The Frankfurt School’s refusal to name utopia echoed the Jewish taboo against naming God.
Evidence
By stressing it in their works in the forties, however, Horkheimer and Adorno were not abandoning that refusal to name or describe the “other,” which as we have seen was one of the central premises of Critical Theory from the start. In fact, their reluctance to do so was consistent with the Jewish taboo against uttering the sacred. Jews do not call God by his right name because to do so would be premature; the messianic age has not yet arrived. Similarly, the Frankfurt School’s unwillingness to outline a utopian vision reflected its members’ conviction that true reconciliation could never be achieved by philosophy alone. As Marx had argued, the “realm of freedom” could not be envisaged by men who were still unfree. Until social conditions drastically altered, philosophy had a limited role to play: “inasmuch as subject and object, word and thing, cannot be integrated under present conditions, we are driven by the principle of negation to attempt to salvage relative truths from the wreckage of false ultimates.” 36 Adorno, in fact, had taken Benjamin to task for his theological attempt to call things by their right names, as a combination of magic and positivism.” In the chapter on the culture industry in the Dialectic, he and Horkheimer used the same combination of apparent opposites to describe the ideological, instrumental language produced by mass culture.‘e Negation rather than the premature search for resolutions was the real refuge of truth. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 790
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the chapter on the Jewish dimension of Critical Theory and to later reflections on negative dialectics in Jay’s broader history. — connects to: Horkheimer traced fascist language corruption back through Jewish religious prohibitions against naming God — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 701
- QUESTION: How did this refusal-to-name actually distinguish the School’s exile work from its earlier 1930s formulations? Jay gestures at continuity — worth verifying.
Broader Connections
- Horkheimer traced fascist language corruption back through Jewish religious prohibitions against naming God
#corroborates(0.90) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 701