Alžběta Dyčková

This article aims to provide an elaboration of Theodor Adorno’s notion of exact fantasy and its function within his idea of genuine philosophical thought. It is divided into two main parts. In the first one, I explore the features of the notion of fantasy through a comparison of its understanding in Walter Benjamin’s and Adorno’s bodies of work. I further explicate what features Adorno takes over from Benjamin and where the authors’ ideas diverge. I present the role of fantasy in Adorno’s thought as a non-transparent and emotional element of thinking that is responsible for the active arrangement of elements into constellations, which his individual essays are the embodiment of. In the second part, I follow Adorno’s criticism of the situation of late capitalist society in the light of the feature of lack of fantasy that is according to him caused by the influence of modern mass culture. I put this feature in connection to his examination of the phenomenon of boredom, depicting fantasy as an intellectual faculty which enhances intellectual freedom and resists the ”neurotic feelings” inherent in boredom. In the conclusion, I try to defend the possibility of the validity of Adorno’s insights despite their unconcealed intellectual elitism.

This article aims to explore the connection between freedom and language in T.W. Adorno's Notes to Literature, presenting freedom as a liberation of our way of thinking that has the potential to arrive at an unrestrained interpretation of art and representation of the intellectual experience. I also attempt to show some of Adorno's insights into language and freedom in The Essay as a Form and their role in his essays about Valéry and Proust. Namely I focus on the problematics of the suspension of the subject of the artist within the production of the work of art. Through showing the connection between Adorno's insights into problematics of language, freedom and suspension of subject I hope to contribute to the explication of one of the constructive steps of Adorno's philosophy.

Lyric Philosophy: To Think by Experiencing an Echo of Meaning The study aims to present and shed light on lyric philosophy, a philosophical orienta- tion established by the Canadian philosopher Jan Zwicky. It does so in several steps. First, it presents the central idea of the existence of nonverbal lyric thinking and the experiencing of lyric practice in the framework of which the meaning of this world and its individual parts is to be shown to us. It then illustrates these theses by present- ing the two main inspirations of lyric philosophy – the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgen- stein and gestaltism. It also brings nearer the relationship between lyric philosophy and the philosophical method that is reduced to thinking in words with the help of logical categories. It then focuses on the communication of meaning through meta- phorical expression, which Zwicky considers to be a sort of “window” in the “wall” between us and the meaning through which we are able to see meaning. Finally, the study considers lyric philosophy’s problematic areas and relationship with the philo- sophical tradition and makes an attempt to outline its potential for philosophical re- search in general.