Research: Dialectics of MythologyA few decades after the peak of the Mythos-Debatte, the problem of myth – understood from time to time as a disastrous tool for ideological manipulation or as the only way out of the crisis of legitimacy of Western democracies, as a perpetual impulse to narrative and metaphor or as latent anthropological persistence – remains far from exhausted. It is a matter of exploring those philosophical-mythological territories that have passed partially unnoticed to the Mythos-Debatte precisely because they build up its presupposition, and therefore cannot be fully grasped. This project aims then to probe, deepen and systematize the debate on mythology in Germany in the interwar period, electing as the starting and ending point the concept of the "mythical" in the Dialektik der Aufklärung by Horkheimer and Adorno. In the complex text of the Frankfurter philosophers is to be found in fact a highly problematic synthesis of all speculative concerns and of all anthropological or political or social urges that had enlivened the German philosophical life at the turn of the Nazi rise. The deconstruction of the myth-enlightenment dialectic may then give birth to an implicit prehistory that, once exposed to light, will help to specify (by analogy and contrast) the proprium of the Frankfurter position in the contemporary German landscape, and, at the same time, will prepare the appropriate conceptual instrumentary for a theoretically dispassionate analysis of the most aporetic fringes of dialectics, understood as a “logic of myth”.
keywords
Myth - Dialectics of Enlightenment - Adorno - Benjamin - Blumenberg - Mythos-Debatte - Daemonic - Philosophy of History