Eduardo Soares Neves Silva (UFMG): Was die Peripherie der Dialektik zeigt. Roberto Schwarz, Adorno und die Grenzen der immanenten Kritik

This lecture begins with an archival discovery: correspondence between Roberto Schwarz and Theodor W. Adorno from 1961 and 1962 preserved in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive in Frankfurt am Main. This seemingly incidental correspondence becomes the basis for a philosophical constellation. How should we understand the fact that a thinker from the periphery of capitalism—who was educated in the tradition of the Seminário sobre O Capital in São Paulo and in the school of Antonio Candido—appropriates Adorno’s dialectic productively and pushes it to its objective limits? The lecture argues that peripheral experience is not just another form of immanent critique but rather its corrective. It reveals the inherent structural linearity in Adorno’s dialectic—the tacit assumption that the periphery can or will repeat the steps of the center. This argument is developed by drawing on Schwarz's writings, as well as on the constellation of Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory, reconfigured within the German-Brazilian context. This topic was the focus of an essay published in 2019 and is further developed here in light of recent research.

Respondent: Pedro Mora Madrinan

The lecture is part of the project Der dritte Rand: Hegels Rezeption in Brasilien in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Third Periphery: The Reception of Hegel in Brazil in the Second Half of the 20th Century), which is funded by the Probral CAPES-DAAD program and is a collaboration between the ZfL and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte.

Eduardo Soares Neves Silva is Professor of Philosophy at UFMG, where he leads the research group Crítica e Dialética. His research focuses on Critical Theory (particularly Adorno and Horkheimer), social and political philosophy, Marxism, democratic theory, and aesthetics and cultural criticism.

Pedro Mora Madrinan is a doctoral candidate at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies with a dissertation project titled “Critical Theory on the Periphery of Capitalism: Literary Form and the Contradictions of Progress in the Work of Roberto Schwarz,” and a research associate at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” at Freie Universität Berlin.