Translator’s note.
First published in German in 2003 as front-matter in the Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII,1 the text translated below is a three-paragraph excerpt from Adorno’s draft of a new preface for the 1969 republication of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Given the late Horkheimer’s reactionary turn, the fact this material was not used is hardly surprising. In the draft, Adorno is uncharacteristically explicit: that critical theory was in 1947 and remains in 1969 a self-critical development of the critique of political economy in the spirit of Marx himself; that the authors were in 1947 and remain in 1969 committed to the same project of utterly “exhausting”2 its categories and concepts in the process of reflection on their changing limits and potential explanatory power. Adorno goes even further, however. Towards the end of the draft he makes several claims that, given my previous expectations, struck me as completely out of character for his later works: that while critical theory in 1947 did not anticipate the global protest movement of 1968/69, the recent youth protests constitute genuine resistance to the same social tendencies in a later phase (“towards the totally administered world”) targeted by Dialectic of Enlightenment in an earlier one; that the “real function” of Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1969 depends on whether the critical theory from 1947 can help “the impulses of resistance” gain a new consciousness of themselves and, in so doing, help them avoid the traps of “despair” and “collective narcissism” in the struggle for a praxis blinded by neither.
The difference between Adorno’s draft and the published “Preface to the 1969 Edition,” dated to April of that year and signed by Horkheimer,3 is stark. The published preface was undoubtedly the result of a compromise with the late Horkheimer’s revisionist reinterpretation of early critical theory, an essential part of which was an ongoing effort to historicize Marx/ism and, by extension, the majority of critical theory written before 1950.4 The published preface also adopts a conservative stance more in line with the late Horkheimer’s rearguard defense of “remnants of freedom,” however powerless they might seem. Unlike the late Adorno, the late Horkheimer could not see anything but the prolongation of horror. Adorno’s concrete reference to “impulses of resistance” disappears into the late Horkheimer’s pet cliche: the abstract possibility of something completely otherwise. The published preface claims too much for Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947 and too little for Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1969. This short excerpt from Adorno’s February draft seemed worth translating because it offers another starting-point for the correction of precisely this.
Draft (Preface) for a New Edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment (Feb. 1969).
While the book [viz., Dialectic of Enlightenment] does not conceal its origins in materialist dialectics, it had already broken with the orthodoxy. Foregoing the extensive economic analyses that would, in most cases, have been required, it employed the concept of domination heretically, in opposition to the polemics of Engels’ Anti-Dühring. But its departure from purely economic thinking has its economic ground. The object of Marxian political economy was liberalism as reality and ideology. With its development into an economic system that, though it leaves room for a pseudo-market, otherwise depends primarily upon the powers that control production, and which also determine circulation and distribution, the liberal laws of the marketplace lose their meaning, and along with them so too does the economistic concept of economy. Domination has always been implicit in political economy. The sale of labor-power as a commodity, from which Marx deduces the class relation, presupposes compulsion to sell it. Domination, therefore, is no longer merely unsuitable for explanation on account of its abstractness; rather, it is the form taken by economic reason long since consumed by its irrationality. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel derived, on the one hand, the state from the play of social forces and interpreted, on the other, the state as the very authority that suspends this play of forces, as if from the outside; in so doing, he confronted, albeit with an apologetic accent, a closely related situation, both in logic and in content.
As a consequence, the categories of political economy such as surplus-value, immiseration, and even that of class, need to be determined anew. Critical theory today faces a dilemma: either rigidly adhere to these categories and thereby crudely miss its mark—miss what is so obviously the case—or, with the intention of taking the changes in reality into account in theory, dilute its own theoretical apparatus and like so many contemporary theorists fall prey to conceptless positivism. The authors have not mastered this dilemma; this is the limit of the book, and indeed of critical theory. So long as these categories have not been reformulated in a manner both radical and sober, relevant but not obedient, blind actionism [Aktionismus] is abetted; the ever more manifest irrational moments of the ruling rationality, the same at which the book took aim, raise doubts about whether this task can be accomplished at all. Then as now, the authors believe that this dilemma, which they have made no attempt to conceal, is best reckoned with by putting the once-valid critical concepts to use, not in order to enshrine them as invariants—which, by virtue of their content, they cannot ever be—but in order to exhaust them in the process of their reflection and, perhaps, drive them further.
There is one experience not anticipated in the book, though other texts of ours contain hints: the youth at least are fighting back against the transition—which is carried out not seamlessly but through dictatorships and wars—towards the totally administered world. The protest movement in all countries, both in the blocs and the Third World, bears witness to the fact the world will not be integrated so quietly. Were the book to help the impulses of resistance attain a consciousness that illuminates and thereby prevents them from falling prey to the blind praxis of despair and collective narcissism, it might be given a real function. The idea of an emancipated society is immanent to critical theory. {The convergence of both power blocs holds more than just the prospect of total oppression. Real détente might very well be able to break the spell; hence the fear of détente. The appearance of the Sakharov Memorandum could not have been foreseen in 1947. Of course, whether such efforts will be crushed beneath the respective administrative machineries, which are more like-minded than they let on, remains to be seen; the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and the complicity of the Western states gives cause for concern.}5
Theodor W. Adorno, “Aus einem Entwurf »Zur Neuausgabe« der Dialektik der Aufklärung Frankfurt a.M., Februar 1969,” in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII (edition text + kritik, 2003), 7-8. Author’s translation.
Below, I translate “aufzuzehren” as “to exhaust.” It could also be translated as “to [completely] use up / expend” and, more literally, “to [completely] consume / devour.”
“Preface to the New Edition” (1969), in: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), xi-xii.
For a critique of the late Horkheimer’s explicitly revisionist reinterpretation of early critical theory in an attempt to rescue it from “scientific socialism” (Marxism), see:
Brackets in original.
Fascinating. Thank you for this.
The reference to the Sakharov Memorandum suggests that the bracketed sentences were added after March 1971 at the earliest, when Sakharov sent his piece to Brezhnev, which prompted his exile. This memo was published in the NYTimes in 1972, but it's possible Adorno accessed it sooner than that.