive forms of the slave-owner, the free

entrepreneur, and the administrator is the logical subject of enlightenment.

The difficulties within this concept of reason, arising from the fact
that its subjects, the bearers of one and the same reason, are in real opposition to each other, are concealed in the Western Enlightenment behind

the apparent clarity of its judgments. In the Critique o/Pure Reason, however, those difficulties make themselves apparent in the unclear relationship of the transcendental to the empirical ego and in the other irreconcilable contradictions. Kant's concepts are ambiguous. Reason as the transcendental, supraindividual self contains the idea of a free coexistence in

which human beings organize themselves ro form the universal subject
and resolve the conflict between pure and empirical reason in the con-

scious solidarity of the whole. The whole represents the idea of true universality, utopia, At the same time, however, reason is the agency of calculating thought, which arranges the world for the purposes of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than that of working on the
object as mere sense material in order ro make it the material of subjugation. The true nature of the schernarisrn which externally coordinates the
universal and the particular, the concept and the individual, case, finally

turns our, in current science, ro be the interest of industrial society. Being
is apprehended in terms of manipulation and administration. Everything-including the individual human being, not to mention the animal-becomes a repeatable, replaceable process, a mere example of the

conceptual models of the system. Conflict between administrative, reifying science, between the public mind and the experience of the individual,

is precluded by the prevailing circumstances. The senses are determined
by the conceptual apparatus in advance of perception; the citizen sees the

world as made a priori of the stuff from which he himself constructs it.
Kant intuitively anticipated what Hollywood has consciously put into
practice: images are precensored during production by the same standard
of understanding which will later determine their reception by viewers.

66 Excursus II

The perception by which public judgment feels itself confirmed has been
shaped by that judgment even before the perception takes place. Although
the secret utopia harbored within the concept of reason may have
glimpsed the repressed identical interest which lies beyond the diverse
accidental interests of subjects, reason, operating under the pressure of
purposes merely as systematic science, not only levels out the differences

but standardizes the identical interest. It acknowledges no determination
other than the classifications of the social operation. No one is different to
the purpose for which he has been produced: a useful, successful, or failed
member of professional and national groups. He is a single, random rep-

resentative of his geographical, psychological, and sociological type. Logic
is democratic: in this respect the great have no advantage over the most
menial. The former are counted as prominent citizens while the latter are
prospective objects of welfare relief. Science stands in the same relationship to I?-ature and human beings in general as insurance theory stands to
life and death in particular. Who dies is unimportant; what matters is the
ratio of incidences of death to the liabilities of the company. It is the law
of large numbers, not the particular case, which recurs in the formula. Nor
is the concordance of general and particular concealed any longer within
an intellect which always perceives the particular as a case of the general
and the general only as the aspect __of the particular by which it can be
"grasped and manipulated. Science itself has no awareness of itself; it is
merely a tool. Enlightenment, however, is the philosophy which equates
truth with the scientific system. Kant's attempt to justify this identity,
which was still made with a philosophical intention, gave rise to concepts
which have no meaning for science, since they are not simply instructions
for petforming manipulations accordingto certain rules. The notion of the
self-understanding of science conflicts with the concept of science itself.
Kant's work transcends experience as mere operation, and for that reason-and in accordance with, its own principles-is rejected as dogmatic

by enlightenment today. In confirming the scientific system as the embodiment of truth-the result arrived at by Kanr-s -rhought sets the seal on its

own insignificance, because science is a technical operation, as far removed
from reflection on- its own objectives as" is any other form of labor under
the pressure of the system"

~ The moral teachings of the Enlightenment beat witness to the hopelcssness of attempting to replace enfeebled teligi<;lI1 by an intellectual

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 67
motive for enduring within society when material interest no longer suffices. As solid citizens , philosophers ally themselves in practice with the
powers they condemn in theory. The theories are logical and hard while
the moral philosophies are propagandistic and sentimental, even when rigorous in tone , or else the moral philosophies are acts of violence performed
in the awareness that morality is nondeducible, like Kant's recourse to
treating moral forces as facts. His attempt to derive the duty of mutual
respect from a law of reason, although more cautious than any other such
undertaking in Western philosophy, has no support within the Critique. It
is the usual endeavor of bourgeois thought to ground the respect without
which civilization cannot exist on something other than material inrerest-an attempt more sublime and paradoxical than any that went before.
but just as ephemeral . The citizen who renounced a profit out of the
Kantian motive of respect for the mere form of the law would not be

enlightened but superstitious-a fool. The root of Kanrian optimism,
according to which moral actions are reasonable even when base ones are
likely to prosper, is a horror of relapsing inro barbarism . If-Kant writes
in response to Haller'P-c -one of these great moral forces, reciprocal love
and respect, were to collapse. "then nothingness (immorality) with gaping
maw would drink the whole realm of (moral) beings like a drop ofwater."
But, according to Kant, from the standpoint of scientific reason moral
forces are neutral drives and forms of behavior, no less than immoral ones,

which they im mediately become when no longer directed at that hidden
possibility but at reconciliation with power. Enlightenmenr expels differ-

ence from theory. It considers "human actions and desires' exactly as if I
were dealing with lines, planes, and bodies."!' The totalitarian order has
put this into effect in ut,ter seriousness . Freed from supervision by one's
own class, which had obliged the n ineteenth-century businessman to
mainrain Kanrian respect and reciprocal love, fascism: which by its iron
discipline relieves its peoples of the burden of moral feelings, no longer
needs to observe any discipline. Contrary to the categorical imperative,
and all the more deeply in accord with pure reason, it treats human beings
as things, centers of modes of behavior. The rulers sought to shield the
bourgeois world from the flood of naked violence, which now has broken
over Europe, only for as long as economic concentration was insufficiently advanced . Previously only the poor and savages had been exposed to the
untrammeled force of the capitalist elements. But the totalitarian order has

68 Excursus II

granted unlimited rights to calculating thought and puts its trust in science as such. Irs canon is its own brutal efficiency.* From Kant's Critique

[Q Nietzsche's Genealogy ofMorals, the hand of philosophy had traced the
writing on the wall; one individual pur that writing into practice, in all its
details. The work of me Marquis de Sade exhibits "understanding without
direction from anorher'l-e-rhar is [Q say. the bourgeois subject freed from
all rurelage,

Self-preservation is me constitutive principle of science, me soul of
the table of categories, even if, as in Kant, it has [Q be deduced idealisti-

cally. Even the ego, me synthetic unity of apperception, the agency which
Kant calls the highest point, from which the whole of logic must be sus-

pended,'! is really both me product and me condition of material existence. Individuals, in having to fend for themselves, develop me ego as the
agency of reflective foresight and overview; over successive generations it

expands and contracts with the individual's prospects of economic auronomyand productive ownership. Finally it passes from the expropriated cit-

izens to me roralirarian trust-masters, whose science has become the quintessence of the methods by which the subjugated masssociety reproduces
itself. Sade erected an early monument [Q their planning skills. The conspiracy of rulers against peoples, implemented by relencless organization,
finds the Enlightenment spirit since Machiavelli and Hobbes no less compliant than the bourgeois republic. That spirit is hostile [Q authority only

when authority lacks me strength [Q enforce obedience, and [Q violence

only when violence is not an established fact. As long as one does not ask
who is applying it, reason has no greater affinity with violence than with
mediation; depending on the situation of individuals and groups, it pre-

senrs either peace or war, tolerance or repression, as me given state of
affairs. Because it unmasks substantial goals as asserting the power of
nature over mind and as curtailing its own self-legislation, reason, as a

purely formal entity, is at me service of every natural interest. Becoming
simply an organ, thinking reverts to nature. For me rulers, however,
human beings become mere materials as the whole of nature has become

material for society, After me brief interlude of liberalism in which the

bourgeois kept one another in check, power is revealing itself as archaic
terror in a f..:lscistically rationalized form. * "The religious chimeras," says
the Prince or Francavilla at the court of King Ferdinand of Naples, "must

he replaced by utmost terror. The people must be freed from the fear of a

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 69
future Hell. Once that is destroyed they will abandon themselves to any-

thing. But that chimerical fear must be replaced by penal laws of enormous severity, which apply, of course, only ro the people, since they alone
cause unrest in the state. Malcontents are born only to the lower classes.
What do the rich care for the idea of a leash they will never feel themselves, if this empty semblance gives them the right ro grind down those
living under their yoke? You will find no one in that class who will not permit the darkest shadow of tyranny to fallon him, provided it really falls
on others."!' Reason is the organ of calculation, of planning; it is neutral
with regard ro ends; its element is coordination. More than a century
before the emergence of sporr, Sade demonstrated empirically what Kanr
grounded transcendentally: the affinity between knowledge and planning
which has set its stamp of inescapable functionality on a bourgeois existence rationalized even in its breathing spaces. The precisely coordinated
modern sporting squad, in which no member is in doubt over his role and
a replacement is held ready for each, has irs exact counrerpart in the sexual teams of Juliette, in which no momenr is unused, no body orifice
neglected, no function left inactive. In sport, as in all branches of mass culrure, a tense, purposive bustle prevails, although none but the wholly initiated observer could fathom the differenr combinations or the meaning
of the game's changing fortunes, governed by arbitrarily chosen rules. The
special architectonic structure of the Kantian system, like the gymnasts'
pyramids in Sade's orgies and the formalized principles of early bourgeois
freemasonry-cynically reflected in the strict regime of the libertine soci-

ety of the I20 Days ofSodom-p refigures the organization, devoid of any
subsranrial goals, which was to encompass the whole of life. What seems
ro matter in such events, more than pleasure itself, is the busy pursuit of
pleasure, irs organization; just as in other demythologized epochs, imperial Rome. the Renaissance, and the Baroque, the schema of activity counted for more than its content. In the modern period enlightenment has
released the ideas of harmony and perfection from their hyposrarization in
a religious Beyond and made them available as criteria for human endeavor within the form of the system. Once the utopia which inspired the
hopes of the French Revolution had been absorbed, potently and irnporenrly, into German music and philosophy, the established bourgeois order

entirely funcrionalized reason. It became a purposiveness without purpose,
which for that very reason could be harnessed ro any end. It is planning

70 Excursus II

considered as an end in itself. The totalitarian state manipulates nations.

"Just so," replies the Prince in Sade to the speaker just quoted, "the gov-

ernment itself must control the population. It must possess the means to
exterminate the people, should it fear them, or to increase their numbers,
should it consider that necessary. And nothing should weigh in the balance of its justice except its own interests or passions, together only with
the passions and interests of those who, as we have said, have been grant-

ed just enough power to multiply our own."14 The Prince points the path
which imperialism, reason in its most terrible form, has always followed.
"Take away its god from the people you wish to subjugate and you will

demoralize it. As long as it has no other god than yours, you will always
be its master ... Grant it in return the widest, most criminal license.

Never punish it, except when it turns against yoU."15

As reason posits no substantial goals, all affects are equally remote to
it. They are merely natural. The principle according to which reason is
simply opposed to everything unreasonable underlies the true opposition
between enlightenment and mythology. The latter recognizes spirit only

as something immers~d in nature, a natural power. For it, inward impulses, like outward forces, are living powers of divine or demonic origin.

Enlightenment, by contrast, relocates contexte meaning, and life entirely
within a subjectivity which is actually constituted only by this relocation.
For enlightenment, reason is the chemical agent which absorbs the real

substance of things a~d volatilizes it into the mere autonomy of reason. In
order to escape the superstitious fear of nature, enlightenment has presented effective objective entities and forms without exception as mere
veils of chaotic matter and condemned matter's influence on the human

agent as enslavement, until the subject, according to its own concept, had
been turned into a single, unrestricted, empty authority. The whole force
of nature became a mere undifferentiated resistance to the abstract power
of the subject. The particular mythology which the Western Enlightenment, including Calvinism, had ro do away with was the Catholic doc-

trine of the ordo and the pagan popular religion which continued to flourish beneath it. To liberate human beings from such beliefs was the objective of bourgeois philosophy. However, the liberation went further than its
humane originators had intended. The market economy it unleashed, was
at dnce the prevailing form of reason and the power which ruined reason.
The Rornanric reactionaries only expressed what the bourgeois themselves

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 71
had realized: that freedom in their world tended toward organized anarchy. The Catholic counterrevolution's critique of the Enlightenment
proved no less valid than the Enlightenment's critique ofCatholicism. The
Enlightenment had pinned its colors to liberalism. Ifall affects are of equal
value, then self-preservation, which dominates the form of the system in

any case, seems to offer the most plausible maxims for action. It was to be
given free rein in the free economy. The somber writers of the early bourgeois period, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville, who spoke up
for the egoism of the self, thereby recognized society as the destructive
principle and denounced harmony before it was elevated to the official
doctrine by the bearers of light, the classicists. The former writers exposed
the totality of the bourgeois order as the horrifying entity which finally
engulfed both, the general and the particular, society and the self. With the
development of the economic system" in which the control of the economic apparatus by private groups creates a division between human
beings, self-preservation, although treated by reason as identical, had become the reified drive of each individual citizen and proved to be a destructive natural force no longer distinguishable from self-destruction.
The two principles combined in a murky fusion. Pure reason became
unreason, a procedure as immune to errors as it was devoid of content.
However, with the revolutionary avant-garde, the utopia which proclaimed the reconciliation between nature and the self emerged from its
hiding place in German philosophy as something at once irrational and
reasonable, as the idea of the community of free individuals*-and
brought down on itself the full fury of reason. In society as it is, despite
feeble moralistic attempts to propagate humanity as the most rational
means, self-preservation remains unencumbered by a utopia denounced as
myth. For those at the top, shrewd self-preservation means the fascist
struggle for power, and for individuals it means adaptation to injustice at
any price. Enlightened reason no-more possesses the means of measuring
one drive within itself against others than of ordering the universe into

spheres. It rightly exposes the notion of hierarchy in nature as a reflection
of medieval society, and later attempts to demonstrate a new order of values bear the unmistakable taint of mendacity. The irrationalism which is
evident in such futile reconstructions is far from opposing industrial reason.* Whereas great philosophy, in Leibniz and Hegel, had recognized a
claim to truth even in subjective and objective forms of expression-feel-

72 Excursus II

ings, institutions, works of art-which do not amount to actual ideas, irra-

tionalism, here as elsewhere showing its kinship to the last dregs of the
Enlightenment, modern positivism, draws a strict line between feeling, in
the form of religion and art, and anything deserving the name of knowledge. Although irrationalism restricts cold reason in favor of immediate
life, it turns the latter into a principle merely hostile to thought. Under
cover of this illusory enmity feeling, and finally all human expression,
indeed culture itself. is stripped of any responsibility to thought and transformed into the neutralized element of the all-embracing rationality of an
economic system" long since grown irrational. From the first, that reason
has been unable to rely on its attractive power alone and has supplement-

ed it with the cult of emotions. In appealing to this cult. it rums against
its own medium. thought. which was always suspect to this self-estranged
form of reason. The tender effusions of lovers in films already function as
a blow against dispassionate theory, and that is taken funher in the sentimental argument against any thought which attacks injustice. This elevation of feelings to an ideology does not abolish the contempt in which
they are really held. The fact that, compared to the starry heights into
which ideology transposes them, they appear all the more vulgar merely
contributes to their ostracism .. The verdict on feelings was already implicit in the formalization of reason. Even self-preservation, as a natural drive
like other impulses, has a bad conscience; only bustling efficiency and the
institutions created to serve it-mediation, apparatus, organization, systematization as ends in themselves-enjoy the esteem, in practice as in
theory, of being deemed reasonable; the emotions are incorporated into .
this spurious reason.
The Enlightenment of the modern age has been marked from the
first by radicalism: This fact 'distinguishes it from all earlier stages of
demythologization. As a rule, whenever a new religion and a new mentality have won a place in world history, bringing a new mode of social exisrenee, the old gods have been cast into the dust together with the old classes, tribes, and peoples. But especially when a people, such as the Jews, has
,

taken on a new form of soeiallife as a result of its own fate, its venerable

customs, sacred actions, and objects of wors~ip have been magically transri)r~ed into abominable misdeeds and terrifying specters. The phobias
and Idiosyncrasies of today, the character traits which are most despised
and derided, can be deciphered as marks of a huge idvance in human

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 73
development. From the disgust aroused by excrement and human flesh to
the contempt for fanaticism, idleness, and poverty, both spiritual and
material, a line connects behavioral forms which were once adequate and
necessary to those which are abominated. This line is at once that of
destruction and of civilization. Each step has been an advance, a stage of
enlightenment. But whereas all the earlier changes, from preanimism to
magic, from matriarchal to patriarchal culture, from the polytheism of the
slave traders to the Catholic hierarchy, replaced the older mythologies
with new albeit enlightened ones, the Great Mother with the God of
Hosts, the totem with the veneration of the Lamb, in the glare of enlightened reason any devotion which believed itself objective, grounded in the
matter at hand. was dispelled as mythological. All preexisting ties were
tabooed by this verdict, not excluding those which were necessary to the
existence of the bourgeois order itself. The instrument by means of which

the bourgeoisie had come to power, the unfettering of forces, universal
freedom, self-determination-in short, enlightenment-turned against
the bourgeoisie as soon as that class, as a system of rule, was forced to suppress those it ruled. By virtue of its principle, enlightenment does not stop
short at the minimum of belief without which the bourgeois world could
not exist. It does not render to power the reliable services which had
always been performed for it by the old ideologies. Its antiauthoritarian
tendency, which communicates, if only subrerraneously, with the utopia
contained in the concept of reason, finally made it as inimical to the established bourgeoisie as to the aristocracy, with which, indeed, it lost no time
in forming alliances. Ultimately, the antiauthoritarian principle necessarily becomes its own antithesis, the agency opposed to reason: its abolition
of all absolute ties allows power to decree and manipulate any ties which
suit its purposes. After civic virtue and charity, for which it never offered
good reasons, philosophy proclaimed authority and hierarchy as virtues,
when enlightenment had long since revealed them as lies. But against such
perversion of itself enlightenment, too, had no arguments, since pristine
truth has no advantage over distortion, or rationalization over reason, unless it can demonstrate a practical one as well. With the formalization of
reason, theory itself, if it seeks to be more than a cipher for neutral procedures, becomes an incomprehensible concept, and thought is deemed
meaningful only after the sacrifice of meaning. Once harnessed to the
dominant mode of production, enlightenment, which strives to under-

74 Excursus II

mine any order which has become repressive, nullifies itself. This is
expressed in the early attacks of the current form of enlightenment on the
"all-crushing" Kant. JUSt as Kant's moral philosophy set limits to his
enlightened critique in order to rescue the possibility of reason, unreflecting enlightened thinking has always sought, for its own survival, to cancel
itself with skepticism, in order to make room for the existing order.
In contrast to such precautions, the work of Sade, like that of
Nietzsche, is an intransigent critique of practical reason, beside which

even that of Kant himself appears like a revocation of his own thought. It
pushes the scientific principle to annihilating extremes. Kant, to be sure,
had so purified the moral law within the self of any heteronymous belief
that respect, despite his assurances, could be no more than a psychological fact of nature, as the starry sky above the self was a physical one. "A fact
of reason," he called it,16 while Leibniz termed it "a general instinct of society."17 Bur.facts count for nothing where they do not exist. Sade does not
deny their occurrence. Justine, the virtuous sister, is a martyr to the moral
law. Juliette, however, draws the conclusion the bourgeoisie sought to
avoid: she demonizes Catholicism as the latest mythology, and with it civilization as a whole. The energies previously focused on the sacrament are
now devoted, perversely, to sacrilege. This inversion is extended to community in general. In all this Juliette does not proceed fanatically, as
Catholicism had done with the Incas, but merely attends to the business
of sacrilege in the efficient, enlightened way that Catholics, too, still had
in their blood from archaic times. The primeval forms of behavior which
had been tabooed by civilization, and had grown destructive under the stigma of bestiality, had led an underground life. Juliette revives them in
their outlawed, not their natural form. She compensates the value judgment against them-which, like all value judgments, was unfounded-by
its opposite. Thus, when she reenacts the primitive reactions they are no
longer primitive bur bestial. In psychological terms Juliette, not unlike
Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereusesl': embodies neither unsublimated nor

regressive libido bur intellectual pleasure in regression, amor intellectualis
diaboli, the joy of defeating civilization with its own weapons. She loves
systems and logic. She wields the instrument of rational thought with con-

sll'nmate skill. As far as self-mastery is c~ncerned, her instructions ""Sometimes stand in the same relation to Kant's as the special application does
to the-principle. "Virtue," writes the latter;'? "in so far as it is grounded on
.

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 75
inner freedom, also contains an affirmative imperative for men, namely to

place all their capacities and inclinations under the power [of reason] and
therefore under the authority over oneself, which imperative is added to
the interdiction on allowing oneself to be commanded by one's feelings
and inclinations [the duty of apathy]. For unless reason takes the reins of
government into its hands, those feelings and inclinations will play the
master over men." Juliette teaches as follows on the self-discipline of the
criminal: "First, reflect on your plan for several days in advance. Consider
all its consequences, paying attention to what can be useful to you ... and

what might possibly betray you. Weigh these things just as soberly as if
you were sure to be discovered."20 The murderer's face must show utmost
calm. "Let your features show calm and indifference. Try to acquire the
greatest possible callousness in this situation.... If you are unsure of being
free of pangs of conscience-and you will gain such certainty only
through the habit of crjme-if you are unsure of this, I say, then you will

labor in vain to master the play of your features.'?' To be free of the stab
of conscience is as essential to formalistic reason as to be free of love or

hate. Remorse posits the past-which, contrary to popular ideology, has
always meant nothing to the bourgeoisie-as something which exists; it is
a relapse, to prevent which, for bourgeois praxis, would be remorse's only
justification. Spinoza, following the Stoics, states the matter as follows:
"Repentance is not a virtue, or, in other words, it does not arise from reason, but he who repents of an action is twice as unhappy or as weak as
before."22 But he goes on at once, quite in the spirit of Francavilla: "If the
mob is not in fear, it threatens in its turn,"23 thus maintaining, as a good
student of Machiavelli, that modesty and remorse, like fear and hope, are
undoubtedly useful, however contrary to reason. "Apathy (considered as a
strength) is a necessary presupposition of virtue," writes Kant,z4 distin-

guishing, not unlike Sade, between this "moral apathy" and insensibility
in the sense of indifference to sensory stimulation. Enthusiasm is bad.
Calm and resolution constitute the strength of virtue. "That is the state of
health in moral life, whereas the affect, even when it is excited by the idea
of the good, is a momentarily lustrous phenomenon which leaves behind
lassitude.Y" Juliette's friend Clairwil makes exactly the same observation

with regard to vice." "My soul is hardened, and I am far from preferring
sensibiliry to the happy indifference I now enjoy. Oh Juliette ... perhaps
yOli arc deceiving yourself about the dangerous sensibility prized by so

76 Excursus 11

many fools." Apathy arises at the turning points in bourgeois history, as in
the history of antiquity, when the pauci beati become aware of their powerlessness in face of the overwhelming historical tendency. It marks the
retreat of the individual's spontaneity into the private sphere, which is thus
established as the truly bourgeois form of existence. Stoicism-which is
the bourgeois philosophy-makes it easier for the privileged to look what

threatens them in the eye by dwelling on the suffering of others. It affirms
the general by elevating private existence, as protection from it, to the status of a principle. The private sphere of the bourgeois" is an upper-class
cultural asset which has come down in the world.

Juliette's credo is science. She abominates any veneration which cannot be shown to be rational: belief in God and his dead son, obedience to

the Ten Commandments, preference of the good to the wicked, salvation
to sin. She is attracted by those reactions which have been proscribed by
the legends of civilization. She manipulates semantics and logical syntax
like the most up-to-date positivist, but unlike that employee of the latest
administration she does not direct her linguistic criticism primarily against
thought and philosophy but, as a daughter of the militant Enlightenment,
against religion. "A dead God!" she says of Christ. "Nothing is more comical than this nonsensical combination of words from the Catholic dictio-

nary: God, which means eternal; death, which means not eternal. Idiotic
Christians, what do you intend to do with your dead God?"2? The conversion of what is condemned without scientific proof into something to
be striven for, and of what is respected without proof into an object of
revulsion, the transvaluation of values, the "courage to do the forbidden,'?" though without the telltale histrionics of Nietzsche's "WoMan!"
[Onwardl] and without his biological idealism, is her specific passion. "Are
pretexts needed, to commit crimes?" asks Princess Borghese, Juliette's
friend, quite in Nietzsche's spirit." Nietzsche proclaims the quintessence
of her doctrine.l'' "Let the weaklings and failures go to ruin: the first prin-

ciple of our philanthropy. And we should help them on their way. What
is more damaging than any vice? The-pity of active people for the unsuccessful and the weak-Christianity."31 The latter, "with its curious interI,

est in overthrowing -tyrants and making~them submit to principles of
brot~lerhood ... plays the galne of the weak. It represents the weak, -and
has to speak like them .... We may be sure that such fraternal bonds were
not only-proposed bur put in place by the weak, when,priestly power had

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 77
chanced to fall into their hands."32 This contribution to the genealogy of
morals is made by Noirceuil, Juliette's mentor. Nietzsche maliciously celebrates the mighty and their cruelty when it is directed "outside their circle," that is, against everything alien to themselves. "Once abroad in the
wilderness, they revel in the freedom from social constraint and compensate for their long confinement in the quietude of their own community.
They revert to the innocence of wild animals: we can imagine them
returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and
at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity
prank-convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will
have something to sing about and praise.... This 'boldness' of noble
races, so headstrong, absurd, incalculable, sudden, improbable, ... their
utter indifference to safety and comfort, their terrible pleasure in destruction, their taste for cruelty,"33 this boldness, stridently proclaimed by
Nietzsche, has also taken hold of Juliette. "Live dangerously" is her message, too: "Dare henceforth to do anything without fear."34 There are the
strong and the weak, there are classes, races, and nations which dominate
and others which are subjected. "Where, I ask you," cries Verneuil, "is the
mortal stupid enough in face of all the evidence to claim that all men are
born equal, in law and in fact? It was lefr to a misanthropist like Rousseau
to put forward such a paradox, since, being extremely weak, he wanted to
pull down those to whose level he was unable to raise himself. What
effrontery did it take, I ask you, for this pygmy four feet two inches rall to
compare himself to the model of stature and strength whom nature had
endowed with the strength and figure of a Hercules? Is that not the same
as comparing a fly to an elephant? Strength, beauty, stature, eloquence:
those are the virtues which were decisive when authority passed to the
rulers at the dawn of society."35 "To expect that strength will not manifest
itself as strength," Nietzsche goes on,36 "as the desire to overcome, to appropriate, to have enemies, obstacles, and triumphs, is every bit as absurd
as to expect that weakness will manifest itself as strengrh." -"How do you
really expect" says Verneuil,37 "a man endowed by nature with the highest
predisposition for crime, whether through his superior strength, the refinement of his senses or as a result of an education fitting to his class or his
wealth-how, I ask, do you expect this individual to be judged by the
same law as those whom everything constrains to act virtuously and moderately? Would the law be more just if it punished both in the same way?

78 Excursus II

Is it natural for someone whom everything invites to do evil to be treated
like someone whom everything impels to behave with prudence?"
Once the objective order of nature has been dismissed as prejudice
and myth, nature is no more than a mass of material. For Nietzsche there
is no law "which we not only recognize but recognize over US. " 38 To the
extent that the understanding, which was formed against the standard of
self-preservation, recognizes any law oflife, it is that of the stronger. While
reason , because of its formalism , is unable to yield any necessary model for

humanity, it has the advantage of actuality, in contrast to mendacious ideology. It is the weak who are guilty, according to Nietzsche's doctrine,

since they use cunning to circumvent the natural law. "It is the diseased
who imperil mankind, and not the ' beasts of prey.' It is the predestined
failures and victims who undermine the social structure, who poison our
faith in life and our fellow men . "39 They have spread throughout the world
the Christianity which Nietzsche hates and abominates no less than Sade.
"lr is not the reprisals of the weak against the strong which truly conform
to nature. They exist in the mental realm, not the physical . To carry out
such reprisals the weak man would need strength he has not been given.
He would have to assume a character which is by no means his-in a cerla in way he would do violence to nature. What is truthful in the laws of
th is wise mother is that the strong are allowed to inju re the weak, since, to
ncr in th is way, they must only use the gifts they have received . The strong
ind ividual does not, like the weak, disguise himself with a character other

than his own. He merely expresses in action what he has received from
narure. Everything which follows from that is therefore natural: his
oppression, his violence, his cruelties. his tyrannies, his injustices . .. are

pure , like the hand which has imprinted them on him. And if the strong
person exercises all his rights to oppress and pillage the weak , he is only
doing the most natural thing in the world. .. . We should never, therefore,
have scru ples over what we are able to take from the weak , since it is not
v«: who arc committing the crime. Rather, it is the defense or revenge of
ihc weak which are characteristic of crirne.l"? If a weak person defends
himself: he does wrong, "the wrong of stepping outside his own character
of weakness, which nature has impressed on him. She created him to be a

~laVl: , and poor. He refuses to submit; that is hiS wrong."!' In such magis-reri al spc,\cches Dorval, the leader of a respectable Paris gang, expounds for
[ulicuc the secret creed of all ruling classes, a creed to which Nietzsche,

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 79
proclaiming it to his own time, added the psychology of resentment. Like
Juliette he admired "the beautiful terribleness of the deed,"42 even though,
as a German professor, he differed from Sade in rejecting criminality, because its egoism "is restricted to such base goals. If its goals are lofty
humanity has a different standard, judging 'crime,' even when committed
with the most terrible means, not to be such. "43 The enlightened Juliette
is still free of such prejudice in favor of greatness, a prejudice which,
indeed. is characteristic of the bourgeois world; for her the racketeer is not
less admirable than the minister because his victims are fewer. For the

German. however, beauty is a function of size, and amid the twilight of
the idols he cannot shake off the idealistic habit ofwanting to see the petty
thief hanged while imperialist raids are transfigured into world-historical
missions. By elevating the cult of strength to a world-historical doctrine,
German fascism took it to its absurd conclusion. As a protest against civilization the master morality perversely upheld the oppressed: hatred of
stunted instincts objectively exposes the true nature of the slave masters,
which reveals itself only in their victims. But, in the guise of a great power
and a state religion, the master morality places itself entirely in the service
of the civilizing powers that be, of the solid majority, of resentment and
everything it once opposed. The realization of Nietzsche's doctrines both
refutes them and reveals their truth-a truth which, despite his yea-saying affirmation of life, was hostile to the spirit of reality.
If remorse was contrary to reason, pity was outright sin. Anyone who
yields to it "perverts the general law; whence it follows that pity, far from
being a virtue, becomes truly a vice as soon as it induces us to interfere
with the inequality required by the laws of nature."44 Sade and Nietzsche
realized that once reason had been formalized pity was left behind as a
kind of sensuous awareness of the identity of general and particular, as
naturalized mediation. It then forms a highly compelling prejudice: "compassion ... does not appertain to the use of reason ... although it seems

to bear in it a sort of piety," writes Spinoza," and "he who is moved neither by reason nor pity to help others is rightly called inhuman."46
Commiseratio is humanity in its immediate form, but at the same time
"bad and useless,"47 since it is the opposite of the manly competence
which, from Roman virtus through the Medici to efficiency under the
Fords. has always been the true bourgeois virtue. Womanish and childish,
Clairwil calls pity. vaunting her own "stoicism," the "tranquility of the pas-

80 Excursus II

sions" which enables her "to accomplish and endure everything without

agitation."48 "Pity is anything but a virtue. It is a weakness, born of fear
and misfortune, a weakness that must be overcome most of all if one is

striving to conquer excessive nervous sensibility, which is irreconcilable
with the maxims of philosophy."? Women are the source of "outbursts of
unrestrained compassion."50 Sade and Nietzsche knew that their doctrine
of the sinfulness of pity was an old bourgeois heritage. The latter speaks
of "strong times" and "aristocratic cultures," while the former refers to
Aristotle!' and the Periparetics.V Pity could not withstand the scrutiny of
philosophy. Nor did Kant make an exception. Pity was, he said, "a certain
soft-heartedness" and lacked "the dignity of virtue."53 He failed to notice,

however, that the principle of "general benevolence toward the human
race,"54 by which, in contrast to C1airwil's rationalism, he sought to replace
pity, falls under the same curse of irrationality as "this well-meaning passion" which can easily seduce a person into becoming "a tender-hearted
idler." Enlightenment cannot be duped; for it the general has no advantage over the particular fact, or an all-embracing love over a limited one.
Pity stands in disrepute. Like Sade, Nietzsche cites the Ars poetica in passing judgment. "According to Aristotle, the Greeks often suffered an excess
of pity: hence its necessary discharge through tragedy. We can see how sus-

pect this inclination appeared to them. It endangers the state, takes away
the nt;cessary hardness and discipline, makes heroes howl like women."55
Zararhustra preaches: "I see as much weakness as goodness. As much
weakness as justice and pity."56 Pity has, in fact, a moment which conflicts •
with justice, although Nietzsche lumps the two together. It confirms the
rule of inhumanity by the exception it makes. By limiting the abolition of

injustice to fortuitous love ofone's neighbor, pity accepts as unalterable the
law of universal estrangement which it would like to alleviate. It is true
that the person who shows pity upholds as an individual the claim of the
general, that is, the claim to life, against the general in the form of nature
and society, which deny it. But the unity with the general as something
inward, practiced by such an individual, is shown to be deceptive by his
own weakness. It is not the softness but the restrictive nature of pity which
makes it quescionable-s-it is always too little. Just as the Stoic indifference
" on which bourgeois coldness.irhe counterpart of pity, has modeled itself
was r110rC loyal. however wretchedly, to the universal it had rejected than
rlic compassionate baseness which adapted itself to the world, so it was
-,

.

Juliette or Enlightenment and MoralilJl 81
those who unmasked pity who, however negatively, espoused the Revolution. The narcissistic deformations of pity, like the effusions of philanthropists and the moral complacency of the social welfare worker, are still
an internalized endorsement of the difference between rich and poor. Admittedly, by imprudently confessing the joys of hardness, philosophy has
put itself at the disposal of those who least forgive it the admission. The
fascist masters" of the world translated the vilification of pity into that of
political respect and the appeal to martial law, in which they were at one
with Schopenhauer, the metaphysician of pity. For him the establishment
of a humane order was the presumptuous delusion of someone who could
hope only for misfortune. The enemies of pity were unwilling to equate
humanity with misfortune. For them, the existence of misfortune was a
scandal. With their impotent delicacy, they could not bear to see humanity pitied. In desperation their powerlessness switched to the glorification
of power, while disowning it in practice whenever it gave them leave.

Kindness and good deeds become a sin, domination and suppression
virtue. "All good things have at one time been considered evil; every original sin has, at some point, turned into an original virtue."57 In the new
epoch Juliette applies this principle in earnest, for the first time consciously performing the transvaluation of all values. After the destruction
of all ideologies she elevates as her own morality what Christianity, in its

ideology if not always in its practice. held to be abominable. As a good
philosopher she remains cool and reflective. All is done without illusions.
To Clairwil's proposal for a sacrilegious act she responds: "Now that we do
not believe in God, my dear, the desecrations you desire. are no more
than useless childish games I may be still firmer in my disbelief than
you; my atheism is unshakable. So do not imagine that I need the childish pranks you propose to confirm it. I shall take part because it amuses
you, but only for enterrainment'l-c -the American murderess Annie Hen-

ry" would have said "just for fun"-"and never as something necessary,
eirher ro strengthen my way of thinking, or to convince others of it."58
Though swayed by momentary kindness toward her accomplice, she still
upholds her principles. Even injustice, hatred, and destruction become
merely operations, now that the formalization of reason has stripped all

goals of the characrer of necessity and objectivity, which is dismissed as
illusion. Magic passes into mere activity, into the means-in short, into
industry. The formalization of reason is merely the intellectual expression

82 Excursus II

of mechanized production. The means is fetishized: it absorbs pleasure.
Just as the goals with which the old system of rule had veiled itself are ren-

dered illusory by enlightenment in theory, the possibility of abundance
removes their justification in practice. Domination survives as an end in
itself, in the form of economic power. Pleasure itself shows traces of the
outdated, the irrelevant, like the metaphysics which forbade it. Juliette
speaks of the motives of crime."? She herself is no less ambitious and avari-

cious than her friend Sbrigani, but she idolizes the forbidden. Sbrigani, a
man devoted to the means and to duty, is more advanced. "To enrich our-

selves-that is what matters. It would be the height of guilt if we failed to
reach that goal. Only if one is truly on the way to becoming wealthy is one
permitted to reap one's pleasures: until then one must forget them." For
all her rational superiority, Juliette still clings to one superstition. While
she recognizes the naivety of sacrilege, in the end it still gives her pleasure.
But every pleasure betrays idolization: it is self-abandonment to an Other.
Nature actually does not know pleasure: it does not go beyond the satisfaction of needs. All pleasure is social, in the unsublimated affects no less

than in the sublimated. It springs from alienation. Even when enjoyment
is ignorant of the prohibition it infringes, it owes its origin to civilization,
to the fixed order from which it yearns to return to the very nature from
which that order protects it. Only when dream absolves them of the com-

pulsion of work, of the individual's attachment to a particular social function and finally to a self, leading back to a primal state free of domination

and discipline, do human beings feel the magic of pleasure. It was tile
homesickness of those enmeshed in civilization, the "objective despair" of
those who had to turn themselves into elements of the social order, which

nourished the love of gods and demons; to them as transfigured nature this
love turned in adoration. Thought arose in the course of liberation from

terrible nature, which is finally subjugated utterly. Pleasure, so to speak, is
nature's revenge. In it human beings divest thernselvesof thought. escape
from civilization. In earlier societies such homecoming was provided by
communal festivals. Primitive orgies are the collective origin of pleasure.
"The interlude of universal confusion represented by the festival," writes

Roger Caillois, "seems truly like the moment when the world's order is suspended. All excesses are permitted. Rules must be broken, everything
mJst be turned upside down. In the mythic epoch the course of time was

reversed: one was born aged, died as a child.... All ~he precepts protect-

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 83

ing the good, natural, and social order are systematically violated."60 One
abandons oneself to the transfigured powers of origin; but from the standpoint of the suspended interdiction these actions appear as dissipated and
insane." Only with increasing civilization and enlightenment do the
strengthened self and the secure system of power reduce the festival to
farce. The rulers introduce pleasure as a rational measure, a tribute paid to
imperfectly subdued nature; they seek at once to detoxify it and to preserve it in higher culture; to administer it to their subjects in controlled
doses where it cannot be entirely withdrawn. Pleasure becomes an object
of manipulation, until it finally perishes in the administrative arrangements. This development extends from the primitive feast to the holiday.
"The more dominant the complex social organism becomes, the less it tolerates interruptions of the ordinary course of life. Today as yesterday,
tomorrow as today, everything must follow the same course. The general
overflowing is no longer possible. The period of turbulence has been indi-

vidualized. Holidays have supplanted the feast."62 In fascism they are supplemented by the collective fake intoxication, concocted from radio, head-

lines, and Benzedrine.* Sbrigani has a presentiment of this. He grants
himself amusements "on the road to fortune," as vacations. Juliette, by
contrast, still emulates the ancien regime. She deifies sin. Her libertinism

is in thrall to Catholicism as the nun's ecstasy is to paganism.
Nietzsche is aware of the still mythical nature of pleasure. In its
abandonment to nature pleasure renounces the possible, just as pity
renounces the transformation of the whole. Both contain a moment of res-

ignation. Nietzsche tracks down pleasure in all its hiding places, as narcis-

sism in solitude, as masochistic enjoyment in the depressions of the self-

tormentor. ''Against all who merely enjoy!"63 juliette tries to rescue pleasure by rejecting love in its bourgeois form as devotion, which, as resistance to the bourgeoisie's own shrewdness, is characteristic of that class in

its last century. In love, pleasure was linked to the deification of the per-

son who bestowed it and was the truly human passion. It is being finally
revoked as a value judgment conditioned by sexuality. In the enraptured
adoration of the lover, as in the boundless admiration shown in return by
the beloved, the actual servitude of the woman was endlessly transfigured.

Again and again, the sexes were reconciled on the basis of their recognition of this servitude: the woman seemed freely to accept her defeat, the
man to grant her victory. Under Christianity the hierarchy of the sexes, the

84 Excursus II

yoke placed on the feminine character by the masculine order of property,
was idealized as the union of hearts in marriage, and the memory of sex-

uality's better, prepatriarchal past appeased. Under big industry" love is
annulled. The decline of middle-class property, the downfall of the free
economic subject, affects the family: it is no longer the celebrated cell of
society it once was, since it no longer forms the basis of the citizen's economic existence. For adolescents the family no longer marks out the horizon of their lives; the autonomy of the father is vanishing and with it resistance to his authority. Earlier, the girl's servitude in the paternal home
inflamed in her the passion which seemed to lead to freedom but was ful-

filled neither in marriage nor anywhere outside. As the prospect of a job
opens for the girl, that of love is closed. The more universally the system
of modern industry" requires everyone to enter its service, the more all
those who do not form part of the ocean of "white trash,"* which is
absorbing the unqualified employed and unemployed, are turned into
petty experts, into employees who must fend for themselves. In the form
of skilled work the autonomy of the entrepreneur, which is over, is spreading to all those admitted as producers, including the "working" woman,
and is becoming their character. Their self-respect grows in proportion to
their fungibility. Defiance of the family is no more an act of daring than

the leisure-time relationship with the boyfriend is the gateway to heaven.
People are taking on the rational. calculating attitude to their own sexuality long since proclaimed as ancient wisdom by Juliette's enlightened circ1e. Mind and body are being separated in reality, just as those indiscreet
bourgeois libertines demanded: "It appears to me," Noirceuil states rationalistically/" "that love and pleasure are two very different things ...
because tender feelings correspond to relationships of caprice and decorum, but in no way spring from the beauty of a neck or the pretty curve
of a hip. And these objects, which. in accordance with our taste, can keenly excite our physical affects, have, it seems to me, no rights over our menral affections. To complete my thought, Belize is ugly, is forty years old,
entirely lacks grace of person, is without regular fearures or any physical
charm. But Belize has intelligence, a precious character, a million things
which attach my feelings and preferences. I shall never wish to sleep with

Belize, but I shall love her to the point -of madness, whereas I shall lust
"'

af"tet,r Ararninrhe but heartily detest her ~ soon as the fever of desire is
past." I-len.', the inevitable consequence implicit in the Cartesian division

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 85
of the human being into thinking and extensive substance is expressed
with total clarity as the destruction of Romantic love. The latter is taken
to be a mask. a rationalization of the physical drive, "a false and always
dangerous meraphysics.T" as Count Belmor explains in his great speech
on love. For all their libertinisrn, Juliette's friends conceive of sexuality, as
against tenderness, of earthly as against heavenly love, not just as a degree
too powerful but also as oversimplified. The beauty of a neck or the curve
of a hip acts on sexuality not as un historical, merely natural facts but as
images in which the whole of social experience is contained; this experience harbors an intention toward something different to nature, a love not
restricted to sexuality. But even the most incorporeal tenderness is transformed sexuality; the hand stroking the hair, the kiss on the brow, which
express the rapture of spiritual love, are in pacified form the beating and
biting which accompany the sexual act among Australian aborigines. The
distinction is abstract. Metaphysics, Belmor reaches, falsifies the factual
situation, it prevents the beloved from being seen as he or she is; it stems
from magic, it is a veil. "And I am not to snatch it from our eyes? That
would be weakness ... cowardice. Let us analyze her when the pleasure is
over, this goddess who has just blinded me."66 Love itself is an unscientific concept: "False definitions are always leading us astray," Dolmance

declares in the memorable fift:h dialogue of La Philosophic dans le Boudoir,
"I don't know what it is-the heart. I simply use that term for weakness

of mind,"67 "If we spend one moment in what Lucretius calls the 'background of life,'''-meaning, in cold analysis-"we find that neither the
elevation of the beloved nor romantic feeling withstands analysis.... It is
the body alone that I love, and it is the body alone that I lament, although
I can have it again at any time."68What is true in all this is the insight into
the dissociation of love, the work of progress. This dissociation, which
mechanizes pleasure and distorts longing into a deception, attacks love at
its core. By turning her praise of genital and perverted sexuality into condemnation of what is unnatural, immaterial, illusory, the libertine Juliette
has thrown in her lot with the normality which belittles and restricts not
only the utopian exaltation oflove but physical pleasure, not only the lofticsr joy but that which is nearest at hand. The cynical roue whose side she
rakes has metamorphosed, with the help of the sex educator, the psychoanalyst, and the hormone physiologist. into the open-minded practical
man who extends his affirmarion of sport and hygiene to include the sex

86 Excursus II

life. Juliette's critique contains the same inner discord as the Enlightenment itself. In so far as the criminal violation of taboos, which once made
common cause with the bourgeois revolution, has not been simply
absorbed into the new marter-of-facmess, it lives on. with sublime love, as

fidelity to the utopia brought near by the availability of physical pleasure
to all.

"The ridiculous enthusiasm" which attached us to a particular individual as the only one, the elevation of woman in love. can be traced back

beyond Christianity to matriarchal stages. "It is certain that our spirit of
chivalrous courtship, which comically offers our homage to an object
made only to satisfy our need-it is certain, I say. that this spirit stems
from the reverence our ancestors once had for women because of their profession as prophetesses in town and country. Through terror, aversion
became worship. and chivalry was nurtured in the womb of superstition.
But this reverence never existed in nature, and it would be a waste of time

to seek it there. The inferiority of that sex to ours is too well founded ever
to give us a sound motive to respect it, and the love which arises from that

blind reverence is, like it, a prejudice.I"? It is on power, however legalistically veiled, that the social hierarchy ultimately rests. The mastery of
nature is reproduced within humanity. Christian civilization, which used
the idea of protecting the physically weak to justify exploitation o(the
strong bondsman, never entirely won the hearts of the converted peoples.
The principle oflove was too strongly disavowed by the sharp intellect and
the still sharper weapons of the Christian masters, until Lutheranism abolished the antithesis between state and doctrine by making the sword and

rod the Gospel's quintessence. It directly equated spiritual freedom with

the affirmation of actual oppression. But woman bears the stigma of we~ness; her weakness places her in a minority even when she is numerically
superior to men. As with the subjugated original inhabitants in early forms
of state, the indigenous population of colonies, who lack the organization
and weapons of their conqueror§, as with the Jews among Aryans, her
defenselessness legitimizes her oppression. Sade expresses as formulae the
reflections of Strindberg. "Let us not doubt that there is a difference
between man and woman no less certain and important than that between

~lan and the apes of the forest.' We would have just as good reason to deny
woman membership of our species as to refuse to acknowledge brotherhood- with rhe apes. Examine carefully a naked woman beside a man of

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 87
the same age, naked like her, and you will be readily convinced of the considerable difference (disregarding the sex) which exists between the two
creatures and will clearly see that the woman is merely a lower degree of
the man. The differences likewise exist within, and anatomical dissection

of one and the other, if done with painstaking care, will bring this truth to
light."70 Christianity's attempt to compensate the suppression of sexuality
ideologically by the veneration ofwoman, and thus to sublimate the memory of the archaic instead of merely repressing it, is annulled by its rancor
against the woman thus elevated and against theoretically emancipated
pleasure. The affect which corresponds to the practice of oppression is
contempt, not veneration, and lurking behind the love of one's neighbor
throughout the Christian centuries has been the forbidden, compulsive
hatred of the object which continually brought 1:0 mind the futility of that
exertion: woman. Women paid for the cult of the Madonna with the

obsessive belief in witches, the revenge taken on the memory of the preChristian prophetess who secretly called into question the sanctified patriarchal system of power. The woman excites the savage rage of the half-converted man who is required to honor her, just as the weak in general can
count on the mortal enmity of the superficially civilized strong who are
supposed to spare them. Sade brings this hatred to consciousness. "I have
never believed," says Count Ghigi, the Roman chief of police, "that the
union of rwo bodies could ever give rise to the union of two hearts. 1 see
in this physical union strong reasons for contempt ... , for revulsion, but
not a single one for love."71 And when a girl terrorized by Saint-Fonds, the
royal minister, bursts into tears, he exclaims: "That is how 1 like women.
. Why cannot 1 reduce them all to such a stare with a single word?"72
Man as ruler refuses to do woman the honor of individualizing her.
Socially, the individual woman is an example of the species, a representative of her sex, and thus, wholly encompassed by male logic, she stands for
nature, the substrate of never-ending subsumption on the plane of ideas
and of never-ending subjection on that of reality. Woman as an allegedly
natural being is a product of history, which denatures her. But the desperate, destructive urge directed against everything which embodies the
lure of nature, everything which is physiologically, biologically, nationally,
or socially inferior, indicates that Christianity's attempt has failed. "Que ne
puis-je, d'un mot, les reduire toutes en eet etat!" To eradicate utterly the
hated but overwhelming temptation to lapse back into nature-that is the
.

.

cruelty which sterns from Eliled civilization; il is barbarism. the other side
of culture. "Them all!" For destruction tolerates no exceptions; the will to
destroy is totalitarian, and totalitarianism springs from that will alone. "I
have reached [he point," Juliette tells the Pope, "where I can say with
Tiberius: if only the whole of mankind had only one head, so that I could
have the pleasure of cutting it off with a single blow!"73 The signs of powerlessness, hasty uncoordinated movements, animal fear, swarming masses, provoke the lust for murder. The explanation for the hatred of woman
as the weaker in mental and physical power, who bears the mark of domination On her brow, is the same as for the hatred of the Jews. Women and

Jews show visible evidence of not having ruled for thousands of years.
They live, although they could be eliminated, and their fear and weakness,
the greater affinity to narure produced in them by perennial oppression, is
the element in which they live. In the strong, who pay for their strength
with their strained remoteness from nature and must forever forbid them-

selves fear, this incites blind fury. They identify themselves with nature by
calling forth from their victims, multiplied a thousandfold, the cry they

may not utter themselves. "These senseless creatures!" writes President

Blammont of women in Aline et Valcour, "How I love to see them Struggling in my hands! They are like lambs in the jaws of the lion."?4 And in

the same letter: "It is the same as conquering a city. You must occupy the
heights ... establish yourself at all the commanding points and then
launch your attack without any fear of resistance."75 A creature which has
fallen attracts predators: humiliation of those already visited by misfortune
brings the keenest pleasure. The less the danger to the one on top, the
more unhampered the joy in the torments he can now inflict: only through
the hopeless despair of the victim can power become pleasure and triumphantly revoke its own principle, discipline. Fear averted from the self
bursts out in hearty laughter, the expression of a hardening within the
individual which can only be fully lived out through the collective.
Ringing laughter has always denounced civilization. "Of all the lava
spewed forth from the crater of the human mouth, the most calamitous is
merriment," writes Victor Hugo in the chapter headed "Storms of men are
worse than storms of oceans."?6 "It is on misfortune," Juliette teaches."
"that the full weight of our malice most fall. The tears wrung from
wretchedness have a keenness which profoundly thrills our nervo_us sub-

~ance."7H Rather than with tenderness, pleasure makes its pact with cru-

chy, .uid sexual love becomes wh.u according 10 Nicl'/,sche,'" il always was:
"in irs means, war; anJ .u irs basis [he morral haired of [he sexes." "Wilh

both [he male and [he female." zoology leaches us, "Tove', or sexual atrrac-

[ion, is originally and preeminently 'sadie': it is positively gra[ified by [he
infliction of pain; it is as cruel as hunger."8o Thus, as its final result, civilization leads back to the terrors of nature. The lethal love on which Sade's

work is consranrly focused, Nietzsche's impudently solicitous magnanimi-

ty in seeking to spare the victim humiliation at any price: cruelty and the
idea of greatness deal no less harshly with human beings on the plane of
play and imagination than German fascism* was to do on that of reality.
However, whereas the unconscious colossus of real existence, subjeccless
capitalism, inflicts its destruction blindly, the deludedly rebellious subject

is willing to see that destruction as its fulfillment, and, together with the
biting cold it emits toward human beings misused as things, it also radiates the perverred love which, in the world of things, takes the place of
love in its immediacy. Sickness becomes the symptom of recovery. In

transfiguring the victims, delusion accepts their degradation. It makes
itself resemble the monster ofdomination which it cannot physically overcome. Imagination seeks as horror to withstand horror. The Roman
proverb that harshness is true pleasure expresses not merely the brutality
of slave drivers but the indissoluble contradiction of order, which, when it

sanctions happiness, turns it into self-parody and creates it only through
proscribing it. While they perpetuated this contradiction, Sade and
Nietzsche also contributed to its clarification.

To reason, devotion to the adored creature appears as idol worship.
The demise of idolatry follows necessarily from the ban on mythology
pronounced by Jewish monotheism and enforced against the changing
objects of adoration in the history of thought by that monotheism's secularized form, enlightenment. The decay of economic reality, which has

always been at the basis of superstition, released specific forces of negation.
Christianity, however, propagated love: the pure adoration of Jesus. It
sought to elevate the blind sexual drive by the hallowing of marriage, as it
also tried to bring the crystalline radiance of law closer to earthly life by
the idea of heavenly grace. The reconciliation of civilization with nature
which it sought prematurely to purchase with the doctrine of the crucified
God remained as alien to Judaism as to the rigorism of the Enlightenmen r.
Neither Moses nor Kant proclaimed emotion; their icy law knew neither

90 Excursus II

love nor sacrificial pyres. Nietzsche's attack on monotheism dealt a heav-

ier blow to Christian than to Jewish doctrine. While he repudiated the
Law he pledged himself to the "higher self,"81 a self no longer natural but
more-than-natural. He wanted to replace God by the "Overman" because
monotheism, in its broken, Christian form, had transparently become
mythology. But just as, in the service of this higher self, the old ascetic
ideals are extolled by Nietzsche as self-overcoming in the interest of developing "dominant power,"82 so the higher self turns out to be a desperate
attempt to rescue the God who was dead. In this, Nietzsche renews Kant's
endeavor to transform the divine law into an autonomous principle, to
rescue European civilization from giving up the ghost in English skepticism. Kant's principle: "that everything be done from the maxim of one's
will as a will that could at the same time have as its object itself as giving
universal law,"83 is also the secret of the Overman. His will is no less

despotic than the categorical imperative. Both principles aim at independence from external powers, at the unconditional freedom from tutelage
which defines the essence of enlightenment. However, as the fear of falsehood, a fear which even in his most "enlightened" moments Nietzsche
decried as "a piece of Quixotism.T" replaced the Law with self-legislation,
so that everything was made transparent as one great unmasked superstition, enlightenment itself, indeed, truth in any form, became an idol, and
we realize that "even we knowing ones of today, the godless and anti metaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief millennia old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that

God is truth, that the truth is divine. "85 .Science itself, therefore, is open to
the same criticism as metaphysics. The denial of God contains an irresolvable contradiction; it negates knowledge itself. Sade did not drive the
idea of enlightenment to this point, where it turns against itself. The
reflection of science on itself, the work of the Enlightenment's conscience,
was left to philosophy, meaning German philosophy. For Sade, enlightenment was not so much an intellectual as a social phenomenon. He carried
forward the dissolution of bonds-which Nietzsche idealistically believed
could be overcome by the higher self-and the critique of solidarity with
society, office, family86 to the point of proclaiming anarchy. His work lays
bare the mythological nature, of the principles on which civilization-was

hase\.1 alter the demise of religion: those of the Decalogue, of paternal
uurhoriry, of property. It is the exact inversion of the social theory e1abo.

juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 91
rated by Le Playa hundred years later." Each of the Ten Commandments
is declared void before the tribunal of formal reason. They are revealed
without exception as ideologies. At Juliette's request the Pope himself
pleads the case for murder." He finds it easier to rationalize un-Christian
acts in the light of natural reason than it had ever been to justify the
Christian principles according to which those acts were devilish. The
"mitered philosopher" has less need of sophistry in advocating murder
than Maimonides and St Thomas Aquinas in condemning it. Roman reason is even more inclined than the god of the Prussians to side with the
bigger battalions. The Law, however, has been dethroned, and the love
which was supposed to humanize it is unmasked as a reversion to idolatry.

It is not just romantic sexual love which has been condemned as metaphysics by science and industry bur love of any kind, for no love can withstand reason: neither that between wife and husband nor between lover

and beloved, nor the love between parents and children. The Due de
Blangis announces to his subjects that those related to the rulers, daughters and wives. should be treated as harshly, indeed, still more harshly, than
others, "in order to show you how deeply we despise the bonds by which
you may think us fettered."89 Woman's love is abolished like that of man.
The rules of liberrinage passed on by Saint-Fonds to Juliette are to apply
to all women/" Dolmance voices the materialistic disenchantment of

parental love. "These latter ties originate in the parents' fear of being abandoned in old age, and the self-interested concern they show for us in our
childhood is intended to earn them the same consideration in old age."?'
Sade's argument is as old as the bourgeoisie. Dernocritus already
denounced parental love as economic." Sade, however, applies the same
disenchantment even to exogamy, the foundation of civilization.
According ro him, there are no rational grounds to oppose incest." and
the hygienic argument formerly used has now been invalidated by ad-

vanced science, which ratifies Sade's cold judgment. "It has by no means
been proved that children born of incest have a greater tendency than others to suffer from cretinism, deaf-muteness, rickets, etc."94 The family,
held together not by romantic sexual love bur by maternal love, which
forms the basis of all tenderness and social feelings," conflicts with society itself. "Do not imagine you will make good republicans as long as you
isolate children, who should belong only to the whole community, within
your families.... Whereas there are great disadvantages in allowing chil-

92 Excursus II

dren to be absorbed into family interests which often diverge strongly
from those of the nation, very great benefits lie in separating them from
them."% "Conjugal ties" must be destroyed for social reasons; children are
ro be "absolutely forbidden" knowledge of their fathers, since they are

"uniquement les enfants de fa patril';97 the anarchy and individualism
which Sade proclaimed in the struggle against laws" culminate in the
absolute rule of the generality, the republic. Just as the deposed god returns

as a more repressive idol, the old, undemanding bourgeois state reappears
in the violence of the fascist collective. Sade thought through ro the end
the state socialism whose first steps brought the downfall of Saint-just and
Robespierre. If the bourgeoisie sent them, irs most loyal politicians, to the
guillotine, it banished its most outspoken writer ro the hell of the Bibliotheque Narionale, For the chronique scandaleuse of Justine and Juliette
which, turned out as if on a production line, prefigured in the style of the
eighteenth cenrury the sensational literature of the ninereenrh and the
mass literature of the twentieth is the Homeric epic after it has discarded

its last mythological veil: the story of thought as an instrument of power.
In taking fright at the image in irs own mirror, that thought opens ro view

what lies beyond it. It is not the harmonious social ideal, which even Sade
glimpsed dimly in the future: "gardez vas frontieres et restez chez VOUS";99 it

is not even the socialist uropia developed in the srory of Zame: loo it is the
f:lct that Sade did not leave it ro its enemies ro be horrified by the
Enlightenment which makes his work pivotal ro its rescue.
The dark writers of the bourgeoisie, unlike its apologists, did not
seek to avert the consequences of the Enlightenment with harrnonistic
doctrines. They did not pretend that fdrmalistic reason had a closer affinity ro morality than to immorality. While the light-bringing writers protected the indissoluble alliance of reason and atrocity, bourgeois society
and power, by denying that alliance, the bearers of darker messages pitilessly expressed the shocking truth. "Into hands stained by the murder of
spouses and children, sodomy, killing, prostitution, and infamy, heaven
has placed these riches ro reward me for such abominations," says Clairwil

in her summary of her brother's life. lol She exaggerates. The justice of bad
domination is not quite so consisrenr as \to reward only infamy. But only

exaggeration is true. The e~enrial character of prehistory" is the appear-

an~e of utmost horror in the individual detail. A statistical compilation of
those slaughtered in a pogrom, which also includes mercy killings, con.

Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality 93
ceals its essence, which emerges only in an exact description of the exception, the most hideous torture. A happy life in a world of horror is ignominiously refuted by the mere existence of that world. The larrer therefore
becomes the essence, the former negligible. No doubt, the ruling group in
the bourgeois era did not engage in killing their own children and spouses, or in prostirurion and sodomy, as frequenrlyas their subjects, who rook
over the morals of the rulers of earlier times. However, when power was at
stake, the rulers have piled up mounrains of corpses even in recenr centuries. Compared ro the menraliry and actions of the rulers under fascism,
in which power has come fully inro its own, the enthusiastic description
of the life of Brisa-Testa-although those rulers are recognizable in itpales to harmless banaliry. In Sade as in Mandeville, private vices are the

anticipatory hisroriography of public virtues in the totalitarian era. It is
because they did nor hush up the impossibiliry of deriving from reason a
fundamental argument against murder, but proclaimed it from the
rooftops, that Sade and Nietzsche are still vilified, above all by progressive
thinkers. In a different way to logical positivism, they both rook science at
its word. In pursuing the implications of reason still more resolutely than
the positivists their secret purpose was to lay bare the uropia which is contained in every great philosophy, as it is in Kant'S concept of reason: the
uropia of a humaniry which, itself no longer distorted, no longer needs
distortion. In proclaiming the identity of power and reason, their pitiless
doctrines are more compassionate than those of the moral lackeys of the
bourgeoisie. "Where are thy greatest dangers?," Nietzsche once asked, 102

"In piry." With his denial he redeemed the unwavering trust in humanity
which day by day is betrayed by consoling affirmation.

The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception

The sociological view that the loss of support from objective religion
and the disintegration of the last precapitalist residues, in conjunction
with technical and social differentiation and specialization, have given rise

to cultural chaos is refuted by daily experi enc e. ~di¢ (sEla, is hilCCEiiig
.

.

.

n=:=
.

Even the aesthetic manifestations of poliri opposiles~proclaim the

~e inflexible rhythm. The" decorative administrative and exhibition
buildings of industry differ little between authoritarian and other countries. The bright monumental structures shooting up on all sides show off
the systematic ingenuity of the state-spanning combines, toward which
the unfettered entrepreneurial system, whose monuments are the dismal
residential and commercial blocks in the surrounding areas of desolate
cities, was already swiftly advancing. The older buildings around the concrete centers already look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts, like the flimsy structures at international trade fairs, sing the praises of technical progress while inviting their users to throw them away after
shorr use like tin cans. But the town-planning projects, which are supposed to perpetuate individuals as autonomous units in hygienic small
apartments, subjugate them only more completely to their adversary, the
total power of capital." Just as.rhe occupants of city centers are uniformly
summoned there for purposes of work and leisure, as producers and con.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 95
sumers, so the living cells crystallize into homogenous, well-organized
complexes. The conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of

universal and particular. AJI mass culture under monopoITisidenti~\and
the COntours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand Out. Those in charge no longer take much rrouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted. Films and radio no longer need to present
themselves as an. the truth that they are nothingburbusiness is used as;<tti

ideology to legrtimiie a;~-t-~ash·th'e::TnttihtifHtaU;;:pftidl1$t. They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors' incomes quell
any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products.
Interested parties like to explain the culture industry in technological terms. Irs millions of participants, they argue, demand reproduction

processes which inevitably lead to the use of standard products to meet the
same needs at countless locations. The technical antithesis between few

production centers and widely dispersed reception necessitates organization and planning by those in control. The standardized forms, it is
claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is

why they are aCl"epred with so little resistance. Til re'aht1";~a' cyele"ofmanip~
ulation and rerroacri \T need is un i~'il1g (he system ever mer.e. - tigh-tly. \'\/har
is not mentioned is that the basis on which technology is gaining power
over society is the power of those whose economic position in society is
strongest." Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It·
• is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself. Automobiles,
bombs, and films hold the totality together until their leveling element
demonstrates its power against the very system of injustice it served. For
the present the technology of the culture industry confines itself to standardization and mass production and sacrifices what once distinguished
the logic of the work from that of society. These adverse effects, however,
should not be attributed to the internal laws of technology itself but to its

function within the economy today, * Any need which might escape the
central control is repressed by that of individual consciousness, The step
from telephone to radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former lib-

erally permitted the participant to play the role of subject. The latter
democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose
them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put our by different

96 The Culture Industry
stations. No mechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned ro unfreedom. They confine themselves to the
apocryphal sphere of "amateurs," who, in any case, are organized from
above. Any trace of spontaneity in the audience of the official radio is
steered and absorbed into a selection of specializations by talent-spotters,

performance competitions, and sponsored evenrs of every kind. The talents belong to the operation long before they are put on show; otherwise

they would nor conform so eagerly. The mentality of the public, which
allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a pan of
the system, not an excuse for it. If a branch of art follows the same recipe
as one far removed from it in terms of its medium and subject matter; if
the dramatic denouement in radio "soap operas?" is used as an instructive
example ofhow ro solve technical difficulties-which are mastered no less
in "jam sessions" than at the highest levels of jazz-or if a movement from
Beethoven is loosely "adapted" in the same way as a Tolsroy novel is adapt-

ed for film, the pretext of meeting the public's spontaneous wishes is mere

hot air. An explanation in terms of the specific interests of the technical
apparatus and its personnel would be closer ro the truth, provided that
apparatus were undersrood in all its details as a part of the economic

mechanism of selection. * Added ro this is the agreement, or at least the
common determination, of the executive powers ro produce or let pass
nothing which does not conform ro their tables, co their concept of the
U)11~1l1ncr. or. above all, ro themselves.
If the objective social tendency of this age is incarnated in the ob-

scure subjective intentions of·hoard chairmen, this is primarily the case in
dw most powerful sectors of indust rv: steel. petroleum, elecrricirv, cherni,als. (:oIllpared to them the culture monopolies are weak and dependent.
They have to keep in with the true wielders of power, ro ensure that their

sphere of mass society, the specific product of which still has roo much of

cozy liberalism and Jewish ~nrellectualism about it, is not subjected ro a
series of purges. * The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting
company on the electrical industry, or of film on the banks, characterizes
the whole sphere, the individual secrors of which are themselves economically intertwined. Everything is so tightly clustered that the concentration

of illtelle~t reaches a level ",\here it overflows the demarcations between
company names and technical secrors. The-relentless unity of the culture

industry bears witness to the emergenr unity of politics. Sharp distinctions
-,

.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 97
like those between A and B films. or between short stories published in

magazines in different price segments, do not so much reflect real differences as assist in the classification, organization, and identification of con-

sumers.. SOlllt:lhin~ is provided tor everyone so that no one can '::SGlpC; differences art: hammered home and propagated. The hierarchy of serial
qualities purveyed to the public serves only to quantify it more complete-

ly. Everyone is supposed to behave spontaneously according to a "level"
determined by indices and to select the category of mass product manufactured for their type. On the charts of research organizations. indistinguishable from those of political propaganda, consumers are divided up as
statistical material inro red. ?;reen. and blue areas .l~()rding to income
group.

The schematic nature of this procedure is evident from the fact that
the mechanically differentiated products are ultimately all the same. That
the difference between the models of Chrysler and General Motors is fun-

damentally illusory is known by any child, who is fascinated by that very
difference. The advantages and disadvantages debated by enthusiasts serve

()~ly to perpetuale the apflC;:li~.2ce of competition and choice. It is no different with the offerings of Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

But the differences, even between the more expensive and cheaper products from the same firm, are shrinking-in cars to the different number
of cylinders, engine capacity, and details of the gadgets, and in films to the

different number of stars, the expense lavished on technology, labor and
costumes, or the use of the latest psychological formulae. The unified standard of value consists in the level of conspicuous production, the amount
of investment put on show. The budgeted differences of value in the culture industry have nothing to do with actual differences. with the meaning of the product itself. The technical media, tOO, are being engulfed by
an insatiable uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film,
delayed only for as long as the interested parries cannot agree. Such a synthesis, with its unlimited possibilities, promises to intensify the impoverishment of the aesthetic material so radically that the identity of all indus-

trial cultural products, still scantily disguised today, will triumph openly
tomorrow in a mocking fulfillment of Wagner's dream of the total an
work. The accord between word, image, and music is achieved so much
1110rc perfectly than in Tristan because the sensuous elements, which compliantly document only the surface of social reality, are produced in prin-

98 The Culture Industry
ciple within the same technical work process, the uniry of whi ch they

expr ess as their true content. This work process integrates all the elements
of production, from the original concept of the novel, shaped by its side-

long glance at film, * to the last sound effect. It is the triumph of invested
capital. To impress the omnipotence of capital on the hearts of expropriated job candidates as the power of their true master is the purpose of all
films , regardless of the plot selected by the production directors.
Even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves

according to the uniry of production . The active contribution which
Kanrian schernatisrn still expected of subjects-that they should, from the
first, relate sensuous rnulripliciry to fundamenral concepts-is denied to

the subject by industry. It purveys schematism as its first service to the cuscomer. According ro Kanrian schematism, a secret mechanism within the
psyche preformed immediate data ro fit them into the system of pure reason. That secret has now been unraveled. Although the operations of the
mechanism appear to be planned by those who supply the data, th e cul-

t urc industry, the planning is in facr imposed un the indusrry b:v the iner-

li ;\ or a society irrational de spite all its rationalization. and thi s cal arnirous
I cudcncy, in passing through the agencies of business;' takes on the
shrewd intentionality peculiar ro them . For the co nsumer there is no:-hing
Idi ltl c lassify, since the classification has already been preempted bv the , d ll': III;Hism of production, T his dr eamless a n for the people tulfils the

.1 /"(':1111)' idealism whi ch went too f;lr ror idealism in its critical fo rm . Everything comes from consciousness-from that of God for Malebranche and
Berkeley, and from earthly production management for mass art. Not only

do hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically
;IS rig id invariants, but the specific content of productions, the seemingly
variable element, is itself derived from those rypes . The details become
interchangeable. The brief interval sequence which has proved catchy in a
h it so n g, the hero's temporary disgrace which he accepts as a "good sport,"
the wholesome slaps the heroine receives from the strong hand of the male

star, his plain-speaking abruptness toward the pampered heiress, are, like
all the details, ready-made cliches, ro be used here and there as desired and
always completely defined by thepurpose they serve within the schema.
' Ii, confirm "the schema by acting as its constituents is their sole raison

(/'hrc'. In a film, the outcome can invariably be -predicted at the Starr-who
-,

.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 99
will be rewarded, punished, forgotten-and in light music the prepared
ear can always guess the continuation after the first bars of a hit song and
is gratified when it actually occurs. The average choice of words in a short
story must not be tampered with. The gags and effects are no less calculated than their framework. They are managed by special experts, and their
slim variety is specifically tailored to the office pigeonhole. The culture
industry has developed in conjunction with the predominance of the
effect, the tangible performance, the technical detail, over the work, which
once carried the idea and was liquidated with it. By emancipating itself,
the detail had become refractory; from Romanticism ro Expressionism it
had rebelled as unbridled expression, as the agent of opposition, against
organization. In music, the individual harmonic effect had obliterated
awareness of the form as a whole; in painting the particular detail had
obscured the overall composition; in the novel psychological penetration
had blurred the architecture. Through totality, the culture industry is
purting an end to all rhat.'*1though operating only with effects, it subdues

~ unruliness and subordinates them to the formula which supplants
the work. It crushes equally the whole and the parts. The whole confronts
the details in implacable detachment, somewhat like the career of a successful man, in which everything serves ro illustrate and demonstrate a
success which, in fact, it is no more than the sum of those idiotic events.

The so-called leading idea is a filing compartment which creates order, not
connections. Lacking both contrasr and relatedness. the whole and the detail look alike, Their harmony, guaranteed in advance, mocks the painfully achieved harmony of the great bourgeois works of art. In Germany even
the most carefree films of democracy were overhung already by the graveyard stillness of dictatorship.
The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry.
The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside
as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production. The more densely and completely its techniques duplicate em pi ricaI objects, rhe more easily it creates rhe illusion that the world
outside is a seamless extension of the one which has been revealed in the
'I

cinema. Since the abrupt introduction of the sound film, mechanical
duplication has become entirely subservient to this objective. According to
this tendency, life is ro be made indistinguishable from the sound film. Far

11Ill

/lit' (,'/111/11 '/ ' Illtl/lllnl

1I101't: slI'ollgly rhnn the rhc.urc ul illusion, l,jm ,I, Iii" II , , 11 1,li, 'Il( (' ,IJ'"
dlll1l"II' ,i"ll ill 1\lli, II ill<'l ' IIII)' ,I,! 1 ",1 1 1 1 liLLI, 111 lJJ1.I~lJl,lIl"11 - LUJltalnn1

1)\ ill<' IJiI11~ lr.un .-work hili lImuj.JL'!vi,eJ hv ib I'rcci~e aCillalirle~-with-

.u u I<,.,illg i1IL dlll', IL !; tltlJ~ It t r.uns dlU~L' exposed [0 it to idcntiiv film
dlll\ d\ Will. re:llil). The withering of imagination and spontaneity in the
consumer of culrure raday need nor be traced back ro psychological mechanisms. The producrs themselves, especially the mosr characreristic, the

sound film, cripple those faculties rhrough their objective makeup. They
arc so constructed that their adequare comprehension requires a quick, observant, knowledgeable cast of mind bur positively debars the specraror
from thinking, if he is not to miss the fleeting facts. This kind of alertness
is so ingrained that it does not even need to be activared in particular
cases, while still repressing the powers of imagination. Anyone who is so
absorbed by the world of the film, by gesrure, image, and word, that he or
she is unable ro supply thar which would have made ir a world in the first
place, does not need to be entirely transfixed by the special operations of

the machinery at rhe moment of the performance. The required qualities
of arn-ru ion have bCL'Ul11c so familiar from orher tllms :1I1d other culture

I'r"dllLt~ already known to him or her that they appear autornaticallv. The
power of indusrrial society" is imprinted on people once and for all. The
pruducrs of the culture industry are such that rhev can be alerrlv con-

,UIlU:J even in a SLue of distraction. Bur each one is a model of the gigan-

ric economic machinery, * which, from the firsr, keeps everyone on their
roes, both ar work and in the leisure rime which resembles it. In any sound
film or any radio broadcasr something is discernible which cannot be
attributed as a social effecr to anyone of them, but to all together. Each
single manifesration of rhe culrure indusrry inescapably reproduces

human beings, as what the whole h:ts made them. And J.11 its Jgcms, Cn:;'1l1
I h, producer to the women's organizations, are on the alert to ensure that
the <irnple reproduction of mind does not lead on to rhe expansion of
!1~inJ.
The complaints o€ art historians and cultural artorneys over the
exhaustion of the energy which created artistic sryle in rhe West are frighteningly unfounded. <The routine translation of everything, eV1:11 of what
has not yet been thought. into the schema of mechanical reproducibiliry
sues heyond the rigor and scope of any true style -the concept with
which culture lovers idealize the precapiralist pasr as an organic era. No

Pulcstri na could have dim i n.ucd t he unprepared or u nrcsolved dissona nee
more purisrically than the jazz arranger excludes ally phrase which does
nor exactly fit the jargon. Ifhe jazzes up Mozart, he changes the music not
only where it is too difficult or serious but also where the melody is merely harmonized differencly, indeed, more simply, than is usual today. No
medieval patron of architecture can have scrutinized the subjects ofchurch
windows and sculptures more suspiciously than the studio hierarchies
examine a plot by Balzac or Victor Hugo before it receives the imprimatur
of feasibility. No cathedral chapter could have assigned the grimaces and
torments of the damned to their proper places in the order of divine love
more scrupulously than production managers decide the position of the
torture of the hero or the raised hem of the leading lady's dress within the

litany of the big film. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalog of what is forbidden and what is tolerared" is so extensive that it not
only defines the area left free but wholly controls it. Even the most minor
details are modeled according to this lexicon. Like its adversary, avantgarde an, the culture indusrrv defines irs own language positively, b.}:.- .
means of prohibitions applied ro its syntax and vocabulary. The permanent compulsion to produce new effects which yet remain bound to the

old schema, becoming additional rules, merely increases the power of the
tradition which the individual effect seeks to escape. Every phenomenon
is by now so thoroughly imprinted by the schema that nothing can occur
that does not bear in advance the trace of the jargon, that is not seen at
first glance to be approved. But the true masters, as both producers and
reproducers, are those who speak the jargon with the same free-and-easy
relish as if it were the language it has long since silenced. Such is the indus-

try's ideal of naturalness. It asserts itself more imperiously the more the
perfected technology reduces the tension between the culture product and
everyday existence. The paradox of famine travestied as nature is detectable in every utterance of rhe culture industry. and in many is quire bla-

!£UL A jazz musician who has to playa piece of serious music, Beethoven's
simplest minuet, involuntarily syncopates. and condescends to start on
the beat only with a superior smile. Such "naturalness," complicated by
the ever more pervasive and exorbitant claims of the specific medium, constitutes the new style, "a system of nonculture to which one might even
concede a certain 'unity of style' if it made any sense to speak of a stylized
barbarism.'"

102

The Culture Industry

The general influence of this stylization may already be more binding than the official rules and prohibitions; a hit song is treated more
leniently today if it does not respect the thirty-two bars or the compass of
the ninth than if it includes even the most elusive melodic or harmonic

detail which falls outside the idiom. Orson Welles is forgiven all his
offences against the usages of the craft because, as calculated rudeness,

they confirm the validity of the system all the more zealously. The compulsion of the technically conditioned idiom which t:he stars and directors
must produce as second nature, so that the nation may make it theirs,
relates to nuances so fine as to be almost as subtle as the devices used in a

work of the avant-garde, where, unlike those of the hit song, they serve

truth. The rare ability to conform punctiliously to the obligations of the
idiom of naturalness in all branches of the culture industry becomes the
measure of expertise. As in logical positivism, what: is said and how it is
said must be verifiable against everyday speech. The producers are experts.
The idiom demands the most prodigious productive powers, which it
absorbs and squanders. Satanically, it has rendered cultural conservatism's
distinction between genuine and artificial style obsolete. A style might
possibly be called artificial if it had been imposed from outside against the
resistance of the intrinsic tendencies of form. But in the culture industry
t h« subject matter itself. down ("0 its smallest elements, springs from the
s.uuc apparaLLls as the jargon inro which it is absorbed. The deals struck
between the art specialists and the sponsor and censor over some all-roo unbelievable lie tell us less about internal, aesthetic tensions than about a

divergence of interests. The reputation of th~ specialist, in which a last
residue of actual autonomy still occasionally finds refuge, collides with the
business policy of the church or the industrial combine producing the culture commodity. By its own nature, however, the matter has already been
reified as negotiable even before the various agencies come into conflict.
Even before Zanuck" acquired her, Saint Bernadetre gleamed in the eye of
her writer as an advert aimed at all the relevant consortia. To this the

impulses of form have been reduced. As a result, the style of the culture
industry, which has no resistant material to overcome, is at the same time
the negation of style. The reconciliation of general and particular, of rules
and the specific demands of the subject, through which alone style takes
on substance, is nullified by the absence of tension between the poles: "the
l:XITl:IlICS which touch" have become a murky idenriry in which the general C:I1l replace the particular and vice versa.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 103

Nevertheless, this caricature of style reveals something about the
genuine style of the past. The concept of a genuine style becomes transparent in the culture industry as the aesthetic equivalent of power. The
notion of style as a merely aesthetic regularity is a retrospective fantasy of
Romanticism. The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages
but of the Renaissance expresses the different structures of social coercion
in those periods, not the obscure experience of the subjects, in which the
universal was locked away. The great artists were never those whose works
embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who
adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering,
as a negative truth. In the style of these works expression took on the
strength without which existence is dissipated unheard. Even works which
are called classical, like the music of Mozart, contain objective tendencies
which resist the style they incarnate. Up to Schonberg and Picasso, great
artists have been mistrustful of style, which at decisive points has guided
them less than the logic of the subject matter. What the Expressionists and
Dadaists attacked in their polemics, the untruth of style as such, triumphs
today in the vocal jargon of the crooner, in the adept grace of the film star,
and even in the mastery of the photographic shot of a farm laborer's hovel.
In every work of an, style is a promise. In being absorbed through style
into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea
of the true universal. This promise of the work of art to create truth by
impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms is as nec-

essary as it is hypocritical. By claiming to anticipate fulfillment through
their aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of the existing order as
absolure.s lo this extent the claims of art are always also ideology. Yer it is '
onlv in its stntggle with tradition, a srruggle precipitated in style, that art
can rind expression for surfering. The moment in the work of art by which
it transcends reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment,
however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity
of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those
traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the pas-

sionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure, in
which the style of the great work of art has always negated itself, the inferior work has relied on its similarity to others, the surrogate of identity.
I he culrnrt- indusuv ha- r111<1][," posited this imitation as absolute. Being
ll()fhirl~~, or hrr (kill "\1\1 . .- . il dlvldge~ ~IVlc-\ sec ret: obcdicucc 10 i h« '(lei,ll

104 The Culture Industry
jhierarchy. Aesthetic barbarism today is accomplishing what has threatened

intellectual formations since they were brought together as culture and
neutralized. To speak about culture always went against the grain of culture. The general designation "culture" already contains, virtually, the
process of identifying, cataloging, and classifying which imports culture
into the realm of administration. Only what has been industrialized, rigorously subsumed, is fully adequate to this concept of culture. Only by

subordinating all branches of intellectual production equally to the single
purpose of imposing on the senses of human beings, from the time they
leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock on in the morning,
the imprint of the work routine which they must sustain rhroughour the
day, does [hi.'> culture mockingly fultlll the notion of a unified culture
which the philosophers of the individual personality held out agaiusr mass
culture,

The culture industry. the nIOS[ inllexibie style of ali. thus proves to

be the goal of the very liberalism which is criticized for its lack of style.

Not only did its categories and contents originate in the liberal sphere, in
domesticated naturalism no less than in the operetta and the revue, but
the modern culture combines are the economic area in which a piece of
the circulation sphere otherwise in the process of disintegration, together
with the corresponding entrepreneurial types, still tenuously survives. In
that area people can still make their way, provided they do not look roo
closely at their true purpose and are willing to be compliant..\nvone who
resists can survive only bv being incorporated, Once-registered as diverging from the culture industry, they belong to it as the land reformer does
to capitalism. Realistic indignation is the trademark of those with a new
idea ,to sell. Public authority in the present society" allows only those com-

plaints to be heard in which the ~ttentive ear can discern the prominent
figure under whose protection the rebel is suing for peace. The more

immeasurable the gulf between chorus and leaders, the more certainly is
there a place among the latter for anyone who demonstrates superiority by
well-organized dissidence. In this way liberalism's rendencv to f.inc t'ree

!ei'~ In iI' .thll'q members survives in the culture indusrrv, To open that
industry to clever people is the function of the otherwise largely regulated
market, in which, even in its heyday, freedom was the freedom of the stupid 10 starve, in art as elsewhere. Not for nothing did the system of the
.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 105

culture industry originate in the liberal industrial countries, just as all its
characteristic media, especially cinema, radio, jazz, and magazines, also
triumph there. Its progress, however, stems from the general laws of capital. Gaumont and Pathe," Ullstein and Hugenberg* did not follow the
international trend to their own disadvantage; Europe's economic dependence on the USA after the war and the inflation also made its contribu-

tion. The belief that the barbarism of the culture industry is a result of
"cultural lag,n of the backwardness of American consciousness in relation
to the state of technology, is quite illusory. Prefascist Europe was backward
in relation to the monopoly of culture. But it was precisely to such backwardness that intellectual activity owed a remnant of autonomy, its last
exponents their livelihood, however meager. In Germany the incomplete
permeation of life by democratic control had a paradoxical effect. Many
areas were still exempt from the market mechanism which had been
unleashed in Western countries. The German educational system, including the universities, the artistically influential theatres, the great orchestras, and the museums were under patronage. The political powers, the
state and the local authorities who inherited such institutions from abso-

lutism, had left them a degree of independence from the power of the
market as the princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This stiffened the backbone of art in its late phase against the verdict
of supply and demand, heightening its resistance far beyond its actual
degree of protection. In the market itself the homage paid to not yet marketable artistic quality was converted into purchasing power, so that reputable literary and musical publishers could suppOrt authors who brought
in little more than the respect of connoisseurs. Only the dire and incessant
threat of incorporation into commercial life as aesthetic experts finally
hrought the artists to heel. In former times they signed their letters, like
Kant and Hume, "Your most obedient servant," while undermining the
foundations of throne and altar. Today they call heads of government by
their first names and are subject, in every artistic impulse, to the judgment
of their illiterate principals. The analysis offered by de Tocqueville a hundred years ago has been fully borne out in the meantime. Under the private monopoly of culture tyranny does indeed "leave the body free and
sets to work directly on the soul. The ruler no longer says: 'Either you
think as I do or you die.' He says: 'You are free not to think as I do; your
lire, YOllr propcny-all that yOll shall keep. But from this day on you will

ro6 The Culture Industry
be a stranger among US.'' '2 Anyone who dues not conform is condemned
to an economic impotence which is prolonged in the intellectual powerlessness of the eccentric lonef. .J:4sconnt:GtCd,tr6fll·''f:ID~-maifltouearn. 11tJ- ioS';

casiiY"l:onvicted of"'i'ffmft!i!tUatyi \'\"h",rea<; rlu- mechanism or ,upph- and
demand is today disintegrating in material production, in the superstructure it acts as a control on behalf of the rulers. The consumers are the

workers and salaried employees, the farmers and petty bourgeois.
Capitalist production hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they
unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them. However, just as
the ruled have always taken the morality dispensed to them by the rulers
more seriously than the rulers themselves, the defrauded masses today
cling to the myth of success still more ardently than the successful. They,
[00, have their aspirations. They insist unwaveringly on the ideology by
which they are enslaved. The pernicious love of the common people for

the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities. It
surpasses the rigor of the Hays Office,* just as, in great epochs, it has
inspired renewed zeal in greater agencies directed against it, the terror of
the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney* rather than the tragic Garbo,
Donald Duck rather than Betty Boop. The industry. bows to the vote it
has itself rigged. The incidental costs to the firm which cannot turn a profit from its contract with a declining star are legitimate costs for the system
as a whole. By artfully sanctioning the demand for trash, the system inaugurates total harmony. Connoisseurship and expertise are proscribed as the
arrogance of those who think themselvessuperior, whereas culture dis-

tributes its privileges democratically to all. Under the ideological truce
between them, the conformism of die consumers, like the shamelessness

of the producers they sustain, can have a good conscience. Both content
themselves with the reproduction of sameness.
Unending sameness also govern1i the relationship to the past. What
is new in the phase of mass culture compared to that of late liberalism is
[he exclusion of the new. The machine is rotating on the spot. While it
already determines consumption, it rejects anything untried as a risk. In
film, any manuscript which is not reassuringly based on a best-seller is
viewed with mistrust. That is why there is incessant talk of ideas. novelty
and surprises, of what is both totally familiar and has never existed before.
Tempo and dynamism are paramount. Nothing is allowed to stay as it was,

everything must be endlessly in motion. ror only rhe l1~iwr":11 vicrorv or

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 107

the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that

nothing will change, that nothing unsuitable will emerge.~To add anything
to the proven cultural inventory would be too speculative. The frozen genres-sketch, short story, problem film, hit song-represent the average of
late liberal taste threateningly imposed as a norm. The most powerful of
the culture agencies, who work harmoniously with others of their kind as
only managers do, whether they come from the ready-to-wear trade or"
college, have long since reorganized and rationalized the objective mind.
It is as if some omnipresent agency* had reviewed the material and issued
an authoritative catalog tersely listing the products available. The ideal
forms are inscribed in the cultural heavens where they were already numbered by Plato-indeed, were only numbers, incapable of increase or
change.
Amusement and all the other elements of the culture industry existed long before the industry itself. Now they have been taken over from
above and brought fully up to date. The culture industry can boast of having energetically accomplished and elevated to a principle the often inept
transposition of art to the consumption sphere, of having stripped amusement of its obtrusive naiveties and improved the quality of its commodities. The more all-embracing the culture industry has become, the more
pitilessly it has forced the outsider into either bankruptcy or a syndicate;
at the same time it has become more refined and elevated, becoming final-

lya synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris.* Its victory is twofold:
what is destroyed as truth outside its sphere can be reproduced indefinite-

ly .....irhin it as lies. "Light" art as such, entertainment, is not-a form of
decadence. Those who deplore it as a betrayal of the ideal of pure expres-

sion harbor illusions about society.* The purity of bourgeois art, hypostatized as a realm of freedom contrasting to material praxis, was bought
from the outset with the exclusion of the lower class; and art keeps faith
with the cause of that class, the true universal, precisely by freeing itself
from the purposes of the false. Serious art has denied itself to those for
whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness
and who must be glad to use the time not spent at the production line in
being simply carried along. Light art has accompanied autonomous art as
its shadow. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which

the latter could not apprehend because of its social premises gives the former an appearance of objective justification. The split between them is

108

The Culture Industry

itself the truth: it expresses at least the negativity of the culture which is
the sum of both spheres. The antithesis can be reconciled least of all by
:lhsorbing light art into serious or vice versa. That, however, is what the
culture industry attempts. The eccentricity of the circus, the peep show, or
the brothel in relation to society is as embarrassing to it as that of Schonberg and Karl Kraus. The leading jazz musician Benny Goodman therefore has to appear with the Budapest String Quartet, more pedantic rhythmically than any amateur clarinetist, while the quartet play with the sac-

charine monotony of Guy Lombardo. * What is significant is not crude
ignorance, stupidity or lack of polish. The culiurc industry hJ..'> abolished
tIll" rubbish of Iorrner times bv imposing irs own pertection, by prohibiting and domesticating dilettantism. while itself incessantly committing
l he blunders without which the elevated style cannot be conceived. \Vhal
is new, however, is that the irreconcilable elements of culture. art. and

.u n use rne nr have been subjected equally to the concept of purpose and
l hus hrought under a single lalse denominator: -the totality of the culture
industry. Its element is repetition. The fact that its characteristic innovations are in all cases mere improvements to mass production is not extraneuus to the system. With good reason the interest of countless consumers
is focused on the technology, not on the rigidly repeated, threadbare and
half-abandoned content. The social power revered by the spectators manifests itself more effectively in the technically enforced ubiquity of stereo-

types than in the stale ideologies which the ephemeral contents have to
endorse.

Nevertheless, rhe culture industry remains rhe entertainment busi- •
I1l:SS:tJrs corrrrol of consumers i~ 1"riediatedhy~i.uid its hold

principle of entertainment to anything which is more than it,d!: S I'"

will not be broken by outright dictate but by the hostility inherent in the

1cn.,kI1Lie~ ~:tQ~ ;,,~.~m.· [limed into the ilesh and blood of
the- pllhlic hy the social proc.::ss as a whole. those tendencies are reinforced
bv till' survival of the market in the industrv. Demand has not yet been

replaced by simple obedience. The major reorganization of the film industry shortly before the First World War, the material precondition for its
expansion, was a deliberate adaptation to needs of the public registered at

the tick~t office, which were hardly thought worthy of consideration in the
pioneering days of the screen. That view is still held by the captains of the
film indusrry, who accept only more or less phenomenal box-office success
.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 109

as evidence and prudently igl1mc the counterevidence. truth. Their ideol-

og.~· is business, In this they arc righl to the extent that rll~(priweribf'the
'Ctrl't't~~.~;,,·"Air'i.th~ed'·~dand not in simple
antithesis to it-or even in the antithesis between omnipotence and powerlessness. Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capital-

ism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again. At the same time, however, ll}Ccb, -

. mizarion ha.:.~<i~ef.'civer leisure and itshappin-ess""deteHni~w#>';
thoroughly"Hie 'hrb~Q~of.-;HtataU1mcru commodiaes, that the olTduty worker can experience nothing. but afltT-inugcs of the work process
itself The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what is imprinted is the automated sequence of standardized tasks. The only escape
from [he work process in bcrory and otfice is through adaptation to it in
leisure time. This is the incurable sickness of all entertainment. Amuse-

ment congeals into boredom, since. [0 be amusement. it must cost no
effOrt J.nJ therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association, The spectator must need no thoughts of his own: the product prescribes each reaction, not through any actual coherence-which collapses
once exposed to thought-but through signals. Any logical connection
presupposing mental capacity is scrupulously avoided. Developments are
to emerge from the directly preceding situation, not from the idea of the

whole. There is no plot which could withstand the screenwriters' eagerness
to extract the maximum effect from the individual scene. Finally, even the
schematic formula seems dangerous, since it provides some coherence of
meaning, however meager, when only meaninglessness is acceptable.
Often the plot is willfully denied the development called for by characters
and theme under the old schema. Instead, the next step is determined by
what the writers take to be their most effective idea. Obtusely ingenious
surprises disrupt the plot. The product's tendency to fall back perniciouslyon the pure nonsense which. as buffoonery and clowning, was a legitimate part of popular an up to Chaplin and the Marx brothers, emerges
most strikingly in the less sophisticated genres. Whereas the films ofGreer
Garson and Bette Davis can still derive some claim to a coherent plot from
the unity of the socio-psychological case represented, the tendency to subvert meaning has taken over completely in the text of novelty songs," suspense films, and cartoons. The idea itself, like objects in comic and horror
films. is massacred and mutilated. Novelty songs have always lived 011 con-

IID

The Culture Industry

tempt for meaning, which, as both ancestors and descendants of psychoanalysis, they reduce to the monotony of sexual symbolism. In crime and
adventure films the spectators are begrudged even the opportunity to witness the resolution. Even in nonironic examples of the genre they must
make do with the mere horror of situations connected in only the most
perfunctory way.

Cartoon and stunt films were once expo~ents of fantasy against
rationalism. They allowed justice to be done to the animals and things
electrified by their technology, by granting the mutilated beings a second
life. Today they merely confirm the victory of technological reason over
truth. A few years ago they had solid plots which were resolved only in the
whirl of pursuit of the final minutes. In this their procedure resembled
that of slapstick comedy. But now the temporal relations have shifted. The
opening sequences state a plot motif so that destruction can work on it
throughout the action: with the audience in gleeful pursuit the protagonist is tossed about like a scrap of litter, The quantity of organized amusement is converted into the quality of organized cruelty," The self-elected
censors of the film industry, its accomplices, monitor the duration of the"

atrocity prolonged into a hunt. The jollity-dispels the joy supposedly conferred by the sight of an embrace and postpones satisfaction until the day
of the pogrom. To the extent that cartoons do more than accustom the
senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that
continuous attrition, the breaking of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfor-

runarc victim in real lite receive [heir beatings so that [he spectators can
accustom themselves to theirs.

The enjoyment of the violence done to the film character turns im o •
violence against the spectatOr; distraction becomes exertion. No stimulant
concocted by the experts may escape the weary eye; in face of the slick presentation no one may appear stupid even for a moment; everyone has to
keep up, emulating the smartness displayed and propagated by the production. This makes it doubtful whether the culture industry even still fulfils its self-proclaimed function of distraction. If the majority of radio stations and cinemas were shut down, consumers probably would not feel too
much deprived. In stepping from the street into the cinema, they no
longer enter the world of dream in any case, and once the use of these
institutions was no longer made 'obligatory by their mere existence, the
.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

III

urge to use them might not be so overwhelming. * Shutting them down in
this way would not be reactionary machine-wrecking. Those who suffered
would not be the film enthusiasts but those who always pay the penalty in
any case, the ones who had lagged behind. For the housewife, despite the
films which are supposed to integrate her still further, the dark of the cinema grants a refuge in which she can spend a few unsupervised hours, just
as once, when there were still dwellings and evening repose, she could sit
gazing Out of the window. The unemployed of the great centers find freshness in summer and warmth in winter in these places of regulated temperature. Apart from that, and even by the measure of the existing order,
the bloated entertainment apparatus does not make life more worthy of
human beings. The idea of "exploiting" the given technical possibilities,"
of fully utilizing the capacities for aesthetic mass consumption, is part of
an economic system which refuses to utilize capacities when it is a question of abolishing hunger.
;The culture indusrrv endlessly cheats iC5 consumers out
of what it
---...:_.cndlcssly promises. The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and
packaging is indefinitely prolonged: the promise, which actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to
come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu. The desire
inflamed by the glossy names and images is served up finally with a celebration of the daily round it sought to escape. Of course, genuine works
of art were not sexual exhibitions either. But by presenting denial as negative, they reversed, as it were, the debasement of the drive and rescued by
~

~

mediation what had been denied. That is the secret of aesthetic sublima-

tion: to present fulfillment in its brokenness. The culture industry" does
not sublimate: it suppresses. By constantly exhibiting the object of desire,
the breasts beneath the sweater, the naked torso of the sporting hero, it
merely goads the unsublirnated anticipation of pleasure, which through
the habit of denial has long since been mutilated as masochism. There is
no erotic situation in which innuendo and incitement are not accompanied by the clear notification that things will never go so far. The Hays
Office* merely confirms the ritual which the culture industry has staged
in any case: that of Tantalus. Works of art are ascetic and shameless; the
culture industry is pornographic and prudish. It reduces love to romance.
And, once reduced, much is permitted, even libertinage as a marketable
specialty, purveyed by quota with the trade description "daring." The mass

II2

The Culture Industry

production of sexuality autornaucally hrings about its repression. Because
of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is supposed to fall in love is.
from the start, a copy of himself. Every tenor now sounds like a Caruso
record, and the natural faces of Texas girls already resemble those of the
established models by which they would be typecast in Hollywood. The
mechanical reproduct ion of beaurv-c -which, admirredlv, j, made onlv
more inescapable hy the reactionary culture zealots with their methodical
idolizat ion of individuality-s -no longer leaves any room for the uncon-

scious idolatry wirh which thc experience of beaurv has always bee~
linked. The triumph over beauty is completed by humor, the malicious
pleasure elicited by any successful deprivation. There is laughter because
there is nothing to laugh about. Laughter. whether reconciled or terrible;

.i lways accompanies (he moment when a fear is ended." It indicates a
release, whether from physical danger or from the grip oflogic. Reconciled
laughter resounds with the echo of escape from power; wrong laughter
copes with fear by defecting to the agencies which inspire ir.-It echoes rhe
inescnpabiliry of power..4'un is a medicinal bath which the entertainment
industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for
cheating happiness. To moments of happiness laughter is foreign; only
operettas, and now films, present sex amid peals of merriment. But
Baudelaire is as humorless as Holderlin. In wrong society laughter is a
sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society's worthless totality. Laughter about something is always laughter arit. and the vital force
which, according to Bergson, bursts through rigidity in laughter is, in
truth, the irruption of barbarity, ,the self-assertion which, in convivial settings, dares to celebrate its liberation from scruple. The collective of those
who laugh parodies humanity. They are monads. each abandoning himself to the pleasure-at the expense of all others and with the majority in
supeon-of being ready to shrink from nothing. Their harmony presents
a caricature of solidarity. What is infernal about wrong laughter is that it
compellingly parodies what is best, reconciliation. Joy, however, is austere:
res seuera verum gaudium.* The ideology of monasteries, that it is not
asceticism but the sexual act which marks the renunciation of attainable

bliss" is negatively confirmed by the gravity of the lover who presciently
pins his whole life to the fleeting moment. The culture industry replaces
pain, which is present in ecstasy no less than in asceticism, with jovial
denial. Its supremc law is that its/consumers shall at nq price be given what

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 113

they desire: and in that very deprivation they must take their laughing satisfaction. In each performance of the culture industry the permanent
denial imposed by civilization is once more inflicted on and unmistakably
demonstrated to its victims. To offer them something and to withhold it
is one and the same. That is what the erotic commotion achieves. Just

because it can never take place, everything revolves around the coitus. In
film, to allow an illicit relationship without due punishment of the culprits
is even more strictly tabooed than it is for the future son-in-law of a millionaire to be active in the workers' movement. Unlike that of the liberal

era, industrial no less than nationalist culture can permit itself to inveigh
against capitalism, but not to renounce the threat of castration. This threat

constitutes its essence. * It outlasts the organized relaxation of morals toward the wearers of uniforms, first in the jaunty films produced for them

. a nd then in reality. What is decisive today is no longer Puritanism, though
it still asserts itself in the form of women's organizations, but the necessi-

ty, inherent in the system, * of never releasing its grip on the consumer, of
not for a moment allowing him or her to suspect that resistance is possi-

ble. This principle requires that while all needs should be presented to
individuals as capable of fulfillment by the culture industry, they should
be so set up in advance that individuals experience themselves through
their needs only as eternal consumers, as the culture industry's object. Not
only does it persuade them that its fraud is satisfaction; it also gives them
to understand that they must make do with what is offered, whatever it
may be. The flight from the everyday world, promised by the culture

industry in all its branches, is much like the abduction of the daughter in
the American cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The
culture industry presents that same everyday world as paradise. Escape,
like elopement, is destined from the first to lead back to its starting point.
Entertainment fosters the resignation which seeks to forget itself in entertainment.

Amusement, free of all restraint, would be not only the opposite of
art but its complementary extreme. Absurdity in the manner of Mark
Twain, with which the American culture industry flirts from time to time,
could be a corrective to art. The more scriouslv nrr rakes its opposition to
• D .i"l-:lll:.l.: , the more it resembles the seriousness of existence, its antithesis:

;he 11111r~ it [,iLJors to develop strictly according ro its own tormal laws, rhc
m or.' hhnr it requires to h~' understood, whereas its goal had been pre-

114 The Culture Industry
Liscly to negate the burden of labor. In some revue films, and especially in

'g~ot~sque stories and "funnies,"* the possibility of this negation is
momentarily glimpsed. Its realization, of course, cannot be allowed. Pure
amusement indulged to the full, relaxed abandon to colorful associations
and merry nonsense, is Cut short by amusement in its marketable form: it
is disrupted by the surrogate of a coherent meaning with which the culture industry insists on endowing its products while at the same time slyly
misusing them as pretexts for bringing on the stars. Biographies and other
fables stitch together the scraps of nonsense into a feeble-minded plot. It
is not the bells on the fool's cap that jingle but the bunch of keys of capitalist reason, which even in its images harnesses joy to the purpose of getting ahead. Every kiss in the revue film must contribute to the career of
the boxer or hit-song expert whose success is being glorified. The deception is not that the culture industry serves up amusement but that it spoils
rhe fun by its business-minded attachment to the ideological cliches of the
culture which is liquidating itself. Ethics and taste suppress unbridled
amusement as "naive"-naivety being rated no more highly than intellectualism-s-and even restrict its technical possibilities. The culture industry
is corrupt, not as a sink of iniquity but as the cathedral of higher gratifiGuion. At all its levels, from Hemingway to Emil Ludwig,* from Mrs.
M iniver* to the Lone Ranger, * from Toscanini to Guy Lombardo, * intellccrual products drawn ready-made from art and science are infected with
untruth. Traces of something better persist in those features of the culture
industry by which it resembles the circus-e-m the stubbornly purposeless
expertise of riders, acrobats, and clowns, in the "defense and justification
oj' physical as against intellectual art. "J'But the hiding places of mindless
.misrry, which represents what is human against the social mechanism, are
being relentlessly ferreted out by organizational reason, which forces

everything to justify itself in terms of meaning and effect. It is causing
meaninglessness to disappear at the lowest level of an just as radically as
meaning is disappearing at the highest.
The fusion of culture and entertainment is brought about today not

only by the debasement of culture but equally by the compulsory inrcllec-

. tu.ili,.. uiou uJ" ,UllU~l."111C1H. This is already evident in the fact that amusemcut is now experienced only in facsimile, in the form of cinema photography or the radio recording. In the age of liberal expansion amusement
was sustained hy an unbroken belief in the future: things would stay the
.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 115
same yet get better. Today, that belief has itself been intellectualized,
becoming so refined as to lose sight of all actual goals and to consist only

in a golden shimmer projected beyond the real. It is composed of the extra
touches of meaning-running exactly parallel to life itself-applied in the
screen world to the good guy, the engineer, the decent girl, and also to the
ruthlessness disguised as character, to the sporting interest, and finally to
the cars and cigarettes, even where the entertainment does not directly
serve the publicity needs of the manufacturer concerned but advertises the
system as a whole. Amusement itself becomes.an ideal, taking the place of
the higher values it eradicates from the masses by repeating them in an

even more stereotyped form than the advertising slogans paid for by
private interests. Inwardness, the subjectively restricted form of truth, was
always more beholden to the outward rulers than it imagined. The culture
industry is perverting it into a barefaced lie. It appears now only as the
high-minded prattle tolerated by consumers of religious bestsellers, psychological films, and women's serials" as an embarrassingly agreeable in-

gredient, so that they can more reliably control their own human emotions. In this sense entertainment is purging the affects in the manner once
attributed by Aristotle to tragedy and now by Mortimer Adler* to film.

The culture i I1d usrrv rcYcJJ~ the rru rh not only about style but also about .
•-carhars is.

The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it

can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers-producing, controlling, disciplining them; even withdrawing amusement altogether: here, no
limits are set to cultural progress. But the tendency is immanent in the
principle of entertainment itself, as a principle of bourgeois enlightenment. If the need for entertainment was largely created by industry, which
recommended the work to the masses through its subject matter, the oleo-

graph through the delicate morsel it portrayed and, conversely, the pudding mix through the image of a pudding, entertainment has always borne
the trace of commercial brashness, of sales talk, the voice of the fairground
huckster. But the original affinity between business and entertainment
reveals itself in the meaning of entertainment itself: as society's apologia.
To be entertained means to be in agreement. Entertainment makes itself

possible only by insulating itself from the totality of the social process,
making itself stupid and perversely renouncing from the first the in-

u6 The Culture Industry
escapable claim of any work, even the most trivial: in its restrictedness to
reflect the whole. Amusement always means putting things our of mind,
forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness.

It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad reality but from
the last thought of resisting that reality. The liberation which amusement
promises is from thinking as negation. The shamelessness of the rhetorical question "What do people want?" lies in the fact that it appeals to the
very people as thinking subjects whose subjectivity it specifically seeks to
annul. Even on those occasions when the public rebels against the pleasure
industry it displays the feebleness systematically instilled in it by that
industry. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly difficult to keep the
public in submission. The advance of stupidity must not lag behind the
simultaneous advance of in telligence. In the age of statistics the masses are
roo astute to identify with the millionaire on the screen and too obtuse to
deviate even minutely from the law oflarge numbers. Ideology hides itself
in probability calculations. Fortune will not smile on all-just on the one
who draws the winning ticket or, rather, the one designated to do so by a
higher power-usually the entertainment industry itself, which presents
itself as ceaselessly in search of talent. Those discovered by the talent
scouts and then built up by the studios are ideal types of the new, dependent middle classes. The female starlet is supposed to symbolize the secretary, though in a way which makes her seem predestined, unlike the real
secretary, to wear the flowing evening gown. Thus she apprises the female
spectator not only of the possibility that she, too, might appear on the
screen but still more insistently of the distance between them. Only one
can draw the winning lot, only one isprominent, and even though all have
mathematically the same chance, it is so minimal for each individual that
it is best to write it off at once and rejoice in the good fortune of someone
else, who might just as well be oneself but never is. Where the culture
industry still invites naive identification, it immediately denies it. It is no
longer possible to lose oneself in others. Once, film spectators saw their
own wedding in that of others. Now the happy couple on the screen are
specimens of the same species as everyone in the audience, but the sameness posits the insuperable separation of its human elements. The perfected similarity is the absolute difference. The identity of the species prohihirs that of the individual cases. The culture industry" has sardonically
realized man's species being. Everyone amounts only to th,ose qualities by

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 117

which he or she can replace everyone else: all are fungible, mere specimens.

As individuals they are absolutely replaceable, pure nothingness, and are
made aware of this as soon as time deprives them of their sameness. This
changes the inner composition of the religion of success, which they are

sternly required to uphold. The path per aspera ad astra, which presupposes need and effort, is increasingly replaced by the prize. The element of
blindness in the routine decision as to which song is to be a hit, which
extra a heroine, is celebrated by ideology. Films emphasize chance. By imposing an essential sameness on their characters, with the exception of the
villain, to the point of excluding any faces which do l10t conform-for
example, those which, like Garbo's, do not look as if they would welcome
the greeting "Hello, sister"-the ideology does, it is true, make life initially easier for the spectators. They are assured that they do not need to
be in any way other than they are and that they can succeed just as well
without having to perform tasks of which they know themselves incapable. But at the same time they are given the hint that effort would not
help them in any case, because even bourgeois success no longer has any
connection to the calculable effect of their own work. They take the hint.
Fundamentally, everyone recognizes chance, by which someone is some-

times lucky, as the other side of planning. * Just because society's energies
have developed so far on the side of rationality that anyone might become
an engineer or a manager, the choice of who is to receive from society the
investment and confidence to be trained for such functions becomes

entirely irrational. Chance and planning become identical since, given the
sameness of people, the fortune or misfortune of the individual,' right up

to the top, loses all economic importance. Chance itself is planned; not in
the sense that it will affect this or that particular individual but in that
people believe in its control. For the planners it serves as an alibi, giving
the impression that the web of transactions and measures into which life
has been transformed" still leaves room for spontaneous, immediate rela-

tionships between human beings. Such freedom is symbolized in the various media of the culture industry by the arbitrary selection of average
cases. In the detailed reports on the modestly luxurious pleasure trip organized by the magazine for the lucky competition winner-preferably a
shorthand typist who probably won through contacts with local powersthat-be-e-the powerlessness of everyone is reflected. So much are the
masses mere material that those in control" can raise one of them up to

u8

The Culture Industry

their heaven and cast him or her out again: let them go hang with their
justice and their labor. Industry" is interested in human beings only as its
customers and employees and has in fact reduced humanity as a whole,
like each of its elements, to this exhaustive formula. Depending on which
aspect happens to be paramount at the time, ideology stresses plan or
chance, technology or life, civilization or nature. As employees people are
reminded of the rational organization and must fit into it as common
sense requires. As customers they are regaled, whether on the screen or in
the press, with human interest stories demonstrating freedom of choice
and the charm of not belonging to the system. In both cases they remain
objects.
The less the culture industry has to promise and the less it can offer
a meaningful explanation oflife, the emptier the ideology it disseminates
necessarily becomes. Even the abstract ideals of the harmony and benevolence of society are too concrete in the age of the universal advertisement.
Abstractions in particular are identified as publicity devices. Language
which appeals to mere truth only arouses impatience to get down to the
real business behind it. Words which are not a means seem meaningless,
the others seem to be fiction, untruth. Value judgments are perceived
either as advertisements or as mere chatter. The noncommittal vagueness
of the resulting ideology does not make it more transparent, or weaker. Its
very vagueness, the quasiscientific reluctance to be pinned down to anything which cannot be verified, functions as an instrument of contro!'
Ideology becomes the emphatic and systematic proclamation of what is.
Through its inherent tendency to adopt the tone of the factual report, the
culture industry makes itself the irrefutable prophet of the existing order.
With consummate skill it maneuvers between the crags of demonstrable
misinformation and obvious truth by faithfully duplicating appearances,
the density of which blocks insight. Thus the omnipresent and impenetrable world of appearances is set up as the ideal. Ideology is split between
the photographing of brute existence and the blatant lie about its meaning, a lie which is not articulated directly but drummed in by suggestion.
The mere cynical reiteration of the real is enough to demonstrate its divinity. Such.. photological proof" may not be stringent, but it is overwhelming. Anyone who continues to 'doubt in face of the power of monotony is
a [ool. The culture industry sweeps aside objections to itself along with
dIOse to rill' world it neutrally duplicates. One has only the choice of conI

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 119
forming or being consigned to the backwoods: the provincials who oppose
cinema and radio by falling back on eternal beauty and amateur theatricals have already reached the political stance toward which the members
of mass culture are still being driven. This culture is hardened enough
either to poke fun at the old wishful dreams, the paternal ideal no less than
unconditional feeling, or to invoke them as ideology, as the occasion
demands. The new ideology has the world as such as its subject. It exploits
the cult of fact by describing bad existence with utmost exactitude in order
to elevate it into the realm of facts. Through such elevation existence itself
becomes a surrogate of meaning and justice. BeJUIV is whatever the camera reproduces. The disappointed hope that one might oneself be the
employee who won the world trip is matched by the disappointing appearance of the exactly photographed regions through which the journey
might have led. What is offered is not Italy but evidence that it exists. The
film can permit itself to show the Paris in which the young American
woman hopes to still her longing as a desolately barren place, in order to
drive her all the more implacably into the arms of the smart American boy
she might equally well have met at home. That life goes on at all, that the
system, even in its most recent phase, reproduces the lives of those who
constitute it instead of doing away with them straight away, is even credited to the system as its meaning and value. The ability to keep going at
all becomes the justification for the blind continuation of the system,
indeed, for its immutability. What is repeated is healthy-the cycle in
nature as in industry. The same babies-grin endlessly from magazines, and

endlessly the jazz machine pounds. Despite all the progress inthe tech-

niques of representation, all the rules and specialties, all the gesticulating
bustle, the bread on which the culture industry feeds humanity, remains
the stone of stereorype.r lr lives Oil (he cyclical. on the admittedly wellfounded amazement ihar, in spite of evcryrhing, mothers still give birth rochildren. that the wheels have not vet come completely to a halt. 'All this
consolidates the immutability of the existing circumstances. The swaying
cornfields at the end of Chaplin's film on Hitler give the lie to the antifascist speech about freedom. They resemble the blond tresses of the
German maidens whose outdoor life in the summer wind is photographed

by Ufa. Nature, in being presented by society's control mechanism as the
healing antithesis of society, is itself absorbed into that incurable society
.uul sold off. The solemn pictorial affirmation that the trees are green, the

120

The Culture Industry

sky is blue, and the clouds are sailing overhead already makes them cryptograms for factory chimneys and gasoline stations. Conversely, wheels
and machine parts are made to gleam expressively, debased as receptacles
of that leafy, cloudy soul. In this way both nature and technology are
mobilized against the alleged stuffiness, the faked recollection of liberal
society as a world in which people idled lasciviously in plush-lined rooms
instead of taking wholesome open-air baths as they do today, or suffered
breakdowns in antediluvian Benz models instead of traveling at rocket
speed from where they are in any case to where it is no different. The triumph of the giant corporation" over entrepreneurial initiative is celebrated by the culture industry as the perpetuity of entrepreneurial initiative.
The fight is waged against an enemy who has already been defeated, the
thinking subject." The resurrection of Ham Sonnensttfier;" the enemy of

bourgeois philistines, in Germany, and the smug coziness of Life with
Father" have one and the same meaning.
On one matter, however, this hollow ideology is utterly serious:
everyone is provided for. "No one must be hungry or cold. Anyone failing
to comply goes to a concentration camp." The joke from Hitler's Germany
might well shine out as a maxim above all the portals of the culture industry. With naive shrewdness it anticipates the situation characteristic of the
latest society:" that it knows how to identify its true supporters. Formal
freedom is guaranteed for everyone. - No one has to answer officially* for
what he or she thinks. However, all find themselves enclosed from early
on within a system of churches, clubs, professional associations, and other
relationships which amount to the most sensitive instrument of social control. Anyone who wants to avoid ruin must take care not to weigh too little in the scales of this apparatus. Otherwise he will fall behind in life and
finally go under. The fact that in every career, and especially in the liberal
professions, specialist knowledge as a rule goes hand in hand with a prescribed set of attitudes easily gives the misleading impression that expert
knowledge is all that counts. In reality, it is a feature of the irrationally-systematic nature of this society that it reproduces, passably, only the lives of
irs loy-al members. The gradations in the standard of living correspond
very precisely to the degree by which classes and individuals inwardly
adhere to the system. Managers can be relied on; even the minor employ-

ee I )ab>wood, + who lives in realiry no less than in the Fomic strip, is reli-

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

121

able. Bur anyone who goes hungry and suffers from cold, especially if he
once had good prospects, is a marked man. He is an outsider, and-with
the occasional exception of the capital crime-to be an oursider is the

gravest guilt. In films such a person is, at best, an eccentric, an object of
maliciously indulgent humor; bur mostly he is a villain and is identified as
such on his very first appearance, long before the action requires it, to forestall even the momentary misapprehension that society rums against those

of good will. In fact, a kind ofwelfare state on a higher level is being established" today. To assert their positions people keep in motion an economy
in which the extreme development of technology has made the masses in
principle superfluous as producers in their own country. According to the

ideological illusion, [he workers, [he true providers, .irc ted by the leaders
<)findll'uy,' whom (hey teed. Thus the position of the individual becomes
precarious. Under liberalism the poor were regarded as lazy; today they are
.nuc r n.uic.illy suspect. Anyone who is not provided for outside the concentration camp belongs inside it, or at any rate in the hell of the most
demeaning labor and the slums. The culture industry, however, reflects
society's positive and negative provision" for those it administers as direct
human solidarity in the world of honest folk. No one is forgotten, everywhere are neighbors, social welfare officers, Dr Gillespies, and armchair
philosophers with their hearts in the right place who, with their kindly
man-to-man interventions, turn the socially perpetuated wretchedness
into remediable individual cases, unless even that is ruled our by the personal depravity of those concerned. The managed provision of friendly
care, administered by every factory as a means of increasing .producrion,
brings the last private impulse under social control; by being given the
appearance of immediacy, the relationships of people within production
are returned to the private sphere. Such "winter aid"* casts its conciliatory shadow over the films and broadcasts of the culture industry long before
such care is transferred in totalitarian style from the factory to society
itself. The great helpers and benefactors of humanity, whose scholarly and
scientific achievements have to be embellished by scriptwriters as simple
acts of compassion to wring from them a fictitious human interest, function as stand-ins for the leaders of nations, who ultimately decree the abolition of compassion and succeed in preventing all infections by exterminating the last of the sick.
The emphasis on the heart of gold is society's way of admitting the

122

The Culture Industry

suffering it creates: everyone knows that they are helpless within the system, and ideology must take account of this . Far from merely concealing

the suffering under the cloak of improvised comradeship, the culture
industry stakes its company pride on looking it manfully in the eye and
acknowledging it with unflinching composure. This posture of steadfast
endurance justifies the world which that posture makes necessary. Such is
the world-so hard, yet therefore so wonderful, so healthy. The lie does

_!~!_ .sh.rink backeyen froID. ~feg.~gy ..J~~. ~-:o_t~i~ariansDciety does.not
abolish the suffering of irs members, but registers and plans it, mass cuJtur e does the same with tragedy. Hence the persistent borrowings from art .

An supplies the tragic substance which pure entertainment cannot provide
on its own yet which it needs if it is to adhere to its principle of meticulously duplicating appearance. Tragedy, included in society's calculations

and affirmed as a moment of the world, becomes a blessing. It deflects the
charge that truth is glossed over, whereas in fact it is appropriated with
cynical regret. It imparts an element of interest to the insipidity of censored happiness and makes that interest manageable. To the consumer
who has seen culturally better days it offers the surrogate oflong-abolished
depth, and to regular moviegoers the veneer of culture they need for purposes of prestige. To all it grants the solace that human fate in its strength
a nd authenticity is possible even now" and its unflinching depiction in-

escapable, The unbroken surface of existence, in the duplication of which

ideology consists solely today, appears all the more splendid, glorious, and
imposing the more it is imbued with necessary suffering. It takes on the
aspect of fate. Tragedy is leveled)down to the threat to destroy anyone who
does not conform, whereas its paradoxical meaning once lay in hopeless
resistance to mythical threat. Tragic fate becomes the just punishment into
which bourgeois aesthetics has always longed to transform it. The morality of mass culture has come down to it from yesterday's children's books .
In the first-class production the villain is dressed up as the hysteric who,
in a study of ostensibly clinical exactitude, seeks to trick her more realistic
rival out of her life's happiness and who herself suffers a quite untheatrical
death . To be sure, only at the top are things managed as scientifically as
this. Further down, the resources are scarcer. There tragedy has its teeth
drawn without social psychology. Just as any honest Hungarian-Viennese
opcrcrra must have its tragic finale in the second act, leaving nothing for
rhe third but the righting of misunderstandings, m :l" • u h u rr ,:i\( \

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

123

.tragedy permanent employment as routine. The obvious existence of a for-

mula is enough in itself t~ allay the concern that tragedy might still be
untamed. The housewife's description of the recipe for drama as "getting
into trouble and out again" encompasses the whole of mass culture from
the weak-minded women's serial" to its highest productions. Even the
worst outcome, which once had better intentions, still confirms the estab-

lished order and corrupts tragedy, whether because the irregular lover pays
for her brief happiness with death or because the sad end in the picture
makes the indestructibility of actual life shine all the more brightly. Tragic
cinema is becoming truly a house of moral correction. The masses, demoralized by existence under the pressure of the system" and manifesting civilization only as compulsively rehearsed behavior in which rage and rebelliousness everywhere show through, are to be kept in order by the spectacle of implacable life and the exemplary conduct of those it crushes.
Culture has always contributed to the subduing of revolutionary as well as
of barbaric instincts. Industrial culture does something more. It inculcate.5-_
l~~onditions--oll-w.hich_lgtplagbk life is allowed .to be lived. at all.

Individuals must use their general satiety as a motive for abandoning
themselves to the collective power of which they are sated. The permanently hopeless situations which grind down ftlmgoers in daily life are
transformed by their reproduction, in some unknown way, into a promise
that they may continue to exist. One needs only to become aware of one's
nullity, to subscribe to one's own defeat, and one is already a party to it.
Society is made up of the desperate and thus falls prey to rackets. In a few
of the most significant German novels of the prefascistic era, such as Berlin
Alexanderplatz and Kleiner Mann. was nun?, this tendency was as vividly
evident as in the mediocre film and in the procedures of jazz. Fundamentally, they all present the self-mockery of man. The possibility of
becoming an economic subject, an entrepreneur, a proprietor, is entirely
liquidated. Right down to the small grocery, the independent firm on the
running and inheriting of which the bourgeois family and the position of
its head were founded, has fallen into hopeless dependence. All have

becPIDc-em.p.lQr-e~~J~he civilization ofeme.loyees the dignitrJl£.rhe..",
father, dubious in any case, ceases to b.e ._The behavior of the individual

toward the-~~cket,-~heth~~~mmercial, professional, or political, both
before and after admittance to it; the gestures of the leader before the
masses, of the lover before the woman he woos, are taking on peculiarly

124 The Culture Industry
masochistic traits. The attitude all are forced ro adopt in order ro demonstrate ever again their moral fitness for this society is reminiscent of that
of boys during admission to a tribe; circling under the blows of the priest,

they wear stereotypical smiles. Existence in late c~i_~a)i_~~ is a permanent

rite of i~!ti~tio~_ryoI1~_rnl,l~~(rheyidenrify ~horenearredly--'

with the power which beats them. This is inherent in the principle ~f syncopation in jazz. which mocks the act of stumbling while elevating it to
the norm. The eunuch-like voice of the radio crooner, the handsome suit-

or of the heiress, who falls into the swimming pool wearing his tuxedo, are
models for those who want to make themselves into that ro which the systern" breaks them. Everyone can be like the omnipotent society, everyone
can be happy if only they hand themselves over to it body and soul and
relinquish their claim to happiness. In their weakness society recognizes its
own strength and passes some of it back ro them. Their lack of resistance
certifies them as reliable customers. Thus is tragedy abolished. Once, the
antithesis between individual and society made up its substance. Tragedy
glorified "courage and freedom of feeling in face of a mighty foe, sublime

adversity, a problem which awakened dread."" 'Today tragedy ha~ been dissipated in the void of the f.1lsc identity of socierv and subject. the honor
of- which is still just fleetingly visible in the vacuous semblance of the lrag, ic., But the miracle of integration, the permanent benevolence of those in

command. * who admit the unresisting subject while he chokes down his
unruliness-all this signifies fascism. Fascism lurks in the humaneness
with which Doblin allows his protagonist Biberkopf ro find refuge, no less
than in films with a social slailt. The ability to slip through, ro survive
one's own ruin, which has superseded tragedy, is ingrained in the new generation; its members are capable of any work, since the work process
allows them to become attached ro none. One is reminded of thesad pliability of the soldier returning home, unaffected by the war, of the casual
laborer who finally joins the clandestine groups and the paramilitary organizations. The liquidation of tragedy confirms the abolition of the individ ual.

It is not only jhe standardized mOQe_~ PS_0911ction.of--the--c--u1wre.

industry which makes ~he-i~di~iduaT illusory in its products. Individuals
arc tolerated only as far as their wholehearted identity with the universal

is beyond question. From the standardized improvisati?n in jazz to the

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 125

original film personality who must have a lock of hair straying over her
eyes so that she can be recognized as such, pseudoindividuality reigns. The
individual trait is reduced to the ability of the universal so completely to
mold the accidental that it can be recognized as accidental. The sulky raeirurniry or the elegant walk of the individual who happens to be on show
is serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimeter. The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly
commodity misrepresented as natural. It is reduced to the moustache, the
Frc.ru:h,accdlt, the deep voice of the prostitute, the "Lubitsch touch"-like
9- fingerprint on the otherwise uniform identity cards to which the lives
and faces of all individuals, from the film star to the convict, have been .

reduced by the power of the universal. Pseudoindividuality is a recondition for a .. r _ehendin and detoxi in tra e : onl ecauselilarvla:u.aJs·- '·

are none bur mere jnt_ersections of universal.tel"ldm~ies..i~jcPQ§sL, ..e _ .t.Q . ..
;;-absorb them smoothly into the universal. Mass culrure thereby reveals.
the fictitious quality which has characterized the individual throu hout
e bourgeois era and is wrong only in priding itself on this murky har-

mony between universal and particular,.Ih~IincipkJ)£.indiv~dua1itywas.
contradictory frQmme_olltset..First,.noindividuation .was ..ever r~~ly .
acb.leved. The class-determined form of self-preservation. maintained
everyone at the level of mere species being. Every bourgeoisrcharacter

e~p'ressed the same thing, even and especially when deviating from ie, the
harshness of competitive society. The individualvon.whom .socierz.was
supported, itself bore society's taint; in the individual's, apparentfreedom
he was the product of society's economic and social apparatus. Power has
always invoked the existing power relationships when seeking the approval
of those subjected to power. At the same time, the advance of bourgeois
society has promoted the development of the individual. Against the will
of those controlling it, technology has changed human beings from children into persons. Bur all such progress of individuation has been at the
expense of the individuality in whose name it took place, leaving behind
nothing except individuals' determination to pursue their own purposes
alone. The cirizens whose lives are split between business and- privace.life,

their priva_te lif~ be~v~en ostentati~d~ti~~~ their i.!:!~.i..ma~ berw~
the sullen .corJ.1!~llJli~_oLmarriage and the. birter solace of being.enrirely
alone, a.t odds with. themselves and with. everyone, are virtually alreadY_1
.Nazis. who arc at once enthusiastic and fed up, or the city dwellers of

126

The Culture Industry

today, who can imagine friendship only as "social contact" between the

~ ~;~diy uncorinecrecCThe culture induS{ ~ C<Ul onlv m an ipul ate.' ind iyid -

ualiry so successfully because the fract ured nature of society has alwavs
been reproduced wi thi n it. In the ready-made faces of film heroes and privare persons fabricated according to magazine-cover stereotypes , a semblance of individuality-in which no one believes in any case-is fading,
-

-

and ~~uch h_e~~I~js_nQurjsh~9.__by~h~..st:~~e~~~~isfaction
that the effort of individuation is at last being replaced by the admittedly
more breathless one of imitation. The hope that the contradictory, disintegrating person could not surv ive for generations, that the psychological

fracture within it must split the system itself, and that human beings
m ight refuse to tolerate the mendacious substitution of the stereotype for
the individual-that hope is vain . The unity of the personality has been
recognized as illusory since Shakespeare's Hamlet. In the synthetically
manufactured physiognomies of today the fact that the concept of human
life ever existed is already forgotten. For cenruries society has prepared for
Victor Mature and Mickey Rooney.* They come to fulfill the very individuality they destroy.
The heroizing of the average forms pan of the cult of cheapness. The
highest-paid stars resemble advertisements for unnamed merchandise.
Not for nothing are they often chose n from the ranks of commercial models. The dominant taste derives its idea.! from tb..e_~4vertisementJ fr2,!!1
commodified beauty. Socrates' dictum that beauty is the useful has at last
been ironically fulfilled. The cinema publicizes the cultural conglomerate"
as a totality, while the radio advertises individually the products for whose

sake the cultural system exists. for a fe~(Ojps YO Il can see the.film.which
cost millions, for.evenless XQl~_ .gp_bu~_the ~h~W!Dg gU'n..behind which...

sta nd the ent~~~ riches ()f ~h~ w.o.tId... and .~h~ sel~s of which increase those
riches still further. Through universal suffrage the vast funding of armies
is gencrally known and approved, if in absentia, while prostitution behind
the line s is not permitted, The best orchestras in the world, which are
none, arc delivered free of charge to the home. All this mockingly rescmblcs the land of milk and honey as the national community apes the
human one. Something is served up for everyone." A provincial visitor's
comment on the old Berlin Merropolrheater that "it is remarkable what
can be done for the money" has long since been adopted by the culture
industry and elevated to the substance of production itself. Not only is a

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

127

production always accompanied by triumphant celebration that it has

been possible at all, but to a large extent it is that triumph itself. To put
on a show means to show everyone what one has and can do. The show is
still a fairground, but one incurably infected by culture. Just as people

lured by the fairground crier overcame their disappointment inside the
booths with a brave smile, since they expected it in any case, the movie-

goer remains tolerantly loyal to the institurion. ~u l the c h ea p ness o f m a s sproduced luxury arricles. .ind it~ complement, universal fraud. are changing the cOl11I1IOJit\, character cl an iiselt. That character is not new; it rs
~

..

-.

--

.

th e b~t rh.u art 119.\\:, J utit\:(lr admits to being a Wllllll ~~~.E!:.~~. HQjr.u.'(;s , ~ts

autonornv aud proudly takes its place among COnSLUl1C r gpod), that h~,cll,C
charm ofnovclrj; Arr was onlv ever ahle to exist as 3 separate sphere in' its

bo u racois fo rm, Even its fr eedom , as negation of the social utility which is

-

~

establishing itself through the market, is essentially conditioned by the
commodity economy. Pure works of art, which negated the commodity
character of society by simply following their own inherent laws, were at
the same time always commodities. To the extent that, up to the eighteenth century, artists were protected from the market by patronage, they

were subject to the patrons and their purposes instead. ·n.le,p urpo~.d~sso
ness of the great modern work ofart is sustained bythe anonymity ofthe
om :uke r. The latter's demands are so diversely mediated that the artist is
exempted from any particular claim, although only to a certain degree,
since his autonomy, being merely tolerated, has been attended throughout
bourgeois history by a moment of untruth, which has culminated now in
the social liquidation of art. The mortally sick Beethoven, who flung away
a novel by Walter Scott with the cry : "The fellow writes for money," while
himself proving an extremely experienced and tenacious businessman in
commercializing the last quartets-works representing the most extreme
repudiation of the market-offers the most grandiose example of the

u n irv of the opposites of market and autonomy in bourgeois art. . I hc
1r ri ~ t S w ho succumb co ideology ar e pr ecisely those who conceal this co ~'.!;~Ji,: UUll instead of_as.~,~0.;,!t.i~lg il . i,lll()~he consciousness of their OW.J.1
fjfoducrion. as Beethoven di d: he imp ro vi sed on "Rage over a L o st Penny"

,111<l . lc rivcd (he met.iphvsical in junction "It rnust be," wh ich see ks acs-

IIt"II, ,11 lv IU .mnul the world's compulsion hv raking that burden onto
I I " 'Ii , 11,>:11 It l' hllU,c kcl'[ler\ clcm.i n.! 6Jr her monrhlv wage s, The princi1,1, of idealist aesthetics, purposiveness without purpose," reverses the

128 The Culture Industry
schema socially adopted by bourgeois art: purposelessness for purposes

dictated by the market. In the demand for entertainment and relaxation,
purpose has finally consumed the realm of the purposeless. But as the
demand for the marketability of art becomes total, a shih in the inner economic composition of cultural commodities* is becoming apparent. For
the use which is made of the work of art in antagonistic society is largely
that of confirming the very existence of the useless, which art's total subsurnption under usefulness has abolished. In adapting itself entirely to
need, the work of art defrauds human beings in advance of the liberation
from the principle of utility which it is supposed to bring about. What
might be called use value in the reception of cultural assets is being

replaced" by exchange value; enjoyment is giving way to being there and

being in the know, connoisseurship by enhanced prestige. The consumer

becomes d.l~ ideology llf the amusement industry, whose ill~t irtlri(!r:~ l_l_~9_r
she cannot escape." One has to have seen Mrs. Miniver," )ust as one must-

subscribe to Life and Time. Everything is perceived only hom the point of
view that it can serve as something else, however vaguely that other thing

might be envisaged. Eve1J'1!1ing has value only inso f<l!:_~.iI.~~~~-

changed, nor in so far as i!j;-;-~ething in ir'~elf.For consumers the use
value-or art, its essence. is :J. fetish. and the fetish-. the social valuation

which they mistake for rhe merit of works of art-becomes irs only usc

value, rhe only gualiry they enjoy.unthis-w.iYth~~~modity ch~~~ orart disintegrates just as it is fully realized. Art becomes a species of com-

modirv, worked IIp and adarred to industrial production, saleable and
exchangeable: but art as the species of commodity which exists in order to
be sold yet nor for sale becomes something hypocritically unsaleable as

soon as the business transaction is no longer merely its intentio~ but its
sole principle. The Toscanini performance on the radio is, in a sense,
unsaleable. One listens to it for nothing, and each note of the symphony
is accompanied, as it were, by the sublime advertisement that the symphony is nor being interrupted by advertisements-"This concert is
brought to you as a public service." The deception" takes place indirectly
Ilia the profit of all the united aut;-mobiie--a:na -soap manufacturers, on
whose.paymcnrs the stations survive, and, of course, via the increased sales
of the electrical industry as the producer of the receiver sets. Radio, the
progressive latecomer to mass culture, is drawing conclusions which film's
pscudomarkcr at present denies that industry. The technical structure of
.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

129

the commercial radio system" makes it immune ro liberal deviations of the
kind the film industry can still permit itself in irs own preserve . Film is a
pr ivate emerprise which already represems the sovereign whole," in which
respect it has some advantages over the other individual combines."
Chesrerfield is merely the nation's cigarette. bur the radio is irs mouthpiece. In the total assimilation of culture products into the commodiry
sphere radio makes no attempr [Q purvey irs products as commodities. In
America it levies no duty from the public. Ir thereby rakes on the deceprive form of a disinterested, impartial authority, which firs fascism like a

glove. In fascism radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the ,!iihrerj
in the loudspeakers on the sneer his voice merges with the howl of sirens

proclaiming panic, from which modern propaganda is hard ro distinguish
in any case. The National Socialists knew that broadcasring gave their

cause stature as the priming press did [Q the Reformarion . The Eiihreis.- .
metaphysical charisma, invented by the sociology of religion, * turned our
----

finally ' -r;;be merely the omnipresence of his radio addresses, which

demonically parodies that of the divine spiri.t. The giganric fact that the
speech penerrares everywhere replaces irs content, as the benevolent acr of
the Toscanini broadcast supplants irs content, the symphony. No listener

can apprehend the symphony's true coherence. while the Fiihrers address
is in any case a lie. To posit the human word as absolute, rhe false com-

mandrnenr, is the immanent tendency of radio . Recommendati2!l..J!~:__
comes command. The promorion of identical commodities under differ-

~nt br~;'d n~he scientifically endorsed praise of the laxative in the
slick voice of the announcer between the' overrures of La Traviata and

Rienz i, has become untenable if only for irs silliness. One day the Diktat
uf production, the specific advertisement, veiled by the semblance of

choice. can finally become the Fiihrers oven command. ~oci~!y...9f..
large-scale fascisric rackets whi~b _ .~gr~~ among themselves on how much
of the national product is to be allocated [Q provi-ding for the needs of the
people, [Q invite the people to use a particular soap powder would, in the

end, seem anachronistic, In a more mo~r'!,J~~s c.erem9nioY§ §ryl~ , the
Fiihrer directly orders both the _h o l ~~aus r and the supply of trash,
Today works of an. suitably packaged like political slogans, are
pre ssed on a reluctant public at reduced prices by the culture industry;
they arc opened up for popular en joyment like parks. However, the erovion oftheir genuine commodity character does not mean rhar they would

130

The Culture Industry

be abolished in the life of a free society bur that the last barrier to their
debasement as cultural assets has now been removed. The abolition of

educational privilege by disposing of culture at bargain prices does not
admit the masses to the preserves from which they were formerly excluded but, under the existing social conditions, contributes to the decay of

education and the progress of barbaric incoherence. Someone who in the
nineteenth or early twentieth century spent money to attend a drama or a
concert, paid the performance at least as much respect as the money spent.
The citizen who wanted a return for his outlay might occasionally try to
establish some connection to the work. The guidebooks to Wagner's music

dramas or the commentaries on Faust bear wi mess to this. They form a
transition to the biographical glaze applied to works of art and the other
practices to which works of art are subjected today. Even when the art
business was in the bloom of youth, use value" was not dragged along as

,t mere appendage by excll;lnge value- bur was developed as a precondition

of the latter, to rhe social hcncfir of works of an. :A:, IOIl~ as ir was expen-'
sivc, art kept the citizen within some bounds. That is now over,..A.n:"upbounded proximity to those exposed to it, no longer mediated by money,

completes the alienation between work and consumer, whichrc5~mhle
each other in triumphant reificarion. In the culture indusrrv resf1CCl IS vani,hillg along with criticixrn: the latter gives \\-ay [0 rnccharucul cxpcrrise.
Ihl' !(ll"IlJlT to the f(xgerful cult of celebrities. F6r consumers. nothing is

expensive any more. Nevertheless.jhey.arcdimly aware mat the less some-

Ihin~ costs, the less ic can be a gift to them. The rViOr"()ld mistrust (lC ira,lilil)l1,d culture as Ideo]og\' mingles with that of indust ri.ilized culture as

Ir.iu.] , Reduced to mere adjuncts, the degraded works of art are secretly
rejected by their happy recipients along with the junk the medium has

made them resemble. The public should rejoice that there is so much to
see and hear. And indeed, everything is to be had. The "screenos?" and
cinema vaudevilles, the competitions in recognizing musical extracts, the
free magazines, rewards.jind gift articles handed out to the listeners of certain radio programs are not mere accidents, but continue what is happen-

ing to the culture products themselves. The symphony is becoming the

prize for lis,reDIDg. to.d1e radio at aH1 and if the. teclmoIQgyJle.f!.i~_~,;IY_~ film w~uld already be delivered to the apartment on the model of the
. . .•....

.

-

radio." It is moving towards the commercial system. Television points the
way 10 a development which easily enough could push the Warner broth.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

131

ers" into the doubtless unwelcome position of little theatre performers and
cultural conservatives. However, the pursuit of prizes has already left its
imprint on consumer behavior. Because culture presents itself as a bonus,
with unquestioned private and social benefits, its reception has become a
matter of taking one's chances. The public crowds forward for fear of missing something. What that might be is unclear, but, at any rate, only those
who join in have any chance. Fascism, however, hopes" to reorganize the
gift-receivers trained by the culture industry into its enforced adherents.

Cu..l~llf~ is.aperadoxical commodiry, It'is so completely subject to the
law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with

use that it em no longer be used. For this reason it merges~lth the advertisement. 'i he more meaningless the latter appears under monopoly, the
more omnipotent culture becomes. Its motives are economic enough.
That life could continue without the whole culture industry is too certain;
the satiation and apathy it generates among consumers are too great. It can
do little to combat this from its own resources. Advertising is its elixir of

lik! But because its product ceaselessly reduces the pleasure it promises as
a commodity to that mere promise, it finally coincides with the advertisement it needs on account of its own inability to please. In the competitive

society advertising performed a social service in orienti~tlie-OU-yei:-lni:be
market. facilitating choice and helping the more efficient but unknown
supplier to find customers. It did not merely cost labor time, but saved it.
Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those in control of the
system are entrenching themselves in advertising! It strengthens the bond
which shackles consumers to the big combines. Only those who can keep

paying the exorbitant fees charged by the advertising agencies, and most
of all by radio itself, that is, those who are already part of the system or are
co-opted into it by me decisions of banks and industrial capital, can enter
the pseudornarker as sellers. The costs of advertising, which finally flow
back into the pockets of me combines," spare them the troublesome task
of subduing unwanted outsiders; they guarantee that the wielders of influence remain among their peers, not unlike the resolutions of economic
councils" which control the establishment and continuation of businesses

in the totalitarian state.Advertising today is a negative principle, a block-

lHlto ..lcvicc: allythill~ which does nor bear its seal of approval is econornicaliv SlISp':ll. All -pervasive advertising is certainly not needed to acquaint

132

The Culture Industry

people with the goods on offer, the varieties of which are limited in any

case. It benefits the selling of goods only directly. The termination of a
familiar advertising campaign by an individual firm represents a loss of
prestige, and is indeed an offence against the discipline which the leading
clique imposes on its members. In wartime, commodities which can no
longer be supplied continue to be advertised merely as a display of industrial power. At such times the subsidizing of the ideological media is more

important than the repetition of names. * Through their ubiquitous use
under the pressure of the system, advertising techniques have invaded the
idiom, the "style" of the culture industry. So complete is their triumph
that in key positions it is no longer even explicit: the imposing buildings
of the big companies," floodlit advertisements in stone, are free of advertising, merely displaying the illuminated company initials on their pinnacles, with no further need ofself-congratulation. By contrast, the buildings
surviving from the nineteenth century, the architecture of which still
shamefully reveals their utility as consumer goods, their function as accommodation, are covered from basement to above roof level with hoard-

ings and banners: the landscape becomes a mere background for sign-

boards and symbols. Advertising becorn~Lsjmply-me-art-.w.ith._wh.i.ch
Goebbels presciently equated. it,·- l'art-pour i!art;.advenising.for. advertis-

ing's sake, the pure representation of social power..In rh~jnfluen.rial
American magazines Life and Fortune the images and texts of advertjsemerits are, at a cursory glance, hardly distinguishable from the editorial

section. The enthusiastic and unpaid picture story about the living_~abits_
and personal grooming of celebrities, which wins themnew£~s,"J..s_edito-

rial, while the ad';~rtjs~':lKP;.g~~_~ly _QfLph9t.ographs and data so facrua:t an~f !if~i~.':. t~a~~tE.~i ~~sent the ideal~fj! furJna.tia.O~~~_~hi~h the edi.tU.l:.8.l section -only aspire; Everylll~ is a preview of the-fie-xc":wfiiCfi.
promises yet again to unite the same heroic couple under the same exotic
sun: anyone arriving late cannot tell whether he is watching the trailer or
the real thing. The montage character of the culture industry, the synthetic, controlled manner in which its products are assembled-factory-like
not only in the film studio but also, virtually, in the compilation of the
cheap biographies, journalistic novels, and hit songs-predisposes it to
advertising: the individual moment, in being detachable, replaceable,
estranged even technically from any coherence of meaning, lends itself to
pmposcs ourside the work. The special effect, the trick, the isolated and
.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 133

repeatable individual performance have always conspired with the exhibition of commodities for advertising purposes, and today every close-up of
a film actress is an advert for her name, every hit song a plug for its rune.
Advertising and the culture industry are merging technically no less than
economically. In both, the same thing appears in countless places, and the
mechanical repetition of the same culture product is already that of the
same propaganda slogan. In both, under the dictate of effectiveness, technique is becoming psychotechnique, a procedure for manipulating human
beings. In both, the norms of the striking yet familiar, the easy but catchy,
the worldly wise but straightforward hold good; everything is directed at
overpowering a customer conceived as distracted or resistant.
Through the language they speak, the customers make their own
contribution to culture as advertising. For the more completely language
coincides with communication, the more words change from substantial
carriers of meaning to signs devoid ofqualities; the more purely and transparently they communicate what they designate, the more impenetrable
they become. The demythologizing oflanguage, as an element of the total
process of enlightenment, reverts to magic. In magic word and content
were at once different from each other and indissolubly linked. Concepts
like melancholy, history, indeed, life, were apprehended in the word which
both set them apart and preserved them. Its particular form constituted
and reflected them at the same time. The trenchant distinction which

declares the word itself fortuitous and its allocation to its object arbitrary
does away with the superstitious commingling of word and thing. Anything in a given sequence of letters which goes beyond the correlation to

the event designated is banished as unclear and as verbal metaphysics. As
a result, the word, which henceforth is allowed only to designate something and not to mean it, becomes so fixated on the object that it hardens
to a formula. This affects language and subject matter equally. Instead of
raising a matter to the level of experience, the purified word exhibits it as
a case of an abstract moment, and everything else, severed from now
defunct expression by the demand for pitiless clarity, therefore withers in
reality also. The outside-left in football, the blackshirt," the Hitler Youth
member, and others of their kind are no more than what they are called.
If, before its rationalization, the word had set free not only longing but
lies, in its rationalized form it has become a straightjacket more for longing than tor lies. The blindness and muteness of the data to which posi-

134 The Culture Industry
rivism reduces the world passes over into language itself, which is limited
to registering those data. Thus relationships themselves become impenetrable, taking on an impact, a power of adhesion and repulsion which
makes them resemble their extreme antithesis, spells. They act once more
like the practices of a kind of sorcery, whether the name of a diva is concocted in the studio on the basis of statistical data, or welfare government
is averted by the use of taboo-laden words such as "bureaucracy" and "intellectuals," or vileness exonerates itself by invoking the name of a homeland. The name, to which magic most readily attaches, is today under-

going a chemical change. It is being transformed into arbitrary, manipulable designations, the power of which, although calculable, is for that reason as willful as that of archaic names. First names, the archaic residues,

have been brought up to date either by stylizing them into advertising
brands-film stars' surnames have become first names-or by standardizing them collectively. By contrast, the bourgeois, family name which,
instead of being a trademark, individualized its bearers by relating them to
their own prehistory, sounds old-fashioned. In Americans it arouses a curi-

ous unease. To conceal the unco_mforrable ~~~c:~xi~~ par-

ticular peopl~ they call themse[ves Bob and Harry, like replaceable members of teams. Such forms of interaction reduce hurriin-bel~gs ~~-the

brotherhood of the sporring public, which protects them fron;t~~fiater-

niry, Signification, the only function of the word admitted hise-~~~i~~,
is consummated in the sign.drs character as sign is reinrorcedbv the speed
-wuh which linguistic models arc put into circulation from above. Whether
folksongs are rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture which has come
down in the world, their elements have at least taken on their popular
form in a long, highly mediated process of experience. The dissemination
of popular songs, by contrast, is practically instantaneous. The American
term "fad" for fashions which catch on epidemically-inflamed by the
action of highly concentrated economic powers-referred to this phenomenon long before totalitarian advertising bosses had laid down the
general lines of culture in their countries.Tfthe Cl:fman tascists bunch d

word like "inrolemhle" IUntragbm·j over the loudspeakers one day. the_
whole .nauon is s:wing "inrolerable" the next. On the same pattern, the

nations against which the German Blitzkrieg was directed have adopted it
in their OWI1 jargon. The universal repetition of the term denoting such
measures makes the measures, roo; familiar, just as, at the time of the free
.

Enlightenment as Mass Deception 135

market, the brand name on everyone's lips increased sales. T~e bli!1~_.and.
r~dly spre~c!i'p'g.rep..eci.tion-.o£desjgnated ..woJ".cls J!.nks advertising.ro.rhe
totalitarian slogan. The layer of experience which made words human like
those who spoke them has been stripped away, and in its prompt appropriation language takes on the coldness which hitherto was peculiar to
billboards and the advertising sections of newspapers. Countless people

use wor~_and ~.!~sions w..hi~h.l.h~YJ:ither..h.a.v.e.ceased~ .undersrand. at.

aJf~r use only accordingro their behavioral functions.. just as trademarks
adhere all the more compulsivelytorheir 'obf~cts' cite less.their linguistic
meaning is apprehended. The Minister of Public Education speaks ignorantly of "dynamic forces," and the hit songs sing endlessly of "reverie"
and "rhapsody," hitching their popularity to the magic of the incomprehensible as if to some deep intimation of a higher life. Other stereotypes,
such as "memory," are still partly comprehended, but become detached

from the experience which might fulfill them. They obtrude into the spoken language like enclaves. On the German radio of Flesch and Hitler
they are discernible in the affected diction of the announcer, who pronounces phrases like "Goodnight, listeners," or "This is the Hitler Youth

speaking," or even "the Fuhrer" with an inflection which passes into the
mother tongue of millions. In such turns of phrase the last bond between
sedirnented experience and language, which still exerted a reconciling influence in dialect in the nineteenth century, is severed. By contrast, in the
hands of the editor whose supple opinions have promoted him to the sta-

tus of Schrifileiter,* German words become petrified and alien. In any
word one can distinguish how far it has been disfigured by the fascist
"folk" community. By now, of course, such language* has become universal, totalitarian. The violence done to words is no longer audible in them.
The radio announcer does not need to talk in an affected voice; indeed, he

would be impossible if his tone differed from that of his designated listeners. This means, however, that the language and gestures of listeners
and spectators are more deeply permeated by the patterns of the culture
industry than ever before, in nuances still beyond the reach of experimental methods. Today the culture industry has taken over the civilizing inheritance of the frontier and entrepreneurial democracy, whose receptivity to
intellectual deviations was never too highly developed. All are free to
dance and amuse themselves, just as, since the historical neutralization of
religion, they have been free 10 join any of the countless sects. But free-

136 The Culture Industry
dom to choose an ideology, which always reflects economic coercion,
everywhere proves to be freedom to be the same. The way in which the
young girl accepts and performs the obligatory date, the tone of voice used
on the telephone and in the most intimate situations, the choice of words
in conversation, indeed, the whole inner life compartmentalized according
to the categories of vulgarized depth psychology, bears witness to the attempt to turn oneself into an apparatus meeting the requirements of success, an apparatus which, even in its unconscious impulses, conforms to
the model presented by the culture industry. The most intimate reactions
of human beings have become so entirely reified, even to themselves, that
the idea of anything peculiar to them survives only in extreme abstraction:

.personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom
from hod)' odor and emotions. That.isrhe triumph of advertising in the
culture industry: the compulsive imitation bv consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same rime, they recognize as false.'

Elements ofAnti-Semitism:

Limits of Enlightenment

Anti-Semitism today is for some a question affecting human destiny
and for others a mere pretext. For the fascists the Jews are not a minority
but the antirace, the negative principle as such; on their extermination the
world's happiness depends. Diametrically opposed to this is the thesis that
the Jews, free of national or racial features, form a group through religious
belief and tradition and nothing else. Jewish traits relate to Eastern Jews,
and only to those not yet assimilated. Both doctrines are true and false at
the same time.

The first is true in the sense that fascism has made it true. The Jews

are today the group which, in practice and in theory, draws to itself the
destructive urge which the wrong social order spontaneously produces.
They are branded as absolute evil by absolute evil. In this sense they are
indeed the chosen people. Now that power is no longer needed for economic reasons," the Jews are designated as its absolute object, existing

merely for the exercise of power. The workers, * who are the real target, are
understandably not told as much to their faces; the blacks must be kept in
their place, but the Jews are to be wiped from the face of the earth, and
the call to exterminate them like vermin finds an echo among the prospective fascists of all countries. In the image of the Jew which the racial
nationalists hold up before the world they express their own essence. Their
(raving is for exclusive ownership, appropriation," unlimited power, and

138 Elements ofAnti-Semitism

at any price. The Jew, burdened with his tormentors' guilt, mocked as their
lord, they nail to the cross, endlessly repeating a sacrifice in whose power
they are unable to believe.

The other, liberal thesis is true as an idea. It contains an image of the
society in which rage would no longer reproduce itself or seek qualities on
which to be discharged. * But by assuming the unity of humanity to have
been already realized in principle, the liberal thesis serves as an apology for
the existing order. The attempt to avert the direst threat by minority policies and other democratic measures is ambiguous as is the defensive strategy of the last liberal citizens. Their powerlessness attracts the enemy of
powerlessness. The mode of life and appearance of the Jews compromise
the existing universal by deficient adaptation. Their inflexible adherence to
their own order of life has placed them in an insecure relationship to the
prevailing one. They expected to be sustained by that order without subscribing to it. Their relationship to the dominant nations was one of greed
and fear. Yet whenever they sacrificed their difference to the prevailing
mode, the successfully adapted Jews rook on in exchange the cold, stoical
character which existing society" imposes on human beings. The dialectical intertwinement of enlightenment and power, the dual relationship of
progress to both cruelty and liberation, which has been brought home to
the Jews no less by the great exponents of enlightenment than by 'democratic popular movements, manifests itself in the makeup of the assimilated Jews themselves. The enlightened self-control with which adapted Jews
effilCed within themselves the painful scars of domination by others, a
kind of second circumcision, made them forsake their own dilapidated
community and wholeheartedly embrace the life of the modern bourgeoisie. which was already advancing ineluctably toward a reversion ro
pure oppression and reorganization into an exclusively racial entity. Race
is not, as the racial nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity.
Rather, it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order,* constitutes precisely the universal.
Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into
the barbaric collective. The harmonious society IO which the liberal Jews
declaredtheir allegiance has finally been granted to them in the form of
the national community. They believed that only anti-Semitism disfigured
this order, which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings.

Limits ofEnlightenment 139
The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated
from that order.* Irs essence, however it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed.

II

Anti-Semitism as a popular movement has always been driven by the
urge of which its instigators accuse the social democrats: to make everyone
the same. Those without the power to command must fare no better than
ordinary people. From the German civil servant to the Negroes in Harlem, those avidly emulating their betters have always known that they
would really gain nothing but the satisfaction of seeing others no better off
than themselves. The Aryanization of Jewish property, which in any case
primarily benefited those at the top, enriched the masses in the Third
Reich hardly more than the wretched booty pillaged from Jewish quarters
enriched the Cossacks. The real benefit it brought was a half-understood
ideology. That the demonstration of its economic futility heightened rather than moderated the attraction of the racialist panacea points to its true
nature: it does not help human beings but assuages their urge to destroy.
The actual advantage enjoyed by the racialist comrade is that his rage will
be sanctioned by the collective. The less he gains in any other way, the
more obstinately, against better knowledge, he clings to the movement.
Anti-Semitism has proved immune to the charge of inadequate profitability. For the common people it is a luxury.
Its usefulness for the rulers is evident. It serves as a distraction, a

cheap means of corruption, a terrorist warning. The respectable rackets
condone it, the disreputable ones" carry it out. But the form of the mentality, both social and individual, which manifests itself in anti-Semitism,
the primeval-historical entrapment from which it is a desperate attempt to
escape, remains wholly obscure. If a malady so deeply embedded in civilization is not properly accounted for by knowledge, the individual, roo,
though he may be as well intentioned as the victim himself, cannot mitigate it through understanding. The plausibly rational, economic, and
political explanations and counterargurnenrs-e -however correct their individual observations-cannot appease it, since rationality itself, through its
link to power, is submerged in the same malady. Whether blindly dealing

140

Elements ofAnti-Semitism

out blows or blindly fending them off, persecutors and victims form parr
of the same calamitous cycle. Anti-Semitic behavior is unleashed in situations in which blinded people, deprived of subjectivity, are let loose as subjects. Their actions-for those involved-are lethal yet meaningless reac-

tions, of the kind which behaviorists register but fail to interpret. AntiSemitism is a well-rehearsed pattern, indeed, a ritual of civilization, and
the pogroms are the true ritual murders. They demonstrate the impotence
of what might have restrained them-reflection, meaning, ultimately
truth. The mindless pastime of bearing people to death confirms the drab
existence to which one merely conforms.
The blindness of anti-Semitism, its lack of intention, lends a degree
of truth to the explanation of the movement as a release valve. Rage is
vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected. And JUSt as,
depending on the constellation, the victims are interchangeable: vagrants,"
Jews, Protestants, Catholics, so each of them can replace the murderer, in

the same blind lust for killing, as soon as he feels the power of representing the norm. There is no authentic anti-Semitism, and certainly no born
anti-Semite. The older adults to whom the call for Jewish blood has

become second nature are as ignorant of the reason as the young people
who have to shed it. The high-placed instigators, who know me reason,
neither hate the Jews nor love their own followers. The latter, however,

who always go short, economically and sexually, hate without end; they
find relaxation unbearable because they do not know fulfillment. Indeed,

the organized robbers and murder~rs are animated by a kind of dynamic
idealism. Setting out on their pillages, they construct a grandiose ideology for what they do, with fatuous talk of saving the family, the fatherland,
humanity. But as they remain the dupes they secretly suspect themselves
(0 be, their pitiful rational motive, the theft which was supposed to rationalize the deed, is finally discarded entirely, and the rationalization
becomes truthful against its will. The obscure impulse which was always
more congenial to them than reason takes them over completely. The
rational island sinks beneath the flood, and those desperately floundering
now appear only as defenders of truth, restorers of the earth, which has to
be reformed to its farthest corners. All living things become material for
their ghastly duty, which now flinches at nothing. Action becomes a purpose in itself, cloaking its own purposelessness. Anti-Semitism always
starts with an appeal 10 complete the task. Anti-Semitism and totality have
.

Limits ofEnlightenment

141

always been profoundly connected. Blindness encompasses everything
because it comprehends nothing.
Liberalism had granted the Jews property, but without the authority
to command. The purpose ofhuman rights was to promise happiness even
where power was lacking. Because the cheated masses are dimly aware that
this promise, being universal, remains a lie as long as classes exist, it arouses their anger; they feel themselves scorned. They must constantly repress
the thought of that happiness, even as a possibility, an idea, and they deny
it all the more fiercely the more its time has come. Wherever it appears to
be realized amid the systematic deprivation, they must reenact the suppression which has been applied to their own longing. Whatever that reenactment is directed against. however unhappy it may itselfbe-Ahasuerus
and Mignon, exoticism which evokes the promised land, beauty which
summons the thought of sex, the animal whose hint of promiscuity condemns it as repulsive-draws down on itself the destructive fury of the
civilized, who can never fully complete the painful process of civilization.
To those who compulsively control it, tormented nature provocatively
reflects back the appearance of powerless happiness. The idea of happiness
without power is unendurable because it alone would be happiness. The
fantasy of the conspiracy of lascivious Jewish bankers who finance
Bolshevism is a sign of innate powerlessness, the good life an emblem of
happiness. These are joined by the image of the intellectual, who appears
to enjoy in thought what the others deny themselves and is spared the
sweat of toil and bodily strength. The banker and the intellectual, money
and mind. the exponents of circulation, are the disowned wishful image of
those mutilated by power, an image which power uses to perpetuate itself

III

The present society, in which primitive religious feelings, new cults,
and the legacy of revolutions are peddled in the market, in which the fascist leaders barter the land and lives of nations behind locked doors while

the public lulled by their radio sets calculate the cost; this society in which
even the word which unmasks it doubles as an invitation to join a politi-

cal racket; in which no longer is politics merely business but business is the
whole of politics-c --rhis society is scandalized by the Jew with his obsolete
shopkeeper's mannerisms, labeling him a materialist, a haggler, who should

142

Elements ofAnti-Semitism

make way for the pioneering spirit of those who have elevated business to
an absolute.

Bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic purpose: to conceal
domination in production. If in earlier epochs the rulers were directly
repressive, so that they not only left work exclusively to the lower orders
but declared it the ignominy it always was under domination, in the age
of mercantilism the absol ute monarch transformed himself into the su-

preme master of manufactories. Production became presentable at court.
Finally, as bourgeois, the masters replaced their colorful robes with civilian dress. Work is no disgrace, they said-the more rationally to take possession 0[* that of others. Aligning themselves with the productive elements, they remained the parasites of old.* The factory owner ventured
and raked in like a great merchant or banker. He calculated, procured,
bought, sold. In the market he competed with the merchants and bankers
for the profit due to his capital. But he grabbed not merely from the market but from the source: as a functionary of the class system he took care
not to go short of the fruits of his workers' labor. The workers had to deliver as much as possible. Like a true Shylock he insisted on his contract. By
virtue of owning the machines and materials, he forced the others to produce. He called himself the producer, but he and everyone secretly knew
the truth. The productive work of the capitalist, whether he justified his
profit as the reward of enterprise, as under liberalism, or as the director's
salary, as today, was the ideology which concealed the nature of the labor
contract and the rapacity of the 'economic system in general.*

That is why people shout: "StOP thiefl"-and point at the Jew. He
is indeed the scapegoat, not only for individual maneuvers and machinalions but in the wider sense that the economic injustice of the whole class
is attributed to him. The factory owner has his debtors. the workers, under
observation in his factory and can check their performance before he parts
with his money. They only find out the true nature of the exchange only
when they see what they can buy with it: the smallest magnate has access
to a quantity of services and goods available to no ruler before him; but
the workers receive what is called the cultural minimum. Not content with

letting the market tell them how few goods can be theirs, the salesman
sings the praises of those they cannot afford. Only the relationship of
wages to prices expresses what is withheld" from the workers. With their

wages they have accepted the principle of just remuneration. The mer-

Limits ofEnlightenment 143
chant presents them with the promissory note they have signed on behalf
of the manufacturer. The merchant is the bailiff for the whole system, raking upon himself the odium due to the others. That the circulation sphere
is responsible for exploitation is a socially necessary illusion .
The Jews had not been the only people active in the circulation
sphere . But they had been locked up in it too long not to reflect in their
makeup something of the hatred so long directed at that sphere. Unlike
their Aryan colleagues, they were largely denied access to the source of
added value. Only at a late stage and with difficulry were they allowed to

gain ownership of the means of production. To be sure, in the history of
Europe, and even in imperial Germany, baptized Jews had reached high
positions in administration and industry. But they always had to justify
this with redoubled devotion and diligence, and stubborn self-denial.
They were only admitted if, through their behavior, they tacitly adopted
and confirmed the verdict on the other Jews: that is the purpose of baptism. All the great achievements of their prominent members were not
enough to allow Jews to be admitted to the peoples of Europe; having
been prevented from putting down roots they were then criticized as rootless. They always remained the protected Jews, dependent on emperors,
princes, or the absolutist state . These patrons were economically more
advanced than the rest of the population . To the extent that they could
make use of the Jew as an intermediary, they protected h im against the
masses who had to foot the bill for progress. The Jews were the colonizers
of progress. Having helped as merchants to disseminate Roman civilization throughout Gentile Europe, they became, in keeping with their patriarchal religion, representatives of urban, civic, and finally industrial conditions. As bearers of capitalist modes of existence from country to country they earned the hatred of those who suffered under that system. For
the sake of the economic progress which today is their downfall the Jews
were from the first a thorn in the side of the craftsmen and farmers whose

status capitalism undermined. Now it is their turn to bear the brunt of its
exclusive, particularist character . They, who always wanted to be first, are
left far behind. Even the Jewish head of an American entertainment trust

is hopelessly defensive amid his wealth. The caftan was the ghostly residue
of ancient civic dress. Today it is a sign that its wearers have been flung to
rhe margins of a society" which, now wholly enlightened, is exorcising the
spirits of its prehistory. They who propagated individualism, abstract law,

144 Elements ofAnti-Semitism
the concept of the person, have been debased to a species. They who were
never allowed untroubled ownership of the civic right which should have
granted them human dignity are again called "the Jews" without distinction. Even in the nineteenth century the Jew remained dependent on an
alliance with the central authority. The general law, protected by the stare,
was the guarantor of his safety, and the exceptive law the specter which
ensured his docility. He remained an object. dependent on grace and
favor, even when claiming his rights. Trade was not his vocation, it was his
fate. The Jews were the trauma of the knights of industry, who have to
masquerade as productive creators. * In the Jewish jargon they detect what
they secretly despise in themselves: their anti-Semitism is self-hate, the bad
conscience of the parasite.

IV

Nationalist anti-Semitism seeks to disregard religion. It claims to be
concerned with purity of race and nation. Its exponents notice that peo-

ple have long ceased to trouble themselves about eternal salvation. * The
average believer today is as crafty as only cardinals were in former times.
To accuse the Jews of being obdurate unbelievers is no longer enough to
incite the masses. But the religious hostility which motivated the persecution of the Jews for two millennia is far from completely extinguished.
Rather, anti-Semitism's eagerness to deny its religious tradition indicates
that that tradition is secretly rio less deeply embedded in it than secular
idiosyncrasy once was in religious zealotry. Religion has been incorporated as cultural heritage, not abolished. The alliance between enlightenment
and power has debarred from consciousness the moment of truth in religion while conserving irs reified forms. Both circumstances finally benefit
fascism: the unchanneled longing is guided into racial-nationalist rebellion, while the descendants of the evangelistic zealots are converted into
conspirators of blood communities and elite guards, on the model of the
Wagnerian knighrs of the Grail. In this way religion as an institution is
partly meshed directly into the system and partly transposed into the
pomp of mass culture and parades. The fanatical faith on which leader and
Followers pride themselves is no other than the grim doctrine which was
earlier used to discipline the desperate, excepr that irs content has gone
nsrray. That content lives on only as hatred of those who do not share the
.

Limits ofEnlightenment 145

faith. Among the "German Christians,"* all that remained of the religion
of love was anti-Semitism.

Christianity is not only a regression beyond Judaism. The latter's
God, in passing from a henorheistic to a universal form, did not entirely
shed the features of the nature demon. The terror originating in remote
preanimist times passes from nature into the concept of the absolute self
which, as its creator and ruler, entirely subjugates nature. Despite the ineffable power and splendor in which such alienation clothes it, that ruler is
still attainable to thought, which becomes universal through this very relationship to something supreme, transcendental. God as spirit is the principle opposed to nature; it not only stands for nature's blind cycle as do all
the mythical gods, but offers liberation from it. But in its remote abstractness, the incommensurable has at the same time become more terrible,

and the pitiless statement: "I am who am," which tolerates nothing beside
itself, surpasses in its inescapable power the blinder and therefore more

ambiguous judgment of anonymous fate. The God of Judaism demands
what he is owed and settles accounts with the defaulter. He enmeshes his

creatures in a tissue of debt and credit, guilt and merit. In contrast,
Christianity emphasized the moment of grace, although that, too, is contained in Judaism, in God's covenant with men and in the Messianic

promise. It softened the terror of the absolute by allowing the creature to
find itself reflected in the deity: the divine mediator is called by a human
name and dies a human death. His message is: fear not; the law yields
before faith; love becomes greater than any majesty, the only commandment.

But by virtue of the same moments by which it lifted the spell of
nature religion, Christianity is producing ideology once again, in a spiritualized form. To the same degree as the absolute is brought closer to the
finite, the finite is made absolute. Christ, the incarnated spirit, is the deified sorcerer. The human self-reflection in the absolute, the humanization

of God through Christ, is the proton pseudos [first substitution]. The progress beyond Judaism is paid for with the assertion that the mortal Jesus was
God. The harm is done precisely by the reflective moment of Christianity,
the spiritualization of magic. A spiritual essence is attributed to something
which mind identifies as natural. Mind consists precisely in demonstrating rhe contradiction inherent in such pretensions of the finite. Bad conscience is therefore obliged to present the prophet as a symbol, the magi-

146 Elements ofAnti-Semitism

cal practice as transubsrantiarion. It is that which makes Christianity a
religion, and, in a sense, the only one: an intellectual link (0 something
intellectually suspect, a special sphere of culture. Like the great Asiatic
belief systems, pre-Christian Judaism was hardly separable from national
life, from collective self-preservation. The reshaping of the heathen ritual
of sacrifice nor only took place in worship and in the mind but determined
the form of the labor process. In providing the schema for the latter, sacrifice becomes rational. The taboo is transformed into the rational organi-

zation of the work process. It regulates administration in war and peace,
sowing and harvesting, food preparation and slaughter, Although the rules
may not arise from rational reflection, rationality arises from them. The
effort of primitive peoples to free themselves from immediate fear engendered among rhern the institution of ritual; this was refined by Judaism
into the sanctified rhythm of family and national life. The priests were
appointed (0 watch over the proper observance of custom. Their function
within the power structure was clearly displayed in theocratic practice;
Christianity, however, wanted (0 remain spiritual even where it aspired (0
power. In ideology it repudiated self-preservation by the ultimate sacrifice, that of the man-god, but thereby relegated devalued life to the sphere
of the profane: ir abolished the law of Moses but rendered what was
theirs unto both God and Caesar. Secular authority is either confirmed or
usurped, while Christianity acquires a license to manage salvation. Selfpreservation is to be conqueredjthough the imitation of Christ-by order.
In this way self-sacrificing love is stripped of irs naivety, severed from natural love and turned (0 account as credit. The love mediated by ecclesiastical knowledge is presented as immediate love, in which nature and the
supernatural are reconciled. Therein lies irs Untruth: in the fraudulently
affirmative interpretation of self-forgetting.
That interpretation is fraudulent because the church depends for irs
existence on people's belief that they will attain salvation by following irs
reaching, whether that teaching demands works like the Catholic version
or faith like the Protesranr, yet cannot guarantee that goal. The nonbinding nature of the religious promise of salvation, the Jewish and negative
moment in the Christian doctrine, by which magic and finally rhe church
itself are relativized, is tacitly ignored by naive believers, for whom
Christianiry, supranaturalisrn, becomes a magic ritual. a nature religion.
They believe only by forgetting their belief. They convince themselves of

Limits ofEnlightenment 147
the certainty of their knowledge like astrologers or spiritualists. That is not
necessarily worse than spiritualized theology. The old Italian lady who
with devout simplicity consecrates a candle to Sr Gennaro to protect her
grandson in the war may be closer to the truth than the high priests and
pontiffs who, untainted by idolatry, bless the weapons against which St
Gennaro is powerless. To the simple, however, religion itself becomes a
substitute for religion. Christianity had some awareness of this from its
earliest days, but it was only the paradoxical Christians, the antiofficial
thinkers from Pascal through Lessing and Kierkegaard to Barth, who
made it the keystone of their theology. In this awareness they were not
only the radical Christians but the tolerant ones. The others, who repressed that knowledge and with bad conscience convinced themselves of
Christianity as a secure possession, were obliged to confirm their eternal
salvation by the worldly ruin of those who refused to make the murky sacrifice of reason. That is the religious origin of anti-Semitism. The adherents of the religion of the Son hated the supporters of the religion of the
Father as one hates those who know better. This is the hostility of spirit
hardened as faith in salvation for spirit as mind. What is vexatious for the
Christian enemies of the Jews is the truth which withstands evil without

rationalizing it, and clings to the idea of unearned beatitude in disregard
of worldly actions and the order of salvation which allegedly bring it

about. Anti-Semitism is supposed to confirm that the ritual of faith and
history is justified by ritually sacrificing those who deny its justice.

v

"I simply can't abide you-so don't forget it," says Siegfried to
Mime, who is trying to win his love. The stock reply of all anti-Semites is
rhe appeal to idiosyncrasy. Society's emancipation from anti-Semitism
depends on whether the content of that idiosyncrasy is raised to the level
of a concept and becomes aware of its own senselessness. But idiosyncrasy
attaches itself to the peculiar. The universal, that which fits into the con(ext of social utility, is regarded as natural. But anything natural which has
nor been absorbed into utility by passing through the cleansing channels

or conceptual order-the screech of stylus on slate which sets the teeth on
edge. the haut gout which brings to mind filth and corruption, the sweat
which appears on the brow of the diligent-whatever is not quite assirni-

148 Elements ofAnti-Semitism

lared, or infringes the commands in which the progress of centuries has
been sedimented, is felt as intrusive and arouses a compulsive aversion.
The motifs which trigger such idiosyncrasy are those which allude
to origin. They recreate moments of biological prehistory: danger signs
which made the hair stand on end and the heart srop. In the idiosyncratic aversion individual organs escape the subject's control, autonomously
obeying fundamental biological stimuli. The self which experiences itself
in such reactions-rigidity of the skin, muscles, and limbs-is not quire
master of them. For a few moments they mimic the motionlessness of surrounding nature. But as what is mobile draws closer to the immobile,
more highly developed life to mere nature, it is also estranged from it,
since immobile nature, which living creatures, like Daphne, seek with utmost agitation to become, is capable only of the most external, spatial relationships. Space is absolute alienation. Where the human seeks to resemble nature, at the same time it hardens itself against it. Protection as petrified terror is a form of camouflage. These numb human reactions are
archaic patterns of self-preservation: the tribute life pays for its continued
existence is adaptation to death.
Civilization replaced the organic adaptation to otherness, mimetic
behavior proper, firstly, in the magical phase, with the organized manipulation of mimesis, and finally, in the historical phase, with rational praxis,
work. Uncontrolled mimesis is proscribed. The angel which, with fiery
sword, drove humans om of paradise and on to the path of technical
progress, is itself the syrribol of that progress. The severity with which, over
the centuries, the rulers have prevented both their own successors and the
subjugated masses from relapsing into mimetic behavior-from the religious ban on graven images through the social ostracizing of actors and
gypsies to rhe education which "cures" children of childishness-is the
condition of civilization. Social and individual education reinforces the

objectifying behavior required by work and prevents people from submerging themselves once more in the ebb and flow of surrounding nature.
All disrracrion, indeed, all devotion has an element of mimicry. The ego
has been forged by hardening itself against such behavior. The transition
from reflecting mimesis to controlled reflection completes its formation.
Bodily adaptation [Q nature is replaced by "recognition in a concepr.?" the
subsuming ofdifference under sameness. However, the constellation under
which sameness is established, both the direct sameness of mimesis and the
.

Limits ofEnlightenment 149
indirect sameness of synthesis, the adaptation of the self to the thing in the
blind act of living no less than the comparison of reified elements in scientific concepmalizarion-that constellation remains terror. Society perperuates the threat from nature as the permanem, organized compulsion
which, reproducing itself in individuals as systematic self-preservation,
rebounds against nature as society's control over it. Science is repetition,

refined to observed regularity and preserved in stereotypes. The mathematical formula is consciously manipulated regression, just as the magic
ritual was; it is [he most sublimated form of mimicry. In technology the
adaptation to lifelessness in the service of self-preservation is no longer
accomplished, as in magic. by bodily imitation of external nature. but by
automating mental processes, turning them into blind sequences. With its
triumph human expressions become both controllable and compulsive. All
that remains of the adaptation to nature is the hardening against it. The
camouflage used to protect and strike terror today is the blind mastery of
nature, which is identical to farsighted instrumentality.
In the bourgeois mode of production the ineradicable mimetic heritage present in all praxis is consigned to oblivion. The pitiless ban on
regression appears like an edict of fate; the denial is so total that it is no
longer registered consciously. Those blinded by civilization have contact
with their own tabooed mimetic traits only through certain gestures and
forms of behavior they encounter in others, as isolated, shameful residues
in their rationalized environment. What repels them as alien is all too

familiar. I It lurks in the contagious gestures of an immediacy suppressed
by civilization: gestures of touching, nestling, soothing, coaxing. What
makes such impulses repellent today is their outmodedness. In seeking to
win over the buyer with flattery, the debtor with threats, the creditor with
supplication. they appear to translate long-reified human relationships
back into those of personal power. Any emotion is finally embarrassing;

mere excitement is preferable. All unmanipulated expression appears like
the grimace which the manipulated expression-of the film actor, the

lynch mob, the Fiibrer« speech-always was. Undisciplined mimicry is
the brand burned by the old domination into the living substance of the
dominated, and is inherited through an unconscious process of imitation

in early childhood from generation to generation, from the Jewish rags.uid-bones man to the banker. Such mimicry provokes anger. because it
plltS on show, in face of the new relationships of production, the old fear

150

Elements ofAnti-Semitism

which one has had to forget in order ro survive them. It is the compulsive
moment in behavior, the rage of the tormentor and of the tormented,
reappearing indistinguishably in the grimace, that triggers the specific rage
of civilized people. Impotent appearance is answered by deadly realiry,
play by seriousness.
The grimace seems like play-acting because, instead of performing

serious work, it prefers to portray displeasure. It appears to evade the seriousness of life by admitting it without restraint: therefore it is false. But
expression is the painful echo of overwhelming power, violence which

finds utterance in complaint. It is always overdone, no matter how heartfelt it may be, because, as in each work of art, the whole world seems con-

tained in every plaintive sound. Only activity is proportionate. It, and not
mimesis, can bring an end to suffering. But its consequence is the rigid,
unmoved visage, culminating, at the end of this age, in the baby faces of
the practical men, the politicians, priests, managing directors, racketeers.
The strident voices of fascist rabble-rousers and camp commanders show
the reverse side of the same social condition. The screaming is as coldblooded as business. Even the plaintive sounds of nature are appropriated
as an element of technique. The bellowing of these orators is to the
pogrom what its howling klaxon is to the German flying bomb: the cry of
terror which announces terror is mechanically switched on. The screamers
deliberately use the wail of the victim, which first called violence by its
name, and even the mere werd which designates the victim-Frenchman,
Negro, Jew-to induce in themselves the desperation of the persecuted
who have to hit out. They are the false likeness of the terrified mimesis.
They reproduce within themselves the insatiability of the power of which
they are afraid. Everything must be used, everything must belong to them.

The mere existence of the other is a provocation. Everyone else "gets in the
way" and must be shown their limits-the limits of limitless horror. No
one who seeks shelter shall find it; those who express what everyone
craves-peace, homeland, freedom-will be denied it, just as nomads and
traveling players have always been refused rights of domicile. Whatever
someone fears, that is done to him. Even the last resting place shall be
none, The despoiling of graveyards is not an excess of anti-Semitism; it is
anti-Semitism itself. Those evicted compulsively arouse the lust to evict
them even here. The marks left on them by violence endlessly inflame vio-

lcnce, A!lything which merely wants to vegetate must ge rooted out, The

Limits ofEnlightenment

151

chaotically regular flight reactions of the lower animals, the patterns of
swarming crowds, the convulsive gestures of the tortured-all these express what wretched life can never quite control: the mimetic impulse. In
the death throes of the creature. at the furthest extreme from freedom,

freedom itself irresistibly shines forth as the thwarted destiny of matter, It
is against this freedom that the idiosyncratic aversion, the purported motive of anti-Semitism, is ultimately directed.
The psychic energy harnessed by political anti-Semitism is this ratio-

nalized idiosyncrasy. All the gesticulations devised by the Fuhrer and his
followers are pretexts for giving way to the mimetic temptation without
openly violating the reality principle-with honor, as it were. They detest
the Jews and imitate them constantly. There is no anti-Semite who does
not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be Jewishness. The
same mimetic codes are cons tan tly used: the argumentative jerking of the
hands, the singing tone of voice, which vividly animates a situation or a
feeling independently of judgment, and the nose, that physiognomic principium individuation is, which writes the individual's peculiarity on his
face. In the ambiguous partialities of the sense of smell the old nostalgia
for what is lower lives on, the longing for immediate union with surrounding nature, with earth and slime. Of all the senses the act of
smelling, which is attracted without objectifying, reveals most sensuously
the urge to lose oneselfin identification with the Other. That is why smell,
as both the perception and the perceived-which are one in the act of
olfaction-is more expressive than other senses. When we see we remain
who we are, when we smell we are absorbed entirely. In civilization, therefore, smell is regarded as a disgrace, a sign of the lower social orders, lesser races, and baser animals. The civilized person is allowed to give way to
such desires only if the prohibition is suspended by rationalization in the
service of practical purposes, real or apparent. One is allowed to indulge
the outlawed drive if acting with the unquestionable aim of expunging it.

This is manifested in the practical joke. It is a wretched parody of fulfillment. The mimetic function is sneeringly enjoyed as something despised
and self-despising. Anyone who sniffs out "bad" smells in order to extirpate them may imitate to his heart's content the snuffling which takes its
unrationalized pleasure in the smell itself. Disinfected by the civilized sniffer's absolute identification with the prohibiting agency. the forbidden
impulse eludes the prohibition. If it crosses the threshold, the response is

152

Elements ofAnti-Semitism

laughter. That is the schema of the anti-Semitic reaction. The anri-Semires
gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment
alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred
spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusa-

tions and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn.
Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.
The purpose of the fascist cult of formulae, the ritualized discipline, the
uniforms, and the whole allegedly irrational apparatus, is to make possible
mimetic behavior. The elaborate symbols proper to every counterrevolutionary movement, the dearh's heads and masquerades, the barbaric drumming, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures, are so many
organized imitations of magical practices, the mimesis of mimesis. The

Fuhrer, with his ham-actor's facial expressions and the hysterical charisma
turned on with a switch, leads the dance. In his performance he acts out
by proxy and in effigy what is denied to everyone else in reality. Hitler can
gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a provincial tenor,
Goebbels talk as glibly as the Jewish agent whose murder he is recommending, Coughlin" preach love like the Savior himself, whose crucifixion he impersonates for the sake of yet more bloodshed. Fascism is also
totalitarian in seeking to place oppressed nature's rebellion against domination directly in the service of domination.
This mechanism needs the Jews. Their artificially heightened visibility acts on the legitimate son of Gentile civilization like a kind of magnetic
field. In being made aware, through his very difference from the Jew, of
the humanity they have in common, the rooted Gentile is overcome by a
feeling of something antithetical and alien. In this way the tabooed
impulses which run counter to work in its dominant form are converted
into conforming idiosyncrasies. Against this the economic position of the
Jews, the last defrauded fraudsters of the liberal ideology, offers no reliable
protection. Because they are so eminently suited to generating these inductive psychic currents they are unresisringly allocated to such functions.
They share the fate of the rebellious nature for which fascism substitutes

them, being put to use with the perspicuity of the blind. It makes little difference whether the Jews as individuals really display the mimetic traits
which cause the malign infection or whether those traits are merely imputed. If the holders of economic power have once overcome their fear of
employing fascist agents, in face of the Jews the harmony of the national

Limits ofEnlightenment 153
community is automatically established. They are sacrificed by the dominant order when, through its increasing estrangement from nature, it has
reverted to mere nature. The Jews as a whole are charged with practicing
forbidden magic and bloody rituals. Disguised as an accusation, the subliminal craving of the indigenous population to revert to mimetic sacrificial practices is joyously readmitted to their consciousness. Once the horror of the primeval age, sent packing by civilization, has been rehabilitated as a rational interest through projection onto the Jews, there is no hold-

ing back. It can be acted out in reality, and the evil which is acted OUt surpasses even the evil content of the projection. The popular nationalist fantasies of Jewish crimes, of infanticide and sadistic excesses, of racial poisoning and international conspiracy. precisely define the anti-Semitic
dream, and fall short of its realization. Once things have gone so far, the
mere word Jew appears like the bloody grimace whose image-skull and
mangled cross in one-is unfurled on the swastika flag; the fact that
someone is called a Jew acts as a provocation to set about him until he
resembles that image.
Civilization is the triumph of society over nature-a triumph which
transforms everything into mere nature. The Jews themselves, over the
millennia, have played their pan in this, with enlightenment no less than
with cynicism. fu the oldest surviving patriarchy, the incarnation of
monotheism, they convened taboos into maxims of civilization while the
others were still enmeshed in magic. The Jews appeared to have successfully achieved what Christianity had attempted in vain: the disempowerment of magic by means of its own strength, which, as worship of God, is
turned against itself They have not so much eradicated the adaptation to
nature as elevated it to the pure duties of ritual. In this way they have preserved its reconciling memory. without relapsing through symbols into
mythology. They are therefore regarded by advanced civilization as both
backward and too advanced, like and unlike, shrewd and stupid. They are

pronounced guilty of what, as the first citizens, they were the first to subdue in themselves: the susceptibility to the lure of base instincts, the urge
toward the beast and the earth, the worship of images. Because they
invented the concept of the kosher, they are persecuted as swine. The antiSemites appoint themselves executors of the Old Testament: they see to it
that the Jews, having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, unto dust shall
return.

154 Elements ofAnti-Semitism

VI

Anti-Semitism is based on false projection. It is the reverse of genuine mimesis and has deep affinities to the repressed; in fact, it may itself
be the pathic character trait in which the latter is precipitated. If mimesis
makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself If, for the former, the outward becomes the

model to which the inward clings, so that the alien becomes the intimately known, the latter displaces the volatile inward into the outer world,
branding the intimate friend as foe. Impulses which are not acknowledged
by the subject and yet are his, are attributed to the object: the prospective

victim. For the ordinary paranoiac the choice of victim is not free; it obeys
the laws of his illness. In fascism this behavior is adopted by politics; the
object of the illness is declared true to reality, the system of delusions the
reasonable norm in a world which makes deviation neurosis. The mecha-

nism which the totalitarian order takes into its service is as old as civiliza-

tion. The sexual impulses suppressed by humanity survived in both individuals and peoples and asserted themselves in the imaginary transforma-

tion of the surrounding world into a diabolic system. Those impelled by
blind murderous lust have always seen in the victim the pursuer who has

driven them to desperate self-defense, and the mightiest of the rich have
experienced their weakest neighbor as an intolerable threat before falling
upon him. The rationalization was both a ruse and a compulsion. The per-

son chosen as foe is already 'perceived as foe. The disorder lies in the subject's faulty distinction between his own contribution to the projected
material and that of others.

In a certain sense, all perception is projection. The projection of
sense impressions is a legacy of animal prehistory, a mechanism for the
purposes of defense and obtaining food, an extension of the readiness for
combat with which higher species reacted actively or passively to movements, regardless of the intention of the object. Projection has been automated in man like other forms of offensive or defensive behavior which

have become reflexes. In this way his objective world has been constituted as a product of "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul,

whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze. "l The system of things, the fixed univcrsal order of which science is merely an abstract expression, is, if Kant's
.

Limits ofEnlightenment 155
critique of knowledge is applied anthropologically, the unconscious product of the animal tool in the struggle for existence-it is the automatic
projection. In human society, however, where both the affective and the
intellectual life grow complex with the formation of the individual, projection must be increasingly controlled; individuals must learn both to

refine and to inhibit it. fu economic compulsion teaches them to distinguish between their own thoughts and feelings and those of others, a distinction emerges between outer and inner, the possibility of detachment
and of identification, self-consciousness and conscience. More precise
reflection is needed to understand this controlled form of projection and
irs degeneration into the false projection which is essential to antiSemitism.

The physiological theory of perception, which has been despised by
philosophers since Kant as naively realistic and as a circular argument,
holds the world of perception to be a reflection, guided by the intellect, of
the data received from real objects by the brain. According to this view,
punctual indices, or impressions, are registered physiologically and then
ordered by the mind. Although the Gestalt people may insist that the

physiological substance receives not merely points but structure, Schopenhauer and Helmholtz, despite or even because of the circularity of their
view, knew more about the interrneshed relationship of subject and object
than is reflected in the official logical consistency of the schools, whether
neopsychological or neo-Kantian: the perceptual image does indeed contain concepts and judgments. Between the actual object and the indubitable sense datum, between inner and outer, yawns an abyss which the
subject must bridge at its own peril. To reflect the thing as it is, the subject must give back to it more than it receives from it. From the traces the
thing leaves behind in its senses the subject recreates the world outside it:
rhe unity of the thing in its manifold properties and states; and in so
doing, in learning how to impart a synthetic unity not only to the outward
impressions but to the inward ones which gradually separate themselves
from them, it retroactively constitutes the sel£ The identical ego is the
most recent constant product of projection. In a process which could only
he accomplished historically when the powers of the human physiological
c onstitution were fully developed, this self has emerged as a unified and,
,II (he same time, an eccentric function. But even as an autonomously

object ificd subject it is only what the objective world is for it. The inner

156 Elements ofAnti-Semitism

depth of the subject consists in nothing other than the delicacy and richness of the outer perceptual world. If this intermeshing is broken, the self
petrifies. If it is confined, positivistically, to registering the given without
itself giving, it shrinks to a point, and if, idealistically, it projects the world
out of the bottomless origin or its own self, it exhausts itself in monotonous repetition. In both cases it gives up the ghost-in this case the mind
or spirit. Only mediation, in which the insignificant sense datum raises
thought to the fullest productivity of which it is capable, and in which,
conversely, thought gives itself up without reservation to the overwhelming impression-only mediation can overcome the isolation which ails the
whole of nature. Neither the certainty untroubled by thought, nor the preconceptual unity of perception and object, but only their self-reflective
antithesis contains the possibility of reconciliation. The antithesis is perceived in the subject, which has the external world within irs own consciousness and yet recognizes it as other. Reflection on that antithesis,
therefore, the life of reason, takes place as conscious projection.
The pathic element in anti-Semitism is not projective behavior as
such but the exclusion of reflection from that behavior. Because the sub-

ject is unable to return to the object what it has received from it, it is not
enriched but impoverished. It loses reflection in both directions: as it no
longer reflects the object, it no longer reflects on itself, and thereby loses
the ability to differentiate. Instead of the voice of conscience, it hears voices; instead of inwardly examining itself in order to draw up a protocol of
its own lust for power, it attributes to others the Protocol of the Elders of
Zion. It overflows at the same time as it dries up. It invests the outside
world boundlessly with what is within itself; but what it invests is something utterly insignificant, an inflated accumulation of mere means, relationships, machinations, a grim praxis unillurninared by thought. Domination itself which, even as absolute power, is inherently only a means,
becomes in untrammeled projection the purpose both of oneself and of
others, purpose as such. In the sickness of the individual, humanity's
sharpened intellectual apparatus is turned once more against humanity,
regressing to the blind instrument of hostility it was in animal prehistory, and as which, for the species, it has never ceased to operate in relation
to the rest of nature. Just as, since its rise, the human species has manifested itself toward others as developmentally the highest, capable of the
most terrible destruction; and jusr as, within humanity, the more ad-

Limits o/FII/ighlt'llnll'lll 157
vanced races have confronted the more primitive, the technically superior
nations the more backward, so the sick individual confronts the other indi-

vidual, in megalomania as in persecution mania. In both cases the subject
is at the center, the world a mere occasion for its delusion; it becomes the

impotent or omnipotent quintessence of what is projected on to it. The
opposition of which the paranoiac complains indiscriminately at every

step is the result of the lack of resistance, of the emptiness which the encapsulated subject generates around itself. The paranoiac cannot stop. The
idea, having no firm hold on reality, insists all the more and becomes the
fixation.

Because paranoiacs perceive the outside world only in so far as it corresponds to their blind purposes, they can only endlessly repeat their own
self, which has been alienated from them as an abstract mania. This naked

schema of power as such, equally overwhelming toward others and toward
a self at odds with itself, seizes whatever comes its way and, wholly disregarding its peculiarity, incorporates it in its mythic web. The closed circle
of perpetual sameness becomes a surrogate for omnipotence. It is as if the

serpent which told the first humans "Ye shall be as gods" had kept his
promise in the paranoiac. He creates everything in his own image. He
seems to need no living thing yet demands that all shall serve him. His will

permeates the whole universe; nothing may be unrelated to him. His sys-

tems know of no gaps. As astrologer, he endows the stars with powers
which bring about the ruin of the unsuspecting, whether it is the ruin of
others in the preclinical stage or of his own ego in the clinical stage. As
philosopher, he makes world history the executor of inescapable catastro-

phes and downfalls. As completely insane or absolutely rational, he annihilates those marked down as victims either by the individual act of terror

or by the well-considered strategy of extermination. In this way he succeeds. Just as women adore the unmoved paranoid man, nations fall to
their knees before totalitarian fascism. The paranoid element in the devotees responds to the paranoiac as to the evil spirit, their fear of conscience
to his utter lack of scruples, for which they feel gratitude. They follow the
man who looks past them, who does not treat them as subjects but hands
them over to the operations of his many purposes. Like everyone else,
these women have made the occupation of greater or lesser positions of
power their religion, and themselves the malign creatures society takes
them for. And so the gaze which reminds them of freedom must strike

158 Elements ofAnti-Semitism
them as that of the over-naive seducer. Their world is inverted. But at the

same time they know, like the ancient gods who shunned the gaze of the
faithful, that something lifeless resides behind their veil. In the trusting
look of the nonparanoid they are reminded of the spirit which has died in
them, because they see outside them only the cold means of their selfpreservation. To be touched in this way awakens in them shame and rage.
Yet the madman does not reach them, even though he may stare them in
the face like the Fuhrer. He merely inflames them. His proverbial gaze
straight into the eyes, unlike the free gaze, does not preserve individuality. It fixates. It binds others to one-sided loyalty, by confining them to the

windowless monadic fortress of their own person. It does not awaken conscience, but prematurely imposes responsibility. The penetrating look and
the one that goes past you, the hypnotic and the disregarding gaze, are of
the same kind: in both, the subject is extinguished. Because in both looks
reflection is absent, the unreflecting are electrified by them. They are betrayed: the women cast away, the nation incinerated. Thus, the self-encapsulated flgure remains a caricature of divine power. Just as his lordly gesture is entirely without creative power in reality, so, like the devil, he lacks
the attributes of the principle he usurps: mindful love and freedom secure
within itself He is malignant, driven by compulsion, and as weak as he is
strong. If divine omnipotence is said to draw creation unto itself, this
satanic. imagined omnipotence draws everything into its impotence. That
is the secret of its rule. The compulsively projecting self can project nothing except its own unhappiness, from the cause of which, residing in itself,

it is yet cut off by its lack ~f reflection. For this reason the products offalse
projection, the stereotyped schemata of both thought and reality, bring
calamity. For the ego, sinking into the meaningless abyss of itself, objects
become allegories of ruin, which harbor the meaning of its own downfall.
The psychoanalytic theory of pathic projection has identified the
transference of socially tabooed impulses from the subject to the object as
the substance of that projection. Under the pressure of the superego, the
ego projects aggressive urges emanating from the id which, through their
strength, are a danger to itself, as malign intentions onto the outside
world, and succeeds in ridding itself of them as reactions to that outside
world. either in fantasy by identification with the alleged malefactor or in
reality by ostensible self-defense. The proscribed material converted into
aggrtssioll is usually homosexual in nature. Through fear of castration,

Limits ofEnlightenment 159
obedience toward the father preempts castration by adapting the conscious
emotional life to that of a little girl, and hatred of the father is repressed
as endless rancor. In paranoia, this hatred is intensified to a castration wish
expressed as a universal urge to destroy. The sick subject regresses to an
archaic confusion between love and dominance. It is concerned with phys-

ical closeness, with taking possession, finally with relationship at any price .
Because it cannot acknowledge desire within itself, it assails the other with
jealousy or persecution, as the repressed sodomite hounds the animal as
hunter or driver. The attraction stems from excessive attachment or devel-

ops at first sight; it can emanate from great figures , as in the case of malcontents and murderers of presidents, or from the most wretched as in the

pogrom itself. The objects of the fixation are replaceable like father figures
in childhood; whatever it hits on fits its purpose; the delusion of relatedness strikes out unrelatedly, Pathie projection is a desperate exertion by an
ego which, according to Freud has a far weaker resistance to internal than
to external stimuli: under the pressure of pent-up homosexual aggression
the psychic mechanism forgets its most recent phylogenetic attainment,
the perception of self, and experiences that aggression as an enemy in the
world, the better to master it .

This pressure acts also, however, on the healthy cognitive process as
a moment of its unreflecting naivety, which tends toward violence.
Wherever intellectual energies are concentrated on an external intention,

wherever it is a matter of pursuing, ascertaining, grasping-of exerting
those functions which have been sublimated from the primitive overpowering of animals into the scientific methods of controlling nature-the
subjective process is easily overlooked in the schernatization , and the system is posited as the thing itself. Objectifying thought, like its pathological counterpart, has the arbitrariness of a subjective purpose extraneous to
the matter itself and, in forgetting the matter, does to it in thought the vio-

lence which later will be done in practice. The unconditional realism of
civilized humanity, which culminates in fascism, is a special case of para-

noid delusion which depopulates nature and finally nations themselves. In
the abyss of uncertainty, which every objectifying act must bridge, paranoia installs itself. Because there is no absolutely compelling argument

.I~ainlit materially false judgments, the distorted perception in which they
lurk cannot be healed. Every percept unconsciously contains conceptual
clements, just as every judgment contains unclarified ph enomenalistic

160

Elements ofAnti-Semitism

ones. Because imagination is involved in truth, it can always appear to this

damaged imagination that truth is fantastic and its illusion the truth. The
maimed subject lives on the element of imagination immanent in truth by
ceaselessly putting it on show. Democratically, he insists on equal rights
for his delusion, because, in fact, not even truth is stringent. While the citizen may admit that the anti-Semite is in the wrong, he requires the victim to be guilty too. Thus Hitler demands the right to practice mass murder in the name of the principle of sovereignty under international law,
which tolerates any act of violence in another country," Like every paranoiac he takes advantage of the hypocritical identity of truth and
sophistry; the distinction between them is as uncompelling as it nevertheless is strict. Perception is only possible in so far as the thing is already

apprehended as determinate-for example, as a case of a genus or type. It
is a mediated immediacy, thought infused with the seductive power of sen-

suality. It blindly transfers subjective elements to the apparent given ness of
the object. Only the self-conscious work of thought-that is, according to
Leibnizian and Hegelian idealism, only philosophy-can escape this hallucinatory power. fu, in the course of cognition, thought identifies the
conceptual moments which are immediately posited in perception and are
therefore compelling, it progressively takes them back into the subject and
strips them of their intuitive power. In this process every earlier stage,
including science, turns out to be, in comparison to philosophy, a kind of
percept, an estranged phenomenon permeated with unrecognized intellectual elements; persistence at this stage, without negation, forms part of
the pathology of cognition. The subject which naively postulates absolutes, no matter how universally active it may be, is sick, passively succumbing to the dazzlernent of false immediacy.
Such blindness is, however, a constitutive element of all judgment, a
necessary illusion. Every judgment, even negative, is reassuring. However
much a judgment may stress its own isolation and relativity for the purpose of self-correction, it must assert its own content, no matter how cautiously formulated, as something not merely isolated and relative. That
constitutes its nature as judgment, whereas the clause merely entrenches a
claim. Truth, unlike probability, has no gradations. The negating step
beyond the individual judgment, which rescues its truth, is possible only
in so far as it takes itself to be truth and in that sense is paranoid. True
derangement lies only in the immovable, in thought's incapacity for the
.

Limits ofEnlightenment

161

negation in which, unlike the fixed judgment, thought actually consists.
The paranoid over-consistency, the bad infinity of never-changing judgment. is a lack of consistency in thought; instead of conceptually carrying
through the failure of the absolute claim and thereby continuing to qualify his or her judgment, the paranoiac clings obdurately to the claim which
has caused the judgment to fail. Instead ofgoing further by penetrating its
subject matter more deeply, thought places itself entirely in the hopeless
service of the particular judgment. The latter's irresistibility is the same as
its intact positivity, and the paranoiac's weakness is that of thought itself.
For reflection, which in the healthy subject breaks the power of immediacy, is never as compelling as the illusion it dispels. As a negative, reflective
movement not directed straight ahead, it lacks the brutality inherent in the

positive. If the psychic energy of paranoia stems from the libidinal dynamic laid bare by psychoanalysis. its objective impregnability is founded on
the ambiguity inseparable from the objectifying act; indeed, the latter's
hallucinatory power will have been originally decisive. To clarify, it can be
said in the language of natural selection theory that during the formative
period of the human sensorium those individuals survived in whom the
power of the projective mechanisms extended most deeply into their rudimentary logical faculties. or was least moderated by the premature onset
of reflection. Just as, even today. practically fruitful scientific enterprises
call for an unimpaired capacity for definition, for shutting down thought
at a point designated by social need, for demarcating a field which is then
investigated in the minutest detail without passing outside it, paranoiacs
cannot step outside a complex of interests designated by their psychological fate. Their mental acuteness 'consumes itself within the circle drawn

by their fixed idea, as human ingenuity is liquidating itself under the spell
of technical civilization. Paranoia is the shadow of cognition.
So calamitous is the mind's tendency to false projection that, as the
isolated schema of self-preservation, such projection threatens to dominate
everything which goes beyond self-preservation: culture. False projection
is the usurper in the realm of freedom as of culture; paranoia is the symptom of the half-educated. For such people, all words become a system of
delusion, an attempt mentally to occupy the regions to which their experience does not extend, violently to give meaning to a world which makes
I hem meaningless, but at the same time to denigrate the intellect and the
experience from which they arc excluded and to burden them with the

162

Elements ofAnti-Semitism

guilt really borne by the society which has brought about that exclusion.
The half-educated who, unlike the merely uneducated, hypostatize limited knowledge as truth, cannot endure the breach between inward and outward, individual fate and social law, appearance and essence, which for
them is heightened to unbearable levels. To be sure, their suffering does
contain an element of truth, compared to the mere acceptance of the given
to which superior understanding has sworn allegiance. Nevertheless, the
half-educated reach out stereorypically in their fear for the formula which
suits their need, now to justify the disaster which has happened, now to
predict the catastrophe still to come, which is sometimes disguised as a
regeneration. The explanation, in which their own desires appear as an
objective power, is always as external and meaningless as the isolated event
itself, at once feeble-minded and sinister. The obscurantist systems of
today bring about what the devil myth of the official religion enabled peaple to do in the Middle Ages: to imbue the outside world with an arbitrary
meaning, which the lone paranoiac now constructs according to a private
schema shared by no one, and which only for that reason appears actually
mad. Relief is provided by the dire conventicles and panaceas which put
on scientific airs while cutting off thought: theosophy, numerology, naturopathy, eurhythrny, teetotalism, Yoga, and countless other sects, competing and interchangeable, all with academies, hierarchies and specialist jargon, the fetishized officialese of science and religion. When confronted by
an educated public, they remained apocryphal and disreputable. But today, when education itself is withering for economic reasons, unprecedented conditions are created for the paranoia of the masses. The belief
systems of the past, which were embraced by the populace as self-contained paranoid forms, had wider meshes. Just because they were so rationally elaborated and specific, they left room, at least above them, for culture and mind, which, conceived as spirit, were their true medium.
Indeed, to an extent they counteracted paranoia. Freud calls neuroseseven rightly in this instance-"asocial formations"; "they endeavor to

achieve by private means what is affected in society by collective effort."3
Those belief systems retain something of the collectivity which preserves
individuals from pathological symptoms. The sickness is socialized: in the
intoxication of the communal ecstasy-indeed, as itself a communityblindness becomes a relationship and the paranoid mechanism is made
controllable, without losing the power to strike terror. Perhaps that was

Limits ofEnlightenment 163
one of the major contributions of religions to the survival of the species.
Paranoid forms of consciousness tend to give rise to leagues, factions, rackets. Their members are afraid to believe their madness on their own.

Projecting it, they everywhere see proselytizing and conspiracy. The established group has always taken a paranoid stance toward others; in this the
great empires, indeed, organized humanity as a whole, are no better than
headhunters. Those who were excluded from humanity against their will,
like those who excluded themselves from it out of longing for humanity,
knew that the pathological cohesion of the established group was strengthened by persecuting them. Its normal members relieve their paranoia by
participating in the collective one, and cling passionately to the objectified, collective, approved forms of delusion. The horror uacui with which
they devote themselves to their confederacies welds them together and
gives them their almost irresistible power.
With bourgeois property, education and culture spread, driving

paranoia into the dark corners of society and the psyche. But as the real
emancipation of humanity did not coincide with the enlightenment of the
mind, education itself became sick. The less social reality kept pace with
educated consciousness, the more that consciousness itself succumbed to

a process of reification. Culture was entirely commoditized, disseminated
as information which did not permeate those who acquired it. Thought
becomes short-winded, confines itself to apprehending isolated facts.
Intellectual connections are rejected as an inconvenient and useless exerlion. The developmental moment in thought, its whole genetic and intensive dimension, is forgotten and leveled down to what is immediately prevent, to the extensive. The present order of life allows the self no scope to
draw intellectual or spiritual conclusions. Thought, stripped down to
knowledge, is neutralized, harnessed merely to qualifying its practitioner
lor specific labor markets and heightening the commodity value of the
personality, In this way the self-reflection of the mind, which counteracts
p.iranoia, is disabled. Finally, under the conditions of late capitalism, the
h.rlf-cducated condition has become the objective spirit. In the totalitari. 1 11 phase of government its exponents reinstate the provincial charlatans of
1'"lilies, and with them the system of delusion, as the ultima ratio, irnpos-

IIII~ it 011 the majority of the administered, who have already been softened
"I' by big politics and the culture industry," The absurdity of the present
', I '\Il'1ll of rule is so transparent to healthy consciousness that it needs sick

164 Elements ofAnti-Semitism
consciousness to keep itself alive. Only those suffering from persecution
mania can tolerate the persecution which domination inevitably becomes,
provided they are allowed to persecute others.
In fascism, where the responsibility for wife and child painfully
inculcated by bourgeois civilization is being obscured by the individual's
insistent conformity to regulations, conscience is being liquidated in any
case. Contrary to the ideas of Dostoievski and the German apostles of
inwardness, conscience consisted in the self's devotion to something substantial outside itself, in the ability to make the true concerns of others
one's own. This ability involves reflection as an interpenetration of receptivity and imagination. Because the abolition of the independent economic subject by big industry*-partly by absorbing free entrepreneurs and
partly by transforming the workers" into objects of trades unions-is irresistibly eroding the basis of moral decisions, reflection, roo, must wither.
The soul, as the possibility of guilt aware of itself, decays. Conscience is
deprived of objects, since individuals' responsibility for themselves and
their dependents is replaced-although still under the old moral title-by
their mere performance for the apparatus. The internal conflict of drives,
in which the agency of conscience is formed, can no longer be worked
through. If internalized, the social injunctions would not only be made
both more binding and more open but also would be emancipated from

society and even turned against it; instead, the individual identifies himself or herself promptly and directly with the stereotyped scales of values.
The exemplary German woman, who has a monopoly on femininity as the
(rue German man has on masculinity, and their counterpans elsewhere,
an: conformist, asocial human types. Despite and because of its obvious
deficiency, the system of power has become so preponderant that powerless individuals can avert their fate only through blind compliance.
In face of such power, it is left to chance-guided by the Party-ro
decide where despairing self-preservation is to project the guilt for its terror. The Jews are the predestined target of this guided chance. The circulation sphere, in which they once held positions of economic power, is
vanishing. The liberal form of commercial enterprise once endowed fragmented wealth with political influence. Now, no sooner emancipated, its
owners are merged with the state apparatus and placed at the mercy of
capilal powers which have outgrown competition. No matter what the
makeup of" the Jews may be in reality, their image, that of the defeated, has
.

Limits ofEnlightenment 165
characteristics which must make totalitarian rule their mortal enemy: happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without fron-

tiers. religion without myth. These features are outlawed by the ruling
powers because they are secretly coveted by the ruled. The former can survive only as long as the latter turn what they yearn for into an object of
hate. They do so through pathic projection, since even hatred leads to
union with the object-in destruction. It is the negative of reconciliation.
Reconciliation is Judaism's highest concept, and expectation its whole
meaning. The paranoid reaction stems from the incapacity for expectation. The anti-Semites are realizing their negative absolute through power,

by transforming the world into the hell they have always taken it to be. A
radical change would depend on whether the ruled, in face of absolute
madness, could master themselves and hold the madness back. Only the
liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize
the idea which has been unrealized until now": that the Jew is a human

being. This would be a step away from the anti-Semitic society, which
drives both Jews and others into sickness, and toward the human one.

Such a step would fulfill the fascist lie by contradicting it: the Jewish question would indeed prove the turning-point of history.* By conquering the
sickness of the mind which flourishes on the rich soil of self-assertion un-

hampered by reflection, humanity would cease to be the universal antirace
and become the species which, as nature, is more than mere nature, in that
ir is aware of its own image. The individual and social emancipation from
domination is the countermovement to false projection, and no longer

would Jews seek, by resembling it, to appease the evil senselessly visited on

them as on an the persecuted, whether animals or human beings.

Bur there are no longer any anti-Sernires. The last of them were lib-

crals who wanted to express their antiliberal opinions. By the end of the
nineteenth century the old-style conservative aloofness of the nobility and
I he officer corps toward the Jews was merely reactionary. The people
. rhrcasr of the times were the Ahlwardts and the Knuppelkunzes." They

drew their followers from the same groups as the Fahrer, but their support
, .une from rroublemakers and malcontents throughout the country. When
I'mpl" voiced anti-Semitic attitudes, (hey felr they were being bourgeois

166 Elements ofAnti-Semitism
and rebellious at the same time. Their nationalistic grumbling was still a
distorted form of civil freedom. The beer hall politics of the anti-Semites
exposed the lie of German liberalism, on which it fed and whose demise
it finally brought about. Even though they used their own mediocrity as a
license to subject the Jews to beatings in which universal murder was
already latent, they were economically farsighted enough to weigh the risks
of the Third Reich against the advantages of a hostile form of tolerance.
Anti-Semitism was still a competing motif within a range of subjective
choices. But the outcome related specifically to it. The whole chauvinistic

vocabulary was implied from the start in the adoption of the IJolkisch thesis. Anti-Semitic views always reflected stereotyped thinking. Today only
that thinking is left. People still vote, but only between totalities. The antiSemitic psychology has largely been replaced by mere acceptance of the

whole fascist ticket, * which is an inventory of the slogans of belligerent big
business. Just as, on the ballot paper of the mass party, voters are presented with the names of people remote from their experience for whom they

can only vote en bloc, the central ideological concepts have been codified

into a small number of lists. One has to opt for one of them en bloc if one's
own position is not to seem as futile as splinter votes on polling day in face
of the statistical mammoths. Anti-Semitism has practically ceased to be an
independent impulse and has become a plank in the platform: anyone
who gives fascism its chance subscribes to the settlement of the Jewish
question along with the breaking of the unions and the crusade against
Bolshevism. The anti-Semite's conviction, however mendacious it may be.
has been absorbed into.rhe preconditioned reflexes of the subjectless exponents of a particular standpoint. When the masses accept the reactionary
ticket containing the clause against the Jews, they are obeying social mechanisms in which individual people's experiences ofJews play no part. It has
been shown, in fact, that anti-Semitism's prospects are no less good in
"[ew-free'" areas than in Hollywood itself. Experience is replaced by
cliche, the imagination active in experience by diligent acceptance. The
members of each class have to absorb their quota of guidelines on pain of
rapid downfall. Just as they need to be instructed on the technical merits
of a particular aircraft, so do they, roo, on their allegiance to one of the
prescribed agencies of power.
In the world of mass production, stereotypes replace intellectual car-

egories. Judgment is no longer based on a real act of synthesis bur on blind

Limits ofEnlightenment 167
subsumption. If, at an early historical stage, judgment consisted in the
swift decision which immediately unleashed the poisoned arrow, in the
meantime exchange and the institutions oflaw have taken their effect. The
act of judgment passed through a stage of deliberation which afforded the
judging subject some protection from brutal identification with the predicate. In late-industrial society there is a regression to judgment without
judging. When, in fascism, the protracted legal process was replaced by an
accelerated procedure in criminal trials, up-to-date people had been economically prepared for this development. They had learned to see things
unreflectingly, through ready-made thought models, the termini technici
which provide them with iron rations following the decay of language.
The perceiver is no longer present in the process of perception. He or she
is incapable of the active passivity of cognition, in which categorial elements are appropriately reshaped by preformed conventional schemata
and vice versa, so that justice is done to the perceived object. In the field
of the social sciences, as in that of individual experience, blind intuition
and empty concepts are brought togethcr rigidly and without mediation."
In the age of the "three hundred basic words" the ability to exercise judgment, and therefore to distinguish between true and false, is vanishing.
Thinking, where it is not merely a highly specialized piece of professional
equipment in this or that branch of the division of labor, is suspect as an
old-fashioned luxury: "armchair thinking." It is supposed to "produce"
something. The more superfluous physical labor is made by the developmerit of technology, the more enthusiastically it is set up as a model for
mental work, which must not be tempted, however, to draw any awkward
ronclusions. That is the secret of advancing stupidi ry, on which antiScmitism thrives. If, even within the field of logic, the concept stands
opposed to the particular as something merely external, anything which
sr.uids for difference within society itself must indeed tremble. Everyone is
labeled friend or foe. The disregard for the subject makes things easy for
rhe administration. Ethnic groups are transported to different latitudes;
Individuals labeled "Jew" are dispatched to the gas chambers.
The indifference to the individual expressed in logic draws its conI lnsions from the economic process. The individual had become an
uupcdiment to production. The lack of synchronicity between technical
.1 I1t! human development, the "cultural lag" which used to exercise the

IlIind~ of sociologists, is beginning to disappear. Economic rationality, the

168 Elements ofAnti-Semitism
vaunted principle of the smallest necessary means, is unremittingly
reshaping the last units of the economy: businesses and human beings.
The most advanced form at a given time becomes the predominant one.
Once, the department store expropriated the old-style specialist shop. The
latter, having outgrown mercantilist regulation, had absorbed initiative,
control, and organization within itself and become, like the old mill and
smithy, a little factory, a free enterprise. Its mode of operation was complicated, expensive, risky. Competition therefore replaced it by the more
efficient, centralized form of retail shop, the department store. The psy-

chological small business-the individual-is meeting the same fate. It
came into being as the power cell of economic activity. Emancipated from
the tutelage of earlier economic stages, individuals fended for themselves
alone: as proletarians by hiring themselves out through the labor market
and by constant adaptation to new technical conditions, as entrepreneurs

by tirelessly realizing of the ideal type of homo oeconomicus. Psychoanalysis
has portrayed the internal small business which thus carne into being as a
complex dynamic of unconscious and conscious elements, of id, ego, and
superego. In its negotiations with the superego, the ego, the agency of
social control within the individual, keeps the drives within the limits set
by self-preservation. The areas of friction are large and neuroses, the incidental expenses of such a drive economy, inevitable. Nevertheless, this
complex psychical apparatus made possible the relatively free interplay of
subjects which constituted the market economy. In the era of large combines and world wars; however, the mediation of the social process by innumerable monads is proving obsolete. The subjects of the drive economy
are being psychologically expropriated, and the drive economy is being
more rationally operated by society itself. The individual no longer has to
decide what he or she is supposed to do in a given situation in a painful

inner dialogue between conscience, self-preservation, and drives. For the
human being as wage earner the decision is taken by a hierarchy extending from trade associations to the national administration; in the private

sphere it is taken by the schema of mass culture, which appropriates even
the most intimate impulses of its forced consumers. The committees and
stars function as ego and superego, and the masses, stripped of even the
semblance of personality, are molded far more compliantly by the catchwords and models than ever the instincts were by the internal censor. If,
in [ibcralisrn, rhc individuation of a section of the. population was neces-

Limits 0It:111i.~hl/·1/II/t'/I1

1(,<)

sary for the adaptation of society as a whole to the state of technology,

today the functioning of the economic apparatus demands that the masses be directed without the hindrance of individuation, The economically
determined direction of the whole society, which has always governed the
mental and physical constitution of human beings, is causing the organs
which enabled individuals to manage their lives autonomously to atrophy.
Now that thinking has become a mere sector of the division of labor, the
plans of the authorized experts and leaders have made individuals who
plan their own happiness redundant. The irrationality of the unresisting
and eager adaptation to reality becomes, for the individual, more reasonable than reason. If, previously, the bourgeois had introjected the compulsions of conscience and duty into themselves and the workers, now the
entire human being has become at once the subject and the object of
repression. In the progress of industrial society, which is supposed to have

conjured away the law of increasing misery it had itself brought into
being, the concept which justified the whole-the human being as person, as the bearer of reason-is going under. The dialectic of enlightenment is culminating objectively in madness.
This is also a madness of political reality. As a dense web of modern communications, the world has become so standardized that the dif-

ferences between diplomatic breakfasts in Durnbarton Oaks and Persia
have to be specially devised as an expression of national character, while
actual national peculiarity is experienced primarily by the millions hungering for rice who have fallen through the narrow meshes. Although the
abundance of goods which could be produced everywhere and simultaneously makes the struggle for raw materials and markets seem ever more
anachronistic, humanity is nevertheless divided into a small number of
armed power blocs. They compete more pitilessly than the firms involved
in the anarchy of commodity production ever did, and strive toward
mutual liquidation. The more senseless the antagonism, the more rigid the
blocs. Only the total identification of the population with these monxrrosities of power, so deeply imprinted as to have become second nature

,IIIJ stopping all the pores of consciousness. maintains the masses in the
viarc of absolute apathy which makes them capable of their miraculous

.nl I ievernents. As far as any decisions are still left to individuals, they are
dlt.'nivcly decided in advance. The irreconcilability of the ideologies
trumpeted by the politicians from the different camps is itself just one

170

Elements ofAnti-Semitism

more ideology of the blind constellation of power. Ticket thinking. a
product of industrialization and its advertising. is being extended to international relations. Whether a citizen chooses the communist or the fascist

ticket depends on whether he happens to be more impressed by the Red
Army or the laboratories of the West. The reification by virtue of which
the power structure, made possible solely by the passivity of the masses,
appears to those same masses as an iron reality, has been consolidated to
the point where any spontaneity, or even the ability to conceive of the true
state of affairs, has necessarily become an eccentric utopia, an irrelevant
sectarianism. Illusion has become so concentrated that to see through it
objectively assumes the character of hallucination. To vote for a ticket, by
contrast, means to practice adaptation to illusion petrified as reality, which
endlessly reproduces itself through such adaptation. The reluctant voter is
therefore ostracized as a deserter. Since Hamlet, hesitation was for modern

people a sign of reflection and humanity. The wasted time at once represented and mediated the gap between individual and universal, as circulation does between consumption and production in the economy. Today
individuals receive their tickets ready-made from the powers that be, as
consumers receive their automobiles from the sales outlets of factories.

Conformity to reality, adaptation to power, are no longer the result of a
dialectical process between subject and reality but are produced directly by
the cogs and levers of industry. The process is one of liquidation instead
of sublation, of formal instead of determinate negation. The unleashed
colossi of production have subdued the individual not by granting him or
her full satisfaction, 'Out by extinguishing the subject. Precisely therein lies
their perfect rationality, which coincides with their insanity. The extreme

disproportion between collective and individual eliminates tension, but
the untroubled harmony between omnipotence and impotence is itself
un mediated contradiction, the absolute antithesis of reconciliation.

For this reason the psychological determinants of the individualwhich have always been the internal human agencies of wrong societyhave not disappeared with the individual itself. However, these character
types are now being assigned to their mathematically exact positions within the coordinates of power. Both their efficiency and their coefficient of
friction are included in 'the calculation. The ticket acts as a gearwheel in
this process. Anything in the old psychological mechanism which was
compulsive, unfree, and irrational is precisely adjusted to it. The react

Limits ofEnlightenment

171

tionary ticket which includes anti-Semitism is suited to the destructive-

conventional syndrome. It is not so much that such people react originally against the Jews as that their drive-structure has developed a tendency
toward persecution which the ticket then furnishes with an adequate
object. The "elements of anti-Semitism" once derived from experience and
now rendered inoperative by the loss of experience reflected in ticket
thinking, are remobilized by the ticket. Being already corrupted, these ele-

ments also provide the nco-anti-Semite with the bad conscience and thus
with the insatiability of evil. Just because the psychology of the individual
can now construct itself and its content only from the synthetic schemata
supplied by society, contemporary anti-Semitism takes on its empty but
impenetrable character The Jewish middleman fully becomes the image of
the devil only when economically he has ceased to exist. Victory is thus
made easy, and the anti-Semitic family man becomes the spectator,
exempt from responsibility, of an irresistible historical tendency, intervening only when called to do so by his role as an employee of the Party or
the Zyklon gas factories. As they designate obsolete sections of the population for extermination, the administrations of totalitarian states are

merely the executors of economic verdicts passed long ago. Members of
other branches of the division of labor can look on with the indifference

of people reading newspaper reports on clean-up operations at the scene
of yesterday's catastrophe. The peculiarities for the sake of which the victims are killed have long been effaced. Those who fall within the terms of
the decree as Jews have to be identified by means of elaborate questionnaires, now that the antagonistic religions which once differentiated them
have been successfully remodeled and assimilated as cultural heritage
under the leveling pressure of late-industrial society. The Jewish masses
themselves are no more immune to ticket thinking than the most hostile
youth organization. In this sense fascist anti-Semitism is obliged to invent
its own object. Paranoia no longer pursues its goal on the basis of the individual case history of the persecutor; having become a vital component of
society it must locate that goal within the delusive context of wars and economic cycles before the psychologically predisposed "national comrades"
can support themselves on it, both inwardly and outwardly, as patients.
The tendency according to which anti-Semitism now exists only as
one item on an interchangeable ticket gives irrefutable reason to hope for
its end. The Jews arc being murdered at a time when the leaders could

172

Elements ofAnti-Semitism

replace the anti-Semitic plank in their platform just as easily as their followers can be transplanted from one location of wholly rationalized production to another. The development which leads to ticket thinking is
based, in any case, on the universal reduccion of every specific energy to
the one, identical, abstract form of labor, from the battlefield to the stu-

dio. However, the transition from those conditions to a more human state

cannot take place, because benign and malign tendencies suffer the same
fate. The freedom on the progressive ticket is as far removed from the
existing political power structures, to which progressive decisions necessarily lead, as hostility to the Jews is external to the chemical cartel. To be
sure, the psychologically more humane are attracted to freedom, but the
advancing loss of experience is finally turning even the supporters of the

progressive ticket into enemies of difference. It is not just the anti-Semitic
ticket which is anti-Semitic, but the ticket mentality itself The rage
against difference which is teleologically inherent in that mentality as the
rancor of the dominated subjects of the domination of nature is always
ready to attack the natural minority, even though it is the social minority
which those subjects primarily threaten. The socially responsible elite is in
any case far harder to pin down than other minorities. In the murky intertwinement of property, ownership, control, and management it successfully eludes theoretical definition. The ideology of race and the reality of
class both equally reveal only an abstract difference from the majority. But
although the progressive ticket tends to produce something worse than its
content, the content of the fascist ticket is so vacuous that it can be main-

tained as a substitute for something better only by desperate efforts on the
part of the deceived. Its horror is that of the blatant but insistent lie. While
it admits no truth by which it might be measured, its absurdity is so monstrous as to bring truth negatively within reach, so that it can be kept apart
from those deprived of judgment only by their total abstention from
thought. Enlightenment itself, having mastered itself and assumed its own

power, could break through the limits of enlightenment.

Notes and Sketches

AGAINST KNOWINGNESS

One of the lessons of the Hitler period is the stupidity of cleverness.
How many were the expert arguments with which Jews dismissed the likelihood of Hitler's rise, when it was already as clear as daylight. I recall a
conversation with an economist who demonstrated the impossibility of
Germany's militarization from the interests of Bavarian brewers. And in
any case, according to the clever people, fascism was impossible in the
West. Clever people have always made things easy for barbarians, because
they are so stupid. It is the well-informed, farsighted judgments, the prognoses based on statistics and experience. the observations which begin: "1
happen to be an expert in this field," it is the well-founded, conclusive
statements which are untrue.

Hitler was against intellect and humanity. But there is also an intellect which is against humanity: it is distinguished by well-informed superiority.
Postscript
That cleverness is becoming stupidity is inherent in the historical
tendency. To be reasonable, in the sense used by Chamberlain when he
called Hitler's demands at Bad Godesberg* unreasonable, means to insist
that there be equivalence between giving and taking. Such reason is modeled on exchange. Objectives may be attained only through the mediation

174 Notes and Sketches

of a kind of market, in the little advantages that power can steal while
respecting the rule by which one concession is exchanged for another.
Cleverness is helpless as soon as power disregards that rule and simply
appropriates directly. The medium of traditional bourgeois intelligence,
discussion, is in decline. Even individuals can no longer converse, and
know it; that is why they have turned card games into a serious, responsible institution that calls on all their powers, so that although there are no

conversations, the silence goes unheard. It is no different on the big stage.
A fascist does not like to be spoken to. When others have their say, he takes
it as an impudent interruption. He is impervious to reason because he recognizes it only in concessions made by others.
The contradiction of the stupidity of cleverness is necessary. For
bourgeois reason is obliged to claim universality while its own development curtails it. Just as, in an exchange, each party receives its due but
social injustice nevertheless results, me exchange economy's form of reflection, the prevalent rationality, is just, universal, and particularistic, the
instrument of privilege within equality. Fascism makes it pay the price. It
openly represents the particular interest, thus unmasking reason, which
wrongly flaunts its universality, as itself limited. That this turns clever people all at once into dunces convicts reason of its own unreason.
But the fascist, too, suffers under the contradiction. For bourgeois
reason is not only particularistic but also, indeed, universal, and in denying its universality fascism defeats itself. Those who came to power in
Germany were smarter than the liberals and more stupid. The "progress
toward the new order" has been carried largely by people whose consciousness progress has left behind-bankrupts, sectarians, fools. They are
exempt from error as long as their power precludes all competition. In the
competition between states, however, the fascists not only are just as capable pf making mistakes but-with qualities such as myopia, bigotry, igno-

rance of economic forces, and, above all, the inability to perceive the negative and include it in their assessment of the situation as a whole-are

also impelled subjectively toward the catastrophe which, in their hearts,
they have always expected.

Notrs tlml S/..'t 'fl '!Jt'J

liS

TWO WORLDS

In this country" there is no difference between a person and that person's economic fate. No one is anything other than his wealth, his income,
his job, his prospects. In the consciousness of everyone, including its wearer, the economic mask coincides exactly with what lies beneath it, even in
its smallest wrinkles. All are worth as much as they earn, and earn as much
as they are worth. They find out what they are through the ups and downs
of their economic life. They know themselves as nothing else. If the materialist critique of society once opposed idealism by asserting that it is not
consciousness which determines being but being consciousness, and that
the truth about society is to be found not in its idealistic notions of itself
but in its economy, up-to-date self-consciousness has meanwhile discarded such idealism. People judge their own selves by their market value and
find out who they are from how they fare in the capitalist economy. Their
fate, however sad it may be, is for them not something external: they
acknowledge it. A Chinese, taking leave,
Spoke with tear-dimmed tones: On me, my friend
The smile of worldly fortune did not fall.
And now I leave to wander mounrain parhs
Seeking my heart's peace in rheir loneliness."

"I am a failure," says the American-and that is that.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE IDEA
INTO POWER

Familiar tendencies from recenr times are sometimes found prefigured in ancient, exotic history, where distance lends them a heightened
clarity.
In his commentary on the Isa-Upanishad, Deussen' argues that in
that work Indian thought took a step beyond what had gone before in the
same way as Jesus in the Gospel according to St. Matthew went beyond
St. John the Baptist, and the Stoics beyond the Cynics. However, this
observation is historically one-sided because the uncompromising ideas of
John the Baptist and of the Cynics, no less than the views against which
the first lines of the Isa-Upanishad are supposed to represent progress.'

176 Notes and Sketches

look much more like left-wing secessionist tendencies which have split off
from powerful cliques and parties than central tendencies of historical
movements, from which European philosophy, Christianity, and the liv-

ing Vedic religion themselves branched off. Accordingly, as Deussen himself notes, the Isa-Upanishad is usually placed at the beginning of Indian
collections, long before the writings it is said to have gone beyond. Yet this
first work itself shows traces of a betrayal ofyouthful radicalism, of treachery against revolutionary opposition to the dominant reality.
Vedantisrn, Stoicism, and Christianity took the step which made
them capable of organization when they began to participate in social reality and to construct unified theoretical systems. That step was mediated
by the doctrine that an active role in life need not be harmful to the salvation of the soul, provided one has the right spiritual outlook. To be sure,
Christianity reached this point only with St Paul. The idea which dis-

tances itself from the existing order turns into religion. Those who refused
to compromise were censured. They stood aloof "from the desire for children, the desire for wealth, the desire for the world, and wandered about

as beggars. For the desire for children is a desire for property, and the
desire for property is a worldly desire; and both alike are vain."? Those
who express such views may speak the truth according to the upholders of
civilization, but they do not keep step with the course of social life. They
therefore became madmen, and did indeed resemble John the Baptist. He
"was clothed with camel's hair, and had a girdle of skin about his loins; and
he did eat locusts and wild honey,"? "The cynics," says Hegel, "have little
philosophical training and never managed to produce a system, a science.
Only later was their system made a philosophical discipline. by the
Stoics."6 "Swinish, shameless beggars,"? he called these successors.
The uncompromising figures of whom history has left some record
did not entirely lack an organized following; otherwise not even their
names would have come down to us. They set up at least some part of a
systematic doctrine or a code of behavior. Even the more radical
Upanishads, attacked by the Isa-Upanishad, were verses and sacrificial for-

mulae used by priestly guilds;8 John the Baptist may not have inaugurated a religion. but he did found an order." The Cynics formed a school of
philosophers; its founder, Antisthenes, even sketched the outlines of a theory of the sratc.!" But the theoretical and practical systems of such historical outsiders were unstructured, without a center, an.d differed from the

Notes and Sketches 177

successful systems by a streak of anarchy. The idea and the individual
mean more to them than administration and the collective. They therefore
provoke anger. Plato, the champion of power, had the Cynics in his sights
when he railed against equating the office of king with that of a common
shepherd and compared a loose organization of humanity without national frontiers to a state of swine. I I The uncompromising spirits may have
been willing to unite and cooperate, but they lacked the skill to construct
a solid hierarchy closed to those from below. Neither in their theory,
which was without uniformity or consistency, nor in their practice, which
lacked the cohesion to make an impact, did they themselves reflect the
world as it actually was.
That was the formal difference between the radical and the con-

formist movements in religion and philosophy, which did not lie in their
content in isolation. The sect of the ascetic Gaurarna conquered the Asiatic
world. During his lifetime he showed a great talent for organization. Even
if he did not, like the reformer Cankara, exclude the lower orders from the

communication of his doctrine;" he expressly acknowledged property in
human beings and prided himself on the "sons of noble families" who
joined his order, in which pariahs, "if present at all, appear to have been
rare exceptions."13 From the first, his disciples were differentiated on the
Brahmin model. 14 Cripples, the sick, criminals, and many others were
denied admission." Have you, applicants were asked, "leprosy, scrofula,
white leprosy, consumption, epilepsy? Are you a human being? Are you a
man? Are you your own master? Are you without debts? Are you not in the
king's service?" and so on. Fully in keeping with India's brutal patriarchalism, women were admitted only reluctantly to the original Buddhist order.
They had to subjugate themselves to the men and remained in effect
minors." The entire order enjoyed the patronage of the rulers and fitted
admirably into Indian life.
Asceticism and materialism, those opposites, are ambiguous in the
same way. Asceticism as a refusal to participate in the bad existing order
coincides, in face of oppression, with the material demands of the masses,
just as, conversely, asceticism as an agent of discipline, imposed by cliques,
aims at adaptation to injustice. The materialistic acceptance of the status
quo, individual egoism, has always been linked to renunciation, while the
gaze of the unworldly zealot, roving beyond the existing order, rests mate-

rialistically on the LUll! of milk and honey. Asceticism is sublated in true

178 Notes and Sketches

materialism, and materialism in true ascencism. The history of those
ancient religions and schools, like that of the modern panies and revolutions, can teach us that the price of survival is practical complicity, the
transformation of the idea into power.

THE THEORY OF GHOSTS

Freud's theory that the belief in ghosts comes from the evil thoughts
of the living about the dead, from the memory of old death wishes, is too

narrow. The hatred of the dead is jealousy as much as a feeling of guilt.
Those left behind feel abandoned, and attribute their pain to the deceased
who causes it. At the stages of humanity's development when death still
appeared as a direct continuation of life, the abandonment of the living in
death seemed necessarily like a betrayal, and even in enlightened times the

old belief is not quite extinguished. It runs counter to consciousness to
conceive of death as absolute nothingness; absolute nothingness cannot be
thought. And as the burden of life falls back on those left behind, the sit-

uation of the dead can readily seem the better state. The way in which
some bereaved people entirely reorganize their lives after the death of one
close to them, the busy cult of the deceased or, inversely, the forgetting
rationalized as tact, are the modern counterpart to the belief in ghosts
which, in unsublimated form, continues unabated in spiritualism. Only
when the horror of annihilation is raised fully into consciousness are we
placed in the proper relationship to the dead: that of unity with them,
since we, like them, are victims of the same conditions and of the same dis-

appointed' hope.
Postscript
The disturbed relationship to the dead-who are forgotten and
em balmed-i-is one of the symptoms of the sickness of experience today. It

might almost be said that the concept of human life itself, as the unity of
a person's history, has become invalid: the individual's life is now defined
merely by its opposite, annihilation, but has lost all concordance, all coni inuiry between conscious remembrance and involuntary memorymeaning, Individuals are reduced-to a mere succession of instantaneous

PI'l'.~CII1S, which leave behind no trace, or rather, the trace of which they
hall' as somcrhing irrational, superfluous, utterly obsolete~ Just as any

Notes and Sketches 179

book which has not been published recently is suspect; just as the idea of
history, outside the specialized activities of the academic discipline, makes
up-to-date people nervous, the past of a human being makes them furious. What someone was and experienced earlier is annulled in face of what
he is now, or of the purpose for which he can be used. The threateningly
well-meaning advice frequently given to emigrants that they should forget
the past because it cannot be transplanted, that they should write off their
prehistory and start an entirely new life, merely inflicts verbally on the
spectral intruders the violence they have long learned to do to themselves.
They repress history in themselves and others, OUt of fear that it might
remind them of the disintegration of their own lives, a disintegration
which itself consists largely in the repression of history. The fate which
befalls all feelings, the ostracizing of what has no market value, is applied
most harshly to something which cannot even contribute to a psychological restoration of labor power, mourning. It is becoming the stigma of civilization, an asocial sentimentality which reveals that human beings have
not yet been made to swear absolute allegiance to the realm of purposes.

Therefore mourning, more than all else, is disfigured, deliberately turned
into the social formality which, for the hardened survivors, the beautiful
corpse has always been. In the funeral home and the crematorium, where
the deceased are processed into transportable ashes, into a burdensome
possession, it is indeed untimely to let oneself go, and the young girl who,
proudly describing the first-class funeral of her grandmother, added: "A
pity that Daddy lost control," because he had shed a few tears, precisely
expresses the current state of affairs. The dead are in truth subjected to
what for the ancient Jews was the most grievous curse: To thee shall no
thoughts be turned. The living vent on the dead their despair that they no
longer give thought to themselves.

QUAND ME-ME

External pressure has forced human beings to overcome their own
inertia, to produce material and intellectual works. Thinkers from
Democrirus to Freud are not wrong in believing this. The resistance of
external nature, to which the pressure can finally be traced back, propagates itself in society through the classes, acting on all human beings from

childhood onward as the callousness of their fellows. People are gentle

180

Notes and Sketches

when they want something from those who are stronger, and harsh when

the weaker wanr something from them. That has been the key to the
nature of the person in society up to now.
The conclusion drawn by conservatives, that terror and civilization
are inseparable, is well founded. What could enable human beings to
develop the ability to master complex stimuli, if not their own developmental exertions, which have to be spurred on by external resistance? The
resistance which drives them is first embodied in the father; later it grows
a thousand heads: teachers, superiors, customers, competitors, the representatives of social and state powers. Their brutality stimulates individual
spontaneity.
That this harshness might be moderated in the future, that the bloody
punishments by which humanity has been tamed in the course of centuries
could be replaced by the establishment of sanatoria, seems no more than a
dream. Simulated compulsion is powerless. Culture has evolved under the
shadow of the executioner; Genesis, which tells of the expulsion from

Paradise, and the Soirees de Petersbourg" are in agreement on this. Work and
pleasure take place under the shadow of the executioner. To contradict this

is to fly in the face of all science, all logic. One cannot abolish terror and
retain civilization. Even to relax the former means the beginning of disintegration. The most diverse conclusions can be drawn from this: from the

worship of fascist barbarism to a flight into the circles ofHell. * There is one
orher possibility: to scorn logic, if it is against humanity.

ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY"

A large dog stands beside the highway. If he walks trustfully onto it
he will be run over. His peaceful expression indicates that normally he is
better looked aher-a pet which no one harms. But do the sons of the
upper bourgeoisie, whom no one harms, have peaceful expressions on
their faces? They have not been worse looked after than the dog, which is
now run over.

FOR VOLTAIRE

Your reason is one-sided, whispers one-sided reason; you have done
power an injustice. You have trumpeted the scandal of tyranny eloquent-

Notes and Sketches

181

Iy, tearfully, sarcastically, thunderously; but the good that power has
brought about-on that you have kept silent. Without the security which
only power could establish, that good would never have come into being.
Beneath the wings of power, life and love have played; even your own happiness has been wrested from hostile nature by power. Thoughts inspired
by apologetics are true and false at once. Despite its great accomplishments, only power can commit injustice, for only the executed judgment
is unjust, not the lawyer's unexecuted plea. Only when discourse aims at
oppression, defending power instead of powerlessness, does it contribute
to the general wrong. But power, one-sided reason now whispers, is represented by human beings. By exposing the former, you make a target of the
latter. And after them, worse perhaps will come. The lie speaks truth.
When fascist murderers are waiting, one should not incite the people
against the weak government. But even the alliance with the less brutal
power does not imply that one should keep silent about infamies. The
likelihood that good causes might be damaged by denunciation of the
injustice which protects them from the devil has always been outweighed
by the advantage the devil gains if the denunciation of injustice is left solely to him. How far must a society have sunk in which only scoundrels still
speak the truth-and Goebbels reminds us that the lynch mob is still happily at work. Not the good but the bad is the subject matter of theory.
Theory presupposes the reproduction of life in its existing forms. Its element is freedom, its theme oppression. Where language grows apologetic,
it is already corrupted; by its nature it can be neither neutral nor practical. -Could you not portray the good sides of life and proclaim love as a
principle, instead of endless bitterness?-There is only one expression for
truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good
sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own
opposite: violence. With words I can intrigue, propagate, suggest; that is

ihe attribute which entangles them, as it entangles all activity in the world,
and is the only one which is understood by the lie. It insinuates that even
when one contradicts the existing order, one is acting in the service of
other, emergent powers, competing bureaucracies, and rulers. In its nameless fear, it can and will see only what resembles itself. Anything which is
uhsorbed into its medium, language as mere instrument, becomes identilal 10 the lie as objects become indistinguishable in darkness. But
.ddl Ough it is true rh.u there is 110 word which could nor ultimately be

182

Notes and Sketches

used by the lie, the word's temper never gleams in the lie but only in the
thought hardened in the fight against power. Uncompromising hatred of
the terror inflicted on the last of the earth's creatures legitimizes the gratitude of those who are spared. Invocation of the sun is idolatry. Only the
spectacle of the tree withered in its heat gives a presentiment of the
majesty of the day which will not scorch the world on which it shines.

CLASSIFICATION

General concepts coined by means of abstraction or axiomatically by
individual sciences form the material of representation no less than the
names of individual objects. Opposition to general concepts is absurd.
There is more to be said, however, about the status of the general. What
many individual things have in common, or what constantly recurs in one
individual thing, needs not be more stable, eternal, or deep than the particular. The scale of categories is not the same as that of significance. That
was precisely the error of the Eleatics and all who followed them, with
Plato and Aristotle at their head.

The world is unique. The mere repetition in speech of moments
which occur again and again in the same form bears more resemblance to
a futile, compulsive litany than to the redeeming word. Classification is a
condition of knowledge, not knowledge itself, and knowledge in turn dissolves classification.

AVALANCHE --

The present time is without turning points. A turn of events is
always for the better. But when, as today, calamity is at its height, the heavens open and hurl their fire on those who are lost in any case.
This impression is communicated first of all by what was commonly called the social and political sphere. At one time, the front pages of
daily newspapers seemed strange and vulgar to happy women and children-newspapers reminded them of alehouse swagger-until the bold
headline finally crossed their threshold as a real threat. Rearmament, overseas affairs, tension in the Mediterranean, and who knows what other

grandiose phrases put genuine fear into people, until the First World War
broke 0111. Then, with its ever more dizzying figurs=s , came inflation.

Notes and Sketches 183

When it paused in its course, that did not mean a turning point but still
greater misfortune: rationalization, closures, demolition. When Hitler's
vote went up, modestly at first but insistently, it was already clear that its
motion was that of an avalanche. Voting figures are, indeed, characteristic
of that phenomenon. When, on the evening of the prefascist election day,
the first results came in from the districts an eighth, a sixteenth of the
votes already anticipated the whole. If ten or twenty districts turn en masse
in a certain direction. the remaining hundred will not oppose them.
Already a uniform mentality exists. The essence of the world coincides
with the statistical law by which its surface is classified.
In Germany, fascism triumphed under a crassly xenophobic. anticultural, collectivist ideology. Now that it has devastated the earth, nations

must fight against it; there is no other way. But when all is over, a spirit of
freedom need not spread across Europe; its nations may become as xenophobic, as hostile to culture, and as pseudocollectivist as the fascism
against which they had to defend themselves. Even its defeat will not necessarily break the motion of the avalanche.
The fundamental principle of liberal philosophy was that of
both/and. Today the principle of either/or seems to apply, but in such a
way that the decision has already been taken for the worse.

ISOLATION BY COMMUNICATION

That communication media cause isolation is true not only in the
intellectual sphere. Not only does the mendacious idiom of the radio
announcer fix itself in the brain as an image of language itself. preventing
people from speaking to one another; not only does the voice advertising
Pepsi-Cola drown out the leveling of continents; not only does the ghostly image of the cinema hero model the embraces of adolescents, and later
adultery. Progress keeps people literally apart. The little counter at the railroad station or the bank allowed the clerks to whisper to their colleagues
and share their meager secrets; the glass partitions of modern offices, the
huge rooms in which countless employees sitting together can be easily
supervised both by the public and by their managers, no longer counrenance private conversations and idylls. Even in offices, the taxpayer is now
protected from wasting of time by wage earners, who are isolated in their
c ollectivc. Bur the means of communication also isolate people physically.

184 Notes and Sketches

The railroad has been supplanted by cars. The making of travel acquaintances is reduced by the private automobile to half-threatening encounters
with hitchhikers. People travel on rubber tires in strict isolation from one
another. What is talked about in one family automobile is the same as in
another; in the nuclear family, conversation is regulated by practical interests. Just as every family with a certain income spends the same percentage on housing, cinema, cigarettes, exactly as statistics prescribe, the subject matter of conversations is schernatized according to the class of automobile. When they meet on Sunday outings or in restaurants, the menus
and decor of which are identical to others in the same price category, the
guests find that with increasing isolation they have become more and
more alike. Communication makes people conform by isolating them.

ON THE CRITIQUE OF THE PHILOSOPHY
OF HISTORY

The human species is not, as has been asserted, a freak event in natural history, an incidental and abnormal formation produced by hypertrophy of the cerebral organ. That assertion is true only of reason in certain individuals, or perhaps even of a few countries over short periods,
when the economy has allowed maneuvering space to such individuals.
The cerebral organ, human intelligence, is firmly established enough to
constitute a regular epoch of the earth's history. In this epoch, the human
species, including irs machines, chemicals, and organizational powersfor why should they not be seen as a part of it as teeth are a part of the

bear, since they serve the same purpose and merely function better?-is
the last word in adaptation. Humans have not only overtaken their immediate predecessors but have eradicated them more thoroughly than almost
any other recent species, not excluding the carnivorous saurians.
In face of this it seems somewhat whimsical to try to construe world

history, as did Hegel. in terms of categories such as freedom and justice.
These categories do indeed originate in eccentric individuals, who arc
insignificant in relation to the general course of the whole, unless it be that
they help to bring about transient historical conditions in which especial-

ly large quantities of machines and chemicals are produced to strengthen
I he species and subjugate others. According to this serious history, all

Notes and Sketches 185

ideas, prohibitions, religions, and political creeds are of interest only insofar as, arising from diverse conditions, they increase or decrease the natural survival prospects of the human species on the earth or within the universe. The liberation of citizens from the injustice of the feudal and absolutist past served, through liberalism, to unleash machinery, just as the
emancipation of women has culminated in their being trained as a branch
of the armed forces. The mind, and all that is good in its origins and existence, is hopelessly implicated in this horror. We owe the serum which the
doctor administers to the sick child to the attack on defenseless creatures.

In the endearments of lovers. as in the most sacred symbols of Christ-

ianity, we can detect the lust for the flesh of the kid. just as the ambiguous respect for the totem animal is discernible in that lust. Even our complex understanding of cooking, church, and theater is a consequence of
the sophisticated division of labor, which exists at the expense of nature
within and outside human society. The historical function of culture lies
in retroactively heightening this form of organization. That is why genuine
thought, which detaches itself from that function, reason in its pure form,
takes on the trait of madness which down-to-earth people have never
failed to observe. If that kind of reason were to win a decisive victory within humanity, the predominance of the species would be threatened. The
"freak event" theory would finally turn out to be true. But that theory,
which cynically sought to support a critique of the anthropocentric philosophy of history, is itself too anthropocentric to hold true. Reason acts
as an instrument of adaptation and not as a sedative, as might appear from
the use sometimes made of it by individuals. Its ruse consists' in making
humans into beasts with an ever-wider reach, and not in bringing about
the identity of subject and object.
A philosophical interpretation of world history would have to show
how, despite all the detours and resistances. the systematic domination
over nature has been asserted more and more decisively and has integratl'll all internal human characteristics. Economic, political, and cultural
lorrns" would have to be derived from this position. The idea of the superhuman can be applicable only in the sense of a transition from quantity to
quality. Just as the airman with the toxic spray, who in a few flights can
I lc.uisc the last continents of the last free animals. might be called super111.111 ill comparison to the troglodyte! a human super-amphibian might
, muc inro being for whom the airman of today would seem like a harm-

186 Notes and Sketches

less swallow. But it is doubtful whether a species one stage higher than
man can emerge as a genuine product of natural history. For anthropomorphism contains a measure of truth in that natural history did not reckon with the happy throw of the dice it accomplished in engendering the
human being. The human capacity for destruction promises to become so

great that-once this species has exhausted itself-a tabula rasa wiII have
been created. Either the human species will tear itself to pieces or it will
take all the earth's fauna and flora down with it, and if the earth is still

young enough, the whole procedure-to vary a famous dicrum*-will
have to start again on a much lower level.
By attributing humane ideas as active powers to history, and presenting them as history's culmination, the philosophy of history stripped
them of the naivety inherent in their content. The poor figure always cut
by such ideas when the economy-that is, when power-was not with
them" makes a mockery of everything weak, and in this way their authors
have unwittingly identified themselves with the oppression they sought to
abolish. The philosophy of history repeats what happened in Christianity:
the good, which in reality remains at the mercy of suffering, is dressed up
as a force which determines the course of history and finally triumphs. It
is deified as the World Spirit or as an immanent law. But not only is history thereby turned into its direct opposite, but the idea, which was supposed to break the necessity, the logical course of events, is itself distorted.
The danger of the "freak event" is averted. Impotence mistaken for power
is denied a second time by such elevation, as if erased from memory. In
this way, Christianity, idealism, and materialism, which in themselves contain truth, also bear guilt for the villainies committed in their name. In
proclaiming power-even a benign power-they became themselves
highly organized historical powers, and as such played their bloody role in
the real history of the human species: as instruments of organization.
Because history as the correlative of unified theory, as something
capable of interpretation, is not the good but, in fact, the horror, thought
is in reality a negative element. The hope for better conditions, insofar as
it is not merely an illusion, is founded less on the assurance that those conditions are guaranteed, sustainable, and final than on a lack of respect for
what is so firmly ensconced amid the general suffering. The infinite
patience, the tender, never-extinguished impulse of creaturelv life toward
expression and light, which seems to soften andpacify within itself the

Notes and Sketches 187

violence of creative evolution, does not, like the rational philosophies of
history, prescribe a certain praxis as beneficial, not even that of nonresistance. The light of reason, which dawned in that impulse and is reflected
in the recollecting thought of human beings, falls, even on the happiest
day, on its irresolvable contradiction: the calamity which reason alone cannot avert.

MONUMENTS TO HUMANITY

Humanity has always been more at home in France than elsewhere.
But the French were no longer aware of the fact. What their books contained was ideology recognized by all. The better qualities led a segregated existence of their own: in the inflection of voice, the turn of phrase, the
artful cuisine, the existence of brothels, the cast-iron pissoirs. But the
Blum govemment" already declared war on such respect for the individual, and even the conservatives did little to protect its monuments.

FROM A THEORY OF THE CRIMINAL*

...

Like the criminal, imprisonment was a bourgeois affair. In the

Middle Ages incarceration was reserved for the offspring of princes who
symbolized an inconvenient hereditary claim. Criminals were tortured to
death, to instill a respect for order and law in the mass of the population,
since the example of severity and cruelty teaches the severe and cruel to

love. Regular imprisonment presupposes a rising need for labor power. * It
reflects the bourgeois mode of life as suffering. The rows of cells in a modern prison represent monads in the true Leibnizian sense. "The Monads
have no windows, through which anything could come in or go out.
Accidents cannot separate themselves from substances nor go about outside them, as the 'sensible species' of the Scholastics used to do. Thus neither substance nor accident can come into a Monad from outside."17 The

monads have no direct influence on one another; their lives are regulated
and coordinated by God, or the prison administration. IS The absolute
loneliness, the enforced reliance on a self whose whole being consists in
ihc mastering of material and the monotonous rhythm of work, spectral-

ly prefigure human existence in the modern world. The radical isolation
.ind the radical reduction to an unchanging, hopeless nothingness are

188 Notes and Sketches

identical. The human being in jail is the virtual image of the bourgeois
type he has yet to make himself in reality. Those who fail to achieve this
outside have it inflicted on them with terrible purity inside. The rationalization of prison life through the need to segregate the criminal from society. or even to improve him, does not go to the root of the matter. Prisons
are the image of the bourgeois working world thought through to the end,
set up as an emblem in the world by the hatred of human beings for what
they are forced to make themselves become. The weak, the retarded. the
brutalized must suffer in modified form the order of life to which others

have lovelessly adapted themselves; the introverted violence of the latter is
grimly repeated against the former. The criminal, in whose crime selfpreservation was paramount, has in reality the weaker, more labile self; the
habitual offender is an enfeebled being.
Prisoners are invalids. Their weakness has brought them into a situation which has undermined them in body and mind and continues to do
so. Most were already sick when they committed the crime which put
them in prison-sick through their constitution and their circumstances.
Other acted as any healthy person would in the same constellation of
stimuli and motives but were simply unlucky. A residue were more malevolent and cruel than most free people-as malevolent and cruel in their
persons as the fascist world rulers are through their positions. The deed of
the common criminal is petty, personal, directly destructive. The probability is that even in the case of the most extreme crimes the living substance, which is the same in everyone, could not, in any embodiment,
have escaped the pressure of bodily constitution and individual fate from
birth onward which :led the criminal to the crime; and that you and I, but
for the grace of the insight granted to us through a chain of circumstances,
would have acted like the person who committed murder. And now, as
prisoners, they are mere invalids, and the punishment meted out to them
is blind, an alien event, a misfortune like cancer or the collapse of a house.
Imprisonment is a lingering illness. This is revealed by prisoners' expressions, their cautious gait, their circumstantial way of thinking. Like the
sick, they can talk only of their sickness.
When, as today, the boundaries between respectable and illegal rackets are objectively fluid, psychological figures also merge. But as long as
criminals were still invalids, as in the nineteenth century, custody represcared a reversal of their weakness. The strength to stand out as an indi-

Notes and Sketches 189

vidual against one's environment and, at the same time, to make contact
with it through the approved forms of intercourse and thereby to assert
oneself within it-in criminals this strength was eroded. They represented a tendency deeply inherent in living things, the overcoming of which is
the mark of all development: the tendency to lose oneself in one's surroundings instead of actively engaging with them, the inclination to let
oneself go, to lapse back into nature. Freud called this the death impulse,

Caillois le mimetisme,'? Addiction of this kind permeates anything which
runs counter to unswerving progress, from crime, which cannot take the
detour through the current forms of labor, to the sublime work of art. The
yielding attitude to things without which art cannot exist is not so far
removed from the clenched violence of the criminal. The inability to say
No which causes the young girl to succumb to prostitution also tends to
determine the career of the criminal. He is characterized by a negation
which lacks the power of resistance. Against such deliquescence, whichwithout definite consciousness, timid and impotent even in its most brutal form-at the same time imitates and destroys pitiless civilization, the
latter sets the solid walls of prisons and workhouses, its own stony ideal.
Just as, according to de Tocqueville, bourgeois republics, unlike monarchies, do not violate the body but set to work directly on the soul, punishments of this kind attack the spirit. Those they torture no longer die
broken on the wheel over long days and nights but perish mentally, as
silent, invisible examples in the great prison buildings, which differ from
lunatic asylums almost only in name.
Fascism absorbs both institutions. The concentration of command

throughout production is causing society to revert to the stage of direct
rule. As the detour of power via the internal markets of nations disappears,
so, too, do intellectual mediations, including law. Thinking, which had
developed though transactions, as a result of egoism's need to negotiate, is
now given over wholly to the planning of violent appropriation. The fascist mass murderer has emerged as the pure essence of the German factory owner, no longer distinguished from the criminal by anything but
power. The detour has become unnecessary. Civil law, which continued to
function in regulating differences between entrepreneurs surviving in the
shadow of big industry, has become a kind of tribunal against the lower
orders, a justice which no longer upholds, however badly, the interests of
vicrims-a mere instrument of terror. However, the legal protection

Notes and Sketches

190

which is now disappearing once defined property. Monopoly, as the consummation of private property, is annihilating the latter's concepL Of the
international and social contract, which fascism" in its dealings with states
is replacing by secret agreements, only the compulsion of the universal is
allowed to apply in internal affairs, a compulsion its servants then liberal-

ly administer to the rest of humanity. In the totalitarian state" punishment
and crime are being liquidated as superstitious residues, and a naked eradication of opponents, certain of its political goal, is spreading across
Europe under the regime of criminals. Next to the concentration camp,
the penitentiary seems like a memory of the good old days, much as the
old-style advertiser, though it already betrayed truth, appears beside the
glossy magazine, the literary content of which-even if it concerns
Michelangelo-performs the function, still more than the advertisements,
of business report, emblem of authority and publicity medium. The isolation once inflicted on prisoners from outside has by now implanted itself
universally in the flesh and blood of individuals. Their well-trained souls
and happiness are as bleak as the prison cells which the rulers can already
do without, since the entire labor force of nations has fallen to them as

spoils. The penal sentence pales beside the social reality.

LE PRIX DU PROGRES

In a recently discovered letter by the French physiologist Pierre
Flourens, who once had the unhappy distinction of being elected to the
Academic Francaise in preference to Victor Hugo, a curious passage
occurs:

I still cannot bring myself to assent to the use of chloroform in general sur-

gical practice, As you may know, I have devoted extensive study to this drug and
as a resulr of animal experiments have been one of the first to describe its specific characteristics. My scruples are based on the simple fact that operations under
chloroform, and probably also under the other known forms of narcosis, amount
1'0 a deception. The agents act only on certain rnoror and coordination centers and
on the residual capacity of the nerve substance. Under the influence of chloro-

form it loses a significant part of its ability to record rraces of impressions bur not
the capacity for feeling as such. On the contrary, my observations indicate that in
conjunction with a gcneral paralysis of innervation, pain is felt still more keenly

rhan in ihe normal state. Thc deception of the public results from the inability of

Notes and Sketches

191

the patient to remember the events once the operation is completed. If we told
our patients me truth, it is likely that none of them would opt for the drug,
whereas now, as a result of our silence, they generally insist on its use.
But even disregarding the fact that the only. dubious benefit is a loss of
memory regarding me time of the intervention, me spread of this practice seems
to me to bring with it a far more serious danger. Givcn me increasing superficiality of me general academic training of our doctors, medicine might be encouraged
by an unlimited use of the drug heedlessly to undertake ever more complicated
and serious surgical interventions. Instead of carrying out such experiments on
animals in the service of research, we should rhen make our patients the unwitting subjects of experiments. It is conceivable mat the painful excitations which,
in view of their specific nature, may exceed all known sensations of this kind,
would cause lasting psychical damage to me patient, or might even lead to an
indescribably agonizing death under narcosis, me peculiarities of which would
remain for ever hidden from family members and me world. Would that not be
altogether too great a price to pay for progress?
If Flourens were right in this letter, the obscure workings of the
world's divine governance would at least for once be justified. The animal
would be avenged by the sufferings of its executioner: each operation a
vivisection. A suspicion would arise that our attitude toward human
beings, and toward all creatures, is no different to that toward ourselves
after a successful operation: blindness to torment. For cognition, the space

separating us from Others would mean the same thing as the time between
us and the suffering in our own past: an insurmountable barrier. But the
perennial dominion over nature, medical and nonmedical technology, derives its strength from such blindness; it would be made possible only by
oblivion. Loss of memory as the transcendental condition of science. All

reification is forgetting. *

VAIN TERROR

The gaze fixed on calarniry has an element of fascination. But theretilre of secret compliciry. So strong are the social bad conscience of all who
have a part in injustice, and the hatred of fulfilled life, that in critical situations they turn directly against self-interest as an immanent revenge.
There was in the French bourgeois a fatal agency which ironically resemhlcd rlic heroic ideal of the fascists: they rejoiced in the triumph of their

likeness, as expressed in I lirlcr's rise, even though it threatened them with

192

Notes and Sketches

ruin; indeed, they took their own ruin as evidence of the justice of the
order they represented. A precursor of this behavior is found in the attitude of many rich people to impoverishment, the image of which they
conjure up under the rationalization of parsimony: it is their latent tendency, even while they fight tenaciously for every penny, suddenly to give
up all their possessions without a fight or irresponsibly to gamble them
away. In fascism they achieve the synthesis of power-craving and self-hate,
and their vain terror is always accompanied by the qualification: I always
saw it coming.

INTEREST IN THE BODY

Beneath the known history ofEurope there runs a subterranean one.
It consists of the fate of the human instincts and passions repressed and
distorted by civilization. From the vantage point of the fascist present, in
which the hidden is coming to light, the manifest history is also revealing
its connection to that dark side, which is passed over in the official legend

of nation states, and no less in its progressive critique.
Most mutilated ofall is the relationship to the body. Under the division of labor, in which the benefits accrued to one side and labor to the

other, brute strength was anathematized. The less the masters could do
without the labor of the rest, the more base labor was declared to be. Like

the slave, work received a stigma. Christianity celebrated labor but, in
compensation, vilified the flesh as the source of all evil. In collusion with
the unbeliever ,Machiavelli, it rang in the modern bourgeois order by
extolling work, 'which in the Old Testament had been designated a curse.
For the Desert Fathers, Dorotheus, Moses the Robber, Paul the Simple,
and others of the poor in spirit, labor was still a direct means of entering
the Kingdom of Heaven. For Luther and Calvin the link berween work
and salvation was already so convoluted that the relentless injunction to
work seems almost like mockery, the boot grinding the worm into the
dust.

The princes and patricians could console themselves for the religious
gulf which had opened between their earthly days and their eternal vocation with the thought of the revenues they would derive from the labor
time of others. For the irrationality of the doctrine of election left the possibility of redemption open to them. But on t,he others the pressure

Notes and Sketches 193

weighed all the more heavily. They were dimly aware that the mortification of the flesh by power was nothing other than the ideological reflection of the oppression practiced on them. The fate of the slaves of
Antiquity was endured by victims up to the modern colonial peoples: they
counted as inferior. There were by nature twO races: the higher and the
lower. The emancipation of the European individual took place in conjunction with a general cultural transformation by which the split within
the emancipated penetrated more deeply the more the external physical
compulsion abated. The exploited body was to be regarded by the lower
orders as the bad and the mind, for which the others had leisure, as the

highest good. This development made Europe capable of its most sublime
cultural achievements, but, at the same time as the control over the body
was increased, the hint of fraud which had been detectable from the first

also intensified the obscene malice, the love-hate toward the body which
permeated the mentality of the masses over the centuries and found its

authentic expression in the language of Luther. In the relationship ofindividuals to the body, their own and that of others, is reenacted the irra-

tionality and injustice of power as cruelty; and that irrationality is as far
removed from judicious insight and serene reflection as power is from freedom. In Nietzsche's theory of cruelty, and still more in the work of Sade,
the extent of this connection is recognized, while in Freud's doctrines of
narcissism and the death impulse it is interpreted psychologically.
Love-hate for the body colors the whole of modern culture. The
body is scorned and rejected as something inferior, enslaved, and at the

same time is desired as forbidden, reified, estranged. Only culture treats
the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from mind, the quintessence of power and command, as the
object, the dead thing, the corpus. In humanity's self-abasement to the corpllS nature takes its revenge for the debasement of the human being to an
object of power, to raw material. The compulsion toward cruelty and
destruction stems from the organic repression of proximity to the body,
much as, according to Freud's inspired intuition, disgust came into being
when, with the adoption of the upright stance and the greater distance
from the earth, the sense of smell, which attracted the male animal to the

menstruating female, fell victim to organic repression. In Western civilizaI ion, and probably in any civilization, what pertains to the body is
r.rhoocd, a subject of attraction and revulsion. Among the Greek rulers,

194 Notes and Sketches

and in feudalism, the relationship to the body was also conditioned by
power, through the need for personal physical prowess. The cultivation of

the body had a naively social objective. The kalos kagathos was only partly
an illusion; in part the gymnasium was needed for the actual maintenance
of personal power, at least as training in the lordly posrure. With the complete transition of power to the bourgeois form mediated by trade and
communications, and still more with the rise of industry, a formal change
occurred. Instead of to the sword. humanity has enslaved itself to the
gigantic apparatus, which, to be sure, ultimately forges the sword. The
rational purpose of enhancing the male body thereby disappeared; the
Romantic attempts to achieve a renascence of the body in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries merely idealize something dead and mutilated.
Nietzsche, Gauguin, George, and Klages recognized the nameless stupid-

ity which is the result of progress. But they drew the wrong conclusion.
They did not denounce the wrong as it is bur transfigured the wrong as it
was. The rejection of mechanization became an embellishment of industrial mass culture, which cannot do without the noble gesture. Against

their will, artists reworked the lost image of the unity of body and mind
for the advertising industry. The celebration of paragons of vitality, from
the Blond Beast to the south-sea islanders, culminates ineluctably in the
"sarong film," the advertisements for vitamins and skin cream. which are
only stand-ins for the immanent goal of publicity: the new, big, beautiful,
noble human type-the leaders and their troops. The fascist leaders again
take the implements of murder into their hands, executing their prisoners
with pistol and horsewhip, not as a result of their superior strength but
because the gigantic apparatus and the real holders of power, who still
I

abstain from such acts, deliver the victims of reason of state to the base-

ment of their headquarters.

The body cannot be turned back into the envelope of the soul. It
remains a cadaver, no matter how trained and fit it may be. The transfor-

mation into dead matter, indicated by the affinity of corpus to corpse, was
a part of the perennial process which turned nature into stuff, material.
The achievements of civilization are a product of sublimation, of the
acquired love-hate for body and earth, from which domination has violently severed all human beings. The spirit's reaction to the corporealization of humanity is productive in medicine, while its reaction to the reification of the whole of nature is productive in tec,hnolngy. But the rnur-

Notes and Sketches 195

derer, the killer, the brutalized colossi who are used by the ruling powers,

legal and illegal, great and small, as their clandestine enforcers, the violent
men who are always on hand when there is someone to be dispatched, the
lynchers and clan members, the bruiser who steps in when someone
answers back, the terrible figures to whom everyone is delivered up as soon
as the protective hand of power is withdrawn from them, a soon as they
lose wealth and position, all the werewolves lurking in the darkness of history and sustaining the fear without which there is no domination: in
them the love-hate for the body is crude and direct; they desecrate what
they touch, they destroy what they see in the light, and this destruction is
a rancor against reification; in blind rage they repeat against the living
thing what they cannot make undone: the splitting of life into mind and
its object. The human being irresistibly attracts them, they want to reduce
him or her to the body, nothing shall be allowed to live. This enmity of
the lowest for the life withered within them, an enmity once carefully
implanted and nurtured by those at the top, whether secular or clerical,
and to which the lowest relate themselves, homosexually and paranoiacal-

ly, by killing, has always been an indispensable instrument of the art of
government. The hostility of the enslaved to life is an inexhaustible source
of history's dark side. Even the puritanical excess, hitting th e booze, takes
despairing revenge on life.
The love of nature and fate proclaimed by totalitarian propaganda is

merely a superficial reaction to fixation at the level of the body, to the failure of civilization to fulfill itself. Being unable to escape it, one praises the
hody when not allowed to hit it. The "tragic" world-view of the fascists" is
I he ideological stag party on the eve of the real blood wedding. Those who
ex rolled rhe body in Germany, the gymnasts and ourdoor sports enthusi.is rs , alwa ys had an intimate affin ity to killing, as nature lovers have to
hunring. They see the body as a mobile mechanism, with its hinged links,
ihc flesh upholstering the skeleton . They manipulate the body, actuating
the limbs as if they were already severed. The Jewish tradition instills an
.ivcrsion to measuring human beings with a yardstick, because the dead are
mcasured-s-fcr the coffin. That is what gives the body-manipulators their
rujoymenr. Unaware, they measure the other with the eye of the coffin
ru.ikcr, The rrurh comes our when they state the result, calling the person

r. rll Iill German: long], short, far, heavy. They are interested in illness,
.l lI l ir ipal i ng their fellow diner's death in what he eats, their interest being

196 Notes and Sketches

only thinly rationalized by concern for his health. Language keeps in step
with them. It has converted the stroll into exercise and food into calories,

just as in English and French the name for a throng of living trees is synonymous with "timber." Along with the mortality rate, society is reducing
life to a chemical process.
In the fiendish humiliation of prisoners in the concentration camps.
which-for no rational reason-the modern executioner adds to the death

by torture, the unsublimated yet repressed rebellion of despised nature
breaks out. Its full hideousness is vented on the martyrs oflove, the alleged
sexual offenders and libertines, for sexuality is the body unreduced; it is
expression, that which the butchers secretly and despairingly crave. In free
sexuality the murderer fears the lost immediacy, the original oneness, in

which he can no longer exist. It is the dead thing which rises up and lives.
He now makes everything one by making it nothing, because he has to stifle that oneness in himself. For him the victim represents life which has
survived the schism; it must be broken and the universe must be nothing
but dust and abstract power.

MASS SOCIETY

Complementing the cult of stars is the social mechanism of the notables, which levels anything that stands out; the stars and dignitaries are
mere patterns for the ready-made world, and for the scissors of juridical
and economic justice, which snip off the last loose ends.
i

Postscript
The view that the leveling and standardization of people in general,
on the one hand, is matched, on the other, by a heightening of individu-

.aliry in the so-called leader figures, in keeping with their power, is erroneous and itself a piece of ideology. The fascist masters of today are not so
much supermen as functions of their own publicity apparatus, intersections of the identical reactions of countless people. If, in the psychology of
the present-day masses, the leader no longer represents the father so much
as the collective, monstrously enlarged projection of the impotent ego of
each individual, then the leader figures do indeed correspond to what they
represent. Not by accident do they resemble hairdressers. provincial
actors, and gutter journalists. A pan of their moral influence lies precisely
.

Notes and Sketches 197

in the fact that, while in themselves as powerless as all the rest, they
embody on the latter's behalf the whole abundance of power without
being anything more than the blank spaces which power has happened to

occupy. It is not so much that they are exempt from the decay of individuality as that decayed individuals triumph in them and are in some way
rewarded for their decay. The leaders have become fully what they always
were slightly throughout the bourgeois era, actors playing leaders. The distance berween the individuality of Bismarck and of Hitler is hardly less
than that berween the prose of Gedanken und Erinnerungen and the gibberish of Mein Kampf In the struggle against fascism, not the least concern is to reduce the bloated leader images to the true scale of their
insignificance. At least in the similarity berween the ghetto barber and the
dictator, Chaplin's film" hit on something essential.

CONTRADICTIONS

A moral system, with axioms, corollaries, and iron logic, and reliable
application to every moral dilemma-that is what is demanded of philoso-

phers. As a rule, they have fulfLIled the expectation. Even when they have
not set up a practical system or a fully developed casuistry, they have managed to derive obedience to authority from their theories. Usually they
have justified once again the whole scale of values already sanctioned by
public praxis. with all the comforts of sophisticated reasoning, demonstration, and evidence. "Honor the gods through the traditional native

religion. n said Epicurus." and Hegel said it after him. A philosopher who
hesitates to make such a profession is all the more energetically required

to deliver a general principle. If t~ug~ d~~s.Ilot_siITlPly. reaffirm the
prevalent rules, it must appear yet more self-assured, universal, and

authoritative than if it had merely justified what was already in force. You
consider the prevailing power unjust; would you rather have no power at
all, but chaos? You criticize the standardization oflife and progress; should
we then light wax candles in the evening and have our cities filled with the
stink of refuse. as in the Middle Ages? You do not like slaughterhouses;
should society henceforth eat raw vegetables? The positive answers to such
questions, however absurd. find willing listeners. Political anarchism, the
reactionary arts and crafts movement, radical vegetarianism, eccentric
sects and parties have "advertising appeal." The doctrine need only be gen-

198 Notes and Sketches

eral, self-assured, universal, and imperative. Whar people cannot endure is
the attempt to evade the either/or, the mistrust of abstract principles,
sreadfasrness without a docrrine.

Two young people are having a conversarion:
A. You don't want to be a doctor?

B. By their profession doctors have a lot to do with dying people; that desensitizes them. Moreover, with advanced institutionalization the doctor represenrs
business and irs hierarchy vis-a-vis the patient. He is often tempted to act as an
advocate of death. He becomes an agent of big business" against conswners. Ifone
is selling automobiles it's not so bad, but if the commodity being administered is
life and the consumers are the sick, that's a situation I'd prefer not to be in. The
profession of family doctor may have been more innocuous, but that is in decline.
A. So you think there shouldn't be any doctors, or the old charlatans ought
to come back?

B. I did not say that. I JUSt have a horror of being a doctor myself, and especially a senior consultant with power of command over a mass hospital. Nevertheless, I do, of course, think it better to have doctors and hospitals than to leave
sick people to die. I would not want to be a public prosecutor, yet giving a free
run to armed robbers would seem to me a far greater evil than the existence of the
body of people who put them in prison. Justice is reasonable. I am not against reason; I only want to investigate the form it has taken.
A. You are in contradiction with yourself You yourself constantly make use
of the advantages provided by doctors and judges. You are as guilty as they are. It
is just that you don't want to be burdened with the work which others do for you.
Your own life presupposes the principle you are trying to evade.
B. I do not deny it, but contradiction is necessary. It is a response to the
objective contradiction of society. In a division of labor as complex as that of
today, horror can manifest itself in one place and bring down guilt on everyone.
If word of it gOt about, or if even a small proportion of people were aware of it,
lunatic asylums and penal institutes might be humanized and courts of justice
might finally be superfluous. But that is not the reason why I want to be a writer.
I JUSt want to be clearer about the terrible state in which everything is.
A. If everyone thought as you do, and no one wanted to get his hands dirty,
there would be neither doctors nor judges, and the world would be even more
dreadful.

B. That is JUSt what I find questionable; for if everyone thought as I do,
then I hope that not just the means of opposing evil would be reduced. but evil
itself Humanity has other possibilities. I am not the whole of humanity, and I
G1I1nOl simply represclH it in my thought. The moral precept rhar each of my
.

Notes and Sketches 199

actions ought to provide a general maxim is very problematic. It bypasses history.
Why should my disinclination to be a doctor be equivalent to the view that there
should be no doctors? In reality there are many people who would make good
doctors and have a good chance of becoming one. If they behave morally within
the limits to which their profession is subject today, they have my admiration.
Perhaps they may even contribute to reducing the deficiencies I have pointed our
to you; bur perhaps they will deepen them, despite all their professional skill and
morality. My life as I imagine it, my horror and my desire for knowledge, seem to
me as justified as the profession of doctor, even though I cannot help anyone
directly.
A. But if you knew mat by studying medicine you might one day save the
life of a loved person which would quite certainly be lost without you, would you
not take it up at once?
B. Probably, bur by now you can see for yourself that with your love of
implacable logic you are forced to offer the most absurd examples, while I, with
my impractical obstinacy and my contradictions, have remained within the
bounds of common sense.

This conversation is repeated wherever someone refuses to give up
thought in face of praxis. Such a person finds logic and consistency always
on the other side. Anyone who is against vivisection ought not to draw a
single breath which might cost the life of a bacillus. Logic places itself in

the service of progress and of reaction, and at all events of reality. And yet,
in an age when education is radically focused on reality, conversations have
become rarer, and the neurotic interlocutor B needs superhuman strength
in order not to become healthy.

MARKED

People in their forties are apt to make a curious observation. They
discover that most of those with whom they have grown up and kept in
contact show disorders in their habits and their consciousness. One allows

his work to deteriorate so far that his business collapses; another destroys
his marriage through no fault of his wife; another embezzles. But even
those who escape such drastic changes bear signs of decomposition.
Conversaticn with them becomes shallow, bombastic, fatuous. Whereas

curlier the person growing older received intellectual stimulus from others,
\lOW lie fInds himself almost the only one who voluntarily displays objccuvc mtcrcst.

200

Notes and Sketches

To begin with he is inclined to regard the development of his coevals

as an unpleasant accident. They have simply changed for the worse. Perhaps it has to do with their generation and its special outward fate. Finally
he discovers that this experience is already familiar to him, bur from a different perspective: that of his youth in relation to grown-ups. Was he not
convinced then, too, that something was amiss with this or that teacher,
with his uncles and aunts, the friends of his parents, and, later, with the

university professors or the trainee's manager? It may have been that they
displayed some ridiculous tic or that their presence was especially barren,
oppressive, disappointing.
At that time he did not think further about it, accepting the inferi-

ority of grown-ups as simply a fact of nature. But now he finds it confirmed that under the existing conditions the mere act of living while
maintaining specific technical or intellectual skills leads even in the prime
oflife to cretinism. Not even the worldly-wise are exempt. It is as if human
beings, as punishment for betraying the hopes of their youth and accommodating themselves to the world, are marked by premature decay.
Postscript
The decay of individuality today not only teaches us to regard that
category as historical bur also raises doubts concerning its positive nature.
The inherent principle of the phase ofcompetition was the wrong done to
the individual. This relates, however, not only to the function of the individual and its particularistic interests in society bur also to the inner composition of individuality itself. The tendency toward human emancipation
emerged under the aegis of individuality bur at the same time was the
result of the very mechanism from which humanity was to be emancipated. In the autonomy and uniqueness of the individual, the resistance to
the blind, repressive power of the irrational whole was crystallized. But
that resistance was made historically possible only by the blindness and
irrationality of the autonomous and unique individual. Conversely, however, that which, as particularistic, was absolutely opposed to the whole
remains perniciously and opaquely attached to the existing order. The radically individual, unassirnilated features of a human being are always both

at once: residues not fully encompassed by the prevailing system and still
happily surviving, and marks of the rnurilarion inflicted on its members by
that system. In these traits, basic determinants o£ the system are repeated

Notes and Sketches

201

in exaggerated form: miserliness, for example, magnifies the principle of
fixed property, hypochondria that of unreflecting self-preservation. Because the individual seeks desperately, through such traits, ro assert itself
against the compulsions of nature and society-sickness and bankruptcy-the traits themselves necessarily take on a compulsive quality. Within
its innermost cell the individual encounters the same power from which it
has fled within itself. This makes its flight a hopeless chimera. Moliere's
comedies show awareness of this curse no less than Daurnier's caricatures;

but the National Socialists, who are abolishing the individual, feed contentedly on it and set up Spitzweg as their classical painter.
Only in relation to hardened society, and not absolutely, does the
hardened individual represent something better. Its hardness bears witness
to the shame called forth by what the collective ceaselessly does ro the
individual and by what ensues when there are no longer individuals. The
acolytes of today, bereft of self, are the necessary consequence of the sple-

netic apothecaries, the passionate rose growers and political cripples ofyesterday.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE DIVISION OF LABOR

The place of science in the social division of labor is readily identified. Its task is to accumulate facts and functional connections between

facts in the largest possible quantities. The storage system must be easily
surveyed. It must enable individual industries immediately to locate the
desired intellectual commodity in the required variety. Already the compilation is largely made with an eye for certain industrial contracts.
Historical works, too, are required to contribute material. Its utility
is ro be sought not directly in industry but indirectly in administration.
Just as Machiavelli wrote for the purposes of princes and republics, historians of today work for economic and political committees. Admittedly,
rhe historical form has become an impediment to such use; the material is
better arranged straight away in terms of a specific administrative task: to
manipulate commodity prices or the emotions of the masses. In addition
III administration and industrial consortia, trade unions and political parI ics are potential customers.
Official philosophy serves the science which functions in this way. It
1\ supposed, like a kind of inrcllccrual Taylorisrn, to improve scientific pro-

202

Notes and Sketches

duction methods, to rationalize the accumulation of knowledge, and prevent the waste of mental energy. It has its allotted place in the division of
labor, like chemistry or bacteriology. The few philosophical residues which
hark back to the divine worship of the Middle Ages or the contemplation
of eternal essentialities are still tolerated at secular universities because they
are so reactionary. In addition, a few historians of philosophy continue to
propagate themselves by tirelessly expounding Plato and Descartes while
poinring our their obsoleteness. They are accompanied here and there by a
veteran of sensualism or an expert personalist who keeps the field of science free of any dialectical weeds that might otherwise spring up.
Unlike its custodians, philosophy refers, among other things, to
thinking which refuses to capitulate to the prevailing division of labor and
does not accept prescribed tasks. The existing order coerces people not
merely by physical force and material interests but by overwhelming suggestion. Philosophy is not a synthesis, a basic science, or an overarching
science bur an effort to resist suggestion, a determination to protect inrellecrual and actual freedom.

In this effort, the division of labor which has emerged under domination is not ignored. Philosophy detects the lie which domination
inescapably brings with it. Refusing to be hypnotized by the preponderanr
power, it pursues it into all its hiding-places in the social machinery, which
by its nature cannot be taken by storm, or placed under differenr control,
bur must be understood in freedom from the spell which it casts. When
the officials which industry maintains in its intellectual departments-the
universities, churches, and newspapers-challenge philosophy to produce
credenrials by which to legitimate its snooping, it finds itself fatally at a
loss. It acknowledges no abstract norms or goals which could be a practicable alternative to those in force. Irs exemption from the suggestive influence of the existing order lies precisely in the fact that, without favoring
them, it accepts the bourgeois ideals, whether those which that order's
exponenrs still proclaim, in however distorted a form, or those which are
still discernible as the objective purpose of institutions, both technical and

cultural, despite all the manipulation. It believes that the division oflabor
exists for the sake of human beings and that progress leads to freedom.
That is why it is liable to come into conflict both with the division oflabor
and with progress. It gives voice to the contradiction between belief and
reality, paying dose attention to phenomena conditioned by the rime,

Unlike the press, it docs nor utrach more importance ro gigantic ma~~

Notes and Sketches

203

murder than to me liquidation of a few asylum inmates, It does nor place
me inrrigues of the statesman compromised by fascism above the modest
lynching, or me advertising frenzy of me film industry above the intimate
funeral announcemenr. The taste for the grandiose is foreign to it, Thus it
is at the same rime remote from me existing order and deeply cornplicit
with it, It lends irs voice to irs subject, against me latter's will; it is the voice
of the contradiction which otherwise would nor be heard, bur would tri-

umph silently.

THOUGHT

It is, of course, mistaken to believe mar the truth of a theory is the
same as irs fruirfulness. There are some, however, who appear to assume
me opposite. For them, theory has so little need to find application in
thought that it should dispense with thinking alrogerhcr. They misinrer-

prer every utterance as a final profession of belief, an injunction, or a
taboo. They seek to submit to me idea as to a god or arrack it as an idol.

They lack freedom in relation to it. Bur it is in the narure of truth that one
is involved in it as an active subject. People may hear propositions which
in themselves are rrue; bur they experience their truth only by rhinking as

rhey hear and by conrinuing to think,
This fetishism manifests itself in a drastic form today, One is called
to account for one's thoughts, as if rhey applied direcrly to praxis.* For this
reason, nor only is me urrerance which attacks power found inrolerable
bur the one which gropes forward experimentally, playing with me possi-

biliry of error. Yer to be unfinished and to know it is me mark even of the
thought which opposes power, and especially of the thought for which it
would be worth dying. The proposition mar the rrue is the whole" proves
(0 be the same as its antithesis, that truth exists only as a parr. The most
wretched of the excuses which inrellecruals have found for execurioners-

.uid in the last century they have nor been idle in finding rhem-is that
I he thinking for which me victim was murdered was fallacious.

MAN AND BEAST

Throughout European history me idea of the human being has been
rvprcsscd in contradistinction ro the animal. The latter's lack of reason is

rI,(' proof of human dignilY. So insisrcurly and unanimously has this

204

Notes and Sketches

antithesis been recited by all the earliest precursors of bourgeois thought,
the ancient Jews, the Stoics, and the Early Fathers, and then through the
Middle Ages to modern times, that few other ideas are so fundamental to
Western anthropology. The antithesis is acknowledged even today. The
behaviorists only appear to have forgotten it. That they apply to human
beings the same formulae and results which they wring without restraint
from defenseless animals in their abominable physiological laboratories,
proclaims the difference in an especially subtle way. The conclusion they
draw from the mutilated animal bodies applies, not to animals in freedom,

but to human beings today. * By mistreating animals they announce that
they, and only they in the whole of creation, function voluntarily in the
same mechanical, blind, automatic way as the twitching movements of the
bound victims made use of by the expert. The professor at the dissection
table defines such movements scientifically as reflexes; the soothsayer at
the altar would have proclaimed them a sign from his gods. Humans possess reason, which pitilessly follows its path; the animals from which they
draw their bloody conclusions have only unreasoning terror, the impulse
to take flight on a path which is cut off.
The lack of reason has no words. Its possession, which dominates
manifest history, is eloquent. The whole earth bears witness to the glory
of man. In war and peace, arena and slaughterhouse, from the slow death
of the elephant overpowered by primitive human hordes with the aid of
the first planning to the perfected exploitation of the animal world today,
the unreasoning creature has always suffered at the hands of reason. This
visible course of b-ents conceals from the executioners the invisible one:

existence without the light of reason, the actual life of animals. It would
be the proper subject matter for psychology, for only the life of animals
runs its course according to inner impulses; where psychology has to
explain human beings, they are already regressive and destroyed. When
the help of psychology is sought among human beings, the meager field
of their immediate relationships is narrowed still further, and even within
it they are made into things. Psychology used to explain others is impertinent, and to explain one's own motives sentimental. Animal psychology,
meanwhile, has lost sight of its object; engrossed with the chicanery of its
traps and labyrinths, it has forgotten that to speak of and acknowledge a
psyche or soul (See/e) is appropriate precisely and only in the case of animals. Even Aristotle, who attributed J soul 10 them, if an inferior one, pre·
.

Notes and Sketches

205

ferred [Q speak of the bodies, parrs, movements, and procreation of animals ramer man the life peculiar [Q them,
The world of animals is without concepts, There is no word to hold
fasr me identical in me flux of phenomena, the same genus in me succession of specimens, the same thing in changing situations, Although the
possibiliry of recognition is nor absent, identificarion is restricted [Q viral

patterns, There is nothing in me flux* mar could be defined as lasting, and
yer everything remains one and me same, because there is no fixed knowl-

edge of me pasr and no clear prospecr into the future, The animal

responds to irs name and has no self, it is enclosed in itself yer exposed,
one compulsion is followed by another, no idea extends beyond ir. Irs loss
of solace is nor balanced by a reduction in fear, irs lack of awareness of
happiness by the absence of mourning and pain. For happiness [Q become
substantial, for life [Q be endowed wirh death, idenrifying remembrance is
needed, assuaging knowledge, me religious or philosophical idea, in short,
the concepr. There are happy animals, bur how short-lived is mar happiness! The animal's experience of duration, uninterrupted by liberating

thought, is dreary and depressive. To escape the gnawing emptiness of
existence some resistance is needed, and irs backbone is language. Even the
srrongesr animal is infinitely feeble. Schopenhauer's doctrine according [Q
which the pendulum oflife oscillates berween pain and boredom, berween
brief moments of sated impulse and endless craving, is true of the animal,

which cannot interrupt me fatal cycle wirh cognition. In the animal's soul
the individual feelings and needs of human beings are vestigially presenr,
without me stability which only organizing reason confers. Thebest days
Air pasr in a busrling medley like a dream, which the animal can hardly

distinguish from waking in any case. It is without me clear division
berween play and seriousness, the happy awakening from nightmare to
realiry.
In popular fairy tales me metamorphosis of humans into animals is
a recurring punishmenr. To be imprisoned in an animal body is regarded
as damnation. To children and peoples. the idea of such rransformarions
is immediately comprehensible and familiar. Believers in me rransmigrarion of souls in the earliest cultures saw the animal form as punishment
and torment, The mure wildness in the animal's gaze bears witness to the
horror which is feared by humans in such metamorphoses. Every animal
recalls ro them an immense misfortune which rook place in primeval

206

Notes and Sketches

times. Fairy tales express this dim human intuition, Bur whereas me

prince in the fairy tale retained his reason so mat, when the time came, he
could tell of his woe and the fairy could release him, the animal's lack of
reason holds it eternally captive in irs form, unless man, who is one with
it through his past, can find the redeeming formula and through it sofren
me srony hearr of infiniry at the end of time.
For me being endowed with reason, however, concern for me unreasoning animal is idle. Western civilization has lefr that to women. They
have no autonomous share in the capabilities which gave rise to this civilization. The man must go our inro hostile life, must act and strive." The
woman is not a subjecr. She does not produce bur looks after me producers, a living monumenr to me long-vanished rime of me self-sufficient
household. The division of labor imposed on her by me man was unfavorable. She became an embodimenr of biological function, an image of
nature, in the suppression of which this civilization's claim to glory lay. To
dominate nature boundlessly, to turn me cosmos inro an endless hunting
ground, has been me dream of millennia. It shaped the idea of man in a
male sociery. It was me purpose of reason, on which man prided himself.
Woman was smaller and weaker, berween her and man there was a differ-

ence she could not overcome, a difference set by nature, me most shaming, degrading agency possible within me male sociery. When domination
of nature is the true goal, biological inferioriry remains me ultimate stigma, the weakness imprinred by nature, me mark which invites violence.
The church, which in the course of history has hardly missed an opporruniry to take a leading voice in popular institutions, whether they be slavery, crusades, or simply pogroms, sided with Plato, despite me Ave Maria,
in the assessmenr of woman. The image of me Mother of Sorrows was a
concession to matriarchal residues. Yet me church used the very image
which was supposed to redeem woman from her inferioriry to sanction ir.
"The influence of Divine Law in a Christian land," proclaimed de
Maistre, that law's legitimate son, "need only be extinguished or weakened
to a cerrain degree by roleraring the freedom of women which has arisen
from it, and freedom, though noble and moving in itself, will degenerate
soon enough into shamelessness. Women would become the fatal instruments of a general decline, which would swifrly undermine the vital
organs of the state. Engulfed by corruption, the state would spread shame

and terror in its fiery ruin. " 21 The witch trials used by the allied feudal

rackets to terrorize the populace when the)' found tl~el1lsdvcs thrcarcncd

Notes and Sketches

207

were at the same time a celebration and confirmation of the victory of
male domination over primeval matriarchal and mimetic stages of development. The autos-daft were the Church's pagan bonfires, a triumph of
nature in the form of self-preserving reason, to the glory of reason's domination over nature.

The bourgeoisie reaped the benefit of feminine virtue and modesty
as reaction formations of the matriarchal rebellion. Woman gained admission to the world of mastery on behalf of the whole of exploited nature,
but in a broken form. Subjugated, she mirrors her conqueror's victory in
her spontaneous submission, reflecting defeat back to him as devotion,
despair as the beautiful soul, the violated heart as the loving breast. At the
price of radical exclusion from praxis and withdrawal into a charmed circle. nature receives homage from the lord of creation. Art, morality, and
sublime love are masks of nature, in which nature reappears transformed
and becomes expressive as its own antithesis. Through its masks it acquires the gift of speech; in its distortion it manifests its essence; beauty is
the serpent which displays the wound where once the fang was implanted.
Yet behind man's admiration for beauty lurks always the ringing laughter,
the boundless scorn, the barbaric obscenity vented by potency on impotence, with which it numbs the secret fear that it is itself enslaved to impotence, to death, to narure. When the deformed jesters whose capers and
foolscaps once enacted the mournful gaiety of broken nature had escaped
the service of kings, the planned cultivation of beauty was entrusted to
women. Modern puritanical woman zealously took up the task, identifying herself fully with the fait accompli, with nature not in its-wildness bu t
in its domestication. What was left of the fans. songs, and dances of
Roman slave girls was definitively reduced in Birmingham to piano playing and other handicrafts, until the last residues of female wantonness had
been entirely sublimated as emblems of patriarchal civilization. Under the
pressure of universal" advertising, powder and lipstick, rejecting their origin among courtesans, became skin care, the bathing suit an attribute of
hygiene. Nothing can escape. Even love, through the mere fact that it
takes place within the completely organized system of domination," has
the system's trademark imprinted on it. In Germany those entrapped by
the existing order now demonstrate their obedience to it by promiscuity,
as earlier by modesty, affirming by indiscriminate performance of the sex-

ual act their rigid subordination to the dominant reason. *
Jutting into rhc present- like ;l fossil of the bourgeois esteem for

208

Notes and Sketches

woman is the rermaganr, the shrew. For measureless ages her nagging has

avenged, within her own house, the wretchedness which has befallen her
sex. Outside ir, roo, in the absence of the genuflecrion she fails to receive,
the malevolent crone barks at the absenr-minded man who fails [Q rise to

his feer in her presence, knocking off his hat, That the head itself must
roll, come what may, she has always demanded in politics, whether in reminiscence of the maenadic pasr or through ourbidding man and his order
in her impotent rage. The bloodthirstiness of women in pogroms eclipses
that of men. The oppressed woman as Fury has outlived her rime, continuing [Q display the grimace of mutilated narure in an age when domination is molding the well-trained bodies of both sexes, in whose uniformiry the grimace has been effaced. Against the background of such mass production, the scolding of the shrew, who at least retained her own disringUishing face, becomes a sign ofhumaniry, her ugliness a trace of spirir. If
in pasr cenruries the young girl wore her subjection in her melancholy features and her devoted love, an alienated image of nature, an aesthetic culrural object, ar least the harridan of today has finally discovered a new
female profession. As a social hyena she actively pursues cultural goals.
Her ambition runs after honors and publicity, bur her undemanding of
male culrure is nor yer sufficiencly sharpened to prevenr her, amid the

injuries done her, from commirring faux pas and showing that she is nor
yet ar home in the civilization of men. Isolated, she seeks refuge in conglomerares of science and magic, rnisbegonen offspring of the idealistic
privy councilor and the Nordic clairvoyanre. She feels herself drawn to
mischief. The las:r female opposition to the spirit of male sociery is degen-

erating in a morass of trivial rackets, sects, and hobbies, is rurning into the
perverted aggression of social work and theosophical gossip, venring its
perry rancor in good works and Christian Science. In this quagmire, solidariry with crearurely life expresses itself nor so much in the animal protection league as in neo-Buddhism and the Pekinese, whose distorted visage, now as in early paintings, reminds us of the physiognomy of the court
jester left behind by progress. Like the hunchback's ungainly leaps, the litde dog's features still represenr mutilated nature, while mass industry and
mass culrure have learned to prepare the bodies of breeding bulls and
humans according to scientific methods, The standardized masses are now
so little aware of their own rranstorrnation, in which rhey have desperateIy collaborated, that they no longer require irs symbolic display. Among
,

.

Notes and Sketches

209

the lesser news items on the second and third pages of newspapers, the
front pages of which are filled with the horrifying exploits of human
beings, circus fires and the poisoning of large animals are sometimes
reported. We are reminded of animals when their last specimens, of the
same species as the medieval fool, perish in endless torment, a capital loss
to their owner who was unable to provide the loyal creatures with fire protection in an age of concrete buildings. The tall giraffe and the wise elephant are oddities which can no longer provide amusement for wised-up
schoolboys. In Africa, the last part of the earth which has vainly sought to
protect their poor herds from civilization, they form traffic obstacles to
bombers landing in the latest war. They are being eradicated entirely. On
an earth made reasonable there is no longer a need for the aesthetic reflection. The demons are driven out by directly imprinting humans. Domination no longer needs numinous images; it produces them industrially,
the more reliably to insinuate itself into human beings.
The distortion which is inherent in every work of art, as mutilation
is inherent in the luster of feminine beauty, the maiming which puts on
show the wound in which subjugated nature recognizes itself-that
maiming is again being done by fascism, bur no longer as mere appear-

ance. It is inflicted directly on the damned. In this society there is no
longer any sphere in which domination can profess its contradictions, as it
does in art; there is no longer any means of duplication by which the distortion might be expressed. Bur in earlier times such expression was called
not only beauty but thought, intellect, language itself. Today language calculates, designates, betrays, initiates death; it does not express. The culture industry" has, like science, its own precise, external means of measurement by which to judge itself: facts. Film stars are experts, their performances are records of natural behavior, classifying modes of reaction;
the directors and scriptwriters produce models of adapted behavior. The
precision work of the culture industry" precludes distortion as a mere
fault, an accident, something defectively subjective and natural. The deviation is analyzed to discover the practical cause which would link it back
to rationality. Only then is it forgiven. Along with the reflection of power
by nature, the tragic, like the comic, has disappeared; the rulers become
serious in proportion to the resistance to be overcome, and humorous in
proportion to the despair they perceive. Intellectual enjoyment used to be
confined to the presentation of suffering, bur they play with horror itself.

210

Notes and Sketches

Sublime love attached itself to strength appearing through weakness, in
woman's beauty, bur they attach themselves directly to power: the idol of
today's society is the masculine face which exhibits a cerrain rakish lordliness. The woman is used for work, childbearing; or, if presentable, she
enhances the status of her mate. No longer does she sweep the man away

in rapture. Adoration reverts to self-love. The world and its purposes
demand the whole of man. None can give away any parr of himself; he

must keep it all within. Bur, in the eyes of praxis, nature is all that is withour and underneath, an object-as the girl, in vulgar parlance, has always
been for the soldier. Feeling confines itself to power in relation to power.

As woman did earlier, man now lays down his arms before man, bur with
dark, unswerving coldness. He becomes a woman, with eyes only for power. In the fascist collective," with its teams and work camps, everyone from
tender youth is a prisoner in solitary confinement, which breeds homosexualiry. Even the beast must wear the lordly features. The distinctive
human face, which humiliatingly recalls our origin in nature and our
enslavement to it, irresistibly invites expert homicide. The caricature of
the Jew has always relied on this, and even Goethe's aversion to apes

marked our the limits of his humaniry. When captains of industry and fascist leaders have animals around them, they are not domestic poodles bur
Great Danes and lion cubs. They are there to add spice to power through
the terror they inspire. So blind is the murderous fascist colossus in face of
nature that he conceives of animals only as means of humiliating humans.
Nietzsche's unjust accusation of Schopenhauer and Voltaire, that they
"knew how to disguise [their] hatred of cerrain men and things as piry

roward animals,"22 applies truly to the fascisr butcher. The precondition of
the fascists' pious love of animals, nature, and children is the lust of the

hunter. The idle stroking of children's hair and animal pelts signifies: this

hand can destroy. It tenderly fondles one victim before felling the other,
and its choice has nothing to do with the victim's guilt. The caress intimates that all are the same before power, that they have no being in them-

'selves. For domination's bloody purposes the creature is only material.
Thus the Fiihrer flaunts his concern for innocents, who are plucked out
without merit as others are kilIed without desert. Nature is filth. Only the
devious strength which survives is in the right. Bur that strength itself is

only nature; the whole ingenious machinery of modern indusrrial society
is no more rhan nature dismembering itself There is no longer any

Notes and Sketches

211

medium through which this contradiction can find expression. It unfolds
with the glum obstinacy of a world from which art, thought, and negativity have vanished. Human beings are so radically estranged from themselves and from nature that they know only how to use and harm each
other. Each is merely a factor, the subject or object of some praxis, something to be reckoned with or discounted.
In this world liberated from appearance-in which human beings,
having forfeited reflection, have become once more the cleverest animals,
which subjugate the rest of the universe when they happen not to be tearing themselves apart-to show concern for animals is considered no
longer merely sentimental but a betrayal of progress. In the best reactionary tradition Goring linked animal protection to racial hatred, the
Lutheran-Germanic joys of the happy murderer with the genteel fair play
of the aristocratic hunter. The fronts are clearly drawn; anyone who opposes Hearst" and Goring is on the side of Pavlov and vivisection; anyone
who hesitates between the two is fair game for both. Such a person is told
to follow reason. The choice is obligatory and inescapable. Anyone who
wants to change the world should at all costs avoid finishing up in the
morass of petty rackets, where political sectarians, utopians, and anarchists
go to ruin along with the spiritualists. Intellectuals whose thought is unattached to any active historical power, and orientates itself by neither of the
poles toward which industrial society is heading, lose their substance; their

thought becomes baseless.* The real is the rational. Anyone who does not
join in, the progressives also tell them, is of no help to anyone. Everything
depends on society, and thought, no matter how precise, must align itself
with the powerful social tendencies, without which it becomes mere

whimsy. This consensus unites all the righteous realists, who declare their
allegiance to human society as to a mass racket within nature. The thought
which does not putsue the aims of any of their departments incurs their
boundless wrath. It reminds them that something which exists only to be
smashed still has a voice: nature, with which the lies of the nationalist folk-

lore-lovers are full to overflowing. When irs sound interrupts, even for a
moment, their chanting chorus, the dread they seek to drown with their
voices, and which lives on in their rationalized. broken hearts as in every
animal, makes itself heard. The tendencies brought into daylight by the
expression of such thoughts are omnipresent and blind. Nature in itself is
neither good, as was believed by the old Romanticism, nor noble, as is

212

Notes and Sketches

asserted by the new. As a model and goal it signifies anti-intellectualism,
lies, bestiality; only when apprehended as knowledge does it become the
urge of the living toward peace, the consciousness which, from the begin-

ning, has inspired the unerring resistance to Fuhrer and collective. What
threatens the prevailing praxis and its inescapable alternatives is not
nature, with which that praxis coincides, but the remembrance of nature.

PROPAGANDA

Propaganda directed at changing the world-what an absurdity!
Propaganda turns language into an instrument, a lever, a machine.
Propaganda fixes the composition which human beings have taken on
under social injustice, by stirring them. It counts on their ability to be
counted on. All people know in their innermost awareness that through
this medium they are turned into media, as in a factory. The rage they feel
in following it is the old rage against the yoke, reinforced by the dim
knowledge thar the way out pointed by propaganda is the wrong one.
Propaganda manipulates human beings; when it screams freedom it con-

tradicts itself. Mendacity is inseparable from it. It is the community oflies
in which the leader and the led come together, even when its content as
such is correct. In it even truth becomes a mere means, to the end of gaining adherents; it falsifies truth simply by taking it into its mouth. That is

why true resistance is without propaganda. Propaganda is antihuman. It
presupposes that the principle that politics should spring from communal
insight is no more than a form of words.
In a society which prudently sets limits to the threatening abundance, what is recommended to everyone by others deserves mistrust. The
warning against commercial advertisements, that no company gives anything away, is applicable everywhere, and, after the merger of business and
politics, especially to the latter, The degree of eulogy increases with the
decrease in quality: the Volkswagen, unlike the Rolls-Royce, depends on
advertising. The interests of industry and consumers do not harmonize
even when the former seriously has something to offer. Even propaganda
for freedom can be a source of confusion in that it necessarily effaces the
difference between theory and the particular interests of its addressees.
The workers' leaders murdered in Germany were cheated even of the truth
of their own action, since fascism belied their solidarity hy the selectiviry

Notes and Sketches

213

of its revenge. When intellectuals are tortured to death in concentration
camps, that does not necessarily make the workers outside worse off.
Fascism was not the same for Ossietzky and for the proletariat. Propaganda cheated both.
What is suspect is not, of course, the depiction of reality as hell but
the routine invitation to break out of it. If that invitation can be addressed

to anyone today, it is neither to the so-called masses nor to the individual,
who is powerless, but rather to an imaginary witness, to whom we bequeath it so that it is not entirely lost with us.

IN THE GENESIS OF STUPIDITY

The emblem of intelligence is the feeler of the snail, the creature
"with the fumbling face," with which, if we can believe Mephistopheles,"
it also smells. Meeting an obstacle, the feeler is immediately withdrawn
into the protection of the body, it becomes one with the whole until it
timidly ventures forth again as an autonomous agent. If the danger is still
present, it disappears once more, and the intervals between the attempts
grow longer. Mental life in its earliest stages is infinitely delicate. The
snail's sense is dependent on a muscle, and muscles grow slack if their
scope for movement is impaired. The body is crippled by physical injury,
the mind by fear. In their origin both effects are inseparable.
The higher animals have themselves to thank for their greater freedom; their existence is evidence that feelers were once stretched out in new

directions and not repulsed. Each of their species is a monument to countless others whose attempts to develop were blocked at the outset, which
gave way to fright if only a single feeler stirred in the path of their evolution. The suppression of possibilities by the direct resistance of surrounding nature is extended inwardly by the wasting of organs through fright.
Each time an animal looks out with curiosity a new form of the living
dawns, a form which might emerge from the clearly formed species to
which the individual creature belongs. But it is not only this specific form
which holds it back in the security of the old state; the force which its look
encounters is the resistance, millions of years old, which has imprisoned it
at its present stage from the first, and which, constantly renewed, inhibits
('wry step which goes beyond that stage. That first, tentative look is always
c.isily repulsed; behind it stand goodwill, fragile hope, but no continuous

214

Notes and Sketches

energy. In the direction from which it has been definitely scared off the
animal becomes shy and stupid.
Stupidity is a scar. It can relate to one faculty among many or to
them all, practical and mental. Every partial stupidity in a human being
marks a spot where the awakening play of muscles has been inhibited
instead of fostered. With the inhibition, the vain repetition of unorganized, awkward attempts originally began. The child's endless questions
are already a sign of a secret pain, a serious question to which it has found

no answer and which it cannot frame in its proper form. 24 The repetition
half resembles playful determination, as when a dog endlessly leaps against
a door it has not learned how to open, finally giving up if the handle is too
high, and half corresponds to hopeless compulsion, as when a lion paces
endlessly up and down in its cage or a neurotic repeats the defense reaction which has already proved futile. If the child has wearied of its repetitions, or if the thwarting has been too brutal, its attention can turn in
another direction; the child is richer in experience, as one says, but at the
point where its impulse has been blocked a scar can easily be left behind,
a slight callous where the surface is numb. Such scars lead to deformations.
They can produce "characters," hard and capable; they can produce stupidity, in the form of deficiency symptoms, blindness, or impotence, if
they merely stagnate, or in the form of malice, spite, and fanaticism, if
they turn cancerous within. Goodwill is turned to ill will by the violence
it suffers. And nor only the forbidden question but the suppressed imitation, the forbidden weeping or the forbidden reckless game, can give rise
to such scars. Like the genera within the series of fauna, the intellectual
gradations within the human species, indeed, the blind spots within the

same individual, mark the points where hope has come to a halt and in
their ossification bear witness to what holds all living things in thrall.

Reference Matter

Editor's Afterword

The Position of "Dialectic ofEnlightenment"
in the Development ofCritical Theory

Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic ofEnlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Critical Theory of the
Frankfurt School, and one of its most compressed theoretical statements.
The book was written during the Second World War, between 1939 and
1944, and first published in 1944 in a limited edition. as a hectographic
typescript of the Institute for Social Research, on the occasion of Friedrich
Pollock's fiftieth birthday, It was published as a printed edition by Querido
of Amsterdam, the most important publisher of German writers in exile,
in 1947.

""What we had set out to do," the authors wrote in the Preface, "was

nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly
human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." I Yet the work goes
far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote
developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity
itself from the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are
connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. It is true that the book scarcely forms a unity in the formal sense. It
consists of five highly unconnected chapters, together with a number of
shorter notes, the subjects of which at first sight appear somewhat heterogeneous. The various analyses relate to phenomena such as the way in
which science has become detached from practical life, formalized morality, an entertainment culture which has reverted to manipulation, and a

218 Editor's Afterword
paranoid behavioral structure, as expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism,
which marks the limits of enlightenment. The common element which
the authors perceive in these phenomena is the tendency toward the selfdestruction of enlightenment's own guiding criteria which had been inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. The historical analyses
are intended to elucidate the present. For this reason, the two historical
chapters, concerned with decisive thresholds of enlightenment in Homeric Greece and in Central Europe in the eighteenth century, are relegated
to the status of "excurses," although they are indispensable to the argument of the book as a whole. In this way, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, the authors show why the National Socialist terror
was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.

The self-destruction of Western reason is seen to be grounded in an
historical and fateful dialectic of the domination of external nature, inter-

nal nature, and society. Enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, is
traced back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth are not seen,
therefore, as irreconcilable opposites but as dialectically mediated qualities
of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and:
enlightenment reverts to mythology,'? This paradox is the fundamental
thesis of the book. Reason appears as inextricably entangled with domination. Since the beginnings of history, liberation from the compulsions of
external nature has been achieved only by introducing a power relationship of second degree. Both the repression of the internal nature of human
drives, and social domination, are already at work in myth. Finally, fascism
and the modern culture industry are the forms taken by a return of
repressed nature. In the service of an advancing rationalization of instrumental thought modeled on the domination of nature and serving its purposes, enlightened reason is progressively hollowed OUt until it reverts to
the new mythology of a resurrected relationship to nature, to violence.
This theme is summed up in the opening sentences of the book: "Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has
always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as
masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant
calamity,":'
The book look a considerable time to reach a wide audience, not

lcasr h~cal1se of the peculiarly dense, allusive, and demanding nature of

Editor's Afterword

219

the text. But it has now become one of the most intensively read and widely discussed writings of Critical Theory. This is not the place to offer yet
another critical or systematic discussion of the theoretical problems it raises. Instead, three questions relating to editorial matters, which can in part
be clarified by reference to materials in the posthumous papers, will be
examined in detail here. First: What were me specific individual contributions of the authors to the text they jointly composed? Second; Which
especially important theoretical implications and, in particular, internal
revisions to Critical Theory, present but not fully worked out in the text,
are significant for its interpretation? This will also involve clarifying where
Dialectic of Enlightenment is to be located in the development, in particular, of Horkheimer's theoretical thinking. However useful it may be to
divide Horkheimer's development into "historical" periods, such an ap-

proach risks hypostatizing those periods. An overprecise diagnosis of discontinuities in the author's thought obstructs perception of the transitions
within it, and therefore of the preconditions of those discontinuities. This
account should therefore be seen as a counterweight to an often overschematic reception of Horkheimer's thought, its identity, and its changes.
The discussion will therefore take account of a number of shorter pieces

written in the 1940S which are thematically related to Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Third, and last, there is the question of how the textual
variations between me printed edition of 1947 and hectographic edition of
1944 are to be evaluated. The reasons for the prolonged resistance of the
authors, especially Horkheimer, to a reedition of the book will also be considered-reasons bound up with their own later evaluation of their work.

I. Authorship and the "Tension Between
Two Intellectual Temperaments"
The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment repeatedly stressed their
joint responsibility for the entire work. In the Preface to the new edition
of 1969 they write: "No one who was not involved in the writing could
easily understand to what extent we both feel responsible for every sentence. We dictated long stretches together; the Dialectic derives its vital
energy from the tension between the two intellectual temperaments which
came together in writing ir."? That the authors did not make this assertion
for reasons of academic politics or because of other strategic and external

220

Editor's Afterword

considerations is demonstrated by the following letter from Adorno to
Horkheimer of 2 June 1949: "Dear Max, I am enclosing copies of rwo critical comments sent to me by their author, Karl Thieme of Basel. I immediately corrected the nonsensical contention that I am the author of
'Elements of Anti-Semitism.' People seem unable to resist the temptation

to keep us apart, although I wrote to Thieme in February that Dialectic of
Enlightenment is 'the joint work of Horkheimer and myself, to the extent
that every sentence belongs to us both.' Warm regards, Teddie.";
The collaboration between the rwo was not confined to this book.

Records from the years 1931/32 and 1938 to 1946 bear witness to intensive
theoretical discussions." Numerous essays and memoranda from that period, and from the 1950S, and even as late as the 19605, bear traces of their

joint work, as is clear from handwritten corrections to the typescripts.
When the rwo writers decided to return to Frankfurt after the end of the

war and thought about publishing again in German journals, it is clear

that they planned for a time to combine their works once and for all visa-vis the public. The correspondence between the two demonstrates that
I he initiative came primarily from Adorno. In 1949 he drafted the follow-

ing declaration-which, however, remained unpublished: "As our entire
scholarly work, borh theoretical and empirical, has for years been so fused
IOgerher that our COntributions cannot be separated, it seems timely for us
10 declare publicly that all our philosophical. sociological, and psychological publications should be regarded as composed by us jointly and that we

share responsibility for them. This also applies to work signed by us individually. "7
Indisputable as it is that Horkheimer and Adorno successfully en-

gaged over long periods in a collaboration of which Dialectic ofEnlightrnment is only the best-known and historically most influential product. it

is extremely doubtful wherher both theories really form a seamless unity,
as asserted in this declaration. Viewed from a temporal distance, the dec-

laration rhrows less light on the actual relationship between the two
authors than on their ideal, which they had approached so closely through
joint work during the 1940S that the differences could largely be overlooked. With characteristic exuberance, Adorno proclaimed the complete
identity between rheir views at the start of a new phase of collaboration at
the lnstitut fUr Sozialforschung, reestablished in Frankfurt, as if he wanteel to make permanenr rhat period of joint writing, securing it against all
couiucrvailhu; tendencies.

Editor'sAfterword

221

With the work on Dialectic ofEnlightenment the thought of the two
authors drew together more closely than before or immediately afterward.
All the same, the book had very different functions in the individual

developments of the two authors. Reference to the manuscripts for

Dialectic of Enlightenment preserved in the posthumous papers of the
authors, and to recorded comments on the question of the book's authorship, provides a basis for answering the more far-reaching question concerning theoretical agreements, differences, and developments. Regardless
of that, however, the fact remains that the authorship of the book, which
cannot necessarily be reduced to the act of writing the text, must ulti-

mately be attributed to both together. Any motives of playing one author
off against the other, that may have been involved in similar exercises during their lifetimes, automatically cease to apply from the present historical
distance.

In determining the respective contributions of the two authors to
their communal text, two kinds of sources are available: the preliminary
drafts contained in the posthumous papers (A) and comments transmitted
verbally (B).

(A) Posthumous papers
(I) "Preface": This is present among Horkheimer's posthumous
papers in a number of typed sections which bear numerous handwritten
corrections and additions by Horkheimer and a few corrections by

Adorno." No draft is to be found in Adorno's posthumous papers."
(2) "The Concept of Enlightenment": In the 1944 version the chap- '
rer has the title "Dialectic of Enlightenment," and in the typescripts it is
titled "Myth and Enlightenment." Handwritten notes and text passages

relating to this chapter by Horkheimer and, in smaller quantities, by
Adorno, are preserved in Horkheirner's posthumous papers; fragments of
typewritten versions with handwritten corrections by both authors are pre-

sent in similar proportions." Adorno's posthumous papers contain nothing relating to this chapter.
(3) "Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment": Horkheirner's posthumous papers have no material on this chapter, while
Adorno's contain a typescript with numerous handwritten corrections and
additions.

(4) "Excursus II: juliette or Enlightenment and Morality": the typescript is in Horkheimer's posthumous papers and has the title "Enlighten-

222 Editor's Afterword
rnent and Rigorism."!' Adorno's posthumous papers contain nothing on
this chapter.
(5) "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception":
Horkheimer's posthumous papers contain two versions of this chapter
with the title "The Schema of Mass Culrure.l"! The earlier of the two ver-

sions is marked "Second Draft," is dated "October 1942," and bears the

name Max Horkheimer (on the cover page of the notebook) and the initials M.H. in his own handwriting (on the title page). This typescript has
eighty-nine pages, the first forty-five having numerous handwritten corrections and additions by Horkheimer. Only the pan of the chapter
revised up to that point was included in the editions of 1944 and 1947.
This version corresponds to the second typescript of the chapter in
Horkheirner's posthumous papers. In the printed version it closes with the
note "To be continued," which was, however, omitted from the new edi-

tion of 1969. The surviving drafts for this chapter show in exemplary form
the problems which arise when trying to draw conclusions about authorship from the form of the material. They also give us deeper insight into
the way the two authors worked. To anticipate the result: despite indiarions pointing to Horkheirner, Adorno is probably the author of the first
version (not extant) of the chapter. His posthumous papers also include
the typescript known as the "Second Draft"; it is in triplicate, one copy
being uncorrected, another showing a few handwritten corrections by
Adorno-it has the handwritten initials T.W .A. on the title page-and
the third having numerous handwritten corrections and additions by
Adorno on the first forty-five pages. Some of these notes agree word for
word with those of Horkheimer, while others diverge from them. Judging
from the materials, therefore, the contributions of the two authors to the

secondary revision were about equal. Only recorded verbal comments can
throw light on the authorship of the first draft, and they refer to Adorno
as the author. If the form of the materials is taken as the basis, the course

of work on this chapter could be reconstructed as follows: after Adorno,
011 the basis of discussions and notes no longer accessible, had produced a
"Second Draft" and hurriedly corrected it, the two authors discussed the
typescript sentence by sentence, at the same time inserting the corrections
Oil which they agreed. Independently of each other-beforehand or afterward-each of them made handwritten revisions to the typescript. This

proct's~ of revision came to an end at page 45 of the ~pescript, for con-

Editor's Afterword

223

ringenr reasons. The printed version was produced as a compilation of the
rwo revised versions of the first part. According to this interpretation, the
abbreviations M.H . and T.WA. clearly do not refer to the author but to
the "owner" of the typescript at the time, the reviser. The insertion of
"Max Horkheirner" as the author's name on the cover sheet was not made

by Horkheimer himself and appears to be a later, mistaken addition by a
secretary. This reconstruction is the decisive reason why the Editor decided not to include the second, unrevised part of the chapter in Horkheirner's posthumous writings.P
(6) "Elements of Anti-Semitism. Limits of Enlightenment": No
typescript of this chapter ready for publication is ro be found in Horkheirner's posthumous papers, which do, however, contain numerous typewritten fragments, mostly with handwritten corrections and additions by

Horkheimer, together with text passages handwritten by Horkheimer."
One of these handwritten texts follows directly after three pages written
by Gretel Adorno (probably under dictation). This bundle also includes a
few handwritten notes by Adorno and a six-page typescript by Adorno

with the title "Draft." It also contains reports of discussions berween the
rwo authors on anti-Semirism.P Thesis VII of this chapter, not added
until the printed version of 1947, is also to be found in several versions as
a typescript with handwritten corrections and additions by Horkheimer.l"
Attached to this is a three-page typescript by Adorno, "Remarks on Thesis
VII," with the date "Sept. 4/ 46" handwritten by him. I? Adorno's posthumous papers contain no further materials for this chapter.
(7) "Notes and Sketches": These are to be found in Horkheimer's

posthumous papers, each one usually in several typescript versions, with

handwritten corrections by Horkheimer.P The parts added as "Postscripts"
to some of the notes are missing. The aphorisms are collected in several

bundles. Of the typescripts present here only about half were included in

rhe printed version of Dialectic ofEnlightenment. The notes not included
in ir!? are brought together in rwo bundles, one of which is marked with
the abbreviations M.H . and Dr. H . The other, the contents of which coin-

cide largely with those of the first, is bound as a typescript and bears the
title "Notes As an Addition to the Festschrift for Friedrich Pollock" and is

preceded by the remark: "The notes have not been revised. They were
excluded from the Nores and Sketches of the Festschrift as being too pro-

visional.":" The "Notes and Skcrchcs" arc the oldest parts of Dialectic of

224 Editor's Afterword
Enlightenment. Those which are dated were written in 1939, 1940, and
1942. Adorno's posthumous papers contain no manuscripts or typescripts
relating to them.

(B) Oral comments
(I) "The authorship of the individual chapters," writes Jiirgen
Haberrnas, "is by no means indivisible. Gretel Adorno once confirmed my
conjecture, which, in any case, is obvious to a careful reader, that the title
essay and the Sade chapter were written predominantly by Horkheirner,
while the chapters on Odysseus and the culture industry an be attributed
primarily to Adorno. This conclusion is based not only on stylistic differences.'?!

(2) More precise and comprehensive is a report by Rolf'Tiedernann.P

based on a verbal communication by Adorno. It is consistent with the evidence from the materials of the posthumous papers. According to this
remark the two authors dictated the chapter on the "Concept of Enlightenment" jointly. (The materials indicate a certain preponderance of
drafts by Horkheirner.) The first excursus, "Odysseus or Myth and
Enlightenment," according to this report, was written almost exclusively
by Adorno, while the second, "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality,"
can be attributed to the same degree to Horkheimer. The chapter "The

Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception" is based on a draft
by Adorno, which, however, was so intensively revised by Horkheimer that
the contributions of both should be regarded as practically equal. The
reverse is the case with the chapter "Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of
Enlightenment," which was originally written by Horkheimer and intensively revised by Adorno. In addition, the "Preface" of 1944 refers to a considerable contribution by Leo Lowenthal to the formulation of the first
three theses of this chapter." According to this report the "Notes and
Sketches" were written by Horkheimer and contain no interventions by
Adorno. Adorno wrote the "Postscripts," which were not revised by
Horkheirner,

2. Genesis ofthe Work: Theoretical Implications
Whereas Dialectic ~r Enlightenment fits more or less searnlcssly iIHO
Adorno's ocuure, in Horkhcimcr's case it represents the most pronounced

expression or a phase in his inrcllccural devclopmcru ;"'hich difTers sharply

Editor's Afterword

225

from that of the 1930s. Whereas the essays for Zeitschrift were still borne
up by the confidence that it was possible to translate the central ideas of
the philosophical and political Enlightenment into materialist terms and
to realize them practically, Critical Theory now seems to hope for little
more than to preserve the memory of those ideas in the vortex of an overwhelming process of disintegration. The critique derives its incisiveness
from being directed against a modern concept of reason which took its
standard from the progress of productive forces and still formed the basis
of the most advanced critique of the relations of production which had
existed up to then. Enlightenment thus becomes enlightenment on the
origins and consequences of enlightenment. The change in the development of Horkheimer's Critical Theory first shows itself in the essays "The
Authoritarian State" and "The End of Reason"24 and is emphatically pre-

sent in Dialectic ofEnlightenment.
Since the early 1930S Horkheimer had been developing the idea of a
materialism to be implemented in an interdisciplinary way. The journal he

published, ZeitschriftfUr Sozialforschung, illustrates how a critical theory of
society guided by philosophy and underpinned historically and psychologically was to articulate and develop theoretically the practical interest in
the abolition of individual suffering and social injustice. According to this
conception, the only political groups which had the strength to bring
about a revolutionary transformation of society were those which were
able to make use of a comprehensive theory which employed the most
advanced scholarly instruments.
The form of this theory, however, and especially its philosophical
foundations, were by no means clearly outlined. Toward the end of the
1930S, therefore, Horkheimer planned an extensive work on dialectics in
which he aimed to elaborate further the philosophical content of his arti-

cles published in Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung. In a letter of 10 November
1938 Adorno wrote to Benjamin regarding Horkheimer: "He is currently
in an extremely overburdened state connected with his move to Scarsdale.

III the next few years he wants to free himself from all his administrative
work in order to devote his undivided energy to the book on the dialec-

ric"!~ We know about the plan for this book from a memorandum writ1l'1I by Horkheimer about the same time on "The Idea, Activities and
I'rogr;ml of the Insrirut fur Sozialforschung," which, however, was not
published at that rime. The planned work is mentioned there under the
ru lc of a "dialectical logic": "This is nor a formalistic epistemology but a

226 Editor's Afterword
materialist theory of categories. The scholarly and political discussion of
social problems makes use of categories about which differences of opinion arise as soon as closer definition is requested. They include concepts
such as causality, tendency, progress, law, necessity, freedom, class, culture,
value, ideology, dialectic, etc. [. . .] The definition of philosophical concepts is always at the same time a description of human society in its historically given embodiment. In this respect the planned book conceives of
logic in a similar way to Hegel in his great work, not as a collection of
abstract modes of thought but as a definition of the most important substantial categories of progressive consciousness in the present time."26
But it was not until spring 1941, when he moved to California, that
the book on dialectics took shape-though not, admittedly, as a "theory
of categories." Nevertheless, even now Horkheimer connected his undertaking with the aim of producing a major philosophical work. In a letter
to Pollock of 27 November 1942 he wrote about his efforts, his moments
of success, his ambitions and his awareness of the limits of his work: "It is

true, the subjects which I am dealing with are the most difficult ones that
exist, but the pains you suffer by working on them are at the same time
the greatest experience you can have in life. [. . .] There is no doubt that
the studies, which I am undertaking now and which are really the fulfillment of what we have dreamt to be our raison d'etre when we were very
young, cannot be achieved in one or two years. [. ..] IfHusseri needed ten
years to write his Logical Investigations and another thirteen years to publish his Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, not to speak of more famous
works on philosophy and related subjects, and if you take my poor forces,
education, and routine into consideration, you will appreciate what I am
in for. What I definitely know, however, and what makes me happy, is that
I am really doing what I can. Ultra posse nemini obligatio. We are really on
our way."27
Even after his move from New York to California in spring 1941,
Horkheimer was unable to withdraw to the extent he wished from the

administrative [asks mentioned by Adorno. His original plan for a materialist reformulation of Hegel's Logic was changed, suspended, or abandoned
in favor of other considerations. However, far more responsible for his
decision was the circumstance that Horkheirner's intellectual position and
self-reflection were being accompanied by a number of significant polirical and theoretical experiences and by outward ans-\ inward changes in his

Editor's Ajierwo,.d

227

life. These changes concerned not merely the planned book but-notwithstanding the continuity ofhis philosophical inrention-e -Horkheimer's
thinking as a whole.
If one looks exclusively at the difference berween "Traditional and

Critical Theory" and Dialectic ofEnlightenment, one risks misinterpreting
these changes as an abrupt break. A closer examination of his less wellknown publications, of the records of the history of the Institute for Social
Research which have now been collected, and of writings from Horkheirner's posthumous papers from that time reveals a number of interme-

diate steps and mediating links which make the transformation comprehensible.

In Horkheimer's view the rwofold linkage of a philosophically orientated, critical theory of society with traditional research, on the one
hand, and with political action. on the other, became weaker and weaker
during the 1930S. Adorno had originally tried to draw a sharp dividing line

berween research in individual disciplines and philosophical interpreta-

rion." Now, from the perspective of a sketch of a dialectical logic, or of a
dialectic of enlightenment and myth from the point of view of the philosophy of history, this division cast crucial doubt on the philosophical

self-consistency of the categories within individual disciplines.'? Critical
Theory could no longer draw on individual disciplines in the same way as

previously. Finally, in the Preface to Dialectic ofEnlightenment, the authors
write on this point: "In the present collapse of bourgeois civilization not
only the operations but the purpose of science have become dubious.P''
The status of Critical Theory as an immanent critique of traditional the-

ory is thus also called increasingly into question.
The full scope of the particular considerations and doubts relating to
the purpose of science becomes clear only from the posthumous papers
and letters of the rwo authors. Important examples of these doubts are

Horkheimer's public reflections on the philosophy of language from 1939

onward, which are now published in Vol. 12 of his Gesammelte Schriften.
They continue from earlier critical discussions of the ideological aspect of
language, especially with regard to the conception of language of Logical
Positivism, to be found in a number of essays from the 1930S. Horkheimer

now radicalizes this earlier standpoint, making it into an aporetic critique
of the concept itself. The critique remains aporeric because, by interpret-

ing language as rhc prcpondcr.rnr relationship of the subject (0 the object,

228 Editor's Afterword
it renders obsolete its own standard of a language which is not instrumentally stunted. Language, Horkheimer writes in one of these notes
from 1946, contains, inextricably mixed, both the power to suppress the
particular and the strength to liberate it from that suppression, to reconcile the particular with the universal. Both the negative and the positive
sides of this critique appear in Dialectic ofEnlightenment, but without
mediation. The thesis of the universality of blindness implies the complementary thesis that the spell could be lifted at a stroke from humans and
things if only the redeeming word were spoken. The critique of a reason
which reverts to myth requires as its background not only an historical
philosophy of reconciliation but also a utopia of true language. In the

notes from the 1940S in his posthumous papers, Horkheimer even seems
to be aiming at a sublation of the philosophy of history in a critical phi-

losophy of language. 3 1
In Critical Theory, reflections of this kind on the concept oflanguage
and on the concept itself never have the self-satisfied character of solutions
to the special problems of individual disciplines or of specialist philosophy.
Rather, they are persistently seen by Horkheimer and Adorno in their relationship to social theory, and indeed to historical-political experience. The
positivist conception of language, in the view of the two authors, concerned merely the real function of language within monopolistic society, a
function which it misinterpreted. Not least because language threatened to
forfeit its capacity conceptually to transcend the existing order, the unity
of theory and political praxis-no matter how mediated-appeared to
them to be irremediably shattered by the beginning of the 1940s. The hope
for- a radial transformation of conditions, indeed, any confidence in the
possibility ofhistorical progress at all. seemed to be without substance. The
failure of a proletarian revolution to occur in the developed capitalist societies, the subjugation of workers' organizations to a consolidated and
expanding fascism, the manipulative power of monopolistic mass society
in the West and of state socialism on the Stalinist model in the East-all

these political experiences lent impetus to the transition from the Critical
Theory of the 1930S to the critique of instrumental reason during the
1940s, a critique whiq became at the same time theoretically more radical
and practically more conservative. In addition, there were internal changes
at the Institute which went hand in hand with the theoretical transforma-

tions. Especially significant in this context were. first, the break between
.

.~

Editor's Afterword

229

Fromm and the other members of the Institute" and, second, Adorno's

move &om Oxford to New York, which began the phase of particularly
intensive collaboration berween him and Horkheimer.

In the early 1930S Fromm had played a leading part in the elaboration of a concept of analytic social psychology by the Institute. The function of psychoanalysis in this project was, above all, to identify the psychical forces opposing rational interests which aimed at social change,
forces which "form, as it were, the cement without which society would
not hold together and which contribute to the production of the great
social ideologies in all cultural spheres."33 Horkheimer drew on this sketch
for the general conception of Studien iiber Autoritdt und Familie,34 according to which the authoritarian attitude mediated through family or state
institutions should be understood as the medium by which individuals are
adapted to the structures of social domination. Fromm took further the
critique, contained in these studies, of Freud's conception of himself as a
natural scientist in his later publications concerning a critique of the psychoanalytic theory of libido. The assumption of a basic sexual drive was to
be replaced by the wider conception of a drive toward social connection.
At the same time Fromm sharpened the criticism he had expressed earlier
of Freud's pessimistic anthropology, which he regarded as a hyposrarizadon of bourgeois-patriarchal family structures."
By contrast, Horkheimer's evaluation of psychoanalysis changed in
the opposite direction, one might say, during the same period. Against
Fromm, whom he accused of lapsing into a psychology of common sense,
he adhered more emphatically than ever to the Freudian theory of drives.
However, he now interpreted this theory in a different way, as a precise
expression of the disempowerment of the subject, which he saw as bound
lip with the decay of liberalism. Against the theoretical categories and the
practical, therapeutic maxims of psychoanalytic ego-psychology he
emphasized the socially critical implications of Freud's biological, physil •• list materialism. Freud's pessimism regarding the possibility of subjugating destructive forces, founded on the theory of drives, appeared to
l lorkheirner all the more convincing the less he himself was able to attach
vnch hopes to the abolition of domination by concrete social movements.
How important such an interpretation of psychoanalysis-orthodox
ITl reading Freud, so to speak, against the grain-was for the conception
III l tialrctic of F"liglJfntmntt can be seen from records of talks berween

230

Editor's Afterword

Horkheimer and Adorno from 1939, which can be regarded as preliminary

discussions on the work they were planning together. 36 It appears that at
times the authors had considered planning their joint work entirely or
partly as a critique of psychoanalysis. This is indicated negatively by a formulation concerning the revision of such a plan: "Instead of the orientation to analysis, I propose orienting the book toward currently outlawed
concepts like that of the saboteur. "37 In these discussions psychoanalysis is
seen, on the one hand, as a variety of positivist thinking ultimately tending toward a false reconciliation berween the mutilated individual and the
social agencies to which it owes its suffering. On the other hand, however, the psychoanalyric concepts spring from an Enlightenment tradition of
asserting truth against illusions and taboos, on which the authors wished
to draw. Critical Theory was to subject the scientific concepts of "bourgeois" thought to a change of function corresponding to Marx's procedure
with regard to classical political economy. Those concepts contained standards by which their failure to be realized in existing society was to be
measured. They were to be stripped of their illusory ahistorical appearance.
In the case of psychoanalysis, this applied, for example, to the concept of

the individual: "The Progressive momenr of analysis consists in the contributions it has made to an understanding of the individual as an arena.

It might be said that the analytic categories, however distorted, are conducive to the insight that the individual itself is 'a history of class srrug-

I "'38 g es.
However, in Dialectic ofEnlightenment itself the dispute with psychoanalysis is carried on much more behind the scenes. It is present in
central ideas of the book even though it may not be visible at first sight.
The psychoanalytic category of the return of the repressed, for example,
itself returns in the dialectic of the domination of nature, in the thesis that:

"the subjugation of everything natural to the sovereign subject culmina res
in the domination of what is blindly objective and natural. This tendency
levels out all the antitheses of bourgeois thought, especially that berween
moral rigor and absolute amoraliry.V? The proximity of Horkheimer's and
Adorno's argumentation to psychoanalytic theory and empirical practice is

unmistakable, above ~I, in the chapters on the culture industry and antiScmitism. The culture industry is the regression, operating wirh enlighrenment means in restricted form, from the effort of cultural sublimation.

In anti-Sernitism this regression reveals its deadly, seriousness. lr is based

Editor's Afterword

231

on the triumph of the projective manipulation of the world over the differentiations and inhibitions of rational thought and behavior: "Impulses
which are not acknowledged by the subject and yet are his are attributed
to the object: the prospective victim."40
In their Preface the authors stress the close connection between the

chapter on anti-Semitism and the studies in social psychology of the
Institute for Social Research during the 1940s, which were published in

the five volumes of Studies in Prejudice;" The chapter "Elements of AntiSernirism" should therefore be read as the historical, philosophical, and
theoretical background to the empirical studies on prejudice, which in
their turn were an attempt to translate the theory into quantitative investigations. Moreover, Adorno refers expressly to this connection in an essay

from 1968; "The chapter 'Elements of Anti-Semitism' in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I wrote joinrly in the strictest
sense, that is to say, we literally dictated it together, strongly influenced my
contribution to the investigations carried out later with the Berkeley

Public Opinion Study Group. The Authoritarian Personality was the literary outcome of those investigations. [.. .J 'Elements of Anti-Semitism'
placed racial prejudice theoretically in the context of an objectively oriented, critical theory of society. Admittedly, in contrast to a certain economic orthodoxy, we did not take an aloof attitude toward psychoJogy bur
gave it its due place in our sketch as a moment of enlightenment. Never,
however, did we leave any doubt as to the precedence of objective factors

over psychology. [. ..J We regarded social psychology as a subjective mediation of the objective social system: without its mechanisms subjects could
nor have been kept in their place."42
Despite Adorno's stress on the connection between empirical work

and the general theory of anti-Semitism, the guJf between the two, measured by Horkheimer's original program for an interdisciplinary materialism, cannot be overlooked.P Unlike earlier attempts to mediate between
phiJosophical, sociological, and psychological knowledge, Horkheimer
and Adorno contended that the split between these conceptual spheres
corresponded to an actual breach between individual and society and
therefore would be merely short-circuited by a purely conceptual approach. This had the result, however, that their evaluation of anti-Semitism was not wholly consistent in both areas. For example, whereas the
empirical investigations inio the authoritarian character limit its destruc-

232 Editor's Afterword

tive potential by conceding the possibility of a nonrepressive education
within existing society, the "Elements" chapter emphatically relates it to
"the nature of the dominant reason and of the world corresponding to its

image. "44 An end to prejudice could therefore be expected only from a radical break with the logic of the civilizing process up to now. In the empirical studies, therefore, the counterpan to the authoritarian, intolerant, and
prejudice-ridden personality is represented by a subject type which, with-

in the framework of Dialectic ofEnlightenment, appears to be almost inextricably entangled with the principles of self-preservation, of the domination of internal and external nature.

In the extracts cited above from the report on the studies of the
1940s, Adorno points to a second strand of theory which, compared to
psychoanalysis, was still more important for Dialectic ofEnlightenment:
economics, meaning the critique of Marx and his successors. But however decisive the link to the critique of political economy may have been, no
less characteristic was its relegation to the level of the merely implicit. This
was done still more thoroughly than in the case of psychoanalysis. Whereas, in the discussions of 1939 already cited, the authors were still considering an historical-materialist reformulation of the psychoanalytic concept of
the individual as a "history of class struggles," the explanatory principle
underlying the Marxian concept of history is largely absent from Horkhelmer's and Adorno's historical-philosophical sketch. Its place is taken by
the more general antagonism between domination of nature and enslavement to it.

The authors attempt to show how reason, having regressed to instrumental rationality, has combined in the present era with the domination
of nature and social control to form a quasirnythical compulsion. In the
modern varieties of totalitarianism, only the always-calamitous intertwinement of reason and power is manifested. The historical phenomenon
of fascism no longer appears, as in the orthodox Marxist view, as the last
political stage of monopoly capitalism but is related in manifold ways to
overarching structures of bourgeois thought and action. National
Socialism, which needed military expansion and terror to achieve internal
stability yet was bound to miss its goal by using these means, is interpreted as an unstable barbaric interlude on the way to the historically and
generically irrevocable goal of the "administered world."

This does nor mean, however, that the Marx~an approach compris-

Editor's Afterword 233
ing a dialectic of productive forces and relations of production has been

simply replaced by a general analysis of technological rationality. Rather,
an abundance of links to the Marxist critique of political economy still
remain. To give an example from "Elements of Anti-Semitism" just quoted: the role of the Jews is interpreted there not least as a socioeconomic
function of the distribution sphere and its loss of power in monopoly capitalism, and anti-Semitism as a projective obfuscating of the nonequivalent
exchange of equivalents in the sale of labor power. Such an interpretation
is based on the continuing anempts of the Institut during the late 1930S to
redefine the concept of monopoly capitalism and, on that basis, the con-

cept of fascism. A decisive influence on Dialectic ofEnlightenment in this
respect was Pollock's thesis that fascism and bureaucratic socialism were
variants of a new order of capitalism which differed fundamemally both
from earlier private capitalism and from modern monopoly capitalism,
and which he called "state capiralism.T" In a contribution which follows
this Afterword, Willem van Reijen and Jan Bransen discuss in more detail
this thesis and its importance for the discussions at the Institute for Social
Research.

The pessimism regarding the possibility of socialist politics dominant in Horkheirner's thought since the early 1940s has its economic foun-

dation in the theory of state capitalism, its political foundation in the connected theory of "rackets" as a "basic form of domination. " 46 According to
Pollock's thesis there is in state capitalism no structural conflict between
political objectives and economic necessities. In the "command economy"
the productive forces and the Jaws of the market are stripped of their
autonomy and thus of their explosive potential. The planned economy has
become inevitable; the only decisive political question is whether it will be
democratic or totalitarian, that is, the question as to how access to the
administrative control of the economy and thus to the new ruling class is
regulated. This provides the starting point for Horkheirner's theory of
rackets, according to which social power, in keeping with its own economic principle, is transformed from the form mediated by exchange, via
the form conferred on it by economic monopolies, into direct domination
by force. By rackets Horkheimer means the groups, cliques, councils,
boards, or committees formed in the most diverse epochs whose social
function is largely supplanted by the imperative to preserve and increase
their uwn power. The theory of rackets, which grew out of the discussions

234 Editor's Afterword

on the applicability of Marxian theory to the present form of society, is
first of all an attempt to escape the myth of a revolutionary subject without falling back into illusory cultural criticism behind the screen of a critique of political economy. Beyond that, it aims to construct a theory of
power which reveals the historically limited model of the rule ofliberalism
regulated by market laws to be a special case of the monopolization of
advantages on the basis of social performance.
For Horkheirner, the topical application of the racket theory was to
be found in the transfer of traditional class antagonism to the field of
international relations, on the one hand, and to institutionally determined
antitheses within the classes themselves, on the other. In postliberal capitalism, according to this theory, new forms of conflict conceal the basic
contradiction between capital and labor. With state capitalism mechanisms have come into being to mitigate the economic crises which earlier
had the potential to disintegrate the system. In this way the economic
"base" loses its role in supporting the social totality. National Socialism
and bureaucratic socialism or, more generally, a new "integral statism," can
no longer be described only in terms ofeconomic basic categories. Political
analysis takes on greater importance to the extent that liberalism appears
as an historical episode, after the downfall of which society reverts to direct
methods of domination no longer mediated via the market. The fundamental economic factors leading to crisis are tending to become controllable by measures of state intervention, which can range from compensatory welfare legislation to overt terror.
This new form of the "primacy of politics" does not leave untouched
the concept of the political itself, in comparison to its function in general
capitalism. Above all, it should not be confused with the positivist substitution of-historical, political, or psychological laws for economic ones. In
a fragment written by Horkheimer about 1942, he describes politics in
posdiberalism as an illusion which affects not only the dominated masses
but the political agents themselves: "Politics, the rediscovery of which in
the Renaissance was a theoretical advance, has become, in thinking under
monopoly, even more an ideological category than the laws of the market
under liberalism: with its aid the surface is hypostatized. The dominated
masses attribute world events to politics. They hear the appeal and the
decree, they are informed about the lives of the powerful, which consist of
facts in no need of theory; the masses experienct: the direct consequences

Editor's Afterword 235
of political anions, of negoriarions between rackets, rhey feel the effecrs of
emergency aid, of rising prices, of the new job, of war, and perceive big

politics as fare and nature just as rhey earlier perceived the economic
depression. And the protagonists share this belief: They know that they
hold key positions: jusr as the enrrepreneur misrook his business venrures,
calculations and specularions, that he underrook on rhe basis of the economic cycle, for freedom, the presidenrs of unions and governmenrs rnisconstrue their decisions as the beginnings of causal chains. Government,
however, must bow to the same necessities as buying and seJling: to the
requiremenrs of the reproduction of society within the power relationships
as rhey are. This is nor so differenr in the two periods. The opacity of the
marker which gave rise ro the self-deception abour freedom merely expressed the fan that the relationships of enrrepreneurs among themselves
were nor rational bur were governed by individual self-asserrion. Today the

srruggles rake place within much srronger groups, amid movemenrs of
highly concenrrared masses of capital, The governments are execurive
mechanisms which cannot rarionally understand the acrual state of the
forces on which they depend, bur merely feel their concrete effecrs."47
The state capitalist "primacy of politics" can be undersrood as a perversion of the socialist idea of the planned economy which was supposed
to repJace the anarchy of private appropriarion by rational decisions in the

generalizable interest of society as a whole. Whar is expressed in fascism,
in especially brutal form, is merely what characterizes democratic state
capitalism as well as bureaucratic socialism of the Soviet kind: the end of
liberal, legal agencies of mediation under the power politics of competing
ruling cliques. These groups rake over rhe now necessary planning of the
economic process, whether that process is still democrarically legirimized
or is already an almost openJy planned and organized piracy.
The starting poinr of rhe racket theory is therefore an analysis of
conremporary society as a conglomerate of organized groups under the
leadership of bureaucratic or quasibureaucraric elites. The relationship of
a clique to irs clienrele is structured on the principle of prorecrion in exchange for obedience. Since the individual rackets no longer even pretend
to pursue inrellecrual ideals or objectives relaring [Q society as a whole, the
traditional ideologies, which used to make particularist interests appear
universal, also disappear. They are replaced by the unashamedly pragmaric objectives of manipul.uion and the preservation of power. The ability to

236 Editor's Afterword
impose these objectives decides the selection and careers of the leading
personnel within a racket.
Beyond that, this approach aims to produce an historically generalizable theory of relations of class and domination: "Under the conditions
of monopolism and total domination," Horkheimer writes in 1943, "the
permanence of oppression. its parasitic nature, becomes manifest. Every
ruling class has always been monopolistic to the extent that it excluded the
overwhelming majority of human beings. The structure corresponded to
that of competing rackets. Even the socially useful functions which the
ruling classes used to perform have been transformed into weapons against
the oppressed population and against competing groups within their own
class. The racket pattern, which used to be typical of the behavior of rulers
toward the ruled, is now representative of all human relationships, even
those within the working class. The difference between the racket within
capital and the racket within labor lies in the fact that in the capitalist
racket the whole class profits, whereas the racket of labor functions as a
monopoly only for its leaders and for the worker-aristocracy. The laboring
masses are the objects of both forms; they merely have to pay for the whole
system. The similarity between the most highly respected historical formations, such as the medieval hierarchies, to the modern rackets is obvi-

ous. The concept of the racket applies to both large and small enterprises;
they all struggle for the largest possible share of added value. In this
respect the highest capitalist corporations resemble the small interest
groups which operate among the lowliest strata of the population, both
within and outside the legal boundaries. [. ..] A true sociology of the racket as the living element of the ruling class in history could serve both a

political and a scientific purpose. It could help to clarify the goal of political praxis: a society with a pattern different to that of the racket, a rack-

et-less society. It could contribute to defining the idea ofdemocracy which
still leads a shadowy life in the heads of human beings. [. ..J Expressed in
scientific terms, a more appropriate philosophy of history could evolve
from the sociology of the racket. [. ..] The modern concept contributes
to describing social relationships of the past. 'The human anatomy is the
key to the anatomy of tfe ape.' "48
The political and economic basis for a theory of rackets and of state
capitalism was developed within the Institute primarily by Horkheimer
and Pollock; dissenting voices were not lacking among their colleagues,
.

Editor's Afterword 237
particularly those of Neumann and Kirchheimer. Although Horkheimer
adhered fundamentally to the thesis, the criticism may have retarded early
publication of his reflections on racket theory. Adorno's contribution.t?
too, remained unpublished. These beginnings of the theory were not elaborated in detail later.

They were, however, the decisive factor in the transition from the

earlier form of Critical Theory, represented by the essays in Zeitschrift fUr
Sozialforschung during the 1930S, to an historical and generic critique of
instrumental reason, of which Dialectic ofEnlightenment is the most important document. But the specific economic and political arguments do
not appear, or appear only in rudimentary form, in this book. Nevertheless, they provide the background ofsocial theory against which the scientific, moral, cultural, and psychological phenomena of the self-destruction of enlightenment were interpreted. Since the authors limit the application of the Marxian categories essentially to liberalism-which, especially with regard to the, at least partial, achievement of bourgeois freedom, is presented as a transient episode in a history of power always dominated by the law of the racket-s-it is understandable why those categories

are pushed into the background in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. Racket theory, of course, has as its occasion and subject the fate of the once opposi-

tional workers' organizations. 50 It shows how far the class struggle had
been transformed under monopoly capitalism into a system of transac-

tions between monopolistic units and thus into a medium of adaptation.

3. Textual Variants. Theoretical Revisions and Misgivings

Regarding the Dissemination ofthe Theory
The reason for the decision initially not to commit Dialectic ofEnlightenment to print was certainly not only the slender financial means and
uncertain academic, political, and geographical future of the Institute in
the mid-I940S. This is indicated by the facts that the hectographic edition
was limited to about 500 copies and distributed only to specific recipients;
that an American edition was not seriously considered; and, finally, that
the text for the printed edition published three years later was subjected to
thorough revision. None of this is surprising in the case of authors who
were always concerned to ensure that their own theoretical utterances or
those of others never became entirely detached from their systematic, his-

238 Editor's Afterword
torical, and social contexts. AU the more revealing from the historical
standpoint, therefore, are the revisions to the content and terminology of
the text undertaken not only in that first period but also more than two
decades later. In this edition, these changes, when they go beyond mere
orthographic corrections and minor changes of wording, are indicated in
the form of footnotes. These were produced on the basis of comparisons

between the different editions (1944, 1947, and 1969) made by Willem van
Reijen and Jan Bransen. In their commentary, which follows this Afterword, they relate the textual changes (between 1944 and 1947) to the evolution of the economic and political theory underlying them.
Clearly, there are a number of different motives for the later interventions in the text. That becomes clear if the textual variants are classi-

fied. The following groups of revised formulations can be distinguished.
(I) Formulations which tie the text directly to its time of origin.
These include editorial explanations ("When, two years ago, we began this
work ..."51), qualifications reflecting contemporary history ("fascist present"52), or overly specialized historical on geographical examples ("The
German and Russian pavilions at the Paris World Exposition seemed of
the same essence,"53 "the monumental buildings of monopoly, the skyscrapers of Wrigley and Rockefeller">').
(2) Obscure or elaborate formulations which required stylistic simplification or unraveling, but without replacing theoretically or politically
loaded terms (for example, "the official spokesmen [...] are repudiating
the thought to which they owe their place in the sun" becomes "the official spokesmen [...] are liquidating the theory to which they owe their
place in the sun?").
Terminological changes based on theoretical considerations, such as
the replacement of the expression "mass culture" originally used by "the
culture industry," can be included in this group. 56
(3) Formulations in which monopoly capitalism, totalitarianism, and
fascism were equated too indiscriminately. In these cases what had been
said in general terms about "class society," "monopolism," or the "totalitarian order" is made more concrete and is restricted to "fascism" or

"German fascism.";? There is clearly also an intention to soften excessh::ely crass judgments on Western democracy or liberalism." Two formulations referring especially critically and inclusively to Jewish functionaries

and Christian churches can also be included in rhis group."

Editor's Afterword 239
(4) Formulations in which certain theoretically, historically, or polit-

ically loaded terms from Marxian or Marxist theory were used. This group
not only preponderates quantitatively-it includes more than half the
amended passages-but is also far more interesting historically than the
others. The politico-economic terms are replaced as a rule by neutral eco-

nomic, sociological, or moral-practical expressions-for example, "proletarians" by "workers.Y" "capitalist" by "entrepreneur.Y" "throughout class
history" by "until today,"G2 "exploitation" by "suffering."G3 More than half
of these offending formulations include a single concept, that of "monopoly" (and, again, the great majority of these cases is found in the chapter
on "The Culture Industry").
One important motive for such reformulations was undoubtedly the
concern to avoid making political enemies, which might possibly have had

threatening consequences for the Institute or individual members of it. As
early as the 1930S Horkheimer had had serious doubts about the lasting

susrainabiliry of a liberal right of asylum in face of opposition from interest groups involved in domestic or foreign politics. The terminological
changes, therefore, do nor reflect a single break but rather a continuum in
Horkheirner's thinking. Even the terminology from this period relating to

the proletariat and the revolution Was characteristically modified in the

publications of the Zeitschrift.64 And even as late as the 1950S and 1960s in
postwar Germany he constantly anticipated the possibly fatal consequences of ill-considered utterances: indeed, he even feared the return of
a situation in which people would be able to communicate only, as it were,
in whispers."
Such "translations" of Marxist concepts in keeping with the tradition
of philosophical and political enlightenment were all the more natural

since Critical Theory, starting with its name, represented a reaction to the
repudiation of Marxian theory by the authoritarian forms of socialism.
The use of language, and reference to the "classics," especially under integral statism of the Soviet kind, had, in the authors' view, lost any truly critical power and, indeed, had itself become a means of repression. For this

reason Critical Theory not only was able to draw on the established disciplines and concepts of scholarly tradition but also considered the "tendencies opposed to official science'l'" to have become obsolete. For, as they
write, alluding to Sovier Marxism, "They suffer the fate which has always

been reserved for rriurnphaur rhoughr, If ir voluntarily leaves behind its

240

Editor's Afterword

critical element to become a mere means in the service of an exisring order,
it involuntarily tends to transform the positive cause it has espoused into
something negative and destructive. "67This interpretation is fundamental

to Dialectic ofEnlightenment but was not carried out in the book itself. In
his "Remarks on Thesis VII [of "Elements of Anti-Semitism"]," Adorno

noted critically in 1946 that in Dialectic ofEnlightenment the authoritarian "ticket thinking" present in Bolshevism was neglected: "The thesis
applies there in its classical form. [. . .] This whole process of the extermination of humanity in the name of socialism was untouched in the

Fragments .68 It is, however, essential to an understanding of the situation
as a whole and can no longer be ignored ."69 As early as "The Authoritarian
State" Horkheimer had criticized bureaucratic socialism as the most

advanced form of authoritarian rule, and there was no lack, subsequently,
of unmistakable statements regarding Soviet Marxism by both authors.

But they never produced a comprehensive critique of that system and
therefore were constantly in fear of being confused with it.
Independently of such questions concerning the prejudiced reception the book might receive, however, there was also a more narrowly theoretical motive. The change in their evaluation of Marx.ian theory and its
applicability to state capitalism and integral statism, on the one hand, and
of economic and political reality, of the political tendencies and the
chances of changing them, on the other, needed to be reflected in the terminology. The elimination.of fascist rule in Central Europe as a result of
the war required a redefinition of certain terms which earlier had implicitly equated totalitarianism, fascism, and monopoly capitalism; and the
regular focus of the diagnosis of the present on "monopoly" in the earlier
version of the text suggested an indiscriminately econornistic or subjectivist approach which stood in flat contradiction to the acuity of their
analysis elsewhere: economic monopoly could neither causally explain the
dialectic of enlightenment in its fuji breadth nor identify the historical
subject of the fateful history of the species. And, not least important, it
was necessary to address the thesis that the monopoly capitalism which
had existed up to then was ,in the process of undergoing a qualitative
change to become "state capitalism." In this respect the racket theory held
an ambiguous position. On the one hand, the identification of fascist rule
as an unrnediared form of power and at the same time the legitimate heir
of bourgeois monopoly capitalism?" prepared the way for a generalized

Editor's Afterword

241

racket theory of domination which went beyond the limited model of the

criminal gang. On the other, however, such a theory was in danger-as

Horkheimer himself was aware 71-of merely replacing an oversimplified
economic concept ("monopoly") by an oversimplified political one ("rackets"). Probably for this reason, the textual changes affected both terms:
"monopoly" is replaced by "the influential clique"72 and "rackets" by "the
completely organized system of domination."73
Despite this critical distance, at the time of the book's first publication in printed form the authors continued to regard themselves as
Marxists. In the report of a discussion in 1946 about the planned continuation of their joint work after the completion of the printed version,
Horkheimer writes: "We see this moment of unity [in the analysis of politics and philosophy] in holding fast to the radical impulses of Marxism
and, in fact, of the entire Enlightenment-for the rescue of the Enlightenment is our concern-but without identifying ourselves with any empirically existing party or group. Our position is, in a sense, a materialism
which dispenses with the prejudice of regarding any moment of existing
material reality as directly positive. The paradox, the dialectical secret of a
true politics, consists in choosing a critical standpoint which does not
hypostatize itself as the positive standpoint. [.. .] [W]e are [...] Stoics
because there is no party."74

Adorno objected to this stoic conception of oneself on the grounds
that it was inappropriate to an advanced technology which could now
eliminate all material poverty. His counterproposal for their continuing
work was, however, no closer to the reality of politics. For he went back to
the original conception of a materialist theory of categories dating from
1938. Political and economic questions should not be taken as the starting
point for philosophical analyses, as Horkheimer envisaged; rather, "one
should begin by analyzing logical and epistemological categories. The task
would be to subject categories like concept, judgment, subject, substantiality, essence, and suchlike to the kind of examination that was already
begun in the Fragments. This should include not only purely logical but
also historical and social discussions. The historical and social substance of

the categories and their present status should be determined from their
immanent meanings, and such an analysis would lead on to a judgment
on the correct and talse moments of the categories concerned."75

The two authors f:lilt·d ro agree, however, on the question of the

242

Editor's Afterword

proper relationship between political and philosophical analysis. Horkheimer, from the outset, placed greater emphasis on the political. To which
Adorno responded: "What you fear is a heavy chunk of professorial philosophy. My fear is that the leap from logic to reality will be made in a
dogmatic or analogistic way."76 Perhaps this dissent should be seen as one
of the-undoubtedly numerous-reasons why the planned continuation

of Dialectic of Enlightenment did not materialize. Horkheimer put the
emphasis on the question of how his intention to "rescue the Enlightenment"77 was to be reconciled with the radical nature of a self-referential

critique of reason: "I should like to see one main theme, e.g.: What can
theory do in the present situation? What is its place? Or: How can the
abstractness of the concept be overcome by the concept itself?"78 Adorno,
for his part, came down much more squarely on the negative side of this
aporia: "[ ...] reason is its own sickness.'?"

In this way Dialectic ofEnlightenment also remained a fragment in
the sense that its planned continuation did not come about. It formed the
indispensable starting point and reference point for Horkheimer's thought
during the two decades after his return from emigration." But this refer-

ence point remained latent, and of uncertain usefulness. a n the one hand,
the epochs of fascism and postwar democracy in Western countries,
despite their deep-seated differences, were, for Horkheimer, connected by
a continuum: the preponderance of bureaucratic structures over the free
subject, which they buried beneath them. On the other, he saw in Western
democracies very serious possibilities of opposing this tendency, which he
regarded as irreversible in the history of the species; to preserve the scope
for freedom which, despite everything, still existed, was for him a practical postulate. To express this contradiction, the resolution of which he did
not believe possible, he coined, and applied to himself, the notion of a
complementarity of theoretical pessimism and practical optimism."
This dichotomy is also present in a similar form in the relationship
of Critical Theory to science. The rejection of established and departmen-

talized science announced in the Preface to Dialectic ofEnlightenment is
anything but consistently carried through in the book itself, in which the
authors continue frequently to base their argument, whether affirmatively
or critically, on the findings of individual disciplines. Irrespective of the
philosophical reflection which rejects both sense data and judgments as
mediated immediacies, they concede even here -th'l1 "practically fruitful
.

Editor's Afterword 243
scientific enterprises call for an unimpaired capacity for definition, for
shutting down thought at a point designated by social need, for demarcating a field which is then investigated in the minutest detail without
passing outside it."82 From this point of view, the empirical research projects which the Institute had planned from the early 1940S and carried OUt
until the end of that decade belie the radical nature of their rejection of
science. And after their return to Frankfurt both the reestablishment of

the Institut and Horkheirner's and Adorno's intensive academic work and

involvement in educational politics during the 1950S and 1960s bear witness to their continuing and vigorous confidence in the enlightening
potential of science. Nevertheless, all these concessions to the "business"
of science are subject to a general reservation: science, Horkheimer writes
in one of his notebooks in the early 1950S, is inherently subject to "standards adapted to the purpose of domination.T" and the true philosophy
which aims to resist the negative course of the world must beware of
secretly wishing to submit to scientific standards.

The question whether a new edition of Dialectic ofEnlightenment
should be published did not arise until the early 196os-uP to then copies
of the first edition had still been available. At that time the initial decision

on such matters was in the responsibility of Pollock. In January 1961 he
compiled, for the first time, a list of "problematic" passages and expressions in the text and noted: "Reacquaintance with Dialectic ofEnlightenment leads distressingly to two conclusions: How many significant ideas
are contained in it, and in an adequate and convincing form; and how little or, rather. how much less than fifteen years ago, one can say without
incurring the fury of the mob. [. . .J My question marks and crosses predominantly indicate misgivings about the too-unguarded use of language.
Only in a few places did I think it necessary to express doubts, as an 'expert,' on the correctness of the content. All in all, I come to the dismal
conclusion that the content of Dialectic is not suitable for mass circulation.

However, individual chapters, somewhat amended here and there, should

be republished in the planned collection."84 It is reported that Adorno did
not share such misgivings to the same extent as Horkheimer and that he
tried, vainly at first, to persuade the latter to agree to a largely unamended new edition. The particular reasons for Horkheirner's hesitation have
not been recorded; but they were, no doubt, political concerns which
probably arc approximately reflected in Pollock's formulations. That Ador-

244 Editor's Afterword
no, too, shared such misgivings, at least in part, is shown by a draft he produced for a letter, written in summer 1962, in which he and Horkheimer

jointly replied to Marcuse, who had emphatically supported the idea of a
new edition. In this draft he writes: "The situation is simply that, on the
one hand, there are certain hazardous formulations, especially concerning
organized religion, that we are afraid about, should the book achieve the
circulation which is now to be expected; on the other hand, we wish to
keep the text intact and not to water it down because of any concerns and
considerations. [.. .] One gradually grows too old to be able to pay overmuch attention to matters of security. The 'pro' for republication is there-

fore beginning to tilt the scales against the 'contra.'''85 However, in the
final text of the letter redrafted by Horkheirner, this is replaced by the general formulation: "The well-known reasons which had deterred us from

agreeing to the second edition become less weighty with each year that we
get older. "86
By now an Italian translation had been ready for printing for some
time-the authors had agreed to its production, by Renato Solmi, as early
as 1955;87 it finally came out in 1966. In this text, and in line with the preceding misgivings, a considerable number of changes were made, which
Pollock justified in a draft for a preface, written for Horkheirner and
Adorno, and certainly after agreeing to the content with them. Because
this draft clearly characterizes the authors' policical self-understanding at
this time, as well as their view of the context of the book's production, it
will be quoted in full here:
The German text of Dialectic afEnlightenment is a fragment. Abour the end
of the war it was intended to form the introduction to the theory of history and
society which we had conceived during the National Socialist period of rule. The
attempr to use Hitler's regime to accelerate the regression to the bourgeois-indi-

vidualistic-world, because the power srruggles in rhe new period of world history.
in both war and peace, require an absence of economic and administrative fricrion which is difficult to achieve under the conditions of democracy, had failed.
The rapacious nationalism of the East had nor been eliminated by its crazy halfbrother in the West; rather, war had unleashed developments in Asia, Africa, and
South America from which nationalism finally benefits. Life in Europe is threatened by a new migration of peoples which overshadows the earlier one in violence
and terror. If physical resistance finally gives way. at leasr something of irs capacity for experience, for reflection and crirical consciousness shall live on. just as rhc
critique of power lived on at rhe end of Anriquiry.

Editor's Afterword 245
That was the mood in which the fragment was written-and we do not dis-

claim it today. However. instead of developing the theory further we moved back
to Germany to try to assist by teaching, despite the dark horizon. Meanwhile the
calamity which seems to hang over Europe has been symbolically concretized in
the divided Germany. In the Eastern regions people live like slaves, while in the
West they subordinate everything else to the will to protect themselves from such
slavery. Culture threatens to become a mere means. That is why we believe the
book to be still topical today. Bur the terror inflicted by the National Socialist
murderers in the 1940S lives on in the more up-to-date and historically more powerful form which the tyrants of the Eastern mass empires disseminate today.
This has affected the content of the book with no intervention from us. The

terminology used in our critique of totalitarian terror has hardened through its use
by terror's representatives in the East to a litany which contradicts what it once
meant. No word is immune to its own history. We sincerely thank the translator,
Dr Renato Solrni, for the dedication to which his work bears witness. As far as we

can judge, he has masterfully fulfilled our request to convey the book's meaning.
Our analysis of cultural phenomena from the 1930S and 1940s, which we in

no way intend to moderate, is supplemented by our hope that the overthrow of
the totalitarian Nazi rule has awakened forces which, despite everything, will
resist the temptation which will nor fail to emerge one day in every country.
Through its theme. our book points OUt the regressive tendencies which arise
from economic, social, and cultural progress itself. We know of no linguistic
88
sphere which contains a more sensitive organ for this task than the ltalian.
Solmi responded by advising urgently against most of the textual changes
and asked Horkheirner, as the latter writes to Adorno, "almost on bended

knee," "to omit the substantive discussion [in the Preface], because it

would unleash political controversy.Y? Horkheimer, however, attributed
these misgivings mainly to concerns about the political tendency of the
publishing house. The authors therefore insisted on the textual changes,
but dispensed with the substantive preface on the grounds that "it does no
good to encourage the reader to start searching for changes."9o In the
event, no Italian reviewer noticed the changes to begin with; they were discovered only about ten years later and subjected, in some cases, to politi-

cal debate." In Germany, however, twenty-nine amended passages were
painstakingly listed as early as 1967, in an article in a Frankfurt students'
newspaper, refuting the assurances in the prefaces that no essential
changes had been made. Annoyance at what was taken to be an abandonmcnt of Marxism was unavoidable: "What is left of Critical Theory's claim

246 Editor's Afienoord

to be critical if its sting is removed in the way indicated by the Italian edition?"92

This experience with the Italian edition is unlikely, on the one hand,
to have exactly encouraged the authors to bring out a new German edition
but probably did, on the other hand, contribute to the fact that, when the
new edition finally appeared in 1969, it was largely spared further interventions in the content. A year earlier, in his "Letter to S. Fischer Verlag,"
Horkheimer had unequivocally distanced himself from the hopes regarding the future that he had expressed in his early writings but without abandoning the intention which underlay those essays: "My hesitation [regarding republication] springs from the difficulty of reexpressing the old ideas,
which Were not independent of that time, without harming what seems to
me true today: the need to renounce the belief in the imminent realization
of the ideas ofWestern civilization and yet to advocate those ideas-without Providence, indeed, against the progress attributed to them."93 In fact,
Horkheimer had already renounced the beliefin the imminent "realization
of the ideas of Western civilization," as he here paraphrases the proletarian revolution in terms of cultural philosophy, in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. Nevertheless, this statement also throws light on his evaluation of
his critique of society and reason in the 1940S. For common to both phases of Horkheimer's Critical Theory is the impulse to withstand the contradiction of "expressing the frightening tendencies of the present while
not giving up the idea of something different. "94
But it was not only external pressures or the pirated editions of the
text already in circulation which are likely to have induced Horkheimer
finally to agree to the new, authorized publication. Another decisive factor
may have been that in the course of the 19605 Horkheimer's thinking once
more drew closer to the theoretical standpoint of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this period, as we can read in Notizen I9so-I969, his thinking was
marked by a deep-seated skepticism with regard to reason, which took up
some features of those earlier ideas and radicalized them further. Adorno,

on his return to Frankfurt, had been able to connect directly with this text

and the other work from those years in his new writing. It was not until
the end of the 19505, however-the year of his retirement, 1959, could be
mentioned as the decisive moment-that Horkheirner returned to a position extremely close in some respects to that of Adorno." However, he

expressed this position only in the Notizen, which w~re unpublished in his

Editor's Afterword 247
lifetime. In these notes, negative metaphysics and negative religion are
joined in a precarious unity. The "true yearning for something different"
springs from the fundamental experience of ineradicable suffering in the
social context and of a metaphysical, global negation of meaning. Philosophy seems possible only in the vanishing private sphere. It has thus beCOme obsolete in face of historical progress. Such reflections, however,
must set themselves philosophical demands if they are not to remain
trapped in empty skepticism. Horkheirner's late philosophy is marked by

this contradiction, already prefigured in Dialectic ofEnlightenment: to recognize that the path to the realization of reason in history is blocked and
yet, despite all the criticism, to assume the purpose and possibility of enlightenment.

The Disappearance of Class History in
"Dialectic ofEnlightenment"
A Commentary on the Textual Variants (I947 and I944)

by Willem van Reijen and Jan Bransen

Since the early 1940S scholars at the Institute for Social Research had
devoted themselves with special intensity to analyzing the causes and consequences of fascist rule, with the aim of carrying out extensive research
projects. In the course of this work two opposed views emerged. On one
side, Horkheirner, Adorno, Pollock, and Lowenthal developed the thesis
that National Socialism, as compared to traditional capitalism, represented a new order. While they regarded fascist state capitalism as the most
recent outcome of capitalist logic, they believed that this outcome manifested a new quality: the dominance of politics over economics. In his

essay entitled "Is National Socialism a New Order?"! Pollock, on whose
specialist knowledge of economics the other advocates of this view relied,
answered this question in the affirmative. On the other side, Neumann,
Kirchheimer, and Gurland supported the thesis that the National Socialist
ecortornic order was a continuous development of capitalism, so that one
could not speak of a new order. This controversy over the primacy of politics or economics in postliberal capitalism, as authors such as Dubiel and
Sellner or Brick and Postone show," impinged deeply on the theoretical
self-understanding of the members of the Institute for Social Research.
Pollock's study of the development of capitalism had been a permanent part of the Institute's work since the early 1930S. !n his early essays'

A Commentary on the Textual Variants 249
he followed Marx in locating the contradictions threatening the capitalist

system in the growing tension between productive forces and the relations
of production. He argued that the quality of the new economic crisis
demonstrated that liberal capitalism, with its attempts to regulate crises
through the market, must fail. It was therefore time for a transition to a
new economic order which, although based on the old one and therefore
to be seen as a development of it, exhibited the novel quality of a planned
economy. The latter, according to Pollock, was possible in two forms: as a
capitalist planned economy on the basis of private ownership of the means
of production, or as a Socialist planned economy on the basis of socialized
ownership of the means of production. Pollock contradicted the Marxian
theory of the collapse of capitalism and went still further in prophesying
its permanence: "What is coming to an end is not capitalism but only its
liberal phase.t"
In the early 1940S Pollock refined and sharpened his analysis.? He
now applied the term "state capitalism" both to the National Socialist economy and to the economy of the Soviet Union. Both were totalitarian forms
of the economic order. Typical of both these forms of state capitalism was
the "fusion of leading bureaucracies from the worlds of business, state, and
parry'" to form a new ruling class. By contrast, in the democratic form of
state capitalism to be found in the USA, for example, the state apparatus
was, to be sure, controlled by the people but had in common with the
totalitarian varieties the fact that state activity rendered the key function of
the market inoperative. While there were still profits, prices, and wages,
these no longer predominantly determined economic actions. And the
influence on decisions of the private ownership of the means of production
had disappeared. The individual capitalist, separated from the centralized
decision-making agencies and "overruled" by the state administration, had
become a mere recipient of annuities." There were no longer any autonomous economic problems, only administrative problems. For this reason
impulses for social change no longer emanated from the economic sphere.

It had become static. All initiatives issued from politics-unless problems
of political legitimation arose, for example, in connection with unemployment or the failure of the standard of living to rise. Pollock therefore
replaced the tension between the relations of production and the productive forces, regarded as fundamental by Marx, by the tension between the
relations of production and distribution. The switch from the primacy of

'!1Jr' / Ji.ltlN'l 'tll'tll/((' o( (. '/tlJ.\ //i.r/my

J.Sll

economics to that of politics takes place within the distribution sphere: it
is the switch from unconscious to conscious distribution and control. In

both cases Pollock assumed a primacy of the mode of distribution."
The concept of "state capitalism" did not remain uncontested within the Institute. Neumann, in particular. rook a critical view.? His position
makes clear the theory of the paramount role of economics which is also

implicit in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. For Neumann continued to advance
the thesis of continuity in the development from liberal capitalism to
National Socialism. Neumann considered Pollock's concept to be a contradictio in adjecto. Either, he argued, National Socialist society is capitalist-in which case market, competition, and profit continue to function
as before; or the state determines economic processes-in which case soci-

ety is not capitalist in the Marxian sense. Unlike Pollock, Neumann put
the emphasis on the fact that the contradictions in developed capitalism

had not been resolved but intensified. As empirical evidence he cited various measures of totalitarian rule and economic regulation which did not
curtail the importance of competition and profit.

But Neumann's work, roo, contains a number of ideas by which he
sought to account for the qualitative changes in the relationship of monopoly capitalism to totalitarian rule. He did not dispute the functional

increase of politics compared to economics which he, too, perceived as
continuing in the postfascist states and in which he saw a "developmental
product of capitalism."!" Finally, he attempted to incorporate Pollock's

analyses, in reinterpreted form, in his own approach: "Control over the
state apparatus is [...J the pivot on which everything turns. This is the
only possible meaning of the primacy of politics over economics."!' In
arguing this, however, he did not mean to call into question the fundamentally capitalist mode of operation of "totalitarian monopoly capitalism," to use his expression, which has remained a standard term until
today.
Naturally, Horkheirner's own work was not uninfluenced by this
controversy. In 1937 he still unquestioningly accepted the Marxian thesis
of the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of
production; what had changed under fascism was, above all. that the techniques of power and manipulation had been perfected. The culture taken

over by fascism, Horkheimer argued, no longer held resources for criticism
and opposition. In 1942, in the essay "The Authoritarian State," however,

he based himself on Pollo('b theory of state capitalism. Nation.rl Social
ism and bureaucratic Socialism of the Soviet kind }vcre'llistinguished, .u

most, by the composition of the ruling cliques, but in both cases politics

had gained dominance over economics. As "integral statism" the Soviet
system appeared as the most logical form of the authoritarian state.

If the two versions of Dialectic ofEnlightenment are compared-the
mimeographic publication of the Institute of Social Research of 1944 and
the first printed copy of 1947-it is clear how deeply the debate over the
primacy of economics over politics had affected the self-understanding of
its twO authors. To be sure, Horkheimer and Adorno assertin their Preface

to the book edition, which follows the original Preface, that 'The book

contains no essential changes to the text completed during the War."ll Bur
few things are more open to dispute than the question as to what is essential; the textual changes made for the book edition of 1947 can be called,
at least, significant. This will be shown by a few representative passagl'S:
Throughout the book the authors replaced terms such as "monopoly," "capital," and "profit," which had become charged with specific mean-

ings through the debate over state capitalism, with less charged expressions.
"Monopoly" becomes "the economic apparatus'{'? or the term is replaced
by "the agencies of mass producrion,"!? "the system of modern industry,"!'

"the culture industry,"16 "those in control,"!" or, more neutrally, "the system."18 However, the term "monopoly" is not infrequently replaced hy
"trusts" and "combines."!" The "monopoly rulers" are transformed into
"managing direcrors.P? "Capital" becomes "the economy,":" its "power"
the "power of the economically strongest,"22 or "capitalism" disappears
complerely.P
From the postwar perspective in which the printed version was pro-

duced, fascist phenomena are more precisely qualified, whereas earlier they
had been referred to generally as economic phenomena: the "collective of
the totalitarian monopoly" becomes the "fascist collective,"24 "monopoly"

becomes "fascism."25 There is an increasing distance from Marxian terminology. The "relations of production" become "economic forms,"26 "class
domination" becomes "domination.V? "exploitation" becomes the more
neutral "enslavement,":" "control" becomes "utilization,'?" "those in control" become "leaders.P? "Class history" disappears cornplctcly" "Mo-

nopoly" becomes "industry"32 or no longer appears at al1.3.~
The almost complete elimination of the term "monopoly" from all

252

The Disappearance of Class History

important passages, and the transformation of "capital" into "economy"
and similar terms in most places, are nor sufficiently explained by politi-

cal misgivings and considerations alone. Rather-and this is more important for a theoretical and systematic undersranding of Dialectic ofEnlightenment-they show that in the mid-1940S Horkheimer and Adorno, in
keeping with Pollock's analyses, had distanced themselves definitively
from a form of Marxism which assumed the primacy of economics. Instead, the importance of control through politics and the culture industry
moves clearly into the foreground.
It would nevertheless be mistaken to conclude that Horkheimer and

Adorno had thereby turned their backs on Marxian rheory alrogether. The
references to fascism, which emerged more emphatically in the book version than in the first publication, should be understood not only as anx-

ious reminders that the dangers issuing from fascism still persisred but also
as evidence of the authors' view that capitalism and fascism were still interrwined as social principles and that capitalism continued to have the tendency to prevent the realization of the "realm of freedom." Horkheimer
and Adorno decisively rejected a mechanistic interpretation of Marx of the
kind adopted by theoreticians of rhe Second International and by the
Sovier orthodoxy, but they did not deny the fundamental importance of
rhe economic order for rhe roraliry of social orders in rhe modern period.
For this reason the Marxian approach continued ro be fundamental to
Crirical Theory.

Notes

[Bracketed numbers are the page numbers on which asterisk notes appear; other
numbers refer to the numbered notes. "It. tr," = from the Italian rranslarion.]
DEDICATION

[vii] "Pollock" / 1944: Pollock for his fiftieth birthday on 22 May 1944; 1947=
"Pollock for his fiftieth birthday."
PREFACES

[xiii] "Preface to the Italian Edition": Translated from the Italian by Philipp
Rippel with reference to the German draft by M.H . and T.W .A.
[xiv] "When" / 1944/47: "When, rwo years ago."
[xiv] "a ... of" / 1944: "renewed."

[xiv] "with an increasing" / 1944: "readily with the."
[xiv] "The tireless ... humaniry" / 1944: "The end of enlightenment by its
own hand. hypocritically celebrated by crude advocates of the totalitarian order
in their propaganda speeches and naively executed by the smart attorneys of the
victims in their respective branches of the culture industry."
[xv] "friendship" / 1944: "friendship, in the Action Franc;:aise."-"Action Francaise": extreme right-wing movement in France berween 1898 and 1944.
[xv] "place in ... sun": allusion to an imperialist slogan coined in Wilhelmine
Germany.
[xv] "liquidating ... completely." / 1944: "repudiating the thought to which
they owe their place in the sun before it has had time to prostitute itself completely in the service of those now basking there."

254 Notes to Pages xvi-xix
[xvi] "the regression" / 1944: "its reversal."
[xvi] "headlong" / 1944: "in such a way."
[xvi] "rational" / 1944: "a rational."

[xvii] "In the ... increase" / 1944: "The powerless and pliability of the masses increase."

[xvii] "Today, however," / 1944: "In the name of enlightenment."
[xvii] "increased sufferings" / 1944: "increased exploitation."
[xvii] "melting down ... crucible" / 1944: "application of the national melting

pot to all cultural entities."
[xviii] "Volkswagen" / 1944: "chewing gum."
[xviii] "curtain" / 1944: "veil."
[xix] "demonstrates" / 1944: "defines."

[xix] "fragmentary" / 1944: "fragmentary. Large pam, written long before.
need only final editing. In them the positive aspects of mass culture will also be
dealt with."-The second pan of the chapter, not finally edited at that time, has
now been published with the title "Das Schema der Massenkultur" as an appen-

dix to Dialekti]: tier Aufkliirung in Adorno, Gesammelte Schrifien, Vol. III, Frankfurt am Main 1981, pp. 299ff.
[xix] "empirical ... Research" / 1944: "the research project of the Institute of
Social Research."

[xix] "anthropology" / 1944: "anthropology.
In selecting the fragrnenrs from the work of the previous rwo years we opted
for those with clear internal coherence and unity of language. We excluded all
English works produced in the same period. regardless of their thematic connection to the fragments. We would mention the lecture series "Society and Reason";
the essays "Sociology of Class Relations" and "The Revival of Dogmatism"; the

extensive analysis of anti-Semitic propaganda, "The Psychological Technique of
Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses," and our other studies in contributions

to the project on anti-Semitism. Collaboration in this study carried OUt in New
York, Los Angeles. and Berkeley took at least half our time.-Of the German preliminary studies to the whole work, which include the fragmenlS themselves. we
left om the pieces on logic, among others. The already formulated parts of the

planned section concerned with a critique of sociology are also omitted.
If the good fortune of being able to work on such questions without the
unpleasant pressure of immediate purposes should continue, we hope to complete the whole work in the not too distant future. We are encouraged to believe
this by the confidence, undefleeted by the vicissitudes of the time, of the person

to whom the parr completed so far is now dedicated."
"Society and Reason": under this general title Horkheimer gave five lectures at
Columbia University, New York, in February and March 1944. They were later

Notes to Pages I-5 255
used as the basis of Eclipse ofReason (New York 1947), German title Zur Kritik der
instrumentellen Vernunft, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
"Sociology of Class Relations": essay by Horkheimer from 1943 now published
with the title "Zur Soziologie der Klassenverhaltnisse" in Gesammelte Schrifien,
Vol. XII, Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 75ff.
"The Revival of Dogmatism. Remarks on Neo-Positivism and Neo-Thomism": Horkheirner's manuscript with his title later formed the basis of Chapter 2
of Eclipse ofReason.
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT

[I] "The concept" / 1944: "The dialectic."
[I] "disenchantment of the world": "allusion to a formulation of Max \X:reber's;

cf. Weber, "Wissenschafr als Beruf" (1919) in Gesammelte Aufiiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tiibingen 1968, p. 594.
I. Voltaire, Lettres pbilosopbiques, ed. F . A . Taylor, London 1992, p. 36 .
2. "In Praise of Knowledge," in Francis Bacon, ed. Arthur Johnston, London
1965, p. 15·
[2] "enslavement" / 1944: "exploitation."
[2] "economic system" / 1944: "capitalism."

[2] "exploitation ... others" / 1944: "control of foreign work."
3. Cf. Bacon, Novum Organum, The WVrks ofFrancis Bacon, ed. Basil Montagu, London 1825, Vol. XIV, p. 3I.
4. Bacon, "Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature." Miscellaneous
Tracts upon Human Knowledge, Works, Vol. I, p. 28I.
[3] "spirit-seer": allusion to Kant's dispute with Swedenborg: "Dreams of a
spirit-seer elucidated by dreams of metaphysics" in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy,
trans. David Walford, Cambridge/New York 1992.
5. Cf. Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, trans. A V . Miller, Oxford 1977, pp.
Wf.

6. Xenophanes, Monraigne, Hurne, Feuerbach, and Salomon Reinach are at
one here. Cf. Reinach, Orpheus, trans. F . Simmons, London and New York 1909,
pp.6fE
7. Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, WOrks, Vol. VIII, p. Ip.
8. J. de Maistre, "Les Soirees de Sainr-Perersbourg." 5ieme enrretien, Oeuvres
completes, Lyon 1891, Vol. IV, p. 256.
9. Bacon, Advancement ofLearning, WVrks, Vol. II, p. 126.
roo Genesis I, 26

II. Archilochus, fro 87, quoted by Deussen, Allgemeine Gescbichte der Pbilosophie, Vol. II, Pt. 1 , Leipzig 1911, p. 18.
12. Solon, fro 13.25 er seq., quoted by Deussen, op. cit., p. 20.

256 Notes to Pages 7-I6
13. Cf. Robert H. Lowie, An Introduction to CulturalAnthropology, New York
1940, pp. 344f.

14. Cf. Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Complete Psychological WOrks ofSigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, London 1991, pp. 85ff.
15. Ibid., p. 89.
[7] "industrial technology" 1 1944: "the technology of monopoly."
[8] "insufficient righteousness": allusion to the positivists' charge that metaphysical philosophers lacked sufficient correctness, honesty, and uprightness, a

charge generally leveled by "enlightened" thought against me preceding philosophical systems. (It. tr.)
[9] "doubtless" 11944: (missing).
16. Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, op. cit., p. 342 (where Trupp is translated
more neutrally as "group").

17. Cf. W Kirfel, "Geschichre Indiens," in Propyliienweltgeschichte, Vol. III,
pp. 261ff, and G. Glorz, "Hisroire Grecque," Vol. I, in Histoire Ancienne, Paris
1938, pp. 137ff.

[9] "subjugated people" 1 1944= "objects of exploitation."
18. G . Glotz, op. cit., p. 140.
19. Cf. Kurt Eckermann, [ahrbuch der Religionsgeschichte lend Mythologie,
Halle 1845, Vol. I, p. 241, and O. Kern, Die Religion der Griecben, Vol. I, Berlin
1926, pp. 181f.
[10] "link" / 1944: "link" (n. 20 here).
20. Hubert and Mauss describe me nature of "sympathy" or mimesis as follows: "Lun est Ie tour, tout est dans l'un, la nature triomphe de la nature." H.

Hubert and M. Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magic," in L'Annee Saciologique
1902-3, p. 100 .

21. Cf. Westermarck, Ursprung derMoralbegriffi, Leipzig 1913, Vol. I, p. 402.
[13] "total art" / an allusion to Richard Wagner's concept of the total art work

(Gesmtkunsnverk) (It. tr.) .
22. Cf. Plato, The Republic, Book 10.
23. Schelling, Enter Entwurf eines Systems der Naturpbilosopbie. S. 5, U7erke,
Abc. I, Vol. II, p. 623.

24. Ibid., p. 626.
[15] "twentieth century": allusion to Alfred Rosenberg's Der Mythos des
zwanzigsten [abrbunderts (1930).
[16] "the consolidated ... privileged" / 1944: "class domination."
25. Cf. E . Durkheim, "De quelques formes primitives de classification,"

L'Annee Sociologique, Vol. IV, 1903, pp. 66ff.
26. cr. The New Science ofGiambattista Vico, trans. jrd ed. Thomas Goddard

B:rgin and M~x Haro'id Fisch, New York 1961.

-

Notes to Pages I7-30 257
[17] "industrial trusts" / 1944: "social upheaval caused by monopoly."
27. Hubert and Mauss, op. cit., p. uS.

2S. Cf. Tennies, "Philosophische Terminologie," in Psychologisch-Soziologische
Ansicbt, Leipzig 1905, p. 31.

29. Hegel, Phenomenology, op. cit., p. 51.
[IS] "value" / 1944: "word."

30. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, an Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr,
Evanston, 1970.

31. Cf. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E . F. J . Payne, Oxford
1974, Vol. II, §356, p. 610 .
[20] "spirit-seer": C( note [6], p. 255.
[21] "industrialism ... things." / 1944: "industry makes souls into things. The
rule of the monopolists, as of individual capitalists earlier, is not expressed direct-

ly in the commands of the rulers."
[21] "The countless ... culture" / 1944: "Monopoly."
[22] "value" /1944: "exchange value."
32. Spinoza, Ethics, trans. A . Boyle, London/New York 1945, Parr IV, Propos.
XXII, Coroll.

[23] "merely an aid ... apparatus" / 1944: "an apparatus in the perpetuating
monopoly."
[23] "unitary knowledge": The "unity of knowledge" postulated by the Vienna Circle, especially Neurarh and Carnap.
[24] "pleasure": allusion to the National Socialist promotion of physical culture for racial. genetic ends, which went hand in hand with the lifting of certain

taboos in the private sexual sphere ("Strengrh Through Joy," "Lebensborn e.v,"
etc. Cf. Friedrich Pollock, "Is National Socialism a New Order?" in Studies in

Philosophy and SocialScience, Vol. IX, 1941, pp. 44S(
[24] "The German ... self-contempt" / 1944: "Pleasure, which the neopagans
and administrators of war fever wanted to set free, has, on its way to totalitarian
emancipation, internalized meanness as self-contempt."
33. Homer, Odyssey, trans. E . V . Rieu (amended), Harmondsworrh 1965, p.
194·

34. Ibid.

35. Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit. op cit., p. u6.
[29] "society" / 1944: "class society."
[29] "rulers" [Lenker] / 1944: "those in control" [VnjUgende].
[29] "of ... injustice" / 1944: "of exploitation."
130] "of the cliques ... embodied" / 1944: "of monopoly, the last incarnation
of economic necessity."

258 Notes to Pages 30-38
[30] "Intuitions," "dynamic worldview," "mission," and "fate" were common
terms in "educated" National Socialist jargon.
[30] "company chairmen" / 1944: "monopoly controllers."

[30] "of those still" 1 1944: "the hands needed to operate the increasing fixed
capital."

[30] "Poverty" 1 1944: "Increasing misery."
[30 "the economy" 1 1944: "capital."
[30] "rackets": Systems for extorting protection money; in a wider sense,
groups securing the system of power. Also see Editor's Afterword, pp. 233ff.
[31] "the reason of the reasonable" 1 1944= "this."

[31] "industrialists ... This" 1 1944: "those in power ... This rwofold."
[31] "that thinking": Refers to the Marxian concept of the period of history
preceding the socialist society.
[31] "truth": The authors are paraphrasing the scholastic formulation: "verum
index sui et falsi" (It. tr.) .

[32] "eternal": Cf. Marx, Capital. A Critique o/Political Economy, trans. David
Fernbach. Harrnondsworrh 1991, Vol. III .

[33] "unfettered technology" 1 1944: "the unfenered technical forces of production."

36. "The supreme question which confronts our generation today-the ques-

tion to which all other problems are merely corollaries-is whether technology can

be brought under control ... Nobody can be sure of the formula by which this
end can be achieved ... We must draw on all the resources to which access can be

had ..." (The Rockefeller Foundation. A Reviewfir 1943. New York 19# pp. Hff).
[33] Cf. note 2, p. 255·
EXCURSUS 1

r. Nietzsche, Nacblass, Werke, Vol. XIV . Leipzig 1904. p. 206 .

2. iu«. Vol. XV, p. 235.
[37] "Borchardt": An earlier draft of the manuscript (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv) contains a reference to Borchardt's afterword to his translation of the poems

of Pin dar Pindarische Gedicbte, Munich 1929/30 (private impression), pp. 99, 103,
and 93; cf. "Einleirung in das Versrandnis der Pindarischen Poesie," in Gesammelte

U7erke, Prosa II, Stuttgart 1959, pp. 161ff.
3. Ibid., Vol. IX, p. 289.
[37] "rational" / 1944/47: "more rational."

4. Holderlin, "Patrnos," Poems and Fragments. trans. Michael Hamburger,
Cambridge and New York 1980, p. 463.
5. Direct evidence in support of this argument is found early in Book xx.
Odysseus notes, the maids' nightly visits to the beds of the Suitors. "Odysseus'
.

Note to Page 38 259
gorge rose within him . Yet he was quire uncertain what [Q do and he debated

long. Should he dash afrer them and pur rhern all [Q death; or should he ler them
spend this one lasr nighr in rhe arms of their profligate lovers?The thought made
h im snarl with repressed fury, like a birch that snarls and shows fight as she rakes
her stand above her helpless puppies when a srranger comes by. So did Odysseus

groan [Q himself in sheer revoir ar these licentious ways. Bur in the end he brought
his fisc down on his hearr and called it to order. 'Patience, my heard ' he said. 'You
had a far more loathsome thing than this to pur up wirh when the savage Cyclops
devoured those gallanr men. And yet you managed [Q hold our, till cunning gor
you clear of the cave where you had thought your end had come.' Bur though he
was able by such self-rebuke [Q quell all mutiny in his heart and sreel it to endure,

Odysseus nevertheless could not help rossing ro and fro on his bed . . .n (The
Odyssey , op. cit., P: 304). The subject is not yet articulated [Q form a firm inner
idenriry, Affecrs, courage, the "heart" still rise up independently. "At che begin-

ning of this episode, his heart, kradie or etor (the fWO words are synonyms for
" h ear t ," 17.22), snarls and growls within him, and Odysseus bears his breast, that
is, his heart, and addresses it. His hean bears violemly; this part of his body is stir-

ring against his will. That he speaks ro ir is nor, therefore, a mere formal device,
as when hand or foot is addressed in Euripides to set them in motion; his heart
acts autonomously" (Wilamowirz-Moellendorff, Die Heimkebr des Odysseus, Berlin 1927, P: 189). The affect is equated with an animal which the human being is
subduing: The metaphor of the bitch forms parr of the same stratum of experience as the merarnorphosis ofOdysseus 's companions into swine . The subject, srill
spl it and forced [Q do violence ro nature both within himself and outs ide , "pun ish es" his heart, compelling ir to be patient and denying it direct satisfaction in
the pre sent for the sake of a more distant future. Bearing one 's breast later became
a gesture of triumph: Whar the vicror really expresses is thar his victory is over his
own nature, The achievemem is accomplished by self-preserving reason. " . . . the
speaker thought first of his wildly bearing heart; his metis [cunning] , which is rhus
seen a separare inner force, was able ro master ir, and saved Odysseus . Later phi-

losophers would have contrasted it as nils [mind] or logirtikon [reasoning] to the
unreason ing parts of the body" (Wilamowitz, op. cit. , p. 190). Bur the "sc1f"autos-s-is nor mentioned umil line 24 , after the impulse has been successfully
mastered by reason. If the choice and sequence of the words are taken as evidence,

the idenciry-forrning self is regarded by Homer as resulting from a masrery of
nature within the human being. This new self trembles inwardly, as a thing, the
body, when the heart within ir is punished. Ar any rare, Wilamowitz's juxtaposing of separately analyzed moments of the psyche, which ofien speak to each
oth er, seems [Q confirm the loose cohesion of the subject, whose substance consists only in the coordination of th ese moments.

260

Notes to Pages 4o-4I

6. In contrast to Nietzsche's materialistic interpretation, Klages understood
sacrifice and exchange entirely in terms of magic: "The general necessity to offer
sacrifices affects everyone, because everyone, as has been seen. receives his or her
share oflife, and all the goods oflife they can obtain-the original suum cuiqueonly through the constant exchange of gifts. This. however. is not exchange in the

ordinary sense of exchanging goods (although at the very beginning that, too. was
consecrated by the idea of sacrifice) but of exchanging fluids or essences by abandoning one's own soul to the supporting and nurturing life of the world" (Ludwig

Klages, Del' Geistals Widersacher der Seele, Leipzig 1932, Vol. HI . Part 2, P: 1409).
However, the rwofold character of sacrifice-the magic self-abandonment of the
individual to the collective (in whatever form) and the self-preservation achieved

through the technology of this magic-implies an objective contradiction which
necessitates further development of the rational element in sacrifice. Still under
the influence of magic, rationality, as the behavior of the performer of the sacrifice, becomes cunning. Klages himself, the zealous apologist of myth and sacrifice, came up against this contradiction and found himself obliged, even within
the ideal image of Pelagianisrn, to distinguish between genuine and false communication with nature. However, he was unable to derive from mythical thinking itself any opposing principle to set against the illusion of the magical mastery

of nature, because that very illusion constitutes the essence of myth. "It is no
longer merely pagan belief but pagan superstition which compels the king of the
gods, on ascending his throne, to swear that henceforth he will cause the sun to
shine and the field to be covered in fruits" (Klages, op. cit., P: 1408).
7. In keeping with this, human sacrifices in the literal sense do not occur in
Homer. The epic's civilizing tendency is manifested in the selection of the incidents narrated. "With one exception ... both Iliad and Odyssey are completely
expurgated of the abomination of Human Sacrifice" (Gilbert Murray, The Rise of
the Greek Epic. Oxford 1911, p. 150).
[40] "The representative character ... deity." / 1944: "The idea of magic representation implied in sacrifice. which he affirms, cannot be separated from the
victim's status as the elect. But this status results from the priests' transposition of
the victim to the heaven of the gods. An dement of this projection, which elevates
the perishable person as the bearer of the divine substance, has always been

detectable in the ego, which owes its origin to projection. It bears the features of
the idolized victim: not without reason was Odysseus continually regarded as a
secularized deity."
8. Probably not at the earliest stages. "The custom of human sacrifice ... is
far more widespread among barbarous and half-civilized peoples than among true

~;Ivages. aud it is hardly found at all at the lowest levels of culture. It has been
observed that in some peoples this custom has become increasingly predominant
I

Notes to Page 42

261

in me course of time"-on me Society Islands, in Polynesia, in India, among the

Aztecs. "With regard to Africa Winwood Read states mat 'me mightier me nation

me more prominent the custom of sacrifice'" (Eduard Westermarck, Ursprung
und Entioicklung der Mornlbegriffe, Leipzig 1913, Vol. I, p. 363).
9. Among cannibal peoples like those of West Africa, "neither women nor

adolescents ... were allowed to taste me delicacy" (Westermarck, op cit., Leipzig
1909. Vol. II, p. 459).

10. Wilamowitz places nus in "sharp opposition" to logos (Glaube del' Hellenen,
Berlin 1931, Vol. I, pp. 41f). For him myth is "a story one tells oneself," a fairy tale.
an untruth, but also. without distinction from that, the ultimate, undernonstra-

ble truth, as in Plato. While Wilamowirz is aware of the illusory character of
myths, he equates them with poetry. In other words, he looks for myths only in

significative language, which has already come into objective contradiction with
its intention, and seeks to resolve it as poetry: "Myth is in me first place spoken
discourse; me words are indifferent to the content" (ibid.). By hypostatizing this
late concept of myth, which presupposes reason as its explicit counterpart, he
arrives-in an implicit polemic against Bachofen, whom he dismisses as merely
fashionable without mentioning him by name-at a clear distinction between
mythology and religion (op. cit., P: 5), whereby myth appears not as me older but
me younger state: "I attempt ... to trace me evolution, me transformations and

the transition from faith to myth" (op. cit., p. I). The Hellenistic scholar's rigid

departmental arrogance blocks his perception of me dialectic of myth, religion,
and enlightenment: "I do not know me languages from which the currently modish words 'taboo,' 'totem,' 'mana,' and 'orenda are taken but consider it legitimate
to confine myself to the Greeks, and to think about Greek matters in Greek

terms" (op. cit.• P: 10). How his unexplained contention that "the germ of the
Platonic deity" was present "in me earliest Hellenic culture" is therefore to be rec-

onciled with the historical view. pUt forward by Kirchhoff and taken over by
Wilarnowirz, that the earliest core of the Odyssey is contained in me mythical
encounters of the nostos, remains unclear, just as the central concept of myth itself
lacks adequate philosophical articulation in Wilamowitz. Nevertheless, his oppo-

sition to me irrationalism which idolizes myth and his insistence on the untruth
of myths reveal unmistakable insight. His repugnance for primitive thinking and
prehistory shows up all me more clearly the tension which has always existed
between the deceptive word and truth. The arbitrariness of fabrication which

Wilamowitz criticizes in later myths must already have been contained in the ear-

liest ones, by virtue of the pseudos [substitute] of sacrifice. This pseudos is related
to precisely the Platonic deity which Wilamowirz dates back to archaic Hellenism.
II. The conception of Christianity as a pagan sacrificial religion is fundamental to Werner Hegemann's (;rrrllrlt"l' Chrisms (Potsdam 1928).

262 Notes to Pages 43-50

[43] "society's predicament" 11944: "the predicament of the whole of class history,"

12. For example, when he refrains from killing Polyphemus at once (IX, 302);
when he has to endure the mistreatment ofAntinous in order not to give himself
away (XVII, 460ff). Also compare the episode of the winds (X, 50ff) and Tei-

resias's prophecy in the first visit (Q the Underworld (XI, 105ff), which makes his
homecoming dependent on mastery of his heart. To be sure, Odysseus's renunciation is more a postponement than a final state; he usually performs the deeds of
vengeance all the more thoroughly for having delayed them; his endurance is
patience. His behavior still displays relatively openly, as a natural objective, something which was later concealed in total, imperative renunciation, thereby taking
on the irresistible violence which subjug-ated everything natural. Through being
transposed inside the subject and emancipated from its mythical content, this

subjugation becomes "objective," confronting the special purposes of humans as
an independent entity and becoming the universal rational law. In Odysseus's
parience-s -quire clearly after the death of the Suirors-s-vengeance is already turning into judicial procedure: the ultimate fulfillment of the mythical impulse becomes the objective instrument of domination. Law is vengeance which is capable of renunciation. But since this judicial patience is generated by something
outside itself, the longing for the homeland, it takes on human traits, almost a

quality of trust, which point beyond vengeance postponed. In fully developed
bourgeois society, however, both are annulled: with the idea of vengeance longing, too, is tabooed-thereby, of course, enthroning vengeance, mediated as the
self's revenge on itself

13. Max Weber, Wirtschnftsgeschichte, Munich and Leipzig 1924, P: 3.
14. Victor Berard has strongly emphasized the Semitic element in the Odyssey,
though not without some apocryphal interpretation. C£ the chapter "Les Pheni-

ciens er l'Odyssee" in La Resurrection d'Homere, Paris 1930, pp. nrff
[48] "capitalist economy" 11944: "exploitation."

[48] "make use ... worker" 1 1944: "have anyone to exploit."
[48] "entrepreneur" 11944: "capitalist."

[48] "moral ... profit" 1 1944: "moral justification for the plunder raked in by
the privileged."

[49] nostos: Greek: "journey," "homecoming."

15. Odyssey, Book IX, op. cit., P: 141.
16. Ibid., p. 349.
17. Ibid" p. 141.
18. Jacob Burckhardt, History of Greek Culture, trans. Palmer Hilty, London
1\)63, p. 180 .

I\). Oriyssq, "p. cit., p."141.

Notes to Pages 50-56 263
20. In Indian mythology Lotus is the earth goddess. (C£ Heinrich Zimmer,
Maja, Stuttgart and Berlin 1936. pp . 105£) If there is a connection between this
and the mythical tradition on which the old Homeric nostos is based. the

encounter with the Lotus-eaters might be characterized as a stage in the struggle
with the chthonic powers.

21. Odyssey, op. cit.• P: 142.
22. According to Wilamowirz the Cyclopes are "really animals " (Glaube der
Hellenen , Vol. I, p. 14).
23. Odyssey, op. cit., p. 148.

2.4 . Ibid.• p. 142 ·
25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., p . 150.
27. Ibid., p. 151 (adapted) .
28. Ibid., p. 146.
29. Ibid., p. 146.
30. Ibid., p. 149.
31. "The mindless creature's frequent stupidities might be seen as a kind of
stillborn humor" (Klages, op. cit., p. 1469).

32. Odyssey, op. cit.• P: 148.
B. Ibid., p. 163.
34. C£ ibid., p. 159. C£ F. C. Bauer, Symbolik und Mythologie. Stuttgart 1824.
Vol. I, p. 47.
35 . Cf. Baudelaire, "Le vin du solitaire," Les Fleurs du Mal.

36. Cf. J . A. K. Thomson, Studies in the Odyssey. Oxford 1914, p . 153.
37. Odyssey , op. cit., p. 161.
38. Murray refers to the "sexual expurgations" to which the poems of Homer
were subjected while being edited (cf op. cit., pp. 14Iff).
39. "Pigs are in general the sacrificial animals of Demeter" (Wilamowirz-

Mocllendorff, Der Glaube der Hellenen, Vol. II, p. 53).
40 . C£ Freud, Complete Psychological WOrks, trans. James Strachey, Vol. XXI,
London 1978, p. 99, fn. 1.
41. In a note Wilamowitz points to a surprising connection between the
notions of snuffling and of noos, autonomous reason: "Schwyzer has very convincingly linked noos to snorting and snuffling" (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Die
Heimkehr des Odysseus. op. cit., p. 191). Wilamowitz doubts. however, whether the
etymological relationship contributes to elucidating the meaning.
42. Odyssey, op. cit., P: 161.
43. The consciousness of her irresistibility was later expressed in the cult of
Aphrodite Peithon, "whose magic brooks no refusal" (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,
Drr Clttllbe drr Hrllenen, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 152).

264 Notes to Pages 56-60
[56] "Aeaea": Circe's island; old name for Colchis.

44. Odyssey, p. 164 .
45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., p. 166.
47. Ibid.

48. Cf. Bauer, op. cit., pp. 47, 49.

49· Odyssey, p. 343·
50. Goethe, WiUJelm Meister's Years ofApprenticeship, trans. H . M. Waidson,
London 1977, P: 62.

51. Odyssey, p. 346.
[59] "Underworld": Greek: sacrifice offered for the dead; Greek title of Book

XI of the Odyssey.
52. Cf. Thomson, op. cit., p. 28 .
53. "My eyes filled with tears when 1 saw her there, and 1 was stirred (Q compassion. Yet, deeply moved though 1 was, 1 would not allow her to approach the

blood out of turn, before I had had speech with Teiresias" (Odyssey, p. (73).
54. "I see the soul of my dead mother over there. She sits in silence by the
blood and cannot bring herself (Q look her own son in the face or say a single word

(Q him. Tell me, my prince, is there no way (Q make her know that 1 am he" (ibid.,
p. (75)?

55. "I cannot avoid believing that the whole of Book XI, with the exception of
a few passages ... is a fragment of the old nostos and therefore of the oldest pan
of the poem" (Kirchhoff, Die homeriscbe Odyssee, Berlin 1879, p. 226).

56. Odyssey, p. 174 ·

57. He was originally the "husband of the earth" (cf. Wilamowitz, Glaube tier
Hellenen, Vol. I, pp. 112ff) and only became the sea god at a late stage. Teiresias's
prophecy may be an allusion (Q his twofold nature. It is conceivable that his propitiation by means of an earthly sacrifice far from any sea implies a symbolic
restoration of his chthonic power. This restoration might reflect the superseding
of the sea voyage in search of boory by agriculture: The cults of Poseidon and

Demeter merged (cf. Thomson, op. cit., P: 96, fn).
58. Translated from Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmdrchen, Leipzig n.d., P: 208.
Closely related motifs are passed down from antiquity, especially regarding Demeter. "Demeter came (Q Eleusis in search of her daughter after she had been abducted and was given lodging by Dysaules and his wife Baubo; but in her great
sorrow she rcfused (Q touch food or drink. Thereupon her hostess Baubo made
her laugh by suddenly lifting up her dress and exposing her body" (Freud,
Complete Psychological U70rks, Vol. XIV, London 1962, P: 338; cf. Salomon Reinach,
Cultes, Mythes et Religions; Paris [912, Vol. IV, pp. 1l5ff).

160] "up to now" I [944: "throughout class history."

Notes to Pages 6I-7I 265
59. Holderlin, "Autumn," Poems and Fragments, op. cit., p. 595.
60. Odyssey, p. 340.
61. Wilamowitz considers that the execution was "carried out with satisfaction

by the poet" (Die Heimkehr des Odysseus, op. cit., P: 67). But when the authoritarian scholar enthuses over the simile of the snares, which "conveys the dangling

of the maids' corpses in an apt and modern way" (ibid., also cf. ibid.• p. 76), the
satisfaction appears to be largely his own. Wilamowitz's writings are among the
most striking documents of the German intermingling of barbarism and culture,
which is fundamental to modern Philhellenism.

62. Gilbert Murray draws attention to the consoling intention of this line.

According to his theory, scenes of torture have been expunged from Homer by
civilizing censorship. The deaths of Melanthios and the maids have been retained

(op. cit., p. 146).
EXCURSUS II

I. Kant, "An answer to the question: What is Enlightenment?" Practical

Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge 1996, p. 17 .
2. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. trans. Norman Kemp Smith.
London 1973, p. 533 ·
3. Ibid.

4· Ibid., p. 542 .
5· Ibid., p. 534·
6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 148.

8. Kant's Critique ofjudgmmt, trans. J . H. Bernard, London and New York
1892, p.24·
9. Ibid., p. 25·
10. Metapbysiscbe An{dnge derTugendlehre, Kants U7erke. Akademie-Textausgabe,
Berlin 1968-, Vol. VI, p. 449.

II. Spinoza, Ethics, trans. A. Boyle, LondonlNew York 1948, Pt. III. Pref, p.
84·

[67] "fascism" 11944: "monopoly."

[68] [German text.] Leistungsfiihigkeit 11944: "efficiency."
12. Critique ofPure Reason. znd ed., op cit., p. 154 .
[68] "is revealing ... form." 11944: "monopoly is outgrowing itself in a fascistically rationalized form."

13. Translated from de Sade, Histoire dejuliette, HoIland 1797, Vol. V, pp. 319f.
[4. Ibid., pp. 32 2f.
15· Ibid.. p. 324 .
[71] "economic system" 1 [944: "capitalism."

266 Notes to Pages 7I-79
[71] "as ... individuals": An allusion (Q Marx's formulation in Capital (Marx,
Engels, Collected WOrks, Vol. 35, London 1996, p. 89).
[71] "industrial reason" 1 1944: "monopoly and its reason."

[72] "system" 1 1944/47: "system, me reason of capital."

16. E .g. Critique ofPractical Reason, Kant, Practical Philosophy. trans. Mary J.
Gregor, Cambridge 1996, p. 165.
17. Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement Humain, ed. Erdmann, Berlin 1840.
BookI,Ch.II,§9,p.215.
18. C( Heinrich Mann's introduction to the Insel Verlag edition.

19. Metaphysische Anfiinge tier Tugendlehre, op. cit., p. 408 .
20. juliette, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 58.
21. Ibid., pp. 60(

22. Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. IV, Prop. L~ op. cit., p. 178.
23. Spinoza, ibid.

24. Metapbysiscbe Anfiinge der Tugendlebre, op. cit., p. 408.
25· Ibid., P: 409·

26. juliette, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 114.
[76] "bourgeois" 1 1944: "bourgeois in democracy."
27. Ibid., Vol. III, p. 282.
28. Nietzsche, Umwertung aller werte. werke, Kroner, Vol. VIII, p. 213.
29. juliette. op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 204.
30. E . Diihren pointed out this affinity in Neue Forschungm. Berlin 1904, pp.
453f[

31. Nietzsche, op. cit., Vol. VIII, P: 218.

32. juliette, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 315£
33. Nietzsche, The Birth ofTragedy and The Gmealogy ofMorals, trans. Francis

Golffing, New York 1956, pp. 174
34. juliette, op. cit.• Vol. I, p. 300 .
35. Histoire de justine, Holland 1797, Vol. IV, p. 4 (also quoted by Duhren, op.
cit., p. 452).

36. Genealogy ofMorals, op. cit., P: 178.
37. justine, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 7 .
38. Nacblass, op. cit., Vol. XI, p. 214.
39. Genealogy ofMorals, op. cit.• P: 258.
40. juliette, Vol. I, P: 208ff.

41. Ibid., pp. 211£

42. BeyondGoodand Evil. trans. R. J . Hollingdale, London (Penguin Classics)
1990, p. 97·

43. Nachlass, op. cit., ",:"01. XII, p. 108.
44. juliette, opt cit.. Vol. I, p. 313.

Notes to Pages 79-87 267
45. Ethics, Pt. IV, Appendix, XVI , op. cit., p. 194.
46. Ibid., Pt. IV, Prop . L. Note, p. 176.
47. Ibid., Prop. L, p. 175·

48. Juliette, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 125.
49. Ibid.

50. Nietzsche contra wagner, op. cit., Vol. VIII, p. 204.
51. Juliette, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 313.
52. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 216.
53. Beobachtungen iiber tim Gefilhl des Schonen und Erhabenen , op. cit., Vol. II,
pp . 215f.
54. Ibid.

55 . Nachlas s, op. cit., Vol. XI, pp . 227f.

56. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zaratbustra, trans . R . J . Hollingdale, Harmondsworth 1984, P: 189.

[81] "fascist masters" 11944: "masters ."

57. Genealogy ofMorals, op. cit., p. 249.
[81] "Annie Henry": In 1940 she shot a man by whom she and a companion
had been taken for a walk, after having threatened him with a pistol and humili-

ated him for hours; cf. Los Angeles Examiner, 29.1I.1942.
58. Juliette, op. cit., Vol. III , pp . 78f.
59. Ibid., Vol. IV, pp. 126f.
60. R. Caillois, "Theorie de la fete," Nouvelle RevueFmncaise, Jan . 1940, p. 49.
61. Cf. ibid.

62. Cf. ibid., pp. 58f.
[83] " Benzed rin e": A suong stimulant administered by the Nazi commanders
to their troops (It. tr.) .

63. Nachlass, op. cit., Vol. XII, p. 364.
[84] "appeased ... industry" 1 1944: "hypostatized as an accomplished reconciliation. Under monopoly."
[84] "system ... industry" 11944 : "monopoly. "
[84] "white trash"; derogatory expression for white workers.

64. Juliette, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 81f.
65. Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 172f.
66. Ibid., pp. 176f.
67. Private edition by Helpey, p. 267.

68. Juliette, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 176f.
69. Ibid., pp. 178f.
70 . Ibid., pp. 188-99.
71. Juliette, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 261.
72. Ibid., Vol. II . p. 273.

268 Notes to Pages 88-94
73- Ibid., Vol. IV; p. 379·
74. Aline et Valcour, Brussels 1883, Vol. I, p. 58 .
75· Ibid., p. 57·
76. Vicwr Hugo. The Laughing Man. Book VIII, Ch. 7.
77. juliette, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 199·

78. Cf. Les I20 [ournees de Sodome, Paris 1935. Vol. II, p. 308 .
79. Der Fall wagner, op. cit., Vol. VIII, p. 10.
80. R . Briffault, The Mothers, New York 1927, Vol. I, p. II9.
[89] "German fascism" 1 1944: "the class society."
81. Nachlass, op. cit., Vol. XI, p. 216.
82. Ibid., vol. XIV, p. 273.

83. Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge 1996. P: 82.
84· Nietzsche. joyful Wisdom. trans. Thomas Common, New York 1973, P:
279·

85. Ibid.

86. Cf. Nietzsche, Nachlass, op. cit., Vol. XI, p. 216.
87. Cf. Le Play, Les ouuriers europeens, Paris 1879, Vol. I, esp. pp. 133fT.
88. juliette, op. cit., Vol. IV, pp. 303ff.
89. Les I20 [ournees de Sodome, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 72.
90. Cf. juliette, op. cit., Vol. Il, P: 235, n,
91. La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, op. cit., P: 185.
92. Cf. Dernocritus, Diels Fragment 278, Berlin 1912, Vol. II, pp. 117f.

93. La Pbilosopbie dans le Boudoir, op. cit., p. 242 .
94. S . Reinach, "La prohibition de l'inceste et Ie sentiment de la pudeur," in

Cultes, Mytbes et Religions, Paris 19°5, Vol. 1, P: 157.
95. La Pbilosopbie dans le Boudoir, op. cit., p. 238.
96. Ibid., pp. 238-49.
97. Ibid.

98. juliette, op. cit., Vol. IV, pp. 24<r-44 .
99. La Philosophie dam le Boudoir, op. cit., P: 263.

[00. Aline et Valcour, op. cit., Vol. II . pp. 181ff.
101. juliette, op. cit., Vol. II . pp. 181ff.
[92] "prehistory": Cf. note [31], p. 258 ("that thinking").

102. Nietzsche, joyfttl Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common, New York 1973, p.
2°9·
THE CULTURE [NDUSTRY

194J "The" 1 [944: "The German and Russian pavilions at the Paris World
Exposition (of [937, Ed.) ,seemed of the same essence, and the."
1'J41 "the toial power of capital" 11944: "monopoly." •

Notes to Pages 95-III 269
[95] "those whose ... strongest" 11944: "capital."

[95] "economy today" 1 1944 : "p ro fit economy."
[96] "Soap operas": alludes (0 the fact mat such programs were or iginally
broadcast at times when housewives were at home doing their washing (It . tr.) .

[96] "selection" 1 1944: "selectio n . The operations of the large studios , including the quality of me highly paid human material populating them , is a product
of me monopoly system into wh ich it is integrated ."
[96] "subjected . . . purges" 11944: "ex pro pr iated even before fascism."

[98] "at film" 1 1944: "a t me film monopoly."
[98] "age ncies ... business" 11944: "m on o polist ic agencies ."
[100] "industrial society" 11944: "the machinery."
[100] "gigamic economic machinery" 11944: "gigantic machin ery of monopoly. "

[IOI] "tolerated" 11944: "tolerated , used by monopoly. "

I. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen. werke, Leipzig 1917 , Vol. I, P: 187.
[102.] "Zanuck": Film producer. cofounder of zoth Century Pictures.
[r04] "present society" 1 1944 : "monopoly society."
[105] "Pathe": French film magnates.
[105] "Hugenberg": Founders of German publishing combines .

2. A . de Tocqueville, De fa Democratie ell Amerique, Paris 1864. Vol. II, p. 151 .
[106] "Hays Office": Voluntary censorship agency (It. tr.), set up in 1934 in
Hollywood.
[106] " M ickey Rooney" : See note [126], P: 271.

[107] "ready-to-wear trade or" 1 1944 : "Jewish clothing trade or the Episcopal. "

[107] "some omnipresent agency" 1 1944 : "a Rockefeller Institute, only slightly more omnipresent man me one in Radio City,"-"Radio City ": the name given
since me cady 1930S [D a pan of the Rockefeller Center in New York containing
several theatres, radio studios, and the Radio City Music Hall.
[107] "C asi n o de Paris": Music hall in Paris. famous for its luxurious furnish-

ings.

[107] "society" 1 1944: "class society."
[108] " Lo m bard o": Orchestra leader especially known for his annual musical
broadcasts on New Year's Eve.

[1091 "novelty songs": Hit songs with comic elements.

[1I0] "cruelty" 1 1944: "lust for murder."
[tro] "of me" 1 1944: "of the kiss, but not of the."

[m] " . . . overwhelming": The idea expressed here dates from a time when
television was not in widespread use (It. tr.) .
[m] "possibilities" 11944: "p rod uctive forces."

270

Notes to Pages III-I2I

[I1IJ "culture industry" 11944: "mass culture. "
[I1IJ "Hays Office": See note [106], p. 2.69.
[U2.J " Laughter ... ended": On this twofold function of laughter cf. pp. 60f

(It. tr.).
[U2.J "res . . . gaudium": Seneca, Lerter 2.3; letters (Q Lucilius (Letters ftom a
Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell. Harmondsworth (969).
[U3J "constitutes its essence": Cf. Adorno, "Ober Jazz" (1937), in Gesammelte

Schrifien, Vol. 17, Frankfurt am Main 1982.. P: 98.
[1I3J "the system" 11944: "prevailing in monopolistic society."
[1I4J "funnies": Amusement pages in newspapers with jokes and comic strips.
[1I4J "Ludwig": Primarily a writer of popular biographies.
[1I4J "Mrs. Miniver": Leading role in a radio family serial; also filmed.
[1I4J "Lone Ranger": Title figure in a radio western serial, the type of the lone

cowboy fighring for the good; also filmed,
[U4J "Lombardo": See note [108J, p. 2.69.
3. Frank Wedekind, Gesammelte werke, Munich 192.1 . Vol. IX, P: 42.6.
[115] "women's serials": Light novels in women's magazines.

[1I5J "Adler": Neo-Thomi~t popular philosopher who defended film with arguments [TOm scholastic philosophy (It. tr.)-Cf. Horkheirner, "Neue Kunst und

Massenkultur,' in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4 .
[116] "the culture industry" 11944: "the monopoly system."

[1I7J "planning" 11944: "monopoly planning. "
[Il7J "life has been transformed" 11944: "monopoly has transformed life."
[1l7J "those in control" 11944: "monopoly."
[118] "Industry" 11944: "Monopoly. "
[1I8J "proof": A play on the various philosophical-theological (ontological,
cosmological, etc.) proofs of the existence of God.

[120] "giant corporation" 11944: "monopoly."
[[2.oJ "the thinking subject" 11944: "liberalism."

[12.0] Hans SonnenstiifJers Hidlenfahn. Ein beiteres Traumspiel. Radio play by
Paul Apel (1931), revised version by Gustaf Griindgens (1937).

[120] "Lift with Father": Popular American radio family serial after a stage play

by Clarence Day.
[12.0] "the latest society" 11944: "monopoly society."

[[2.0] "Formal freedom ... answer officially" 1 1944: "Bourgeois democracy
guarantees formal freedom for everyone. No one is officially responsible (Q the
government."

[12.0] "Dagwood": Character in the comic strip Blondie.
112.I] "established" 11944: "established by monopoly. "

112.11 " leaders of industry" I [944: "monopolists."

Notes to Pages 12I-IJI

271

[121] "provision" 1 1944: "provision by the monopoly."
[121] "winter aid": Winterhilfiwerk: National Socialist organization to support
the unemployed and other needy persons under the direction of the Ministry of
Propaganda.

[122] "even now" 1 1944: "even under monopoly."
[123] "women's serial": See note [U5], p. 270.

[123] "the pressure of the system" 1 1944: "monopoly."
[124] "rhe system" 1 1944: "monopoly."
4- Nietzsche, Gbtzendammerung, W'erke, op. cit., Vol. VIII, p. 136.
[124] "rhose in command" 1 1944: "monopoly."
[125] "bourgeois" 1 1944: "German bourgeois."
[126] "Mature ... Rooney": Well-known film actors, embodiments of the
hero and rhe antihero.

[126] "cultural conglomerare" 1 1944: "cultural conglomerate and monopoly."
[126] "Something ... everyone" 1 1944: "Monopoly serves up something for
everyone."

[127] "The purpose": C£ Kant, Critique o/Judgment, op. cit., p. 68.
[128] "inner commodities" 1 1944: "composition of cultural commodities
in terms of use value and exchange value."
[128] "What ... replaced" 1 1944: "Use value is being replaced in the reception of cultural assets."

[128] "The consumer ... escape." 1 1944: (missing).
[128] "Mrs. Miniver": See nore [U4], p. 270.

[128] "deception" 1 1944: "swindle."
[129] "rhe commercial radio system" 1 1944: "broadcasting."
[129] "rhe sovereign whole" 1 1944: "monopoly as rhe sovereign whole."
[129] "combines" 1 1944: "monopolies."
[129] "invented by the sociology of religion": Allusion to Max Weber's concepr
of charismatic authority; cf Economy and Society, Vol. I, ed. Guenther Roth and
Claus Wirrich, Berkeley 1978, pp. 24lff .
[130] "Even ... use value" 1 1944: "Use value."
[130] "screenos": Bingo games played by the audience between pictures.
[130] "radio": Television was still in irs infancy when rhe authors were writing
(It. rr.).
[131] "the Warner brothers": Owners of large film studios.

[131] "hopes" 1 1944: "waits."
[131] "labor rime ... in advertising" 1 1944: "social labor rime, but saved it.
Today, when the free marker is ar an end, monopoly is entrenching itself in advertising."
[I3I] "the combines" /1944: "monopoly."

272 Notes to Pages IJI-I44
[131] "wielders of influence ... economic councils" / 1944: "class remains

among its peers, as a preliminary form of the resolutions of economic councils of
industrialists. "

[132] "It benefits ... names." / 1944: "Irs termination by an individual firm
represents only a loss of prestige, in fact an offence against the class discipline

which monopoly imposes on its members. In wartime, commodities which can
no longer be supplied continue to be advertised merely in order to keep the institution, and naturally also the war economy, in operation."
[132] "the big companies" / 1944: "monopoly, the skyscrapers of Wrigley and
Rockefeller."

[133] "blackshirt": A term for fascists, after the black shirts of their uniforms,

especially in Italy but also in other countries.
[134] "people" / 1944: "people, which still determines life in monopoly society."

[135] "Scbrifileiter": The term Schriftleiter [lit. director of writing] was preferred by the National Socialists to the "foreign" word Redakteur (It. rr .),
[135] "such language" / 1944: "the language of monopoly."
[136] "false." / 1944/47: "false." After paragraph break: "(to be continued)."
ELEMENTS OF ANTI-SEMITISM

[137] "Now that ... reasons," / 1944: "In the age when political domination
is obsolete."

[137] "workers" / 1944: "proletarians."
[137] "appropriation" / 1944: "exploitation."
[138] "discharged." / 1944: "discharged. That would be the classless society."
[138] "existing society" / 1944: "the class society."
[138] "the existing order" / 1944: "capitalism."
[139] "that order" / 1944: "class society."
[139] "The respectable ... disreputable ones" / 1944: "Monopoly, the
respectable rackets, condone it, and the fascists, the disreputable ones."
[I40J "vagrants" / 1944: "Negroes. Mexican wrescling clubs."
[I42J "take possession of" / 1944: "appropriate."
[142] "parasites of old": Allusion to the Nazis' anticapitalist propaganda dis-

tinction between "productive" [schaffendJ and "parasitic" [raffend; lit. "grasping"]
capital, i.e., between industrial and bank capital; cf. Franz Neumann, Behemoth
(1942), Frankfurt/Main 1977. p. 376.
[142] "of the economic system in general" / 1944: "of all capital."
[142] «what is withheld" /1944: "what capital withholds."
[143] "society" / 1944: "class."
[144] "knights of industry ... creators" / 1944: "capitalist bloodsucker who has
to j~stify himself as a creator."

Notes to fJlIgt'J 14 .1-175 J.J I

[144] "salvation." 1 1944/47: "salvation, now that the churches have bccu
reduced entirely to the function of social control."
[145] "German Christians": The Protestant movement "Deutsche Christen"

sought a union between Church and National Socialism.
[148] "recognition in a concept": Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, op. cit., pp.
79ff [B 103]·
I. Cf. Freud, "The Uncanny," The Complete Psychological WOrks, op. cit., Vol.
XVII, pp. 219ff.
[152] "Coughlin": Charles Edward Coughlin, Catholic priest, demagogic antiSemitic radio preacher.
2. Kant's Critique ofPure Reason, op. cit., P: 183 [B IS0f].
[160] "any ... country" 1 1944: "even lynching."

3. Freud, Totem and Taboo, op. cit., Vol. XIII, p. 73.
[163] "culture industry" 1 1944: "economic and cultural monopoly."
[164] "big industry" /1944: "monopoly."
[164] "workers" 1 1944: "proletarians."
[165] "until now" 1 1944: "in liberalism."

[165] " ... turning-point of history": Allusion to Marx's "Zur Judenfrage," in
AU! den Deuach-Franzdsischen Johrbuchern 1843/44.

[165] "VII": The whole of section VII ("But ... of enlightenment.") was nor
contained in the 1944 edition.

[165] "the Ahlwardts and rhe Knuppelkunzes": Hermann Ahlwardr: author of
anti-Semi ric pamphlets, Reichsrag deputy ar rhe end of the nineteenth century;
for years his appearances were accompanied by uproar and scandal.
Hermann Kunze: teacher ar the Cader School, Chairman of the Deutsch-

Soziale Partei, anti-Semitic demagogue; his nickname [Knuppel; stick, cudgel]
resulred from the frequent brawls at his meetings.
[166] "ticket": single lisr of a party's candida res in the American electoral system.

[166] "Jew-free": From the National Socialist term judenrein.
[167] " ... without mediation": Allusion to Kant's proposirion: "Thoughts

without content are empty, intuitions without conceprs are blind," Critique of
Pure Reason, op. cit., P: 93 [A 51].
NOTES AND SKETCHES

[173] "Chamberlain ... Bad Godesberg": Chamberlain mer Hitler three times
in Seprember 1938; rhe second meeting took place in Bad Godesberg.
[175] "In this country": In America [lr. rr .] .

[175J "Spoke ... loneliness": Translared from Die cbinesische Fldt«, NachdichrlIngcn von Hans Bedlgc. lnscl-Btichcrei, p. 17 [It. tr.] .

274 Notes to Pages I75-I87

I. Paul Deussen, Secbzig Upanishad's des Veda. Leipzig 1905, p. 524.
2. Matthew 2,17-19. [I think it should be ch. lI-tr.]

3. Above all Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad 3, 5, I and 4, 4, 22. Deussen, op. cit.,
pp. 436f and 479f.

4· Op. cit., p. 436.
5. Mark, I, 6.

6. Translated from Vorlesungen tiber die Gescbicbte der Philosophic, Vol, 2,
W'erke, Yol. XlV, pp. 159f.
7. Ibid., p. 168.
8. Cf. Deussen, op. cit., p. 373.
9. Cf. Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und Anflingedes Cbristentums, Stuttgart/Berlin
1921, Yol. I, p. 90.
10. Diogenes Laertius, IY, 15.

II. Cf. Politeia, 372; Politikos, 267ff and Eduard Zeller, Die Pbilosopbie der
Griecben, Leipzig 1922, Part 2, Section I, pp . 325f note.
12. Cf. Deussen, Das System des Vedanta, Leipzig 1906, znd ed., pp. 63ff.
13. Hermann Oldenberg, Buddha, SrurrganiBerlin 1914, pp. 174f .
14. Ibid., p. 386 .
15· Ibid., pp. 393f.
16. Cf. ibid., pp. 184ff and pp. 4z4f
[180] "Soirees de Petersbourg": Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirees de Saint Petersbourg (1821).

[180] "circles of Heir: Allusion to Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno III, 4ff (It.
tr.) .

[180] "Animal psychology": In the 1944 edition this entry comes directly after
"Against knowingness."
[185] "Economic ... forms" / 1944: "Relations of production, forms of class
domination, culture."

[185] "troglodyte": Paleolithic cave dweller.

[186] "dictum": Cf. Marx, Die deutscbe Ideologic, in Marx-Engels WL-rke, Vol. 3,
Berlin 1969, pp. 34f.

[186] "The poor figure ... them": Cf. Marx, Engels, Die Heilig« Familie, in

Marx-Engels Werke, Vol. 2, Berlin 1958, p. 85; also Marx, "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie," in Marx-Engels WL-rke, Vol, I, Berlin 1957, pp. 385f.
[187] "Blum government": Popular front government 1936-37, introduced
extensive social reforms.

[187] "From a theory of the criminal": Cf. the full text, "Theorie des Ver-

brechers," in Gesammelte Schriftm, Vol, 12, Frankfurt/Main 1985, pp. 266fT.
[187] "rising ... labor power" / 1944: "a regular need for labor power, increased
production."
.

17. Leibniz, The Monodology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Robert
Latta, Oxford 1925, § 7, pp. 219f.
18. Cf. ibid., § 51.

19. Cf. R. Caillois, L~ Mythe et l'Homme, Paris 1938, pp. 125ff.
[190] "fascism" 1 1944: "monopoly."
[190J "state" 1 1944: "order,"

[191J "executioner: each operation ... forgerring." 1 1944: "executioner. But
that is not to say enough. Is not death the radical loss of the 'residual capacity of
the nerve substance'? Life would not be a dream but a narcosis. We would behave

toward other people, not to mention all other creatures, as, in Flourens's view, the
patient behaves towards the interval when he or she was under the influence of

the drug: deludedly. The narcosis acts like the principium individuationis. The
positivists, however, could learn from this how far they have advanced with their
science: their note taking would be limited in principle to the posrnarcoric peri-

od. Ir would be the utterance of a life which had forgorren itself under the influence of narcotics, or rather of death, from which one can remember nothing.
They would, in their thing-language, have "morrificared" it. Reality would be lefr
to metaphysics and to antiquated French physiologists. Adrnirredly, a test of the

objective justificarion of such speculations would call for a discriminating analysis of Schopenhauer's norion, which still contributes too much to Flourens's positivism."

[195J "The 'tragic' world-view of the fascists": An allusion to the vulgarized
reception of Nietzsche by some National Socialist authors in the early 1930s.

[197] "Chaplin's film": The Great Dictator (1940).
20. Translated from Die Nacbsokratileer, ed. Wilhelm Nestle, Jena 1923,Vol. I .
72a, P: 195·

[198] "big business" 1 1944: "monopoly."
[203] "praxis." 1 1944: "praxis. In Europe there is now hardly a country in
which one would not be shot for a slip of the tongue."

[203] "The proposition ... the whole": Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, op.
cit., p. II.
[204J "today" 1 1944: "under monopoly."
[205] "flux" 1 1944: "transience."

[206J "The man ... strive": Allusion to Schiller's poem, "Das Lied von der
Glocke."

21. Cf. Eclaircissement sur les Sacrifices. Oeuvres, Lyon 1892, Vol. V, pp. 322f.
[207J "universal" 1 1944: "monopolistic."
[207J "completely domination" 11944: "system of big rackets."
[2071 "In Germany reason": Cf. note [24], P: 257 ("pleasure").
[2071 "present" 1 1') .\01: "1;lsrisl pn:senr, in which she no longer needs meta-

276 Notes to Pages 209-222

phorically to put on mannish trousers because she is already in desexualized
slacks, machining bombs."

[209] "culture industry" I 1944: "mass culture."
[210] "fascist collective" I 1944: "collective of the totalitarian monopoly."

22. JoyfUl Wisdom, op. cit., p. 136.
[2U] "Hearst": William Randolph Hearst, founder of the USA's largest press
conglomerate.

[2II] "baseless" I 1944: "baseless; on this Heidegger and Lukacs agree."
23. Goethe, Faust, Part 1, 4068.

24. Cf. Karl Landauer, "Inrelligenz und Durnrnheir," in DIlS Psycboanalytische
Volksbuch, Bern 1939. p. 172 .
EDITOR'S AFTERWORD

1. P. xiv of this edition.
2. P. xviii of this edition.
3. P . I of this edition.

4. P. xi of this edition.
5. Max-Horkheimer Archiv der Stadt- und Universiratsbibliothek Frankfurt

am Main (abbreviated henceforth to MHA): VI 10.210.

6. Published in Horkheirner, Gesammelte Schrifien, Vol. 12. Frankfurt am
Main 1985.
7. MHA: VI 10.66-The declaration was to be issued in connection with the

publication of essays by both authors in the periodical Der M01UZt. As contributions by Horkheimer, "Vernunft und Selbsrerhalrung" [Engl.: "The End of Rea-

son," see n. 24. Afterword], "Auroritar und Familie in der Gegenwarr" [Engl.:

"Authoritarianism and the Family Today," in The Family: Its Function and Destiny.
cd. R. N. Anshen, New York 1949, pp. 359-374]. or a section from Eclipse of
Reason (Oxford 1947) were considered (cf MHA: VI I 0.158, 16rA). However,

Horkhcimer then withdrew his permission. The joint declaration, too, was not
published. The reasons for this emerge only parcly from the correspondence
between Horkheimer and Adorno. They have to do, above all. with misgivings
about a further political declaration which was to be combined with this first one.
However, there is no reason to assume that the two authors were unwilling to
endorse the content and formulation of the first declaration.

8. MHA: Xl 6.86.

9. My thanks go to Rolf Tiedemann for information on the content of
Adorno's posthumous papers here and elsewhere.
10. MHA: Xl 6.2 .
II. MHA: Xl 6.3 .
12. MHA: XI 6+
<;

Notes to Pages 223-227 277
13. lr is to be found under the ririe "Das Schema der Massenkulrur" as an appendix :0 Dialektik der Aufklarung in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften,
Vol. 3, Frankfurt am Main 1981. pp. 299ff.
14. MHA: X 17.1-17.

15. Published in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 12, pp. 587ff.
16. MHA: XI 6.64.
17. MHA: XI 6.65.

18. MHA: XI 6.5-IIO; Xl 6a.I -3: Xl 7a.3-5.

19. Now published in Horkheirner, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12. The designation Fragments, which Dialectic ofEnlightenment bears as its subtitle (and as its
main title in the original version of 1944), therefore has nor only the metaphorical meaning of a kind of thinking opposed to the compulsion of a system bur also
the literal meaning that the printed version does not include everything initially
wrirren for it. Adorno also wanted to include The Philosophy ofModern Music as
an excursus for Dialectic ofEnlightenment; cf. Adorno, Gesammeltc Schriften Vol.
12, Frankfurt am Main 1975. P: II.
20. MHA: XI 6.43-62.

2I. jurgen Habermas, "Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung des Horkheimcrschen
Werkes." in Max Horkheimer beute: W'erk und Wirkung. ed. Alfred Schmidt and
Norbert Alrwicker, Frankfurt am Main 1986. p. 171.
22. Verbal communication to the Editor on 22.IO.I985.
23. Cf. P: xix of this edition.

24. "The Authoritarian State," tr, The People's Translation Service, Berkeley, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. ed. Andrew Araro and Eike Geb-

hardt. pp. 95 -Il7, New York 1982; German: "Aurorirarer Staat," in Gesammelte
Schrifterl, Vol. 5, Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 293ff; "The End of Reason," The
Essential Frankfurt School Reader. op. cit., pp. 26-48; German: "Vernunfr und
Selbsrerhalrung," in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 5. Frankfurt am Main 1987. pp.
320ff.

25. Theodor W Adorno, Ober Walter Benjamin, Frankfurt am Main 1970, p.
143- The srraightforwatd identification by the editor of that volume. Rolf Tiedemann, of the "book on the dialectic" mentioned in the letter with the later book

Dialeaic ofEnlightenment. seems to me questionable, especially in the light of the
memorandum about to be cited.

26. "Idee, Akrivirar und Programm des Institurs fur Sozialforschung," in
Horkheirner, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12, Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 156f.
27. MHA: VI 33-62-63 .

28. Ct~ Adorno, "Die Aktualitar der Philosophic" (1931). in Gesammelte
Scbrijie», Vol. I . Frankfurt am Main 1973.
29. Cf. Horkhcimcr, Adorno. "Diskussion ubcr die Differenz zwischen Posi-

278 Notes to Pages 227-233

rivisrnus und rnarerialisrischer Dialektik," in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften,
Vol. 12, pp. 467ff.
30. P . xiv of this edition.

31. Cf. Horkheimer "Vertrauen auf Geschichre," in GesammelteSchriften, Vol.
12, op. cit. Also compare the more detailed interpretation in Gunzelin Schmid
Noerr, "Wahrheit, Macht und die Sprache der Philosophic. Zu Horkheimers
sprachphilosophischen Reflexionen in seinen nachgelassenen Schriften zwischen

1939 und 1946," in Max Horkheimer beute: werk und Wirkung, op. cit.
32. Cf. Martin Jay, Dialektische Phantasie, Frankfurt am Main 1973. pp . 125fT,
and Wolfgang Bonli, "Psychoanalyse als Wissenschafr und Kritik. Zur Freud-

rezeprion der Frankfurter Schule,' in Sozialforschung als Kritik, ed. Wolfgang
Bong and Axel, Honneth, Frankfurt am Main 1982, esp. pp . 391ff.
33. Erich Fromm. "Uber Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozial-

psychologie," in Zeitschriftfiir Sozialforschung, Vol. I . 1932, P: 50.
34. Paris 1936.

35. Cf. Horkheirner, "Ernst Simmel und die Freudsche Philosophic," Gesam-

melte Schriften, Vol. 5, Frankfurt am Main 1987. pp . 396ff.
36. Horkheirner, Adorno, "Diskussionen tiber die Differenz zwischen Posiriv-

ismus und materialistischer Dialekrik," in Horkheirner, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol.
12, esp. pp . 433-451; "Diskussionen tiber Sprache und Erkennrnis, Naturbe-

hcrrschung am Menschen, politische Aspekte des Marxisrnus," ibid., pp. 510-512 .
37. Horkheimer, Adorno. "Diskussionen tiber die Differenz zwischen Positiv-

ismus und rnarerialisrischer Dialekrik," op. cit., P: 443.
38. Ibid.
39. P. xviii of this edition.

40. I~ 154 of this edition.

41. New York 1949-50; one of these volumes is The Authoritarian Personality

(Ncw York 1950), written by Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson.
and R. Nevitt Sanford, mentioned by Adorno and in the following quotation.
42. Adorno, "Wissenschafcliche Erfahrungen in Amerika," in Gesammelte

Schr~ften, Vol. 10.2, Frankfurt am Main 1977, pp. 721-723.
43. Martin Jay discusses this in more detail in "The Frankfurt School m

Exilc," in Perspectives in American History, Vol. VI, pp. 348 -355 .
44. P. xix of this edition.

45. Cf. especially Pollock. "State Capitalism." in Studies ofPhilosophy and 50riu! Science IX, 1941, and "Is National Socialism a New Order?" ibid. Horkheimer

himself explains this concept in his essay "The Authoritarian State" [see n. 24,
Afrcrword].

46. "Aufzeichnungcn und Entwurfe zur Dialektik der Aufkliinmg 1939-1942,"

in (;rsl11nmr.!u Schl'~ftm; Vol. 12 , op. cit.• p. 287.

Notes to Pages 235-240 279
47. "Zur Ideologie der Politik heure (Fragment). " in Gesammelte Schriften,
Vol. 12, op. cit., pp. 317£

48. "Zur Soziologie der Klassenverhalrnisse," in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12,
op. cit., pp. 101 -104. That Horkheimer's theory of rackets, which, in the end, was
developed to only a rudimentary level, aimed to go far beyond a sociological
analysis in the narrower sense becomes clear from an analogy with his reflections
on linguistic philosophy mentioned earlier. In an essay of 1946 he described the
function of the concept on the basis of the racket model, protection in exchange

for oppression: "In the concept fulfillment is inseparable from suffering. Its fixity

only faithfi.rIly reflects the society which serves life by oppressing it, which develops human beings by mutilating them and knows of homeland only as the protection which suppresses the protected." ( "Vertrauen auf Geschichre,' in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12, op cit., P: 124).
49. "Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie" (1942), in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften,
Vol. 8, Frankfurt am Main 1972.

50. Cf. Horkheirner, "Zur Soziologie der Klassenverhaltnisse," op. cit., pp.
75ff.

51. P . xiv of this edition.
52. P . 207 of this edition.

53. P . 94 of this edition.
54. P . 132 of this edition.

55. P . xv of this edition.

56. E.g ., P: 209 of this edition.

57. E.g ., P: 67 and P: 89 of this edition.
58. E.g ., p. 76 and p. 120 of this edition.
59. P . 107 and P: 144 of this edition.
60. P . 137 of this edition.

61. P . 48 of this edition.
62. P . 60 of this edition.
63. P . xvii of this edition.

64. For example, in a note written probably in the early 1930S and at any rate
not later than 1935, Horkheimer writes of the "independence of the revolutionary

fighter" (MHA: XI 16.¥, P: 5). The note was incorporated in "Bernerkungen zur
philosophischen Anthropologie," published in 1935, where, however, he writes of
the "independence of the person who pursues this goal [of a free humanity]"

(Zeitschrift fUr Sozill/forschung, Vol. IV, 1935. p. 16).
65. According to a verbal communication to the Editor from Rudolph Hirsch
in November 1983.
66. P . xv of this edition.

67. I~ xv of this edition.

280 Notes to Pages 240-246

68. The original main ricle of the book was Philosophical Fragments.
69. MHA: Xl 6.65.

70. C£ "Reason and Self-Preservarion," op. cit.
71. C£ "Zur Ideologie der Polirik heure (Fragrnenr)," in Gesammelte Schriften.
Vol. 12. op. cit., pp. 316ff. This text reads like a critique of a posirivistically abbreviared reading of Pollock's theory of state capitalism.
72. E.g ., p. 131 of this edition.

73. p. 207 of this edition.
74. Horkheimer, Adorno, "Rertung der Aufklarung. Diskussion tiber eine

geplante Schrifr zur Dialekrik" (1946), in Horkheirner, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol.
12, op. cit.• pp. 597-599.

75. Ibid.• p. 600.
76. Ibid., p. 604.
77· Ibid., pp. 594, 598.
78. Ibid., p. 601.
79. Ibid., p. 602.
80. C( The Editor's Afterword to Vols. 7 and 8 of Horkheimer's Gesammelte

Schriften, in Vol. 8, esp. pp. 461-465.
81. Cf. e .g ., "Kritische Theorie gestem und heute" (1969/72), in Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 8, Frankfurt am Main 1985. p. 353; "Pessirnismus heure" (1971). in
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 7, Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 232; "Das Schlimme
erwarten und doch das Gure versuchen. Gesprach mit Gerhard Rein" (1972/76),

ibid., p. 467.
82. P. 161 of this edirion.

83. Notizen I950 bis I969. Frankfurt am Main 1974. p. 12.
84. MHA: VI 40.245 c.
85. MHA: VI 4.146.

86. MHA: V n8+

87. C( Sohni's letter to Horkheimer of 5.7.1961 (MHA: V 61.21).
88. MHA: V 61.13 -14.

89. Lerrer of 26.2 .1962 (MHA: VI 4.181).
90. Letter from Horkheimer to Solmi of 15.8.1962 (MHA: V 6I.I). In the

Italian edition Solmi's name finally no longer appeared bur was replaced by the

pseudonym Lionello Vinci-clearly a sign of distancing.
91. My thanks go to Furio Cerutti of Florence for this information.

92. Nico Pasero, Rudolph Bauer, "Aulklarung auf Iralienisch," In Diskus.
Fmnkfilrter Studrntenzeitung, Vol. 17. July 1967, p. 4.

9.~. In Kritiscbe Tbeorie, Vol. II. Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. Xl.
9-1 . [IJid.• p. IX .

95. Cf. Alfred Schmidt, "Die geistige Phy~iognolllie Max l lorkhc imers, " Intro duction to Horkheirner, Notizen [1)50-' 969 , Franldilfl ;U ll M ain 1')74. pp. XI .IX.
L, LXVIII.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CLAS S Ill STOlty

I. In Studies in Philosophy and Social Slitl/a, Vol. IX, 1941. pp . 264ft:
2 . Helmut Dubiel, Alfons Sollncr, "Die Narionalsozialisrnusforschung des Instiruts rur Sozialforschung-ihrc wisscnschafrsgcschichrliche Srcllung und ihre ge-

genwartige Bedeutung," in Wimchtlji, Rrcln und Staat im Nationalsozialismus . . .,
op. cit., pp. 7!f, Barbara Brick, Moishc Postone, "Kritischer Pessimismus und die

Grenzcn des traditionellen Marxisrnus," in SOZitllforsclJUug als Kritik, cd . Wolfgang Bon6 and Axel Honnerh , Frankfurt ant Main 1982. pp . 179ff. In what follow s we base ourselves substantially on these texts, without discu ssing them in

detail. Regarding the context described in these works cf. also: Martin Jay, Dialektiscbe Pbantasie, Frankfurt am Main 1981, Ch. V . and Alfons Sellner, Gescbicbt«

und Herrschafi, Frankfurt am Main 1979, Ch. 3.3.6 .
3. "Die gegenwartige Lage des Kapitalismus und die Aussichten einer plan-

wirrschafclichen Neuordnung," in Zcitschrift flir Sozialforschung, Vol. I, pp. 8fT;
"Bemerkungen zur Wirtschafrskrise," ibid., Vol. II, pp. 32ItI
4 . Quoted from Brick, Postone, op. cit., p. 184.

5. Cf. "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations," in Studies in Philosophy and SocialScience, Vol. IX, 1941, pp . 200tI
6. Quoted from Brick. Postone, op. cit., p. 185.
7. Cf. ibid.

8. Cf. ibid., pp . I89f.
9. Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth , New York 1942.
10. Quoted from Dubiel, Sollner, op. cit. , P: 18.
n, Ibid.
12 . P. xix of this edition.

13. p. 23 of this edition.
14. p. 21 of this edition.
15. P . 84 of this edition.
16. P. n6 of this edition.

17. p. 117 of this edition.
18. p. 124 of this edition.
19. p. 17 of this edition.
20. P. 30 of this edition.

21. p. 30 of this edition.
22. p. 95 of rhis edition .
2) . p. 1}8 of Ihis edition.

282

Notes to Page 25I

24. P . 210 of this edition.

25. p. 190 of this edition.
26. p. 185 of this edition.
27. Ibid.
28. P. 2 of this edition.

29. Ibid.
30. P. 29 of this edition.

31. Pp . 43 and 60 of this edition.
32. p. u8 of this edition.
33. Pp . 100, 101 , 104, and u8 of this edition.

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