Review Essay: 'Understanding Marxism' and 'Adorno Reframed' by Geoff Boucher (original) (raw)
Related papers
Truth and Enigma: Adorno and the Politics of Art
New German Critique, 2018
This article reappraises the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics in the aftermath of the postmodern debate. It proposes a shift of focus from the concept of “semblance character” to the concept of “enigmatic character” in order to grasp what Adorno means by the “truth content” of artworks. This theoretical move is meant to shed new light on how Adorno sees the relationship between art and politics. The inclusion of Adorno in the tradition of the beautiful and his portrayal as a forerunner of Jean-François Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime are flawed. In other words, artworks would be true not because of what they make apparent or acknowledge as unpresentable but because their enigmatic complexion unleashes a crisis of comprehension that challenges our understanding of the world. A “maybe” emblematizes the enigma, whose imaginative appropriation remains truer to emancipation than any utopia or dystopia could ever become.
Art and Aesthetics after Adorno
Townsend Center For the Humanities, 2010
Published one year after his death, Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) is without any doubt one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deep and critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the twentieth century. It is coupled, moreover, with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be as a form of critique if it is to meet the demands made by artworks. As such, it opens the project of critical theory to the unique set of pressures created by the class of objects-meaningful, sensuous, and particular-that we have come to recognize as "works of art." But the forward-looking horizon of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, where the existence of "art" had already come into question; its background was European art from roughly the time of Bach to the present. Much has happened since then both in practice and in theory, including revisions of aesthetic theory in light of a much broader view of the history of art.
Art as a Form of Negative Dialectics: 'Theory' in Adorno's 'Aesthetic Theory'
Journal of Speculative Philospohy , 1997
In an effort to clarify Adorno's aesthetic position, I argue that Adorno embraces a version of the Kantian thesis concerning art's autonomy and that he criticizes transcendental philosophy. I discuss how Adorno provides the outlines for a dialectical conception of artistic truth and how this aspect of Adorno's thinking is applied in his argument with Hegel. This paper also engages Adorno's assessment of the Enlightenment through his interpretation of twentieth-century literature. Returning to the example of art as a sign of historical truth, I conclude my study by stressing the political implications of Adorno's position.
forthcoming in the Blackwell Companion to Adorno
This essay first contextualizes Adorno's essays in literary criticism in relation to his historico-philosophical account of modern rationalization and late capitalism, his dialectical theory of culture, and his return to postwar Germany. It then presents the neo-Marxist and formalist principles that inform his literary criticism, emphasizing the artwork's critical relationship to society on the one hand, and the theory of aesthetic experience undergone by the artwork's recipient on the other. These principles are exemplified in selective readings of Adorno's essays on Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Hölderlin. The essay concludes by polemically juxtaposing Adorno's practice of literary criticism with that of neo-Aristotelian "ethical criticism."
Adorno's Aesthetic Model of Social Critique
Blackwell Companion to Adorno, ed. Espen Hammer, Peter Gordon, Max Pensky
Aesthetics, in many ways, is at the center of Adorno's philosophical enterprise. Politics, and social critique, are in turn very much at the fore in his aesthetics. His art criticism is thereby bound up with social and political critique. That much is of course a truism about Adorno. In this essay, I shall suggest that Adorno's social criticism (in one of its main manifestations) is related to his art criticism in another interesting way as well. Specifically, their form is similar. The object of critical analysis, whether an artwork or other social phenomenon, is objectionable not simply because it promotes or fosters problematic things downstream-authoritarianism, anti-semitism, and the like-as cause to effect. Rather, it is objectionable because it contains, often in a way difficult immediately to detect, such objectionable ideologies covertly embedded in it. Critique will thus be a hermeneutic endeavor seeking to expose these ideologies. While this critical-interpretive model is of course more familiar in the aesthetic sphere, Adorno extends it to unmasking a wider range of social phenomena.
's Aesthetic Theory illuminates the basic question of the aesthetic claim to truth. Adorno's text presents key philosophical questions about the nature of aesthetics. Through grounding Adorno's aesthetic theory in Hegelian logic, this article explicates why and how the veracity of a modern artwork dwells in its claim to the truth of its own untruth. What is the relation between aesthetic truth and the objective truth of empirical reality? Can aesthetic truth disclose the truth of empirical reality? By relating negatively to what Adorno calls the empirical reality, modern artworks not only become identical to their nonidentity, but also present that which they are nonidentical with as their formative ground. If the truth of an object is mediated, aesthetic truth must disclose the degree of objectivity found in empirical reality. Consequently, aesthetic truth becomes for-itself a mediated truth, and aesthetic truth comes to reveal the mediatedness of empirical reality.