On Adorno's aesthetical materialism in the thirties

• Grant number: 15/22485-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2016
• End date: December 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Ribeiro Terra
• Grantee: Lutti Mira Salineiro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 17/23817-3 - Time diagnosis, autonomy of art and domination in Adornos socio-aesthetical thinking, BE.EP.IC

Abstract

The research intends to analise Adorno's writings on musical sociology in the thirties; as a general program, we divided this decade in three main texts: (1.) Why is the new art so hard to understand?, a conference given in 1931; (2.) On the social situation of music, the first large adornian effort to think the relationship between music and society (1932), and (3.) On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening, Adorno's most famous essay in the thirties, published in 1938. We defend that a sharp analysis of these texts may offer relevant elements to think Adorno's development as a thinker, offering as well some insight in his relationship with the thinking of Walter Benjamin. In order to analyse these aspects, we intend to delimitate Adorno's conception of aesthetical materialism developed during the thirties.