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Theodor Adorno on the Essay: An Antidote to Modernity

How does Theodor Adorno conceptualize the essay as an antidote to modern life’s obsession with science?

What is the significance of the essay for intellectual history? How does it interact with prevailing norms of academia and knowledge production in general? This article explains the answer that Theodor W. Adorno, Frankfurt School philosopher and cultural theorist, gave to this question. It begins by discussing the ambivalent stance with which Adorno begins the essay, before moving on to an explanation of his conception of culture and its domination by capital. Another critical concept of his work, that of reification, is then discussed and examined, before Adorno’s argument in defense of the essay as an antidote to an overriding fixation on scientific forms of knowledge production is set out in detail.

Theodor Adorno on The Essay and Philosophy

Adorno begins The Essay as Form with a conjoined defense and castigation of the essay. On the one hand, he takes aim at the conception of knowledge production, which is interested only in saying all there is to be said, proceeding only from the most basic or fundamental presumptions, describing what is given as it is given without augmentation. In other words, Adorno’s starting point involves a criticism of the pseudo-scientific seriousness of academia in general, and academic philosophy in particular.

Correspondingly, Adorno defends a more pluralistic conception of intellectual value, which permits interpretation beyond the intention of a work, beginning one’s interpretation in media res ( in the midst of things), an analysis of cultural objects without a compulsory tether to something more foundational, and so on.

Yet at the same time, Adorno takes aim at the essay just as he defends it. He opposes the essay insofar as it takes the form of a slick commercial product, an uncritical regurgitation or acclamation of culture, an extension of the culture industry. In a sense, the defense and critique of the essay both take the oblique form of a plea for greater self-awareness in intellectual activity.

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Adorno begins his discussion of the essay with the warning that the essay has the potential to be or become an utterly commercial product. The terms of this warning, and its significance, must be understood in light of the centrality of Adorno’s critical stance towards mass culture, which he theorized in more detail (along with his long-time collaborator and fellow Frankfurt School bigwig Max Horkheimer ) in the Dialectic of Enlightenment .

The conception of culture in Dialectic is an essentially Marxist one, and indeed an extension of certain Marxist ideas (e.g, commodity fetishism ) into terrain Marx himself did not take them. It holds that the logic of domination, which is constitutive of the capitalist mode of social and economic production, is equally a feature of culture.

The critical historical shift towards the creation of a “culture industry” is the internalization of marketability to the work of art itself, and, therefore, the impossibility of purposelessness in the work of art. Adorno puts the point this way:

“Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation [ gesellschaftliche Schätzung ] which they mistake for the merit [ Rang ] of works of art— becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy”.

That culture, the site (at least historically) of experimentation and freedom from prevailing social norms, has been colonized by capital shows how all-devouring the capitalist system of value really is.

Adorno’s Alternative Vision of the Essay

So if the choice is not between the spurious objectivity of academic prose, or the complicity and uncritical disposition of fluff, then what is Adorno’s alternative vision for the essay as a form of writing?

Adorno is concerned, for one thing, with the essay’s ambition to go beyond the confines of philosophy and yet construct a kind of purer way of speaking about concepts like “being.” To claim for itself a kind of “primordial” status, to claim that it can avoid the obligations of conceptual thought, and that it can “abolish objectified thought and its history,” the essay commits itself to become totally meaningless.

It is the mutual encroachment of science to the realm of art and vice versa that Adorno laments so bitterly. The essay is firmly in the realm of art, and so, for Adorno, it must resist what he calls “fraternizing with reification,” which is the exact thing that art has to protest, resist, and oppose.

But what is reification? Reification is a concept developed by the Hungarian Marxist social theorist and literary historian György Lukács, who had a formative influence on Adorno as a younger man. Lukács defines it as, “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Science is, for Adorno, a site of reification – the promise of liberation from stupidity and brutality by science has been broken, and science is now itself irrational.

The Problem With Science

The problems which Adorno finds with science – in particular, its rigidity and its unreflective empiricism – are (in a sense) where Adorno feels the essay finds its raison d’être. As much as the encroachment of science on art and art on science trouble him, so too does the inflexibility of the “division of labor” which has taken place between art and science in the first instance. The very existence of the essay undermines the determination to find a place for every kind of knowledge and its pre-conditions.

Indeed, in order to identify the potential he sees in the essay as a form, Adorno goes back to the origins of the term essay, in Montesquieu , and in particular to its initial meaning as “attempts” or “tries.” It is in its very modesty, even if that is often a false modesty, that the value of the essay is revealed. It makes room for non-totalizing intellectual activity, for, “the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly; it is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character.”

This is why it is so harmful for essayists to attempt to claim that they have, in fact, bested the philosopher or the scientist in the source for primordial language or foundational knowledge – they are meant to offer a direct contrast, a clear alternative, to this way of thinking in our intellectual life.

Adorno on The Essay as a Philosophical Tool

Yet for Adorno, the value of the essay as a philosophical tool runs deeper. In particular, the essay is a kind of rebuke to the conception of knowledge as directly and straightforwardly reflecting the structure of reality. The essay rebukes the idea that historical products (which are necessarily contingent, not embedded in the structure of reality as such) are, at best, a subject for secondary, lesser forms of understanding.

In fact, more abstraction does not invest thought with greater importance or profundity, and the essay reflects the radical disjunction between one’s grasping for the total and how liable one is to actually understand it:

“The essay, however, does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and distill it out; it tries to ren- der the transient eternal. Its weakness bears witness to the very non-identity it had to express. It also testifies to an excess of intention over object and thereby to the utopia which is blocked by the partition of the world into the eternal and the transient. In the emphatic essay thought divests itself of the traditional idea of truth.”

As Adorno has it, what is true and worth saving about the essay is, from the scientific point of view, untrue. Indeed, the discipline of rhetoric – to which the essay in some sense belongs – has long been “scientized,” reduced to the new discipline of “communications.” Science’s antipathy to the idea of anthropomorphic tendencies in knowledge production makes the essay a direct provocation for the kind of scientism which Adorno takes aim at in various points of his work.

It is in the pleasure of the essay, both of the writing and of the reading, that this provocation reaches its climax. Adorno observes that happiness is, for a certain kind of philosopher – in particular Kant and Hegel – a regression to the most basic parts of our nature, and a failure to show continence in the face of curiosity, which is (as Adorno has it) “the pleasure principle in thought.”

The essay deploys this principle as a seduction, going a step beyond the orator whose relaxed, listenable manner of speaking beguiles one into failing to notice the ever-enclosing net of persuasion. The logic of the essay is local – it must fit together, its transitions must make sense of themselves, but not of things at large or as such (“it co-ordinate elements instead of subordinating them”). It has no broader project in mind for these elements. For Adorno, the essay is an anachronism – contemporary life is inhospitable to it.

4 Ideas by Theodor Adorno That Changed the World

By Luke Dunne BA Philosophy & Theology Luke is a graduate of the University of Oxford's departments of Philosophy and Theology, his main interests include the history of philosophy, the metaphysics of mind, and social theory.

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Notes on Adorno's "The Essay as Form"

Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Essay as Form’. The Adorno Reader. Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor & Frederic Will. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 92–111. Print.

92: Essay form decried as lacking tradition in contemporary Germany [1958] Not changed by being unhappy with this Nor by being unhappy with scientific principles that designate art in the realm of the irrational Being called a “writer” makes one unacademic

93: The cultural artefact is excluded from academic discourse, unless it can be universalized and the particular is neglected This prejudice would be puzzling, except that German culture is painfully uncultivated in its recognition of the man of letters In Germany, the essay is the constant reminder of academic freedom that never fully emerged from the Enlightenment principles The German Enlightenment was always willing to subordinate itself to ulterior interests The essay form, though, does not allow this prescription to dominate it There is an element of luck and play in the essay and its success The essay does not cover all; it starts at its start and ends when it feels itself complete This is branded as “idleness” because it is not “what masks itself as objectivity” But the essay writer who interprets is persecuted as “intellectualizing” (Adorno likens this to a Nazi persecution: “as if with a yellow star”) Important not to be terrorized by the idea intentionality, which is a fallacy

94: The criteria of interpretation are: compatibility with the text; internal consistency of the interpretation; and the power of the interpretation to unleash the power of the text The essay therefore looks like art because it possesses an artistic autonomy Lukács was, therefore, wrong to call the essay form an artwork It is also wrong, though, to say that the essay form can have nothing of art's autonomy of form It is impossible to speak of form and content wholly separately; impossible to speak of the “aesthetic unaesthetically” The urge to perform this impossibility harkens back to logical positivism and its insistence on protocol sentences (sentences on direct experience) Positivism and science despises form If the essay doesn't examine the social, it falls for the tricks of the culture industry The essay form is capable of being subsumed by the culture industry

95: Saint-Beuve, Herbert Eulenberg and popular films about Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Bible all promote the transformation of cultural artefacts into commodities Stefan Zweig started well and then described Balzac's psychology (thereby failing in Adorno's view) This writing does not criticize, but presupposes, “abstract concepts, mindless dates, worn-out cliches” This undermines academic freedom Irresponsibility respects the object when it is irresponsible towards authorities, but in bad essays, irresponsibility merely accounts for itself before these authorities Separation of knowledge from art is irreversible; this is part of the Enlightenment's demythologization of the world A reconciliation between perception and concept; image and sign (cf. Kant) can only come about as the utopian conclusion of a dialectical process Philosophy's attempt to do away with the split of subject/object by borrowing its form from art results in a pseudo-culture

96: Both the philosophical and aesthetic value of such work is weak This results in the “jargon of authenticity” The attempt to aesthetically transcend the objectivizing nature of language results in a meaninglessness, which positivism then criticizes but also shares Some ranting about the reification of consciousness inherent in scientific mathesis Art is, though, also woven into the dominant tendency of the Enlightenment and has appropriated its techniques In art, though, “quantity becomes quality” When technique is deemed all in artworks, it succumbs to a meaninglessness that Adorno equates with Heidegger and his focus on “Being” Although art and science have separated, this separation is not to be treated as an absolute concrete reality Disciplinary separation is not sanctioned by a “disgust for anachronistic eclecticism” Disciplinary purity is repressive and presupposes that all knowledge can be converted into science

97: This is negated in that living consciousness has always escaped this transformation Proust encapsulates this consciousness, despite his use of scientific-positivistic elements, far better through “individual experience, united in hope and disillusion”, rather than through “repeated testing” College studies of aesthetics tend towards slapping on pre-culled modish philosophy and crudely applying it, or philosophizing in highly abstract and nonsensical terms Division of labour between art and science is not wholly responsible for the split, though

98: It is rather the fact that Enlightenment thought overrides pre-Enlightenment models of knowledge that might promise a different future The essay draws the harshest condemnation from scientific thought for this reason Adorno notes that science presupposes conditions of knowledge and that doubt (surely a Descartes allusion) was raised by the essay The essay “does justice to the consciousness of non-identity […] in accentuating the fragmentary, the partial rather than the total” The essay contests that the ephemeral and changing is unworthy of philosophy The essay shuns universal dogma through abstraction The essay rejects the order of things being identical with the order of ideas as this is based on the notion of unmediated acccess We cannot think facts non-conceptually and we cannot think concepts non-factually

99: The essay is not frightened of the “depraved profundity” of the claim that history and truth are incompatible If truth is rooted to a temporal moment, then the full historical content is integral to truth (cf. Last point on page 98) Experiential judgements become concretely independent of experience The relation to experience is a relation to all of history The essay acts as a corrective to theory's deprecation of the historically produced “The intellectual process which canonizes a distinction between the temporal and timeless is losing its authority” Abstraction tends to kill metaphysics and sanctity of thought, for which the essay attempts to make amends Attacks on the essay as fragmentary assume the givenness of totality (cf. “The Whole is the False”) and the split of subject and object, suggesting that we control that totality The essay doesn't want to “filter the eternal out of the transitory”, but to “make the transitory eternal” Its “weakness” shows that it expresses non-identity and tries to nullify the distinction between eternal and transitory The essay “suspends the traditional concept of method” It penetrates the object, rather than referring back to something else The essay chooses. It “freely associates what can be found associated in the freely chosen object” It does not pretend to be beyond mediation

100: The essay does not want to move from thought to action It honours nature by confirming that nature does not belong to human beings The essay does not abandon entirely the idea of immediacy: “All levels of the mediated are immediate to the essay, before its reflection begins” The essay takes the “anti-systematic impulse into its own procedure” It takes the unmediated and gives them precision through their relation to one another (cf. Constellation) All concepts, contra to science's statements, are already implicitly concretized through the language in which they stand The essay articulates these pre-concepts in order to “help language”

101: The essay can neither do without concepts nor treat them arbitrarily “The how of expression should rescue, in precision, what the refusal to outline sacrifices” The essay mediates an “arena of intellectual experience” The essay does not ignore indisputable certainty; it “becomes true in its progress” The essay does not start from an obvious origin, but rather from a hidden endpoint “[T]he essay expresses the utopian intention”

102: All parts of an essay support one another The essay defies ideals of clear and distinct perception and of absolute certainty It is a protest against the four rules of Descartes' Discourse on Method The artefact that is the object of the essay “refuses analysis of its elements and can only be constructed from its specific idea” The essay will deal purely neither with the whole generation of the specific nor vice versa

103: The essay will begin with the complex and the difficult The student who is told to begin with the simple is mistaken The essay will not be exhaustive; it will omit and is not totalizing in its system

104: The essay as form must “annul the theoretically outmoded claims of totality and continuity” “Self-relativization is immanent in its form” The essay lights up the whole without asserting the presence of the whole

105: The essay does not assert the identity between thought and thing Some rants against literary theory! “The consciousness of the non-identity between presentation and presented material forces the form to make unlimited efforts. In that respect alone the essay resembles art” The essay, though, is not art but related to theory

106: The essay's relation to theories is not a standpoint (cf. Negative Dialectics: “dialectics is not a standpoint”) The essay is the critique of ideology; the critique of what artefacts are as opposed to their concepts The essay is dialectical. It takes a truth and pushes it to the point where its untruth becomes manifest

107: The proper theme of the essay is the “interrelation of nature and culture” (cf. Enlightenment) All objects are central for the essay, hence its free choice of artefacts The essay “refuses to glorify concern for the primal”

108: “Those who believe they must defend the intellect against the charge of a lack of solidity are the enemies of intellect” The essay is related to rhetoric Ideas of happiness abound in the rhetorical pleasure of the essay through the idea of freedom This is posed against scientific discourse On the basis of Kant's “transcendental dialectic” and the forbidding of reason to go beyond the realm of experience

109: The essay reflects the object without doing violence to it and “silently laments the fact that truth has betrayed happiness” An essay's rhetoric is fused with its truth content Equivocation in the essay is used in order to clarify the unity of the differences between words “the totality of its sentences must fit together coherently”

110: The “law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy's secret purpose to keep invisible.”

Featured image by Jeremy Shapiro at Wikipedia .

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Monday, June 16, 2014

Justin evans: adorno's essay as form, still.

The essay is a literary form that falls between the arts and scholarship. It is concerned with style and subjectivity, and offers a unique perspective that is neither objective like scholarship nor purely expressive like art. The essayist reflects on specific cultural objects and their personal reactions to them, without making claims to objective truth. This ambiguity can be frustrating, but it also offers an opportunity to challenge the divisions between art, scholarship, and commodities in our society. A good essay can point us towards these divisions and force us to question why they exist.

• DOI: 10.2307/488160
• Corpus ID: 171037412

The Essay as Form

• Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno , Bob Hullot-Kentor , F. Will
• Published 21 January 1984
• Art, Philosophy
• New German Critique

307 Citations

Thinking on paper: incompleteness and the essay, it’s about time: trying an essay film, the return of/to the essay, transformation, not transcendence, the politics of genre and the rhetoric of radical cosmopolitanism; or, who's afraid of arundhati roy, tentative lessons of experience, a book consubstantial with its author, "unsolved problems": essayism, counterfactuals, and the futures of a room of one's own, “destabilized perception”, charles lamb's art of intimation, related papers.

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Philosophy of Art, Art of Philosophy: Adorno’s Aesthetic Utopia

• First Online: 23 September 2018

Cite this chapter

• Oshrat C. Silberbusch 2  

465 Accesses

This chapter explores Adorno’s aesthetic theory. It looks at his claim that “writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” in its relationship to art’s fragile, double-edged autonomy, and examines his theory of mimesis—a non-conceptual affinity between subject and object that, expelled by identity thinking, has found refuge in art. Through a close reading of Adorno’s reflections on natural beauty, aura, the sublime, and on the not yet fully rationalized child, the chapter examines his intuition that the aesthetic is crucial in any attempt to integrate the nonidentical into reason. Finally, a study of Adorno’s writing style and an excursus on his critique of Heidegger show how Adorno demarcates his own dialectic of form and content from what he views as Heidegger’s self-serving manipulation of the preconceptual.

Art is not to be subsumed under the concept of reason or rationality—rather, it is that rationality itself, only in the form of its otherness, in the form of a certain resistance against it. —Adorno, Lectures on Aesthetics

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For an overview of the German response to Adorno’s dictum from poets and writers, see Petra Kiedaisch, Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995).

Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft” in GS 10.1:20.

Ibid., 10.1:29–30.

Ibid., 10.1:30.

Ibid., 10.1:34.

Adorno, “Jene Zwanziger Jahre”, in GS 10.2:506.

Otto F. Bollnow (1903–1991), a German philosopher and educational theorist whose collected works were recently republished, considered himself a critical disciple of Heidegger. From Adorno’s point of view, it is worth noting that Bollnow, who joined Rosenberg’s antisemitic Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in 1933, signed the loyalty oath of university professors to Hitler and became member of the NSDAP in 1940, continued his academic career after the war undisturbed and received numerous awards and honors, including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1983. See Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005), 62.

Adorno, “Engagement”, in GS 11:423–4.

This clash (compounded by commodification) is also the basis of Adorno’s critique of the popular protest music of the 1960s: “I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with ‘popular music’—that is, with entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start. The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from commodity, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial…And I have to say that when somebody…sings maudlin music about Vietnam being unbearable, I find that really it is this song that is in fact unbearable—by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.” Interview with Adorno, viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-njxKF8CkoU (accessed 07/11/2016).

For a look at the genesis of Adorno’s aesthetic theory and its relationship to Benjamin’s thought, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectic , 122–35.

In a letter to his friend René Leibowitz, Adorno wrote: “It requires no long explanation that the fact that, due to my biographical fate, and certainly also due to certain psychological mechanisms in my life, I have not remotely achieved as composer what I continue to believe that I could have achieved, is a trauma that has impacted my entire existence.” T.W. Adorno to René Leibowitz, 3.10.1963, in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VII (München: text + kritik, 2001), 61.

Ibid. See in particular Plato’s Ion , in The Collected Dialogues of Plato , edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 215–28.

Despite the fact that Habermas dismissed Adorno’s mimesis early on as insufficiently theorized (see Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action . Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), mimesis has been far from absent in Adorno scholarship. Josef Früchtl, Mimesis: Konstellation eines Zentralbegriffs bei Adorno (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), looks at the various occurrences of the term in Adorno’s work, without however lingering much on the meaning of their constellation. Karla Schultz, Mimesis on the Move: Theodor W. Adorno’s Concept of Imitation (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990) traces the concept through Adorno’s aesthetic writings and explores its Freudian undercurrents. Britta Scholze ( Kunst als Kritik. Adornos Weg aus der Dialektik . Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000) focuses mainly on the mimetic relationship between artwork and natural beauty (136–82).

Ruth Sonderegger, “ Ästhetische Theorie ” in: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.), Adorno Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), 417.

See for example: “I have not tried to explain to you what Kant himself was thinking as he was thinking [was Kant sich bei seinem Denken gedacht hat], something which I consider perfectly irrelevant to a philosophy.” KRV 121/78; see also AES 216–7/135–6.

Shierry Weber Nicholsen points to the importance of children in Benjamin’s writing and the latter’s possible influence on Adorno in this matter. See Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work , 141–5.

In this respect, Jay Bernstein remarks “how ruthlessly dry and dead are the objects of perception with which philosophy has classically dealt: impressions and ideas, qualia and sense data, synthesizing perceptual manifolds (…) and so on. Even G. E. Moore’s ‘This hand I see before me’ is more ghost hand than living one.” Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 257.

Adorno, “Zur Musikpädagogik” in: Dissonanzen. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. GS 14 , 117.

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft , § 28, in Kant, Werke . Band 8, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1957), 349.

Kant , Kritik der Urteilskraft , 349.

Ibid., 349–50.

Ibid., 350.

Ibid., 349.

Ibid., 353.

Hegel , Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik , in Werke in zwanzig Bänden , Band 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 190. For Hegel’s justification of this assessment, see ibid., 190–2.

Kant himself was arguably well aware that his transcendental subjectivity could not account for the full range of our experiences; his Critique of Judgment could be considered an attempt to respond to this shortcoming. Tom Huhn writes: “The Critique of Judgment might be read as an attempt to rectify the [occlusion of the pervasiveness of subjectivity in representation], to reveal what has been concealed, and to offer a more sweeping, though less cognitive basis for subjective unity.” Huhn, Imitation and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 115.

See Kant , Kritik der Urteilskraft, particularly §18–22, in Kant, Werke , Band 8, 319–24.

I owe the notion of an “excess of form” to Jay Bernstein’s Lectures on Kant’s Third Critique held at the New School for Social Research in New York, accessible at www.bernsteintapes.com . See notably the lectures of 10/31/07 and 11/14/07.

The enigmatic is an integer part of many of the elements examined in this study: natural beauty, aura, gaze, mimesis, the animal’s otherness, uncertainty, and of course the nonidentical in general. For further analyses of the enigmatic in Adorno’s philosophy, see Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics , 150–7; Alexander Garcia Düttman, So ist es. Ein philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos ‘Minima Moralia’ (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004), 55–63.

See Hegel , Werke , Bd. 15: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III , 573.

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften , Bd. 1.2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 479.

AET 7:89/56. See Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”, in Gesammelte Schriften , Bd. 2 (1) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998), 368–85.

Benjamin , “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7(1), 353.

Weber Nicholsen, “ Aesthetic Theory ’s Mimesis of Walter Benjamin” in Exact Imagination, Late Work (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 165.

See notably Soeren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (London: Penguin, 1992).

Hegel , Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte , in Hegel, Werke in Zwanzig Bänden , Bd. 12, 261.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), 160.

Adorno and Horkheimer, [Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis] in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften , Bd. 19 (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1996), 58.

Christina Gerhardt, “The Ethics of Animals”, New German Critique 97 (2006): 160.

Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 123.

Adorno, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen” in GS 11: 282.

In a note in 1961 where he deplores the state of the Geist in post-war Europe, he fustigates “the kind of art which mistakes the—literal—whetting [ Zurüsten —the German word has a strong military connotation] of natural material (…) with aesthetic objectification.” Adorno, “Graeculus”, 21.

Adorno, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen”, 283.

Ibid., 286.

Ibid., 285.

Adorno, “Über Tradition” in GS 10.1:314–5.

See Adorno’s analysis of alienation in art, AES 124–9/77–9.

Adorno, “Jene zwanziger Jahre” in GS 10.2, 506.

There is an obvious affinity between this account of aesthetic experience and Kant’s free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding as developed in his Critique of Judgment . For an insightful reading of Kant’s Third Critique through Adornian glasses, see Huhn, Imitation and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

Jürgen Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer have written prominent and influential critiques of Adorno’s intertwine of art and philosophy. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity ( Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne ; Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998, 130–57), Habermas argues that by blurring the boundaries between art and reason, Adorno ignores their vital separation and weakens both, thus undermining his own argumentation; the result, Habermas writes, is something that is neither philosophy nor art. Habermas’ critique appears to completely ignore the larger context of Adorno’s philosophical approach, ascribing to a methodical flaw a reality that, as Adorno repeatedly pointed out, lies “in der Sache”. Wellmer’s criticism (“Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation” in The Persistence of Modernity , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997, 1–35) is a variation of Habermas’ (see critical discussion by Zuidervaart in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory , 276–303). Bernstein discusses both in The Fate of Art , 245–8. For a more recent critique, see Rüdiger Bubner, “Concerning the Central Idea of Adorno’s Philosophy”, in Huhn and Zuidervaart (ed.), The Semblance of Subjectivity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 147–75. For an overview of the criticism, see Scholze, Kunst als Kritik . Nicholsen, Jameson, Scholze (all op.cit), and Bernstein in The Fate of Art , offer a more sympathetic reading of Adorno’s conjunction of rationality and aesthetics.

A parallel reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his Critique of Pure Reason points to numerous connections between judgments on beauty and cognitive understanding, without Kant explicitly consecrating the conjunction. Adorno would have called this an instance of Kant going beyond himself. For a wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and cognition in Kant, see the essay collection by Rebecca Kukla (ed.), Aesthetics and cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Adorno, “Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm”, Interview with the Magazine “Der Spiegel”, May 5, 1969, in: Wolfgang Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung , Bd. 2 (Hamburg: Zweitausendeins, 1998), 607.

Adorno and Horkheimer, [Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis], 58.

I don’t share Martin Jay’s assessment that “[Adorno’s] writing was deliberately designed to thwart an effortless reception by passive readers”. Rather (as Jay himself continues), he “refused to present his complicated and nuanced ideas in a simplified fashion” (Jay, Adorno , 11, italics added) because, in his own words, “the laxly said is badly thought” (ND 6:29/18), and “where linguistic intensity lessens, the moral responsibility to the object [Sache] also lessens” (Adorno, “Der Begriff der Philosophie” in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter II , München: text + kritik, 1993, 31).

Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, in GS 11:11. English translation: “The Essay as Form”, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, in New German Critique , No. 32 (1984), 153.

Ibid., 14/156.

Ibid., 15/156.

Ibid., 17/158.

Ibid., 25/164.

Ibid., 17/157.

Ibid., 20/160.

Ibid., 21/160.

Ibid., 26/166.

In his use of constellations, Adorno is indebted to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin first mentions constellations in his 1925 “The Origin of the German Tragic Drama”, where he writes that “ideas relate to things as stars do to constellations” ( Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1.1 , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991, 214) and speaks of “truth represent[ing] itself in the dance of represented ideas” (209). Adorno took up the idea as early as 1931, in his lecture on “The Actuality of Philosophy”, where he says that “philosophy must put its elements… into changing constellations” (GS 1:335).

Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, 21/161.

On the self-destructive skepticism of enlightened rationality, see Bernstein, Adorno: Ethics and Disenchantment , 75–135.

Adorno and Horkheimer, [Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis], 57.

He frequently uses the term in his writings on music. “Far more important than [the leitmotive] however is the inner composition [ Zusammensetzung ] of the music, the Gewebe .” Adorno, “Zu Werken. Alban Berg, Wozzeck” in GS 13:432.

See AES 142–3/88.

Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, 25/164. This underscores how problematic it is to pluck a sentence out of Adorno’s work and consider it self-sufficient, as it is too often done (the “dictum” on poetry after Auschwitz being but one famous example).

Quoted in AET, “Editor’s Afterword”, 541/364.

Adorno frequently uses the expression in his writings on music .. See e.g. GS 11:578; GS 12:61; GS 13:244, GS 13:393.

Plato, “Gorgias”, 453a, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato . Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 236.

Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno and the Persistence of the Dialectic , 161.

Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, 13/155.

Ibid., 13–4/155.

Hermann Mörchen, a disciple of Heidegger’s, took it upon himself to write a 700-page study on the relationship of the latter’s philosophy to Adorno’s, and vice versa. The author tries to convince the reader that the two thinkers’ “refusal to communicate” is due to too much proximity rather than unbridgeable differences. While I will not deny that Adorno and Heidegger were moved partly by similar concerns (critique of scientism, of systems, question of historicity), the driving force behind their thought, or, to put it in Adornian terms, the point from which they philosophized, is very different in each of them. Mörchen’s book makes for a fascinating study of these differences “ums Ganze”, even if that was not the author’s intention. See Mörchen, Adorno und Heidegger. Untersuchung einer philosophischen Kommunikationsverweigerung (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1981).

The jargon is according to Adorno a “product of the disintegration [Verfallsprodukt]” of an aura that the disenchantment of the world has made inaccessible to our experience. See JE 6: 419/10.

“In the name of contemporary authenticity, even a torturer could make all sorts of ontological claims, as long as he was a good torturer.” JE 6:497/125.

Adorno, Brief an Herrn S., 3.1.1963, published in: Musikalische Schriften , GS 19, 638.

“Betrayed is not only thought, but also religion, which once promised humanity eternal bliss, while authenticity quietly resigns itself to a ‘ultimately idyllic world’” JE 6:429/25.

Quoted in JE 6:447/51.

Quoted in JE 6:448/53.

Quoted in PT 1:153.

See Adorno’s lecture on the topic, PT 1:161–73.

As Adorno points out, Heidegger himself uses the term ‘half-poetic”, JE 6:448/53.

See Adorno, “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” in GS 10.2:567.

Martin Jay’s claim that this criticism “could perhaps be extended to [Adorno] as well” misrepresents in my opinion the relationship of form and content in Adorno’s work. See Jay, Adorno , 11–2. See also Note 62.

In biology, the term homeostasis refers to the complex set of interacting metabolic reactions that ensure the equilibrium of the whole organism.

“Logizität” is Adorno’s term for art’s own internal logic. See e.g. AET 7:151/98; 181/119; 205–11/136–40.

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Silberbusch, O.C. (2018). Philosophy of Art, Art of Philosophy: Adorno’s Aesthetic Utopia. In: Adorno’s Philosophy of the Nonidentical. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95627-5_4

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Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

1. Biographical Sketch

2. dialectic of enlightenment, 3. critical social theory, 4. aesthetic theory, 5. negative dialectics, 6. ethics and metaphysics after auschwitz, other internet resources, related entries.

Born on September 11, 1903 as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived in Frankfurt am Main for the first three decades of his life and the last two (Müller-Doohm 2005, Claussen 2008). He was the only son of a wealthy German wine merchant of assimilated Jewish background and an accomplished musician of Corsican Catholic descent. Adorno studied philosophy with the neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius and music composition with Alban Berg. He completed his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard's aesthetics in 1931, under the supervision of the Christian socialist Paul Tillich. After just two years as a university instructor ( Privatdozent ), he was expelled by the Nazis, along with other professors of Jewish heritage or on the political left. A few years later he turned his father's surname into a middle initial and adopted “Adorno,” the maternal surname by which he is best known.

Adorno left Germany in the spring of 1934. During the Nazi era he resided in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he wrote several books for which he later became famous, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer), Philosophy of New Music , The Authoritarian Personality (a collaborative project), and Minima Moralia . From these years come his provocative critiques of mass culture and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a position in the philosophy department, Adorno quickly established himself as a leading German intellectual and a central figure in the Institute of Social Research. Founded as a free-standing center for Marxist scholarship in 1923, the Institute had been led by Max Horkheimer since 1930. It provided the hub to what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno became the Institute's director in 1958. From the 1950s stem In Search of Wagner , Adorno's ideology-critique of the Nazi's favorite composer; Prisms , a collection of social and cultural studies; Against Epistemology , an antifoundationalist critique of Husserlian phenomenology; and the first volume of Notes to Literature , a collection of essays in literary criticism.

Conflict and consolidation marked the last decade of Adorno's life. A leading figure in the “positivism dispute” in German sociology, Adorno was a key player in debates about restructuring German universities and a lightning rod for both student activists and their right-wing critics. These controversies did not prevent him from publishing numerous volumes of music criticism, two more volumes of Notes to Literature , books on Hegel and on existential philosophy, and collected essays in sociology and in aesthetics. Negative Dialectics , Adorno's magnum opus on epistemology and metaphysics, appeared in 1966. Aesthetic Theory , the other magnum opus on which he had worked throughout the 1960s, appeared posthumously in 1970. He died of a heart attack on August 6, 1969, one month shy of his sixty-sixth birthday.

Long before “postmodernism” became fashionable, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote one of the most searching critiques of modernity to have emerged among progressive European intellectuals. Dialectic of Enlightenment is a product of their wartime exile. It first appeared as a mimeograph titled Philosophical Fragments in 1944. This title became the subtitle when the book was published in 1947. Their book opens with a grim assessment of the modern West: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant” (DE 1, translation modified). How can this be, the authors ask. How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become irrational.

Although they cite Francis Bacon as a leading spokesman for an instrumentalized reason that becomes irrational, Horkheimer and Adorno do not think that modern science and scientism are the sole culprits. The tendency of rational progress to become irrational regress arises much earlier. Indeed, they cite both the Hebrew scriptures and Greek philosophers as contributing to regressive tendencies. If Horkheimer and Adorno are right, then a critique of modernity must also be a critique of premodernity, and a turn toward the postmodern cannot simply be a return to the premodern. Otherwise the failures of modernity will continue in a new guise under contemporary conditions. Society as a whole needs to be transformed.

Horkheimer and Adorno believe that society and culture form a historical totality, such that the pursuit of freedom in society is inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture (DE xvi). There is a flip side to this: a lack or loss of freedom in society—in the political, economic, and legal structures within which we live—signals a concomitant failure in cultural enlightenment—in philosophy, the arts, religion, and the like. The Nazi death camps are not an aberration, nor are mindless studio movies innocent entertainment. Both indicate that something fundamental has gone wrong in the modern West.

According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the source of today's disaster is a pattern of blind domination, domination in a triple sense: the domination of nature by human beings, the domination of nature within human beings, and, in both of these forms of domination, the domination of some human beings by others. What motivates such triple domination is an irrational fear of the unknown: “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization … . Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized” (DE 11). In an unfree society whose culture pursues so-called progress no matter what the cost, that which is “other,” whether human or nonhuman, gets shoved aside, exploited, or destroyed. The means of destruction may be more sophisticated in the modern West, and the exploitation may be less direct than outright slavery, but blind, fear-driven domination continues, with ever greater global consequences. The all-consuming engine driving this process is an ever-expanding capitalist economy, fed by scientific research and the latest technologies.

Contrary to some interpretations, Horkheimer and Adorno do not reject the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Nor do they provide a negative “metanarrative” of universal historical decline. Rather, through a highly unusual combination of philosophical argument, sociological reflection, and literary and cultural commentary, they construct a “double perspective” on the modern West as a historical formation (Jarvis 1998, 23). They summarize this double perspective in two interlinked theses: “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (DE xviii). The first thesis allows them to suggest that, despite being declared mythical and outmoded by the forces of secularization, older rituals, religions, and philosophies may have contributed to the process of enlightenment and may still have something worthwhile to contribute. The second thesis allows them to expose ideological and destructive tendencies within modern forces of secularization, but without denying either that these forces are progressive and enlightening or that the older conceptions they displace were themselves ideological and destructive.

A fundamental mistake in many interpretations of Dialectic of Enlightenment occurs when readers take such theses to be theoretical definitions of unchanging categories rather than critical judgments about historical tendencies. The authors are not saying that myth is “by nature” a force of enlightenment. Nor are they claiming that enlightenment “inevitably” reverts to mythology. In fact, what they find really mythical in both myth and enlightenment is the thought that fundamental change is impossible. Such resistance to change characterizes both ancient myths of fate and modern devotion to the facts.

Accordingly, in constructing a “dialectic of enlightenment” the authors simultaneously aim to carry out a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment not unlike Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit . Two Hegelian concepts anchor this project, namely, determinate negation and conceptual self-reflection. “Determinate negation” ( bestimmte Negation ) indicates that immanent criticism is the way to wrest truth from ideology. A dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment “discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from [the image's] features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth” (DE 18). Beyond and through such determinate negation, a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment also recalls the origin and goal of thought itself. Such recollection is the work of the concept as the self-reflection of thought ( der Begriff als Selbstbesinnung des Denkens , DE 32). Conceptual self-reflection reveals that thought arises from the very corporeal needs and desires that get forgotten when thought becomes a mere instrument of human self-preservation. It also reveals that the goal of thought is not to continue the blind domination of nature and humans but to point toward reconciliation. Adorno works out the details of this conception in his subsequent lectures on Kant (KC), ethics (PMP), and metaphysics (MCP) and in his books on Husserl (AE), Hegel (H), and Heidegger (JA). His most comprehensive statement occurs in Negative Dialectics , which is discussed later.

Dialectic of Enlightenment presupposes a critical social theory indebted to Karl Marx. Adorno reads Marx as a Hegelian materialist whose critique of capitalism unavoidably includes a critique of the ideologies that capitalism sustains and requires. The most important of these is what Marx called “the fetishism of commodities.” Marx aimed his critique of commodity fetishism against bourgeois social scientists who simply describe the capitalist economy but, in so doing, simultaneously misdescribe it and prescribe a false social vision. According to Marx, bourgeois economists necessarily ignore the exploitation intrinsic to capitalist production. They fail to understand that capitalist production, for all its surface “freedom” and “fairness,” must extract surplus value from the labor of the working class. Like ordinary producers and consumers under capitalist conditions, bourgeois economists treat the commodity as a fetish. They treat it as if it were a neutral object, with a life of its own, that directly relates to other commodities, in independence from the human interactions that actually sustain all commodities. Marx, by contrast, argues that whatever makes a product a commodity goes back to human needs, desires, and practices. The commodity would not have “use value” if it did not satisfy human wants. It would not have “exchange value” if no one wished to exchange it for something else. And its exchange value could not be calculated if the commodity did not share with other commodities a “value” created by the expenditure of human labor power and measured by the average labor time socially necessary to produce commodities of various sorts.

Adorno's social theory attempts to make Marx's central insights applicable to “late capitalism.” Although in agreement with Marx's analysis of the commodity, Adorno thinks his critique of commodity fetishism does not go far enough. Significant changes have occurred in the structure of capitalism since Marx's day. This requires revisions on a number of topics: the dialectic between forces of production and relations of production; the relationship between state and economy; the sociology of classes and class consciousness; the nature and function of ideology; and the role of expert cultures, such as modern art and social theory, in criticizing capitalism and calling for the transformation of society as a whole.

The primary clues to these revisions come from a theory of reification proposed by the Hungarian socialist Georg Lukács in the 1920s and from interdisciplinary projects and debates conducted by members of the Institute of Social Research in the 1930s and 1940s. Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, Lukács argues that the capitalist economy is no longer one sector of society alongside others. Rather, commodity exchange has become the central organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity fetishism to permeate all social institutions (e.g., law, administration, journalism) as well as all academic disciplines, including philosophy. “Reification” refers to “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Lukács was especially concerned with how reification makes human beings “seem like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of the marketplace” (Zuidervaart 1991, 76).

Initially Adorno shared this concern, even though he never had Lukács's confidence that the revolutionary working class could overcome reification. Later Adorno called the reification of consciousness an “epiphenomenon.” What a critical social theory really needs to address is why hunger, poverty, and other forms of human suffering persist despite the technological and scientific potential to mitigate them or to eliminate them altogether. The root cause, Adorno says, lies in how capitalist relations of production have come to dominate society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit often invisible, concentrations of wealth and power (ND 189–92). Society has come to be organized around the production of exchange values for the sake of producing exchange values, which, of course, always already requires a silent appropriation of surplus value. Adorno refers to this nexus of production and power as the “principle of exchange” ( Tauschprinzip ). A society where this nexus prevails is an “exchange society” ( Tauschgesellschaft ).

Adorno's diagnosis of the exchange society has three levels: politico-economic, social-psychological, and cultural. Politically and economically he responds to a theory of state capitalism proposed by Friedrich Pollock during the war years. An economist by training who was supposed to contribute a chapter to Dialectic of Enlightenment but never did (Wiggershaus 1994, 313–19), Pollock argued that the state had acquired dominant economic power in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and New Deal America. He called this new constellation of politics and economics “state capitalism.” While acknowledging with Pollock that political and economic power have become more tightly meshed, Adorno does not think this fact changes the fundamentally economic character of capitalist exploitation. Rather, such exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx's day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive.

The social-psychological level in Adorno's diagnosis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness and pervasiveness of late capitalist exploitation. His American studies of anti-Semitism and the “authoritarian personality” argue that these pathologically extend “the logic of late capitalism itself, with its associated dialectic of enlightenment.” People who embrace anti-Semitism and fascism tend to project their fear of abstract domination onto the supposed mediators of capitalism, while rejecting as elitist “all claims to a qualitative difference transcending exchange” (Jarvis 1998, 63).

Adorno's cultural studies show that a similar logic prevails in television, film, and the recording industries. In fact, Adorno first discovered late capitalism's structural change through his work with sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton University Radio Research Project. He articulated this discovery in a widely anthologized essay “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938) and in “The Culture Industry,” a chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment . There Adorno argues that the culture industry involves a change in the commodity character of art, such that art's commodity character is deliberately acknowledged and art “abjures its autonomy” (DE 127). With its emphasis on marketability, the culture industry dispenses entirely with the “purposelessness” that was central to art's autonomy. Once marketability becomes a total demand, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts. Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses, and thereby having a genuine use value that people can enjoy, products mediated by the culture industry have their use value replaced by exchange value: “Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation [ gesellschaftliche Schätzung ] which they mistake for the merit [ Rang ] of works of art— becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy” (DE 128). Hence the culture industry dissolves the “genuine commodity character” that artworks once possessed when exchange value still presupposed use value (DE 129–30). Lacking a background in Marxist theory, and desiring to secure legitimacy for “mass art” or “popular culture,” too many of Adorno's anglophone critics simply ignore the main point to his critique of the culture industry. His main point is that culture-industrial hypercommercialization evidences a fateful shift in the structure of all commodities and therefore in the structure of capitalism itself.

Philosophical and sociological studies of the arts and literature make up more than half of Adorno's collected works ( Gesammelte Schriften ). All of his most important social-theoretical claims show up in these studies. Yet his “aesthetic writings” are not simply “applications” or “test cases” for theses developed in “nonaesthetic” texts. Adorno rejects any such separation of subject matter from methodology and all neat divisions of philosophy into specialized subdisciplines. This is one reason why academic specialists find his texts so challenging, not only musicologists and literary critics but also epistemologists and aestheticians. All of his writings contribute to a comprehensive and interdisciplinary social philosophy (Zuidervaart 2007).

First published the year after Adorno died, Aesthetic Theory marks the unfinished culmination of his remarkably rich body of aesthetic reflections. It casts retrospective light on the entire corpus. It also comes closest to the model of “paratactical presentation” (Hullot-Kentor in AT xi-xxi) that Adorno, inspired especially by Walter Benjamin, found most appropriate for his own “atonal philosophy.” Relentlessly tracing concentric circles, Aesthetic Theory carries out a dialectical double reconstruction. It reconstructs the modern art movement from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics. It simultaneously reconstructs philosophical aesthetics, especially that of Kant and Hegel, from the perspective of modern art. From both sides Adorno tries to elicit the sociohistorical significance of the art and philosophy discussed.

Adorno's claims about art in general stem from his reconstruction of the modern art movement. So a summary of his philosophy of art sometimes needs to signal this by putting “modern” in parentheses. The book begins and ends with reflections on the social character of (modern) art. Two themes stand out in these reflections. One is an updated Hegelian question whether art can survive in a late capitalist world. The other is an updated Marxian question whether art can contribute to the transformation of this world. When addressing both questions, Adorno retains from Kant the notion that art proper (“fine art” or “beautiful art”— schöne Kunst —in Kant's vocabulary) is characterized by formal autonomy. But Adorno combines this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel's emphasis on intellectual import ( geistiger Gehalt ) and Marx's emphasis on art's embeddedness in society as a whole. The result is a complex account of the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of the artwork's autonomy. The artwork's necessary and illusory autonomy, in turn, is the key to (modern) art's social character, namely, to be “the social antithesis of society” (AT 8).

Adorno regards authentic works of (modern) art as social monads. The unavoidable tensions within them express unavoidable conflicts within the larger sociohistorical process from which they arise and to which they belong. These tensions enter the artwork through the artist's struggle with sociohistorically laden materials, and they call forth conflicting interpretations, many of which misread either the work-internal tensions or their connection to conflicts in society as a whole. Adorno sees all of these tensions and conflicts as “contradictions” to be worked through and eventually to be resolved. Their complete resolution, however, would require a transformation in society as a whole, which, given his social theory, does not seem imminent.

As commentary and criticism, Adorno's aesthetic writings are unparalleled in the subtlety and sophistication with which they trace work-internal tensions and relate them to unavoidable sociohistorical conflicts. One gets frequent glimpses of this in Aesthetic Theory . For the most part, however, the book proceeds at the level of “third reflections”—reflections on categories employed in actual commentary and criticism, with a view to their suitability for what artworks express and to their societal implications. Typically he elaborates these categories as polarities or dialectical pairs.

One such polarity, and a central one in Adorno's theory of artworks as social monads, occurs between the categories of import ( Gehalt ) and function ( Funktion ). Adorno's account of these categories distinguishes his sociology of art from both hermeneutical and empirical approaches. A hermeneutical approach would emphasize the artwork's inherent meaning or its cultural significance and downplay the artwork's political or economic functions. An empirical approach would investigate causal connections between the artwork and various social factors without asking hermeneutical questions about its meaning or significance. Adorno, by contrast, argues that, both as categories and as phenomena, import and function need to be understood in terms of each other. On the one hand, an artwork's import and its functions in society can be diametrically opposed. On the other hand, one cannot give a proper account of an artwork's social functions if one does not raise import-related questions about their significance. So too, an artwork's import embodies the work's social functions and has potential relevance for various social contexts. In general, however, and in line with his critiques of positivism and instrumentalized reason, Adorno gives priority to import, understood as societally mediated and socially significant meaning. The social functions emphasized in his own commentaries and criticisms are primarily intellectual functions rather than straightforwardly political or economic functions. This is consistent with a hyperbolic version of the claim that (modern) art is society's social antithesis: “Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness” (AT 227).

The priority of import also informs Adorno's stance on art and politics, which derives from debates with Lukács, Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s (Lunn 1982; Zuidervaart 1991, 28–43). Because of the shift in capitalism's structure, and because of Adorno's own complex emphasis on (modern) art's autonomy, he doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative, or deliberately consciousness-raising art. Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art. Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory , are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks.

Arguably, the idea of “truth content” ( Wahrheitsgehalt ) is the pivotal center around which all the concentric circles of Adorno's aesthetics turn (Zuidervaart 1991; Wellmer 1991, 1–35 ; Jarvis 1998, 90–123). To gain access to this center, one must temporarily suspend standard theories about the nature of truth (whether as correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic success) and allow for artistic truth to be dialectical, disclosive, and nonpropositional. According to Adorno, each artwork has its own import ( Gehalt ) by virtue of an internal dialectic between content ( Inhalt ) and form ( Form ). This import invites critical judgments about its truth or falsity. To do justice to the artwork and its import, such critical judgments need to grasp both the artwork's complex internal dynamics and the dynamics of the sociohistorical totality to which the artwork belongs. The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork's import can be found internally and externally either true or false. Such truth content is not a metaphysical idea or essence hovering outside the artwork. But neither is it a merely human construct. It is historical but not arbitrary; nonpropositional, yet calling for propositional claims to be made about it; utopian in its reach, yet firmly tied to specific societal conditions. Truth content is the way in which an artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and suggests how things could be better, but leaves things practically unchanged: “Art has truth as the semblance of the illusionless” (AT 132).

Adorno's idea of artistic truth content presupposes the epistemological and metaphysical claims he works out most thoroughly in Negative Dialectics . These claims, in turn, consolidate and extend the historiographic and social-theoretical arguments already canvassed. As Simon Jarvis demonstrates, Negative Dialectics tries to formulate a “philosophical materialism” that is historical and critical but not dogmatic. Alternatively, one can describe the book as a “metacritique” of idealist philosophy, especially of the philosophy of Kant and Hegel (Jarvis 1998, 148–74; O'Connor 2004). Adorno says the book aims to complete what he considered his lifelong task as a philosopher: “to use the strength of the [epistemic] subject to break through the deception [ Trug ] of constitutive subjectivity” (ND xx).

This occurs in four stages. First, a long Introduction (ND 1–57) works out a concept of “philosophical experience” that both challenges Kant's distinction between “phenomena” and “noumena” and rejects Hegel's construction of “absolute spirit.” Then Part One (ND 59–131) distinguishes Adorno's project from the “fundamental ontology” in Heidegger's Being and Time . Part Two (ND 133–207) works out Adorno's alternative with respect to the categories he reconfigures from German idealism. Part Three (ND 209–408), composing nearly half the book, elaborates philosophical “models.” These present negative dialectics in action upon key concepts of moral philosophy (“freedom”), philosophy of history (“world spirit” and “natural history”), and metaphysics. Adorno says the final model, devoted to metaphysical questions, “tries by critical self reflection to give the Copernican revolution an axial turn” (ND xx). Alluding to Kant's self-proclaimed “second Copernican revolution,” this description echoes Adorno's comment about breaking through the deception of constitutive subjectivity.

Like Hegel, Adorno criticizes Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena by arguing that the transcendental conditions of experience can be neither so pure nor so separate from each other as Kant seems to claim. As concepts, for example, the a priori categories of the faculty of understanding ( Verstand ) would be unintelligible if they were not already about something that is nonconceptual. Conversely, the supposedly pure forms of space and time cannot simply be nonconceptual intuitions. Not even a transcendental philosopher would have access to them apart from concepts about them. So too, what makes possible any genuine experience cannot simply be the “application” of a priori concepts to a priori intuitions via the “schematism” of the imagination ( Einbildungskraft ). Genuine experience is made possible by that which exceeds the grasp of thought and sensibility. Adorno does not call this excess the “thing in itself,” however, for that would assume the Kantian framework he criticizes. Rather, he calls it “the nonidentical” ( das Nichtidentische ).

The concept of the nonidentical, in turn, marks the difference between Adorno's materialism and Hegel's idealism. Although he shares Hegel's emphasis on a speculative identity between thought and being, between subject and object, and between reason and reality, Adorno denies that this identity has been achieved in a positive fashion. For the most part this identity has occurred negatively instead. That is to say, human thought, in achieving identity and unity, has imposed these upon objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity. Such imposition is driven by a societal formation whose exchange principle demands the equivalence (exchange value) of what is inherently nonequivalent (use value). Whereas Hegel's speculative identity amounts to an identity between identity and nonidentity, Adorno's amounts to a nonidentity between identity and nonidentity. That is why Adorno calls for a “negative dialectic” and why he rejects the affirmative character of Hegel's dialectic (ND 143–61).

Adorno does not reject the necessity of conceptual identification, however, nor does his philosophy claim to have direct access to the nonidentical. Under current societal conditions, thought can only have access to the nonidentical via conceptual criticisms of false identifications. Such criticisms must be “determinate negations,” pointing up specific contradictions between what thought claims and what it actually delivers. Through determinate negation, those aspects of the object which thought misidentifies receive an indirect, conceptual articulation.

The motivation for Adorno's negative dialectic is not simply conceptual, however, nor are its intellectual resources. His epistemology is “materialist” in both regards. It is motivated, he says, by undeniable human suffering—a fact of unreason, if you will, to counter Kant's “fact of reason.” Suffering is the corporeal imprint of society and the object upon human consciousness: “The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject … ” (ND 17–18). The resources available to philosophy in this regard include the “expressive” or “mimetic” dimensions of language, which conflict with “ordinary” (i.e., societally sanctioned) syntax and semantics. In philosophy, this requires an emphasis on “presentation” ( Darstellung ) in which logical stringency and expressive flexibility interact (ND 18–19, 52–53). Another resource lies in unscripted relationships among established concepts. By taking such concepts out of their established patterns and rearranging them in “constellations” around a specific subject matter, philosophy can unlock some of the historical dynamic hidden within objects whose identity exceeds the classifications imposed upon them (ND 52–53, 162–66).

What unifies all of these desiderata, and what most clearly distinguishes Adorno's materialist epistemology from “idealism,” whether Kantian or Hegelian, is his insisting on the “priority of the object” ( Vorrang des Objekts , ND 183–97). Adorno regards as “idealist” any philosophy that affirms an identity between subject and object and thereby assigns constitutive priority to the epistemic subject. In insisting on the priority of the object, Adorno repeatedly makes three claims: first, that the epistemic subject is itself objectively constituted by the society to which it belongs and without which the subject could not exist; second, that no object can be fully known according to the rules and procedures of identitarian thinking; third, that the goal of thought itself, even when thought forgets its goal under societally induced pressures to impose identity on objects, is to honor them in their nonidentity, in their difference from what a restricted rationality declares them to be. Against empiricism, however, he argues that no object is simply “given” either, both because it can be an object only in relation to a subject and because objects are historical and have the potential to change.

Under current conditions the only way for philosophy to give priority to the object is dialectically, Adorno argues. He describes dialectics as the attempt to recognize the nonidentity between thought and the object while carrying out the project of conceptual identification. Dialectics is “the consistent consciousness of nonidentity,” and contradiction, its central category, is “the nonidentical under the aspect of identity.” Thought itself forces this emphasis on contradiction upon us, he says. To think is to identify, and thought can achieve truth only by identifying. So the semblance ( Schein ) of total identity lives within thought itself, mingled with thought's truth ( Wahrheit ). The only way to break through the semblance of total identity is immanently, using the concept. Accordingly, everything that is qualitatively different and that resists conceptualization will show up as a contradiction. “The contradiction is the nonidentical under the aspect of [conceptual] identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics tests the heterogeneous according to unitary thought [ Einheitsdenken ]. By colliding with its own boundary [ Grenze ], unitary thought surpasses itself. Dialectics is the consistent consciousness of nonidentity” (ND 5).

But thinking in contradictions is also forced upon philosophy by society itself. Society is riven with fundamental antagonisms, which, in accordance with the exchange principle, get covered up by identitarian thought. The only way to expose these antagonisms, and thereby to point toward their possible resolution, is to think against thought—in other words, to think in contradictions. In this way “contradiction” cannot be ascribed neatly to either thought or reality. Instead it is a “category of reflection” ( Reflexionskategorie ) , enabling a thoughtful confrontation between concept ( Begriff ) and subject matter or object ( Sache ): “To proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction already experienced in the object [ Sache ], and against that contradiction. A contradiction in reality, [dialectics] is a contradiction against reality” (ND 144–45).

The point of thinking in contradictions is not simply negative, however. It has a fragile, transformative horizon, namely, a society that would no longer be riven with fundamental antagonisms, thinking that would be rid of the compulsion to dominate through conceptual identification, and the flourishing of particular objects in their particularity. Because Adorno is convinced that contemporary society has the resources to alleviate the suffering it nevertheless perpetuates, his negative dialectics has a utopian reach: “In view of the concrete possibility of utopia, dialectics is the ontology of the false condition. A right condition would be freed from dialectics, no more system than contradiction” (ND 11). Such a “right condition” would be one of reconciliation between humans and nature, including the nature within human beings, and among human beings themselves. This idea of reconciliation sustains Adorno's reflections on ethics and metaphysics.

Like Adorno's epistemology, his moral philosophy derives from a materialistic metacritique of German idealism. The model on “Freedom” in Negative Dialectics (ND 211–99) conducts a metacritique of Kant's critique of practical reason. So too, the model on “World Spirit and Natural History” (ND 300–60) provides a metacritique of Hegel's philosophy of history. Both models simultaneously carry out a subterranean debate with the Marxist tradition, and this debate guides Adorno's appropriation of both Kantian and Hegelian “practical philosophy.”

The first section in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics indicates the direction Adorno's appropriation will take (ND 3–4). There he asks whether and how philosophy is still possible. Adorno asks this against the backdrop of Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach , which famously proclaimed that philosophy's task is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. In distinguishing his historical materialism from the sensory materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx portrays human beings as fundamentally productive and political organisms whose interrelations are not merely interpersonal but societal and historical. Marx's emphasis on production, politics, society, and history takes his epistemology in a “pragmatic” direction. “Truth” does not indicate the abstract correspondence between thought and reality, between proposition and fact, he says. Instead, “truth” refers to the economic, political, societal, and historical fruitfulness of thought in practice.

Although Adorno shares many of Marx's anthropological intuitions, he thinks that a twentieth-century equation of truth with practical fruitfulness had disastrous effects on both sides of the iron curtain. The Introduction to Negative Dialectics begins by making two claims. First, although apparently obsolete, philosophy remains necessary because capitalism has not been overthrown. Second, Marx's interpretation of capitalist society was inadequate and his critique is outmoded. Hence, praxis no longer serves as an adequate basis for challenging (philosophical) theory. In fact, praxis serves mostly as a pretext for shutting down the theoretical critique that transformative praxis would require. Having missed the moment of its realization (via the proletarian revolution, according to early Marx), philosophy today must criticize itself: its societal naivete, its intellectual antiquation, its inability to grasp the power at work in industrial late capitalism. While still pretending to grasp the whole, philosophy fails to recognize how thoroughly it depends upon society as a whole, all the way into philosophy's “immanent truth” (ND 4). Philosophy must shed such naivete. It must ask, as Kant asked about metaphysics after Hume's critique of rationalism, How is philosophy still possible? More specifically, How, after the collapse of Hegelian thought, is philosophy still possible? How can the dialectical effort to conceptualize the nonconceptual—which Marx also pursued—how can this philosophy be continued?

This self-implicating critique of the relation between theory and practice is one crucial source to Adorno's reflections on ethics and metaphysics. Another is the catastrophic impact of twentieth-century history on the prospects for imagining and achieving a more humane world. Adorno's is an ethics and metaphysics “after Auschwitz” (Bernstein 2001, 371–414; Zuidervaart 2007, 48–76). Ethically, he says, Hitler's barbarism imposes a “new categorical imperative” on human beings in their condition of unfreedom: so to arrange their thought and action that “Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen” (ND 365). Metaphysically, philosophers must find historically appropriate ways to speak about meaning and truth and suffering that neither deny nor affirm the existence of a world transcendent to the one we know. Whereas denying it would suppress the suffering that calls out for fundamental change, straightforwardly affirming the existence of utopia would cut off the critique of contemporary society and the struggle to change it. The basis for Adorno's double strategy is not a hidden ontology, as some have suggested, but rather a “speculative” or “metaphysical” experience. Adorno appeals to the experience that thought which “does not decapitate itself” flows into the idea of a world where “not only extant suffering would be abolished but also suffering that is irrevocably past would be revoked” (403). Neither logical positivist antimetaphysics nor Heideggerian hypermetaphysics can do justice to this experience.

Adorno indicates his own alternative to both traditional metaphysics and more recent antimetaphysics in passages that juxtapose resolute self-criticism and impassioned hope. His historiographic, social theoretical, aesthetic, and negative dialectical concerns meet in passages such as this:

Thought that does not capitulate before wretched existence comes to nought before its criteria, truth becomes untruth, philosophy becomes folly. And yet philosophy cannot give up, lest idiocy triumph in actualized unreason [ Widervernunft ] … Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth. Even at the highest peaks art is semblance; but art receives the semblance … from nonsemblance [ vom Scheinlosen ] … . No light falls on people and things in which transcendence would not appear [ widerschiene ]. Indelible in resistance to the fungible world of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the world's colors to vanish. In semblance nonsemblance is promised (ND 404–5).

Addressing such passages is crucial in the ongoing assessment of Adorno's philosophy.

Section 1 lists many of Adorno's books in English, including several he co-authored, in the order of their abbreviations. Section 2 lists some anthologies of Adorno's writings in English. Books listed in section 1 without abbreviations were originally published in English; all others were originally published in German. A date in parentheses following a title indicates either the first German edition or, in the case of posthumous publications, the date of the original lectures. Often the translations cited above have been silently modified. The abbreviation “GS” or “NS” after an entry below tells where this book can be found in Adorno's collected writings. “GS” indicates writings published during Adorno's lifetime and collected in the 20 volumes of Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften , edited by Rolf Tiedemann et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1986). “NS” indicates posthumous works that are appearing as editions of the Theodor W. Adorno Archive in the collection Nachgelassene Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993–).

For more extensive Adorno bibliographies, see Huhn 2004, Müller-Doohm 2005, and Zuidervaart 2014, an annotated bibliography.

Primary Literature

2. Adorno Anthologies

• The Adorno Reader , ed. B. O'Connor, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
• Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader , ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. R. Livingstone et al., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
• The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , ed. J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, 1991.
• Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno , ed. R. D. Leppert, trans. S. H. Gillespie et al., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

3. Secondary Literature

• Benhabib, S., 1986, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory , New York: Colombia University Press.
• Benzer, M., 2011, The Sociology of Theodor Adorno , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bernstein, J. M., 1992, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• –––, 2001, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2010, Art and Aesthetics after Adorno , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Boucher, G., 2013, Adorno Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts , London: I. B. Tauris.
• Bowie, A., 2013, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy , Cambridge, Mass.: Polity.
• Brittain, C. C., 2010, Adorno and Theology , London: T. & T. Clark.
• Brunkhorst, H., 1999, Adorno and Critical Theory , Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
• Buck-Morss, S., 1977, The Origin of Negative Dialectics; Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute , New York: Free Press.
• Bürger, P., 1984, Theory of the Avant Garde , trans. M. Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Burke, D. A., et al. (eds.), 2007, Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Claussen, D., 2008, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius , trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Cook, D., 2004, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2011, Adorno on Nature , Durham, UK: Acumen.
• ––– (ed.), 2008, Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts , Durham, UK: Acumen.
• de Vries, H., 2005, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas , trans. G. Hale, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Foster, R., 2007, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Frankfurter Adorno Blätter , 1992–2003, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik. (Published annually, more or less.)
• Freyenhagen, F., 2013, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gibson, N. C., and A. Rubin, (eds.), 2002, Adorno: A Critical Reader , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Geuss, R., 2005, Outside Ethics , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Habermas, J., 1987, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Hammer, E., 2005, Adorno and the Political , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2015, Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hansen, M. B., 2012, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Heberle, R. J. (ed.), 2006, Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Hellings, J., 2014, Adorno and Art: Aesthetic Theory contra Critical Theory , Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Hohendahl, P. U., 1995, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• –––, 2013, The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited , Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press.
• Honneth, Axel, 1991, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory , trans. K. Baynes, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• –––, 2009, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory , trans. J. Ingram et al., New York: Columbia University Press.
• Huhn, T., and L. Zuidervaart (eds.), 1997, The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Huhn, T. (ed.), 2004, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hullot-Kentor, R., 2006, Things beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Jäger, L., 2004, Adorno: A Political Biography , trans. S. Spencer, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
• Jameson, F. 1990, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic , London; New York: Verso.
• Jarvis, S., 1998, Adorno: A Critical Introduction , New York: Routledge.
• ––– (ed.), 2006, Theodor Adorno , 4 vols., London: Routledge.
• Jay, M., 1984, Adorno , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1996, The Dialectical Imagination , 2d ed., Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Jenemann, D., 2007, Adorno in America , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Krakauer, E. L., 1998, The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno's Dialectic of Technology , Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
• Lee, L. Y., 2005, Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of T. W. Adorno , New York: Routledge.
• Lunn, E., 1982, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Macdonald, I. and K. Ziarek (eds.), 2008, Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Martinson, M., 2000, Perseverance without Doctrine: Adorno, Self-Critique, and the Ends of Academic Theology , Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• McArthur, J., 2013, Rethinking Knowledge within Higher Education: Adorno and Social Justice , New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Menke, C., 1998, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida , trans. N. Solomon, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Morgan, A., 2007, Adorno’s Concept of Life , New York: Continuum.
• Morris, M., 2001. Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas, and the Problem of Communicative Freedom , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Müller-Doohm, S., 2005, Adorno: A Biography , trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Nicholsen, S. W., 1997, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• O'Connor, B., 2004, Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• –––, 2013, Adorno , London: Routledge.
• Paddison, M., 1993, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Pensky, M., (ed.), 1997, The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Rensmann, L., and S. Gandesha (eds.), 2012, Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations , Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
• Rose, G., 1978, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno , London: Macmillan Press.
• Ross, N. (ed.), 2015, The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Schweppenhäuser, G., 2009, Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction , Durham: Duke University Press.
• Sherman, D., 2007, Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Sherratt, Y., 2002, Adorno's Positive Dialectic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Shuster, M., 2014, Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Vogel, S., 1996, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Vries, H. de, 2005, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas , trans. G. Hale., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Wellmer, A., 1991, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism , trans. D. Midgley, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• –––, 1998, Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity; Essays and Lectures , trans. D. Midgley, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Whitebook, J., 1995, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Wiggershaus, R., 1994, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance , trans. M. Robertson, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Witkin, R. W., 2003, Adorno on Popular Culture , New York: Routledge.
• Zuidervaart, L., 1991, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Zuidervaart, L., et al., 1998, “Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics , Vol. 1, pp. 16–32, ed. M. Kelly, New York: Oxford University Press; second edition, 2014.
• Zuidervaart, L., 2007, Social Philosophy after Adorno , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Zuidervaart, L., 2014, “Theodor Adorno,” Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy , ed. D. Pritchard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, abridged version available online

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• Archives Center/University Library J.C. Senckenberg at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. This university archive contains the literary bequests of Horkheimer, Pollock, and other of Adorno’s colleagues in the Frankfurt School.
• Association for Adorno Studies
• Theodor W. Adorno Archive/Institute of Social Research , at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.
• Theodor W. Adorno Archive in the Walter Benjamin Archive , at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Benjamin, Walter | contradiction | critical theory | domination | Enlightenment | Habermas, Jürgen | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics | Heidegger, Martin | Horkheimer, Max | Husserl, Edmund | identity | Kant, Immanuel | Lukács, Georg [György] | Marx, Karl | Popper, Karl | postmodernism | -->rationality --> | truth | Weber, Max

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

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The Theory of the Essay: Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin

• Kauffmann, R. Lane
• Advisor(s): Jameson, Fredric R. ;
• Kirkpatrick, Susan

This study treats three German philosopher-critics – Georg Lukacs, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin – whose theories of the essay, considered together, are the most comprehensive attempt yet made to define the essay as a cognitive and philosophical form. The introduction envisages a descriptive-historical poetics of the essay as a methodological standard by which to evaluate the theories just mentioned. The aim of such a poetics would be to elucidate the ways in which particular cognitive projects are actualized in essays through specific literary-discursive devices.The central chapters offer a close analysis of the ideas of Lukacs, Adorno, and Benjamin on the essay, situating each theory in its historical and intellectual context. (The two main documents here are Lukacs' 1910 essay on the essay in his Soul and Form, and Adorno's 1958 "The Essay as Form," in his Notes on Literature. Benjamin left no explicit theory of the essay; his ideas on philosophical method and form – ideas which strongly influenced Adorno – are culled from his study on the baroque Trauerspiel and from his later essays.) These theories are compared with respect to such themes as the historical development of the essay, its dominant aesthetic and philosophical functions (with particular regard to whether the essay is "systematic" or "fragmentary" in nature), and the role of the subject in the act of cognition which is embodied in the essay form. Each theory reflects its author's particular version of Marxist dialectics, his distinct view of the interrelations between aesthetics, cognition, and social reality. Thus, for example, the young Lukacs sees the modern essay as an alienated, fragmentary form which strives for an ideal "system" (this ideal being exemplified by the unity and "immediacy" of Plato's essay-dialogues). The nostalgic longing of Soul and Form reappears in the totalizing Marxism of Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness (1923). For Adorno, by contrast, the essay registers a utopian protest against such totalizing systems. Adorno considers the essay to be the formal enactment of "negative dialectics" (as he named his philosophy); fragmentation is its basic principle.Whereas Adorno's theory is contrasted to that of Lukacs, his practice of the essay is juxtaposed to Benjamin's experiments with the form. The now famous aesthetic dispute between Adorno and Benjamin of the thirties is re-examined in terms of the rhetorical strategies evidenced in their critical writings. It is argued that Benjamin was more attentive than Adorno to the cognitive responses of readers, and that in some ways his essays came closer to satisfying the normative aims of "negative dialectics" than did the essays of Adorno himself.Each of these theories is a "cognitive utopia," a kind of philosophical wish-fulfillment, in that each theorist projects his own ideal Essay as the solution to the most basic problems of modern culture and society. While none of these theories gives an entirely satisfactory historical account of the essay genre, they still serve as interpretive master keys to the essays of the theorists themselves.Or perhaps as clues for a theory of the modern critical essay. Whatever their differences, these thinkers are alike in seeing the essay as a function of the cognitive experience of a writing subject. Thus they belong to a familiar anthropology of discourse which in recent years has been sharply challenged by "poststructuralist" theories. The poststructuralists-among them Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Barthes – reject the notion of a controlling subject of discourse in favor of the "free play" of the language of the text. The concluding chapter imagines a confrontation between Marxist utopias of cognition and poststructuralist utopias of language – two alternative poetics for the modern critical essay.

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4. The Essay as Form (1958)

From the book essays on the essay film.

• Theodor W. Adorno
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Chapters in this book (33)