IMMANENT CRITIQUE AND UTOPIA IN ADORNO

Date

2025-12-23

Author

Çetin, Seyit Baran

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This study investigates the styles of critique in Marx and Adorno, and the concept of utopia stemming from their styles of critique. As this thesis suggests, their method of critique is fundamentally the Hegelian immanent critique, according to which, they share a restricted imagination of the future in terms of utopia. To understand what kind of critique they suggest, I begin with an investigation on the Hegelian immanent critique. Afterwards, I try to show what kinds of revisions Adorno brings to the Hegelian immanence. For Adorno, Hegel’s immanence is a totality in which no individual element can differentiate itself from the others, which he considers as a mark of identity-thinking. To prevent this totality, Adorno suggests a different ontology of the subject and the object including three surpluses of the elements to each other in favor of differentiation. The first surplus is the surplus of the particular to the universal, while the second one is non-conceptuality as a surplus of the object to the subject, and the third one is spontaneity as the surplus of the subject to the object. In this way, Adorno thinks he gives more freedom to both the object and the subject. However, while trying to maintain the differences between the elements, he also tries to maintain the immanent relationship between them, in his words, affinity. As the main argument of the thesis, I suggest that with all three surpluses Adorno creates, his method is coherent with Marx.

Subject Keywords

Adorno, identity-thinking, non-conceptuality, utopia, spontaneity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/117420

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis