The article examines the relationship between mimesis and taboo in Adorno’s philosophy. Mimesis is not just understood as imitation, but rather as a movement of making oneself equal with the other or the environment. In „mimetic behavior“ the boundaries between subject and object, activity and passivity become unstable. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment reconstructs the history of civilization as the history of violence used to draw a sharp boundary between subject and object and to elevate the subject to the ruler of its inner and outer nature. However, the temptation to surrender to the environment, to lose oneself in it, and to free oneself from the burden of subjectivity remains effective. Therefore, to succeed in the process of civilization, a taboo is imposed on mimesis. In the taboo, the longing inherent in „mimetic behavior“ is not only negated but also preserved. The sphere of the aesthetic or children’s games are areas where the tabooed mimesis is socially tolerated and thus areas that remind us of the happiness of self-forgetful devotion. However, in the „administered world,“ any realization of happiness is reversed into its opposite: the „mimetic taboo,“ once a repressive measure for the production of the cold, bourgeois subject, now becomes a protection against the realization of happiness in the „false life,“ which would also be a betrayal of happiness. Adorno calls this transformation in the function of the taboo the „Dialectic of Taboo“.