«CIÒ CHE È DETTO CON TRASCURATEZZA È PENSATO MALE»
LO STILE FILOSOFICO TRA SCIENZA E LETTERATURA DI T. W. ADORNO

Elettra Villani

Despite its millennial past, the thorny question of the relationship between philosophy and style continues to fuel even contemporary philosophical debates. One of its most interesting testimonies can probably be found in the reflections of an intellectual who made a clear mark on the history of thought in the last century: Theodor W. Adorno. At a closer look, not only his works are presented through a wide range of extremely heterogeneous forms, but also many of them offer an explicit thematization of his account on method and style. From these simple factual observations alone, it is possible to grasp the centrality of the linguistic-formal work in Adorno’s philosophical process, to the point that the very understanding of his notions is mediated by their presentation and vice versa. Therefore, when faced with the considerable roughness of the Adornian prose, the reader is not dealing with a stylistic effort for its own sake, that is to say with the result of a taste for pure formal aestheticism, but with the inseparable imbrication of criticism and composition that marks Adorno’s texts. For this reason, the present paper intends to investigate that dialectical inflection that tightens the concept to its presentation, that allows Adorno to point out the intrinsic specificity of philosophy, which distinguishes it from both science and literature, without having to renounce its logical stringency or its preoccupation with style.