The great German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. An accomplished musician, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art. Later he turned to the problem of the self-defeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. In this collection of essays, imbued with the most up-to-date research, a distinguished roster of Adorno specialists explore the full range of his contributions to philosophy, (...) history, music theory, aesthetics and sociology. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Adorno currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Adorno. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno died in 1969 and his last major work, Ästhetische Theorie, was published a year later. Only recently, however, have his aesthetic writings begun to receive sustained attention in the English-speaking world. This collection of essays is an important contribution to the discussion of Adorno's aesthetics in Anglo-American scholarship.The essays are organized around the twin themes of semblance and subjectivity. 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. Adorno's elaboration of the two concepts takes many dialectical twists. 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 aesthetics emphasizes the connection between aesthetic theory and many other aspects of social theory. The paradoxical genius of Aesthetic Theory is that it turns traditional concepts into a theoretical cutting edge. (shrink)

Heidegger formulates the artwork's origin in a movement against the false motion of portrayal and repetition. The term mimesis is employed in the present essay to describe this origin and the means by which truth 'happens', specifically when mimesis turns against itself as imitation. The movement of the artwork is considered within the following constellation: the concept of mimesis is examined in light of Heidegger's 'Origin' essay to illuminate the concept and the essay by placing both in relation to Adorno's (...) aesthetics (especially the way mimesis figures there) as well as Kant's doctrine of the sublime- via Lyotard's Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. The movement of the artwork toward truth is presented as the movement of mimesis. Further, for both Heidegger and Adorno's accounts, the mimetic movement of the artwork parallels the movement of aesthetic judgment, especially as it is construed in regard to Kant's doctrine of the sublime. Key Words: aesthetic judgment • .art theory • . beauty • . mimesis • . the Sublime. (shrink)

A philosophical elaboration of Theodor Adorno's conception of aesthetic form. Adorno's aesthetic theory is presented through a reconstruction of the major concepts in his Aesthetic Theory and via the projects of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics. The dissertation argues that the nature of social and political institutions and ideologies is best revealed through an analysis of the critical social function embodied in aesthetic form. Artworks occupy such a ripe critical position--both in society and in aesthetic theory that confronts what (...) is specifically social in form--because of the way in which artworks simultaneously instantiate and deny socially constructed reality. Modernist art represents a key moment in the history of aesthetic form because it presents the seeming impossibility of artworks asserting any meaning. ;A central task of the dissertation is to show how aesthetic form might resolve the problem of enlightenment, that is, whether and precisely how artworks might overcome the dilemma of reason being always complicit in power and domination. The concept of aesthetic appearance is examined in light of what Adorno terms the crisis of semblance in order to reveal how aesthetic form is the potential transcendence of instrumental rationality. ;The dissertation is situated within the German tradition of Kant and Hegel's aesthetic theories, in which notions of beauty and the sublime have an emphatic relationship to the constitution and form of subjectivity. The concept of the ugly is examined as a specifically modernist phenomenon that represents the aesthetic return of repressed nature. The primary concepts through which Adorno's aesthetic theory is presented include mimesis, exchange, sacrifice and identity. ;The final third of the dissertation consists of arguments against the contemporary philosophical theorists of postmodernism: Jurgen Habermas, Frederic Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Peter Burger and Albrecht Wellmer. It is argued that each of these writers fails to confront, or misreads, the core arguments and insights of Adorno's aesthetic theory. (shrink)

This book reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. Standard accounts of the aesthetic theories of this era hold that the idea of mimesis was supplanted by the far more robust and compelling doctrines of taste and aesthetic judgment. Since the idea of mimesis was taken to apply only in the relation of art to nature, it was judged to be too limited when the focus of aesthetics changed to questions about the constitution of individual (...) subjects in regard to taste. Tom Huhn argues that mimesis, rather than disappearing, instead became a far more pervasive idea in the eighteenth century by becoming submerged within the dynamics of the emerging accounts of judgment and taste. Mimesis also thereby became enmeshed in the ideas of sociality contained, often only implicitly, within the new accounts of aesthetic judgment. The book proceeds by reading three of the foundational treatises in aesthetics—Burke’s _Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_, Hogarth’s _Analysis of Beauty_, and Kant’s _Critique of Judgment_—with an eye for discerning where arguments and analyses betray mimetic structures. Huhn attempts to explicate these books anew by arguing that they are pervaded by a mimetic dynamic. Overall, he seeks to provoke a reconsideration of eighteenth-century aesthetics that centers on its continuity with traditional notions of mimesis. (shrink)

This book reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. Standard accounts of the aesthetic theories of this era hold that the idea of mimesis was supplanted by the far more robust and compelling doctrines of taste and aesthetic judgment. Since the idea of mimesis was taken to apply only in the relation of art to nature, it was judged to be too limited when the focus of aesthetics changed to questions about the constitution of individual (...) subjects in regard to taste. Tom Huhn argues that mimesis, rather than disappearing, instead became a far more pervasive idea in the eighteenth century by becoming submerged within the dynamics of the emerging accounts of judgment and taste. Mimesis also thereby became enmeshed in the ideas of sociality contained, often only implicitly, within the new accounts of aesthetic judgment. The book proceeds by reading three of the foundational treatises in aesthetics—Burke’s _Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_, Hogarth’s _Analysis of Beauty_, and Kant’s _Critique of Judgment_—with an eye for discerning where arguments and analyses betray mimetic structures. Huhn attempts to explicate these books anew by arguing that they are pervaded by a mimetic dynamic. Overall, he seeks to provoke a reconsideration of eighteenth-century aesthetics that centers on its continuity with traditional notions of mimesis. (shrink)

Enigma and truth content are two of the most prominent terms in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. This essay explores the relation between enigma and truth content by considering the peculiar character of the experience that occurs in response to works of modern art. The enigma of modern art is also constitutive of it. The character of this self-contradicting existence is what makes the work of art into the occasion for a baffling and befuddling encounter. The complement to enigma in the work (...) of art is its truth content. Key to engaging the work of art’s enigma and truth content will be the mimetic quality of the relation between experience and the work of art. So too is the misalignment between the work of art and experience an opportunity for encountering what exists as objective contradiction. The ongoing mimetic misalignments of object and subject, expressed in and through the blockages that come to be named artwork and experience, is where we find how much more snarled and entangled the artwork and experience become in order, according to Adorno, to thwart the continuing demands for clarity and meaning. The essay also includes abbreviated attempts to locate in Kant and Schiller’s aesthetics the first stirrings of what will later figure in Adorno’s elucidations of modernist art. (shrink)

Over the past decade, radical questioning of the grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of the aesthetic experience can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open, model for human understanding. This book is a rigorous _explication de texte_ of a central text for this thesis, Kant's Analytic of the Sublime.