Abstract

PHILOSOPHY AND THE NAVEL OF DREAMS. ADORNO AND DERRIDA In 2001 Jacques Derrida received the Theodor W. Adorno award. In the speech which he gave on that occasion, and which may be treated as Derrida’s philosophical testament, he acknowledged his debt to Adorno and the Frankfurt school, thus establishing a link between the German and French modes of philosophizing. What both traditions share is their attachment to the heritage of Hegelian dialectics as well as to the formulations of the “masters of suspicion” (Marx, Freud and Nietzsche). Adorno and Derrida are equally aware of how diffi cult it is to continue the Enlightenment project after Auschwitz – after an event which for ever resists the philosopher’s attempts at conceptual analysis. At the same time, both thinkers stress the necessity of an enlightenment based on the achievements of the psychoanalytical “revolution”. They also believe that thought can arise only within a particular language, at the meeting place of that which is general and that which is couched in a material idiom. This is the consequence of being’s singularity and of the fact that it is not limited to waking consciousness only. But if the work of philosophy resembles that of dreams – i.e. is governed by the logic of desire which subverts the logic of consciousness – how can the language of philosophy become an efficient tool of universal reason.