A estética da violência no pensamento de Theodor Adorno

Abstract

This research examines the possibility of defining a concept of the Aesthetics of Violence in the thought of Theodor Adorno. It articulates this concept with the dynamics of fascism, contemporary processes of cultural domination, and devices of subjectivation, through a psychoanalytic reading. The guiding problem is to understand how Adorno conceives the relation between aesthetics and violence — especially under authoritarian regime — and how this relation intersects with art, culture, and politics. Accordingly, the aim is to understand how the aestheticization of violence and the symbolic manipulation of the masses organize the aesthetic-political phenomenon of fascism. The textual organization follows this structure: (i) the first chapter takes Aesthetic Theory as its key concept, reconstructing the dialectic between the autonomy of art and social determination; (ii) the second chapter situates fascism as an aesthetic-political phenomenon that, by means of propaganda, aestheticizes violence and mobilizes the masses, culminating in a cult of the leader and the glorification of force; (iii) the third chapter shows how the Culture Industry, by standardizing cultural processes, blocks processes of autonomy, renders critical imagination unviable, and naturalizes hierarchies. The methodology is grounded in Adorno’s negative dialectics, which seeks to overcome reifications by unveiling immanent contradictions. The research unfolds through conceptual analysis and a critical hermeneutic reading of Adorno’s works —especially Dialectic of Enlightenment, Aesthetic Theory, and Education and Emancipation — and proposes a systematic dialogue with the Freudian corpus to elucidate the psychic and technical dimensions of aestheticization. The results, based on this thematization, suggest that Adorno understood totalitarian regimes to formulate an Aesthetics of Violence, naturalizing it as culture and instrumentalizing it as political propaganda. Moreover, fascism represents the apex of a logic that converts culture into spectacle, thereby obscuring the very possibility of critique. Therefore, aesthetic education should be grounded in critical reflection, oriented toward a process of emancipation and resistance to forms of massification. In this way, the dissertation contributes to the field of critical philosophy by systematizing the concept of an Aesthetics of Violence, highlighting its historical-political relevance, and offering theoretical parameters for analyzing cultural practices that, even today, sustain the perpetuation and dissemination of regimes of symbolic domination.