After they received news that the Germans had begin to implement the final solution and that their colleague Walter Benjamin had committed suicide, Theodor Adorno and Marx Horkheimer concluded that it was necessary to radicalize their theory so that it would be commensurate with magnitude of the catastrophe that was enveloping Europe. The reformulation of their position involved a move away from the Marxian critique of political economy towards a philosophy of history that took the domination of nature as its central motif as its central motif. That reconstituted theory, articulated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, came to define the Frankfurt School during its classical phase.
One of the resources that the two Critical Theorists drew on to accomplish this radicalization was Freud’s cultural writings. Along with the works of Nietzsche, Weber, Mauss and other’s, they used Freud’s texts to formulate a depth-psychological and depth-anthropological critique of civilization which they entitled “The Primal History of Subjectivity.”
After the war, Horkheimer moved in a different direction, but Adorno continued to work within and elaborate the theoretical framework they had articulated in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Adorno’s thinking philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts thoroughly interpenetrate one another. Indeed, many of his most important philosophical notions — for example, the predominance of the object, the addenda, non-identity, constellations, and mimesis — would have been unthinkable without his appropriation of Freud. In this class, we will examine the thorough interdependence of philosophy and psychoanalysis in the formation Adorno’s distinctive brand of Negative Dialectics.
