Adorno’s Years in California 279Given the objective catastrophe of the age, ‘reflection on the de-
structive aspect of progress’^32 was the decisive imperative guiding their
thinking. The ethical impulse leading them towards this undoubtedly
gigantic programme of rethinking the process of enlightenment and the
principle of rationality by tracing them back to their origins was what
they felt to be the urgent need to find the causes of the persistence of
suffering in history.
During 1942 their work on this project identified four main themes
to be worked on in stages. They wished to show, first, that rationality
had a Janus face. The emancipation of the human species from the
constraints of nature went hand in hand with the domination of nature
both internally and externally. The sovereign subject followed its primary
purpose of self-preservation by distinguishing itself resolutely from a
reified natural world. But, by doing so, the subject degenerates into a
pure means with which to subjugate the whole world without reference
to purposes. Adorno and Horkheimer wished to demonstrate the con-
sequences of the high-handedness of the subject by drawing on two
unusual examples. On the one hand, they drew on episodes from The
Odyssey, one of the earliest documents of the human spirit; and, on the
other, they explored scenes from the Marquis de Sade’s Story of Juliet.
A second strand of thought focused on the way in which enlighten-
ment becomes transformed into mass deception and a completely
commercialized and centrally directed culture attempts systematically
to take possession of people’s minds. Adorno and Horkheimer went on
from there to examine the origins of anti-Semitism, which they treated
as a contemporary manifestation of obvious unreason, as the expression
of a paranoid behaviour structure. Lastly, the section entitled ‘Notes
and Drafts’ was supposed to contain a number of shorter aphorisms
that would shed light on the structure of the entire text, since the authors
had renounced the attempt to develop a coherent, logical narrative frame-
work. Instead, the five principal sections of the later book (the concept
of reason, the interpretation of The Odyssey, the Sade interpretation,
analysis of the culture industry and analysis of anti-Semitism) were all
conceived as separate essays. Apart from the epistemological reasons^33
that made this approach necessary, their method was also influenced
by the working practices that Adorno and Horkheimer had developed
over the course of time.
The two men met every afternoon, either in Adorno’s or in Hork-
heimer’s house, in order to discuss such central philosophical and socio-
logical problems as the concept of dialectics, the subject–object relation
and the domination of nature. These discussions were often quite heated.
Their contents were recorded by Gretel Adorno, who then typed them
out for further consideration. After many revisions the first drafts for
the five sections gradually emerged. The chapters produced by each of
them were then discussed line by line. After numerous corrections the
texts acquired the status of a provisional version. It was this cooperative