Introduction: Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectics, Aesthetics, Anthropology, Society

The year 2019 was an Adornian year because of the 50th anniversary of Adorno’s untimely death on 6 August 1969. In a somehow similar way, the year 2020 was an Adornian year because of the 50th anniversary of the posthumous publication of his great but unfinished masterpiece Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann and first published by Suhrkamp Press in 1970. In this context, we can also remind the readers of “Scenari” that the year 2021 is the 70th anniversary of another masterpiece by Adorno, namely his famous collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, first published in 1951, soon after his return to Germany after many years spent in exile to escape the persecutions of the Nazi regime. In this work, Adorno tried to come to terms with two different but yet interconnected problems: on the one hand, the self-destruction of Germany and Europe with the triumph of Nazism and the terrible war that succeeded to it; on the other hand, the estranged condition of exile in the land of capitalistic success and so-called “land of the free”, the United States of America. The bourgeois world of old Europe had tragically declined and ended because of its irreconciliable contradictions, while the new consumer society in the United States had inaugurated a new form of annihilation of the individual. Faced with a false alternative, in Minima moralia Adorno tried to remain faithful to the impossible possibility of a just and good life: Minima moralia thus presents a “melancholy science” because the possibility of a “good life” has become unrealistic. With the present short monographic section of this issue of “Scenari”, entitled Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectics, Aesthetics, Anthropology, Society, it is our aim to inquire into some fundamental but sometimes overlooked dimensions of Adorno’s vast, multi-faceted and versatile thinking.