ABSTRACT
Is reason’s destruction of the Jews the denouement of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as it is the denouement of the history of enlightenment as Horkheimer and Adorno have represented it? To be sure, just as reason’s destruction of Judaism is the final outcome of the long process of enlightenment, it is the culminating event of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s critique of this process, though in both cases in a general narrative sense only. Other events are meant to unfold from a rhetorical inflection concluding their argument. Specifically, the rhetorical inflection is intended to provoke an interpretive reconfiguration of their argument as a genealogical construction that does not then replace, but rather overlays the linear historical narrative of an enlightenment of violence stretching from preanimistic thinking to modernity. I return to the thought opening my discussion in the last chapter.
