Philosophy and/as Literature: Some Remarks on Theodor W. Adorno and Richard Rorty

This paper takes up the issue of the relation between philosophy and literature, which has somehow characterized the whole history of Western philosophy, and it does so in terms of a discussion of Theodor W. Adorno’s approach to this topic. My account of Adorno in this paper is largely descriptive, and I attempt to capture his view by emphasizing its dialectical complexity: that is, the fact that Adorno constantly sought to avoid either a simple opposition of philosophy and literature, or their simple identification. Finally, I argue that such a dialectical approach can perhaps provide a richer and better understanding of the relation between philosophy and literature than other approaches, such as Richard Rorty’s, who took deconstructionism and pragmatism to their most extreme, and claimed that philosophy should be conceived as nothing more than a kind of writing.