Adorno reader of Kierkegaard: Or, the aesthetics of content as materialistic heritage

Abstract

We intended in this paper (I) to show the elements that constitute Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel and (II) the implications of this criticism for a supposed aesthetic turn made by Adorno in his philosophy as a possibility to overcome the hegelian dialectic. The hypothesis that we will raise here is that in the criticism of Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic, Adorno realizes the possibility of building a notion of unrestricted rational experience that will make possible the effective exit of idealism, especially through what he will later call dialectical materialist aesthetics (materialistisch-dialektischen Ästhetik). We will try to show that when moving Kierkegaard's thought against Hegel (and vice-versa), what Adorno does, besides critically reconstructing the Hegelian idea of ​​dialectics, is to promote the implosion of the idealism present in both authors. In other words, he performs a materialist interpretation of the dialectic that brings to consciousness the mediated (necessary) character of the subject's real and concrete experience with the world, without subtracting one pole from the other, i.e., a dialectic that aims at the disintegration of the idealistic model constitutive subjectivity without eliminating subjectivity nor its opposite pole.