ABSTRACT
If it were possible to summarize Adorno’s achievement in his Aesthetic Theory, perhaps we could say that he disenchants art to reenchant the world, and by so doing reveals a deep ethical impulse within art. Whenever art seemed to disclose meanings underlying our existence, or to celebrate nature’s beauty as a promise of happiness, or to intimate that those who are different from us live out possibilities in ways that also could belong to us, art turns around on itself to betray the illusory qualities of these images. Art deprives us of the belief that our world can be known in such ways, by uncovering a great divide that separates us from what lies unknown on the other side and is forever different from what we know it to be. Unforgivingly and uniquely reflexive, as art’s recognition of the unknown establishes limits to what can be learned from art it establishes limits to reason as well, and it is precisely in the limits to enlightenment installed by the unknown that art’s ethical impulse lies. Reenchanting the world by finding it always different from our every thought of it, art releases reason from the interest in mastery inherent in its need to universalize itself, from its mission to find itself, its principles and its laws and the world to which they pertain, everywhere and always the same. Art sustains a notion of aesthetic rationality, which through the artwork encourages a sensibility to the harm inflicted on difference in every attempt to cross the divide and make the unknown known as though the world conformed to its representations. Affirming the unknown by recognizing the difference between our thought of the world and the world itself, illuminating the violence that accompanies the attempt, in every representation of difference, to cross the divide between thinking and being, art implores us to leave difference be. Through art all the difference in the world opaque to reason takes refuge in a depth beneath the divide separating the unknown world from the known.
