Adorno’s Radical Positions on Philosophy, Art and Society

Lambert Zuidervaart at the TLS:

Perhaps Adorno’s greatest legacy for philosophers lies in the two books that most absorbed his scholarly attention in the 1960s and overlapped with the courses he was teaching: Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory, published posthumously in 1970. Together with a volume he had planned on moral philosophy but did not live to write, these are the books Adorno himself wanted to have “weighed in the balance”. Both are complex and uncompromising summations of Adorno’s philosophy; the first focused on questions about experience, knowledge, history and metaphysics, and the second addressing aesthetics, beauty, art and society.

The two books also work out the implications of Horkheimer and Adorno’s wartime social critique for the radical change in philosophical approach already envisioned in Adorno’s inaugural lecture of 1931.

more here.