SíNTESE - Partindo de um exame mais cuidadoso e de uma leitura menos linear das fontes, o artigo procura mostrar que as concepções adornianas a respeito da arte na era da técnica, embora críticas, revelam uma abertura dialética, não se deixando prender a dogmas e preconceitos, conforme pretendem seus adversários.

ABSTRACTIn this essay I draw attention to conceptual similarities in Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s reflection about language, with special attention to Benjamin’s 1916 essay about language as such, including its theological impulses. In Adorno’s case, I concentrate on language theory as it comes forth in relation to his philosophy of music and the supposed language-character of music. I argue that this particular connection between Benjamin and Adorno is largely unexplored in the literature, and I show that their conceptual (...) affinities have far-reaching consequences for a proper understanding of Adorno’s philosophy as a whole. Music is of fundamental importance for Adorno’s critical theory, and this fact points to an intricate entwinement between materialism and theology, stemming from Benjamin’s theory of language. Thinking of music as secularized prayer means to emphasize that music relates to reality in a way that resembles the logic of Benjamin’s understanding of a pre-lapsarian language of... (shrink)

This thesis argues for the continuing possibility of Adorno set against the backdrop of a post-modern proliferation of affects. A major theoretical contention is the concept of the subject: a sticking point within philosophy. The thesis takes this up and offers a new pathway without falling into the cliché of a renewal of Adorno’s position. Drawing on Adorno’s theoretical thoughts on the subject the thesis contends that the subject is that which by turns dissolves all eventualities or more proportionally acts (...) like a place-holder for the newly emerging: structures that cannot be explained by recourse to the laws that govern its parts. These experiential structures present a surface, resistance, or solidarity that upon closer examination dissolve back into the ephemeral. Although such structures are profligate and prolific, the thesis adopts as its major concern artworks and aesthetics. Following Adorno, a claim is made for artworks that present open-ended possibilities. They are able for example to critically challenge the dominant hegemony the profundity that all too easily sides with the oppressors of life. What philosophy, a critical tool in furtherance of the good life, a concept restaged, here takes from art is not a sense of equivalence, art and philosophy are held apart in a creative and critical tension, but the sense of yearning that animates the nonconceptual side of art which the concept negates. The yearning, being experiential, is always embodied. Its fulfilment negates the immediacies, the mere appearance of life, particularly in its systematically reflexive form. The conclusion concurs with Adorno in the thought that affinity with the object is achieved not as the resultant of identity thinking, but through the act of definite negation of identifying schema. (shrink)

This thesis has two principal aims: to demonstrate the centrality of memory to the philosophy and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno, and to assess its philosophical significance. Although in recent years Adorno's work has been the object of increased scrutiny within Anglo-American philosophical circles, as yet little sustained attention has been devoted to the concept of memory within Adorno's oeuvre. However, in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer proclaimed that it is "by virtue of this memory of nature in the (...) subject" that "enlightenment is universally opposed to domination. "Given that all of Adorno's work is concerned to redeem enlightenment from domination, the importance of a philosophical interpretation of the concept of memory is pivotal for an engagement with the legacy of Adorno's thought today. It will be argued that, for Adorno, memory always operates in relation to reification. The construal of this relation enjoins the consideration of a number of significant categories within Adorno's work: notably tradition, experience, mimesis and utopia; and further, it serves to situate and distance Adorno from those thinkers - Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Benjamin - with whom he incessantly engages. Finally, by focusing on the relation between memory and reification, one can gauge the stakes of the Habermasian critique of Adorno, for it is Adorno's understanding of reconciliation as the "remembrance of nature in the subject" that is the crux of the agon between Habermas and Adorno. I will argue that it is Habermas's failure to fully engage with the ramifications of Adorno's concept of memory that vitiates his critique, and indeed, that this failure provides the means for an Adornian critique of Haberman. It will be argued that memory is not an object of Adornian thought, but rather, that it provides the utopian texture of that thought. (shrink)