Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Conceptual foundations of early Critical Theory
- 2 Benjamin, Adorno, and the decline of the aura
- 3 The dialectic of enlightenment
- 4 The marriage of Marx and Freud
- 5 Dialectics and the revolutionary impulse
- 6 “The dead speaking of stones and stars”
- 7 Critique, state, and economy
- 8 The transcendental turn
- 9 The politics of Critical Theory
- 10 Critical Theory and the analysis of contemporary mass society
- 11 Critical Theory and poststructuralism
- 12 The very idea of a critical social science
- 13 A social pathology of reason
- Select bibliography
- Index
6 - “The dead speaking of stones and stars”
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Conceptual foundations of early Critical Theory
- 2 Benjamin, Adorno, and the decline of the aura
- 3 The dialectic of enlightenment
- 4 The marriage of Marx and Freud
- 5 Dialectics and the revolutionary impulse
- 6 “The dead speaking of stones and stars”
- 7 Critique, state, and economy
- 8 The transcendental turn
- 9 The politics of Critical Theory
- 10 Critical Theory and the analysis of contemporary mass society
- 11 Critical Theory and poststructuralism
- 12 The very idea of a critical social science
- 13 A social pathology of reason
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Unfinished, still a work-in-progress at the time of his death in 1969, Aesthetic Theory is arguably not only Theodor W. Adorno's masterwork, but perhaps the pivotal document of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics. The book was to be dedicated to Samuel Beckett; and, at one level, the work can be construed as the philosophical articulation of the meaning of artistic modernism, as modernism brought to the level of the concept. Yet even these simple statements cannot be forwarded innocently: that a work of aesthetics stands at or near the center of the thought of Adorno's Marxism has always been cause for consternation and embarrassment; that western Marxism (in the writings of Ernst Bloch, Györky Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse) has been from the outset bound to cultural critique and aesthetic theory can only deepen the puzzle. Some ground-clearing is thus necessary before a real start can be made.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory , pp. 139 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
- 11
- Cited by