Article The ‘living entity’:

In his attempt at a renewal of the concept of reification, Axel Honneth has referred to reification as a kind of forgetting. He uses an epigraph from Adorno and Horkheimer’s work to introduce this theme. This article considers the different accounts that are given by Honneth, on the one hand, and Adorno and Horkheimer, on the other, as to the way that reification is a forgetting of core experiential capacities of intersubjective human relations. It argues that Honneth’s account relies too much on a foundational and undifferentiated notion of ‘empathetic engagement’, and that in order to articulate the damage done by reification, we need to contend with the more radical notion of for-getting that is outlined in Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. Keywords forgetting, life, pre-reflective experience, reification, second nature In an oft-cited comment in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer write that ‘all reification is forgetting ’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 191). The kind of for-getting that Adorno and Horkheimer refer to is of a radical kind. It is not just a turning away from something, a denial, or a lack of responsiveness. It is the possibility of the forgotten, of something being completely eradicated. That which is in constant danger of being eradicated is not nature itself but ‘the remembrance of nature ’ (p. 211). This remembrance of nature is responsiveness to past suffering, recognition of the damage done to natural life in the process of enlightenment, and the possibility of a positive con-cept of enlightenment that Adorno and Horkheimer refer to as ‘nature made audible in its estrangement ’ (p. 31). Corresponding author