AUTONOMÍA Y MODELOS DE LA VIDA JUSTA: REFLEXIONES SOBRE LA RELACIÓN ENTRE ÉTICA Y POLÍTICA EN ADORNO

This paper proposes to discuss Theodor W. Adorno’s moral philosophy, taking as its starting point the role played by politics for morality as its condition of possibility. The aim of the article is to show how it would be possible to conceive of an Adornian theory of social action, especially when considering unpublished notes from a moral philosophy lecture given in 1956. Thus, Adorno’s moral philosophy must be understood as the expression of the constitutive tension between two poles: the ethical impossibility of a right life in the false life of the Minima Moralia, and the moral moment defined by the new categorical imperative proposed by Adorno in Negative Dialectics. The consequence of this is the need to embody forms of resistance that are always singular, though necessarily in relation to the universal demands that subjects experience. The article argues that these forms of resistance are necessarily more than simply negative, in that they ultimately call for the elaboration of new forms of social practice.