About experience, delusion and fascism. An articulation from the aesthetics of Th. Adorno

Abstract

This work recovers some contributions from the Frankfurt thinkers, mainly from Adorno and Horkheimer. These authors have sustained in their diagnoses a political bet by not hypostatizing the difference between phenomena such as German Nazism and what they have called cultural industry. In both phenomena a rationality is reproduced at the service of domination, the rejection of difference and the annulment of individual reflection. This work seeks to trace those features of this rationality that allow it to be linked to totalitarian forms of sensitive experience, knowledge and political organization. Specifically we will stop at the concept of impoverished experience, reading from here how this rationality can be conjugated with delusional elements, annihilating individual reflexive mediation and reacting with totalitarian behaviors. Finally, we will recover the concept of experience of the work of art that allows, through contraste¸ to think of other forms of sensibility and non-violent reflection.