Cursory review of the reception of Adorno's unfinished Aesthetic Theory up to the present suggests that an introduction to the book's major concerns, its structure (or lack thereof), and its concepts is missing to this date. Going back to Fredric Jameson's watershed contribution Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), the article attempts to provide the introduction missing to date. It is organized around key concepts of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, beginning with the guiding juxtaposition of Kant's formalist (...) aesthetics vs. Hegel's content aesthetics and the various notions of the End of Art, followed by two sections on art and its respective others (from the culture industry and art appreciation to nature and natural beauty), and concluding with the axiom of suffering and its impact on the key notions of semblance, expression, and mimesis. (shrink)

Since Hegel, the idea of an end of art has become a staple of aesthetic theory. This book analyzes its role and its rhetoric in Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger in order to account for the topic's enduring persistence. In addition to providing a general overview of the main thinkers of post-Idealist German aesthetics, the book explores the relationship between tradition and modernity. For despite the differences that distinguish one philosopher's end of art from another's, all authors treated here (...) turn the end of art into an occasion to thematize and to reflect on the very thing that modernism cannot or should not be: tradition. As a discourse, the end of art is one of our modern traditions. (shrink)

As strategies of suspicion, skeptical philosophies are themselves suspicious. Despite of their routinely anti-systematic rhetoric, skeptics raise the suspicion of secretly playing into the hands of the ruling regime . In his book Skepticism and Epistemology: The Development and Application of the Skeptical Method in Philosophy, Tim Köhne argues at length that a stabilizing, affirmative trait in fact characterizes all argumentative strategies of radical skepticism, for in the final instance it is not doubt that motivates skepticism but instead the desire (...) for coherence or for a system that would rise beyond all doubt. (shrink)

Since the times of Rousseau, education has repeatedly been put forward as a parallel world detached from the state. This insistence on an autonomous education system disregards not only that the imaginary parallel world disaffiliates itself from the state, but that it is disposed indeed, to supplant it. It is a natural consequence of the self-perpetuating dynamic of the term education, emancipated since the time of Rousseau, that, under the exigency of the separation of State and education, that very State's (...) logic is frequently reproduced, which, in the name of autonomous education, one had presumed to counteract. The essay pursues this dynamic force by means of the conception of a Pedagogic Province, in Goethe's 'Wanderjahren', which, in itself portrays a sort of miniature State, in which goods are produced by people having a coherent life-style. (shrink)

A closer look reveals that the intensely researched decade of German Geistesgeschichte was a heterogeneous formation, lacking a unified method and a uniform discursive space, whether of philosophical or any other provenience. By the same token, today one can observe the spectral return of demonized aspects of Geistesgeschichte in similarly capacious and hence diffuse concepts (Anthropocene, diversity, ecology). Against those tendencies, the article suggests a return to the problem of literary history, first articulated by Geistesgeschichte and unsolved to this day.