Minima Moralia and Opusculum Paedagogum. Imagined perspectives in Wallace Stevens and Theodor Adorno

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Imagination and pedagogy. The works of Theodor Adorno deal persistently with the damaged lives of human beings following the catastrophes of the twentieth century. However, for the German philosopher, no less important than that damage is the reconfiguration of the good life. Likewise, one of the leitmotifs of the works of Wallace Stevens is how imagination can give a form to the parts of a world that seemed ruined, meaningless. This essay shows that both philosopher and poet share a pedagogical approach to criticism whose dynamics is aesthetic imagination. Recognizing what is not identical to the subject and, simultaneously, the impossibility of a naked understanding of the world, not mediated by our subjectivity, Adorno and Stevens yearned to reconcile subject and object. For them, imagination becomes the tool to conceive of an “aconceptual synthesis” (Adorno) or an “abstract imagination” (Stevens) that gives sense to the world not through totalization but through an aesthetic reconstruction.