ZNAKOVLJE SVJETSKE CIVILIZACIJE / ISKUSTVO NEGATIVNE DIJALEKTIKE
THE SEMIOTICS OF WORLD CIVILIZATION – THE EXPERIENCE OF NEGATIVE DIALECTIC

Summary/Abstract: This essay, making the hundredth anniversary of Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno’s birth, reconsiders the semiotics of world civilization in the light of the experience of Adorno’s negative dialectic. When the critical self-reflection and self-contradiction of philosophy is re-evaluated, which reaches its peak in Adorno’s negative dialectic, where the European spirit still seeks – after critical metaphysics – to revolve around itself as the spirit of negation, one must “be aware of the strange fate of atonal thought, the intention of which was in the liberation of possible human experience, which shatters the coldness of the bourgeois mind.” For this very reason the shadow of what finally found in thought the motif and need for negation and dominance falls across it. Adorno knew this: his thought remains without “substance” and “ground.” Distancing itself from the arrogance of the traditionalism of philosophy, plunged in the opacity and infinite indifference of Time, it seeks to stand its ground against its own destruction, in the face of the general distortion of both Word and Deed. When man himself opposes the world, his work turns into outcry against the impossible which – without pathetic gestures – is worthy of thought, life and the expression of the ineffable.

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