Aesthetic TheoryTheodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experience that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation 'art is the sedimented history of human misery'. |
Contents
Chapter 1 Art Society Aesthetics | 1 |
Chapter 2 Situation | 23 |
Chapter 3 On the Categories of the Ugly the Beautiful and Technique | 63 |
Chapter 4 Natural Beauty | 85 |
Apparition Spiritualization Intuitability | 109 |
Chapter 6 Semblance and Expression | 139 |
Chapter 7 Enigmaticalness Truth Content Metaphysics | 163 |
Chapter 8 Coherence and Meaning | 187 |
Chapter 10 Toward a Theory of the Artwork | 241 |
Chapter 11 Universal and Particular | 273 |
Chapter 12 Society | 307 |
Chapter 13 Paralipomena | 355 |
Chapter 14 Theories on the Origin of Art Excursus | 429 |
Chapter 15 Draft Introduction | 439 |
Chapter 16 Editors Afterword | 477 |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract achieved Adorno aesthetic experience Aesthetic Theory appearance art’s artworks become authentic autonomy Baudelaire Beethoven bourgeois character claim classicism comportment concept concrete consciousness constitutive contemporary content Inhalt critical critique Critique of Judgment cubism culture industry dialectic domination dynamic element emancipation empirical reality enigmaticalness essence everything existence expression external false consciousness fashion fetish force forces of production formal function genres Hegel heteronomous historical human idea ideal ideology immanent immediacy impulse in-itself individual insofar integration judgment Jugendstil Kant Kant’s kitsch language law of form logic longer material means mediated mimesis mimetic modern art natural beauty negation nexus nominalistic object objectivation once opposition origin particular philistine philosophy play possible praxis precisely primacy principle production progress rationality reflection reification relation relations of production repressed semblance sensual simply social society spirit sublime technique teleology totality traditional trans transcends transformed truth content unity universal virtue wants work’s