Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion

by Lambert Zuidervaart

Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is a vast labyrinth that anyone interested in modern aesthetic theory must at some time enter. Because of his immense difficulty of the same order as Derrida - Adorno's reception has been slowed by the lack of a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the intentions of his aesthetics. This is the first book to put Aesthetic Theory into context and outline the main ideas and relevant debates, offering readers a valuable guide through this huge, difficult, but revelatory work. Its extended argument is that, despite Adorno's assumptions of autonomism, cognitivism, and aesthetic modernism, his idea of artistic truth content offers crucial insights for contemporary philosophical aesthetics.

The eleven chapters are divided into three Context, Content, and Critique. The first part offers a brief biography, describes Adorno's debates with Benjamin, Brecht, and Lukacs, and outlines his philosophical program. The second part is an interpretation of Adorno's aesthetics, examining how he situates art in society, production, politics, and history and uncovering the social, political, and historical dimensions of his idea of artistic truth. The third part evaluates Adorno's contribution by confronting it with the critiques of Peter Burger, Frederic Jameson, and Albrecht Wellmer.

Genres: Philosophy, Art

414 pages, Hardcover

First published March 2, 1991

About the author

Lambert Zuidervaart is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. He is the author of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (MIT Press), Artistic Truth, Social Philosophy after Adorno, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, and other books.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aesthetic Theory is a tough nut to crack. Adorno’s style of writing, the dialectic method, the depth of his philosophical and artistic understanding and the approach to art and philosophy create a complexity that can seem to border on the impenetrable. Zuiderwaart’s Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion does a yeoman’s task of guiding the reader through the conceptual and rational complexities of Aesthetic Theory that sustains the complexity while providing a deeper insight into Adorno’s approach to art.

The difficulty in reviewing this guidance is that there is no unproblematic lynchpin that will reveal Adorno’s approach. Zuidewaart uses the concept of truth in Art, and lays out the approaches Adorno takes to unpack the experience of truth in Art, the role of philosophy in uncovering this truth, and the resistance of art to incorporation into a philosophical body of truth. In the process, we get insight into key concepts for Adorno’s approach to art, including its dialectics of production, its social and historical situatedness, its critical and negative content and its relationship to philosophy. The book ends with assessing the limits of Adorno’s aesthetics over against later version steeped in critical theory and postmodernism, while showing the limits of these interpretive approaches relative to Adorno’s concept of truth.

This is an accessible work, sufficiently exegetical to be of value to someone first approaching Adorno, as well as for someone who has a greater depth of knowledge.