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From constellations to autoprohibition: everything you wanted to know about Adorno's ethics (but were afraid to ask Zizek)

This project is centered on two primary concerns. First, to reformulate Adornos notion of ethical subjectivity in a way that allows for a clearer articulation of his normative position, and second, to make it more relevant to our contemporary social context and advances in social theory. My claim is that we can achieve this by rejecting Adornos philosophical method (negative dialectics and constellations) by reading his ethics through the lens of ieks method which I am calling autoprohibition. As I will show, autoprohibition is ieks strategy for breaking the deadlock of the dialectic of enlightenment and its accompanying defeatist politics by developing a dialectical theory that neither rests on pure negation nor falls into the totalising and reifying trap of orthodox Marxism. It is in the context of autoprohibition that one can rearticulate Adornos normative imperatives (specifically, the imperative to end suffering, and to recognise the truth-content of the body) without these imperatives being negated by the totalising dictates of the dialectic of enlightenment. The best way to redeem the important normative components of Adornos formulation of ethical subjectivity is to reject its underlying philosophical method and resituate it in another. I frame this methodological shift as one from constellations to autoprohibition, which allows for a more positive articulation of Adornos ethics; a plan for actively practising an ethical life vs. one premised on the rejection of participating in an unethical system (which Adornos ethics amounts to on my account).

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:AEU.10048/1022
Date06 1900
CreatorsWebb, Dan
ContributorsKellogg, Catherine (Political Science), Carmichael, Don (Political Science), Morin, Marie-Eve (Philosophy), Adria, Marco (Faculty of Extension), Biro, Andrew (Political Science)
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Format1127946 bytes, application/pdf
Relationhttp://psc.sagepub.com/

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