ABSTRACT
The extent to which Romantic hopes for art in modernity come in the twentieth century to be threatened by historical developments that put the very notion of art into question was evident in Benjamin’s Marxist work in the 1930s. T.W.Adorno’s work on aesthetics is in this respect the most radical attempt to salvage, rather than abandon, the Romantic heritage. In this chapter I want to highlight certain aspects of Adorno’s work in the light of our concerns so far: I shall not undertake anything remotely resembling an exhaustive account of Adorno. Rather than get lost in generalities it is, in line with Adorno’s own assumptions, better to engage in detail with a few key aspects of his work within the framework we have already established. This will entail concentrating upon his route to his more elaborated positions, rather than giving an analysis of Negative Dialectics (ND) and Aesthetic Theory (AT) themselves. 1 Adorno’s work is so complex and so uneven that any attempt either to give a characterisation of, or to pass a verdict on, his philosophy ‘as a whole’ is likely to conceal more than it reveals. An account which simply takes up some of what Adorno says concerning certain major questions, of the kind volunteered here, may in fact do Adorno’s thought more justice. Many of the most influential and important responses to Adorno, such as those of Wellmer and Habermas, are concerned to locate him in a particular theoretical space, which is then shown to be untenable. This creates a specific Adorno, such as the philosopher who reveals by his failure the aporias of a philosophical model which his critics wish to abandon. In the process other Adornos tend to be neglected, at the cost of some vital insights. Although it is crucial to try to establish the predominant conceptual assumptions in Adorno’s texts, careful reading of the best of those texts often reveals that those assumptions do not finally govern how the texts can best be understood. I have no firm idea how consistent one can make ‘Adorno’, though I am pretty sure he is often not wholly consistent. On the other hand the competing Adornos are one of the vital reminders in modern thought that 239there should be no comfortable position from which to judge the most important philosophical issues.
