establish identity of the self in view of otherness, and reason is the instrument by which this is accomplished. ⁴² Reason, ratio, is the cunning of the name-giving self. Language separates the object from its concept, the self from its other, the ego from the world. Language masters externality - not, like labour, by making it work for humans, but by reducing it to an identical substratum. Whereas in magic, the name and the thing named stand in a relationship of 'kinship, not one of intention', ⁴³ the concept which replaces the magical symbol in the course of Western culture reduces 'the manifold affinity of being' to the relation between the meaning-constituting subject and the meaningless object. ⁴⁴ The disenchantment of the world, the loss of magic, is not primarily a consequence of the transition from premodernity to modernity. The transition from symbol to concept already means disenchantment. Ratio abstracts, seeks to comprehend through concepts and names. Abstraction, which can grasp the concrete only in so far as it can reduce it to identity, also liquidates the otherness of the other. With relentless rhetoric, Adorno and Horkheimer pursue the irrationality of cultural rationalism to its sources, namely, to the identity logic which is the deep structure of Western reason: ⁴⁵

When it is announced that the tree is no longer simply itself but a witness for another, the seat of mana, language expresses the contradiction that something is itself and yet at the same time another beside itself, identical and non-identical. . . . The concept, which one would like to define as the characterizing unity of what is subsumed under it, was much more from the very beginning a product of dialectical thinking, whereby each is always what it is, in that it becomes what it is not. ⁴⁶

Here the aporetic structure of a critical theory of society, as conceived by Adorno and Horkheimer, becomes apparent. If the plight of the Enlightenment and of cultural rationalization only reveals the culmination of the identity logic, constitutive of reason, then the theory of the dialectic of the Enlightenment, which is carried out with the tools of this very same reason, perpetuates the very structure of domination it condemns. The critique of Enlightenment is cursed by the same burden as Enlightenment itself. This aporia, which is acknowledged by Adorno and Horkheimer themselves, ⁴⁷ is not resolved, but redeemed through the hope that the critique of Enlightenment can none the less evoke the Utopian principle of non-identity logic, which it must deny as soon as it would articulate it discursively. The end of Enlightenment, the end of the 'natural sinfulness of humanity', cannot be stated discursively. If Enlightenment is the culmination of identity logic, then the overcoming

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