ABSTRACT
In an aphorism entitled ‘Le Prix de Progress’, appended to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno write that ‘Alle Verdinglichung ist ein Vergessen’’ (All reification is a forgetting) (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2008, p. 229, translation altered). 2 This comes as the very last sentence of a reading of a letter by Pierre Flourens, a French physiologist, who was elected to the Académie Française in preference to Victor Hugo. A ground-breaking anaesthesiologist, Flourens raised serious concerns about the use of chloroform in surgery because the substance didn’t simply inure the body to pain but, rather, consigned such pain to oblivion. In other words, chloroform led to a forgetting of suffering. This notion that ‘all reification is a forgetting’ is an appropriate point of departure for our discussion of what comprises ‘reification’ or Verdinglichung (literally: ‘thingification’). The reason for this is that it enables us to bring into view two exemplary ‘models’ that frame the problem of reification specifically as a form of forgetting: these are the models of dialectic, on the one hand, and difference, on the other.
