Inheriting the Frankfurt School on the Periphery: The Case of Roberto Schwarz

Inheriting the Frankfurt School means more than just understanding its concepts and ideas; rather, it engages a dialectics of fidelity, whereby something new must be brought to the theory, not to deny or refute it, but to supplement it. That new element is not merely added, nor is it merely a complement to something missing beforehand, but something that opens the theory from the inside, allowing it to remain itself by way of change. These considerations are particularly useful when thinking about a peripheral context such as the Brazilian one. Here, the distinction between the reception and the inheritance of the Frankfurt School is particularly pronounced and epistemologically rich.