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As an exemplum of that kind of “modern” art, in terms of Adorno, Kafka’s work is marked not only by its strictly “realistic” character, but also by the unavoidable critical and testimonial value of that realism. According to this perspective, both in Adorno and in Benjamin the testimonial aspect of Kafkian writing – that is of a writing as “dialectical image”, as memory of the unfullfilled possibility – it’s all the same not with its symbolical or “epiphanical” aspect but instead with its “allegorical” one.
La experiencia del arte en todas sus variedades tiene siempre una dimensión cognitiva. También las experiencias estéticas negativas la tienen, muy especialmente en el arte contemporáneo. Éstas pueden estar determinadas por el contenido y o los medios de la obra o por los efectos de la misma. Lo que da lugar a una variada tipología de experiencias del arte con uno o más aspectos negativos. La teoría estética de T.W. Adorno nos proporciona diversas herramientas para repensar esta variedad de la cognición artística. En la medida que se trata de una estética negativa, categorías de la misma como las de carácter enigmático, autonomía, resistencia o comunicación de lo incomunicable, nos ofrecen vías para entender el lugar de las experiencias negativas en el arte contemporáneo y su función cognitiva.
The paper discusses the problem of the possible relation between psychoanalytic concepts and social critique in the perspective of Adorno's social thought. The title refers to Adorno's idea that psyche as individual spontaneity has now lost the weight it used to have in the liberal era. As a brief introductory remark, I clarify the status of theory for Adorno, i.e., the circularity between interpretation and description as grounded by the nature of the social object itself. Then I analyse his core idea of “social objectivity” as an impersonal mechanism which is at the same time produced by men and reified, heteronomous for them, and I argue that, for Adorno, the discontinuity existing between individual and society prevents an immediate shift of psychoanalytic concepts to the social world: the example of fascism clearly proves that the determining social forces today, while instrumentally exploiting deep psychical materials, are not themselves psychological. In the final part, I show how, for Adorno, psychology and sociology nevertheless need to be mediated with each other, while avoiding the superficial synthesis the so-called “revised psychoanalysis” aims to, and I point out some similarities between psychoanalytic practice and social critique as conceived by him.