IL LINGUAGGIO, LA RETORICA, L’UTOPIA
ADORNO E LA FORMA ROMANZO DELLA MUSICA MAHLERIANA

Chiara De Cosmo

The aim of my paper is to analyze the deep nexus between negative dialectics and rhetoric in Adorno’s thought. In the first part I will explore the function of the “rhetoric moment” in Adorno’s epistemology, by crossing some of his works from the1950s and 1960s and by highlighting its connection with the possibility to rediscover the tradition not as a “death past”, but instead as form in germination. According to him, the imaginative trait of rhetoric is not external to the conceptual work; it represents rather one of the moments of mediation through which the knowledge seeks to approach its content. In the second part, I will focus on the Adorno’s essay on Mahler as a model of a kind of elaboration of materials, which allows to trace down new utopian potentialities for the philosophical form within the inherited linguistic configurations. I will show in the conclusions how in Adorno’s perspective the rhetoric element of dialectics is necessary to guarantee a critical and freeing potential to the theory.