Captive Enlightenment

Abstract

In this paper, I present a reading of Th. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), with a special focus in the first chapter, or its ‘concept’. This will allow us readers to seek the philosophical potential of pain, and the memory of a living Nature, as elements proper to the captive part of enlightenment: The necessary counterpart of a dialectic that would ultimately lead us to treasure the will of the enlightened project and, therefore, the hope for a transformative praxis