The Critical Theory of Society: The Longing for the Totally Other

In: Critical sociology, Band 31, Heft 1-2, S. 57-113

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the religious and theological dimension of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Walter Benjamin's and other theorists' critical theory of society. It aims at a new critical theory of religion, which would go beyond the religious and theological concerns of the critical theory of society. The essay concentrates on the way, in which the critical theorists of the first and second generation dealt with the modern dichotomy between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, revelation and enlightenment, religious faith and autonomous reason, church and state. The critical theorists have left behind the idealistic attempt to reconcile the modern dichotomy of the religious and the secular: e.g., that of Leibnitz, Hegel, Goethe, or Beethoven. The essay focuses on the critical theorists' materialistic attempt — not to reconcile faith and knowledge, that is not possible at this point in history — but at least to prevent the modern contradiction between monotheism and enlightenment to be closed prematurely either fundamentalistically or scientistically and positivistically. Adorno and Benjamin have initiated an inverse theology, which presupposes a. that religion has indeed contributed to the humanization of mankind, and b.that the secularization process cannot be stopped. The inverse theology allows semantic and semiotic materials and potentials to migrate from the depth of the mythos into the secular discourse among the expert cultures — sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy — and through it into communicative and political action, in order thus to prevent the further rebarbarization of the Western civilization. The inverse theology is a test in so far as that semantic or semiotic material, which cannot be translated into the profane discourse of expert cultures, cannot be rescued and will be lost. One central semantic element, which Adorno and Horkheimer intended to rescue, was the longing for the totally Other than the slaughterbench, holocaust — altar and Golgatha of history. In this longing for the entirely Other is concretely superseded, i.e., criticized, but also preserved and elevated and fulfilled, what once in the world — religions and — philosophies had been called: Eternity, Beauty, Heaven, God, Infinite, Transcendence, Being, Idea, Absolute, Unconditional. The critical theorists transform once certain religious dogmas into longings. The longing for the totally Other has been the fundamental motive and motivation of the critical theorists, which gave them manifestly or latently energy for almost a whole century, and which allowed them to survive two world wars, and fascism, and emigration, and to make it possible for them on one hand not to regress into mythology, and on the other hand not to fall victim to positivism as the metaphysics of what is the case.