Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 337-349, September 2021.

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that, in modernity, art and philosophy are reciprocally dependent upon each other for legitimation and critical force. This claim has puzzled scholars and provoked controversy. I argue that Adorno’s thesis may be comprehended in the following manner: art requires philosophy because, without the latter, art would lack the power to critique social and historical reality (in particular, the ideological elements that often remain invisible as second nature), and to rationally interpret the material particularity expressed by (...) such reality; and, conversely, philosophy requires art because the latter expresses historical experience to reason. Such material historical experience is necessary in order to prevent philosophy from falling into ideological convention; idle speculation; or abstract and reified instrumentality. Thus, the constellation of history, art, and philosophy is essential to Adorno’s aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper seeks to redress the marginalization of Adorno in environmental philosophical discourse. Kate Soper describes two opposing ways of conceiving nature. There is the redemptive “nature-endorsing” paradigm that lays claim to the intrinsic value or “otherness” of nature. Conversely, the “nature-sceptical” approach denies that we can access originary, untouched nature. This paper argues that the significance of Adorno’s treatment of natural beauty lies in how he brings these approaches together. In writings that resonate with the dual connotations of Sebald’s (...) phrase “after nature”, Adorno both affirms the skeptical point that we cannot transcend a human history alienated from nature as well as retaining redemptive hope wherein art “after” nature seeks creative possibilities from out of the very ruins of history marked by nature’s destruction. (shrink)

In Politics without Vision, Tracy Strong claims that in order to adequately grasp the politics of the twentieth century, and so be capable of meeting the challenges of the present, political theory must think without banisters. In this article I take up the task of thinking without banisters through the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Following the startling claim made by Adorno in a lecture course in 1963 that the term ‘humanity’ tends to ‘reify’ and ‘falsify’ important moral issues, I (...) examine three different usages of the concept of humanity in Adorno’s work, which I develop as a critique of foundations. I argue that understanding Adorno’s critique of humanity and of foundations involves understanding the role played by art in connecting the concepts of morality and politics. In connecting morality and politics in this manner, Adorno moves from a moral theory of resistance to a political theory of transformation whose insistence on the radical discontinuity between the present and the future serves as a model of a political theory without banisters. (shrink)