The dialectic of selfhood

Abstract

One of the most important and brilliant contributors to the Frankfurt School understanding of character was Theodore Adorno. For Adorno, domination was not simply due to class relations, but the totality of market society in which Reason as the logic of exchange relationships migrated into the family and was insinuated within the person to colonize subjectivity. A central moment of the critique was the internalization of the authority relations of caretakers within superego (cf. Horkheimer, 1972). The law of value, together with Instrumental Reason as a hegemonic ideology and the commodification of culture led to the formation, if not deformation of an authority seeking superego as the typical means of adaptation that sustained political economic arrangements, albeit through suffering based on the repression of desire, the suppression of self and the thwarting of human possibility. Although this critique was rooted in Marx's analysis of capitalism as alienating, dehumanizing and objectifying, the emancipatory quest sought the liberation of self and desire from the alienation, commodification, and objectification of bourgeois society. But so too can we find that from out of the depths of the alienation and despair of the émigré scholar, there also comes the promise of redemption and the possibility of the “good life,” which requires overcoming alienation, and with that overcoming, transcendence, and emancipation from domination.¹

Citation

Langman, L. (2009), "The dialectic of selfhood", Dahms, H.F. (Ed.) Nature, Knowledge and Negation (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 261-281. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2009)0000026013