Adorno

Summary

Dominique Pagani sees Adorno as a great connoisseur of art music, a pupil of Schoenberg placed at the heart of the avant-gardes, whom he considers the heir of German bourgeois musical culture but also a prisoner of the avant-garde1. He takes up Adorno's critique of pastiche while correcting it: for him, deep archaism is a second meaning of the modern2. He consistently criticizes a puritanism that condemns festive music and jazz, which Adorno supposedly "understood nothing about"3. On the philosophical level, he judges that Adorno's negative dialectics, without negation of the negation or synthesis, illustrates the absolutization of the negative that characterizes Western Marxism; he sees in it a leftism attached to its class position4. Following Clouscard, he places Adorno on the side of neo-Kantianism rather than Marxism. He nevertheless praises the essay Parataxis on Hölderlin and The Jargon of Authenticity, in which Adorno criticizes Heidegger5, and he considers his political courage beyond reproach6.

1. 1The music of history26 Apr 2015 · 1:41:18
2. 2#3 What is called modern music?3 Dec 2020 · 43:14
3. 3#2 From Lévi-Strauss to Nerval, on music3 Dec 2020 · 1:38:01
4. 4Worldliness in Clouscard: desiring what? Through whom?3 Sept 2023 · 1:57:27
5. 5#10.4 From Lascaux to modern music, the permanence of the political stakes in aesthetics3 Nov 2021 · 33:31
6. 6Arendt and Heidegger: the destruction of thought24 Sept 2020 · 1:38:24

Summary produced automatically from 28 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.