From: "L Spencer" <L.SPENCER-AT-tasc.ac.uk>
Date:          Wed, 29 Jan 1997 10:24:31 GMT
Subject:       Re: a & h and d of e


Questions about the "legitimacy" of the position adopted by 
Horkheimer and Adorno seem misplaced...
    "Dialectic of Enlightenment" is a fragment. It remained so 
at least partly because Horkheimer and Adorno were coming from 
different perspectives. 
    Adorno is not shy to acknowledge the relationship of his thinking 
to theology. He does so in a strategic place... in Minima Moralia, 
dedicated to Horkheimer (cf. especially the perspective of "hope" in 
closing extract).
    It is silly to think oneself clever because one has sniffed out 
some supposed "christian baggage". There is little mystery about the 
relation to theological thinking. It has to do with the 
acknowledgement of evil. It call the world "antagonistic" makes it 
sound as if some sort of morally neutral description of it is what 
one is after. The "unreconciled" suggests that the evils of the world 
are not ones we should learn to live with, not ones we could learn to 
live with... 
    I am not trying to justify Adorno's position. But I dont think 
one has begun to understand his life unless one sees how important to 
him was the project of reconnecting the moral, the aesthetic and the 
theoretical ways of thinking. 
    This is theological in the way that Hegel's thinking is 
ineradicably theological - a kind of "inverse" or inside-out 
theology, if you like... which no longer needs the legends of genisis 
or apocalypse. Adorno acknowledges his Hegelianism, too (a kind of 
inside-out Hegelianism) and for the whole Hegelian-Marxist tradition, 
- including Habermas - Kant's division of the self into the subject 
of three more or less independent critiques is symptomatic of exactly 
what needs reconciling. And Rousseau, much loved by Kant, is the 
person who feels that need subjectively and who pleads for it in 
plaintive, emotional terms...


l.spencer-AT-tasc.ac.uk

Lloyd Spencer, School of Media
Trinity & All Saints University College, 
Leeds LS18 5HD, England

Tel. (0113) 2 837 186     
Fax. (0113) 2 837 200