Critical Theory of Religion
The critical theory of religion was an integral part of the critical theory of
society (Adorno and Kogon 1958). In their dialectical theory of society,
Horkheimer and Adorno were interested in religion in so far as it was situ-
ated in the antagonistic totality of civil society and at the same time tran-
scended it: that being the case, it went nevertheless non-positivistically beyond
that which was the case. While the Lutheran Hegel had comprehended Chris-
tianity not only as the religion of becoming and freedom, but also as the
absolute religion, and as such as the end of the history of religions, the Jewish
critical theorists considered it to be a most advanced, but nevertheless only
relative, positive world-religion situated among other relative, positive world-
religions: like magic or fetishism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism,
Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, the Greek and Roman Religion, Judaism, or Islam
(Hegel 1986c; 1986m; Adorno and Kogon 1958). While Hegel had found the
absolute goal of the history of religions in Christianity as the absolute reli-
gion of freedom, the critical theorists foresaw and promoted the determinate
negation, i.e., inversion of its and all other religions’ semantic and semiotic
materials and potentials into their own secular critical theory of society. And,
beyond that, into the likewise profane general discourse of expert cultures,
and through them into emancipatory communicative and political action in
the antagonistic totality of globalizing late capitalist society toward alternative
Future III – the free, solidary, reconciled, redeemed, shortly, the right society
(Hegel 1986c; 1986n; Adorno 1970a; 1997d; Horkheimer 1988b; Habermas 1990).
Prima Philosophia
Adorno and his eleven years older teacher, colleague and friend, Benjamin,
had formulated for the first time their notion of an inverse cipher theology
on the Island of Ibiza in 1932/1933 (Adorno 1970a; Witte 1985). On November
6, 1934, Adorno wrote from Merton College, Oxford, to Benjamin, that he
saw in his Arcades Projecttruly that piece of prima philosophia, which was
given to the critical theorists as a task to be realized (Lonitz 1994; Benjamin
1983). It seemed to be necessary to Adorno, that Benjamin would energize
most forcefully precisely the most distant motives of his Arcades Project: that
of the always the same and that of hell. In Hebrew, hell or Gehenna was the
name for a continually burning rubbish dump near Jerusalem as well as for
a valley in which the Cananites had sacrificed their children to their gods.
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 83