Introduction

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Notes

Notes

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993); original text, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1944; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2006).

2. Weber's prime example of the “ratiocinator” is the entrepreneur, inventor, and utilitarian aphorist Benjamin Franklin; see Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus (Weinheim: Atnehäum, 2000), pt. 1, chap. 2; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2003), chap. 2; and Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Klaus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), vol. 2, 1375–77.

3. Theodor W. Adorno, “Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” Prisms, Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Direct Media, 2004), 10, 1, 247; also see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), 61.

4. That critical theory's escape from subjectivity is successful is questioned by critics of Horkheimer and Adorno; see, e.g., Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon, 1984, 1987), vol. 2, 332–34; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 205–23.

5. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–22.

6. Einleitung, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte [Introduction, Lectures on the Philosophy of History], Sämtliche Werke, VIII, ed. Georg Lasson (Leipzig: Meiner, 1920), 55 (my translation).

7. Utopie wäre die opferlose Nichtidentität des Subjekts. Adorno, Negative Dialektic, Werke 6, 277 (my translation).

8. Odyssey, 11, 121–32 (my translation).

9. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); for an important qualification of the author's thesis about Homer, see Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 1–18.

10. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 85; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 77.

11. Ibid.

12. Derrida “defines” his “term” as follows: “Ce qui s’écrit différance, ce sera donc le mouvement de jeu qui ‘produit,’ par ce qui n’est pas simplement une activité, ces différences, ces effets de différence,” Jacques Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 12; cf. also see “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 11.