Abstract

Long awaited, Adorno's posthumous Aesthetic Theory is finally available in English. It is the culmination of a lifetime of aesthetic investigation and the most important aesthetics of the century. However renowned the difficulty of Adorno's work, comparing the Aesthetic Theory with his earlier work, such as the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is like juxtaposing New York City and seventeenth century Amsterdam. The peculiarity of its language is so intense that it is questionable what language it was written in. The translation has made enormous efforts to make the book understandable. Many passages have been crisply rendered; many lines that force the most devoted reader of the German to break off, sputtering to the surface for air, have been ingeniously and knowledgeably drawn into English