A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment? Horkheimer and Adorno Revisited

Hewitt, Andrew

doi:10.2307/488332

Cited by 17 publications

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“…Horkheimer and Adorno Revisited,” argues that women are included in DOE precisely by means of their exclusion. Their inclusion, in this sense, is an instrumentalization of femininity as having positive utopian potential (Hewitt , 69–96; compare Lee ). On this account, women (both as subject and concept) are not subject to the dialectic of Enlightenment precisely because of their position within the constellation of nonidentity.…”

Section: On Juliette: the Daughter Of The Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Juliette functions within the masculinized morality of the Enlightenment: a morality that lacks a strong affective element or “feminine” characteristics such as compassion and care. “As a good philosopher she remains cool and reflective” (81) and in taking up the masculine philosophical discourse, Juliette has subverted the domination of patriarchal logic that defines itself by her exclusion from it (Lloyd ; Hewitt , 164).…”

Section: On Juliette: the Daughter Of The Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, to claim that they have an unbridled utopian potential of thought is to fail to take seriously the totalizing domination into which they are liberated, even if they can be liberated from their domination by a highly fractured structure, such as patriarchal logic. Thus, feminist appropriations of Adorno that rely on “woman” as nonidentical, and thereby being a potential site of utopian liberation, are mistaken (Flower MacCannell , 141–60; compare Fraser , Hewitt ). Woman, as a concept, is not part of a constellation with nature, art, and beauty because these are utopian, but because these concepts are all inadequate to their objects.…”

Section: On Juliette: the Daughter Of The Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… Andrew Hewitt claims that Adorno and Horkheimer, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment , appear almost nostalgic for a certain type of patriarchal society because it is one in which domination is experienced as domination . If domination is capable of being experienced with the awareness that it is indeed domination, then those who are subjugated know something about the world, via experience, that the dominated who do not experience it as such do not know (Hewitt , 81). …”

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confidence: 99%

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Daughters of the Enlightenment: Reconstructing Adorno on Gender and Feminist Praxis

Duford¹

2017

Hypatia

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This article offers a reconstruction of Theodor Adorno's work as it concerns sex/gender and feminist praxis. Although the prevailing interpretation of Adorno's work conceptualizes its relationship to women as one of either exclusion or essentialism, I argue that both the reading of Sade's Juliette in Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as a number of Adorno's aphorisms in Minima Moralia, present complex feminist claims and commitments. Max Horkheimer and Adorno position Juliette as a subject of the Enlightenment, forestalling the possibility that women qua women are potentially utopian figures. I utilize Adorno's work in Minima Moralia to show that he—far from excluding or essentializing women—was interested in metaphorically capturing the subjective conditions developed by a system of binary sex/gender within a heteropatriarchal society. Indeed, one can find an iteration of queer theoretical commitments in Minima Moralia. As a result, I argue that he displays a number of straightforwardly feminist commitments: that a liberated society requires the disambiguation of sex from gender, affirming the nonnaturalness of our social sex/gender regime, and claiming that all subjects as gendered subjects are damaged by living within a heteropatriarchal society. Lastly, I provide preliminary evidence of Adorno's critique of (neo)liberal feminist praxis.

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Section: On Juliette: the Daughter Of The Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: On Juliette: the Daughter Of The Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: On Juliette: the Daughter Of The Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Daughters of the Enlightenment: Reconstructing Adorno on Gender and Feminist Praxis

Duford¹

2017

Hypatia

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“…4 Feminist analyses of Adorno's writings appeared. 5 Other studies brought together the writings of Martin Heidegger and Adorno. 6 As Jacques Derrida's popularity increased, so too did the number of studies exploring the imbrication of his and Adorno's works.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%