Osservazioni su fantasia e prassi in Th. W. Adorno

Notes about phantasy and praxis in Th. W. Adorno. In Adorno’s gnoseology, fantasy carries out an essential task. It allows thought to keep reality at a distance in a critical way, thus making its interpretation and therefore its knowledge possible. At the level of the social critique, Adorno observes a contraction (restriction) of fantasy – especially in Minima Moralia and in his writings on the crisis of the subject, in the early 1940s – that seriously influences the dynamics of progressive alienation and reification of individuals in mass society. This involves real anthropological changes that substantially alter the possibility of knowing and experiencing reality, of understanding and elaborating experience. Only can the thought that doesn’t renounce to the role of fantasy give rise to an authentic critical consciousness of reality, able to demand a transformation of reality itself.