Abstract
The text analyses the key role that utopia plays in Theodor Adorno’s philosophy. Contrary to the common reception of his work, which is usually presented as a retreat from socialist, engaged political thought, I portray Adorno as a representative of a canon of Marxist thought, who is oriented towards a radical transformation of modern society. Adorno, as part of his theoretical framing of the possibility of that transformation, affirms the concept of utopia and subversively tries to recover it for Marxist theory, which historically has tried to dissociate itself from utopian visions of socialism. I present in the text a dual function of utopia in Adorno’s work – the strictly philosophical one, of utopia as a formal characteristic of our thinking, as well as the politico-historical one, of utopia as the horizon of imagination of societal change and the very condition of that change.
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