Models of experience -- The interpenetration of concepts and society -- Negativism and truth -- Texture, performativity, and truth -- Aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection -- Beethoven, proust, and applying adorno's aesthetic theory.

In this article I revisit A. C. Bradley's account of form/content unity through the lens of both Peter Kivy's and Peter Lamarque's recent work on Bradley's lecture “Poetry for Poetry's Sake.” I argue that Lamarque gives a superior account of Bradley's argument. However, Lamarque claims that form/content unity should be understood as an imposition applied by the reader to poetry. Working with the counterexample of modernist poetry, I throw doubt on both this claim and some associated presuppositions found in Lamarque's (...) account. Modernist poetry appears to intermittently fail to exhibit form/content unity; its unique value also appears bound up with this intermittent failure. However—against the moderates, like Kivy and Kelly Dean Jolley, who this counterexample may seem to support—I claim Lamarque is nonetheless correct that form/content unity is intrinsic in response to poetic value. I argue form/content unity should be seen as a demand, which poems can intentionally frustrate. (shrink)

Adorno’s commitment to anti-foundationalism generates a concern over how his ethically normative appraisals of social phenomena can be founded. Drawing on both Kohlmann and Bernstein’s account, I produce a new reading which contends somatic impulses are capable of bearing intrinsically normative epistemic and moral content. This entails a new way of understanding Adorno’s contention that Auschwitz produced a new categorical imperative. Working with Bernstein’s account, I claim that Auschwitz makes manifest the hostility of the instrumentalization of reason to the somatic (...) grounds of reason. One’s mimetic identification with the victims of Auschwitz arouses a self-preserving desire to intercede in and re-orient the progress of reason itself, for the sake of one’s own somatic integrity. In closing, I claim – contra Zuidervaart – that this reading allows us to place the ethical as primary in Adorno, without reducing the political to it. (shrink)

adorno’s philosophy bristles with terms that, shorn from any settled stipulative definition, present a challenge to the reader.2 Adorno’s difficult concept of “non-identity” is perhaps the most notorious, but it is “mimesis” that more than any other resists easy comprehension. Despite this, or because of it, mimesis has received sustained and enthusiastic attention. Jameson goes so far as it say that mimesis is for Adorno a “foundational concept, never defined nor argued but always alluded to, by name, as though it (...) had pre-existed all the texts.”3 While the talk of foundational concepts is perhaps a little strong, Adorno gives us cause to think mimesis is a central part of his philosophy, due to its infrequent.. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Peter Kivy’s contention that music is incapable of profundity is correct only in a limited sense. So long as we associate profundity with depth of subject matter, even the revisions proposed by Stephen Davies and Julian Dodd are incapable of delivering an account of musical profundity which has the correct scope. Theories of profundity based on criteria of exemplification and non-denotational expression of content remain vulnerable to Kivy’s well-chosen counter-examples of non-profound artworks which meet (...) these criteria. However, the established debate presumes that profundity is only possible through a depth of subject matter; I argue that there is an alternative form off profundity which music does exhibit, relating to its formal complexity. This profundity I term ‘anti-humanist’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I consider Adorno's claim that art is at, or is coming to, an ‘end’. I consider Adorno's account in relation to the work of Arthur Danto and G. W. F. Hegel. I employ Danto's account, together with two distinct interpretive glosses of Hegel's account, as heuristic devices in order to clarify both Adorno's own arguments, and the context within which they are being advanced. I argue that while Danto and Hegel see art as coming to an end (...) autonomously, owing to art's successful realization of its governing principle, Adorno by contrast sees art as coming to an end heteronomously. Art's narrative is forcibly broken off, rather than completed. Adorno's account, indebted to Hegel, of art's commitment both to autonomy and the realization of ‘spiritual needs’ is explored in order to clarify how, on Adorno's view, this has happened to art; and why, precisely, he believes art is coming to an end. (shrink)

I will argue that there are (at least) two species of musical silence, which cannot be distinguished by attending to how these silences sound. I term these two kinds of musical silence ‘capacious’ and ‘opaque’. Both capacious and opaque musical silences might occur in the midst of the ongoing production of sound or might exist in the complete absence of sound. Both kinds of silence can, in certain conditions, be sonically identical, but both are always received by the listening ear (...) in importantly different ways. I will discuss our ability to distinguish between these silences, even when they ‘sound’ the same. I will argue that the accounts of musical silence and silent music offered by (among others) Levinson, Kania, and Davies are vitiated by their failure to distinguish between these kinds of musical silence. I distinguish these kinds of silence by the kinds of listening activity associated with them, and the ideal structure of such listening practices. (shrink)

This paper traces some lines of influence between post-Kantianism and Critical Theory. In the first part of the paper, we discuss Fichte and Hegel; in the second, we discuss Horkheimer, Adorno, and Honneth.

In this chapter I consider what the limits of autonomous aesthetic experience are, for Adorno. Autonomous aesthetic experience can, in Adorno's view, lead us to knowledge of facts about the world external to the artwork. It is challenging to reconcile this with his account of the “hermetically sealed” nature of artworks. In response, I argue that aesthetic experience is for Adorno intrinsically truth‐directed, and intrinsically speculative.

Whether art can be wholly autonomous has been repeatedly challenged in the modern history of aesthetics. In this collection of specially-commissioned chapters, a team of experts discuss the extent to which art can be explained purely in terms of aesthetic categories. Covering examples from Philosophy, Music and Art History and drawing on continental and analytic sources, this volume clarifies the relationship between artworks and extra-aesthetic considerations, including historic, cultural or economic factors. It presents a comprehensive overview of the question of (...) aesthetic autonomy, exploring its relevance to both philosophy and the comprehension of specific artworks themselves. By closely examining how the creation of artworks, and our judgements of these artworks, relate to society and history, Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy provides an insightful and sustained discussion of a major question in aesthetic philosophy. (shrink)

Adorno sees experience as intrinsically interpretative. As interpretation requires normative constraints, in order to guide and channel this interpretative engagement, this opens the question of how experience acquires its motivating criteria. If experience is from the first criterially structured, how are these criteria acquired? Moreover, as these criteria are acquired in isolation from experience – as they are the precondition of that experience – are these criteria sensitive to the particularity of the experiences they produce? In order to address these (...) questions, and the problems they threaten to create for Adorno’s epistemology, I look at Adorno’s theory of impulse and cognition. I argue that Adorno grounds the criterial structure of experience and reason in self-preservation. This provides both a motivation and a determining constraint on the criterial structure of experience. It is also a determining influence which is epistemically flexible and compatible with Adorno’s project of tracing .. (shrink)

Prehistoric artefacts are capable of great beauty, despite our usually being in ignorance of the kind of cultural and interpretive practices which occasioned them, and which would make clear to us what such artefacts meant. I argue that often our aesthetic response to these artefacts—where we have no firm knowledge of their cultural context—is bound up with their ability to present a kind of physiognomy of the historical relationship between such objects, the historical processes which produced them and went on (...) to produce us, and ourselves. I claim further that this physiognomy, and the pathos associated with it, makes possible an aesthetic experience related to the dynamically sublime. I close by considering the consequences of this aesthetic experience for the restoration of prehistorical artefacts, and argue that it demonstrates and explains why—in these cases—a purist form of restoration is required. (shrink)

Axel Honneth has had considerable success in grounding his normative social philosophy on recognitive structures, and the capacity of experiences of disrespect to stimulate “struggles for recognition.” These struggles for recognition are held to yield advances in social structure, and to expand the individual's capacity for self-realization. In this paper, I show that this account relies on a supressed dichotomy between the immediate pre-recognitive self, and the mediated self produced intersubjectively. I argue that this dichotomy persists beyond Honneth's explicit use (...) of Meadian terminology, and that Honneth relies on an unsophisticated account of mediation which, once critiqued, undermines his attempt to derive norms from recognition simpliciter. A promising alternative is found in Adorno's analysis of humanism and the category of the individual, which shows that true fidelity to the aims of humanism entails a rejection of humanism itself, as the individual is a proleptic category. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is threefold. In the first place, I should like to show that Adorno’s philosophy is dependent, to a degree perhaps not always directly recognized in the literature, on a deeply contentious view on the relationship between the mind and the body. In order to show this, I explore and bring out the epistemic and ethical stakes for Adorno’s theory of the relationship between mind and body. Secondly, I move to better articulate precisely what Adorno’s view (...) on the nature of this relationship is. I hold that his position revolves around positing a porous boundary between the domains of the somatic and the cognitive. In closing, I show that Adorno’s account relies on this domain boundary being unidirectionally porous, in that determination of somatic impulses by cognitive content does not seem a live option for Adorno. I go on to note that this smuggles in a dubious position which does a lot of unearned work. The stakes which his implicit account of the body and mind relationship serv.. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Spinoza's claim at E1P15 that “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God” remains exegetically troubling. Briefly noting some unresolved difficulties with the two dominant interpretations of Spinoza's account of the relationship between finite modes and God (these being the inherence and causal dependence readings), I move to claim that there is a third, neglected reading available which deserves consideration. I argue that, perhaps surprisingly, Althusser's notion of “structural (...) causality,” putatively derived from Spinoza himself, can be used to construct this reading. Althusser's original notion of “structural causality” is explained and clarified further, its advantages outlined over competing readings of Spinoza, and exegetical evidence for its applicability to Spinoza is then produced. (shrink)