Mariana Fidelis Jerônimo de Oliveira

At first glance, Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) seems absent from any political meaning, since it denies the possibility of a passage to praxis and is dedicated to a philosophical self-reflection on the main idealist categories. Nevertheless, it proposes a theoretical-philosophical activity that is conceived in order to safeguard the possibility of social criticism in the administered world through a sort of utopian thought. The hypothesis of this work is that the notions of utopia and critique of identity, present in Negative Dialectics explicitly in an epistemological sense, would also be able to open its political dimension. They would be the keys to understanding how Adorno's Critical Theory could still preserve the fundamental impulses of political interest of Critical Theory which, according to its Marxist heritage, aims not only at the critique of capitalist society, but also the fundamental perspective of human emancipation. Furthermore, by carrying out a thorough critique of identity as a principle of thought, Adorno could contribute to the understanding of the recent historical shift of this concept from the field of logic/epistemology to that of ethics/politics.