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Sadean nature and reasoned morality in Adorno/Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment

This article critiques Frankfurt School philosophical claims that blame the eighteenth-century philosophical Enlightenment, and the pornographic texts of the Marquis de Sade in particular, for the development of attitudes to sexual desire and morality that led supposedly to the genocidal hatred of Nazism. It examines the use of the concept of ‘nature’ in the work of Sade and compares this to the ‘Nature’ of Frankfurt School and other psychoanalytic accounts. It argues that the discrepancy between these historically differing visions of nature reveals the problematic character of attempts to psychoanalyse the culture that produced Nazism. While Sade's nature is inconsistently amoral and perversely moral, Frankfurt School claims rely on a Freudian vision of civilisation as divided between nature and reason, with the Holocaust characterised as the failure of an overly formal rationality to control the chaos and violent passion of nature. Sadomasochistic desires are thus implied to be imbricated in the very worst dynamics of violence and hatred, whereas the Holocaust is trivialised as a product of sexual perversion.