An-aesthetic Theory: Adorno, Sexuality, and Memory

Literature and Sensation, 2009

Adorno’s 'Ästhetische Theorie' is a sustained defence of the cognitive and humanizing potential of great art, which is inseparable from the sensuous media against which the academic sciences have allied themselves. Nominalism—or the convergence of the rationalizing forces of science and capital—systematically attacks the sensuous character of experience. The senses are assaulted by the electronic worlds of the culture industry, on the one hand, and robbed of any cognitive capacity by the positivism of the sciences, on the other hand. Today Cultural Studies, like Socialist Realism before it, prescribes the art-alien lessons one is permitted to draw from aesthetic experience. Adorno’s concept of aesthetic negativity defends the ‘sensational’ moment of art from the depredations of popular culture and the idealizing rationality of the sciences. I briefly compare Adorno’s understanding of art and aesthetics as a refuge from ‘the withering of experience’ and Husserl’s conviction that philosophy could shelter the horizonal character of experience from the idealizing currents of scientific explanation. Philosophy may capture the phenomenal essence of experience in Husserl’s phenomenology, but only conceptualize what for Adorno is the not-wholly-conceptualizable character of sensuous perception.

Blackwell Companion to Adorno, ed. Espen Hammer, Peter Gordon, Max Pensky

Aesthetics, in many ways, is at the center of Adorno's philosophical enterprise. Politics, and social critique, are in turn very much at the fore in his aesthetics. His art criticism is thereby bound up with social and political critique. That much is of course a truism about Adorno. In this essay, I shall suggest that Adorno's social criticism (in one of its main manifestations) is related to his art criticism in another interesting way as well. Specifically, their form is similar. The object of critical analysis, whether an artwork or other social phenomenon, is objectionable not simply because it promotes or fosters problematic things downstream-authoritarianism, anti-semitism, and the like-as cause to effect. Rather, it is objectionable because it contains, often in a way difficult immediately to detect, such objectionable ideologies covertly embedded in it. Critique will thus be a hermeneutic endeavor seeking to expose these ideologies. While this critical-interpretive model is of course more familiar in the aesthetic sphere, Adorno extends it to unmasking a wider range of social phenomena.

This essay explores Theodor Adorno's view of pleasure in general and his account of the pleasures of modernist art in particular. At first sight, this hardly seems a promising topic for study, given Adorno's consistently stated antipathy to the false pleasures of the culture industry. While some consideration of Adorno's critique of pleasure is important to this essay, its central aim is to demonstrate that Adorno's aesthetics does not reject pleasure outright. In particular, it will be shown that Adorno's contention that '[d]er Bürger wünscht die Kunstüppig und das Leben asketisch; umgekehrt wäre es besser' does not involve an unqualified advocacy of modernist art as ascetic pure and simple, just as voluptuous life itself could hardly be initiated by an act of will. Rather, voluptuousness and asceticism are to be conceived dialectically, for Adorno, both in aesthetic theory and, indeed, in philosophy and social theory. Specific examples of Adorno's conception of the relation of pleasure to its apparent renunciation will be given from his reading of Charles Baudelaire and from his critique of developments in music allegedly in the wake of Schönberg's innovations.

José A. Zamora & Reyes Mate (Eds.): Philosophy’s Duty Towards Social Suffering. Münster, Wien, Zürich: Lit. Verlag, ISBN: 978-3-643-91486-6, 28-55., 2021

Autonomy is arguably the concept that best defines modern culture. The auto-nomous subject appears as the achievement and always unfinished project of modernity. What philosophical modernity calls subjectivity and the notions associated with it (autonomy, objective knowledge, self-consciousness, freedom, moral will, etc.) cannot be thought of without taking into account the social relations that produce it, however much one may differentiate between genesis and validity. Th. W. Adorno is one of the thinkers who has delved most deeply into the significance of the experience of socially produced suffering in order to clarify the relation between the individual and society and to demystify the illusions of modern constitutive subjectivity. His work relates the question of truth, the critique of social domination, the questioning of morality and the formulation of a new ethical imperative, even the very possibility of art, to the experience of suffering. This contribution develops an analysis of the relation-ship between suffering, subjectivity and society with the help of Th. W. Adorno’s contributions.

Theory & Event, 2008

Estudios de Filosofía, No 68, 2023

The article explores Adorno’s understanding of fetishism and melancholy as immanent to the artwork’s autonomous structure. In order to understand the relation between them, the Freudian understanding of fetishism and melancholy has to be considered along with the more explicit reference to the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Analysing the implications of Adorno’s claim that commodity fetishism is at the origin of artistic autonomy, the article shows how it should be understood not only as a materialist demystification but also as a reaffirmation of art’s apparent self-sufficiency and its capacity to resist the commodification of society. Nevertheless—the article claims—thas this is only possible if art’s fetishism is dialectically opposed to its melancholy, through which art establishes a relation to the heterogeneous element of the lost object produced by its autonomous form.

Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy, 2008

on the other hand, insists on the contingency and, at least in the abstract, the radical mutability of the given. According to Adorno, art lends a concrete objectivity to reality's mutability. His theory points to the possible radical implications of today's cultural forms.

Krisis, 2021

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar". "Love you will nd only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength". "There is no love that is not an echo". (§ 122; § 139). "Sexuality is the strongest force in human beings," claims Joe, the main character (portrayed by Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Lars von Trier's famous and much discussed 2013 lm Nymphomaniac. And "love is strange: how can something so wonderful bring such great pain?", asks Murphy of himself, the main character (portrayed by Karl Glusman) in Gaspar Noé's controversial lm Love from 2015, thus pointing out what we may call the antinomical character of the experience of romantic love, oscillating as it is between the greatest of all joys and sometimes the greatest of all su erings; (as Nick Cave sings: "Well, I've been bound and gagged and I've been terrorized / And I've been castrated and I've been lobotomized / But never has my tormentor come in such a cunning disguise / I let love in"). Although one could surely put this primacy into question and wonder whether love and sex are really the strongest forces in humanity, as claimed by the protagonist of Nymphomaniac, it is anyway impossible to negate their being at least some of the strongest forces in our lives. When one thinks of philosophies of love and sex, certain names may come easily to mind, beginning with Plato's conception of eros and arriving at Kierkegaard's intense meditation on the role of love in the aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions of human life; and, more recently, coming to Foucault's in uential work on the history of sexuality. Scholars of philosophy and the history of ideas such as Anders Nygren and Clive S. Lewis, in turn, have investigated the nature of love and paid attention to such di erentiations as those between eros and agape, or between a ection, friendship, eros and charity (I thank my colleague and friend Donato Ferdori for these references). Broadening the picture beyond the limits of the Western tradition, in his recent book Ars Erotica. Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love Richard Shusterman has investigated this topic by focusing not only on the Greco-Roman context and on Medieval/Renaissance Europe, but also on Chinese, Indian, Islamic and Japanese theories of erotic pleasure, politics, culture, religious beliefs, and habits. Thinkers belonging to other traditions in contemporary philosophy have also sometimes paid great attention to these questions, and in this context it can be worth noting the Frankfurt School's attempt to emphasize the relation of sexuality with domination in the unreconciled and administered world and, at the same time, its relation to potential emancipation and freedom in the perspective of a future reconciled condition. In re ecting on the Frankfurt School and the role played by the dimension of eros in the history of human civilization, most readers will probably spontaneously, and understandably, think of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. However, Horkheimer and Adorno also emphatically suggested in Dialectic of Enlightenment that "sexuality is the