... puppeteers. Artworks not only refuse to subserve such a concept but challenge the grounds of its conceptuality. Adorno illustrates this in the only way a philosophical aesthetics can—by exploring the misrecognition of art brought about by moves for or against it: “As soon as one proceeds...

..., a dialectical aesthetics is required. Finally, I explore some of the important complications involved in Adorno’s reception of Kant’s aesthetics. Kant’s role in Aesthetic Theory has been strongly emphasized in some excellent work on the philosophical background to Adorno’s aesthetics. For example...

...Max Pensky Abstract Theodor W. Adorno’s claim in Aesthetic Theory that artworks have a truth content, and that this truth content in turn depends on philosophical interpretation, is among the work’s most challenging and obscure claims. This article argues that “The Idea of Natural History...

... of perceptual standardization and the consequent devaluation of unique aesthetic experience. A comparison of the work of Friedländer, the philosopher-artist, with that of Walter Benjamin, the cultural critic, reveals the limits and the potentials in their attempts to recover and to celebrate the diversity...

... to compose musical works.” The essay investigates the many references to Johann Sebastian Bach in Adorno’s aesthetic, social, and philosophical writings to show that his Bach case was not merely illustrative but paradigmatic of every case he made for a critical theory of possibility. Adorno’s case...

...Christopher Conti Walter Benjamin's great essay on Franz Kafka exemplifies his philosophical praxis, which exhumes the prehistoric substrate of modernity to expose the myth of progress in modernity's claim to epochal legitimacy. Benjamin's physiognomic thinking endows Kafka with the features of his...

.... Copyright © 2020 by New German Critique, Inc. 2020 Theodor W. Adorno Immanuel Kant philosophical aesthetics Critical Theory materiality In this article I argue that Immanuel Kant’s concept of disinterested contemplation is inadequate because it cannot express the historical suffering...

..., at least in name, the notion of philosophical aesthetics. Adorno’s technique of representation—indeed, his own method—is shaken to its core by modern art’s fundamental uncertainty. That much is obvious from his reworking of inherited concepts like mimesis and form. On the other hand, the concrete (art...

.... The infamous impenetrability of Adorno’s philosophizing and the problematic first translation of Aesthetic Theory may have had much to do with his absence, but Adorno also denies that natural beauty assuages the despair of an age that was caught unawares by nature’s degradation and now longed to ease its...

... of the Laocoön statue occupies a peculiar place in philosophical aesthetics for one simple reason: the scream does not exist. Despite its representation of unbearable agony, the statue famously does not scream. Encircled by three unrelenting serpents and unable to rescue his sons from the same fate, the great...

... texts perform this provocative inversion in a variety of registers and conceptual modulations. In Aesthetic Theory, for instance, Adorno insists that the aes­ thetic dimension of philosophy and the philosophical dimension of art are not merely dimensions among so many others: “Aesthetics...

... Adorno’s refusal to directly interrogate philosophical anthropology leads him to implicitly prescribe a certain figure of the human, undermining the value of his resistance to anthropological definitions. Copyright © 2021 by New German Critique, Inc. 2021 antihumanism aesthetics dialectic...

... is whether this “aporia” results from a consistent interpretation of Adorno’s aesthetics or from the hasty assumption that the dialectics of semblance is the alpha and omega of Aesthetic Theory . In my view, the latter option is both hermeneutically and philosophically more plausible. In what follows, I...

... the philosophical tradi- tion but also from the “intentionless refuse of the physical world.” While the implications of this remain to be worked out at this early stage of Adorno’s career, it is possible to argue that the “aesthetic dignity of words” takes the form of a mimetic relation between philosophy...

... studies, Blickle’s is the most comprehensive in terms of scope and ambition. Blickle seeks to develop a “theory” of Heimat beyond its specific manifestations by considering not only literary but also pertinent philosophical, aesthetic, sociological, and psychoanalytic sources from the late...

... epistemological and aesthetic context in Adorno’s work. I want first to explore the early development of his idea of interpretive philosophy in “Die Aktualität der Philosophie” (1931). Adorno’s Concept of Philosophical Interpretation The emergence of the key features of Adorno’s philosophy in the late...

... simultaneously affirmed and denied the autonomy of art. 2 In what follows, I revisit some of Adorno’s philosophical motivations for this claim. The question of aesthetic autonomy recurs with some frequency in his oeuvre, and it remained a preoccupation throughout his career, from the early phase of his...

... “the decline of artistic genres as such. Art has been caught up in the total process of nominalization’s advance ever since the medieval ordo was broken up.”33 Benedetto Croce, he notes, was perhaps the first philosopher of aesthetics to understand that each work had to be judged on its own merits...

... but crucial reference to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory . 9 Yet these two connections in the context of modern art and its philosophical interpretation, Florman argues, are best explained and interpreted against the background of two writings by Kandinsky’s nephew Alexandre Kojève that shed further light...

..., the philosopher’s entire intellectual career), distance in this cluster of writings should be understood both phenomenologically and historically—at times, one through the other. That is, phenomenologically speaking, distance is the prerequisite for the aesthetic encounter—that whatever we see is not coextensive...