Between utopia and catastrophe: the impasse of progress in Theodor W. Adorno

• Grant number: 25/19420-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2025
• End date: October 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Silvio Ricardo Gomes Carneiro
• Grantee: Mathias Galli Tatsch
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas (CCNH). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Santo André , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In 1964, Theodor W. Adorno published the essay Progress, in which he stressed the urgency of rethinking this concept in an era marked by both catastrophic and utopian possibilities. His intervention emerged at a historical juncture in which a fundamental impasse had imposed itself: the events that inaugurated the twentieth century appeared to undermine the very possibility of conceiving a philosophy of history in which humanity could still be envisioned as advancing toward emancipation and freedom. For Adorno, this impasse takes shape as the challenge of remaining faithful both to the experience of suffering and catastrophe and to the revolutionary project of modernity and Marxism. Against this backdrop, the present project seeks to examine what it means to conceptualize progress-a category forged in a historical horizon oriented toward the future-in a time when the future itself appears threatened by catastrophe. The guiding question is how the dialectical critique of progress, understood as a critique of the present, simultaneously gestures beyond it, toward that which is not yet, and which might be named utopia. The project will therefore analyze the ways in which Adorno approaches this problem through a rigorous articulation of philosophy of history, philosophy of nature, and the dialectic of enlightenment. The aim is to trace how such a constellation of reflections pushes thought toward a determinate negativity that opens the possibility for the emergence of the new against the given present.