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     During Auschwitz: Adorno, Hegel, and the "Unhappy Consciousness" of 
     Critique 
     Steven Helmling 
     University of Delaware 
     helmling@udel.edu 

     (c) 2005 Steven Helmling.
     All rights reserved. 

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     As was already pointed out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, strict 
     positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the 
     artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrow-
     minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its 
     hands together when it finds the two balanced is--as trivialities 
     sometimes are--the caricature of a situation that over the 
     centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in 
     subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely 
     different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in 
     their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under 
     the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality 
     as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought 
     and turn a blind eye to truth; thought, however, approaches 
     tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic 
     comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about 
     historically and is revocable. . . . Ultimately, aesthetic 
     comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if 
     goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be 
     called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the 
     shudder, is at the same time the shudder's own development; life 
     in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the 
     total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without 
     shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder which subjectivity 
     stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched 
     by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that 
     other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation 
     of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros 
     and knowledge. 

     --Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 331 


     1.	The 1944 "Introduction" to Dialectic of Enlightenment announces 
     the book's indictment of "enlightenment," that it has abdicated 
     "[die] Arbeit des Begriffs" (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 14). 
     The German phrase--a Hegelian chestnut--is Englished as "the labor 
     of conceptualization" in John Cumming's 1972 translation (xiv), 
     and as "the work of concepts" by Edmund Jephcott in 2002 
     (Jephcott xvii).[1] Together the two translations show, as neither 
     can by itself, the stretch of the German, which suggests both the 
     work that concepts do, and the labor that making ourselves conscious 
     of the problematics of the concept--"thinking about thought" 
     (Cumming 25), "to 'think thinking'" (Jephcott 19)--imposes on us. 
     "The concept" is too diffuse and ubiquitous a theme in Adorno to 
     treat here. It evokes the mind's engagement at once with the world 
     and a la Hegel) with its own self-consciousness in that engagement; 
     for Adorno, the "labor of the concept" is an imperative from first 
     to last. I want to test the premise that for Adorno, complementary 
     to the project of thinking about thinking--"the concept"--is an 
     effort or struggle that I will call "the work of affects" or "the 
     labor of affectualization." Horkheimer and Adorno thematize this 
     labor in their "excursus" on Odysseus and the Sirens, as a founding 
     myth of what Adorno consistently denounces as "ataraxia"--a 
     culture-wide affective discipline, or repression, which grounds 
     the instrumental "domination of [external] nature" in an 
     internalized, instrumentalizing domination of affect itself. "The 
     need to lend a voice to suffering," writes Adorno, "is the 
     condition of all truth," a premise that rejoins affect and concept, 
     feeling and thinking, to enact Adorno's protest against the 
     separation of these categories--these domains of experience--in 
     Western culture (Negative Dialectics 17-8). For Adorno, "the labor 
     of the concept" itself involves laboring to uncover, focus, 
     articulate, and express its properly affective elements, however 
     repressed or distorted, fetishized or reified. Affect must be 
     completed, "rescued,"[2] even redeemed, by being concretized in 
     the labor of, in the Hegelian formula, "apprehending it as 
     thought"; likewise, thought--the labor of the concept--must suffer 
     the ordeal through which alone thinking may be apprehended as 
     feeling. Adorno urges that to "think thinking" obliges us to 
     think our feeling, to feel our thinking--and (what our traumatic 
     history has perhaps most inhibited in us) to feel our feeling 
     as well.

     2.	This essay explores Adorno's "labor of affectualization" both 
     as theorized in his arguments and as performed in his writing 
     practice--in the modernist and self-conscious way, to adapt 
     Gertrude Stein, that his writing is written. A touchstone 
     throughout will be Adorno's chief model and counter- or 
     cautionary example, the "optimistic" authorial carriage of Hegel, 
     whose utopian promise Adorno's "unhappy [critical] consciousness" 
     would reinscribe under the rubric of the "broken promise." I hope 
     to enlarge our sense of the function or "effect" of "style" (to 
     call it that) in Adorno's critical project, with reference to 
     other figures (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger) 
     that can be "constellated" usefully with it. I conclude with a 
     look at the 1944 "Introduction" to Dialectic of Enlightenment, 
     in which the deliberate "difficulty" of the book is thematized 
     as motivated by the difficulties, both intellectual and 
     emotional, of its historical occasion (enlightenment's 
     calamitous devolution into the barbarism of World War Two). I 
     also read the book's first chapter, which enacts the program 
     (both critical and affective) for which the "Introduction"      
     serves as manifesto. The larger aim is to describe, evoke, and, 
     in ways other commentators on Adorno seem to me to have missed, 
     to account for the sheer power and voltage of Adorno's critical 
     output, in which thinking and writing--and feeling--seethe, and 
     in their agitation impel each other to levels of force quite 
     unlike anything to be found in the work of anyone else. 


     Aesthesis and Anaesthesis 

     3.	Adorno's desire to "rescue" repressed affect finds perhaps 
     its most extreme test, a sort of limit-case, in a 1959 lecture 
     in which Adorno speaks feelingly of "the emotional force of 
     Kant's Critique of Pure Reason" (30). Most readers today, I 
     wager, will raise eyebrows at this characterization. It was 
     apropos of Kant, after all, that Terry Eagleton joked that in 
     the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, "the aesthetic might 
     more accurately be described as an anaesthetic" (196)--and 
     indeed Adorno himself characterizes Kant's aesthetics elsewhere as 
     "a castrated hedonism, desire without desire" (Aesthetic Theory 
     11). Adorno's Kant anticipates that "heroism of modern life" 
     (the black-suited bourgeoisie assisting in stoic dispassion, "not 
     breaking up its lines to weep," nor even presuming to expect a 
     speaking role, at the funeral of its own passional energies) to 
     which Baudelaire paid the back-handed compliment of an 
     uncharacteristically muted mockery. Kant's "emotional force," 
     that is to say, partakes of that struggle against emotion and 
     feeling that Dialectic of Enlightenment traces back to the 
     episode of the Sirens in the Odyssey. Eagleton's "anesthetic" 
     notwithstanding, for Adorno, Kant's "emotional force" lies in the 
     ineradicable felt force of the agon itself, the drive for 
     "domination" of emotion and affect, given that the reified norm, 
     in Adorno's indignant indictment, typically cedes the victory to 
     numbness not only in advance, but also in principle. 

     4.	Adorno's project is heavily invested in an ambition to undo 
     this anaesthesis or (Adorno's own frequent protest-word) 
     "ataraxia"--that is, to redeem the numbness programmatized in 
     modern, bourgeois, enlightenment projects, whether aesthetic or      
     scientific; or, if "redeem" seems too messianic, to "rescue" 
     (Adorno's own word) for "critical" and "conceptual" purpose the 
     affective force normatively repressed in our culture's sundering 
     of thought and feeling. This is an ambition emphatically not to be 
     realized by simply adding an "effect," lending atmospherics to the 
     substance of an argument, much less the adrenaline jolts of a 
     moralized ressentiment. Adorno evokes the "emotional force of 
     Kant's Critique of Pure Reason" to prepare for the broader 
     stipulation, a page later, that "the same, the identical theses 
     may have completely different meanings within the general 
     parameters, the general emotional thrust of a given philosophy" 
     (Kant's Critique 31). Which is to say that the "emotional 
     thrust," the affect and cathexis, of an argument are not some 
     merely epiphenomenal froth upon a putatively substantive content 
     or "theses" that might as well (or better) be considered 
     dispassionately. No, Adorno here states explicitly that the 
     content, the "theses," bear different meanings according to the 
     argument's "emotional thrust": the affective cathexis of the 
     text thereby becomes determinative, even constitutive, of the 
     text's "meanings." Thus the programmatic dispassion of critique 
     generically stands revealed and indicted as an ideology, "an 
     imaginary" conquest of fear, another instance of that 
     "anaesthesis" or "ataraxia" that Dialectic of Enlightenment 
     laments as an impoverishing entailment of our civilization, a 
     bourgeois "coldness" (Minima Moralia 26), from Homer's Sirens 
     to Baudelaire's "modern heroism" and beyond. If I risk putting 
     this in tones that may seem a bit overwrought, it's to underline 
     the point that Adorno here renders explicit a program, for 
     critique at large and for his own critical practice in particular, 
     that his writing everywhere enacts. 

     5.	Adorno protests the analytic disjunction or (his code-word) 
     chorismos (Greek for "separation") of sciences, knowledges, 
     discourses. He aims to rejoin these discourses dialectically in 
     configurations or "constellations" whose transgression against 
     positivist habits of categorization is much of their heteroclite, 
     fish-and-fowl, apples-and-oranges point. For modern purposes, the 
     milestone of enlightened chorismos is Kant, whose intervention in 
     the "contest of faculties" was meant to produce a ceasefire, a 
     disengagement of the combatants--in Kant's time, philosophy and 
     theology. Kant's covert motive was that philosophy displace 
     theology as arbiter among the disciplines, but his overt proposal 
     was that the warring faculties agree to disagree: they were 
     separate discourses, exercising different kinds of "Reason" on 
     different, non-overlapping, problems. The outcome was not what 
     Kant had hoped for: while philosophy and religion were engrossed 
     in their "contest," the real power was passing to the empirical 
     sciences and their new, and (Adorno thought) fatally narrow 
     canons of truth and fact. This disaster--how enlightenment 
     thinking neutralized, indeed, reversed its own radical potential--
     is what Adorno meant by "the dialectic of enlightenment." The 
     "contest of faculties" was protracted and often covert, but as 
     time passed the outcome was increasingly clear. For the losers 
     (philosophy, religion, and art), the defeat was sweetened by a 
     sequestration that allowed each of them to reign in its own 
     highly circumscribed domain. This "enlightenment" regime tolerates 
     aesthetic discourses as specialized disciplines on condition that 
     they moderate or renounce their claim to "truth"; by the same 
     token, the truth-discourses of science offer as condition 
     (almost as guarantee) of their "truth"-value their principled 
     refusal of any affective voltage. Implicit in this compact is that 
     "affect" as such is without truth-value: is even, indeed, an 
     obstacle to truth. Adorno assails these ideological premises 
     constantly, and he ends his career, in Aesthetic Theory, with his 
     most sustained effort to valorize art's claim to being a kind of 
     "truth-discourse"--in part by stipulating the conditions under 
     which art achieves truth, in part by so reconfiguring the question 
     that one puzzles to remember how art can ever have seemed not 
     "true." 

     6.	Aesthetic Theory labors to redeem the aesthetic by undoing 
     the chorismos of thought and feeling that has deprived art of 
     philosophical efficacy. Indeed, the most insistent theme of the 
     book's vast ensemble of theme-and-variations is that art and 
     philosophy are phases of a continuous activity; neither is valid 
     without the other; they need each other; they complete each 
     other. Adorno is tireless in urging that the restoration of 
     critical force to art involves the "labor of the concept"; but 
     he is pretty tight-lipped about the complementary program, of 
     restoring to philosophy (and critique, theory, science: to what he 
     wants to restore as "truth-discourses") something of the affective 
     or aesthetic charge or cathexis they only illusorily renounce in 
     any case. This reticence raises two embarrassments I want to 
     acknowledge here. The smaller one is that Adorno's reticence about 
     affect produces, absent argued discriminations from him, some 
     slippage in my account between "affect" and such terms as 
     "feeling," "cathexis," and "suffering." On this I can only beg 
     your forebearance, and hope my speculations earn their keep. The 
     other embarrassment is more substantial: if Adorno means to 
     "rescue" affect, then why is "affect," as a theme, so repressed 
     in his work? Why isn't he more explicit about it? The answer I'd 
     most like to give is that Adorno counts on the high affective 
     voltages of his writing to make the point, as if coming right out 
     and saying it would be a gaffe on the order of explaining why a 
     joke is funny. Modernism generally plays down affect, in ways 
     sometimes to be read as a kind of (mock-) ataraxia (Celine), 
     sometimes as a kind of restraint (e.g., "impersonality") meant 
     actually to heighten affect, but generally as a refusal or 
     critique of the excesses of so much nineteenth-century art 
     (academic painting, Chopin, Wagner--too many examples). Adorno 
     shares in that critique, and I would say his work risks an 
     emotionalism that most tight-lipped moderns refuse. I suppose, 
     too, that Adorno shied away from making the case explicitly for 
     fear of its being mis-taken to mean that philosophy is a 
     "merely subjective" expression, that is, "aesthetic" in precisely 
     the diminished senses that Adorno means to protest and redeem in 
     his dialectical reinvention of it in Aesthetic Theory. Adorno 
     regularly protests against the "merely subjective" gambit, as a 
     reductive psychologism; in Adorno's own account of the 
     subject/object relation, there is no such thing as the "merely 
     subjective" because the very condition of subjectivity is its 
     dialectical engagement with the objective. (For Adorno, "the 
     concept" is the function of this engagement, the medium or 
     mediation of the subject's dialectic with the objective.) 

     7. In any case, the implication of the affects in the "truth-
     discourses" is ubiquitous in Adorno--for example in his
     surprisingly frequent assimilations of philosophy (et al.) to 
     music: in the very title of Philosophy of Modern Music; in the 
     resonances with Hegel in the Beethoven fragments (see any of the 
     numerous references in the book's Index); and in quotations like 
     this one, from the early (1932) essay, "On the Social Situation 
     of Music": 


     Music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express--in 
     the antinomies of its own formal language--the exigency of the 
     social condition and to call for change through the coded 
     language of suffering. . . . The task of music as art thus enters 
     into a parallel relationship to the task of social theory. . . . 
     solutions offered by music in this process stand equal to theories. 
     (Essays on Music 393) 


     But the premise is put more globally in many places--as in this, 
     from the late (1961) essay, "Opinion Delusion Society": 

     The moment called cathexis in psychology, thought's affective 
     investment in the object, is not extrinsic to thought, not 
     merely psychological, but rather the condition of its truth. Where 
     cathexis atrophies, intelligence becomes stultified. (Critical 
     Models 109) 

     Or, as he writes elsewhere, "the need to lend a voice to suffering is 
     the condition of all truth" (Negative Dialectics 17-8). And in what is 
     undoubtedly his most-remembered utterance--"To write poetry after 
     Auschwitz is barbaric" (Prisms 34)--Adorno might seem to limit the 
     argument, by citing an atrocity that threatens to beggar all affect, 
     indeed, all expression--which would have to mean, all critique as well. 
     For surely Adorno's anxiety about poetry after Auschwitz encompasses     
     anxiety about the continuance of critique and philosophy after 
     Auschwitz as well--a way of putting it that helps uncover the utopian 
     wishfulness in the famous assertion that "philosophy lives on because 
     the moment to realize it was missed" (Negative Dialectics 3). But 
     those who deplore what they take to be the hair-shirt defeatism or 
     melodramatizing "unhappy consciousness" of the "after-Auschwitz" 
     remark would do well to ponder Adorno's own comment a decade and a 
     half later: 


     I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry, and 
     that gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate . . . [I]t is in 
     the nature of philosophy--and everything I write is, unavoidably, 
     philosophy, even if it is not concerned with so-called philosophical      
     themes--that nothing is meant quite literally. Philosophy always 
     relates to tendencies and does not consist of statements of fact. . . . 
     it could equally well be said . . . that [after Auschwitz] one must 
     write poems, in keeping with Hegel's statement in his Aesthetics that 
     as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there 
     must also be art as the objective form of that awareness. . . . [The 
     question whether one can write poetry after Auschwitz should rather be] 
     the question whether one can live after Auschwitz. . . . [I]n one of 
     the most important plays of Sartre . . . a young resistance fighter 
     who is subjected to torture . . . [asks] whether or why one should 
     live in a world in which one is beaten until one's bones are smashed. 
     Since it concerns the possibility of any affirmation of life, this 
     question cannot be evaded. And I would think that any thought which is 
     not measured by this standard, which does not assimilate it 
     theoretically, simply pushes aside at the outset that which thought 
     should address--so that it really cannot be called a thought at all. 
     (Metaphysics 110-1; cf. Negative Dialectics 362) 


     This passage brings together a number of themes I want to foreground 
     here: the evocation of high ambition, or vocation, or doom 
     ("everything I write is, unavoidably, philosophy"); the adviso that 
     in philosophy "nothing is meant quite literally"; the rootedness of 
     art and philosophy alike in "an awareness of suffering," and in the 
     duty to objectify (in the Hegelian sense) that suffering; the ultimate 
     question of "the possibility of any affirmation of life," tellingly 
     evoked by way of Sartre, rather than the (at the time) more 
     fashionable, certainly more affectively subdued, mot on suicide from 
     Camus's Myth of Sisyphus. And indissociable from these thematics is 
     the affect that the passage mobilizes on behalf of that thematics--
     mobilizes, or indeed communicates, and I mean "communicate" in the 
     sense not of transmission from sender to receiver, but of a 
     making-common, of communion, between writer and reader, and in that 
     sense the evocation of "an objective form" of "that awareness [of      
     suffering among human beings]." 

     8.	Adorno's writing, indeed, in the largest sense, his project, 
     involves an affective investment--that "labor of affectualization," 
     or "work of affects"--and to that extent his project is something like 
     "aesthetic" in the radically enlarged senses of Adorno's own Aesthetic 
     Theory. Adorno's aesthesis is quite the reverse of the glamorous 
     "strong pessimism" and "tragic" ecstasies in which Nietzsche affects 
     to find art's "redemption by illusion." All such exaltations of 
     strength and tragic heroism Adorno disdains as "imaginary 
     consolations"; his own ideation tends rather to abjection--and not as 
     the elective asceticism so (ambivalently) conjured by Nietzsche, but 
     as the traumatic burden imposed on us by history, a burden of 
     anguishes in which critique inevitably participates, which it can only      
     attempt, however impossibly, to "work through": 


     Unquestionably, one who submits to the dialectical discipline has to 
     pay dearly in the qualitative variety of experience. Still, in the 
     administered world the impoverishment of experience by dialectics, 
     which outrages healthy opinion, proves appropriate to the monotony of 
     that world. Its agony is the world's agony raised to a concept. 
     (Negative Dialectics 6) 


     The concept of agony must be, must be concretized as, must be made 
     (in the writing, in the reading) agonizing--and agonistic. If 
     Wittgenstein famously sneered that the concept of sugar is not sweet, 
     Adorno consistently retorts, in effect, that the concept of suffering 
     ought surely to hurt. Indeed, given the implication of sugar in the 
     development of the Atlantic slave trade, the American plantation 
     system, the development of banking, credit, and other fiduciary 
     devices in the inauguration of capitalism, I would expect Adorno to 
     urge that the concept of sugar must be very bitter indeed to the 
     critical intelligence that is mindful to "constellate" the concept, 
     including the brutal history, with the sensual and quotidian 
     spatio-temporality of your mocha latte. The proposition that "the 
     concept of sugar is not sweet" is true only in a trivial (and 
     trivializing) sense; "agony raised to a concept" can only be a lie if 
     in the raising conceptualization makes itself into an analgesic 
     against the agony. The very phrase protests the habit of thinking that 
     conceptualization "raises" painful material above (away from) 
     suffering: on the contrary, in Adorno the agony is what "the concept" 
     raises itself to. 

     "Agony Raised to a Concept" 

     9.	Hence, in "lending a voice to suffering," critique itself must be 
     painful. We might call this Adorno's "after-Auschwitz" imperative, 
     with the stipulation that in Adorno's work this critical affect long 
     pre-dates Auschwitz--not to mention that two of Adorno's most poignant 
     books (Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment) were composed, 
     literally, "during-Auschwitz." Dialectic of Enlightenment scorns the 
     official optimisms and triumphalisms of modernity's ideological 
     cheerleaders--from the "revolutionary" scenario of the Stalinist left 
     through the meliorist grand narrative of liberalism to the apocalyptic 
     fantasias of fascism--since it was in pursuit of these diversely 
     ideological happy endings that so much horror was unleashed. Whatever 
     their other conflicts, it was the policy of all three camps that the 
     needs of morale-management (propaganda) must cast critical questioning 
     and truth-telling of any kind as "defeatism" and "pessimism"--reminder 
     enough that critical "unhappy consciousness" like Adorno's was, in his 
     own lifetime, quite the reverse of ivory-tower indulgence. In the 
     context of this optimism/pessimism force-field, Adorno's citation of 
     Hegel as advocate for an awareness of human suffering is telling, 
     because it was Hegel's "optimism" as much as Marx's that underwrote 
     the official optimism of Soviet Marxist-Leninism. For many, especially 
     after the War, Hegel's sanguine view of human history seemed, 
     especially in light of Hegel's professional success post-1816, a 
     "false consciousness" or worse, a Panglossian dishonesty. Adorno often 
     chides Hegel on not dissimilar grounds ("the guaranteed paths to 
     redemption [are] sublimated magic practices" [Jephcott 18]); the Right 
     Hegelians did, after all, have a case.[3] 

     10. I think it's fair to say that every critique or reservation Adorno 
     mounts of Hegel involves this issue: the ideological delusions, the 
     imaginary consolations, the false consciousness, the bourgeois 
     "coldness" (Minima Moralia 26) of Hegel's "happy consciousness."[4] 
     There is for Adorno a "darker" Hegel--a Hegel of repressed-always-
     returning "unhappy consciousness"--and Hegelian precept and Hegelian 
     example figure everywhere in Adorno's work. The vocation of the 
     concept, the dialectic, mediation, contradiction, negation; the 
     imperative to rethink historically the un- or trans-historical 
     Platonic-Aristotelian "hypostases" of hallowed philosophical 
     tradition; the deconstruction (if you'll permit the anachronism) of 
     the hallowed metaphysical binary of appearance and reality, noumenon 
     and phenomenon; the insistence on the philosophical dignity of the 
     latter (that phenomena have, contra Plato, a "logos" and that there 
     is, in consequence, a phenomeno-logy): these and many other Hegelian 
     motives attest to Adorno's large investment in Hegel. Not for nothing 
     does Adorno observe, in one of the Beethoven fragments (#24): "In a 
     similar sense to that in which there is only Hegelian philosophy, in 
     the history of western music there is only Beethoven" (Beethoven 10).

     11. For Adorno as for Hegel, philosophy/critique is no ivory-tower 
     exercise for a "disinterested" elite, but rather a labor in the 
     service of humankind. Both write in the long "physician to an age" 
     tradition, which makes "unhappy consciousness" part of the illness to 
     be cured: this is the programmatic impulse registered in the serenity 
     of Hegel's own textual voice, which has so often seemed to the 
     politically conscious unduly "optimistic"--as if Hegel looked on the 
     horrors of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars with a smile 
     of unflappable composure.  Adorno's concern lest such textual effect, 
     or affect, be taken as a merely "subjective" expression of the author 
     has its analogue in Hegel's own cautions about the solicitations of 
     "unhappy consciousness." Hegel, we should remember, writes in the 
     historical moment when "happiness" first became charged with political
     and social meanings and emotions. Thomas Jefferson made its pursuit an 
     inalienable human right in an age when Rousseau, Lessing, Schiller, 
     Wordsworth and many others dared imagine a "sentimental" or "aesthetic 
     education" in which the promise of cultivated pleasures would supplant 
     corporal punishment as incentive to learning, indeed, to self-making. 
     (Compare the crucial role Hegel assigns in the Phenomenology to 
     Bildung, between "ethics" [Sittlichkeit] and "morality"  [Moralitat].) 
     It was after all the age of Schiller's "play," of his Ode "An Freude" 
     so stirringly set to music by Beethoven (and now the anthem of the 
     European Union), of the utopian visions of Fourier, Saint Simon, 
     Robert Owen. For these and other figures of the great Revolutionary 
     age, the thrilling prospect here was of "happiness" (or the pursuit 
     of it) as a collective, popular, democratic endowment or "right"--no 
     longer the elite privilege exclusive to those fortunate enough to be 
     philosophers, as it was for Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans, 
     and after (for all of whom eudaimonia was, again, a pursuit heavily 
     invested in dispassion). 

     12. Hegel of course knows that happiness, especially collective human 
     happiness, is easier said than done: how, in an age of revolutionary 
     and counterrevolutionary violence, to keep from despairing over your 
     morning newspaper--this is precisely the problem with which Hegel 
     grapples in the famous "slaughterbench of history" passage in his 
     1830 lectures on The Philosophy of World History. Hegel doesn't 
     merely own that history is a nightmare; his further aim is to 
     prescribe for the demoralization that historical consciousness 
     entails. Hegel notes first the simplest defense-mechanism--self-
     congratulation on having escaped the carnage: 


     we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful 
     reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our 
     individual life--the Present formed by our private aims and interests. 
     In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet 
     shore, and thence enjoy in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks 
     confusedly hurled." (21) 


     But the other temptation, the more dangerous one, Hegel seems to 
     imply, anticipating Nietzsche, is ostentatious despair of the 
     breast-beating and hand-wringing sort. Such "sentimentalities" (as 
     Hegel calls them) can become self-perpetuating, for 


     it is not the interest of such sentimentalities, really to rise above 
     those depressing emotions; and to solve the enigmas of Providence 
     which the considerations that occasioned them, present. It is 
     essential to their character to find a gloomy satisfaction in the
     empty and fruitless sublimities of that negative result. (21; see 
     also 34-5) 


     Only Terry Eagleton still chides Adorno's "during-Auschwitz" despair 
     as "defeatism," but to many others today it can still seem to be 
     precisely such a kind of critical "unhappy consciousness": at best a 
     merely personal whining, at worst a kind of moral Pecksniffery, in 
     either case a source of (Hegel) "gloomy satisfactions" that can 
     become compulsive or addictive in the fashion most recently theorized 
     ("Enjoy your symptom!") in Slavoj Zizek's ingenious reinventions of 
     Lacan, or protested in accents of Nietzschean brio in the "kynicism" 
     of Peter Sloterdijk. Adorno, as it happens, anticipates these very 
     objections in a fragment in Minima Moralia (written contemporaneously 
     with Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the last year of World War Two): 


     Subjective reflection, even if critically alerted to itself, has 
     something sentimental and anachronistic about it: something of a 
     lament over the course of the world, a lament to be rejected not for 
     its good faith, but because the lamenting subject threatens to become 
     arrested in its condition and so to fulfill in its turn the law of the 
     world's course. Fidelity to one's own state of consciousness and 
     experience is forever in temptation of lapsing into infidelity, by 
     denying the insight that transcends the individual and calls his 
     substance by its name. (16; on the following page the "name" is 
     spelled out: "society is essentially the substance of the individual.") 


     I take "good faith" here to be ironic: Adorno is accusing "such 
     sentimentalities" (as Hegel calls them) of something very like a 
     Sartrean "mauvaise foi," a moralized or psychologized version of 
     Rousseau's "amour-propre," a (dubiously) "good faith" that Adorno 
     wants to turn, like a Nietzsche in reverse, into a "bad conscience." 
     What gives critical "unhappy consciousness" its validity is that it 
     belongs to "the matter at hand," and to the critique of it, not 
     merely to the subjectivity of the critic. 

     13. Some qualifications are necessary here: Hegel posits "unhappy 
     consciousness" (Phenomenology 111-38) to diagnose precisely the sort 
     of moral addiction or compulsion outlined above. He presents it as 
     coincident historically with the advent of Christianity in the 
     Mediterranean world, and as confluent with Greco-Roman Skepticism and 
     Stoicism. For Hegel, "unhappy consciousness" expresses a relation to 
     some "beyond" that is inaccessible in this world; it thus assumes an 
     "abstract negation" of this-worldly attachments, and of the very 
     possibility of this-worldly happiness as such. For this specific but 
     chronic historical-spiritual disorder, Hegel believes that the 
     fullness of history has, in the modern age, at last enabled a 
     philosophical remedy, which the Phenomenology prescribes: a critical 
     self-consciousness that will redeem the promise of this-worldly 
     happiness by the practice of "determinate negation." Hegel 
     distinguishes between the two kinds of negation, "abstract" versus 
     "determinate": "abstract negation" is negation wholesale, allowing for 
     no discriminations of quality; it thus enjoys the all-or-nothing force 
     of merely quantitative judgment, and entoils itself in all the 
     regressions of "bad infinity"--a formula anticipating the Thanatos of 
     the implacably punitive super-ego diagnosed by Freud. "Determinate 
     negation," by contrast, is qualitative: it negates (criticizes) some 
     particular state of things, and with a particular concept of some 
     better state of things to replace or "sublate" it. "Determinate 
     negation" thereby contributes to the coming-into-existence of a 
     better world. 

     14. The later Hegel was wont (as his younger self was not) to portray 
     this process in providential Christian terms. Christianity originated 
     in the "abstract" (or "symbolic") and Asiatic consciousness of ancient 
     Judaism, but by virtue of its long and shaping experience in Western 
     history--the Hellenization that assimilated it with art and 
     philosophy, the Romanization that politicized it and accommodated it 
     to the needs of statecraft, and the Germanization that suffused it 
     with the spirit, even the libido, of freedom--Christianity so evolved 
     as to realize, in modern times, the qualitative fulfillment or 
     "incarnation" of what had originally been its merely "abstract"      
     promise: the realization, from the Asiatic premise that "one is 
     free," through the classical aristocracy of "some are free," to the 
     democratic ideal emerging in the revolutionary events of Hegel's own 
     lifetime that "all are free," that the state should represent all 
     citizens.

     15. To the extent that Hegel intends "unhappy consciousness" as a 
     diagnosis or symptomatics of a malaise specific to the mood or mode 
     of "abstract negation," it might seem exactly the wrong phrase to      
     apply to the textual effect or affect of Adorno's critical project, 
     which always seeks to "objectify" its claims, to refuse any 
     construction of them as "merely subjective." But the passage just 
     quoted makes clear that the distinction between "subject" and "object" 
     is one that Adorno's writing practice, no less than his arguments in 
     such essays as "On Subject and Object" (Critical Models 245-58), 
     effectively refutes--for the passage not only diagnoses the malaise 
     in question, but confesses its own infection as well. "The lamenting 
     subject" suffers this malaise or "unhappy consciousness" will he or 
     nill he--"even if [especially if?] critically alerted to [him]self." 
     Where Hegel proposed a rationale for overcoming "unhappy 
     consciousness" and attempted to realize it as an effect or affect in 
     his philosophical writing, Adorno more conflictedly insists that the 
     despair of the critic cannot and should not be so complacently 
     "overcome" in the critique: it is stuff and substance of "the matter 
     in hand," of the problems critique addresses. To claim to have 
     transcended or "sublated" "unhappy consciousness" is for Adorno a 
     false consciousness, "an imaginary solution to a real contradiction." 

     Hegel's "Happy Consciousness"? 

     16. For Adorno, clearly, the premise of Hegel's "optimism" is 
     generally circulated too simple-mindedly. In every chapter of the 
     Phenomenology, after all, the human race, groping after happiness, 
     relapses into ironically inventive and original new forms of "unhappy 
     consciousness." Indeed, the narrative of Hegel's Phenomenology is 
     scarcely less insistent than the Bible itself that moral misery is 
     both chronic and productive for humankind, from Genesis 3's access 
     of shaming knowledge, or knowledge-as-shame, to Paul's "I had not 
     known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet" (Rom. 7:7), 
     and John of Patmos's "Revelation" of the fury of divine vengeance. In 
     the Bible, "consciousness" is regularly projected as both effect and 
     cause of pain, fear, suffering and anguish of spirit--"For in much 
     wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth 
     sorrow" (Eccles. 1:18). Greco-Roman culture does the same, from the 
     tears of Achilles and Priam, the family curse driving the Oresteia, 
     and the fated suffering of Oedipus to the lachrymae rerum of Vergil. 
     Greek philosophy projected a relief from such suffering, and in the 
     narrative of Hegel's Phenomenology, "Reason" makes its "first, and 
     therefore imperfect, appearance" with "the beyond" of the 
     "supersensible world" (87-8), a passage allegorizing the advent, in 
     Socrates and Plato, of the high philosophic tradition. The elite 
     subculture of ancient Greek "philosophy" was strongly invested in 
     overcoming affective unhappiness, and often philosophy seems 
     virtually "identifiable" with eudaimonia, a "happiness" whose     
     condition is liberation not merely from unhappy affects, but from 
     affect as such. In the Plato-and-Aristotle tradition, affect itself 
     is unhappy, and the eudaimonia of the philosophers is projected 
     precisely as antidote or narcotic (Eagleton's "anaesthetic") against 
     the vagaries of affect rather than as a redemption of happiness in 
     any affective sense. 

     17. Viewed through the historical lens of Hegelian "unhappy 
     consciousness," the Greek discovery of what Hegel calls "the 
     supersensible" appears as too complacently oriented to the apatheia 
     of "the beyond"; on Hegel's showing, not until Christianity 
     humanized the transcendent as "God" incarnate, and abjected itself 
     before this God as a slave before its master, could unhappiness 
     provide "Reason" with its proper (because at last duly cathected) 
     challenge, that of overcoming unhappiness and abjection as such. 
     Greek "Reason" was de-anthropomorphized; it could not thus appear 
     as "master" in relation to the philosopher-"slave"; only as projected 
     in human form can God, or "Reason," inspire the kind of unhappiness 
     that becomes consciousness in the first place. To say that in Hegel's 
     Phenomenology it is Reason that incarnates itself in human form is to 
     indicate Hegel's most fundamental reinscription of Christianity. 
     "Reason is the slave of the passions": Hume's aphorism, read Hegel-
     wise, may illuminate my point here, stipulating of course that "the 
     passions" are the unhappy ones. Hegel projects "Reason" as the slave 
     destined, in abjection to the master, first to conceive and finally 
     to attain an "independent [and "happy"] self-consciousness" that the 
     master will never know. Try to project this allegory onto the Greek 
     philosophical tradition, and you get a notably chillier picture: 
     something like Plato's Republic, with the philosophers as "guardians"
     in serene service to Logos itself as represented by, but precisely 
     not personified or incarnated in, the philosopher-king, spinning the 
     ideological fictions necessary to keep the benighted populace happily 
     in the dark of the benignly ideological cave. Not for Plato and 
     Aristotle, elite beneficiaries--"masters"--of a "some are free" 
     society, any consciousness or idealization of the self as slave. 
     Only in Diotima's allegory of love in the Symposium does ancient 
     Greek "philosophy" approach an abjected self-idealization, and an 
     "unhappy consciousness" that is dynamic and productive, because 
     affective, in anything like Hegel's way.[5] How telling that its 
     name should be "love." 

     18. So much, on Hegel's showing, for "the first, and therefore 
     imperfect appearance of Reason." By contrast, at the close of the 
     "unhappy consciousness" section, Hegel stages for "Reason" a more 
     consequential second coming. The closing paragraph dramatizes the 
     unhappy consciousness's search for "relief from its misery" 
     (Phenomenology 137); its very last sentence announces the advent to 
     consciousness of "the idea of Reason." What immediately follows, the 
     next unit of the text, is the section (about a fifth of the 
     Phenomenology ) called "Reason." In the "unhappy consciousness" 
     section, the alienations of "the beyond" are entoiled in early 
     Christianity's abjected sense of sin and guilt ([Spirit's] 
     "action . . . remains pitiable, its enjoyment remains pain" [138]), 
     and the search for a "relief" from such "miseries" involves the 
     "sublation" of such antithetical categories as action and obedience, 
     guilt and forgiveness, particular self-surrender and universal will, 
     by the ministrations of a "mediator," a word whose antithetical 
     connotations for a Protestant (Christ/priest) Hegel leaves in play, 
     evidently to register the ambivalence of the Christian legacy. The 
     driving force in Hegel's narrative is "the negative," the "unrest" 
     and "counterthrust" associated with the not-at-all 
     Platonic/Aristotelian theme of "freedom": markers of Hegel's 
     determination to portray the very conflictedness of his World-Spirit 
     history--and the affective no less than the logical extremity of its 
     painful contradictions--as the agonizing but creative ordeal from 
     which "the idea of Reason" first emerges in a form sufficiently 
     "dialectical" to meet (or inaugurate) the challenges of the human 
     story that Hegel wants to tell. Only as incited by affect 
     ("unhappy consciousness") does (Hegelian) "Reason" effectively enter, 
     and change, history. 

     19. The Hegelian grand narrative projects the fulfillments of Spirit 
     as still far off, as "not yet," and so qualifies Hegel's supposed 
     "optimism." The "slaughterbench of history" passage amply attests to 
     Hegel's own "mental torture" at the state of the world, the misery 
     against which the "optimism" of his writing, style as well as 
     substance, attempts something like an exorcism, a performativity in 
     the spirit of "fake-it-till-you-make-it," a veritable therapy for the 
     Weltgeist at large, anticipating "joyful sciences" from Nietzsche and 
     William James's "healthy-mindedness" to Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. 
     Brown, and the self-esteem or "recovery" movement of today. One of 
     Hegel's own most striking ideograms (or "constellations") for this 
     project is reserved for the climactic lines that conclude the 
     Phenomenology where the "Calvary of absolute Spirit" is juxtaposed to 
     the secularized image of the sacramental chalice of communion from 
     Schiller's "Ode to Friendship" (493; for shrewd comment on Hegel's 
     misquotations of the Schiller, see Koj


     this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of 
     thought, of the pure "I." Death, if that is what we want to call this 
     non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast 
     what is dead requires the greatest strength. . . . But the life of 
     Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself 
     untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and 
     maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter 
     dismemberment, it finds itself. . . . Spirit is this power only by 
     looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying 
     with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. 
     This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject. 
     (Phenomenology 19) 



     Spirit's near-death experience lends itself to our thematics of the 
     "labor of affects": overcoming ataraxia in a liberation or 
     re-animation of affect, as fundamental to, even constitutive of 
     Spirit's project, and its eventual reward--a project proleptic of 
     many nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinventions of heroism as a 
     psychological quest-ordeal, from Wordsworth and Coleridge, Baudelaire 
     ("Voyage a Cythere"), Browning's "Dark Tower" to Eliot's The Waste 
     Land, from the sensationalisms of Delacroix and Gericault to 
     Nietzsche's "strong pessimism" and Wagner's grandiose dooms, to Freud 
     (Everyman an Oedipus of anguishing self-inquiry) and Mann and Valery. 
     And, of course, Adorno. Any such list risks silliness, but it seems to 
     me that Hegel's supposed "optimism" has too long obscured his place in 
     the range of figurations and applications of "tarrying with the 
     negative."


     20. "Unhappy consciousness," then, is a chronic human problem, 
     something like, if not a "human nature," then a chronic foible of our 
     "species-being." But there is a more (so to speak) parochial 
     manifestation of the problem, the "unhappy consciousness" very 
     specifically of critique. Adorno indicts critique for shirking the 
     "labor of the concept" with a plangency, an "unhappy consciousness" 
     palpable and audible in the very tone and voice of his prose, in a 
     way to forbid the forgiving thought that critique's fault has been 
     merely a kind of laziness, or stupidity; the further premise that the 
     labor of conceptualization implies also a "labor of affectualization" 
     evokes deficits more morally cathected, deficits of honesty and of 
     courage as well. It is a prominent theme in Dialectic of 
     Enlightenment that "enlightenment" congratulates itself for its 
     courage in facing a demythologized world stripped of the comforts of 
     traditional illusions, but has proven itself to be motivated, no less 
     than "myth" itself, by a drive to master and/or deny "fear," to 
     achieve an "imaginary" comfort or self-assurance in face of a world 
     more complicated and threatening than enlightenment thereby dares 
     to acknowledge. 

     21. Hegel makes similar observations, though (usually) more as satiric 
     jabs at common-sense philosophizing than as Adorno's lamentation over 
     culture-wide pathologies. Hegel, indeed, diagnoses every possible 
     reason for what we might call a "resistance to philosophy"--fear of a 
     death-like "loss" of the self in "doubt and despair" (Phenomenology 
     18-20, 49-51), "shame" at confronting the intellectual challenge and 
     the "alien authority" of the new (35), "the conceit that will not 
     argue" (41), narcissistic "enjoyment" in (or fixation on) one's own 
     unwittingly tautological "explanations" (94, 101). The one obstacle 
     that does not occur to Hegel is the reader's potential intellectual 
     incapacity: Hegel writes not only as a writer/thinker utterly 
     undaunted by the prodigious complexities his inquiry generates for 
     itself, but as if in entire confidence that any reader not 
     debilitated by the moral deficits just mentioned will be fully 
     capable of following where Hegel leads. (I will confess to moments of 
     thinking this the most extravagantly utopian of Hegel's many dizzying 
     "optimisms.") When Hegel notes that "a fear of falling into error 
     sets up a mistrust of Science," he is referring to the enlightenment 
     program, since Bacon and Descartes, of arriving at truth by 
     eliminating all error and illusion: a skeptical, Occam's-razor 
     approach predicated on the hope that when error has been pared away, 
     the remainder will be truth. But Hegel advises that we should 
     "mistrust this very mistrust": 



     Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not 
     just the error itself? Indeed this fear takes something--a great deal 
     in fact--for granted as truth . . . [e.g.,] certain ideas about 
     cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is 
     a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it 
     presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the 
     other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; 
     or in other words, it presupposes that cognition which, since it is 
     excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, 
     is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of 
     error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth. (Phenomenology 47) 



     Hegel goes on to diagnose what appears as merely intellectual error 
     in psychological terms, as a vanity and insecurity vitiating the 
     intellectual courage of the inquirer. (Hegel becomes something of a 
     psychologist of the foibles specific to intellectuals, an impulse and 
     an interest Adorno continues.) Hegel indicts this unwitting "fear of 
     the truth" as rationalizing an "incapacity of Science," as indeed 
     "intended to ward off Science itself, and constitute an empty      
     appearance of knowing." What Hegel calls "natural consciousness" 
     (empiricism, that is, "sense certainty" elevating itself to a 
     scientific claim) resists the "path" of the Notion (a.k.a. "the labor 
     of the concept") because "the realization of the Notion, counts for it 
     [natural consciousness] as the loss of its own self" (Phenomenology 
     49). "The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or 
     more precisely as the way of despair"--shades here of "tarrying with 
     the negative" (19)--and "natural consciousness," economizing its 
     experiential investments to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, 
     shrinks from the discomforts of such a path. But for Hegel, this 
     despair and doubt are part of the "necessary progression and 
     interconnection of the forms of the unreal ["natural"] consciousness 
     [that] will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series" 
     (50). Hegel goes on to outline, in effect, a therapy of Geist in its 
     struggles with such despair and doubt, with the "anxiety" that 
     attends them, with the "sentimentality" that resorts to a wishful 
     optimism or eudaemonism against them, with the "conceit" that will 
     tempt Geist to fortify its "vanity" in the face of such threats of 
     "loss of self." Hegel ends with the promise that the "unrest" of 
     thought will eventually overcome the "inertia" these despairs 
     produce, to renew the quest for truth or "the Absolute" (51-3). 


     22. For Adorno, Hegel's concluding promise rings false because Hegel 
     speaks as if it were not a "broken promise" in the here-and-now      
     world. Hegel's genial and confident tone, in effect, belittles the 
     resistance to philosophy--as if to laugh us out of our intellectual 
     timidity--and offers its own brio as, so to speak, a down-payment on 
     the world-historical promise of eventual redemption and happy 
     consciousness. By contrast, Adorno, most of all in Dialectic of 
     Enlightenment, means to frighten us into new awareness: not only of 
     our very real peril, in the age of industrialized total war, but of 
     the numbness and despair with which we have so far confronted it--or 
     rather, contrived not to confront it. What Hegel satirizes as merely 
     local or personal resistances or failures within the discipline of 
     philosophical inquiry, Adorno diagnoses as a culture-wide pathology, 
     whose lethal potential is all too evident in the age of Auschwitz 
     and Hiroshima. 



     Fear and Enlightenment 

     23. The relevant response to that lethal potential is fear. In 
     Dialectic of Enlightenment, fear is both a key theme and an 
     overarching effect. In Adorno's philosophical and critical tradition, 
     fear, among the principal components of "unhappy consciousness," has 
     held a special, even a rather glamorous, place. In Hegel's 
     master/slave narrative, the "struggle for recognition" surmounts 
     nature only if life is at stake in the struggle. For the slave who 
     buys life at the cost of bondage, the trauma of mortal fear in combat 
     remains the necessary condition of the subsequent achievement of 
     "independence," "self-consciousness," and an instigating conception 
     of "being-for-self." Nietzsche similarly finds an authenticating 
     experience of "pure terror," "original pain," and the like as the 
     sine qua non of (just what wimpy modernity has closed its eyes to) 
     "tragedy"; absent such experiences of terror, there arises (has 
     already arisen) what Francis Fukuyama calls, following Kojeve's famous 
     splenetic "end of history" footnote (158-62, n6), the "last man" 
     problem: the fear that, should utopia ever arrive, humankind, 
     delivered at last from all mortal challenges, will devolve into a 
     thumb-sucking limbo of material complacency and moral insignificance. 
     This anxiety motivates the conflicted attachment of so many to 
     violence, as a guarantee (in ways Rene Girard diagnoses) of the values 
     lost upon the "last man." To be sure, anxieties lest the revolution 
     happen non-violently would seem to be overblown. But the prospect that  
     revolution might banish suffering and unhappiness altogether arouses 
     ambivalence. Even Marx, in the most utopian of the 1844 manuscripts, 
     the section called "Private Property and Communism," avows that come 
     the revolution, not all suffering will end, but only the "alienated" 
     kind: "for suffering, apprehended humanly, is an enjoyment of self 
     in man" (87). We need our fear, to make ourselves heroic. 

     24. Further ideological uses of a glamorized fear also figure in the 
     more individualized inflections of these themes running from 
     Kierkegaard to Heidegger and early Sartre, in which fear is the 
     guarantor of spiritual maturity and courage, a sort of macho 
     philosophique, an openness of the self to moral extremities of fear 
     and anxiety, refusal or innocence of which would be inauthenticity 
     or "mauvaise foi." In Kierkegaard, although the "religious" is the 
     valorized other of the merely "aesthetic" life--Kierkegaard's 
     version of the "last man" vacuity--the political itself appears as, 
     categorically, aesthetic: an evasion of the more challenging fears     
     and tremblings that Kierkegaard projects as the exclusive (why not 
     say) "enjoyments" of the most authentically lived life. Similarly 
     in Heidegger, a courageous "being-towards-death" individuates and 
     valorizes the existential Dasein against the massed, faceless, 
     inauthentic "they" ("das Man"); compare Lacan's grammatologized and 
     historicized version of the story of the devolution of "modern man" 
     from subject-"je" into object-"moi." Adorno was prescient in 
     complaining that such rhetorics resonated all too readily with the 
     political vulgarizations of the cheerleaders for Thanatos ("Viva la 
     muerte!") and the SS bermenschen flouting death's-head insignia, 
     encouraged by Himmler in explicitly Nietzschean language ("self-
     overcoming," etc.) to withstand the urgings of conscience that would 
     impede them in their heroic task of massacring the innocents. 


     25. For Adorno, by contrast, "the goal of the revolution is the 
     elimination of anxiety. That is why we need not fear the former, and 
     need not ontologize the latter" (Complete Correspondence 131). For me, 
     indeed, one of the most attractive things about Adorno is his visceral 
     refusal of any such glamorization of fear, not least because the 
     "violence" of which some intellectuals speak so grandiosely is often 
     merely figurative--indeed, sheerly "imaginary." Hegel's "tarrying with 
     the negative" ("to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest 
     strength") becomes in Adorno the more muted formula, "the embittering 
     part of dialectics" (Negative Dialectics 151). Not for him the 
     accents of Zarathustrian bravado, snook heroically cocked at the 
     void. Adorno is more like Freud (and, with qualifications, Marx) 
     in conceiving fear as a humiliation, a non-elective ordeal imposed on 
     us by the brutality of our historical circumstances, a suffering that 
     may or may not elicit heroism from some of the sufferers, but that is 
     sure to damage and debase, not to ennoble, most of its victims. Like 
     Freud, Adorno distrusts rhetorics that align the experience of fear 
     with moral grandeur or spiritual profit, including those, like the 
     "last man" anxiety, that put the case negatively. For Adorno, indeed, 
     to posit the debasement of the "last man" as an argument against 
     utopia would be ideological delusion: as if the "last man" 
     deprivations weren't already epidemic in the nightmare of our 
     "administered world." The motive Adorno most readily shares with 
     Lacan, though Adorno's moral plangency is at the farthest possible 
     remove from Lacan's knowing Schadenfreude, would be precisely his 
     alarm at the masochistic human addiction to misery, to 
     sentimentalizing rhetorics of amor fati, to the problematic neatly 
     summarized by Zizek's sarcastic injunction "Enjoy your symptom!" and 
     instantiated by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kojeve). Like 
     Lacan, again, Adorno aligns this "weakening of the ego" with a 
     "neutralization of sex," a "desexualization of sexuality" (Critical 
     Models 72-5) that oddly joins Marcuse's "repressive desublimation" 
     with de Rougemont's extension of the Nietzschean "last man" lament to 
     Eros. About the administered world's "castrated hedonism, desire 
     without desire," Adorno's diagnosis would be very much the Lacanian 
     shake of the head at having given way on desire (Aesthetic Theory 11). 
     (One recalls here Weber's "iron cage," "sensualists without heart," 
     etc., in the peroration to The Protestant Ethic.)

     26. So Adorno affects no pose, la Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and 
     Heidegger, of facing down the abyss from which the rest of us cower 
     away in denial; nor, on the other hand, does he make as if to smile 
     it away, as Hegel does. If Adorno's critical "unhappy consciousness" 
     avoids the Scylla of Hegelian "optimism," it equally steers clear of 
     the Charybdis of (self-regardingly) "strong pessimism[s]" of the 
     anti-utopian type so often mobilized in critiques of modernity. 
     Adorno's anxieties about modernity are not Huxleyan, but Orwellian, 
     conjuring not the pampered "last man" whom Nietzsche so haughtily 
     disdains, but rather the brutalized "administered subject" whose 
     abasement before the domination of a "rationalized" world is achieved 
     at the price of a "weakening of the ego" to produce the ironically 
     named "authoritarian personality," disciplined and conditioned in the 
     regimes of the workplace and the routines of commodified pleasure as 
     managed by the culture industry, a colonizing and exploiting     
     appropriation, "for others," of all "spirit," of all subjecthood. 


     The 1944 "Introduction" 

     27. Written during the darkest days of World War Two, while Horkheimer 
     and Adorno were refugees in the U.S., the Dialectic of Enlightenment 
     manifests the "unhappy consciousness of critique" as a deliberate 
     cathexis of fear in writing. Keeping the date of composition in 
     mind--late 1943 to early 1944: "during Auschwitz"--the book aims to 
     arouse the fear narcotized in enlightenment chorismos, the "division 
     of labor" which assigns feeling and thinking to different agencies 
     (art and science) to the detriment of both. ("The narrow-minded 
     wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands 
     together when it finds the two balanced is--as trivialities sometimes 
     are--the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the 
     division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity" 
     [Aesthetic Theory 331]). Horkheimer and Adorno project the ataraxia 
     that enlightenment makes programmatic as foundational to the 
     "dialectic of enlightenment" the book means to diagnose. Later in his 
     career, Adorno frequently avowed the ambition to "rescue" this or 
     that ambition, program, or value that modernity is in danger of 
     forgetting; the project of excavating the "emotional force" of 
     Kant's philosophy (above) is an example, but it is a dim echo of the 
     much more urgent, larger-stakes effort in Dialectic of Enlightenment 
     to reawaken the energy of terror against which the enlightenment has 
     deludedly, compulsively numbed itself. Fear is not merely the "textual 
     effect" or affect of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also the 
     "motivation" of its thematic or indeed thetic burden, announced in 
     the book's opening sentences: 

     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. (Jephcott 1) 


     The book will go on to argue--or I had better say, to evoke, 
     agitatedly, breathlessly, and reiteratively, in a way to enact its 
     thematic of the deadlock or "standstill" that has reversed the 
     developed world's "progress" into "regress"--that so far from having 
     "liberated [ourselves] from fear," our very fear of fear, our 
     anxious repression of our cultural and historical anxieties, has left 
     us enslaved to fear every bit as much as the primitive trapped in the 
     cycle of compulsive rituals that palliate the terror of human 
     impotence in a terrifying world. Enlightenment prides itself on 
     having escaped that cycle, but this very pride has become an 
     illusion and a denial, a "sympathetic magic" against dreads cognate 
     with those that entrap the primitive; the devolution of philosophy 
     into positivism and technology has made of "scientific method" a 
     denial of the unknown, an ethos that assimilates the unknown to the 
     known, the new and the different to the "same old same old." 


     28. Hence our aborted "enlightenment," "triumphant calamity," progress 
     reverting to barbarism, in obedience to an as-if fated "compulsion to 
     repeat." Hence "the curse of irresistible progress is irresistible 
     regression" (Jephcott 28). The fear of fear itself has driven 
     enlightenment to an illusory exorcism of fear, made this impulse its 
     analgesic, its will to deny, in short, its "imaginary victory" over 
     fear, a freedom from fear the more delusional, and (therefore) the 
     more compulsive, the more terror threatens to engulf it. The social 
     and other dislocations of modernization produced turmoil because the 
     new is frightening--and it's a collective reflex in societies engulfed 
     by rapid development to try to master collective fear by refusing the 
     new. Whatever affronts or perplexes or challenges enlightenment's 
     canons of domestication arouses "fear," which enlightenment promptly 
     and preemptively represses. "The cause of enlightenment's relapse into 
     mythology is to be sought . . . in the fear of truth which petrifies 
     enlightenment itself" (Jephcott xvi). 


     29. What the book argues about fear, repression, and the anxiety of 
     the new, it also enacts in the writing. Against the backdrop of World 
     War Two, the contrast of Horkheimer and Adorno's authorial carriage 
     with Freud's is a useful handle. Freud's "stoic" composure--the 
     shocking disclosures delivered in tones of measured calm; the outrages 
     to common sense and morals rendered only the more stinging for the      
     lucidity of the delivery; the scandalized "resistances" to his work 
     which Freud anticipates, and serenely takes as confirmation of it--all 
     this is at the furthest remove from Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose 
     prose is overwrought, urgent, and (often) recklessly obscure. And 
     deliberately, self-consciously so, as we can read in the book's 1944 
     "Introduction," a manifesto in justification of the book's obscurity 
     and difficulty. The argument evokes and coordinates three axes of 
     "difficulty," each motivating, and motivated by, the others: the 
     psychological difficulty of our traumatic history, past, present, and 
     future; the intellectual difficulty of the philosophic-critical 
     tradition whose materials the argument mobilizes; and the darkly 
     enigmatic carriage of the self-consciously, deliberately difficult 
     prose style of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself. 


     30. Dated "May 1944," just days before the allied landings in 
     Normandy, and reprinted without change in subsequent editions and 
     translations, the "Introduction" insists that the "difficulties" 
     of the text are not to be set aside, that they are bone and blood 
     of the book's argument and intended effect, indeed, of its project 
     and its problem: that they are "motivated," programmatic, in ways 
     the authors outline, "make thematic," in the "Introduction" itself. 
     If the text proper enacts or performs--the mot juste here is 
     suffers--the difficulties of "the matter in hand," the 
     "Introduction" more explicitly reflects on them, and thus 
     initiates the challenge of the text. From almost the opening 
     sentence, the difficulties of the project are foregrounded: 


     The further we proceeded with the task the more we became aware 
     of a mismatch between it and our own capabilities. What we had 
     set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, 
     instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind 
     of barbarism. We underestimated the difficulty of dealing with the 
     subject. (Jephcott xiv) 


     The echo of Rousseau's famous lament--"man," born free, lives 
     everywhere in chains--announces an attempt "to explain why" this 
     should be so; the following sentence similarly conjures with the 
     eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in a way to suggest, Marx's 
     provocation notwithstanding, that "interpreting" the world is quite 
     difficult enough, even in default of changing it, and assumes (what 
     Marx can only rhetorically have seemed to question) that there is 
     continuity, not antithesis, between interpreting the world and 
     changing it. In any case, "consciousness" is not a problem Horkheimer 
     and Adorno are prepared to dismiss: 


     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. . . . 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 the last remaining      
     innocence regarding the habits and tendencies of the Zeitgeist. 
     (Jephcott xiv) 



     What had initially looked to be a set of "specialist" problems 
     ("sociology, psychology, and epistemology") turns out to challenge 
     "philosophy" itself--and to challenge it not only on its wonted 
     ground of "theoretical" awareness but also, more radically, on the 
     higher-stakes ground of politics, culture, science, and the very 
     fate of civilization, grounds on which philosophy has wanted to 
     maintain a detached "innocence" that, Horkheimer and Adorno charge, 
     even the most willfully "innocent" can no longer pretend is tenable. 
     The urgency of the crisis is to be read in the very texture, the      
     very "fragmentary" quality, of the text we are about to read: we 
     might have expected that the move from specialist disciplines to 
     the discipline of disciplines, philosophy, would entail an 
     integration and comprehensiveness denied the specialisms (or rather, 
     that the specialisms renounce on principle); instead, Horkheimer and 
     Adorno's "philosophical" effort to overcome the fragmentation of 
     intellectual culture can itself yield only "fragments." In the context 
     of 1944, a phrase like "the tireless self-destruction of 
     enlightenment" might have suggested images from front pages and 
     newsreels of bombed-out cities, whole cultures reduced to rubble, to 
     "fragments." As we'll see, Horkheimer and Adorno diagnose 
     enlightenment as a rapaciously "analytic" (that is, atomizing, 
     separating, distinction-making) habit or drive, or driven-ness, 
     of thought that has already, in the name of science, fragmented 
     the field of intellectual labor from within. Enlightenment's 
     divvying-up of disciplinary turf, modernity's settlement of the 
     "contest of faculties" thematized by Kant, this "innocence," this 
     renunciation of the larger, integrated, theoretically aware or 
     "self-conscious" view that opens itself to the largest problems of 
     the culture, is a large part of the problem, a major symptom--indeed, 
     the pathology itself--of the "dialectic of enlightenment" Horkheimer 
     and Adorno aim to diagnose and to prescribe for.


     31. The effort "to explain why" the world is in such dire straits 
     obliges philosophy to overcome its wonted (ideological) "innocence," 
     to estrange or defamiliarize habits of thinking and of language 
     long since turned ideological: 


     If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned 
     inescapably into a commodity and language into a celebration of the 
     commodity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must 
     refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands 
     before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those 
     demands for world history. (Jephcott xiv-xv) 



     This seems a very "period" modernist or avant-garde disavowal of 
     received conventions, but also a warning--for "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" (Jephcott xvii). Renewal of our debased language 
     will involve expression and thinking, will contravene conventional      
     cultural "demands" that are both "linguistic and intellectual"; 
     the antinomy long dominant in Western critical discourses between the 
     "textual" and the "thetic" is to be collapsed, even something like 
     "deconstructed," not only in the argued theory but even more in the 
     self-consciously difficult writing practice of Dialectic of 
     Enlightenment.


     32. But in dissenting from "current linguistic and intellectual 
     demands" here, Dialectic of Enlightenment declares a crucial 
     difference from (even implies a critique of) avant-gardism as usual, 
     for in the modern arts, the search for new and uncorrupted 
     expressive means typically identifies the "concept," generically, 
     as the enemy, and mobilizes against it in the name of the "concrete" 
     particular, whose redemptive quidditas or "authenticity" the 
     familiarizations of intellect have allegedly habituated and 
     debased. (This axiomatic--why not call it an "ideology"?--replicates 
     itself, of course, in mates noirs, e.g., Heidegger, Jaspers, 
     Scheler.) The twentieth-century arts, too, want to reclaim "truth," 
     but usually by circumventing the very conceptuality Horkheimer and 
     Adorno set in place as a sine qua non of their project and conceiving 
     "truth" aesthetically, as "immediate [that is, unmediated] 
     experience." From the Hegelian viewpoint of Horkheimer and Adorno, 
     "mediation" simply is "the labor of the concept"; its repudiation, 
     in the arts as in the empirical sciences, is itself an important 
     symptom (Adorno's frequent name for it is "nominalism") of the 
     predicament of modernity--that is, of the "dialectic of 
     enlightenment"--that their book means to expose and indict. And 
     redeem or "rescue," in large measure, again, by the "labor of the 
     affects," that is, affectualizing "the labor of the concept" itself. 



     "Mythic Fear Turned Radical" 

     33. I want now to risk a very lengthy quotation that will display 
     these difficulties, and a few new ones, together. It is one of the 
     many projections in Dialectic of Enlightenment of the arc from 
     prehistory to the present, from animism to enlightenment, and it      
     enacts the "progress/regress" motif in the paradoxical gesture of 
     a narrative whose point is to enact the failure of its own progress, 
     to display the inextricability of progress and regression even at 
     the risk of seeming to identify terms whose non-identity would seem 
     to be the very condition of "dialectic" itself. So we have a thematic 
     burden carried less in the details of what the sentences state or 
     argue, than in the formal character of a passage that conducts 
     itself as a quasi- or (even) pseudo-narrative. Crucially, the 
     theme--the failure of progress, the regression to primitive 
     unreason--is charged with dread by reason of the very cryptic-ness 
     of its strange oracular utterance, its broad-brush laying about with 
     complex and loaded terminologies whose meanings or connotations 
     are not clarified or delimited, and above all its rhythm, its air 
     of driven and breathless haste: 



     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 concatenation 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 unknown 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 
     preponderance 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 of what 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. (Jephcott 10-11) 



     This passage illustrates the fundamental--and entirely 
     deliberate--narrative contradiction of Dialectic of Enlightenment, 
     for the momentum of the passage, its energy or, so to speak, 
     body-language as one reads, is narrative--we are reading a 
     story--and yet it is a rum question at the close what, if 
     anything, has been narrated. The passage ends much as it 
     began--enlightenment ends where animism began--in fearful denial 
     of the new or the "outside"; here as elsewhere, what is narrated 
     is the failure of the narrative to achieve narrativity, that is, 
     to accomplish the development, to unfold the new, which would be 
     the sine qua non of narrative, the crucial change or "event" 
     (outcome), the indispensable thing-to-be-narrated in the first 
     place. The burden of this (specifically narrative) "performative 
     contradiction" is that "the curse of irresistible progress is 
     irresistible regression" (Jephcott 28)--and the non-transitive 
     steady-state syntax of that sentence, subject and predicate 
     joined by the present-tense copula, could stand as emblem of just 
     what the narrative's progress/regress enacts, or rather prevents 
     being enacted. A particularly cryptic crux is the word 
     "tautology," here anticipating Adorno's later assault on 
     "identity thinking." In the passage, "tautology" is not, to be 
     sure, simply identifiable with "identity," but acts as something 
     like the surrogate of identity--of the retro- or primary identity 
     of the origin (archny philosophical texts, and hence some of the 
     Frankfurt School's particular "existentialist" b), not of the 
     ultimate identity (telos) of the "Absolute." As actant, in other 
     words, "tautology" appears here as the fated antagonist of 
     "language," of "separation," of apprehension of "the Other," of 
     non-identity, and of "dialectical thinking" itself: at the 
     recurrence of "fear," all achieved differences relapse, as if 
     in obedience to the downward pull of a gravitational field, back 
     to the ground of "tautology" again. 


     34. But Horkheimer and Adorno want to preserve the Hegelian 
     narrative as well as to cancel it; hence, near the middle of the 
     passage, the agitating appearance of "language," "concept," and 
     "dialectic" come onstage and momentarily seem, as narrative 
     actants, capable of breaching the closure of "tautology," the 
     regime from animism to enlightenment, and of enabling a truly 
     narrative movement of change. "Tautology" figures as their 
     nemesis, the ruin of all that they would seem to promise. From 
     the primitive awe of the spirit-name and its "linking horror 
     to holiness," the mere utterance of which becomes "expression" 
     and then "explanation," there arises a rudimentary anticipation      
     of "the division of subject and object," and hence the very 
     Hegelian sense that "language expresses the contradiction that 
     it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, 
     identical and not identical. . . . [thus] speech is transformed 
     from tautology into language." It is as much from the 
     interaction of these terms as from any extant notion we might 
     have of their meaning that we infer what "tautology," "language," 
     "dialectic," and so on, connote here, what role they play in the 
     "night of the world" drama unfolding on the page. 


     35. We note the entry here of "contradiction," a key term in 
     Frankfurt School discourses, and of the problematic of 
     "identity/non-identity" Adorno will later elaborate in Negative 
     Dialectics. In this passage, the next term to agitate the text is 
     "dialectic" itself, here staged as the condition of a redemption 
     of the "concept" from its demotion to "the unity of the features 
     of what it subsumes," a nominalist formulation that reduces the 
     "concept" to a mere enabling fiction. Against such nominalist 
     dismissals of "the concept," the text goes on to retroject what 
     Adorno elsewhere calls "the kinetic force of [the] concept" 
     (Philosophy of Modern Music 26) as Hegel "dialectically" 
     reimagined it, back into antiquity, asserting that the concept 
     "was . . . from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in 
     which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not." 
     The language of "dialectic" and "becoming" here summons the 
     highest Hegelian vocation of the concept and of philosophy, which 
     sets what can be thought against, and as the critique or 
     "negation" of, what merely is, as a volitional element in the 
     temporal stream (or narrative) of "becoming." Having introduced 
     the terminology, and the promise, of the dialectic, the passage 
     now reverts to program, to stage the miscarriage of that promise: 
     for "this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from 
     the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of 
     terror itself." ("Emerges from": enlightenment may suppose it has 
     surmounted the primal terror, but it has merely repressed it, and 
     thus, unconsciously, prolonged it.) The passage then moves to 
     enlightenment, which seeks to escape the "tautology of terror" by 
     "demythologization," by a systematic conquest of the source of 
     fear, the unknown, and its conversion to knowledge--but this 
     impotent dialectic continues despite itself, and unwittingly, to 
     "duplicate" the "tautology of terror" rather than to undo it. 


     36. That some such reversal or catastrophe befalls the 
     enlightenment program, the general drift of the passage makes 
     clear--though neither narratively nor, so to speak, 
     syllogistically, is the exact course of this miscarriage spelled 
     out. Rather there follows a sequence of problematic assertions,
     and oddly it is in the more obscure of these that the extent and 
     irony of the failure emerge most clearly--in, for instance, the 
     most challenging sentence here, which is also the shortest:
     "Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized" (Jephcott 11). It 
     happens this is a sentence ("Aufklarung ist die radikal 
     gewordene, mythische Angst" [Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 
     32]) that I prefer in Cumming's translation: "Enlightenment is 
     mythic fear turned radical" (16). Both wtranslations preserve the 
     etymological and other connotations of "radikal" in the German, 
     but that buzzword makes harder rather than easier the question of 
     what the sentence might mean. For the politically left reader 
     Horkheimer and Adorno address, the first connotations of "turned 
     radical" would be of progress, of "radicalization" as a desirable 
     conversion or development: something has advanced from a 
     complacent, muddled superficiality, has been "made conscious," has 
     been made political: radicalized. So far, the sentence might be 
     read as endorsing the very ideology of enlightenment that, the 
     context makes clear, the authors are in fact attacking. 


     37. Another first-take reading, not incompatible with the first, 
     might read "radicalized" or "turned radical" to suggest something 
     like an eruption or explosion of mythic fear, as if announcing a 
     sudden and transforming release of affects hitherto repressed and 
     held in check--and of course the sudden unblocking of 
     long-repressed energies is a familiar figure for revolution. But 
     again, context counsels otherwise--the "universal taboo" is 
     clearly a universal repression--so "radicalized" or "turned 
     radical" clearly must mean something else: must mean, indeed, 
     virtually the opposite: must mean something like, "enlightenment 
     is primordial fear precisely not bursting up into expression from 
     below, but on the contrary driven downward, back to the 
     fundamental, to the roots." "Radicalized," in short, might mean 
     "repressed"--the reverse of its usual connotation. The most 
     apposite model I can adduce here is Freud's account of trauma in 
     section IV of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, according to which 
     frightening stimuli "invade" the sensorium, which responds with a 
     defensive "hypercathexis" the paradoxical aim of which is to 
     achieve an "anticathexis," by means of which the floods of 
     overwhelming stimuli can be "mastered" and "bound," and rendered 
     thus "quiescent." (Freud is elaborating here the "compulsion to 
     repeat"--a model whose pertinence to Dialectic of Enlightenment 
     seems the more compelling for going unmentioned by the authors.)


     38. And yet, having worked through the twists and turns above, not 
     "cancelled" but "preserved" in all this conflictedness of 
     suggestion and connotation against context and larger thought-
     rhythms, there persists some residue, some still-utopian 
     potential, of the first reading: that enlightenment is indeed, or 
     may somehow again be, a radicalization of mythic fear in the 
     sense projected in the "labor of affectualization," in effect the 
     program of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself: to awaken the fear, 
     terror, angst, dread that "the dialectic of enlightenment" has so 
     far narcotized and repressed, and draw from the jolting accesses 
     of affect thereby released a newly radicalizing energy that will      
     make of "the unhappy consciousness of critique" an engine of 
     advance and of the new, rather than a pitfall, a syndrome--an 
     ataraxia--of defeat and repetition. 


     39. This "and yet," I want to argue, is the "dialectical" 
     condition and/or effect of Adorno's so affective and affecting 
     prose. His challenge is as much moral and emotional as 
     intellectual: as much about confronting fear--as immediate 
     affect, as mediated concept, as meta-fear: the fear of fear 
     itself--as about meeting the interpretive and cognitive 
     challenges of a tough text in the daunting tradition of Hegel-
     and-Marx and after. This text, both in the writing and in the 
     reading, enacts or suffers what it argues: the imperative labor 
     of facing, in thought and in feeling, the Angst that has 
     paralyzed thought and feeling both. The difficulty of the prose 
     is meant to inflict this Angst on the reader, this "labor and 
     suffering of the negative." But--"and yet"--it is meant to 
     agitate as well anxiety's antithetical or dialectical other, 
     hope--however unemphatic in the argument, however merely implicit 
     in the movement, of the text. 


     40. Most of my description here has made Dialectic of 
     Enlightenment sound like a very despairing book--extravagantly, 
     floridly despairing. It is indeed a text answering to Harold 
     Bloom's fine formulation, "an achieved anxiety" (96). But of 
     course Horkheimer and Adorno do not mean to incite affects of 
     fear for their own sake; that would be "mimesis" of the merely 
     ideological kind--mere "repetition" of "symptom," not critical 
     negation. On the contrary, their "immanent critique" intends 
     a "working-through" that must begin by making the traumas and 
     anxieties of World War Two available to consciousness, even at 
     the cost of terror, as indispensable prerequisite to any breach 
     of the paralyzing captivity in which modern consciousness has 
     languished. Adorno intimates as much in an unwontedly 
     straightforward passage from a 1967 essay, originally a radio 
     talk, called "Education after Auschwitz": 



     anxiety must not be repressed. When anxiety is not repressed, 
     when one permits oneself to have, in fact, all the anxiety that 
     this [after-Auschwitz] reality warrants, then precisely by doing 
     that, much of the destructive effect of unconscious and displaced 
     anxiety will probably disappear. (Critical Models 198) 



     Hence the paradoxical "textual effect" (or affect) of Dialectic 
     of Enlightenment, that what might seem Horkheimer and Adorno's ne 
     plus ultra of despair nevertheless achieves a kind of "relief" in 
     what seems at first merely to repeat the very affects from which 
     relief is sought. Only after an evocation of the pain and fear 
     that have paralyzed us can there be any release of affective 
     energies whose freeing might augur possibilities more hopeful: 
     that there remain potentials of consciousness (thought and 
     feeling, agony and concept, eros and knowledge)--potentials, in 
     short, of critique--still to be mobilized. The critical is not 
     yet--"not yet"--the utopian, nor is the promise (Stendhal's 
     promesse du bonheur) quite vouchsafed, let alone realized, its 
     "broken"-ness repaired. Nevertheless, for all its extremities of 
     Angst and terror, Dialectic of Enlightenment manages to arouse 
     hopes that Freud or Weber would dismiss with a sadder-but-wiser 
     shake of the head. 


     Critique and/as Utopia 

     41. I want to close with further consideration of how this 
     happens--this "labor of affectualization," this dialectical 
     transubstantiation of despair into something like hope. The 
     example above derived "hope" as something like a negatively 
     stated motif inferable from what looks to be on its face a very 
     dark passage indeed. I want now to locate such effects in, and 
     ascribe them to, the compositional form or rhythm of Horkheimer 
     and Adorno's text: in the climax of chapter 1 of Dialectic of 
     Enlightenment. We have been looking so far at passages from 
     that program chapter of the book, passages--"Enlightenment is 
     mythic fear turned radical," e.g.--that have evoked the evil, 
     the "triumphant calamity," of the "dialectic of enlightenment." 
     For more than three quarters of its length, the chapter has 
     diagnosed the "repression" of fear under whose pall 
     enlightenment has sleep-walked into terror and evoked the fear 
     itself to undo that repression. At a determinate point (we will 
     look at it shortly) the text introduces, then prosecutes, its 
     case for the necessity of critique--"thought" itself--as the only 
     possible relief of our predicament. But from this sanguine 
     argument, I want to elicit something more elusive: what I might 
     call an intimation of the utopian, or (perhaps better) a "utopia-     
     effect," that is less argued in the book's propositional content 
     or logic (the Bilderverbot against picturing utopia remains in 
     force), than enacted in its verbal energy, and even more in the 
     book's larger structural rhythms, its "through-composition," to 
     inflect the musical term with some of the connotations Adorno's 
     usage lends it, what he elsewhere calls the "agency of form" 
     (Notes on Literature 114). 


     42. The peroration, in the very last paragraphs of the chapter, 
     reprises the motif of "thought" and its agency here evoked as 
     "revolutionary imagination" and "unyielding theory": 


     The suspension of the concept, whether done in the name of 
     progress or of culture, which had both long since formed a 
     secret alliance against truth, 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 to 
     reactionary common sense, prematurely confirmed as eternal. In 
     declaring necessity the sole basis of the future and banishing 
     mind, in the best idealist fashion, to the far pinnacle of the 
     superstructure, socialism clung all too desperately to the 
     heritage of bourgeois philosophy. The relationship of necessity 
     to the realm of freedom was therefore treated as 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 uncomprehended 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 to control that antidote. The fault lies in a social 
     context 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 feels 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 fulfill 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 kings 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 of which "their 
     spials and intelligencers can give no news"--that is, nature 
     misunderstood by masterful science--are remembered 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 
     essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unmastered 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. 
     (Jephcott 32-4) 




     At the top of this final paragraph there is some wordplay in the 
     German (Indem er fr alle Zukunft die Notwendigkeit zur Basis 
     erhob und den Geist auf gut idealistich zur hochsten Spitze 
     depravierte, hielt er das Erbe der brogerlichen Philosophie allzu 
     krampfhaft fest [Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 58]) that is 
     better captured in the Cumming than in the Jephcott translation: 
     "By elevating necessity to the status of the basis for all time 
     to come, and by idealistically degrading the spirit for ever to 
     the very apex, socialism held on all too surely to the legacy of 
     bourgeois philosophy" (41). The play of "basis" and "apex" 
     indicts equally both the "realism" of bourgeois self-preservation 
     and the materialism of "official" Marxist-Leninism, and does so 
     most dazzlingly by way of its witty(geistreich) reversal of the 
     usual terms of the figure: bourgeois and socialist thought alike 
     have "elevated" necessity to the "basis," and "degraded" spirit 
     (Geist) to the "apex." For good measure, Horkheimer and Adorno 
     characterize this officially "materialist" gesture of Stalinist 
     orthodoxy as "idealist." Consciousness as volatile as that seems 
     almost to revoke its own "unhappiness" by sheer force of its wit: 
     or at least, putting thus in play (or standing on its head) the 
     clichd pyramid-image for the tired materialism/idealism 
     shibboleth, such wit twists materialism's all-too-righteous and 
     literal-minded tail. 


     43. Still, utopian consciousness isn't given its head; these 
     critical gestures are checked throughout by the reassertion of 
     our ideological condition (turning now to the Jephcott 
     translation): "By subjecting everything to its discipline,      
     [enlightenment] left the uncomprehended whole free to rebound 
     as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human 
     beings." But the reversion works both ways, in what had by now 
     begun to manifest as a regular rhythm of ideological condition 
     alternating with revolutionary possibility: "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." 


     44. This prose enacts the unremitting agon of a heroically 
     "unyielding theory" against the powers of what the passage 
     licenses us to call "domination uncomprehended": in the 
     passage's own terms, the agon is against "the suspension of 
     the concept"; in the Hegelian terms Horkheimer and Adorno evoke 
     throughout, their struggle is for a renewal of "der Arbeit des 
     Begriffs," the "labor of the concept." But "the oblivion in 
     which society allows thought to ossify" is a deficit not merely 
     of intellect, but of feeling as well: ataraxia, apathy, 
     anaesthesis, asceticism, "coldness," Odysseus roped to the mast, 
     the rowers with ears deliberately, technologically deafened 
     against song. The passage fuses concept and affect when it 
     includes diagnosis of the affects, and of the disease or 
     debilitated psychology or "learned helplessness" of the affects, 
     that its own dialectical "labor" means to "work through," 
     redeem, overcome. Horkheimer and Adorno seek to adapt categories 
     of individual psychological analysis to the domain of the social; 
     more audaciously than Freud--here their alignment is rather with 
     Hegel--they also mean to prescribe, for the social psychology of 
     the "damaged life," a "labor of concept and affect" that offers 
     some deliverance from "unhappy consciousness." As in Hegel there 
     is the premise that "unhappy consciousness" results when people 
     are alienated from their own powers and creations, which they 
     can no longer recognize as their own ("the mythical scientific 
     respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves 
     constantly create"): resentment against what we take to be an 
     externally "given reality" becomes at once shame at our 
     impotence to change it and guilt at our debilitated desire to do 
     so. In Horkheimer and Adorno's social diagnostic, "guilt" is not 
     the irredeemable liability with which wisdom resigns itself to 
     (at best) merely coping; rather, "the fault lies in a context 
     which induces blindness," in a resignation to complicity in      
     collective miseries that paralyzes the very energies that might 
     undo the self-perpetuating structure of collective injury. "That 
     might undo": sounds utopian? It can sound no other way, in an 
     "administered world" in which we have guiltily relinquished our 
     power, in which our deluded guilt converts our Promethean 
     potentialities into self-contempt and abjected, defeated passivity 
     before "the way it is": what Fredric Jameson, following Gunther 
     Anders, calls the "Promethean shame" (315). This is an abjection 
     cognate with that which Horkheimer and Adorno decry above, in 
     which "even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as 
     utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the 
     objective tendency of history." 


     45. In the energy of Horkheimer and Adorno's prose, there is a 
     "making conscious" as much affective as conceptual. 
     "Consciousness without shudder," we have quoted Adorno as saying, 
     "is reified consciousness." The implication is that unreified 
     consciousness, full subjectivity, involves affect as well as 
     cognition. If consciousness ensued (as in Hegel) from mere 
     perception and sensation--of "shudder," for example--"What later 
     came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind 
     anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder's own 
     development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, 
     the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell" 
     (Aesthetic Theory 331). In this "self-transcending" work Adorno 
     sees something very different from Aristotelian catharsis, 
     prototype of the instrumentalization of affects whose 
     culmination is the culture industry. Adorno opposes catharsis, 
     if that would mean simply the neutralization of affect, the 
     de-cathexis of what had been cathected: as he says elsewhere,      
     "[Aristotelian] catharsis is a purging action directed against 
     the affects and an ally of repression" (238). In Adorno's model, 
     the "shudder" persists in, indeed it simply is, "the reaction to 
     the total spell that transcends the spell. " It is both the 
     spell and its transcendence. Just such casting-and-transcending 
     of the "spell" under which enlightenment has lain numbed is the 
     textual effect I have wanted to elicit in Adorno--a "labor and 
     suffering of the negative" that "joins eros and knowledge" (331), 
     affect and concept, and not merely evokes, but enacts, what such 
     labor, sufficiently impassioned, can actually make of "the 
     unhappy consciousness of critique." 


     Department of English 
     University of Delaware
     helmling@udel.edu 

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     Notes 

     1. Citations of the Cumming translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment      
     appear hereafter as "Cumming"; citations of the Jephcott translation      
     appear hereafter as "Jephcott." Note here also a recent translation 
     of "Excursus I" of Dialectic of Enlightenment: "Odysseus or Myth and 
     Enlightenment," translated and with an introduction by Robert 
     Hullot-Kentor, in New German Critique 56 (Spring-Summer 1992): 101-42.

     2. On the motif of "rescue" ("Rettung") in Adorno, see Rolf Tiedemann's 
     note in Kant's Critique 239 n4.

     3. 


     Hegel's conception of life was so philosophical that conservatism, 
     revolution, and restoration, each in its turn, finds its justification 
     in it. On this point the socialist Engels and the conservative 
     historian Treitschke are in agreement; for both recognize that the 
     formula of the identity of the rational and the real could be invoked 
     equally by all political opinions and parties, which differ from one 
     another, not as to this common formula, but in determining what is the 
     rational and real, and what is the irrational and unreal . . . All the 
     wings of the Hegelian school variously participated in the revolution 
     of the nineteenth century, and especially in that of 1848. It was even 
     two Hegelians who wrote in that year the vigorous Communist Manifesto. 
     But the formula common to all of them was not an empty label; it stood 
     for the fact that the Jacobinism and crude naturalism of the century 
     of the "enlightenment" were henceforth ended, and that all men of all 
     political parties had learned from Hegel the meaning of true political 
     sense. (Croce, What is Living 67) 

     Contrast Croce's dry irony in those final words with the affective 
     extremity driving the theme in Dialectic of Enlightenment.


     4. For Hegel as a philosopher of happiness, see Forster 11-125.

     5. At this point I intended to insert a qualification to the effect that 
     my account here of "Reason" as a sort of narrative actant would apply 
     only to the Phenomenology, and not to Reason's profile elsewhere in 
     Hegel; I meant to cite in particular the notorious Panglossian 
     aphorism--"What is rational is actual, and what is actual is 
     rational"--from the opening of the Philosophy of Right and Hegel's 
     response to outraged critics of it in the Encyclopedia Logic 6 and 
     7--but imagine my surprise to find, in both places, asides on Greek 
     Philosophy confirming my hunch (see Philosophy of Right 10 and 
     Encyclopedia Logic 28-31).



     Works Cited 


     Works by Adorno 
     Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. 
     Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 



     ---. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. 
     Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

     ---. The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940. Trans. Nicholas Walker. 
     Ed. Henri Lonitz. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. 

     ---. Critical Models. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP,     
     1998. 

     ---. Essays on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: U of California P, 
     2002. 

     ---. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Ed. 
     Rolf Teidemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. 

     ---. Metaphysics. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Rolf Teidemann. Stanford: 
     Stanford UP, 2000. 

     ---. Minima Moralia. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974. 

     ---. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973. 

     ---. Notes on Literature. Vol. 2. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New 
     York: Columbia UP, 1992. 

     ---. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. 
     Blomster. New York: Continuum, 1994. 

     ---. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT P, 1981. 

     Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 
     Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972. 

     ---. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: 
     Stanford UP, 2002. 

     ---. Dialektik der Aufklarung. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 3. Theodor 
     W. Adorno. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996.

     
     Other Works Cited 

     Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. 

     Croce, Benedetto. What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy 
     of Hegel. Trans. Douglas Ainslee. London: Macmillan, 1915. 

     Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. 

     Forster, Michael N. Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. Chicago: 
     U of Illinois P, 1998. 

     Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. 
     Norton: New York, 1961. 

     Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I. Trans. T. F. Geraets, 
     W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. 

     ---. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Wallace. Oxford: Oxford UP, 
     1977. 

     ---. Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. Buffalo: Prometheus 
     Books, 1991. 

     ---. Philosophy of Right. Trans. T. M. Knox. London: Oxford UP, 1952. 
     
     Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late 
     Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 

     Kaufmann, Walter. Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, Commentary.      
     Doubleday: Garden City, 1965. 
	
     Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Trans. 
     Raymond Queneau. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. 

     Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert 
     C. Tucker. 2nd ed. Norton: New York, 1978. 

     Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans.     
     Talcott Parsons. Scribner's: New York, 1958.