Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 09:53:17 -0400 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> Subject: DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT: From Sade to Nietzsche While I could barely keep from nodding off in the chapter on Odysseus, I perked up with the following chapter on the Marquis de Sade's Juliette. There are some interesting preliminaries regarding Kant, logic, science, and morality, with a severance between the relation of the general and particular that occludes the latter. (See esp. pp. 84-5, Cummings translation.) Soon afterward, Horkheimer and Adorno make a bolder move: "Since reason posits no substantial goals, all affects are equally removed from its governance, and are purely natural. The principle by which reason is merely set over against all that is unreasonable, is the basis of the true antithesis of enlightenment and mythology. Mythology recognizes spirit only as immersed in nature, as natural power. Like the powers without, inward impulses appear as living powers of divine or demonic origin. Enlightenment, on the other hand, puts back coherence, meaning and life into subjectivity, which is properly constituted only in this process. For subjectivity, reason is the chemical agent which absorbs the individual substance of things and volatilizes them in the mere autonomy of reason. In order to escape the superstitious fear of nature, it wholly transformed objective effective entities and forms into the mere veils of a chaotic matter, and anathematized their influence on humanity as slavery, until the ideal form of the subject was no more than unique, unrestricted, though vacuous authority. "All the power of nature was reduced to mere indiscriminate resistance to the abstract power of the subject. The particular mythology which the Western Enlightenment, even in the form of Calvinism, had to get rid of was the Catholic doctrine of the ordo and the popular pagan religion which still flourished under it. The goal of bourgeois philosophy was the liberate men from all this. But the liberation went further than its humane progenitors had conceived. The unleashed market economy was both the actual form of reason and the power which destroyed reason. The Romantic reactionaries only expressed what the bourgeois themselves experienced: that in their world freedom tended toward organized anarchy. ....." [pp. 89-90] Here the differentiation between Enlightenment and pre-modern myth is brought into relief, and its characteristic innovation highlighted: dualism. However H & A intended this, I see this as the linchpin of the argument. (It is, what the Johnson-Forest Tendency, following the young Marx, would name in 1950 as uncritical vulgar materialism and vulgar idealism.) We soon come to the heart and soul (what an irony) of the chapter: a comparative analysis of Sade and Nietzsche (the bulk of which can be found on pp. 96-102). The proto-fascist character of both could not be more obvious. Sade is unmistakably a creature of the Enlightenment. I believe that somewhere H & A want to argue that Nietzsche flows from this tradition as well, but here I see only the proto-fascist reaction against it. Now if the linkage is Enlightenment-Sade-Nietzsche-fascism, one could argue that fascism is contained in the seeds of the Enlightenment, but I am not satisfied with the conceptual structure that seems to underlie this system of linkages. The case of Sade, however, surely reveals the underside of Enlightenment, though just why, remains to be adequately clarified. To be sure, H &A go some distance. Sade's Juliette is revealed to be a Cartesian dualist (p. 108)! The nature of sexual pleasure enunciated by Juliette and that of pleasure in Sade and Nietzsche generally reveal a dualism between physicality and spirituality, intellect and affect. "Nietzsche recognizes the still mythic quality of all pleasure." [p. 106] This dualism justifies the ideology of cruelty argued by Sade and Nietzsche. It is also seen to be a patriarchal male logic that takes revenge on the weakness of "minorities" (women and Jews are named here) for having the nerve to circumvent their weakness by surviving (pp. 110-1). [Marcus, this is what you are looking for that is pertinent to racism.]
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