Open Access

Luca Baldassarre

• In this article the author highlights some issues about Adorno’s thought that are fundamental to be acquired in the present age. It focuses on the questions most criticized in the postwar period: cultural industry, managed world, presumed snobbery about mass society, decline of aura, end of individuality, post-individual or pseudo-individuality, ticket mentality. Therefore, the author suggests to explain contemporary age starting from the Adornian model, an important interpretive antecedent to understand new media and the world that they produce. So this article underscores the similarity about many causes for reflection in Theodor W. Adorno and also H. Marcuse: in spite of oustanding differences, both theorists persist on the “power of negative thinking” and on the “feeling of the contrary”. This persistence lays the foundations of critical thought in Adorno, who shows parodying art such as the critical model par excellence. Finally, last pages are directed to remark the importance of Adorno’s thought such as metacritical philosophy, surely more fruitful than the paradigm of the “second generation” in the following decades.