DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT: From Sade to Nietzsche

[Ralph Dumain]

While I could barely keep from nodding off in the chapter on Odysseus, I 
perked up with the following chapter on the Marquis de Sade's 
Juliette.  There are some interesting preliminaries regarding Kant, logic, 
science, and morality, with a severance between the relation of the general 
and particular that occludes the latter.  (See esp. pp. 84-5, Cummings 
translation.)  Soon afterward, Horkheimer and Adorno make a bolder move:

"Since reason posits no substantial goals, all affects are equally removed 
from its governance, and are purely natural. The principle by which reason 
is merely set over against all that is unreasonable, is the basis of the 
true antithesis of enlightenment and mythology. Mythology recognizes spirit 
only as immersed in nature, as natural power. Like the powers without, 
inward impulses appear as living powers of divine or demonic origin. 
Enlightenment, on the other hand, puts back coherence, meaning and life 
into subjectivity, which is properly constituted only in this process. For 
subjectivity, reason is the chemical agent which absorbs the individual 
substance of things and volatilizes them in the mere autonomy of reason. In 
order to escape the superstitious fear of nature, it wholly transformed 
objective effective entities and forms into the mere veils of a chaotic 
matter, and anathematized their influence on humanity as slavery, until the 
ideal form of the subject was no more than unique, unrestricted, though 
vacuous authority.

"All the power of nature was reduced to mere indiscriminate resistance to 
the abstract power of the subject. The particular mythology which the 
Western Enlightenment, even in the form of Calvinism, had to get rid of was 
the Catholic doctrine of the ordo and the popular pagan religion which 
still flourished under it. The goal of bourgeois philosophy was the 
liberate men from all this. But the liberation went further than its humane 
progenitors had conceived. The unleashed market economy was both the actual 
form of reason and the power which destroyed reason. The Romantic 
reactionaries only expressed what the bourgeois themselves experienced: 
that in their world freedom tended toward organized anarchy. ....." [pp. 89-90]

Here the differentiation between Enlightenment and pre-modern myth is 
brought into relief, and its characteristic innovation highlighted: 
dualism. However H & A intended this, I see this as the linchpin of the 
argument.  (It is, what the Johnson-Forest Tendency, following the young 
Marx, would name in 1950 as uncritical vulgar materialism and vulgar 
idealism.)

We soon come to the heart and soul (what an irony) of the chapter: a 
comparative analysis of Sade and Nietzsche (the bulk of which can be found 
on pp. 96-102).  The proto-fascist character of both could not be more 
obvious.  Sade is unmistakably a creature of the Enlightenment.  I believe 
that somewhere H & A want to argue that Nietzsche flows from this tradition 
as well, but here I see only the proto-fascist reaction against it.  Now if 
the linkage is Enlightenment-Sade-Nietzsche-fascism, one could argue that 
fascism is contained in the seeds of the Enlightenment, but I am not 
satisfied with the conceptual structure that seems to underlie this system 
of linkages.  The case of Sade, however, surely reveals the underside of 
Enlightenment, though just why, remains to be adequately clarified.  To be 
sure, H &A go some distance.  Sade's Juliette is revealed to be a Cartesian 
dualist (p. 108)!  The nature of sexual pleasure enunciated by Juliette and 
that of pleasure in Sade and Nietzsche generally reveal a dualism between 
physicality and spirituality, intellect and affect.  "Nietzsche recognizes 
the still mythic quality of all pleasure." [p. 106]  This dualism justifies 
the ideology of cruelty argued by Sade and Nietzsche.  It is also seen to 
be a patriarchal male logic that takes revenge on the weakness of 
"minorities" (women and Jews are named here) for having the nerve to 
circumvent their weakness by surviving (pp. 110-1).  [Marcus, this is what 
you are looking for that is pertinent to racism.]