Adorno's Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe by Espen Hammer

By Espen Hammer

Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetics has ruled discussions approximately paintings and aesthetic modernism considering the fact that international struggle II, and maintains to notify modern theorizing. Situating Adorno's aesthetic concept within the context of post-Kantian eu philosophy, Espen Hammer explores Adorno's severe view of paintings as engaged in reconsidering basic beneficial properties of our relation to nature and truth.

His publication is established round what Adorno considered as the modern aesthetician's overarching job: to accomplish a imaginative and prescient of the destiny of artwork within the smooth international, whereas demonstrating its distinctive cognitive power. Hammer deals a full of life exam of Adorno's paintings in the course of the principal challenge of what complete human self-actualization will require, and likewise discusses the broader philosophical importance of aesthetic modernism.

This publication may be a invaluable source for students and scholars of social philosophy, artwork, and aesthetics.

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Additional resources for Adorno's Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe

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In the last half of the chapter, however, I seek to elucidate Adorno’s perhaps most important claim about advanced, modern works of art, namely that they emphatically express suffering. This, he argues, is what makes them both critical and true. While containing many thoughts on premodern art, Adorno’s aesthetics is primarily conceived in order to elucidate and grasp the movements and orientations that have been labeled modernist. In my concluding remarks I reflect on some of the implications of this restriction, in particular what it means to refer to the end of modernism.

M. ), The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 139–64. 34 Art and the problem of modernity develop? What is its origin? Is there a culmination? Adorno also asks how we came to view ourselves as creatures of one dominant form of reason (as opposed to other possible or less actualized forms) and what implications this may have for our practices, both individually and collectively – in short, how spirit has come to configure itself.

Thus, in the first half of the chapter I reconstruct in some detail the origin of Adorno’s sense that art has anything to do with such questions as those of the subject–object relationship and human freedom. As I suggest, that origin can be traced back to Kant’s third Critique and its impact on thinkers such as Schelling and Hegel. I will in particular focus on Hegel’s notions of spirit and reconciliation (his key building blocks for a theory of freedom), and my guiding claim – rare in Adorno studies – is that Adorno’s involvement of aesthetics in the greater endeavor of diagnosing the state of reason should be read in the light of these notions.

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