Natureza e dominação social : para uma leitura especulativa da "Dialética do esclarecimento"

Abstract

This dissertation intends to read the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947) from the standpoint of the notion of domination of nature – internal, as defined by the renunciation of impulses as a condition for the abstract subject and its related processes of socialization; external, as defined by the domination of natural forces by means of technique and the social organization of labor. Our hypothesis is that the speculative and anthropological dimension of the argument, which involves a genetic and natural-historical explanation for social domination, can be harmonized, if properly interpreted, with a well-founded critical discourse, one that is capable of justifying itself insofar as it focuses on social forms of domination and violence that are contingent and subject to transformation in the course of historical progress. To this extent, we locate the historical specificity of the text’s critical discourse around the problem of the telluric domination of nature. Despite its connection with an older genealogical process, social domination is unveiled in its obsolescence thanks to the progress of the very domination. Its continuity does not respond to any anthropological or transhistorical principle, but to the immanent determinations of the unprecedented social totalization that bourgeois modernity inaugurates. We conclude that this emphasis on modern enlightenment allows the recognition of the importance of the critique of political economy for the author’s argument. At the same time, we discern, in the topic of the remembrance of nature in the subject and in history, the emancipatory dimension of the work, against the typical reading that interprets its argument as fatalistic or politically resigned.