Abstract EN:

This work attempts to understand the state of the individual in the contemporaneous capitalistic world through an analysis and a criticism of the theme of the fall of the individual in theodor w. Adorno's and max horkheimer's productions. The author seeks and then discards the presuppositions which govern the theorization of this theme in the last mentioned philosophers' works. This endeavour occupies the first three parts. The first, entitled "tact and aura", opposes adorno and walter benjamin: it describes some elementary structures of bourgeois individuality on the way to "liquidation" and measures the difference which separates adorno's and benjamin's theorizations about history and society. The second, entitled "coldness and exuberance", proposes, against the naturalistic interpretation of the coldness suggested by adorno, a social explanation of its appearance rested on the survey of exuberance in the "savage" society. The third, entitled "between nature and history: where must be thought the appearance and the fall of the individual?", undertakes to elucidate the philosophical grounds of the intellectual constellation where adorno and horkheimer conceive the fall of the individual and to break with them by delineating the outline of an other theoretical frame. The last one, entitled "the fall of the individual, subject and person", states the theme in its new frame. It ends in a complete historicization of the category of individual and concludes that it will be necessary to attempt a true historical inquiry about the double birth of the individual in antique Greece and in renaissance.