Reification results from forgetting the pain nature inflicts under domination

Evidence

The stimulus Memory, in fact, played a key role in the Frankfurt School’s understanding of the crisis of modern civilization. Here the Freudian component of Critical Theory came to the fore. One of the greatest costs of progress, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in one of their aphorisms, was the repression of the pain and suffering caused by the mastery of nature. Nature was to be understood not merely as something external to man, but also as an internal reality. “All reification,” they pointed out, “is a forgetting.” … As Adorno noted in his letter of February 29, 1940, to Benjamin, some forgetting is inevitable, and by extension, some reification. The complete identity of the reflecting subject and the object of his reflection was impossible. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 804

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pairs Adorno’s famous aphorism ‘All reification is a forgetting’ with his concession that some forgetting is inevitable, giving the full tension of the concept.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s correspondence with Benjamin and Benjamin’s Proustian theory of involuntary memory (memoire involontaire). — connects to: Active forgetting distorts a people’s self-understanding as it blunts pain — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 123; Adorno reads reification as human self-domination through self-created compulsion — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 88; Reification is an illusion, so grounds for refusal persist — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 884

Broader Connections

• Adorno reads reification as human self-domination through self-created compulsion #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 88
• Active forgetting distorts a people’s self-understanding as it blunts pain #expands (0.82) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 123