hidden in it is also the truth moment of ideology, the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism. ⁴³

Bearing this argument in mind, we are now perhaps in a position to return with more insight to the Borges story with which we began. It will already be apparent that the tale of the subduing of the mirror-animals can be interpreted in terms not only of the libidinal critique of consciousness, but also of the 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' which was first formulated by Horkheimer and Adorno during the early 1940s, and which continues to underpin Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. The humanization of the drives, represented by the transformation of the animals into reflections, does indeed result in a kind of mastery by the ego. But this mastery is bought at the price of a terrible isolation: in Negative Dialectics Adorno returns repeatedly to the pathos of a self helplessly confined within the circle of its own immanence, unable to make contact with anything external which does not turn out to be simply its own reflection. The need to break out of this isolation generates a tension at the heart of subjectivity itself, which post-structuralism, in general, is reluctant or unable to recognize. This inadequacy suggests that there might be substantive aspects of the story which Lyotard has failed to account for in his interpretation.

Firstly, Lyotard describes the banishment and punishment of the animals as a simple act of force, of repression and containment, whereas Borges describes the Emperor as employing his 'magic arts', as putting the animals under a spell. Significantly, the concept of a spell plays an important role in Adorno's philosophy; since enchantment can constitute a peculiarly intangible and non-apparent form of coercion, to speak of a spell suggests a state of compulsive selfhood in which actions are simultaneously autonomous and heteronomous, accompanied by exaggerated subjective illusions of autonomy, but carried out by subjects nevertheless. The metaphor of the spell, in other words, captures both the repressive and enabling features of processes of socialization, which are portrayed as an aspect of the human conquest of nature in the interests of self-preservation. As Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, 'The spell is the subjective form of the world spirit, the internal reinforcement of its primacy over the external processes of life.' ⁴⁴ In the later Critical Theory of Habermas, this parallelism of the instrumental domination of outer nature and the repression of inner nature will be contested. Habermas will avoid Adorno's implication that emancipation from nature entails the closing-down of all communicative sensitivity by attributing socialization and instrumental action to categorically distinct dimensions of historical development. Nevertheless, already in its Adornian version,

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