Theodor W. Adorno: subject, nature and ideology

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to analyze the critique of subject carried out by Theodor Adorno. We try to show the way in which Adorno reset the concept of subject in the context of the relationship between nature and culture through the program of Natural History, a program that we try to expose here as if it were an Ideologiekritik, so that we can demonstrate the following: 1) that Adorno thinks the subject as an ideological “device” that criticism has to disassemble, 2) that Adorno critique of subjectivity can be located in the context of other philosophical critiques of the subject made during the twentieth century, 3) and that, after such critical dissemble, the normative property of this concept of subject can be read as the moral impulse towards abolishing the human physical suffering.