The Dialectic of Enlightenment questioned whether happiness is separable from terror

Evidence

But was it possible to have undiminished happiness without undiminished terror? Adorno had praised the rescuing of Sadism' in Horkheimer's Egoism and the Freedom Movement’. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, examples of a hidden plea for the sublimation of the instincts were to be found. The idea of recollecting nature in humanity, which recurred at numerous points in the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a prospective solution, pointed in this direction as well. Was the image of complete, undivided happiness not more vivid in the complaint against the spirit of domination over nature than in satisfaction with sublimated happiness? Was the idea of an ego which was simultaneously released from its bonds and able to preserve itself anything more than a demand for what was inconceivable, overlooking what was conceivable? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1410

Categorization

• QUESTION: The unresolved tension between sublimated and undiminished happiness is worth chasing across Adorno’s later aesthetic theory.
• XREF: connects to: Fromm linked materialist happiness to a critique of unconscious religiosity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 627; Enlightenment selfhood is purchased through permanent renunciation of happiness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1379