ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I address the account of rationality, domination, and subjectivity provided by Horkheimer and Adorno in the seminal statement of the Frankfurt School of critical theory of the 1940s, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) (hereafter, Dialectic). It is important to consider this text and associated writings from the point of view of my concerns for a number of reasons. Above all, these writings pose the challenge of the rational criticism of reason, i.e. a critical approach to reason seeking neither the wholesale abandonment or destruction of reason. They are thus a part of a body of literature that does not give in to what Foucault called the ‘blackmail of the Enlightenment’ (1986i:42-3), the requirement that one must declare whether one is for or against the Enlightenment for fear of lapsing into irrationalism.