Aesthetic Theory (Volume 88) by Theodor W. Adorno

As a result, isolated theses or polemics have often been extracted from Adorno's work without a proper sense of their philosophical context. Beyond this, however, the difficulty has sometimes been the comparative unfamiliarity of an English-speaking audience with a German philosophical tradition which is the very element in which Adorno's thought lives and moves. The only existing English translation of Adorno's major treatise, Aesthetic Theory, was recently withdrawn by its publishers because of its inaccuracy (although another attempt is to be published shortly). Īdorno's philosophical aesthetics has thus far been unevenly received in the English-speaking world. The paradoxical genius of Aesthetic Theory is that it turns traditional concepts into a theoretical cutting edge.By PETER UWE HOHENDAHL. Adorno's aesthetics emphasizes the connection between aesthetic theory and many other aspects of social theory.

Art, despite the taint of illusion that it has carried since Plato's Republic, turns out in Adorno's account of modernism to have a sophisticated capacity to critique illusion, including its own. Adorno's elaboration of the two concepts takes many dialecical twists. Whereas the concept of semblance, or illusion, points to Adorno's links with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the concept of subjectivity recalls his lifelong struggle with a philosophy of consciousness stemming from Kant, Hegel, and Lukács. The essays in the volume, by many of the major Adorno scholars in the United States and Germany, are organized around the twin themes of semblance and subjectivity.

This collection of essays is an important contribution to the growing discussion of Adorno's aesthetics in Anglo-American scholarship. Yet only recently have his aesthetic writings begun to receive sustained attention in the English-speaking world. Few philosophers have been as well versed in contemporary art, especially music, as Adorno, and even fewer have written so much that is of interest to the social sciences. Adorno died in 1969 and his last major work, Ästhetische Theorie, was published posthumously a year later.

Aesthetic Theory (Volume 88) by Theodor W. Adorno