Trevor,
That post was very insightful in terms of interpreting Adorno's understanding of the dialectic of enlightenment and distinquishing it from that of Habermas. It is very necessary to do that as the Habermas interpretation has been accepted. We do need to get back to Adorno.

What does that mean? You say:

"The dialectic of enlightenment cannot be overcome by perfecting enlightenment because, in essence, it has already been perfected. Auschwitz is the perfection of enlightenment – that’s the point. Negative dialectics is not superior reason. It is the negative moment of enlightenment turned against itself. But this is not an end in itself for Adorno. Negative dialectics needs to be overcome or it turns into a metaphysics, into another binding universal, another immanence, another myth. Negative dialectics is an historical curse, a kind of false teeth, as Canetti describes it."

Some questions.

But how is negative dialectics --as the negative moment of the enlightenment turned against itself---to be overcome?

Does not Adorno suggest an aesthetic reason working off high modernist art?

Why not an ethical reason that reaches back to the Greeks --a medical conception of ethics that starts from living damaged lives?

Are these not different pathways? Why should we accept tha the only pathway is through laughter, whereby the enlightenment finally recognises itself for what it is and gives up its destructive urge.

Why should we accept that reason is equivalent to the instrumental reason of the Enlightenment tradition. Why is negative dialectics the only way of thinking otherwise to that tradition gone sour?

What I find strange is that your interpretation of Adorno sees the textual overlaps between Adorno and Deleuze (fine) but none between Adorno and Heidegger. The same old repetition of insight and blindness.

Heidegger is displaced---yet again---whilst the overlap between the domination of nature in The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Heidegger's substantive account of the technological mode of being is ignored. And we have silence about the ecological interpretation of the domination of nature and technological mode of being--once again. Why this continuing silence.

Now for some polemics.

Given that this kind of silent response to ecological destruction is a systematic one I am now reading your appeal to marxism as some sort of social science touchstone that is premised on the domination and exploitation of nature. That would account for the constant sidelining of an alternative reason (mimesis, the ethics of a good life or a dwelling ethics) to a (Baconian?) concept of the Enlightenment reason perfecting itself.

What you offer is the "the negative moment of enlightenment turned against itself" until it recogizes itself in laughter. Any other pathway of overcoming, opened up by an immanent critique of an Enlightenment reason and its technological mode of being, is shoved aside as turning into "a metaphysics, into another binding universal, another immanence, another myth."

So you speak in the name of reason whilst we ecologists talk in the name of myth. How very convenient. That is a really nice modernist duality you have got going there.

Reason says that it is only in laughter that enlightenment finally recognises itself for what it is and gives up its destructive urge. Really?

Why should I accept that pathway? Why should I be concerned with figuring how do we come to see the joke through negative dialectics? What I see in your turn to aesthetic reason (literature) is a blindness to ecology. A very European blindness. Ecology is the radical difference between us.

There is not even a hint in your account that we live within ecosystems in that account. How very modernist and European. The memory of Australians once living within a healthy ecosystem has been obliterated. You could be living anywhere or nowhere and not at the end of a very sick River Murray.

What I see in South Australia is a lot of people responding to the destruction wrought by an Enlightenment reason on our ecology.They are deeply concerned by this. They desire to develop a new ethical way of living. It is a mode of living that cares for and is concerned about the river country they live, and which is a part of, in their everyday life.

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