Critical afinities. Considerations on the relationship between Politics and Knowledge in L. Althusser, in dialogue with T. Adorno’s questionings of Positivism

Abstract

As shown by some of its classic texts, the foundational moment of Social Sciences associates itself with the layout of a demarcation between knowledge and politics, science and charisma, between the gloomy and dull work of reason and the blind jump of passion. The critique of this foundational segmentation, and the ways in which the relationship between political and cognitive practice is thereafter thought, open a number of questions. Among others: what is the task of knowledge when the confidence on its granted difference towards politics and society becomes not only problematic but, furthermore, eminently ideological? Does such critique of independence as a pretension necessarily lead towards an identification between political and cognitive practices? In spite of having been questioned for its confidence in Science as an alternative to Ideology, Althusser’s reflections on the production of knowledge, which we intend to read here in dialogue with Adorno’s critique of Positivism, show notwithstanding themselves as singularly potent so as to reproblematize the relationship between knowledge and politics nowadays.