Theodor W. Adorno died in 1969 and his last major work, Asthetische 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 Lukacs. 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.
| ISBN | 0262581760 | | Pages | 368 | | ISBN13 | 9780262581769
(What's this?) | | Volumes | 1 | | Publisher | MIT Press Ltd | | Weight (grammes) | 590 | | Imprint | MIT Press | | Published in | Cambridge, Mass. | | Format | Paperback | | Series title | Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought | | Publication date | 26 Feb 1999 | | Height (mm) | 229 | | Writer of introduction | Lambert Zuidervaart | | Width (mm) | 152 | | Library of Congress | B | | Spine width (mm) | 20 | | DEWEY | 111.85 | | Academic level | Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly | | DEWEY edition | DC21 | |
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Mimesis and mimetology - Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Martin Jay; "Aesthetic Theory's" mimesis of Walter Benjamin, Shierry Weber Nicholsen; Benjamin, Adorno, surrealism, Richard Wolin; concept, image, name - on Adorno's "Utopia of Knowledge", Rolf Teidemann; concerning the central idea of Adorno's philosophy, Rudiger Bubner; why rescue semblance? metaphysical experience and the possibilities of ethics, J.M. Bernstein; Adorno's notion of natural beauty - a reconsideration, Heinz Paetzold; Kant, Adorno, and the social opacity of the aesthetic, Tom Huhn; art history and autonomy, Gregg M. Horowitz; construction of a gendered subject - a feminist reading of Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory", Sabine Wilke and Heidi Schlipphacke; the philosophy of dissonance - Adorno and Schoenberg, Robert Hullot-Kentor.
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