A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment? Horkheimer and Adorno Revisited

Abstract

One of the reasons for the continued influence exercised by Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment' a work which could scarcely be more clearly marked by the historical context of its creation upon current theoretical debates in the realms of politics, aesthetics, and sociology, is the paradigm shift it marks in the analysis of power. Wedged between the dual threats of American consumerism on the one hand and Nazism on the other, Dialectic ofEnlightenment effects a move away from the analysis of domination as an essentially binary structure and toward the examination of power as a complex system of mediation. Stated plainly: it is no longer a question, in this work, of analyzing the subject's domination of its object, but rather of exploring that discursive system of power in which effects of domination oriented around notions of Subject and Object are possible, and, indeed, inevitable. Both Subject and Object, dominator and dominated, function as bearers of a power which neither actually possesses. To this extent, Dialectic of Enlightenment offers a rigorous historical recontextualization of the master-slave dialectic, pushing the Hegelian model to that extreme point where the very category of enslavement crumbles beneath the coercive weight of universal consent. Motivated by an attempt to understand the emergence of fascism as a popular