Giovanni Zanotti

This article provides a close reading of Theodor Adorno's 1924 dissertation on Husserl, shaped by the ideas of his academic mentor Hans Cornelius. It opens with a brief overview of Cornelius's transcendental-empiricist theory of knowledge (immediacy, memory, and the object as a law-like nexus of phenomena) and his objections to Husserl. It then reconstructs the dissertation's two movements: first, the critique of the thing's transcendence through an account of subjective constitution; second, the analysis of noema and epoché, where the alleged immunity of sense is challenged by its dependence on experiential change. By analyzing Adorno's rejection of the immediacy of thing-perception and his reinterpretation of objects as immanent relations among experiences, the article highlights an early formulation of themes that will culminate in his later engagement with Husserl and in negative dialectics as a whole: the critique of ontology, the role of mediation, and the historicity of meaning.

In this article I reconstruct Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Pierre Bayle based on his various writings on this subject, most of which are still unpublished. In the introduction I briefly present the history and current editorial situation of each of them. In the first section I analyze some of Kojève’s manuscripts to give an initial account of his position on Bayle’s concept of tolerance. In the second section I outline Kojève’s epistemological argumentation in his book on Bayle. In the third section I rely on Kojève’s notes for his 1936-1937 lectures on Bayle to argue that his position actually differs from both Bayle’s skepticism and political liberalism. Rather, for Kojève, Bayle’s philosophical impasse results from his transitional position in the movement toward a “modern” worldview first consistently produced by Hegel and Marx, implying the idea of a purely historical human truth realized in – and imposed by – the “post-revolutionary” state.

Adorno’s dialectic is threatened by the apparent contradiction between its idea of reconciliation and a critique so radical that it seems to exclude the very possibility of reconciliation. In my article, I offer an interpretation that seeks a way out of this problem through the concept of a “contingent antagonism”. In the first part, I trace the concept back to the young Marx. After, I argue that Adorno’s sharpening of the critical standpoint, while eliminating the dogmatic residue still present in Marx and Lukács, also gives rise to the dilemma of a seemingly all-encompassing negativity. Finally, I suggest that the dilemma can be solved if the object of critique is recognized, at the same time, as conceptually irreducible and historically contingent. I also show how precisely this theoretical turn is a moving force for both Adorno’s sociological and philosophical thought. I conclude by briefly outlining a way in which Adorno’s concepts of contingent antagonism and qualitative change could be developed into a general theory of radical possibility.

In this paper I reconstruct Adorno’s arguments against the phenomenological project as developed by Husserl in the early phase of his thought, with particular focus on the dialectical nature and meaning of such a critique. Primary references are Adorno’s article Husserl and the Problem of Idealism, published in 1940, and his book Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, published in 1956. I argue that, for Adorno, Husserl’s attempt must be understood as both logically impossible and theoretically productive. After laying down the general framework of Adorno’s reading in the first three sections, I examine his criticism of Husserl’s “involuntary dialectic” in detail, also with the help of an independent analysis of some ambiguities in Husserl’s concept of “categorial intuition”. In the last section, I explain why and under what conditions, according to Adorno, the original impulse of Husserlian phenomenology toward an intact knowledge of “things themselves” needs to be maintained in spite of all.

The paper discusses the problem of the possible relation between psychoanalytic concepts and social critique in the perspective of Adorno's social thought. The title refers to Adorno's idea that psyche as individual spontaneity has now lost the weight it used to have in the liberal era. As a brief introductory remark, I clarify the status of theory for Adorno, i.e., the circularity between interpretation and description as grounded by the nature of the social object itself. Then I analyse his core idea of “social objectivity” as an impersonal mechanism which is at the same time produced by men and reified, heteronomous for them, and I argue that, for Adorno, the discontinuity existing between individual and society prevents an immediate shift of psychoanalytic concepts to the social world: the example of fascism clearly proves that the determining social forces today, while instrumentally exploiting deep psychical materials, are not themselves psychological. In the final part, I show how, for Adorno, psychology and sociology nevertheless need to be mediated with each other, while avoiding the superficial synthesis the so-called “revised psychoanalysis” aims to, and I point out some similarities between psychoanalytic practice and social critique as conceived by him.