Il soggetto trascendentale secondo Adorno. Immaginazione, memoria, oblio

The article outlines the transformation that the transcendental subject undergoes in Adorno's oeuvre, till becoming the logical and chronological starting point of the Negative Dialektik. The transcendental subject, according to Adorno, doesn't establish the unity of experience by means of a seamless self-consciousness; rather, that unity should be traced back to the forgetting of the object within the subject. This "forgetting" demands to be understood in a technical sense, as long as the transcendental imagination forgets memory itself, i.e., the faculty of recalling the past, and in doing so makes experience and science possible. Accordingly, the key to Adorno's reading of Kant could be found in the idea of a "transcendental oblivion". The transcendental subject is, as a result, just an illusory compound, and nevertheless a necessary illusion from the viewpoint of a philosophy of history. At the same time, the contradiction between synthesis of a novum and recalling of the past, in the unifying functions of the subject, can provide access to the pre-established disharmony of Erkenntnistheorie and Gesellschaftstheorie.