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Adorno’s Aesthetics
as a Literary Theory
of Art
m a r io fa r i n a
Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art
Mario Farina
Adorno’s Aesthetics
as a Literary Theory
of Art
Mario Farina
Department of Letters and Philosophy
University of Florence
Firenze, Italy
ISBN 978-3-030-45280-3 ISBN 978-3-030-45281-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0
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Preface
Generally deemed inadequate to account for the postmodern issues of

the second half of the twentieth century, Adorno’s philosophical contri-
butions, as Fredric Jameson acknowledged thirty years ago, have been
met by two main groups of objections (Jameson 1996, p. 229). As to the
first, with Jürgen Habermas at the head, Adorno’s philosophy is seen as
being burdened by the Marxian orthodox idea of class struggle, and
thereby as unable to understand contemporary society.1 The second
strand of criticism, instead, looks more closely at Adorno’s aesthetics as at
a typically modernist, and therefore non-postmodernist, explanation of
art. This second set of objections can be traced back to Jean-Françoise
Lyotard, and how he sees Adorno’s emancipatory idea of history as by-
product of the modern hope in the integrity of subjectivity (Lyotard
1974, pp. 127–137). Along the same line can also be placed Peter Bürger’s
approach and his idea of postmodernism as a peculiar and negative defi-
nition of what is simply a phase of modernity itself. In this regard, Bürger
sees in Adorno’s aesthetics an obstinate reluctance in dealing with the fact
that the contemporary condition of art includes both progression and
1
As Habermas writes, Adorno and Horkheimer “held fast to the basic assumptions of the theory of
value as the core of their tacit orthodoxy, and in this way they blinded themselves to the realities of
a developed capitalism based on the pacification of class conflict through welfare-state measures”
(Habermas 1987, p. 334).
v
vi Preface
regression as part of the same progressive and developmental movement

(Bürger 1983, pp. 177–197). These paradigmatic and interconnected
positions—Adorno as a too obstinate Marxist or as too modernist to have
a clear understanding of late- or postmodernity—have defined the theo-
retical ground for large part of the criticism targeting Adorno’s under-
standing of philosophy of art, such as the wide skepticism with which
even non-specialists judge his interpretation of Jazz music, as exemplified
by Eric J. Hobsbawm’s words: “Adorno wrote some of the most stupid
pages ever written about jazz” (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300).
Connected to the question of modernism is also the second mortal sin
of Adorno’s aesthetics, namely its ban on aesthetic pleasure and enjoy-
ment. As Espen Hammer shows, in fact, while vindicating the role of
classical beauty, a new conservative cultural trend in authors such as
Roger Scruton and Alexander Nehamas vehemently attacks one of the
pillars of Adorno’s comprehension of art and also what supposedly quali-
fies it as a modernist aesthetic theory (Hammer 2015, pp. 247–249).
Also because of its “modernist” connotation, the postmodern strand of
Adorno’s detractors understands his rejection of aesthetic pleasure as the
result of his miscomprehension and culturally elitist disgust for popular
mass culture,2 as exemplified by the “perverse rant against popular music”
that Jerrold Levinson (2015, p. 44) finds in his musicology.
There is no doubt, in fact, that Adorno’s philosophy of art is permeated
by tensions originating in how the subject relates to the enjoyment of the
artistic object. “Aesthetic enjoyment”—writes Adorno in a personal note of
1955—“in the superficial sense of the enjoyment of the artistic object as if
it were a piece of sensuous world, in general does not exist and any aesthet-
ics that starts with that is dull. I have never enjoyed an artwork” (TWAA:
20688). This tension, as the scholarly literature has pointed out, also defines
the historical turning point in the development of art, that Adorno calls
“de-artification” of art, and that Richard Wolin describes as the “final dis-
solution of the essential aesthetic qualities which have until this century
been inseparable from the concepts of art itself” (Wolin 2004, p. 11).
2
As Erica Weitzman (2008, p. 185) suggests, “Adorno has been vigorously and exhaustively criti-
cized, by people from every point on the political spectrum, for being a pseudo-revolutionary kill
joy, a narrow-minded elitist, a closet conservative, the fetishizer of his own (historically particular)
miserabilism!”.
Preface vii
According to this framework then, the difficulties Adorno objectively

faces in the understanding of the most advanced tendencies of art in his
time—Adorno is indeed infamous for rarely mentioning the most rele-
vant post-avant-gardist phenomena—can be explained in terms of some
sort of aesthetic conservatism and elitism that prevents his otherwise bril-
liant analysis of artistic products from applying to the art of the second
half of the twentieth century. At variance with mainstream interpreta-
tions, what I intend to argue in this book is not only that the develop-
ment of Adorno’s philosophy of art is inspired by a more complex
constellation of elements than the sum of modernism and Marxist dog-
mas, but also that Adorno’s contributions suit particularly well the most
advanced products of postmodernism. Adorno’s work in aesthetics can be
ultimately seen as an attempt to react to the essential tensions exposed by
contemporary art and which originate from a theoretical principle that I
identify as “the dissolution of the aesthetic element”. In accordance with
large part of the aesthetic debate of the second half of the past century,
Adorno acknowledges an epochal turn in the qualification of art. This
turn consists in the cancellation of the difference between art and every-
day objects, or rather in the trend fostering the annulment of any aesthetic
distinction among them. What should be remarked in this regard is the
contrast between Adorno’s fear for the transformation of art into a com-
mon good and, for example, the satisfaction with which Arthur Danto
welcomes this tendency. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes that “cut loose
from its immanent claim to objectivity, art would be nothing but a more
or less organized system of stimuli-conditioning reflexes […]. The result
would be the negation of the difference between artworks and merely
sensual qualities; it would be an empirical entity, nothing more than—in
American argot—a battery of tests, and the adequate means for giving an
account of art would be program analysis or surveys of average group
reactions to artworks or genres” (ÄT: 394 [264]). In passages like this,
Adorno focuses on the same set of problems standing behind the institu-
tional theory of art and Danto’s idea of the end of art, eventually leading
to the theory of the aesthetic indiscernibility of art and non-art. Although
dealing with the same set of historical and philosophical questions,
remarkable differences can be nevertheless detected in their respective
reactions.
viii Preface
What I suggest in this book is in particular to read Adorno’s reaction

to what he perceives as the dissolution of the aesthetic element of art as
laying the ground for the elaboration of a literary theory of art. I will
argue, in fact, that the process of dissolution of the aesthetic is closely
linked to what one can understand as the thing-like nature of the work of
art. In Adorno’s definition of the aesthetic, in fact, the work—as thing, as
objectual element—directly participates to the economic process in
which things become the mediator of the social relationship between
people, in other words it enters the logic of the capital.3 On the contrary,
literature—as an artistic form—is not constituted by things, but by
meaning-relationships that allude to things and to the way in which they
relate to one another. My proposal—it should be made preliminarily
clear—does not entail in any way the convergence of all the arts into lit-
erature, nor the effective dissolution of visual art in general. On the con-
trary, what I intend to show is the fact that in the effective historical
development of art, literature can be seen as the one artistic form which
is able to act as aesthetic guarantee of the existence of something like art
in general. And this is so precisely because its aesthetic material, namely
language, cannot be completely absorbed in the economic process of pro-
duction. In this regard, supportive elements to the theoretical core of my
position can be found, for example, in Eva Geulen’s acknowledgment of
Adorno’s philosophy of art as a philosophy of language. She indeed
observes that “the tension between universality and particularity is great-
est in language, precisely because of the resistance mounted by its discur-
sivity or semanticity. Artworks are said to be like language when they
develop and sustain the tension that characterizes the literary artefact: to
say the particular in a form that is generic” (Geulen 2006a, p. 58; see also
Geulen 2006b, p. 92).
My overall goal is therefore to show that Adorno’s aesthetic, far from
being an old iron, a historical find to be placed in the museum of theo-
ries, actually provides a set of philosophical tools that can be fruitfully
applied within the context of the contemporary theory of art, as
3
According to Marx’s famous quotation, in fact, “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between
persons which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p. 932).
Preface ix
exemplified also by other recent contributions to the critical debate.4

These tools are notably those of the aesthetics as a philosophy of litera-
ture. The last chapter of this book, in fact, is an attempt to pursue an
interpretation of American postmodern novels within the conceptual
framework of Adorno’s aesthetics as a philosophy of literature. Although
I have no intention of jumping into the debate about postmodernism in
general, about its being a part of modernity or an autonomous historical
category, I believe that Adorno’s aesthetic elements are particularly suited
to clarify the otherwise evasive literary nature of American postmodern
novels. While pursuing this aim, I take American postmodern novels as
an extant category in the contemporary literary debate and I refrain pro-
grammatically from assessing its consistency. My merely instrumental use
of the category is meant to allow me to investigate whether the literary
products it designates have something in common and possibly what it is.
I have divided the book into five chapters. In the first, I will present the
very first determination of the aesthetic in Adorno’s thought and thus
introduce what I read as his construction of the aesthetics. In the second,
I will focus on Adorno’s philosophy of music, and I will detect in it the
principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic. In the third chapter, I will
present the process of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, while
turning to Adorno’s late aesthetic production, in particular to his Aesthetic
Theory and the collection, Notes to Literature. In the fourth, I will point to
what I see as the basic theoretical lines of Adorno’s philosophy of litera-
ture, namely a complete set of theoretical tools that can be applied to the
most advanced results of literary production. Finally, in the fifth and last
chapter, I will investigate and account for the formal issues of American
postmodern novels in what I see as its morphological development from
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, through Wallace’s Infinite Jest, to DeLillo’s
Underworld.
Firenze, Italy Mario Farina
4
I refer to the book of Josh Robinson (2018), published under the title of Adorno’s Poetics of Form,
where he shows the connection of Adorno’s literary aesthetic with the contemporary debate about
historicism and formalism, and to which I will refer again in the following.
x Preface
References
Bürger, Peter. 1983. Das Altern der Moderne. In Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed.
Ludwig von Friedeburg, and Jürgen Habermas, 177–197. Frankfurt a.
M.: Suhrkamp.
Geulen, Eva. 2006a. Adorno and the Poetics of Genre. In Adorno and Literature,
ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 53–66. London/New York:
Continuum.
Geulen, Eva. 2006b. The End of Art. Readings in a Rumor after Hegel. Trans.
J. McFarland. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2. Lifeworld
and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Trans. Thomas McCarthy.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Hammer, Espen. 2015. Happiness and Pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetics. In The
Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 90 (4): 247–259.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1993. The Jazz Scene. New York: Pantheon Book.
Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Late Marxism. Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectics.
London: Verso.
Levinson, Jerrold. 2015. Musical Concerns. Essay in Philosophy of Music. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-Françoise. 1974. Adorno as the Devil. In Télos, 19: 127–137.
Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans.
B. Fowkes. London/New York: Penguin.
Robinson, Josh. 2018. Adorno’s Poetics of Form. Albany: SUNY.
Weitzman, Erica. 2008. No “Fun”: Aporias of Pleasure in Adorno’s “Aesthetic
Theory”. In The German Quarterly, 81 (2): 185–202.
Wolin, Richard. 2004. The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Aesthetische
Theorie. In Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Gerard Delanty, vol. II: 5–30. London/
Thousand Oak/New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
Acknowledgments
For the institutional and material support during the conception and
writing of this book, I am grateful to the Department of Letters and
Philosophy (Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia – DILEF) of the
University of Florence; the Walter Benjamin Archive, Akademie der
Künste Berlin; the School of Philosophy, University College, Dublin.
This book has been developed within the context of the research proj-
ect “Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and the Idea of Natural History”
(2017–2019), financially supported by the Department of Letters and
Philosophy of the University of Florence, and under the scientific super-
vision of Professor Gianluca Garelli, to whom I offer my most sincere
thanks for the precious advice and constant encouragement. I also
extend my thanks to Professor Brian O’Connor for having welcomed
me at his at the University College, Dublin during my research
period there.
My research interest for Adorno has begun over fifteen years ago, dur-
ing my B.A. dissertation at the University of Pavia (defended in 2005),
and it would be impossible to acknowledge all the scholars, colleagues,
and classmates who influenced my studies, the name of many of whom
can be found in the index of this book. Nevertheless, I cannot help but
remember the lively discussions with Professor Markus Ophälders, the
formative experience during my PhD under the supervision of Professor
xi
xii Acknowledgments
Maurizio Pagano, and the always vivid human and intellectual example
of Professor Flavio Cassinari.
I sincerely thank Palgrave Macmillan for deciding to host this book in
its collection. Among the people with whom I had the pleasure to work,
I am especially thankful to April James, who first has shown interest in
my research, and Lauriane Piette, who has brilliantly and carefully fol-
lowed the development of this text.
A special thanks goes to Dr. Tessa Marzotto, who with enviable
patience has turned into real English the mumbling through which I
tend to offend this beautiful language.
Finally, my most sincere acknowledgment is devoted to Serena Feloj:
both as Serena, with whom I decide to spend my life every day, and as
Professor Feloj, the most brilliant discussant and the most stimulating
mind one could hope for.
Contents
1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the

Aesthetic” 1
1.1 Kierkegaard (i): The Autonomy of Art and the
Historicity of “the Aesthetic” 3
1.2 Kierkegaard (ii): The Myth and the History 15
1.3 The Anti-Romantic Choice and Its Consequences: Art
and Society 24
1.4 The Model of the Culture Industry 38
References 47
2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the

Aesthetic 53
2.1 A Philosophy of Art as Philosophy of New Music 54
2.2 The Failure of the Artwork 64
2.3 The Dissolution of the Aesthetic 79
References 88
3 Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic 93

3.1 Art, Its Right to Exist, and Aesthetic Conservatism 96
3.2 The Deaestheticization of Artistic Material 106
xiii
xiv Contents
3.3 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (i): Three

Examples115
3.4 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (ii): The
Form of Literature 124
3.5 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (iii): The
Reflection of the ‘I’ and the Literary Material 128
References137
4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary

Interpretation143
4.1 What Literature Is About: Reality, Truth, and Ontology 146
4.2 The Interpretation of Literature and Its Unity 156
4.3 The Form 161
4.4 The Content and the Author 169
4.5 Interpreting Literature: The Case of Franz Kafka 175
References183
5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel189

5.1 A Theory of the Novel as Literary Genre 192
5.2 The American Postmodern Novel as Literary Form 199
5.3 Conclusion: The Novel as Postmodernist Genre 223
References227
Index231
Abbreviations
Adorno’s Works
In the following list the abbreviation “GS” refers to the edition of Adorno’s
writings: Gesammelte Schriften, 20 Vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997.
A Amorbach. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und

Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 302–309.
AaS Der Artist als Statthalter. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 114–126.
AdP Die Aktualität der Philosophie. In Philosophische Frühschriften, GS, 1,
pp. 325–344.
ÄT Ästhetische Theorie, GS, 7.
AzK Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft.
In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 284–287.
B Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, ed. R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1993.
B-L Balzac-Lektüre. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 139–157.
BW1 Th.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin. Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri
Lonitz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1994.
BW2 Th.W. Adorno, A. Berg. Briefwechsel 1925–1933, ed. Henri Lonitz.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997.
BW3 Th.W. Adorno, T. Mann. Briefwechsel 1943–1955, ed. Christoph
Gödde, and T. Sprecher. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002.
xv
xvi Abbreviations
BW4 Th.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927–1969, 4 Vols., ed.

Christoph Gödde, and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003.
CWB Charakteristik Walter Benjamins. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 238–253.
DdA Dialektik der Aufklärung, GS, 3.
DSH Drei Studien zu Hegel, GS, 5.
E Engagement. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 409–430.
EaF Der Essey als Form. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 9–33.
EMS Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Zwölf theoretische Vorlesungen, GS, 14.
EV Erpreßte Versöhnung. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 251–280.
EzP Einleitung zum »Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie«.
In Soziologische Schriften I, GS, 8, pp. 280–353.
FdK Die Funktion des Kontrapunkts in der neuen Musik. In Klangfiguren.
In Musikalische Schriften I, GS, 16, pp. 145–169.
Fh Funktionalismus heute. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 375–395.
IdN Die Idee der Naturgeschichte. In Philosophische Frühschriften, GS, 1,
pp. 345–365.
IKh Ist die Kunst heiter?. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 599–606.
JdE Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie, GS, 6.
JdP Im Jeu de Paume gekritzelt. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In
K Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, GS, 2.
KPK Kleine Proust-Kommentare. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11,
pp. 203–215.
KuG Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 11–30.
KuK Die Kunst und die Künste. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica.
In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 432–453.
MM Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, GS, 4.
ND Negative Dialektik, GS, 6.
OL Ohne Leitbild. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 291–309.
P Parataxis. Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins. In Noten zur Literatur, GS,
11, pp. 447–491.
Abbreviations xvii
Pei Prefazione all’edizione italiana [Preface to the Italian Edition].

In Th.W. Adorno. Kierkegaard. La costruzione dell’estetico. Trans.
A. Burger Cori, pp. 9–13. Milano: Longanesi, 1962.
PnM Philosophie der neuen Musik, GS, 12.
RaS Rückblickend auf den Surrealismus. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11,
pp. 101–105.
RüK Résumé über Kulturindustrie. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In
RüL Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11,
pp. 49–68.
RüR Rede über den‚ Raritätenladen‘von Charles Dickens. In Noten zur
Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 515–522.
SdE Standort des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman. In Noten zur
Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 41–48.
TWAA Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno Archiv [with the abbreviation TS., I
refer to the pages of the typescripts preserved in Theodor Wiesengrund
Adorno Archive, Frankfurt a. M., and available in reproduction in
Walter Benjamin Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin].
ÜeN Über epische Naivität, in Noten zur Literatur, I, GS, 11, pp. 34–40.
ÜFM Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des
Hörens. In Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt, GS, 14,
pp. 14–50.
VA Valérys Abweichungen. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 158–202.
VH Verfremdetes Hauptwerk. Zur Missa Solemnis. In Moments musicaux.
In Musikalische Schriften IV, GS, 17, pp. 145–161.
VPM Valéry, Proust, Museum. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In
VüW Versuch über Wagner. In Die musikalischen Monographien, GS, 13.
VzU Vorschlag zur Ungüte. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In
WnK Warum ist die neue Kunst so schwer verständlich?. In Musikalische
Schriften V, GS, 18, pp. 824–831.
ZgL Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik. In Musikalische Schriften V,
GS, 18, pp. 729–777.
ZM Zeitlose Mode. Zum Jazz. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In
xviii Abbreviations
Translations
AaA Art and the Arts. In Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical
Reader. Trans R. Livingstone, pp. 368–387. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
AT Aesthetic Theory. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. London-New York:
Continuum, 1997.
B Beethoven. The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts. Trans.
E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
CI The Culture Industry. Selected Essays in Mass Culture, ed. Jay Bernstein.
London-New York: Routledge, 1991.
Cor1 W. Benjamin. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. 1910–1940.
Trans. M.R. Jacobson, and E.M. Jacobson. Chicago-London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Cor2 Th.W. Adorno, A. Berg. Correspondence 1925–1935. Trans.
W. Hoban. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005.
Cor3 Th.W. Adorno, T. Mann. Correspondence 1943–1955. Trans.
N. Walker. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006.
DoE Dialectics of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans.
E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
EoM Essays on Music. Trans. S.H. Gillespie. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London:
University of California Press, 2002.
FT Functionalism Today. In Rethinking Architecture. A Reader in Cultural
Theory, ed. Neil Leach, pp. 5–18. London-New York. Routledge, 1997.
HTS Hegel. Three Studies. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. Cambridge (MA)-
London: MIT Press.
INH The Idea of Natural History. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. In Praxis
International 4, N. 2: 111–124.
IPD Introduction. In Th.W. Adorno et al., The Positivism Dispute in
German Sociology. Trans. G. Adey, and D. Frisby, pp. 1–67. London:
Heinemann, 1976.
JoA Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. K. Tarnowski, and F. Will. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Ki Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
MM Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E. Jephcott.
London-New York: Verso, 2005.
Abbreviations xix
ND Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London-New York:

Routledge, 2004.
NtL1 Notes to Literature. Vol 1. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. New York-
Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991.
NtL2 Notes to Literature. Vol 2. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. New York-
Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991.
PNM Philosophy of New Music. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Pr Prisms. Trans. S. Weber, and S.W. Nicholsen. Cambridge (MA):
MIT Press.
PRP Present Relevance of Philosophy. Trans. D. Robertson. August 31, 2018
[https://shirtysleeves.blogspot.com/2018/08/a-translation-of-die-
aktualitat-der.html]. Retrieved November 01, 2019.
SF Sound Figures. Trans. R. Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999.
SoW In Search of Wagner. Trans. R. Livingstone. London-New York:
Verso, 2005.
1
Construction of “Aesthetics”
as Construction of “the Aesthetic”
In one of the most influential books for Adorno’s philosophical educa-

tion, the Hungarian intellectual György Lukács defines what he under-
stands as the “autonomy of the artwork” in terms of the result of a
historical, and broadly speaking metaphysical, external pressure. “Art”
writes Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1920) “has thus become inde-
pendent [selbständig]: it is no longer a copy, for all the models have gone;
it is a created totality, for the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres
has been destroyed forever” (Lukács 1971a, p. 37). It would be no exag-
geration if one were to state that this very idea of the autonomy (in
German, Selbständigkeit or Autonomie) of the artwork is one of the most
seminal and most persisting ideas in the whole of Adorno’s aesthetic pro-
duction. Already in a short piece written in the 1930s Adorno asks him-
self Why is the New Art so Hard to Understand?, and his answer calls into
question precisely this idea of art’s autonomy, taken as the outcome of the
historical development of capitalistic society. Adorno understands in fact
“the reification of art as the result of a socio-economic development that
transforms all goods into consumer goods”, and, accordingly, he states
that “the autonomy of art, its quality of being a law onto itself, the impos-
sibility of arranging it at will according to the dictates of use, is […] the
© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Farina, Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_1
2 M. Farina
expression of that reification” (WnK: 825–826, EoM: 128). To be fair,

the actual theoretical guiding light in Adorno’s argument, however, is
here not the early, Hegelian Lukács of The Theory of the Novel, but the
late, already Marxist author of History and Class Consciousness (1923). As
the scholarly literature has rightly noticed,1 Lukács’ pathbreaking work of
1923 has been decisive for Adorno. He even confided to Alban Berg that
Lukács “has had a more profound intellectual influence on me more than
almost anyone else” (BW2: 17, Cor2: 9). Proving its long-lasting effect,
the concept of autonomy can be found also in Adorno’s latest and unfin-
ished work, that is the Aesthetic Theory, for example where he writes that
“art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly
reproduced on the level of its autonomy” (ÄT: 16, AT: 5).2
The aim of the first chapter of this volume is precisely to understand in
which terms this very peculiar and paradoxical idea of the autonomy of
art—an autonomy that comes about as the result of an external and social
pressure—leaves a permanent mark on Adorno’s inquiries and the entire
process required by the construction of his “aesthetics” (as philosophical
discipline) by means of the construction of “the aesthetic” (as the qualify-
ing element of that branch of knowledge). From a general point of view,
the notion of autonomy determines the most basic and recurrent dynam-
ics in Adorno’s philosophy of art, that is the tension between a normative
dimension of the artwork and its incessant and necessary leaning toward
the production of newness. The normative nature derives, in fact, from
the bond between the artwork and the a-temporal notion of aesthetic
model, whereas the orientation toward what is new builds the inalienable
character that sets the artwork apart from the simple repetition of already
existing things. In order to be defined as “art”, the product has to prove
its own originality in relation to the context.3 The connection between
1
The relevance of Lukács for the young Adorno is out of discussion and widely accepted. See Susan
Buck-Morss (1977, pp. 25–28), Hall (2006, pp. 155–157), and especially Adorno’s monumental
biography written by Stefan Müller-Doohm, where the author specifies the relevance of History and
Class Consciousness for the young Adorno (Müller-Doohm 2005, pp. 36, 94).
2
While recognizing the role of art as a concretization of aesthetic concepts, Shea Coulson (2007,
pp. 109–121) risks to eliminate the double character of aesthetic products by intending art simply
as a mirror.
3
The connection between autonomy and normativity is what Christoph Menke refers to as the
antinomy of autonomy and sovereignty in modern aesthetics, namely as the idea that aesthetics
1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the Aesthetic” 3
art’s autonomy and the double character of the artistic product is finally
what makes Adorno’s aesthetics an aesthetics of “the success of the art-
work” (das Gelingen des Kunstwerks). According to Adorno, art critique’s
task can be accomplished by assessing the work of art in terms of its suc-
cess (or failure) in showing its autonomy and its capability to express
social reality while simultaneously judging it. In this sense, a work of art
“succeeds” when it expresses the unreconciled nature of late capitalistic
society, by showing at the same time a way to artistically, that is gently
and not violently, recompose social fractures.
This chapter is devoted to the reconstruction of the origins of these
aesthetic concepts in Adorno and to the screening of their outcomes in
the first period of his production, that is, from the first writings (begin-
ning of the 1930s) to the Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944). In these
pages, I will address, therefore, the most relevant passages of Adorno’s
construction of the aesthetic.
1.1 ierkegaard (i): The Autonomy of Art

K
and the Historicity of “the Aesthetic”
As is well known, the monographic study published under the title
Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic is the reworking of Adorno’s
Habilitationsschrift, that is the academic text required to obtain the title
of freier Dozent, namely the go-ahead for teaching in a German univer-
sity. Actually, with the Kierkegaard Adorno was at his second attempt to
obtain the title, after his former tutor Hans Cornelius suggested he with-
drew the first proposal.4 To my purposes, it is not necessary to provide a
detailed account of Adorno’s arguments about Kierkegaard’s theoretical
legacy, as developed in the 1933 revision of his Habilitationsschrift.
seems to allude both to the autonomy of its products and to the fact that they exceed the bonds of
plural reason by creating a different normativity. Menke sees Adorno as the author who has most
clearly expressed this antinomy (see Menke 1999, vii–xiii).
4
Adorno tried to obtain the habilitation in 1927 with a study on The Concept of Unconscious in
Transcendental Theory of Mind; but he succeeded only three years later with the Kierkegaard. The
entire story of the habilitation is accurately retraced by Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 98–109,
119–125).
4 M. Farina
However, it is worth mentioning that the book’s aim is twofold: to over-

turn the canonic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s accounts about aesthet-
ics; and to contribute, although heterodoxically, to the Kierkegaard
renaissance, at the time very much in vogue in German universities.
As to the first, Kierkegaard is renowned for having doomed the aes-
thetic stage of life to a significant downplaying, by arguing that it funda-
mentally fails to attain its true goals, that is to say, sensuous satisfaction
(Hampson 2013, pp. 135–138). At variance with this well-established
interpretation of the value of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard, Adorno tries to
show in which sense it is precisely this kind of unattainable aesthetic sat-
isfaction what can best illustrate Kierkegaard’s notion of existence as “the
historical origin of objectless inwardness” (K: 55, Ki: 37). Moreover,
hinging upon his intuition, Adorno comprehensively challenges the exis-
tentialist approach, that is to say, the mainstream of the Heideggerian
ontological position, very popular at the time in the German academy.
With the release of Time and Being (1927), in fact, Heidegger highlighted
the existential and finite dimension of Kierkegaard’s subjectivity, in par-
ticular its role in the context of “being-toward-death”, as Adam Buben
(2016, pp. 109–120) has recently emphasized. Adorno, to the opposite,
sheds light on the equally present theological element, that is, on the idea
of “leap” or salto mortale into faith (Kierkegaard 2009, pp. 85–90),
namely what allows the ultimate resolution of the finite abyss of the
“objectless inwardness”. By acknowledging this theological dimension,
Adorno shows that in Kierkegaard, beyond his mystical turn, the only
way to justify the religious leap into faith is not through the firm choice
of ethical life, but in the light of the infinite and never reachable satisfac-
tion of the aesthetic one.5
At variance with ontologist trends, the overall sense of the Kierkegaard-
book for Adorno is, in a nutshell, that of a christening of his inquiries in
aesthetics, here achieved by presenting “the aesthetic” element as the
form of knowledge in which it is possible to express the social condition
of the subject. In fact, the lack of integrity, the gap between subject and
5
For that reason, according to the interpretation of Robert Hullot-Kentor, Adorno’s book on
Kierkegaard “intends to recuperate the sphere of the aesthetic from the dialectic experience”
(Hullot-Kentor 2006, p. 79).
objectivity, the late capitalistic oppression of the individual cannot be

fully grasped, according to him, by means of the ontological affirmative
statements about anguish and death, but should rather be investigated by
the indefinite, indirect, and unsatisfied gaze of the aesthetics. In a dialec-
tical argument worthy of Hegel, the way in which Kierkegaard highlights
the deficiencies of the aesthetic life is taken precisely as what allows to
achieve a clear and effective construction of the aesthetic element. Only
in the leap into transcendence Kierkegaard sees the chance to justify the
perfect self-knowledge of subjectivity, a chance that is denied to aesthet-
ics, because of its continuous deferment of satisfaction; exactly in this
intuition, Adorno recognizes the relevance of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic con-
struction, namely the fact that its incomplete nature allows to express
reality in the terms of its fragmented essence: “It is rather a totality of
ruins, and in the depths of the chasms between them a dialectic surges
that does not flow uninterruptedly from one to the other” (K: 130, Ki:
90). What Adorno criticizes in Kierkegaard is however the idea of the
leap into faith, conceived as the attempt to give rise to an idealistic and
“positive” (ideologically comforting) ontology that denies the fragmented
(and realistic) representation of the world by means of the aesthetic.
Kierkegaard, Adorno writes, “repudiates the aesthetic semblance without
pursuing the course of the dialectics to its end, a course which the tran-
scendence of semblance makes evident in its semblance itself ” (K: 194,
Ki: 137). The “dialectic course” of the aesthetic, however, is visible,
Adorno would claim, as soon as one radicalizes the theological element of
Kierkegaard’s thought and leaves behind the purely ontological and exis-
tential level.
What Adorno achieves in the study on Kierkegaard is something close
to the finetuning of his aesthetics’ basic conceptual tools, as already
deployed in his musicological short essays for the Musikblätter des
Anbruchs and the Frankfurter Zeitung, well before their theoretical foun-
dation had been made explicit. The concept of autonomy of art, the dou-
ble character of the artwork, and the relation between art and society, all
the concepts he has drawn from his early readings and family
6 M. Farina
environment6 form the theoretical structure of Adorno’s interpretative

method, and the study on Kierkegaard gives him the chance to make
them explicit through the strenuous conceptual construction of a book,
accustomed as he was to writing short essays. As Adorno clearly states, he
takes the field of aesthetics as a form of knowledge that spurns the abstract
laws of conceptuality without being at the same time arbitrary. In the first
section of the Kierkegaard he considers the relation between philoso-
phy—that is, the conceptual discipline par excellence—and art, by stat-
ing that “the more exclusively philosophical form is crystallized as such,
the more firmly it excludes all metaphors that externally approximates it
into art, so much the better is art able to survive as art by strength of its
own law of form” (K: 23–24, Ki: 14). With these words, and following
Hegel’s example, Adorno intends to criticize any attempt to conceive the
artwork, or the aesthetic in general, as the sensible upholstery of a con-
ceptual thought.7 The artwork, on the contrary, is a product in which the
conceptual—that is universal—dimension and the element of particular-
ity rise together. The aesthetic element is therefore the kind of feature of
human knowledge which is able to identify a single, particular, element
whose validity is that of being a model, without qualifying, though, as a
criterion, a canon, or an abstract concept. As I will show in the next
pages, this determination of the aesthetic corresponds, to an extent, to a
reinterpretation of the most basic conceptual elements developed by
Kant in his third critical work.
With the last of his major works, namely the Critique of the Power of
Judgement (1790), Kant lays the groundwork to an assessment of aesthet-
ics as an autonomous discipline, the groundbraking contribution in this
respect being Kant’s distinction between determining and reflecting judg-
ment. It would be misleading to identify the third Critique as the answer
to one single problem, or to one single author. The overall efforts
6
Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana, the mother of Theodor Wiesengrund, was a pretty well-known
opera singer, and she passed on to her son a talent and passion for music. Besides family heritage,
great relevance in Adorno’s aesthetic formation has been played by the friendship with Siegfried
Kracauer and his art sociology, as Stefan Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 44–45) underlines. Moreover,
one should not forget the effect of Bloch’s expressionistic philosophy as outlined in The Spirit of
the Utopia.
7
Hegel sharply criticizes the idea that art can be reduced to a simple sensible make-up of abstract
concept. For Hegel’s critique of fabula docet in art, see: Hegel (1975, p. 50).
showcased in the text can be seen, in fact, as the attempt to provide an

answer to the problem of Kant’s age in general, that is to say, the problem
of the normativity of what is non-normative at all. When the German
philosopher, Odo Marquard, identifies the Enlightenment as the attempt
to come to terms with the loss of a religious, and therefore normative,
explanation of the world by means of what he sees as a set of compensa-
tion theories (Kompensationstheorien),8 he has in mind, most likely, the
main questions Kant deals with in his third Critique.
The reflecting judgment is Kant’s special tool, devised to account for
the peculiar normativity of the aesthetic experience. Not the simple aver-
age of every single personal taste, as in the empiricist explanation; not the
normative application of an inherited canon, as in the classicist one, the
aesthetic taste is rather the result of a particular human power, that is, the
power of the reflecting judgment (see Guyer 1997, p. 59). To the pur-
poses of this inquiry, however, the key point lies here in the particular
kind of normativity of the reflecting judgment.9 The essential difference
between determining (or intellectual) judgments and reflecting ones con-
sists, in fact, in how they respectively relate the universal dimension of
the norm to the specific individuality of the single particular. As Kant
puts it, the distinction between the two kinds of judgment is defined
precisely on the basis of the relation to the universal or to the particular:
If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of
judgment, which subsumes the particular under it (even when, as a tran-
scendental power of judgment, it provides the conditions a priori in accor-
dance with which alone anything can be subsumed under that universal),
is determining. If, however, only the particular is given, for which the
8
See for example what Marquard says in his essay “Indicted and Unburdened Man in Eighteenth-
Century Philosophy”: “Perhaps it is permissible […] to move a late phenomenological concept
forward into the 18th century and say that we are dealing here with philosophies that provide new
definitions of man which attempt to compensate for a human loss of “life-world”, and a loss that is
specific to the middle of the century” (Marquard 1989, p. 41).
9
The question of the normativity of Kant’s reflecting judgment is one of the most difficult problems
concerning Kantian thought in general. Hannah Ginsborg has recently asserted the presence of a
special kind of normative power in reflective judgment: “What I take Kant to be pointing to, in his
connection between aesthetic judgement and the capacity for empirical conceptualization, is a kind
of normativity involved in perceptual experience which is independent of the normativity typically
associated with cognitive judgement” (Ginsborg 2015, p. 173).
8 M. Farina
universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting.

(Kant 2000, pp. 66–67)
According to the general theory I have here tried to merely sketch out,
the aesthetic judgment is never based on an abstract concept of beauty
owned by the judging subject, but rather on a subjective feeling that
reveals the presence of beauty itself. As it clearly demolishes any direct
normative perspective, the fortune of such theory determines a definitive
break in aesthetics with any explicitly classicist theory of art.
The reader might already have started to see the close connection
between the above outlined mechanism behind the reflecting judgment
and what in the opening lines of this chapter I have introduced as the
double character of the artwork in Adorno, that is to say, its being a par-
ticular, individual, product whose existence alludes to an overall, and
therefore general, meaning. In this respect, Adorno defines the work of
art as “the minute precision and concreteness of a model” (K: 197, Ki:
138), and the model he has in mind is very close to the Kantian univer-
sality of the ideal of beauty. More precisely, the aesthetic model is the
universal field to which every single artwork belongs, although, unlike
intellectual concepts, a particular work could never be abstractly drawn
from it. Given the concepts of “red” and “sphere”, we can infer what a
“red sphere” is; on the contrary, the model of the aesthetic can only be
recognized every time we consider an artwork, and it can never be
acquired once and for all. Because of that, the work of art is always
affected by the tension between the universal dimension of the exemplary
element and the particularity of something new, a tension that Adorno
defines by highlighting the necessary temporal dimension of the work:
“What truly endures in artworks is not that from which time has been
abstracted”, that is, the abstract concept of beauty; it is rather the case
that “those motives assert themselves whose hidden eternity is most
deeply embedded in the constellation of the temporal” (K: 34, Ki: 21).
By means of a typically dialectical argument, Adorno detects the constant
and durable element of artworks precisely in the fact that they constantly
change without ceasing to be recognized as artwork, then without ceasing
to relate directly to a universal model.
Pupil of the neo-Kantian scholar Cornelius, and certainly fascinated

by neo-Kantian ideas,10 Adorno tries in this way to move in the direction
of a historicization of the Kantian theory of reflecting judgment. As is
well known, in fact, the Kantian subjective universality of beauty is
grounded upon the ideal of natural, not artistic, beauty. When Kant
writes that “nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art;
and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it
looks to us like nature” (Kant 2000, p. 179), he is not putting art and
nature on an equal footing. The beauty of nature is what allows to recog-
nize the beauty of art, although beautiful nature looks like art in the sense
that it seems specially made to cause our pleasure.11 Precisely due to his
assumptions concerning the natural origin of beauty, Kant’s transcenden-
tal determination of aesthetic taste does not imply any sort of historical
determination. On the contrary, since Adorno takes aesthetics strictly
speaking as pertaining to human-generated artworks, he has to take into
account their historic dimension. Art is in fact, for Adorno, an exclusively
human and historic product and it cannot be conceived of as if it were a
natural and spontaneous phenomenon. This is why the tension between
universal and particular established by Kant turns, in Adorno, into the
tension between a temporal and a-temporal dimension of the artwork;
this dialectical connection expresses, finally, the fact that the universal
notion of “the art”—what I have defined as the field of “the aesthetic”—
keeps changing historically, but it does not have the power to erase, or
modify, the works of the past and their aesthetic ideal. The fact that now-
adays Damien Hirst’s shark is an artwork and, say, a hypothetical paint-
ing in Leonardo’s style is simply kitsch, does not prevent the fact that La
Gioconda is still an artwork exactly as much as Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup
Cans. The universal field in which artworks exist as works of art consists,
then, in the historical existence and development of the aesthetic element.
10
On Adorno’s youthful neo-Kantism, especially in his relationship with Hans Cornelius, see what
Brandon Bloch (2017, p. 6) maintains: “The debate about the legacy of Kant that defined German
philosophy during Adorno’s intellectually formative years, and in which Cornelius’s works inter-
vened, centered on the capacity of the human subject to generate objective knowledge”.
11
See, for example, how Malcolm Budd (2002, pp. 43–46) describes the natural determination of
the ideal of beauty in Kant.
10 M. Farina
This transition toward the historicization of the Kantian judgment

leads Adorno into the field of Hegel’s (and Marxian12) philosophy, and it
ultimately explains why he resorted to the study of Kierkegaard—an anti-
historical thinker par excellence—in order to define his own construction
of a historical aesthetics. Rather than explicitly relying on Hegel’s phi-
losophy, Adorno derives in fact his own historic aesthetics from an inter-
pretation of Kierkegaard’s (non-historical) thought; this apparently
counterintuitive path clearly defines Adorno’s approach to aesthetics
through the construction of what he understands as “the aesthetic”, and
can be first and foremost elucidated by taking into account the following
passage:
Kierkegaard, in contrast to Hegel, failed to achieve historical concretion—

the only authentic concretion; he absorbed it into the blind self, volatilized
it in the empty spheres: he thereby surrendered philosophy’s central claim
to truth—the interpretation of reality—while calling on a theology from
which his own philosophy extracted the pith. More emphatically than all
previous philosophers, Hegel posited the question of concretion, but suc-
cumbed helplessly to it by believing that he had produced it […]. Both
philosophers remain idealists (K: 133, Ki: 93).
In this passage Adorno sums up the overall problem of history in his

definition of the aesthetic. On the one hand, Hegel has determined aes-
thetics from the strict point of view of its historical development, but he
has grounded it on “the claim of ‘absolute’ spirit” (K: 134, Ki 93), that is
on a metaphysical and eternal category, removing in this way any con-
creteness from it; on the other hand, Kierkegaard engages in the analysis
of the concrete and particular subject, but he renounces to any kind of
historic determination. Adorno’s move is therefore that of showing the
presence of a historical determination (in Hegelian sense) precisely in
Kierkegaard’s argument, despite the fact that it belongs to a project of
construction of the aesthetic developed precisely with the intention of
giving up history. Thus, this is Adorno’s idea, history can emerge without
12
Hullot-Kentor (2006, pp. 84–85) sees Adorno’s Kierkegaard book as the turning point that
reveals Adorno as a Marxist thinker.
being submitted to the metaphysical and idealistic determination of the

totality of absolute spirit.
The accomplishment of this task is attempted by means of the analysis
of the key figure in the whole of the Kierkegaard book, that is to say, the
notion of intérieur (inwardness). With this category, in fact, Adorno tries
to come to terms with two main sources of his intellectual education:
Lukács and Benjamin. Both, indeed, had developed a powerful and dra-
matic interpretation of inwardness. Lukács by stating that the “second
nature” of objective spirit—that is, social disposition in general—corre-
sponds to a “charnel-house of long-dead interiorities [Innerlichkeiten]”
(Lukács 1971a, p. 63), and thus that human inwardness is by now empty
and meaningless face to the disenchanted reality; Benjamin, instead, by
means of an analysis of baroque melancholic interiority, in the Origin of
German Tragic Drama, is taken as an allegory of expressionistic inward
alienation.13 Likewise, the relevance of Kierkegaard’s theory of inward-
ness, according to Adorno, rests on the fact that it allows to show what at
the beginning of this paragraph we have seen as “the historical origin of
objectless inwardness” (K: 55, Ki: 37).
To this aim, Adorno takes into account the core of Kierkegaard’s philo-
sophical method, that is, the inner reasoning and pondering, and he tries
to show that, rather than an existential conversation about anguish and
fear, private speech can be seen as the highest manifestation of the histori-
cal condition, inasmuch as “reality finds expression only in the internally
contradictory temporal course of the monologue, that is, as history”.
Adorno recognizes therefore that Kierkegaard, as Hegel’s opponent,
“developed no philosophy of history”. On the contrary, he decided “to
use the category of ‘person’ and the person’s inner history to exclude
external history”. Nevertheless, this exclusion of history cannot be seen as
the definitive word about the external world, in fact “the inner history of
the person is bound anthropologically to external history through the
unity of the ‘species’” (K: 49, Ki: 32). This means that “even the objectless
‘I’ and its immanent history are bound to historical objectivity” (K:
51–52, Ki: 34). By following this line, Adorno considers Kierkegaard’s
13
On Adorno’s reception in the Kierkegaard book of Benjamin’s and Lukács problems of inward-
ness, see the interpretation of Bartholomew Ryan (2014, pp. 177–179).
12 M. Farina
idea of intérieur in the light of the typical nineteenth-century figure of

the flâneur—the bored and disenchanted dandy that strolled through the
cities in the century of Baudelaire—who, even though “the world only
appears to him reflected by pure inwardness”, actually best expresses the
historic condition of his time with his “promenades in his room”. This
context is deliberately chosen since “in the intérieur the historical dialec-
tics and the eternal power of nature pose their peculiar puzzle” (K: 62,
69, Ki: 41, 46). What happens, in fact, is that “by denying the social
question, Kierkegaard falls into the mercy of his own historical situation,
that of the rentier in the first half of nineteenth century” (K: 70, Ki
47–48). The rentier, deriving his income from rents, interests, and other
kinds of financial activities, is therefore the model of a private inward
person, whose chance to rest in his own interiority, however, is granted to
him by the general social labor and therefore by the historical condition.
This is how history determines the alleged non-historical interiority, so
that “the external world, which at least gives the person some prerogative,
is for this very reason condemned in a general ‘external world’, and not as
a specifically capitalist world” (K: 72, Ki: 49).
What Adorno depicts is a scenery in which he combines both Lukács’
description of the objective world as a second nature (the “charnel-house
of long-dead interiorities”), and Benjamin’s image of the melancholic
interiority.14 In this scenario, the social world has lost any kind of signifi-
cance and the meaningless objectivity, the loss of immediacy, imposes on
the subject to escape into inwardness. In fact, the “pathos of entreaty”,
that prevents Kierkegaard’s subjectivity from falling into complete isola-
tion, “is valid only in a society of immediate human relations, from which
Kierkegaard well knows that he is separated. Fleeing precisely from reifi-
cation, he withdraws into ‘inwardness’. In this arena, however, he acts as
if that immediacy still existed in the external world, whose ersatz is
inwardness itself ” (K: 74–75, Ki: 50). It is, then, the reification of the
14
As Ferenc Feher notices (1985, pp. 126–128), Benjamin’s notion of deprived interiority has been
influenced by Lukács’ Weber-inspired conception of world’s Godforsakenness, although he admits
(130–134) the emerging of sharp contrast among them after Lukács’ abjuration of History and Class
Consciousness. In their monumental biography of Benjamin, however, Howard Eiland and Michael
W. Jennings do not recognize a great relevance to Lukács’ influence on Benjamin, by roughly limit-
ing it to the effect of History and Class Consciousness during Benjamin’s Marxist turn (Eiland and
Jennings 2014, pp. 205–206).
social world, of the external and historical second nature, what pushes the
subject into their own inwardness, whose internal constitution is increas-
ingly different from that of the social world, especially the farther the
latter becomes commodified.
Now, after the assessment of his pivotal argument about inwardness, it
should be easier to understand why, and in which sense, Adorno focuses
on Kierkegaard’s construction of “the aesthetic” in order to establish the
theoretical basis to his own “aesthetics”. The historical constitution of the
non-historical inwardness corresponds in fact to the expression of what
we have seen at the beginning of this chapter as the determining quality
of art, that is its autonomy. As I have already remarked, in fact, “the
autonomy of art, its quality of being a law onto itself, the impossibility of
arranging it at will according to the dictates of use, is […] the expression
of that reification” (WnK: 825–826, EoM: 128). Similarly to how the
subject’s inwardness constitutes itself as a private and isolated space
because of the pressure of the external world, the work of art has to be
defined as autonomous in accordance to the increasing distance it takes
from the petrified and reified world of the market and of social conven-
tions. Whereas the beauty of Kantian aesthetics is the reflection of the
subject’s feeling in front of the representation of the object, Adorno’s
notion of artwork stands for the objective expression of the subject’s inte-
riority, where the interiority is that of the creating subject. The autonomy
of art, one of the most basic features of the artwork according to Adorno,
closely matches the historicization of the aesthetics, or better the out-
come of a historical movement that, starting from the transcendental and
“natural” conception of Kantian aesthetics, goes in the direction of the
Hegelian interpretation of the matter in terms of a philosophy of art. This
is why the autonomy of art cannot be seen merely as a philosophical
translation of the modernist motto l’art pour l’art,15 as the left oriented
critique to Adorno in the 1970s did.16 On the contrary, claims about the
autonomy of art aim to explain to what extent even the most elitist
15
By contrast, Thijs Lijster (2017, p. 48) sees the autonomy of art as art’s being free from the
Church, public institutions, traditions, canons, and so on, that is, as the idea of art for art’s sake.
16
See how James Martin Harding (1997, pp. 11–15) reconstructs the rejection of Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory immediately after its publication in 1970.
14 M. Farina
supporters of “art for art’s sake”, of art as an Empyrean and pure activity,
are determined by their own historical context.
The two features of the artwork we have seen in the opening pages
show finally a close inter-connection. Starting from Kierkegaard’s con-
struction of “the aesthetic” as that sphere which is able to explain the
fragmented and unsatisfied inwardness of late capitalism, Adorno can
build his own “aesthetics” as the demonstration of the artistic quality of
the artworks. Aesthetics corresponds then to the determination of the
general field of the aesthetic products, or better to the critical demonstra-
tion of the qualities of the products that belong to that field, namely the
works of art. Similar to the theoretical space in which the aesthetic has
been constructed, that is Kierkegaard’s inwardness, the work of art is a
product whose structural formal laws—and for Adorno artistic logic is
always a formal one—rejects the laws of reification, of commodification,
of the social world. As an autonomous reaction to social conditions, the
artworks are therefore both an expression of society and a critical judg-
ment on its objective configuration. The work of art, in fact, although it
can no longer be reduced to the outdated category of beauty, still pre-
serves the dimension of conciliation. Social contradictions, human suf-
fering and pain, are subsumed in the aesthetic form of the artwork and,
in this form, they are somehow pacified. The artwork can therefore be
still regarded as “beautiful” in the same sense in which one can exclaim
“beautiful!” in front of the most violent and disturbing exhibition of
Hermann Nitsch. According to Adorno, that exclamation is the demon-
stration that the work succeeded in its own task, that of being an expres-
sion of and at the same time a critical judgment on society. This is
possible, Adorno would add, in virtue of the autonomy of art’s formal
law, which is forced notably by the heteronomy of social pressure.
1.2 ierkegaard (ii): The Myth

K
and the History
Art, for Adorno, consists in the historic layout of what Hegel would call
“the spirit (Geist)”, and that in the contemporary pragmatist-oriented
interpretation of German Idealism becomes “the normative space of rea-
sons” (Pinkard 2002, p. 251), within which the moves of each actor are
justified based on commitments and entitlements to action. In these
terms, one can also understand a given configuration of social life—in
Adorno’s words—or a specific spiritual figure—in Hegel’s—close to one
of Wittgenstein’s language games, whose viable moves are justified by a
certain set of rules, here embodied in the aesthetic expression of the art-
works. As soon as the specific “social game” expressed for example by
Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass ceases to be normative, a subsequent set of
rules expresses a new kind of aesthetic meaning, as conveyed for example
by Klimt’s Judith.17 In this respect, Adorno clearly says that “aesthetics
does not mean, as it did not mean in Kierkegaard, merely a theory of art,
but rather, in Hegelian terms, a stance of thought toward objectivity”
(Pei, p. 12); the “Hegelian sense” to which Adorno alludes is the idea that
art corresponds to the “unfolding of the truth” (Hegel 1975, p. 1236),
that is to the layout of the truth of the space of reasons, within which a
particular work of art is justified as art and at the same time—and this is
what differentiates Adorno’s position from the general field of pragma-
tism—judges the disposition of the space of reason itself; this is how
“theological truth crashes down to human level as aesthetic truth and
reveals itself to man as sign of hope” (K: p. 148, Ki: 104).
It may then seem that, based on this explanatory framework, that of
art is a solved problem, with nothing left to do but being better defined.
This would be true if it wasn’t for the pivotal dilemma with which all
post-Kantian aesthetics have tried to come to terms, that of the aesthetic
creation, and to which Adorno attempts to provide an answer by means
of the obscure and prima facie controversial notion of “myth”. Although
the German debate on the question of myth proliferated again in the
17
This is basically the argument of Robert Pippin when he describes Hegel as “the theorist of mod-
ernism, malgré lui and avant la letter” (Pippin 2014, p. 38).
16 M. Farina
second half of the 1920s, what Adorno subsumed under this concept has
much more to do with a reworking of a traditional aesthetic problem
than with the neo-Romantic, and pre-National Socialist, discussion.18
When in 1926 Thomas Mann—the already famous and celebrated
author of The Magic Mountain, almost revered by Adorno19—released a
short reportage on his trip to France, the neo-Romantic wave was already
traveling at full speed and, as Thomas Mann noticed, it was already anti-
parliamentarily oriented.20 A prominent scholar quoted by Mann is
Alfred Baeumler, the future holder of the chair of political pedagogy in
Hitler’s Berlin, one of those who tried to intellectually legitimize
National Socialism by exploiting some obscure argument in Nietzsche’s
late works. Also in 1926, however, Baeumler published an interesting
selection of writings of the, at the time, almost forgotten late-Romantic
author Johann Jakob Bachofen, by giving a new turn to the debate on
myth. In the generous Introduction to the book, Baeumler lays the
ground to an interpretation of mythology according to which myth,
precisely as natural origin of culture, contains the truest essence of peo-
ple. In his own words, this conception of myth leads to the idea that “the
people [das Volk], the race, are always in an arcane relationship with the
‘original cliff’ on which they were sculpted, and they continue to live in
the permanent communion of natural life with it” (Baeumler 1956, p.
CLXXVI). This notion of the original unity of natural and cultural
life—the core notion in Nazi Blut und Boden—clearly shows to what
extent caution should be exerted while handling the notion of myth, but
18
For the purposes of my research, it can be helpful to refer to Peter Davies’ work about the debate
on myth in German culture, especially where he provides an account of the reception of Johann
J. Bachofen between the 1920s and the 1930s thanks to the debate involving Ludwig Klages, Alfred
Baeumler, Carl Albrech Bernulli, Ernst Howald, and Thomas Mann (see, Davies 2012,
pp. 285–309). As the Italian scholar Furio Jesi suggests, the twentieth-century debate can be
divided in a far right-wing (even fascist) attitude that aims to “drink at the spring” of myth (authors
like Baeumler, Klages, and Mircea Eliade), and in a leftist (or Marxist) orientation whose intention
is that to explain the myth; to this latter orientation belongs Benjamin (Jesi 1973, pp. 69–75).
19
As he writes to Mann after they got to know each other in California, when he was eighteen years
old (i.e. in 1921), during a holiday in Kampen, he met the writer and followed him just imagining
a hypothetical conversation with him (BW3: 17, Cor3: 10).
20
Thomas Mann (1926, in particular pp. 59–61) explicitly connected the anti-democratic and anti-
parliamentary feeling of both Germany and French to a full argument about the neo-Romantic
interpretation and, according to him, misinterpretation of the late Nietzsche.
at the same time it specifies how much Adorno borrowed from the
debate of his time—it is also not a coincidence that Benjamin himself
dedicated a study to Bachofen’s mythology, yet disdaining Baeumler by
counting him among the “official exponents of German fascism”.21 The
reader will pardon my decision to introduce the discussion on myth
referencing Baeumler’s controversial account, rather than with other
equally relevant but less contentious authors.22 My decision has been
motivated by the wish to roughly, and thereby clearly, illustrate the basic
structural lines accounting for the German discussion about this topic in
the 1920s and 1930s, in other words the ambiguous braiding of culture
and nature, and in this respect Baeumler’s reference provides a rough but
clear introduction. This is the cultural landscape inspired by which, in
the book on Kierkegaard, Adorno writes that “in the reified world itself,
however, by its history, mythological nature is driven back into the
inwardness of the individual”, and that “for the instant of the pause,
where dialectic comes to a stop, is the same instant where nature, its
mythical basis, reverberates in the depth of the sounding of the hour”
(K: 89, 144; Ki: 60, 101).
As previously anticipated, the reason why Adorno employs the notion
of myth in this context has to be found in the typical aesthetic problem
of artistic creation and, in addition, in the attempt to keep together
Lukács’ Hegelian perspective and Benjamin’s Romantic heritage. I have
also already pointed out some problematic aspects in the attempt to his-
toricize the Kantian argument, in short the issues connected to the imple-
mentation of a notion of aesthetic value derived from a natural ideal of
beauty to a non-natural but broadly speaking cultural product. The fun-
damental theoretical ground of Kant’s third Critique, in fact, is based on
the “as if ” methodological presupposition.23 On this ground, we find
21
The quotation comes from Benjamin’s 1935 essay published under the title, “Johan Jackob
Bachofen” (Benjamin 2006a, p. 19).
22
In the German philosophical debate, the question of Myth was at stake in several authors during
the years of the Weimar Republic. One can mention, for example, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Klages,
Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, as well as Carl Schmitt; one should also add, Sigmund Freud, with
his interpretation of the psychological meaning of myth, and Carl Gustav Jung.
23
This is one of the most relevant aspects of the Critique of the Power of Judgement, not only for the
aesthetic part, but also, and a fortiori, for the teleological one. It would be difficult to isolate some
exemplary passages, given the widespread dissemination of the as if argument in the text. For a
18 M. Farina
nature attractive and beautiful because it seems to be designed precisely

to that purpose, that is, as if it was conceived by a creating intellect. At
the same time, we agree that we cannot know the project of that hypo-
thetical designer, nor can we state the effective existence of that sort of
intellect behind nature’s form. Nevertheless, we must observe that “nature
is represented through this concept as if an understanding contained the
ground of the unity of the manifold of its empirical laws” (Kant 2000,
p. 68; emphasis mine). The dynamics of the reflecting judgment, in fact,
is effective as long as we assume a free will, although it is clear that we can
never intellectually demonstrate an object to be created according to a
“purposiveness without an end” (Kant 2000, p. 111). This is what I have
defined as the normativity of what is absolutely non-normative. But what
happens when we apply this specific idea of aesthetic value to a product
that, instead, is exactly designed in order to be aesthetically appreciated,
as in the case of the artwork?
Coming to the fore in the early stages of the reception of Kant’s work
on aesthetics, it can be argued that this is, in fact, the basic problem of
German aesthetics. As Schiller’s intellectual path clearly shows, in fact,
conceiving artistic creation in terms of nature’s “purposiveness without
an end” leads to the notion of ancient naïve genius, whose determination
as an involuntary aesthetic creator makes nothing but shifting the unin-
tentionality from nature to an idealized and non-historical origin of cul-
ture, that is to a mythical and imaged ancient Greece, as Schiller points
out in the piece Über naïve und senthimentalische Dischtung (One Naïve
and Sentimental Poetry, 1795–96). As nature creates beauty without hav-
ing beauty as its proper aim, the artistic genius shapes the work of art
according to some natural kind of spontaneity and inspiration, like a
naïve child intent to freely play a purposeless game. However, as Peter
Szondi (1972, pp. 174–206) recognizes in his essay “Das Naïve ist das
Senthimentalische” (“The Naïve Is the Sentimental”), the possibility itself
to recognize something as “naïve”, or “natural”, in this context, stems
directly from the modern, sentimental and non-natural attitude.
Therefore, for Schiller poets can be naïve or sentimental, “they will either
general overview, see the way in which Christian Helmut Wenzel (2005, pp. 78–85) accounts for
the Kantian argument.
be nature, or they will seek the lost nature” (Schiller 1993, p. 196), but
the excellence of naivety can be appreciated only by the one who is no
longer naïve and natural.24 Exactly from this kind of tension in the defini-
tion of art’s creator, originates, roughly speaking, the sharpest, most dis-
tinguishing, and irreconcilable split in modern aesthetics, that is between
the Romantic and the Hegelian explanation of art. Based on Schiller’s—
but to some extent also Goethe’s—reception of the Kantian problem, one
is inclined to see the Romantic, especially the early Romantic, and the
Hegelian solutions as two alternative and competing strategies aimed at
solving the same set of questions.25 While being aware of somehow over-
simplifying things here, I take the most significant and representative
notions of both early Romantic and Hegelian aesthetics as a reaction to
the general debate on the role of will in art’s creation.26 Having Kant
actually exposed the theoretical meaning of aesthetic value, and having
defined it as a product whose natural disposition must only seem to be
intentionally designed, artists find themselves in the paradoxical position
of knowing exactly the thing they mustn’t know in order to naturally and
spontaneously, that is, non-intentionally, do their job.
In order to save the naturalness of artistic expression, the Jena Romantic
circle developed the idea of a new kind of symbolic and sedimented
meanings having the same value of the ancient ones. As Friedrich Schlegel
writes in the Dialogue on Poetry: “We have no mythology. But, I add, we
are close to obtaining one or, rather, it is time that we earnestly work
together to create one” (Schlegel 1968, p. 81). According to Hegel, this
24
As Frederick Beiser (2005, pp. 246–249) remarks, Schiller does not share the fanatic enthusiasm
for the inspiration of genius typical of the period of Sturm und Drang.
25
This is a well-established description of aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
to the point that it seems almost a cliché. But a quick look at the histories of aesthetics confirms
that this cliché, in some way or another, comes in handy for a general presentation of the matter.
This happens when Paul Guyer (2014, pp. 106–107) describes late modern aesthetics under the
influence either of Hegel or Schopenhauer; Similarly, Jay Bernstein (2005, pp. vii–ix) presents the
Hegelian and Romantic aesthetics as two alternative and opposed possibilities to approach the
discipline.
26
Although the rightful restrictions connected to this inquiry force me to shorten some of the argu-
ments on this topic, I refer the reader to my paper, “A Kantian Answer to the Romantics. Hegel’s
Idea of Genius and the Unity of Nature and Freedom” (Farina 2019).
20 M. Farina
amounts to a naïve and mystical understanding of art,27 whose sole con-

tribution is that of making clear that art has by now lost its effectual value
due exactly to an overabundant consciousness of its own tasks. As the
self-proclaimed newborn Hegelian Arthur Danto recognizes, “the histori-
cal stage of art is done with when it is known what art is and means”
(Danto 1984, p. 31). Rather than a new form of mythology, romantic art
displays the end of any mythology all together. “In our day”, writes Hegel
in his Lectures on Fine Art, “in the case of almost all peoples, criticism, the
cultivation of reflection, and, in our German case, freedom of thought
have mastered the artists too, and have made them, so to say, a tabula rasa
in respect of the material and the form of their productions” (Hegel 1975,
p. 605). This loss of substantiality is precisely what pushes art to its death.
The way in which Adorno calls into question the notion of myth in the
Kierkegaard book corresponds then to the manner in which he deals with
the problem of the relationship between the I’s artistic creation and its
historical determination on the path of the construction of his aesthetics.
As Adorno says, “creation is reduced to spirit in the self in order to rescue
the self from its fallenness”, and “the natural content of mere spirit, ‘his-
torical’ in itself, may be called mythical”. The notion of myth, therefore,
is called to purpose precisely in order to give something like a natural
basis to the I’s existence and production, something to which the I has to
react when it creates art, “for the mythical […] is not a free creation of the
author” (K: 114,78, Ki: 78, 53). In this sense, Adorno sees what he takes
as a “dialectic” that “transpires between nature and spirit, mythical con-
tent and consciousness, as qualitatively different, strictly contrary pow-
ers” (K: 86, Ki: 58). The myth, in this respect, especially to the extent that
it is defined as “natural”, corresponds to the not-free element of history,
to that quality and moment of historical development that seems to be
completely independent from human free will and that gives the impres-
sion of overcoming human beings as an external pressure; “in the reified
27
Ernst Behler as well, one of the most relevant scholars of German early Romantics, recognizes the
mystical aspect of the new mythology: “This is the ‘mystical’ aspect of early Romanticism which is
strictly abhorred and avoided by A. W. Schlegel. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis liked to indulge in
it, referring to it ironically as their attempt at founding a new religion. The best-known designation
for this new tendency, however, is that of a ‘new mythology’” (Behler 1993, p. 158).
world, however, by its history, mythical nature is driven back into inward-
ness of individual” (K: 89, Ki: 60).
After having made natural beauty “historical”, Adorno’s reference to
the notion of myth aims, ultimately, to the naturalization of history itself.
The notion of myth is connected here to the same semantic field already
prominent in the German debate on mythology. “Mythical” is in this
respect any kind of social sedimented practice, whose fixity, while
accounting for the non-intentional dimension of artistic production,
appears as natural as any other steady element. In 1932, just about when
work on the Kierkegaard was ongoing, Adorno held a conference under
the title The Idea of Natural History. Also in this conference he deals with
the problem of the relationship between history, nature, and mythology,
and he declares that his goal is that to “comprehend historical being in its
most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural
being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as an historical being where
it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature”, and he clarifies that “the
concept of nature that is to be dissolved is one that, if I translated it into
standard philosophical terminology, would come closest to the concept
of myth” (IdN, 355, 345, INH: 117, 111). Aesthetics, as Adorno says in
the conference, is the branch of human knowledge that is able to formu-
late this idea of natural history,28 that is to express the fact that history is
bound to a non-intentional element, and this element corresponds to its
myth. In order to back this interpretation, in his contribution, Adorno
mentions and quotes two texts about aesthetics we have already men-
tioned: Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and Benjamin’s Origin of German
Tragic Drama. To hold these perspectives together is then one of the aims
of both the conference and the book on Kierkegaard.
From Lukács’ Hegelian theory Adorno borrows the critical dimension
of myth as a configuration of natural history. He closely echoes Lukács’
Hegel-inspired notion of “second nature”, as outlined, for instance, in the
following statement: “This second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yet
senseless like the first: it is a complex of senses—meanings—which has
28
That of 1932 is a particularly intricate conference, in which Adorno obscurely presents his idea
of history and nature. Max Pensky (2004, p. 277) has defined it as “troubling”, and Susan Buck-
Morss (1977, p. 53) as “obscure”. Recently, Tom Whyman (2016, pp. 452–472) tried to under-
stand that of natural history as a therapeutic concept.
22 M. Farina
become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority”

(Lukács 1971a, p. 63). The mythical nature is, in this respect, the hidden
(irreconciled) meaning that art brings to light and helps overcome; it cor-
responds to the double character of art, in terms of expression of mythical
naturalness and judgment of its configuration. According to Hegel’s rea-
soning, in fact, art is a cultural production through which the hidden
content of Geist becomes known and therefore ceases to be mythical.
As some Italian scholars have remarked, Hegel presents art as somehow
fluidifying the rigid, mythical, social meaning.29 In this respect Adorno’s
idea of myth as unconscious, rigid, natural dimension of art seems to be
a consistent, and critical, reinterpretation of that dynamics. In the
Kierkegaard, however, one can find also a second, ambiguous, and obscure
meaning of myth as nature, a meaning that derives from the other great
influence in this text: Benjamin.
The last chapter of the book, in fact, is devoted to the awaited
Construction of the Aesthetic, and this is where Adorno mostly deals with
Benjamin’s categories, such as that of melancholy and fragment. By
nuancing the image of a rigid nature with that of natural (dynamic) decay,
what Adorno notably attempts is to provide a viable solution to the
impasse of a merely critical notion of myth. In this respect, Benjamin
appears as the advocate of an allegorical strategy, allowing him to claim,
for instance, that “everything about history that, from the very begin-
ning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face –
or rather in a dead’s head” (Benjamin 1998, p. 166). Along the same
lines, Adorno tries to save the natural, fragmented elements by saying
that “the origin of their luminosity is putrefaction” (K: 181, Ki: 127).
This tactic, however, forces Adorno into a twofold interpretation of myth.
As we have seen, in fact, the mythical nature is what art brings to light in
order to make it known and solved, but now we are told that “the hope
that inheres in the aesthetic is that of the transparence of decaying fig-
ures” (K: 187, Ki: 132), and the reason lies in the fact that “through fan-
tasy, as recollection, genius continuously restores original creation – not
29
For example, this is how Dino Formaggio (1983, pp. 133–136), in the book published under the
title La “morte dell’arte” e l’estetica (The “Death of Art” and the Aesthetics), presents his interpretation
of Hegel’s idea of death of art in the terms of a rebirth of art itself.
as the creator of its reality but by the reintegration of its given elements in
an image. The moments of fantasy are the festivals of history” (K: 197, Ki
139). In order to hold together the critical dimension of myth and the
significance of the disenchanted nature—in order, that is, to hold together
Lukács and Benjamin—Adorno is forced to consider the activity of genius
as an utter, immediate, and natural creation of meaning.
Adorno’s idea is therefore that to conceive in the first place the mythi-
cal side of history as a rigid and fixed nature, by showing in the second
place myth in the light of nature as decaying, that is in its transitory
embodiment. “Natural” decay shows the necessary decay (the transience)
of the natural and mythical side of history. In order to see this second
aspect as “the hope that inheres in the aesthetic”, justified by the genius
who would be able to “restore original creation”, Adorno is however
forced to take art’s production as an immediate creation of an uncor-
rupted and reconciled meaning. This is how the book on Kierkegaard
ultimately holds together two opposite reactions to the same aesthetic
problem: that of the historicization of Kant’s reflecting judgment. On the
one hand, a critical notion of myth is implicitly developed as what has to
be dissolved by means of the construction of the aesthetic; on the other
hand, still prominent is the idea of myth as the “pre-historical” and con-
ciliated nature that the construction of the aesthetic is called to restore. In
what follows, I will show first in which sense the path through which
Adorno accomplishes the construction of his aesthetics corresponds to an
effort to come to terms with this ambiguity, and finally how this leads to
breaking up with some of Benjamin’s concepts and developing the notion
of “Culture Industry”, as outlined in the Dialectics of the Enlightenment.
24 M. Farina
1.3 he Anti-Romantic Choice and Its

T
Consequences: Art and Society
Among the various and heterogeneous influences that make up Adorno’s
natural and mythical image of history—it would be about time to men-
tion Max Weber’s theory of disenchanted and secularized modernity30—
so far, I have neglected possibly the most relevant, if one is to believe the
closing remarks to the conference on The Idea of Natural History: “it could
be demonstrated that what has been said here is only an interpretation of
certain fundamental elements of the materialist dialectics” (IdN: 365,
INH: 124); this influence is obviously that of Karl Marx. In the German
Ideology, Marx, in fact, provides a full account of history in terms of
development. The main features of such a development’s movement rep-
resent a guiding thread for Adorno’s ideas on the natural-mythical deter-
mination of history. According to Marx’s account, one can point to the
“source and theatre of all history”, against which people “become more
and more enslaved under a power alien to them”, and this is “a pressure
which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called
world spirit”, that they have intended “as ‘substance’ and ‘essence of
man’”, and that “hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients” (Marx
2004, pp. 57, 55, 59, 55). In the first book of The Capital, moreover,
Marx takes into account the basic economic laws of said historical pro-
cess, and he claims that they “appear to the political economists’ bour-
geois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed
necessity” (Marx 1990, p. 175). Here lie precisely the first seeds for
Adorno’s idea of history as a natural-mythical development, seeds that
clearly reject the Romantic conception of myth as the harmonic, concili-
ated, origin of history. The artwork, as a historical product, corresponds
in this respect to the exhibition of this contradictory dynamics, but as an
aesthetic product—that is, as a disposition of social contradictions in a
successful aesthetic form—it corresponds also to the demonstration of
the irreconciled character of society. The growing awareness of this
30
Weber, with the ideas of disenchantment of the world and secularization, was one of the most
influential authors between the first and the second decade of the nineteenth century; for the rel-
evance of Weber in Adorno’s youth, see Axel Honneth (2003, pp. 175–187).
conceptual principle drives Adorno on the path of the resolution of the

tension between a Romantic and a social-historical interpretation of
myth, as shown by his writings on the sociology of music.
In 1932, Adorno wrote a two-part essay for the first issues of the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the official journal of the Institute for
Social Research—the institutional affiliation of the group that will even-
tually be renowned as Frankfurt School. The journal, strongly wanted by
the director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer,31 was principally devoted
to collect “factors, that are determining for the co-existence of human
beings in present day” (Horkheimer 1932, p. i). Adorno contributed to
the project with a piece On the Social Situation of Music, which also paves
the way to the development of his overall sociology of music. As far as
this research is concerned, the essay is of great relevance inasmuch as it
establishes, ex negativo, the impossibility to hold together—or rather to
mediate between—the Romantic and the Hegelian stance toward art.
As Richard Leppert recognizes, the essay lays out a diagnosis of the
process of commodification of music (and art in general) —of the absorp-
tion of music in the economic process of production and consumption—
by isolating what Adorno takes as the real autonomous music, in other
words music that “escapes complete commodification, but only to be
exiled from a society that has no use for it” (Leppert 2002, pp. 332).
Despite being constantly exposed to the socio-economic pressure of com-
modification, music has to preserve its own aesthetic quality in order to,
according to Adorno’s Freudian lexicon (ZgL: 771, EoM: 427), “subli-
mate” social contradiction. The relation between art and society is there-
fore built upon a continuous process of mediation. Art is socially mediated
in the sense that it exists only for the sake of social conflicts, and society
itself is artistically mediated inasmuch as art allows knowledge of social
conflicts from within, without being simultaneously projected beyond
them. This is why art is granted the character of cognition, consequently
demanded of “any music”, as of any form of art, “which today wishes to
preserve its right to existence” (ZgL: 732, EoM: 393). The kind of con-
ciliation that art can claim for itself is just the aesthetic and therefore
31
A reconstruction of the birth and of the early years of activity of the Frankfurt Institute under the
direction of Horkheimer can be found in Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 150–158).
26 M. Farina
formal composition of social conflicts, achieved precisely by depositing

those tensions in a successful aesthetic form; on the contrary, art cannot
produce any effective social resolution of contradiction. Only in the light
of real, effective, antinomies art appears conciliated; not in the light of an
alleged image of social harmony.
Having clarified this issue, it is now possible to explore how Adorno
comes to terms with the seeds of his critique of the Romantics. While
describing the attempt to build a form of autonomous music in the time
of late expressionism, he writes that
radical freedom from all objective norms imposed upon music from the
exterior is coordinated with the most extreme rigidity of immanent struc-
tures, so that music by its own forces eliminates at least within itself alien-
ation as a manner of subjective formation and objective material. […] To
be sure, music overcomes inward alienation only through the perfected
expression thereof on its exterior. And if one were to assume that the imma-
nent overcoming of aporias of music were consistently possible, this would
be nothing more than a romantic transfiguration of craftsmanship. (ZgL:
739, EoM: 399–400)
The “romantic transfiguration of craftsmanship” would be therefore the

supposition that art—in this case, music—could somehow overcome its
own time out of its own efforts and independently produce the concilia-
tion of social antagonisms.32 What art can do, according to Adorno, is
instead to reproduce contemporary social contradictions and—by show-
ing their possible conciliation in the aesthetic element—express the
necessity of their historical overcoming. What an artwork could never do
is, conversely, to normatively indicate the solution of antagonisms. It
would then fall under the same contradictions it wants to protest, inas-
much as it would (somehow) presuppose the existence (somewhere) of
conciliation and the possibility to use it as its normative model. This is,
in brief, the Romantic assumption on art, the presumption to own the
image of conciliation and to be able to socially communicate it by means
of artworks. As already recalled, Schlegel would claim that: “We have no
mythology. But, I add, we are close to obtaining one or, rather, it is time
that we earnestly work together to create one”. By contrast, Adorno says
32
The relationship between the autonomy and the social character of music in the essay of 1932 is
defined in this way also by Max Paddison (1993, pp. 98–99).
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no related content on Scribd:
Fig. 138.—Engraved shell. British Museum.
The first engravers who attacked precious stones had no
diamond dust. They supplied its place with emery powder, which was
to be found in unlimited quantities in the islands of the Archipelago,
whence it was imported by the Phœnicians at a very early date.
Moreover there was nothing to prevent them crushing the precious
stones belonging to the class called corundum, such as sapphires,
rubies, amethysts, emeralds, and the oriental topaz. No doubt the
lathe or wheel was a comparatively late invention. M. Soldi thinks it
hardly came into use in Mesopotamia till about the eighth century
B.C. Before that the continuous rotary movement that was so
necessary for the satisfactory conduct of the operation was obtained
by other means. According to M. Soldi they must have employed for
many centuries a hand-drill turned by a bow, like that of a modern
centre-bit or wimble.[304]
Fig. 139.—Chalcedony cylinder. British Museum.
Fig. 140.—Cylinder of black jasper. British Museum.

On examining the oldest Mesopotamian engravings on precious
stones a skilled craftsman would see at once that nearly all the work
had been done with only two instruments—one for the round hollows
and another for the straight lines. In the designs cut with these tools
we find curiously complete likenesses of the small lay figures with
ball-and-socket joints used by painters. Some idea of the strange
results produced by these first attempts at gem-engraving may be
formed from our reproductions of two cylinders in the collection at
the British Museum. The influence of the process, the tyranny of the
implement, if we may use such a phrase, is conspicuous in both.
Note, for instance, in the first design, which is, apparently, a scene of
sacrifice (Fig. 139), how the head and shoulder of the figure on the
left are each indicated by a circular hollow. The same primitive
system has been used in the cylinder where the god Anou is
separated from another deity by the winged globe (Fig. 140). The
design is here more complex. The bodies of the two divinities and
the wings of the globe are indicated by numerous vertical and
horizontal grooves set close together; but the circular hollows appear
not only in the globe and in the piece of furniture that occupies the
foreground, but also in the knees, calves, ankles, and other parts of
the two figures.
Fig. 141.—Assyrian cylinder. British Museum. Drawn by

Wallet.
As time went on they learnt to use their tools with more freedom
and more varied skill. We shall not attempt to follow M. Soldi in
tracing the art through all its successive stages.[305] As an example
of the skill to which the Mesopotamian artist had attained towards
the seventh century B.C. we may quote a splendid cornelian cylinder
belonging to the British Museum (Fig. 141).[306] The subject is
extremely simple. In its general lines it continually recurs on the bas-
reliefs and gems of the Sargonid period. A winged personage, with
his arms extended, stands between two fantastic winged
quadrupeds and grasps each by a fore-paw. The chief actor in the
scene is very like the winged genius whom we encounter so often on
the walls of the palaces (see above, Fig. 36), while both in the
exaggerated modelling of the legs and in the care with which the
smallest details of the costume are carried out, the special features
that distinguished the sculpture of the time may be recognized. The
execution is firm and significant, though a little dry and hard. It is
made up of short cuts, close together; the engraver did not
understand how to give his work that high polish and finish that
enabled the Greeks to express the subtlest contours of the living
form.
From this period onwards the artists of Mesopotamia and, in later
years, those who worked for the Medes and Persians, put into use
all the precious stones that were afterwards engraved by the Greeks
and Romans. Their tools and processes cannot have greatly differed
from those handed down by antiquity to the gem-cutters of the
middle ages and the Italian renaissance. If their results were inferior
to those obtained by Pyrgoteles and Dioscorides,[307] it was because
oriental art never had the knowledge of the nude or the passion for
beauty of form which made Greek art so original. Intaglio is only a
bas-relief reversed and greatly diminished in size; the style and spirit
of contemporary sculpture are reflected in it as the objects of nature
are reflected in the mirror of the human eye. For want of proper tools
it may lag behind sculpture, but it will never outstrip it.
The close connection between the two arts is nowhere more
strongly marked than in some of the cylinders belonging to the first
monarchy. Although the artist was content in most cases with mere
outlines, he now and then lavished more time and trouble on his
work, and gave to his modelling something of the breadth and truth
that we find in the statues from Tello. These merits are seen at their
best in a fine cylinder belonging to the New York Museum (Fig. 142).
It represents Izdubar and his companion Hea-bani, the Hercules and
Theseus of Chaldæan mythology, engaged in a hand-to-hand
struggle with a wild bull and a lion, a scene which may be taken as
personifying the struggle between the divine protectors of mankind
on the one hand, and the blind forces of nature assisted by all the
supernatural powers of evil on the other.[308] We have already had
occasion to speak of Izdubar, who is always represented nude and
very muscular. As for his companion, he combines the head and
bust of a man with the hind quarters of a bull.[309] There is a certain
conventionality in the attitude of the lion and in the way his claws are
represented, and the movement of Hea-bani’s left arm is ungraceful;
but the antelope under the inscription and the bull overpowered by
Izdubar are rendered with a truth of judgment and touch that all
connoisseurs will appreciate. We may say the same of the two
heroes; their muscular development is given with frankness but
without exaggeration; the treatment generally is free and broad.
Fig. 142.—Chaldæan cylinder. Marble or porphyry. New York

Museum.
Between this cylinder and the one quoted on the last page as
among the masterpieces of Ninevite art, there is the same difference
as between the statues of Tello and the bas-reliefs of Nimroud and
Khorsabad. The engraver, who some fifteen centuries before our
era, cut upon marble this episode from one of the favourite myths of
Chaldæa, may not have been able to manipulate precious stones
with such ease and dexterity as the artist of Sargon or Sennacherib
who made the cylinder in the British Museum, but he had the true
feeling for life and form in a far higher degree.
So far we have studied the cylinders from the standpoint of their
use and the material of which they are composed; we have
described the processes employed in cutting them and the changes
undergone in the course of centuries in the style of art they display.
We have yet to speak of the principal types and scenes to be found
upon them. We cannot pretend, however, to give the details in any
complete fashion. For that a whole book would be necessary, such
as the one promised by M. Ménant.
This is not because the themes treated show any great variety;
they have, in fact, far less originality than might at first be thought.
Compare the impressions from different cabinets and attempt to
classify them in order of subject; you will find the same types and
scenes repeated, with but slight changes, on a great number of
specimens, and you will soon discover that hundreds of cylinders
may be divided into a very small number of groups. In each group,
too, many individual specimens will only be distinguishable from
each other by their inscriptions. All this is to be easily accounted for.
The finest cylinders, whether in design or material, must have
been commissioned by kings, nobles, and priests, while the common
people bought theirs ready-made. When any one of the latter wished
to buy a seal he went to the merchant and chose it from his stock,
which was composed of the patron gods and religious scenes which
happened to be most in fashion at the time. As soon as the
purchaser had made his selection he caused his own name to be
engraved in the space left for the purpose, and it was this inscription,
rather than the scene beside it, that gave its personal character to
the seal. The production of these objects was a real industry, carried
on all over the country and for many centuries, and continually
reproducing the same traditional and consecrated types.
M. Ménant believes himself able to determine where most if not
all the cylinders of the early monarchy were produced. He talks of
the schools of Ur, of Erech, of Arade, and in many cases the signs
on which he relies appear to have a serious value. But we shall not
attempt even to give a résumé of the arguments he uses to justify
the classification he was the first to sketch out; we could not do so
without multiplying our illustrations and extending our letterpress to
an extravagant degree. Judging from the examples quoted by M.
Ménant himself in support of his own theory, the workshops of
different towns in the course of a single period were distinguished
rather by their predilection for particular themes than by anything
peculiar in their styles of execution; the same processes and the
same way of looking at living forms may be recognised in all. We
may, then, treat all these early works of the Chaldæan gem-
engravers as the productions of a single school; and in this history
we only propose to note and discuss the general direction of the
great art currents. We cannot follow all the arms and side streams
into which the main river is subdivided.
Fig. 143.—Chaldæan cylinder. Green serpentine. Louvre. Drawn

by Wallet.
Fig. 144.—Chaldæan cylinder. Basalt. Louvre. Drawn by Wallet.
Fig. 145.—Chaldæan cylinder. Basalt. Louvre.

One of the favourite subjects at this time was the scene of
worship we have already encountered on the Sippara tablet (Vol. I.,
Fig. 71.); in the cylinders as well as on the larger tablet the
worshipper is led by a priest into the presence of an enthroned
divinity. The temple, indicated in the tablet, is suppressed in the
seals, where the space is so much less, but otherwise the
composition is the same. It would be difficult to imagine anything
better fitted for objects of a talismanic character, which were also to
be used for the special purpose of these cylinders. Whenever the
Chaldæan put his seal upon clay he renewed the act of prayer and
faith which the engraver had figured upon it; he took all men to
witness his faith in the protection of Anou, of Samas, or of some
other god. We need therefore feel no surprise at encountering this
subject upon the cylinders of Ourkam, (Vol. I., Fig. 3), and his son
Dungi,[310] princes in whom the oldest Chaldæan royalty was
embodied. Both of these seals seem to have been engraved in Ur,
the home of that dynasty. We have given several other variants of
the same theme (Vol. I., Figs. 17–20, and above, Figs. 40 and 124);
[311] here are two more found by M. de Sarzec at Tello (Figs. 143,
144). In the first of these two streams seem to flow from the
shoulders of the seated deity; they may have some connection with
that worship of the two great rivers whose traces appear elsewhere.
[312] In the second example, which is not a little rough and summary
in its execution, the figures are believed to be those of women, on
account of the way in which the hair is arranged. It is clubbed with
ribbons at the back of the neck. The artist seems also to have tried
to suggest the amplitude of the female bosom. On the whole we may
believe the scene to represent a goddess—Istar perhaps—
surrounded by worshippers of her own sex. In the Louvre there is a
cylinder with a scene of the same kind, but more complex and, for
us, more obscure (Fig. 145). A seated figure, apparently female from
the long hair flowing over the shoulders, sits upon a low stool and
holds a child upon her knees. In front of the group thus formed
stands a man who seems to be offering some beverage in a horn-
shaped cup. Behind him there are three not inelegant vases upon a
bracket, and a man kneeling beside a large jar upon a tripod. The
latter holds in his hand the spoon with which he has filled the goblet
presented by his companion. We may, perhaps, take the whole
scene as a preparation for a feast offered to one of those goddesses
of maternity whom we find on the terra-cottas (see above Fig. 107).
We shall not here go into the question whether we may see in all this
an episode in the legend of the ancient Sargon, the royal infant
whom his mother exposed upon the water after his clandestine birth;
after commencing like Moses, the hero of this adventure was found
and brought up by a boatman, and became the founder of an empire
when he grew to manhood, like Cyrus and Romulus.[313]
Fig. 146.—Chaldæan cylinder. Montigny collection.
If we may believe M. Ménant some of the cylinders belonging to
this period represent human sacrifices. Such he supposes to be the
theme of the example reproduced in Fig. 146. The figure with arm
uplifted would be the priest brandishing his mace over the kneeling
victim, who turns and begs in vain for mercy. The issue of the
unequal struggle is hinted at by the dissevered head introduced in
the lower left-hand corner. To make our description complete we
must notice the subordinate passage, a rampant leopard, winged,
preparing to devour a gazelle.[314] The conjecture is specious, but
until confirmatory texts are discovered, it will remain a conjecture.
Those texts that have been quoted in support of it are vague in the
first place, and, in the second, they appear to refer less to the
sacrifice of human victims than to holocausts of infants, who must
have been thrown into the flames as they were in Phœnicia. Why
should we not look upon it as an emblem of the royal victories, an
emblem similar in kind to the group that recurs so persistently in
Egyptian sculpture, from the time of the ancient Empire to that of the
Ptolemies?[315] The gesture in each case is almost exactly the
same; the weapon raised over the vanquished both in the Theban
relief and the Chaldæan cylinder is well fitted to suggest the power of
the conqueror and his cruel revenges. We have reproduced this
example less for its subject than for the character of its execution.
The figures are modelled in a very rough-and-ready fashion; we
might almost call it a sketch upon stone. The movement, however, of
the two chief figures is well understood and expressive.
Fig. 147.—Chaldæan cylinder. Basalt.

Another and perhaps still richer series is composed of stones on
which the war waged by Izdubar and his faithful Hea-bani against the
monsters is figured.[316] We have already shown Izdubar carrying off
a lion he has killed (see above, Fig. 35). Another task of the
Mesopotamian Hercules is shown in Fig. 147, where he is engaged
in a struggle with the celestial human-headed bull, who has been
roused to attack the hero by Istar, whose love the hero has refused.
[317]
In this cylinder it will be noticed that Izdubar is repeated twice,

once in profile and once full face. Close to him Hea-bani is wrestling
with a lion, the bull’s companion and assistant. In another example
we find Izdubar alone (Fig. 148) and maintaining a vigorous struggle
against a bull with long straight horns, and at the same time turning
his head so as to follow a combat between a lion and ibex that is
going on behind him.[318] The action of both these latter animals is
rendered with great freedom and truth. We have already had to draw
attention to the merit that distinguishes not a few of the animals in
these cylinders.[319] This merit is to be found in almost every
composition in which the artist has been content to make use of
natural types. It is only when he compiles impossible monsters that
the forms become awkward and confused. An instance of this may
be found in a cylinder found by M. de Sarzec at Tello, on which
winged quadrupeds seizing and devouring gazelles are portrayed
(Fig. 149). Too many figures are brought together in the narrow
space and the result is confusion. We are not, however, disposed to
accept this cylinder as belonging to the first years of Chaldæan art. It
is of veined agate, a material that was not among the earliest
employed; but there are many more on which similar scenes are
engraved, and which, by their execution, may be safely placed
among the most ancient products of art.[320]
Fig. 148.—Chaldæan cylinder. Black marble. French

National Library.
One of the earliest types invented by the imaginations of these
people was that of the strange and chaotic beings who, according to
the traditions collected by Berosus, lived upon the earth before the
creation of man, creatures in which the forms and limbs afterwards
separated and distinguished by nature, were mixed up as if by
accident. The text in question is of the very greatest interest and
value. It proves that the composite figures of which Chaldæan art
was so fond were not a simple caprice of the artists who made them,
but were suggested by a cosmic theory of which they formed, as it
were, a plastic embodiment and illustration.
“There was a time,” says Berosus, “when all was water and
darkness, in which monstrous animals were spontaneously
engendered: men with two wings, and some with four; with two
faces, and two heads, the one male and the other female, and with
the other features of both sexes united in their single bodies; men
with the legs and horns of a goat and the feet of a horse; others with
the hind quarters of a horse and the upper part of a man, like the
hippocentaurs. There were also bulls with human heads, dogs with
four bodies and fishes’ tails, and other quadrupeds in which various
animal forms were blended, fishes, reptiles, serpents, and all kinds
of monsters with the greatest variety in their forms, monsters whose
images we see in the paintings of the temple of Bel at Babylon.”[321]
Of all these fantastic creatures there are hardly any but may be
found on some cylinder, and if there be one or two still missing, it is
very probable that future discoveries will fill up the gap.
Fig. 149.—Chaldæan cylinder of veined

agate. Louvre.
Before quitting these remains from the earliest school of gem
engraving, we must draw attention for a moment to the way in which
it treats costume. In most cases the folds of the stuff are imitated by
very fine parallel strokes. Sometimes, as, for instance, in the figure
on the right of Ourkam’s seal (Vol. I., Fig. 3), these close and slightly
sinuous lines extend without interruption from the top to the bottom
of the dress, but in most cases they are crossed by several
transverse bands, probably coloured, either woven into the material
or sewn upon it (see Vol. I., Figs. 3, 17, and 20, and above, Figs. 39
and 41). We have already encountered this method of treating
drapery in certain statuettes from the same place and time (Figs. 99
and 100), but we never find it in Assyria or in Chaldæa after the fall
of Nineveh, either in statues or on engraved stones.
There is another characteristic detail that should not be forgotten,
namely, the caps turned up at the side in the shape of horns (Vol. I.,
Fig. 17 and above, Fig. 143). By this head-dress and the plaited
robes a Chaldæan cylinder may be at once recognised as dating
from these remote ages. Fashions and methods of execution
changed as soon as the preponderance of Assyrian royalty was
assured. Artists of merit must then have migrated northwards and
opened workshops in the cities of the Tigris; but production was
never so great as in the south. Every traveller in those regions
notices that there are far more cylinders to be purchased in the
bazaars of Bagdad and Bassorah than in those of Mossoul.[322] The
glyptic art of Assyria was an exotic, like her sculpture and her
architecture.
Fig. 150.—Archaic Assyrian cylinder. In the Uffizi,

Florence.
In attempting to define the characteristics of the Assyrian
cylinders, and to distinguish them from those of Chaldæa, we may
take as points of departure and as types of the new class, a few
seals bearing legends that enable us to give them a positive date.
Thus we may learn from a signet that once belonged to the governor
of Calah what the execution of the artists employed by the princes of
Elassar and Nimroud was like (Fig. 150). We need not hesitate to
assign this cylinder to the first Assyrian monarchy. The
workmanship, at once careful and awkward, belongs to a time when
all the difficulties of gem engraving had not yet been overcome. In
the wings of the genius and the legs of the personage who follows
him the management of the instrument used is that of an art still in its
infancy. In this seal then we have a valuable example of what we
may call The Archaic Assyrian Cylinder. We have already figured
several in which the same characteristics appear (Figs. 124, 139,
and 140). In the same class we may put a number of cylinders on
which scenes of worship are represented with slight variations (Figs.
151 and 152).[323] The figure of the king standing before the altar
with his right hand upon his bow resembles the Assurnazirpal in
several of the Nimroud reliefs (see above, Fig. 140). The Balawat
gates and other remains from the same time have already made us
acquainted with the accessories of the act of worship figured in the
last of these two cylinders, especially with the short column
surmounted by a cone (Plate XII).
Fig. 151.—Assyrian cylinder. Serpentine. National

Library, Paris.
Fig. 152.—Assyrian cylinder. Serpentine. National Library,
Paris.
Fig. 153.—Assyrian cylinder. British Museum.

Drawn by Wallet.
We now come to the epoch of the Sargonids with its still more
refined and skilful art, of which an exquisite cylinder in the British
Museum may be taken as an example (Fig. 153). The name of a
personage called Musesinip has been read upon it, and it is believed
to be a reduction from a contemporary bas-relief. In the centre
appears the holy tree with the supreme deity floating over it in the
winged disk. On each side of the tree is the figure of a king with a
winged eagle-headed genius behind him. These last-named
creatures have their right hands raised, while in their left they hold
the bronze buckets we have already encountered at Nimroud (Vol. I.,
Fig. 8). There is one detail which is not to be found, so far as I know,
in the bas-reliefs, namely, the double cord that descends from the
winged disk into the hands of the king. The artist, no doubt, meant to
symbolize by this the communication established by prayer between
the prince and his divine protector.
Among the dated and authenticated examples from this epoch
the cylinder inscribed with the name of Ursana, king of Musasir and
adversary of Sargon, may be quoted.[324] We do not reproduce it
because it differs so little from the example of Assyrian gem
engraving given in our Fig. 141. The same genius appears in the
middle, but instead of two winged monsters he holds two ostriches
by the neck. We have already encountered this fight between a man
and an ostrich on a stone dating from the same century (Fig. 75). We
may name as a last example the stone found by Layard at
Kouyundjik, which may be the very signet of Sennacherib himself
(Vol. I., Fig. 70).
If we place all these impressions side by side we shall find they
have a certain number of common characteristics which will enable
us to recognize those of Assyrian parentage even when they bear no
lettering, or when their inscriptions tell us nothing as to their origin. In
the first place they are mostly of fine materials, such as chalcedony
or onyx. Secondly, they contain sacred emblems and types that are
not to be found in the primitive arts of Chaldæa, such as the mystic
tree, the winged globe, the eagle-headed genius, &c. Thirdly, the
fantastic animals of Assyria are different in general appearance from
those of the southern kingdom; and, finally, the costume of the two
countries is not the same. In the cylinders from Calah and Nineveh
we find neither the flounced robes nor the cap with turned-up
borders. As in the palace reliefs, the mantle-fringes cross the figure
slanting-wise—an obliquity which affords a ready means of
distinguishing between a native of Assyria and one of Chaldæa.
Fig. 154.—Chaldæan cylinder dating from the
second monarchy. Black jasper. British
Museum.
Fig. 155.—Impression of a cylinder on a contract; from Ménant.[2]

The use of the cylinder persisted after the fall of Nineveh and
throughout the second Chaldæan monarchy, but the types from this
late epoch display very little invention or variety. The most common
of all shows a personage standing bare-headed before two altars,
one bearing the disk of the sun, the other that of the moon (Fig. 154).
[325] This individual is sometimes bearded, sometimes shaven. His
costume is neither that of early Chaldæa nor the twisted robe of
Assyria. Sometimes one of the altars or the field is occupied by a
monster with a goat’s head and a fish’s body and tail, as in the
impression left by a cylinder on a contract dated “the twelfth year of
Darius, king of Babylon, king of the nations” (Fig. 155).[326] The use
of these types lasted in the valley of the Euphrates all through the
Achæmenid supremacy. No inscriptions were used. Names and
dates were engraved by hand on the clay after the seal had been
placed upon it. We can see clearly from the monotony of the images,
which are repeated almost unchanged on hundreds of tablets, that
the art of gem-engraving was in full decadence. The people were
enslaved, they lived upon the memory of their past, creating neither
new forms nor new ideas. They no longer attempted to make their
seals works of art; they looked upon them as mere utensils.
Fig. 156.—Cylinder with Aramaic characters. Vienna Museum.

Cylinders are sometimes found in this region inscribed with
Aramaic characters, like the weights from Nimroud. Such, for
instance, is one representing a dismounted hunter meeting the
charge of a lion,[327] while his horse stands behind him and awaits
the issue of the struggle (Fig. 156). The costume of the hunter is
neither Assyrian nor Chaldæan. He has been supposed to represent
a Scythian. The Scythian figured at Bisitun has the same pointed
bonnet or cowl. Cylinders of this kind will long be a difficulty for the
classifier.[328]
The cylindrical form was not the only one used by the inhabitants
of Mesopotamia for their seals. Small objects in pietra dura of a
different shape are now often found in the country, and are beginning
to hold their own in our museums; these are pyramids, spheroids,
and especially cones. Every cone, except one or two which may
never, perhaps, have been finished, is pierced near its summit with a
hole for suspension. There has never been any doubt from the first
that they were signets. Their bases, which are generally flat, but
sometimes convex or concave, are always engraved in intaglio. The
impression was thus obtained at one stroke, at one pressure of the
hand, and it was in all probability the greater ease with which that
operation could be carried out that in time led to the supercession of
the cylinder by the cone. The use of the latter became almost
universal in the time of the Seleucidæ and Parthians.
Fig. 157.—Cone. Sapphirine

chalcedony.[329]
Fig. 158.—Cone. Sapphirine

chalcedony.[330]
It is when they grow old that both nations and individuals turn
their attention to ease and comfort. The Chaldees were long
contented with the cylinder, although, as a seal, it was a very

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Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary

Theory of Art 1st ed. Edition Mario

ISBN 978-3-030-45280-3 ISBN 978-3-030-45281-0 (eBook)

Generally deemed inadequate to account for the postmodern issues of

regression as part of the same progressive and developmental movement

According to this framework then, the difficulties Adorno objectively

What I suggest in this book is in particular to read Adorno’s reaction

exemplified also by other recent contributions to the critical debate.4

Firenze, Italy Mario Farina

1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the

2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the

3 Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic 93

3.3 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (i): Three

4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary

5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel189

A Amorbach. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und

BW4 Th.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927–1969, 4 Vols., ed.

Pei Prefazione all’edizione italiana [Preface to the Italian Edition].

ND Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London-New York:

In one of the most influential books for Adorno’s philosophical educa-

© The Author(s) 2020 1

expression of that reification” (WnK: 825–826, EoM: 128). To be fair,

1.1  ierkegaard (i): The Autonomy of Art

However, it is worth mentioning that the book’s aim is twofold: to over-

objectivity, the late capitalistic oppression of the individual cannot be

environment6 form the theoretical structure of Adorno’s interpretative

showcased in the text can be seen, in fact, as the attempt to provide an

universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting.

Pupil of the neo-Kantian scholar Cornelius, and certainly fascinated

This transition toward the historicization of the Kantian judgment

Kierkegaard, in contrast to Hegel, failed to achieve historical concretion—

In this passage Adorno sums up the overall problem of history in his

being submitted to the metaphysical and idealistic determination of the

idea of intérieur in the light of the typical nineteenth-century figure of

1.2  ierkegaard (ii): The Myth

nature attractive and beautiful because it seems to be designed precisely

amounts to a naïve and mystical understanding of art,27 whose sole con-

become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority”

1.3  he Anti-Romantic Choice and Its

conceptual principle drives Adorno on the path of the resolution of the

formal composition of social conflicts, achieved precisely by depositing

The “romantic transfiguration of craftsmanship” would be therefore the

Fig. 140.—Cylinder of black jasper. British Museum.

Fig. 141.—Assyrian cylinder. British Museum. Drawn by

Fig. 142.—Chaldæan cylinder. Marble or porphyry. New York

Fig. 143.—Chaldæan cylinder. Green serpentine. Louvre. Drawn

Fig. 145.—Chaldæan cylinder. Basalt. Louvre.

Fig. 147.—Chaldæan cylinder. Basalt.

In this cylinder it will be noticed that Izdubar is repeated twice,

Fig. 148.—Chaldæan cylinder. Black marble. French

Fig. 149.—Chaldæan cylinder of veined

Fig. 150.—Archaic Assyrian cylinder. In the Uffizi,

Fig. 151.—Assyrian cylinder. Serpentine. National

Fig. 153.—Assyrian cylinder. British Museum.

Fig. 155.—Impression of a cylinder on a contract; from Ménant.[2]

Fig. 156.—Cylinder with Aramaic characters. Vienna Museum.

Fig. 157.—Cone. Sapphirine

Fig. 158.—Cone. Sapphirine

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Firenze, Italy Mario Farina

1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the

2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the

3 Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic 93

3.3 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (i): Three

4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary

5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel189

1.1 ierkegaard (i): The Autonomy of Art

1.2 ierkegaard (ii): The Myth

1.3 he Anti-Romantic Choice and Its