Noel’s Reviews > Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments > Status Update

…physical nature and its social successor, the many. Only deliberate adaptation to it brings nature under the power of the physically weaker. The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death. The subjective mind which disintegrates the spiritualization of nature masters spiritless nature only by imitating its rigidity, disintegrating itself as animistic. Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings.

(I realize it’s probably very pretentious of me to post this difficult passage out of context. For anyone interested, toward the beginning of the book, A&H write: “the more the illusion of magic vanishes, the more implacably repetition, in the guise of regularity, imprisons human beings in the cycle now [scientifically] objectified in the laws of nature” (p. 8). And: “Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the “herd” (Trupp), which Hegel identified as the outcome of enlightenment” (p. 9).

(Returning to this idea of repetition: “The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped” (p. 28).)