Cassandre Caballero

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My PhD dissertation explores how Soren Kierkegaard and T.W. Adorno understand despair, the suffering of the subject, from the perspective of erotic love. Firstly, I will show that, in Kierkegaardian philosophy, love is self-love which means that it is doomed to lose its blissful immediacy and fall into despair. From an existential point of view, it creates a requirement: to find reconciliation. In his book Works of love, Kierkegaard suggests us to turn our loves into an ethical-religious task, an existential struggle where God is the intermediary between the lover and the beloved. Secondly, I will try to show that T.W. Adorno, as a reader of Kierkegaard, takes for himself the idea of the task of reconciliation as a remedy to despair, more specifically to our despaired erotic loves. In his first book Kierkegaard.Construction of the Aesthetic and his two articles on Kierkegaard, Adorno gives a critique of Kierkegaard’s theology and of this ethics of love and shows that, for him, the Danish author did not succeed in finding a remedy to our despaired erotic loves because his ethics of love are idealistic and dehumanizing. Nevertheless, I will show that, despite his critique, Adorno maintains a dialogue with the Danish author and this, up until Aesthetic Theory, his posthumously published book. With his inverse theology— which is a materialistic theology— Adorno, just like Kierkegaard, takes seriously the requirement of despair and keeps the desire to fulfill the Danish author’s theophilosophy and this, throughout his oeuvre.