Giovanni Zanotti

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.