alone guarantees that the critical theory of society, or the new dialectical the-
ory of religion, will not turn into an uncritical one. The longing for the entirely
Other is the critical theorist’s definition of religion. It is the expression and
the basis of religion. It is also the concrete supersession of all the God-
hypostases present in the still living as well as in the dead world religions
in terms of what Ernst Bloch has called humanism as religion in inheritance
(Hegel 1986m; 1986n; Bloch 1985). The longing for the totally Other is indeed
the basis and the motivation of the critical theory of society as well as of the
dialectical theory of religion to be developed out of it, and remains neces-
sary for their survival under the enormous identity – and conformity – pres-
sure of a more and more globalizing late capitalist society (Horkheimer 1985a;
Adorno 1979:354–372, 578–587; Siebert 2001; 2002). The insatiable longing for
the totally Other can even carry and strengthen a religious faith – Jewish,
Christian, or Islamic, etc. – which is no mere putting off toward a Beyond,
but which is a basis for protest and resistance against unjust conditions in
present globalized late capitalist society: critical religion (Adorno 1979; Küng
1994:904–905).
Redemptive Quest
The longing and the hope for the fundamentally imageless and nameless
totally Other as a redemptive quest for the rescue of the hopeless is – as the
main motive of the critical theory of society as well as of the dialectical the-
ory of religion to be developed out of it – to be inversed and translated into
a post-Enlightenment era that has seen Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq (Horkheimer 1985a;
Siebert 2001; 2002). This essay is concerned with the development of a criti-
cal theory of religion in a post-religious and post-metaphysical, as well as
post-enlightenment world, which has lost not only its religious eschatologies,
but also its secular political utopias, and is thus characterized by positivism
as the – as Adorno put it – metaphysics of what is the case, and by the con-
sequent universal despair, which may be more or less conscious (Adorno
1993; 1998; 1970). The new dialectical theory of religion is informed by a
vision of alternative Future III – the right or reconciled society, beyond the
present antagonistic civil society, which is not as it ought to be, measured by
its own cultural closure values, and which daily contradicts its own most
noble institutions and aspirations (Horkheimer 1985a; 1970; Fromm 1973;
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 63