logical conservative force of control and legitimization of the existing social
systems of class exploitation and domination. According to Horkheimer, reli-
gion also gives expression to the radical and revolutionary critique of such
social systems that produce the oppression, suffering and death of innumer-
able generations of innocent victims in the hope of creating a better future
society. It is this inherent social critique of religion in its narrative form of
human resistance and hope, which in the face of modern capitalist society’s
development toward a globalized totally administered society, needs to be
negatively appropriated in the continuing struggle for a more just, humane,
rational, free – in terms of both autonomy and solidarity, and a peaceful future
society. It is in this context of the determinate negation of religion that
Horkheimer ’s concept of the “totally Other” than this historical development
toward such an administered world is understood as a fundamental dynamic
of his materialist theory of society and religion.
Longing for the Totally Other
From the mid-1960s to the year of his death in 1973, Max Horkheimer gave
a number of interviews in which he addressed the question of the relation-
ship between the critical theory and religion/theology. This fundamental and
critical relationship was specifically the topic of a 1970 interview in Montagnola,
Switzerland that was published under the title Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz
Anderen[The Longing for the Totally Other] (Horkheimer, 1970). As Horkheimer
(1985:431) states, the specific expression “the Other” comes from Adorno.
However, this conception of the totally Other is no less a fundamental dialec-
tical notion of Horkheimer ’s materialistic critical theory of religion, which
was a dynamic component of his entire theory from the very beginning.
In this 1970 interview with Helmut Gumnior, Horkheimer gave expression
to the dialectical materialistic meaning of his notion of the “totally Other” in
response to the question of how he, as a Marxist and a revolutionary, could
be concerned with or write about “the infinite One.” Contrary to the accu-
sation that Horkheimer betrayed the revolutionary purpose of the critical
theory by turning back to religion – or “crawling back to the cross” as it is
derogatorily stated in German – in his old age, the critical sublation of reli-
gion as a fundamental element of his entire critical theory had already been
expressed in his early work (Ott 2001), and particularly in a short essay from
1935 entitled “Thoughts on Religion” (Horkheimer 1972). Echoing Marx’s
The Notion of the Totally “Other” • 133