Gender and the Post-Holocaust Crisis of Enlightenment

“HUMANITY HAD TO INFLICT TERRIBLE INJURIES on itself before the self — the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings — was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood,” wrote Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. It has been generally rather little acknowledged that Horkheimer and Adorno's post-Holocaust analysis of the disaster that had engulfed the historical and cultural project of the Enlightenment is couched quite specifically as a critique of the masculine traits that had come to define the concept of human subjectivity in European modernity. At the center of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is an explicitly gendered critique of a form of rationality that, seeking at every stage to dominate and transcend nature in the interests of human self-preservation and progress, leads with fatal inevitability to the destruction both of the rational capacity and of selfhood itself. Horkheimer and Adorno wrote their book of “philosophical fragments” in the United States as Jews in exile from Germany during the latter phases of the Second World War. In this respect, the phenomenon of fascism was key to their studies and lent their critique of Enlightenment a particular political urgency. However, fascism, as they saw it, was more than a mere historical interlude. For them, it displayed a logic underlying the entire trajectory of Enlightenment modernity and indeed, given their analysis of the genesis of masculine subjectivity via a reading of Homer's Odyssey, of the recorded history of patriarchal civilization in the West.