• community
• comunità
• crowd
• enlightenment
• esperienza
• experience
• folla
• illuminismo
• individual
• individuo
• mass
• massa
• Radio generation
• società
• society

In my thesis I tried to frame the problem of the individual from an aesthetic, ethic and politic point of view, starting from Adorno’s own words in Minima moralia, which say that “in the age of individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew”.
The first part – the negative one – is all dedicated to reflect on the liquidation of the individual and its deep meaning. I decided to start with the lecture of the Dialectic of enlightenment, in particular of the famous ‘excursus’ "Odysseus oder Mythos und Aufklärung" (1947), that with high probability was written only by Adorno, paying attention to the first version of Adorno’s chapter, entitled "Geschichtsphilosophischer Exkurs zur Odyssee". Regarding the background of Adorno’s interpretation of the Urgeschichte der Subjektivität, I focused to clarify the influence of post-Nietzschean and anti-modernist thinkers like Rudolf Borchardt and Ludwig Klages – whose names have been removed by Horkheimer, but actually they are the setting for Adorno’s interpretation of Odyssey – and the dialectic between conservation and sacrifice.
Then, in the second chapter, I considered the real “age of individual’s liquidation”. Analyzing Adorno’s essays of the Thirties and Forties about the crisis of the modern individual – from the lack of images, the decay of traditional language, the creation of a “synthetic language, essentially determined by the advertising” to the disintegration of the family’s authority – I outlined a world of loss of experience, in which the individual could be helped neither by psychoanalysis nor by sociology.
Inevitable was the confrontation with Martin Heidegger, to whom I dedicated the third chapter. His description of Dasein collides with the conception of the Adornische individual, but allows us to jump to the problem of the relationship between Dasein and Mitdasein, individual and collectivity.
The second part of my thesis – the positive one – wants, indeed, to show that it is exactly the crisis of the individual to open the possibility for a “new human type” and aspires to an aesthetical-political and ethical prospective of the “otherwise”, where it would be possible a new Enlightenment for a new human type. In the forth chapter, I analyzed a dialogue between Adorno and Horkheimer about the possibility to write a “new manifesto” and an inedited Adorno’s manuscript, titled “Zum Marxismus” (1945), in order to show that the point is not a redefinition of the individual, but the attempt to understand the theoretical coordinates, within which it is even possible to rethink it. And the coordinates to rethink the individual, the new individual, are a new political, pedagogical and aesthetical Enlightenment, in which a new alternative is possible. If so far the history has showed its cruelest face, this does not mean that another one cannot exist. Only running through the reification of the individual, the letter can open a breach of utopia, only if the men know their situation of impotence, they can act on it and change it. Like this it is so shaped a dialectic of individual.
In the last chapter, it was natural to concentrate my reflection to another interlocutor: Walter Benjamin. He is the one, who shows us a new street not only for a new individual, but also for a new collectivity. It is exactly the collective of Paris, Moscow and Naples, to outline a collective, which is not a metropolitan mass nor a Heideggerian community, but a crow, that could indicate a new way for a new collectivity.