Adaptation and selfpreservation in a freudian key: returning to the critique of instrumental reason of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

• Grant number: 14/00964-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: April 01, 2014
• End date: August 26, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Severino Nobre
• Grantee: Raphael Eduardo Alves Concli
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 14/16541-3 - The diagnosis of social integration in the critique of instrumental reason of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

This project proposes a return to the period known as critique of instrumental reasoni among the tradition of the Critical Theory of society in order to retrieve a field of problems presented there that seems to be still relevant: which are the forms and the consequences of the processes of adaptation towards selfpreservation identified by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. This critical model has been widely interpreted, which tend to point out its aporetic diagnosis of time and transhistoric perspective, claiming the importance of moving beyond it. These readings, however, usually let aside the presence of Freud in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclispe of Reason, in favor of the influence of authors such as Max Weber, Gyorgy Lukács and Friedrich Pollock in both these texts. Our intention is to return to the critique of instrumental reason from its first works - Authoritarian State and The End of Reason from Max Horkheimer - and follow the Freudian path in this critical model in order to search which elements of Psychoanalysis play a role there and in which way do Horkheimer and Adorno use them to understand the process of individual adaptation to the society. In this attempt to make the role of Psychoanalysis for these authors clear we also want to know if the way which this discipline is mobilized by them can still be relevant for a historically situated understanding of the adaptation phenomena. (AU)

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

CONCLI, Raphael Eduardo Alves. Social integration and adaptation in the diagnosis of the administered world of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. 2016. Master's Dissertation - Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas Campinas, SP.