Political Praxis in Adorno’s Musical Writings

Abstract

This paper offers a critical exposition of Theodor Adorno’s complex interpretation on the political trait of radical modern art, by focusing, more specifically, on the so-called ‘new music’. First, I will explore the epistemic frame developed by Adorno in Philosophy of the new music, in which the author remarks the tension in the relationship between art and philosophy. From this starting point, I will move forward to the explanation of in what sense both social and political mediations of music are immanent to the work with the very musical material. Secondly, I will show in what way this ‘political trait’ was already present in the adornian conception of ‘the ever-broken promise of happiness’, and how Adorno is led by this conception to a vindication of an aesthetics of silence. The link between these two moments will be the idea that modern radical artists become zoon politikon at the very moment in which, according to Adorno, there would not be any more individuals able to assume a liberating praxis in the strictly political sphere.