Horkheimer and Adorno’s »Dialectic of Enlightenment« — Presentation of the Translation | Devi Dumbadze (New York)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s »Dialectic of Enlightenment« (1944-47; 1969) is a foundational work of Critical Theory. Its primary aim is to critique the historical, social, and epistemological conditions that enabled the singular social catastrophe of the eliminatory antisemitism of World War II.

In this context, the chapter »Elements of Antisemitism« represents an at times unrecognized central »Philosophical Fragment« of the work. The book’s main thesis – that the civilizational process of Enlightenment began with the expulsion of myth, yet fully developed Enlightenment ultimately returns to myth and “new barbarism” – is unfolded here as a critique of antisemitism as a political delusion.

On one hand, the eliminatory form of antisemitism manifested in National Socialist Germany cannot be separated from the broader social conditions, which consist in the generalization of the objectified logic of capital. They express themselves as the regimentation of mimetic comportment and the self-mutilation of the individual as an authoritarian character. On the other hand, the singular event of the extermination of European Jews during World War II defies the framework of the logic of capital and, thus, undermines both Marxist and »bourgeois« theories of history attempting to explain it.

In the chapter on The »Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception«, the same critical impulse is directed to analyzing the transformation that took place nearly a century ago, wherein artistic creation and culture as a whole shifted to the mode of industrial production and consumption.

»Culture today defeats everything through similarity.« – The formal law of the artwork has been supplanted by the schematism of the culture industry. Films, music, and television shows, as well as today's social media, are results of regimented mimesis and the standardization of the constructive-rational principle. Only unregimented experience can perhaps lead beyond this social state.

The presentation and the lecture will be in Georgian