Adorno and Fanon both sought to indict Western human sciences for complicity in racism.

Evidence

Both books are attempting to couple key elements of Marxist and Freudian thinking in such a way as to push them beyond their encapsulation in the Enlightenment tradition; both writers seek to adumbrate a more self-critical standpoint capable of recognizing the implication of the human sciences (including historical materialism and psychoanalysis) in the prosecution of Western racism. And both authors, because of their own intellectual formation and social situation, remain deeply ambivalent about the direction in which their respective lines of thought are leading them, an ambivalence that surfaces in certain key contradictions in their arguments. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1324

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the critique of the Enlightenment’s rationalist project in Adorno’s own Dialectics of the Enlightenment and Habermas’s later rejection of that totalizing critique.