El paquidermo Teddy. Adorno, los animales y el materialismo somático

Facundo Martin

Authors

Facundo Martin CONICET - UBA

Keywords:

Adorno, Materialism, Biology, Body

Abstract

I intend to interrogate the concept of “somatic materialism” in the thought of Th. W. Adorno and place it in relation with the contemporary sciences of life and mind. I will start with a reconstruction of the ethical status of animals in Adorno's philosophy and, on that basis, I will develop a reflection on materialism as a self-reflexive theory of the subject. I will try to think Adorno's maxim about the primacy of the object, under a conceptual movement towards biologically oriented materialism. I will outline three fields of research in the contemporary natural sciences that allow us to rethink the problem of materialism in this biological framework: the autopoietic concept of the organism, the neuroscience of affect, and predictive processing. I will argue, in conclusion, that it is possible to rethink (partly reconstructively) Adorno's philosophy in terms of critical naturalism.

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