La Scuola di Francoforte e il problema della reificazione

The paper intends to explain the meaning of the transformations impressed by the Frankfurt School in the concept of reification (Verdinglichung) originally developed by G. Lukács. From Dialectic of Enlightenment onwards reification is to be grasped not only as “alienation” and “commodity fetishism”, but as a “forgetting”, namely as repression of the deepest roots of rationality, communication and recognition. Such a phenomenon is the starting point for an immanent critique of the contemporary social pathologies of intersubjectivity. The paper examines besides the complex relationship established by Horkheimer and Adorno between the origin of rationality and its reification, as well as the critical-epistemological turn which drove to re-examine reification in terms of language and communication (Habermas), as well as of recognition theory (Honneth), also evaluating the consequences of such assumptions.