O particular e o universal sob a perspectiva da possibilidade de reconciliação em Theodor Adorno

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze the categories of particular and universal in Theodor Adorno's thought in confrontation with Hegel's thought. More precisely, the purpose is to investigate the relationship between the particular and the universal in the context of dialectical thought, from three perspectives of analysis: i) the epistemological, ii) the sociological and iii) the aesthetic; but, emphasizing the primacy of the aesthetic over the epistemological and sociological, based on the hypothesis that, if in the juxtaposition between the particular and the universal, the object and concept and individual and society relations, reconciliation is blocked; in the relationship between art and the administered world, differently, a space for reconciliation is opened – even as a possibility. The impossibility of reconciliation between object and concept and between individual and society is inferred from the Adornian interpretation according to which concept and society tend to subsume and reduce, respectively, object and individual to universality by preventing the non-identical character of both, as well as depriving their latent negative and non-identical potentials. On the contrary, in the sphere of the aesthetic, the nexus between art and the administered world represent a possible reconciliation’s state, considering that the work of art is carried out in empirical reality without oppressing or reducing its antagonistic elements that constitute the formal identity of the aesthetic construct, which, in turn, establishes itself as a non-identical entity in relation to the empirical social reality, transposing the aspiration to redeem the non-identical from the heart of the configuration of the work of art to extra-aesthetic relationships. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is, henceforth, to examine the sustainability of the hypothesis according to which the work of art can be taken as a constellation and non-normative formal model, which expresses itself as a prototype for the realization of possible ways of knowledge and of life in society, insofar as both its internal configuration and its response to externality manifest the refusal of non-identical particularities to succumb to the coercive forces of the universal, whose effort is to reduce the particular and the non-identical to universality and identity. For the realization of this undertaking, the categories of mediation, individuation, monad and utopia will be taken as a starting point, formulated, above all, in the two main works of Theodor Adorno's “philosophical maturity”: Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory.