Adorno's Concept of Utopia

Abstract

This master's thesis examines Adorno's concept of Utopia. Throughout this work I argue that Adorno is a utopian thinker and his conception of Utopia is a constellation or montage of negative, messianic-materialistic, formal, and individualistic definitions of Utopia. I elucidate my argument by reconstructing Adorno's conceptual constellation of Utopia in different chapters and sections of this work in the form of an interpretive constellation. In the first chapter, I explain how Utopia got lost, by investigating the causes of the failure of Enlightenment's utopian goals such as rationality, freedom, progress, and establishment of the whole society as humanity. This failure necessitates a radical reconsideration of all fundamental principles of thought and society. In chapter two I analyze Adorno's conception of negative Utopia as the determinate negation of Dystopia. His negative dialectics is the recognition of what is non-identical to thought's concepts and categories. The non-identical is the condition of the possibility of Utopia, because it indicates that there is something 'more' than what our conceptual system of knowledge can comprehend, this 'more' is the utopian. I continue this chapter by discussing Adorno's inverse theology as messianic materialism which maintains that there is no transcendent...

This master's thesis examines Adorno's concept of Utopia. Throughout this work I argue that Adorno is a utopian thinker and his conception of Utopia is a constellation or montage of negative, messianic-materialistic, formal, and individualistic definitions of Utopia. I elucidate my argument by reconstructing Adorno's conceptual constellation of Utopia in different chapters and sections of this work in the form of an interpretive constellation. In the first chapter, I explain how Utopia got lost, by investigating the causes of the failure of Enlightenment's utopian goals such as rationality, freedom, progress, and establishment of the whole society as humanity. This failure necessitates a radical reconsideration of all fundamental principles of thought and society. In chapter two I analyze Adorno's conception of negative Utopia as the determinate negation of Dystopia. His negative dialectics is the recognition of what is non-identical to thought's concepts and categories. The non-identical is the condition of the possibility of Utopia, because it indicates that there is something 'more' than what our conceptual system of knowledge can comprehend, this 'more' is the utopian. I continue this chapter by discussing Adorno's inverse theology as messianic materialism which maintains that there is no transcendent...