ABSTRACT
Critical theory was shaped by its experiences in America in a more thorough sense than is commonly assumed or is apparent at first sight. This is not only true with respect to the banal insight that the relation between the familiar and the strange is a constitutive factor of subjectivity. The transatlantic broadening of horizons during Horkheimers, Adornos, and Marcuses first years in exile intensified their interest in the heteronomy of life. This concern was integral to their experience in the United States, where the multiple forms of alienation they experienced alienation of being exiled, of being German Jews, of being Marxists without a party were theoretically transformed. This process of intellectually transforming alienation into thought a process one might call emancipated homelessness meant lifting the awareness of being non-identical to ones environment up to the level of critical insight. At the first instance, it developed as the opposite of emancipation.
