Peter Dews

Over the past few years an awareness has begun to develop of the thematic affinities between the work of those recent French thinkers commonly grouped together under the label of 'post-structuralism', and the thought of the first-generation Frankfurt School, particularly that of Adorno. Indeed, what is perhaps most surprising is that it should have taken so long for the interlocking of concerns between these two philosophical currents to be properly appreciated. Among the most prominent of such common preoccupations are: the illusory autonomy of the bourgeois subject, as exposed pre-eminently in the writings of Freud and Nietzsche; the oppressive functioning of scientific and technological reason, not least in its application to the social domain; the radicalizing potential of modernist aesthetic experience; and -- in the case of Adorno, at least -- the manner in which what are apparently the most marginal and fortuitous features of cultural artefacts reveal their most profound, and often unacknowledged, truths. Furthermore, these affinities have not merely been observed by outsiders, but are beginning to become part of the self-consciousness of participants in the two traditions themselves. Towards the end of his life, Michel Foucault admitted that he could have avoided many mistakes through an earlier reading of Critical Theory, and -- in the last of several retrospective reconstructions of his intellectual itinerary -placed his own thought in a tradition concerned with the 'ontology of actuality', running from Kant and Hegel, via Nietzsche and Weber, to the Frankfurt School. ¹ Similarly, Jean-François Lyotard has employed Adorno's account of the decline of metaphysics and the turn to 'micrology' in order to illuminate -- partly by parallel and partly by contrast -- his own interpretation of postmodernity, ² while even Jacques Derrida, the least eclectic of recent French thinkers, has

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