From: gelder-AT-em.uni-frankfurt.de
Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 15:52:35 +0200
Subject: Re: tom wolfe-epictetus-frankfurt



> [A plea for help:  does anybody know JUST WHERE Horkheimer uses the
> phrase "conspiracy against happiness."  I'm about 96% sure I really
> read it in a Horkheimer text but now I can't find it.  Maybe it's
> Kellner or Bob Antonio or somebody instead, but it sure *sounds* like
> Horkheimer, doesn't it?]

Perhaps this passage: (??)

"Liberalism had allowed the Jews property, but no power to 
command. The rights of man were designed to promise happiness 
even to those without power. Because the cheated masses feel that 
this promise in general remains a lie as long as there are still 
classes, their anger is aroused. They feel mocked. They must 
suppress the very possibility and idea of that happiness, the more 
relevant it becomes. Wherever it seems to have been achieved 
despite its fundamental denial, they have to repeat the suppression 
of their own longing. Everything which gives Occasion for such 
repetition, however unhappy it may be in itself - Ahasver or Mignon, 
alien things which are reminders of the promised land, or beauty 
which recalls sex, or the proscribed animal which is reminiscent of 
promiscuity--draws upon itself that destructive lust of civilized men 
who could never fulfill the process of civilization. Those who 
spasmodically dominate nature see in a tormented nature a 
provocative image of powerless happiness. The thought of 
happiness without power is unbearable because it would then be 
true happiness. The illusory conspiracy of corrupt Jewish bankers 
financing Bolshevism is a sign of innate impotence, just as the 
good life is a sign of happiness. The image of the intellectual is in 
the same category: he appears to think - a luxury which the others 
cannot afford-and he does not manifest the sweat of toil and 
physical effort. Bankers and intellectuals, money and mind, the 
exponents of circulation, form the impossible ideal of those who 
have been maimed by domination, an image used by domination to 
perpetuate itself."  

Horkheimer and Adorno, Elements of Anti-Semitism, (Dialectic of
Enlightenment, [NLB 1979 edition] p. 172)