Adorno's Construction of Imagination As a Historical-Systematic Problem in Classical Social Theory.

This proposal addresses a specific chapter in the theoretical and social trajectory of a philosophical-aesthetic category: the imagination. In numerous passages across his essays, articles, lectures, and books, Adorno makes sparse but frequent references to imagination as a philosophical category. He predominantly uses the German term Phantasie (fantasy) rather than its Germanic (Einbildung, Einbildungskraft, or Vorstellungsvermögen) or Latin (Imaginatio) variants. Not infrequently, Adorno's approaches to imagination are connected to his reading of the history and systematics of classical social theory. More broadly, Adorno presents imagination as a problem for positivist sociology, marking Comte's thought as a key reference aspect for a sociological prohibition of imagination. The general framework in which Adorno, beginning with Comte, examines the role of imagination in social theory raises a crucial question: the repeated emphasis on a historical and systematic problem, namely the complex relationship between classical social thought and imagination. In this paper, I aim to reconstruct imagination as a historical-systematic problem in classical social theory, based on Adorno's references. I will do so by arguing that Adorno, in addressing imagination both as part of a "spiritual history of fantasy" and as a methodological problem related to the mind’s operations, proposes an intertwining between the internal structures of social theories and the forms of their historical development. This intertwining, in my view, justifies a historical-systematic approach.