The category of totality in Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic

• Grant number: 15/18308-7
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): November 01, 2015
• Effective date (End): October 01, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal researcher: Luiz Sérgio Repa
• Grantee: Gabriel Petrechen Kugnharski
• Home Institution: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 14/11611-3 - Public sphere and reconstruction: on the constitution of a reconstructive paradigm within Critical Theory, AP.TEM
• Associated scholarship(s): 16/20632-0 - The relation between totality and dialectic in Theodor W. Adorno, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

This project aims to investigate the concept of totality in the late Theodor W. Adorno, specially in Negative Dialectic, and the Adornian reading of Hegelian dialectic around this concept. Although critical of the category of totality, Adorno still uses it in several fields of his analysis, such as the diagnosis of late capitalism through the concept of administered world. If, however, the totality is exposed only as a category that has to be critically denied, or if this concept still keeps in itself, in a certain way, a normative horizon, is a question that does not reach consensus in the secondary literature, and which will be developed in our research. Therewith, we intend to achieve a better understanding of Adorno's own project of a negative dialectic, of his diagnosis of late capitalism and, finally, of his conception of reconciliation. (AU)