Philosophy and Social Theory: on the political meaning of utopia in Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics.

• Grant number: 16/15181-9
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): November 01, 2016
• Effective date (End): February 28, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal researcher: Luiz Sérgio Repa
• Grantee: Mariana Fidelis Jerônimo de Oliveira
• Home Institution: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 17/13278-8 - Normativity and Politics in Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics., BE.EP.DR

Abstract

At first glance, Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966) seems absent to any political meaning, since it transforms the critique of ideology in an epistemological discussion about the idealist categories of identity, synthesis, and system. Denying the possibility of a passage to praxis, Negative Dialectics proposes a form of theoretical and philosophical activity that, nonetheless, is conceived in order to rescue and preserve the possibility of social criticism in the administered world through a sort of utopian thinking. Our thesis is that utopia, explicitly present in an epistemological sense, would also be able of opening a political meaning of Negative Dialectics, clarifying the relationship between philosophy and social theory at Theodor Adorno's thought.