Freud, Adorno and the ban on images

It is less recognized than it should be that Theodor Adorno's key noncategory of the Bilderverbot, or ban on images, owes as much to overturning Sigmund Freud's argument concerning idolatry as it does to the biblical ban on images. Of course, both bounce their thoughts off the second commandment of Exod 20 (and Deut 5). Yet Freud's interpretation runs the risk of replicating precisely what the ban seeks to overcome, for the abstraction he espies in the ban is precisely the move that reinstalls idolatry. For this reason, Adorno seeks to deploy the ban on images in a way that blocks the possibility of any form of idolatry. Not only am I interested in the way the arguments of Freud and Adorno unfold, but also I am vitally concerned with the political implications of Adorno's development of what may be called political iconoclasm. What does it mean to engage in a process that cuts down any possibility of reification in a system-capitalism- for which reification is its very lifeblood? The following argument has two stages, beginning with Freud's arresting argument concerning the ban on images in Moses and Monotheism. This enables me to step back and ask what is going on with the ban on images in the biblical text itself, and so I argue that it constitutes a defense mechanism to block the critique of idolatry. Second, I pick up a line that has been taken less commonly, namely, from Freud to Adorno. The latter famously sought common ground between Marxism, Nietzsche, and psychoanalysis, although his psychoanalytic forays have not stood well the test of time-except for one item: the ban on images, the Bilderverbot that became a leitmotif of his philosophy. However, these are not merely arcane concerns of philosophy, for they have significant ramifications for any viable politics in our day and age. So I focus on what may be called the "political iconoclasm" of Adorno's deployment of the hart on images