Adornos Aesthetics As A Literary Theory of Art PDF

Adorno’s Aesthetics
as a Literary Theory
of Art
m a r io fa r i n a
Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art
Mario Farina
Adorno’s Aesthetics
as a Literary Theory
of Art
Mario Farina
Department of Letters and Philosophy
University of Florence
Firenze, Italy
ISBN 978-3-030-45280-3 ISBN 978-3-030-45281-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
Generally deemed inadequate to account for the postmodern issues of

the second half of the twentieth century, Adorno’s philosophical contri-
butions, as Fredric Jameson acknowledged thirty years ago, have been
met by two main groups of objections (Jameson 1996, p. 229). As to the
first, with Jürgen Habermas at the head, Adorno’s philosophy is seen as
being burdened by the Marxian orthodox idea of class struggle, and
thereby as unable to understand contemporary society.1 The second
strand of criticism, instead, looks more closely at Adorno’s aesthetics as at
a typically modernist, and therefore non-postmodernist, explanation of
art. This second set of objections can be traced back to Jean-Françoise
Lyotard, and how he sees Adorno’s emancipatory idea of history as by-
product of the modern hope in the integrity of subjectivity (Lyotard
1974, pp. 127–137). Along the same line can also be placed Peter Bürger’s
approach and his idea of postmodernism as a peculiar and negative defi-
nition of what is simply a phase of modernity itself. In this regard, Bürger
sees in Adorno’s aesthetics an obstinate reluctance in dealing with the fact
that the contemporary condition of art includes both progression and
1
As Habermas writes, Adorno and Horkheimer “held fast to the basic assumptions of the theory of
value as the core of their tacit orthodoxy, and in this way they blinded themselves to the realities of
a developed capitalism based on the pacification of class conflict through welfare-state measures”
(Habermas 1987, p. 334).
v
vi Preface
regression as part of the same progressive and developmental movement

(Bürger 1983, pp. 177–197). These paradigmatic and interconnected
positions—Adorno as a too obstinate Marxist or as too modernist to have
a clear understanding of late- or postmodernity—have defined the theo-
retical ground for large part of the criticism targeting Adorno’s under-
standing of philosophy of art, such as the wide skepticism with which
even non-specialists judge his interpretation of Jazz music, as exemplified
by Eric J. Hobsbawm’s words: “Adorno wrote some of the most stupid
pages ever written about jazz” (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300).
Connected to the question of modernism is also the second mortal sin
of Adorno’s aesthetics, namely its ban on aesthetic pleasure and enjoy-
ment. As Espen Hammer shows, in fact, while vindicating the role of
classical beauty, a new conservative cultural trend in authors such as
Roger Scruton and Alexander Nehamas vehemently attacks one of the
pillars of Adorno’s comprehension of art and also what supposedly quali-
fies it as a modernist aesthetic theory (Hammer 2015, pp. 247–249).
Also because of its “modernist” connotation, the postmodern strand of
Adorno’s detractors understands his rejection of aesthetic pleasure as the
result of his miscomprehension and culturally elitist disgust for popular
mass culture,2 as exemplified by the “perverse rant against popular music”
that Jerrold Levinson (2015, p. 44) finds in his musicology.
There is no doubt, in fact, that Adorno’s philosophy of art is permeated
by tensions originating in how the subject relates to the enjoyment of the
artistic object. “Aesthetic enjoyment”—writes Adorno in a personal note of
1955—“in the superficial sense of the enjoyment of the artistic object as if
it were a piece of sensuous world, in general does not exist and any aesthet-
ics that starts with that is dull. I have never enjoyed an artwork” (TWAA:
20688). This tension, as the scholarly literature has pointed out, also defines
the historical turning point in the development of art, that Adorno calls
“de-artification” of art, and that Richard Wolin describes as the “final dis-
solution of the essential aesthetic qualities which have until this century
been inseparable from the concepts of art itself” (Wolin 2004, p. 11).
2
As Erica Weitzman (2008, p. 185) suggests, “Adorno has been vigorously and exhaustively criti-
cized, by people from every point on the political spectrum, for being a pseudo-revolutionary kill
joy, a narrow-minded elitist, a closet conservative, the fetishizer of his own (historically particular)
miserabilism!”.
Preface vii
According to this framework then, the difficulties Adorno objectively

faces in the understanding of the most advanced tendencies of art in his
time—Adorno is indeed infamous for rarely mentioning the most rele-
vant post-avant-gardist phenomena—can be explained in terms of some
sort of aesthetic conservatism and elitism that prevents his otherwise bril-
liant analysis of artistic products from applying to the art of the second
half of the twentieth century. At variance with mainstream interpreta-
tions, what I intend to argue in this book is not only that the develop-
ment of Adorno’s philosophy of art is inspired by a more complex
constellation of elements than the sum of modernism and Marxist dog-
mas, but also that Adorno’s contributions suit particularly well the most
advanced products of postmodernism. Adorno’s work in aesthetics can be
ultimately seen as an attempt to react to the essential tensions exposed by
contemporary art and which originate from a theoretical principle that I
identify as “the dissolution of the aesthetic element”. In accordance with
large part of the aesthetic debate of the second half of the past century,
Adorno acknowledges an epochal turn in the qualification of art. This
turn consists in the cancellation of the difference between art and every-
day objects, or rather in the trend fostering the annulment of any aesthetic
distinction among them. What should be remarked in this regard is the
contrast between Adorno’s fear for the transformation of art into a com-
mon good and, for example, the satisfaction with which Arthur Danto
welcomes this tendency. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes that “cut loose
from its immanent claim to objectivity, art would be nothing but a more
or less organized system of stimuli-conditioning reflexes […]. The result
would be the negation of the difference between artworks and merely
sensual qualities; it would be an empirical entity, nothing more than—in
American argot—a battery of tests, and the adequate means for giving an
account of art would be program analysis or surveys of average group
reactions to artworks or genres” (ÄT: 394 [264]). In passages like this,
Adorno focuses on the same set of problems standing behind the institu-
tional theory of art and Danto’s idea of the end of art, eventually leading
to the theory of the aesthetic indiscernibility of art and non-art. Although
dealing with the same set of historical and philosophical questions,
remarkable differences can be nevertheless detected in their respective
reactions.
viii Preface
What I suggest in this book is in particular to read Adorno’s reaction

to what he perceives as the dissolution of the aesthetic element of art as
laying the ground for the elaboration of a literary theory of art. I will
argue, in fact, that the process of dissolution of the aesthetic is closely
linked to what one can understand as the thing-like nature of the work of
art. In Adorno’s definition of the aesthetic, in fact, the work—as thing, as
objectual element—directly participates to the economic process in
which things become the mediator of the social relationship between
people, in other words it enters the logic of the capital.3 On the contrary,
literature—as an artistic form—is not constituted by things, but by
meaning-relationships that allude to things and to the way in which they
relate to one another. My proposal—it should be made preliminarily
clear—does not entail in any way the convergence of all the arts into lit-
erature, nor the effective dissolution of visual art in general. On the con-
trary, what I intend to show is the fact that in the effective historical
development of art, literature can be seen as the one artistic form which
is able to act as aesthetic guarantee of the existence of something like art
in general. And this is so precisely because its aesthetic material, namely
language, cannot be completely absorbed in the economic process of pro-
duction. In this regard, supportive elements to the theoretical core of my
position can be found, for example, in Eva Geulen’s acknowledgment of
Adorno’s philosophy of art as a philosophy of language. She indeed
observes that “the tension between universality and particularity is great-
est in language, precisely because of the resistance mounted by its discur-
sivity or semanticity. Artworks are said to be like language when they
develop and sustain the tension that characterizes the literary artefact: to
say the particular in a form that is generic” (Geulen 2006a, p. 58; see also
Geulen 2006b, p. 92).
My overall goal is therefore to show that Adorno’s aesthetic, far from
being an old iron, a historical find to be placed in the museum of theo-
ries, actually provides a set of philosophical tools that can be fruitfully
applied within the context of the contemporary theory of art, as
3
According to Marx’s famous quotation, in fact, “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between
persons which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p. 932).
Preface ix
exemplified also by other recent contributions to the critical debate.4

These tools are notably those of the aesthetics as a philosophy of litera-
ture. The last chapter of this book, in fact, is an attempt to pursue an
interpretation of American postmodern novels within the conceptual
framework of Adorno’s aesthetics as a philosophy of literature. Although
I have no intention of jumping into the debate about postmodernism in
general, about its being a part of modernity or an autonomous historical
category, I believe that Adorno’s aesthetic elements are particularly suited
to clarify the otherwise evasive literary nature of American postmodern
novels. While pursuing this aim, I take American postmodern novels as
an extant category in the contemporary literary debate and I refrain pro-
grammatically from assessing its consistency. My merely instrumental use
of the category is meant to allow me to investigate whether the literary
products it designates have something in common and possibly what it is.
I have divided the book into five chapters. In the first, I will present the
very first determination of the aesthetic in Adorno’s thought and thus
introduce what I read as his construction of the aesthetics. In the second,
I will focus on Adorno’s philosophy of music, and I will detect in it the
principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic. In the third chapter, I will
present the process of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, while
turning to Adorno’s late aesthetic production, in particular to his Aesthetic
Theory and the collection, Notes to Literature. In the fourth, I will point to
what I see as the basic theoretical lines of Adorno’s philosophy of litera-
ture, namely a complete set of theoretical tools that can be applied to the
most advanced results of literary production. Finally, in the fifth and last
chapter, I will investigate and account for the formal issues of American
postmodern novels in what I see as its morphological development from
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, through Wallace’s Infinite Jest, to DeLillo’s
Underworld.
Firenze, Italy Mario Farina
4
I refer to the book of Josh Robinson (2018), published under the title of Adorno’s Poetics of Form,
where he shows the connection of Adorno’s literary aesthetic with the contemporary debate about
historicism and formalism, and to which I will refer again in the following.
x Preface
References
Bürger, Peter. 1983. Das Altern der Moderne. In Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed.
Ludwig von Friedeburg, and Jürgen Habermas, 177–197. Frankfurt a.
M.: Suhrkamp.
Geulen, Eva. 2006a. Adorno and the Poetics of Genre. In Adorno and Literature,
ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 53–66. London/New York:
Continuum.
Geulen, Eva. 2006b. The End of Art. Readings in a Rumor after Hegel. Trans.
J. McFarland. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2. Lifeworld
and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Trans. Thomas McCarthy.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Hammer, Espen. 2015. Happiness and Pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetics. In The
Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 90 (4): 247–259.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1993. The Jazz Scene. New York: Pantheon Book.
Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Late Marxism. Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectics.
London: Verso.
Levinson, Jerrold. 2015. Musical Concerns. Essay in Philosophy of Music. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-Françoise. 1974. Adorno as the Devil. In Télos, 19: 127–137.
Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans.
B. Fowkes. London/New York: Penguin.
Robinson, Josh. 2018. Adorno’s Poetics of Form. Albany: SUNY.
Weitzman, Erica. 2008. No “Fun”: Aporias of Pleasure in Adorno’s “Aesthetic
Theory”. In The German Quarterly, 81 (2): 185–202.
Wolin, Richard. 2004. The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Aesthetische
Theorie. In Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Gerard Delanty, vol. II: 5–30. London/
Thousand Oak/New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
Acknowledgments
For the institutional and material support during the conception and
writing of this book, I am grateful to the Department of Letters and
Philosophy (Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia – DILEF) of the
University of Florence; the Walter Benjamin Archive, Akademie der
Künste Berlin; the School of Philosophy, University College, Dublin.
This book has been developed within the context of the research proj-
ect “Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and the Idea of Natural History”
(2017–2019), financially supported by the Department of Letters and
Philosophy of the University of Florence, and under the scientific super-
vision of Professor Gianluca Garelli, to whom I offer my most sincere
thanks for the precious advice and constant encouragement. I also
extend my thanks to Professor Brian O’Connor for having welcomed
me at his at the University College, Dublin during my research
period there.
My research interest for Adorno has begun over fifteen years ago, dur-
ing my B.A. dissertation at the University of Pavia (defended in 2005),
and it would be impossible to acknowledge all the scholars, colleagues,
and classmates who influenced my studies, the name of many of whom
can be found in the index of this book. Nevertheless, I cannot help but
remember the lively discussions with Professor Markus Ophälders, the
formative experience during my PhD under the supervision of Professor
xi
xii Acknowledgments
Maurizio Pagano, and the always vivid human and intellectual example
of Professor Flavio Cassinari.
I sincerely thank Palgrave Macmillan for deciding to host this book in
its collection. Among the people with whom I had the pleasure to work,
I am especially thankful to April James, who first has shown interest in
my research, and Lauriane Piette, who has brilliantly and carefully fol-
lowed the development of this text.
A special thanks goes to Dr. Tessa Marzotto, who with enviable
patience has turned into real English the mumbling through which I
tend to offend this beautiful language.
Finally, my most sincere acknowledgment is devoted to Serena Feloj:
both as Serena, with whom I decide to spend my life every day, and as
Professor Feloj, the most brilliant discussant and the most stimulating
mind one could hope for.
Contents
1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the

Aesthetic” 1
1.1 Kierkegaard (i): The Autonomy of Art and the
Historicity of “the Aesthetic” 3
1.2 Kierkegaard (ii): The Myth and the History 15
1.3 The Anti-Romantic Choice and Its Consequences: Art
and Society 24
1.4 The Model of the Culture Industry 38
References 47
2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the

Aesthetic 53
2.1 A Philosophy of Art as Philosophy of New Music 54
2.2 The Failure of the Artwork 64
2.3 The Dissolution of the Aesthetic 79
References 88
3 Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic 93

3.1 Art, Its Right to Exist, and Aesthetic Conservatism 96
3.2 The Deaestheticization of Artistic Material 106
xiii
xiv Contents
3.3 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (i): Three

Examples115
3.4 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (ii): The
Form of Literature 124
3.5 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (iii): The
Reflection of the ‘I’ and the Literary Material 128
References137
4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary

Interpretation143
4.1 What Literature Is About: Reality, Truth, and Ontology 146
4.2 The Interpretation of Literature and Its Unity 156
4.3 The Form 161
4.4 The Content and the Author 169
4.5 Interpreting Literature: The Case of Franz Kafka 175
References183
5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel189

5.1 A Theory of the Novel as Literary Genre 192
5.2 The American Postmodern Novel as Literary Form 199
5.3 Conclusion: The Novel as Postmodernist Genre 223
References227
Index231
Abbreviations
Adorno’s Works
In the following list the abbreviation “GS” refers to the edition of Adorno’s
writings: Gesammelte Schriften, 20 Vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997.
A Amorbach. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und

Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 302–309.
AaS Der Artist als Statthalter. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 114–126.
AdP Die Aktualität der Philosophie. In Philosophische Frühschriften, GS, 1,
pp. 325–344.
ÄT Ästhetische Theorie, GS, 7.
AzK Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft.
In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 284–287.
B Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, ed. R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1993.
B-L Balzac-Lektüre. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 139–157.
BW1 Th.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin. Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri
Lonitz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1994.
BW2 Th.W. Adorno, A. Berg. Briefwechsel 1925–1933, ed. Henri Lonitz.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997.
BW3 Th.W. Adorno, T. Mann. Briefwechsel 1943–1955, ed. Christoph
Gödde, and T. Sprecher. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002.
xv
xvi Abbreviations
BW4 Th.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927–1969, 4 Vols., ed.

Christoph Gödde, and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003.
CWB Charakteristik Walter Benjamins. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 238–253.
DdA Dialektik der Aufklärung, GS, 3.
DSH Drei Studien zu Hegel, GS, 5.
E Engagement. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 409–430.
EaF Der Essey als Form. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 9–33.
EMS Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Zwölf theoretische Vorlesungen, GS, 14.
EV Erpreßte Versöhnung. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 251–280.
EzP Einleitung zum »Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie«.
In Soziologische Schriften I, GS, 8, pp. 280–353.
FdK Die Funktion des Kontrapunkts in der neuen Musik. In Klangfiguren.
In Musikalische Schriften I, GS, 16, pp. 145–169.
Fh Funktionalismus heute. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 375–395.
IdN Die Idee der Naturgeschichte. In Philosophische Frühschriften, GS, 1,
pp. 345–365.
IKh Ist die Kunst heiter?. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 599–606.
JdE Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie, GS, 6.
JdP Im Jeu de Paume gekritzelt. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In
K Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, GS, 2.
KPK Kleine Proust-Kommentare. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11,
pp. 203–215.
KuG Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 11–30.
KuK Die Kunst und die Künste. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica.
In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 432–453.
MM Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, GS, 4.
ND Negative Dialektik, GS, 6.
OL Ohne Leitbild. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 291–309.
P Parataxis. Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins. In Noten zur Literatur, GS,
11, pp. 447–491.
Abbreviations xvii
Pei Prefazione all’edizione italiana [Preface to the Italian Edition].

In Th.W. Adorno. Kierkegaard. La costruzione dell’estetico. Trans.
A. Burger Cori, pp. 9–13. Milano: Longanesi, 1962.
PnM Philosophie der neuen Musik, GS, 12.
RaS Rückblickend auf den Surrealismus. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11,
pp. 101–105.
RüK Résumé über Kulturindustrie. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In
RüL Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11,
pp. 49–68.
RüR Rede über den‚ Raritätenladen‘von Charles Dickens. In Noten zur
Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 515–522.
SdE Standort des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman. In Noten zur
Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 41–48.
TWAA Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno Archiv [with the abbreviation TS., I
refer to the pages of the typescripts preserved in Theodor Wiesengrund
Adorno Archive, Frankfurt a. M., and available in reproduction in
Walter Benjamin Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin].
ÜeN Über epische Naivität, in Noten zur Literatur, I, GS, 11, pp. 34–40.
ÜFM Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des
Hörens. In Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt, GS, 14,
pp. 14–50.
VA Valérys Abweichungen. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 158–202.
VH Verfremdetes Hauptwerk. Zur Missa Solemnis. In Moments musicaux.
In Musikalische Schriften IV, GS, 17, pp. 145–161.
VPM Valéry, Proust, Museum. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In
VüW Versuch über Wagner. In Die musikalischen Monographien, GS, 13.
VzU Vorschlag zur Ungüte. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In
WnK Warum ist die neue Kunst so schwer verständlich?. In Musikalische
Schriften V, GS, 18, pp. 824–831.
ZgL Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik. In Musikalische Schriften V,
GS, 18, pp. 729–777.
ZM Zeitlose Mode. Zum Jazz. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In
xviii Abbreviations
Translations
AaA Art and the Arts. In Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical
Reader. Trans R. Livingstone, pp. 368–387. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
AT Aesthetic Theory. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. London-New York:
Continuum, 1997.
B Beethoven. The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts. Trans.
E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
CI The Culture Industry. Selected Essays in Mass Culture, ed. Jay Bernstein.
London-New York: Routledge, 1991.
Cor1 W. Benjamin. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. 1910–1940.
Trans. M.R. Jacobson, and E.M. Jacobson. Chicago-London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Cor2 Th.W. Adorno, A. Berg. Correspondence 1925–1935. Trans.
W. Hoban. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005.
Cor3 Th.W. Adorno, T. Mann. Correspondence 1943–1955. Trans.
N. Walker. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006.
DoE Dialectics of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans.
E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
EoM Essays on Music. Trans. S.H. Gillespie. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London:
University of California Press, 2002.
FT Functionalism Today. In Rethinking Architecture. A Reader in Cultural
Theory, ed. Neil Leach, pp. 5–18. London-New York. Routledge, 1997.
HTS Hegel. Three Studies. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. Cambridge (MA)-
London: MIT Press.
INH The Idea of Natural History. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. In Praxis
International 4, N. 2: 111–124.
IPD Introduction. In Th.W. Adorno et al., The Positivism Dispute in
German Sociology. Trans. G. Adey, and D. Frisby, pp. 1–67. London:
Heinemann, 1976.
JoA Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. K. Tarnowski, and F. Will. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Ki Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
MM Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E. Jephcott.
London-New York: Verso, 2005.
Abbreviations xix
ND Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London-New York:

Routledge, 2004.
NtL1 Notes to Literature. Vol 1. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. New York-
Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991.
NtL2 Notes to Literature. Vol 2. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. New York-
Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991.
PNM Philosophy of New Music. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Pr Prisms. Trans. S. Weber, and S.W. Nicholsen. Cambridge (MA):
MIT Press.
PRP Present Relevance of Philosophy. Trans. D. Robertson. August 31, 2018
[https://shirtysleeves.blogspot.com/2018/08/a-translation-of-die-
aktualitat-der.html]. Retrieved November 01, 2019.
SF Sound Figures. Trans. R. Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999.
SoW In Search of Wagner. Trans. R. Livingstone. London-New York:
Verso, 2005.
1
Construction of “Aesthetics”
as Construction of “the Aesthetic”
In one of the most influential books for Adorno’s philosophical educa-

tion, the Hungarian intellectual György Lukács defines what he under-
stands as the “autonomy of the artwork” in terms of the result of a
historical, and broadly speaking metaphysical, external pressure. “Art”
writes Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1920) “has thus become inde-
pendent [selbständig]: it is no longer a copy, for all the models have gone;
it is a created totality, for the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres
has been destroyed forever” (Lukács 1971a, p. 37). It would be no exag-
geration if one were to state that this very idea of the autonomy (in
German, Selbständigkeit or Autonomie) of the artwork is one of the most
seminal and most persisting ideas in the whole of Adorno’s aesthetic pro-
duction. Already in a short piece written in the 1930s Adorno asks him-
self Why is the New Art so Hard to Understand?, and his answer calls into
question precisely this idea of art’s autonomy, taken as the outcome of the
historical development of capitalistic society. Adorno understands in fact
“the reification of art as the result of a socio-economic development that
transforms all goods into consumer goods”, and, accordingly, he states
that “the autonomy of art, its quality of being a law onto itself, the impos-
sibility of arranging it at will according to the dictates of use, is […] the
© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Farina, Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_1
2 M. Farina
expression of that reification” (WnK: 825–826, EoM: 128). To be fair,

the actual theoretical guiding light in Adorno’s argument, however, is
here not the early, Hegelian Lukács of The Theory of the Novel, but the
late, already Marxist author of History and Class Consciousness (1923). As
the scholarly literature has rightly noticed,1 Lukács’ pathbreaking work of
1923 has been decisive for Adorno. He even confided to Alban Berg that
Lukács “has had a more profound intellectual influence on me more than
almost anyone else” (BW2: 17, Cor2: 9). Proving its long-lasting effect,
the concept of autonomy can be found also in Adorno’s latest and unfin-
ished work, that is the Aesthetic Theory, for example where he writes that
“art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly
reproduced on the level of its autonomy” (ÄT: 16, AT: 5).2
The aim of the first chapter of this volume is precisely to understand in
which terms this very peculiar and paradoxical idea of the autonomy of
art—an autonomy that comes about as the result of an external and social
pressure—leaves a permanent mark on Adorno’s inquiries and the entire
process required by the construction of his “aesthetics” (as philosophical
discipline) by means of the construction of “the aesthetic” (as the qualify-
ing element of that branch of knowledge). From a general point of view,
the notion of autonomy determines the most basic and recurrent dynam-
ics in Adorno’s philosophy of art, that is the tension between a normative
dimension of the artwork and its incessant and necessary leaning toward
the production of newness. The normative nature derives, in fact, from
the bond between the artwork and the a-temporal notion of aesthetic
model, whereas the orientation toward what is new builds the inalienable
character that sets the artwork apart from the simple repetition of already
existing things. In order to be defined as “art”, the product has to prove
its own originality in relation to the context.3 The connection between
1
The relevance of Lukács for the young Adorno is out of discussion and widely accepted. See Susan
Buck-Morss (1977, pp. 25–28), Hall (2006, pp. 155–157), and especially Adorno’s monumental
biography written by Stefan Müller-Doohm, where the author specifies the relevance of History and
Class Consciousness for the young Adorno (Müller-Doohm 2005, pp. 36, 94).
2
While recognizing the role of art as a concretization of aesthetic concepts, Shea Coulson (2007,
pp. 109–121) risks to eliminate the double character of aesthetic products by intending art simply
as a mirror.
3
The connection between autonomy and normativity is what Christoph Menke refers to as the
antinomy of autonomy and sovereignty in modern aesthetics, namely as the idea that aesthetics
1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the Aesthetic” 3
art’s autonomy and the double character of the artistic product is finally
what makes Adorno’s aesthetics an aesthetics of “the success of the art-
work” (das Gelingen des Kunstwerks). According to Adorno, art critique’s
task can be accomplished by assessing the work of art in terms of its suc-
cess (or failure) in showing its autonomy and its capability to express
social reality while simultaneously judging it. In this sense, a work of art
“succeeds” when it expresses the unreconciled nature of late capitalistic
society, by showing at the same time a way to artistically, that is gently
and not violently, recompose social fractures.
This chapter is devoted to the reconstruction of the origins of these
aesthetic concepts in Adorno and to the screening of their outcomes in
the first period of his production, that is, from the first writings (begin-
ning of the 1930s) to the Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944). In these
pages, I will address, therefore, the most relevant passages of Adorno’s
construction of the aesthetic.
1.1 K
ierkegaard (i): The Autonomy of Art
and the Historicity of “the Aesthetic”
As is well known, the monographic study published under the title
Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic is the reworking of Adorno’s
Habilitationsschrift, that is the academic text required to obtain the title
of freier Dozent, namely the go-ahead for teaching in a German univer-
sity. Actually, with the Kierkegaard Adorno was at his second attempt to
obtain the title, after his former tutor Hans Cornelius suggested he with-
drew the first proposal.4 To my purposes, it is not necessary to provide a
detailed account of Adorno’s arguments about Kierkegaard’s theoretical
legacy, as developed in the 1933 revision of his Habilitationsschrift.
seems to allude both to the autonomy of its products and to the fact that they exceed the bonds of
plural reason by creating a different normativity. Menke sees Adorno as the author who has most
clearly expressed this antinomy (see Menke 1999, vii–xiii).
4
Adorno tried to obtain the habilitation in 1927 with a study on The Concept of Unconscious in
Transcendental Theory of Mind; but he succeeded only three years later with the Kierkegaard. The
entire story of the habilitation is accurately retraced by Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 98–109,
119–125).
4 M. Farina
However, it is worth mentioning that the book’s aim is twofold: to over-

turn the canonic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s accounts about aesthet-
ics; and to contribute, although heterodoxically, to the Kierkegaard
renaissance, at the time very much in vogue in German universities.
As to the first, Kierkegaard is renowned for having doomed the aes-
thetic stage of life to a significant downplaying, by arguing that it funda-
mentally fails to attain its true goals, that is to say, sensuous satisfaction
(Hampson 2013, pp. 135–138). At variance with this well-established
interpretation of the value of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard, Adorno tries to
show in which sense it is precisely this kind of unattainable aesthetic sat-
isfaction what can best illustrate Kierkegaard’s notion of existence as “the
historical origin of objectless inwardness” (K: 55, Ki: 37). Moreover,
hinging upon his intuition, Adorno comprehensively challenges the exis-
tentialist approach, that is to say, the mainstream of the Heideggerian
ontological position, very popular at the time in the German academy.
With the release of Time and Being (1927), in fact, Heidegger highlighted
the existential and finite dimension of Kierkegaard’s subjectivity, in par-
ticular its role in the context of “being-toward-death”, as Adam Buben
(2016, pp. 109–120) has recently emphasized. Adorno, to the opposite,
sheds light on the equally present theological element, that is, on the idea
of “leap” or salto mortale into faith (Kierkegaard 2009, pp. 85–90),
namely what allows the ultimate resolution of the finite abyss of the
“objectless inwardness”. By acknowledging this theological dimension,
Adorno shows that in Kierkegaard, beyond his mystical turn, the only
way to justify the religious leap into faith is not through the firm choice
of ethical life, but in the light of the infinite and never reachable satisfac-
tion of the aesthetic one.5
At variance with ontologist trends, the overall sense of the Kierkegaard-
book for Adorno is, in a nutshell, that of a christening of his inquiries in
aesthetics, here achieved by presenting “the aesthetic” element as the
form of knowledge in which it is possible to express the social condition
of the subject. In fact, the lack of integrity, the gap between subject and
5
For that reason, according to the interpretation of Robert Hullot-Kentor, Adorno’s book on
Kierkegaard “intends to recuperate the sphere of the aesthetic from the dialectic experience”
(Hullot-Kentor 2006, p. 79).
objectivity, the late capitalistic oppression of the individual cannot be

fully grasped, according to him, by means of the ontological affirmative
statements about anguish and death, but should rather be investigated by
the indefinite, indirect, and unsatisfied gaze of the aesthetics. In a dialec-
tical argument worthy of Hegel, the way in which Kierkegaard highlights
the deficiencies of the aesthetic life is taken precisely as what allows to
achieve a clear and effective construction of the aesthetic element. Only
in the leap into transcendence Kierkegaard sees the chance to justify the
perfect self-knowledge of subjectivity, a chance that is denied to aesthet-
ics, because of its continuous deferment of satisfaction; exactly in this
intuition, Adorno recognizes the relevance of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic con-
struction, namely the fact that its incomplete nature allows to express
reality in the terms of its fragmented essence: “It is rather a totality of
ruins, and in the depths of the chasms between them a dialectic surges
that does not flow uninterruptedly from one to the other” (K: 130, Ki:
90). What Adorno criticizes in Kierkegaard is however the idea of the
leap into faith, conceived as the attempt to give rise to an idealistic and
“positive” (ideologically comforting) ontology that denies the fragmented
(and realistic) representation of the world by means of the aesthetic.
Kierkegaard, Adorno writes, “repudiates the aesthetic semblance without
pursuing the course of the dialectics to its end, a course which the tran-
scendence of semblance makes evident in its semblance itself ” (K: 194,
Ki: 137). The “dialectic course” of the aesthetic, however, is visible,
Adorno would claim, as soon as one radicalizes the theological element of
Kierkegaard’s thought and leaves behind the purely ontological and exis-
tential level.
What Adorno achieves in the study on Kierkegaard is something close
to the finetuning of his aesthetics’ basic conceptual tools, as already
deployed in his musicological short essays for the Musikblätter des
Anbruchs and the Frankfurter Zeitung, well before their theoretical foun-
dation had been made explicit. The concept of autonomy of art, the dou-
ble character of the artwork, and the relation between art and society, all
the concepts he has drawn from his early readings and family
6 M. Farina
environment6 form the theoretical structure of Adorno’s interpretative

method, and the study on Kierkegaard gives him the chance to make
them explicit through the strenuous conceptual construction of a book,
accustomed as he was to writing short essays. As Adorno clearly states, he
takes the field of aesthetics as a form of knowledge that spurns the abstract
laws of conceptuality without being at the same time arbitrary. In the first
section of the Kierkegaard he considers the relation between philoso-
phy—that is, the conceptual discipline par excellence—and art, by stat-
ing that “the more exclusively philosophical form is crystallized as such,
the more firmly it excludes all metaphors that externally approximates it
into art, so much the better is art able to survive as art by strength of its
own law of form” (K: 23–24, Ki: 14). With these words, and following
Hegel’s example, Adorno intends to criticize any attempt to conceive the
artwork, or the aesthetic in general, as the sensible upholstery of a con-
ceptual thought.7 The artwork, on the contrary, is a product in which the
conceptual—that is universal—dimension and the element of particular-
ity rise together. The aesthetic element is therefore the kind of feature of
human knowledge which is able to identify a single, particular, element
whose validity is that of being a model, without qualifying, though, as a
criterion, a canon, or an abstract concept. As I will show in the next
pages, this determination of the aesthetic corresponds, to an extent, to a
reinterpretation of the most basic conceptual elements developed by
Kant in his third critical work.
With the last of his major works, namely the Critique of the Power of
Judgement (1790), Kant lays the groundwork to an assessment of aesthet-
ics as an autonomous discipline, the groundbraking contribution in this
respect being Kant’s distinction between determining and reflecting judg-
ment. It would be misleading to identify the third Critique as the answer
to one single problem, or to one single author. The overall efforts
6
Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana, the mother of Theodor Wiesengrund, was a pretty well-known
opera singer, and she passed on to her son a talent and passion for music. Besides family heritage,
great relevance in Adorno’s aesthetic formation has been played by the friendship with Siegfried
Kracauer and his art sociology, as Stefan Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 44–45) underlines. Moreover,
one should not forget the effect of Bloch’s expressionistic philosophy as outlined in The Spirit of
the Utopia.
7
Hegel sharply criticizes the idea that art can be reduced to a simple sensible make-up of abstract
concept. For Hegel’s critique of fabula docet in art, see: Hegel (1975, p. 50).
showcased in the text can be seen, in fact, as the attempt to provide an

answer to the problem of Kant’s age in general, that is to say, the problem
of the normativity of what is non-normative at all. When the German
philosopher, Odo Marquard, identifies the Enlightenment as the attempt
to come to terms with the loss of a religious, and therefore normative,
explanation of the world by means of what he sees as a set of compensa-
tion theories (Kompensationstheorien),8 he has in mind, most likely, the
main questions Kant deals with in his third Critique.
The reflecting judgment is Kant’s special tool, devised to account for
the peculiar normativity of the aesthetic experience. Not the simple aver-
age of every single personal taste, as in the empiricist explanation; not the
normative application of an inherited canon, as in the classicist one, the
aesthetic taste is rather the result of a particular human power, that is, the
power of the reflecting judgment (see Guyer 1997, p. 59). To the pur-
poses of this inquiry, however, the key point lies here in the particular
kind of normativity of the reflecting judgment.9 The essential difference
between determining (or intellectual) judgments and reflecting ones con-
sists, in fact, in how they respectively relate the universal dimension of
the norm to the specific individuality of the single particular. As Kant
puts it, the distinction between the two kinds of judgment is defined
precisely on the basis of the relation to the universal or to the particular:
If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of
judgment, which subsumes the particular under it (even when, as a tran-
scendental power of judgment, it provides the conditions a priori in accor-
dance with which alone anything can be subsumed under that universal),
is determining. If, however, only the particular is given, for which the
8
See for example what Marquard says in his essay “Indicted and Unburdened Man in Eighteenth-
Century Philosophy”: “Perhaps it is permissible […] to move a late phenomenological concept
forward into the 18th century and say that we are dealing here with philosophies that provide new
definitions of man which attempt to compensate for a human loss of “life-world”, and a loss that is
specific to the middle of the century” (Marquard 1989, p. 41).
9
The question of the normativity of Kant’s reflecting judgment is one of the most difficult problems
concerning Kantian thought in general. Hannah Ginsborg has recently asserted the presence of a
special kind of normative power in reflective judgment: “What I take Kant to be pointing to, in his
connection between aesthetic judgement and the capacity for empirical conceptualization, is a kind
of normativity involved in perceptual experience which is independent of the normativity typically
associated with cognitive judgement” (Ginsborg 2015, p. 173).
8 M. Farina
universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting.

(Kant 2000, pp. 66–67)
According to the general theory I have here tried to merely sketch out,
the aesthetic judgment is never based on an abstract concept of beauty
owned by the judging subject, but rather on a subjective feeling that
reveals the presence of beauty itself. As it clearly demolishes any direct
normative perspective, the fortune of such theory determines a definitive
break in aesthetics with any explicitly classicist theory of art.
The reader might already have started to see the close connection
between the above outlined mechanism behind the reflecting judgment
and what in the opening lines of this chapter I have introduced as the
double character of the artwork in Adorno, that is to say, its being a par-
ticular, individual, product whose existence alludes to an overall, and
therefore general, meaning. In this respect, Adorno defines the work of
art as “the minute precision and concreteness of a model” (K: 197, Ki:
138), and the model he has in mind is very close to the Kantian univer-
sality of the ideal of beauty. More precisely, the aesthetic model is the
universal field to which every single artwork belongs, although, unlike
intellectual concepts, a particular work could never be abstractly drawn
from it. Given the concepts of “red” and “sphere”, we can infer what a
“red sphere” is; on the contrary, the model of the aesthetic can only be
recognized every time we consider an artwork, and it can never be
acquired once and for all. Because of that, the work of art is always
affected by the tension between the universal dimension of the exemplary
element and the particularity of something new, a tension that Adorno
defines by highlighting the necessary temporal dimension of the work:
“What truly endures in artworks is not that from which time has been
abstracted”, that is, the abstract concept of beauty; it is rather the case
that “those motives assert themselves whose hidden eternity is most
deeply embedded in the constellation of the temporal” (K: 34, Ki: 21).
By means of a typically dialectical argument, Adorno detects the constant
and durable element of artworks precisely in the fact that they constantly
change without ceasing to be recognized as artwork, then without ceasing
to relate directly to a universal model.
Pupil of the neo-Kantian scholar Cornelius, and certainly fascinated

by neo-Kantian ideas,10 Adorno tries in this way to move in the direction
of a historicization of the Kantian theory of reflecting judgment. As is
well known, in fact, the Kantian subjective universality of beauty is
grounded upon the ideal of natural, not artistic, beauty. When Kant
writes that “nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art;
and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it
looks to us like nature” (Kant 2000, p. 179), he is not putting art and
nature on an equal footing. The beauty of nature is what allows to recog-
nize the beauty of art, although beautiful nature looks like art in the sense
that it seems specially made to cause our pleasure.11 Precisely due to his
assumptions concerning the natural origin of beauty, Kant’s transcenden-
tal determination of aesthetic taste does not imply any sort of historical
determination. On the contrary, since Adorno takes aesthetics strictly
speaking as pertaining to human-generated artworks, he has to take into
account their historic dimension. Art is in fact, for Adorno, an exclusively
human and historic product and it cannot be conceived of as if it were a
natural and spontaneous phenomenon. This is why the tension between
universal and particular established by Kant turns, in Adorno, into the
tension between a temporal and a-temporal dimension of the artwork;
this dialectical connection expresses, finally, the fact that the universal
notion of “the art”—what I have defined as the field of “the aesthetic”—
keeps changing historically, but it does not have the power to erase, or
modify, the works of the past and their aesthetic ideal. The fact that now-
adays Damien Hirst’s shark is an artwork and, say, a hypothetical paint-
ing in Leonardo’s style is simply kitsch, does not prevent the fact that La
Gioconda is still an artwork exactly as much as Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup
Cans. The universal field in which artworks exist as works of art consists,
then, in the historical existence and development of the aesthetic element.
10
On Adorno’s youthful neo-Kantism, especially in his relationship with Hans Cornelius, see what
Brandon Bloch (2017, p. 6) maintains: “The debate about the legacy of Kant that defined German
philosophy during Adorno’s intellectually formative years, and in which Cornelius’s works inter-
vened, centered on the capacity of the human subject to generate objective knowledge”.
11
See, for example, how Malcolm Budd (2002, pp. 43–46) describes the natural determination of
the ideal of beauty in Kant.
10 M. Farina
This transition toward the historicization of the Kantian judgment

leads Adorno into the field of Hegel’s (and Marxian12) philosophy, and it
ultimately explains why he resorted to the study of Kierkegaard—an anti-
historical thinker par excellence—in order to define his own construction
of a historical aesthetics. Rather than explicitly relying on Hegel’s phi-
losophy, Adorno derives in fact his own historic aesthetics from an inter-
pretation of Kierkegaard’s (non-historical) thought; this apparently
counterintuitive path clearly defines Adorno’s approach to aesthetics
through the construction of what he understands as “the aesthetic”, and
can be first and foremost elucidated by taking into account the following
passage:
Kierkegaard, in contrast to Hegel, failed to achieve historical concretion—

the only authentic concretion; he absorbed it into the blind self, volatilized
it in the empty spheres: he thereby surrendered philosophy’s central claim
to truth—the interpretation of reality—while calling on a theology from
which his own philosophy extracted the pith. More emphatically than all
previous philosophers, Hegel posited the question of concretion, but suc-
cumbed helplessly to it by believing that he had produced it […]. Both
philosophers remain idealists (K: 133, Ki: 93).
In this passage Adorno sums up the overall problem of history in his

definition of the aesthetic. On the one hand, Hegel has determined aes-
thetics from the strict point of view of its historical development, but he
has grounded it on “the claim of ‘absolute’ spirit” (K: 134, Ki 93), that is
on a metaphysical and eternal category, removing in this way any con-
creteness from it; on the other hand, Kierkegaard engages in the analysis
of the concrete and particular subject, but he renounces to any kind of
historic determination. Adorno’s move is therefore that of showing the
presence of a historical determination (in Hegelian sense) precisely in
Kierkegaard’s argument, despite the fact that it belongs to a project of
construction of the aesthetic developed precisely with the intention of
giving up history. Thus, this is Adorno’s idea, history can emerge without
12
Hullot-Kentor (2006, pp. 84–85) sees Adorno’s Kierkegaard book as the turning point that
reveals Adorno as a Marxist thinker.
being submitted to the metaphysical and idealistic determination of the

totality of absolute spirit.
The accomplishment of this task is attempted by means of the analysis
of the key figure in the whole of the Kierkegaard book, that is to say, the
notion of intérieur (inwardness). With this category, in fact, Adorno tries
to come to terms with two main sources of his intellectual education:
Lukács and Benjamin. Both, indeed, had developed a powerful and dra-
matic interpretation of inwardness. Lukács by stating that the “second
nature” of objective spirit—that is, social disposition in general—corre-
sponds to a “charnel-house of long-dead interiorities [Innerlichkeiten]”
(Lukács 1971a, p. 63), and thus that human inwardness is by now empty
and meaningless face to the disenchanted reality; Benjamin, instead, by
means of an analysis of baroque melancholic interiority, in the Origin of
German Tragic Drama, is taken as an allegory of expressionistic inward
alienation.13 Likewise, the relevance of Kierkegaard’s theory of inward-
ness, according to Adorno, rests on the fact that it allows to show what at
the beginning of this paragraph we have seen as “the historical origin of
objectless inwardness” (K: 55, Ki: 37).
To this aim, Adorno takes into account the core of Kierkegaard’s philo-
sophical method, that is, the inner reasoning and pondering, and he tries
to show that, rather than an existential conversation about anguish and
fear, private speech can be seen as the highest manifestation of the histori-
cal condition, inasmuch as “reality finds expression only in the internally
contradictory temporal course of the monologue, that is, as history”.
Adorno recognizes therefore that Kierkegaard, as Hegel’s opponent,
“developed no philosophy of history”. On the contrary, he decided “to
use the category of ‘person’ and the person’s inner history to exclude
external history”. Nevertheless, this exclusion of history cannot be seen as
the definitive word about the external world, in fact “the inner history of
the person is bound anthropologically to external history through the
unity of the ‘species’” (K: 49, Ki: 32). This means that “even the objectless
‘I’ and its immanent history are bound to historical objectivity” (K:
51–52, Ki: 34). By following this line, Adorno considers Kierkegaard’s
On Adorno’s reception in the Kierkegaard book of Benjamin’s and Lukács problems of inward-
13
ness, see the interpretation of Bartholomew Ryan (2014, pp. 177–179).

12 M. Farina
idea of intérieur in the light of the typical nineteenth-century figure of

the flâneur—the bored and disenchanted dandy that strolled through the
cities in the century of Baudelaire—who, even though “the world only
appears to him reflected by pure inwardness”, actually best expresses the
historic condition of his time with his “promenades in his room”. This
context is deliberately chosen since “in the intérieur the historical dialec-
tics and the eternal power of nature pose their peculiar puzzle” (K: 62,
69, Ki: 41, 46). What happens, in fact, is that “by denying the social
question, Kierkegaard falls into the mercy of his own historical situation,
that of the rentier in the first half of nineteenth century” (K: 70, Ki
47–48). The rentier, deriving his income from rents, interests, and other
kinds of financial activities, is therefore the model of a private inward
person, whose chance to rest in his own interiority, however, is granted to
him by the general social labor and therefore by the historical condition.
This is how history determines the alleged non-historical interiority, so
that “the external world, which at least gives the person some prerogative,
is for this very reason condemned in a general ‘external world’, and not as
a specifically capitalist world” (K: 72, Ki: 49).
What Adorno depicts is a scenery in which he combines both Lukács’
description of the objective world as a second nature (the “charnel-house
of long-dead interiorities”), and Benjamin’s image of the melancholic
interiority.14 In this scenario, the social world has lost any kind of signifi-
cance and the meaningless objectivity, the loss of immediacy, imposes on
the subject to escape into inwardness. In fact, the “pathos of entreaty”,
that prevents Kierkegaard’s subjectivity from falling into complete isola-
tion, “is valid only in a society of immediate human relations, from which
Kierkegaard well knows that he is separated. Fleeing precisely from reifi-
cation, he withdraws into ‘inwardness’. In this arena, however, he acts as
if that immediacy still existed in the external world, whose ersatz is
inwardness itself ” (K: 74–75, Ki: 50). It is, then, the reification of the
14
As Ferenc Feher notices (1985, pp. 126–128), Benjamin’s notion of deprived interiority has been
influenced by Lukács’ Weber-inspired conception of world’s Godforsakenness, although he admits
(130–134) the emerging of sharp contrast among them after Lukács’ abjuration of History and Class
Consciousness. In their monumental biography of Benjamin, however, Howard Eiland and Michael
W. Jennings do not recognize a great relevance to Lukács’ influence on Benjamin, by roughly limit-
ing it to the effect of History and Class Consciousness during Benjamin’s Marxist turn (Eiland and
Jennings 2014, pp. 205–206).
social world, of the external and historical second nature, what pushes the
subject into their own inwardness, whose internal constitution is increas-
ingly different from that of the social world, especially the farther the
latter becomes commodified.
Now, after the assessment of his pivotal argument about inwardness, it
should be easier to understand why, and in which sense, Adorno focuses
on Kierkegaard’s construction of “the aesthetic” in order to establish the
theoretical basis to his own “aesthetics”. The historical constitution of the
non-historical inwardness corresponds in fact to the expression of what
we have seen at the beginning of this chapter as the determining quality
of art, that is its autonomy. As I have already remarked, in fact, “the
autonomy of art, its quality of being a law onto itself, the impossibility of
arranging it at will according to the dictates of use, is […] the expression
of that reification” (WnK: 825–826, EoM: 128). Similarly to how the
subject’s inwardness constitutes itself as a private and isolated space
because of the pressure of the external world, the work of art has to be
defined as autonomous in accordance to the increasing distance it takes
from the petrified and reified world of the market and of social conven-
tions. Whereas the beauty of Kantian aesthetics is the reflection of the
subject’s feeling in front of the representation of the object, Adorno’s
notion of artwork stands for the objective expression of the subject’s inte-
riority, where the interiority is that of the creating subject. The autonomy
of art, one of the most basic features of the artwork according to Adorno,
closely matches the historicization of the aesthetics, or better the out-
come of a historical movement that, starting from the transcendental and
“natural” conception of Kantian aesthetics, goes in the direction of the
Hegelian interpretation of the matter in terms of a philosophy of art. This
is why the autonomy of art cannot be seen merely as a philosophical
translation of the modernist motto l’art pour l’art,15 as the left oriented
critique to Adorno in the 1970s did.16 On the contrary, claims about the
autonomy of art aim to explain to what extent even the most elitist
15
By contrast, Thijs Lijster (2017, p. 48) sees the autonomy of art as art’s being free from the
Church, public institutions, traditions, canons, and so on, that is, as the idea of art for art’s sake.
16
See how James Martin Harding (1997, pp. 11–15) reconstructs the rejection of Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory immediately after its publication in 1970.
14 M. Farina
supporters of “art for art’s sake”, of art as an Empyrean and pure activity,
are determined by their own historical context.
The two features of the artwork we have seen in the opening pages
show finally a close inter-connection. Starting from Kierkegaard’s con-
struction of “the aesthetic” as that sphere which is able to explain the
fragmented and unsatisfied inwardness of late capitalism, Adorno can
build his own “aesthetics” as the demonstration of the artistic quality of
the artworks. Aesthetics corresponds then to the determination of the
general field of the aesthetic products, or better to the critical demonstra-
tion of the qualities of the products that belong to that field, namely the
works of art. Similar to the theoretical space in which the aesthetic has
been constructed, that is Kierkegaard’s inwardness, the work of art is a
product whose structural formal laws—and for Adorno artistic logic is
always a formal one—rejects the laws of reification, of commodification,
of the social world. As an autonomous reaction to social conditions, the
artworks are therefore both an expression of society and a critical judg-
ment on its objective configuration. The work of art, in fact, although it
can no longer be reduced to the outdated category of beauty, still pre-
serves the dimension of conciliation. Social contradictions, human suf-
fering and pain, are subsumed in the aesthetic form of the artwork and,
in this form, they are somehow pacified. The artwork can therefore be
still regarded as “beautiful” in the same sense in which one can exclaim
“beautiful!” in front of the most violent and disturbing exhibition of
Hermann Nitsch. According to Adorno, that exclamation is the demon-
stration that the work succeeded in its own task, that of being an expres-
sion of and at the same time a critical judgment on society. This is
possible, Adorno would add, in virtue of the autonomy of art’s formal
law, which is forced notably by the heteronomy of social pressure.
1.2 K
ierkegaard (ii): The Myth
and the History
Art, for Adorno, consists in the historic layout of what Hegel would call
“the spirit (Geist)”, and that in the contemporary pragmatist-oriented
interpretation of German Idealism becomes “the normative space of rea-
sons” (Pinkard 2002, p. 251), within which the moves of each actor are
justified based on commitments and entitlements to action. In these
terms, one can also understand a given configuration of social life—in
Adorno’s words—or a specific spiritual figure—in Hegel’s—close to one
of Wittgenstein’s language games, whose viable moves are justified by a
certain set of rules, here embodied in the aesthetic expression of the art-
works. As soon as the specific “social game” expressed for example by
Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass ceases to be normative, a subsequent set of
rules expresses a new kind of aesthetic meaning, as conveyed for example
by Klimt’s Judith.17 In this respect, Adorno clearly says that “aesthetics
does not mean, as it did not mean in Kierkegaard, merely a theory of art,
but rather, in Hegelian terms, a stance of thought toward objectivity”
(Pei, p. 12); the “Hegelian sense” to which Adorno alludes is the idea that
art corresponds to the “unfolding of the truth” (Hegel 1975, p. 1236),
that is to the layout of the truth of the space of reasons, within which a
particular work of art is justified as art and at the same time—and this is
what differentiates Adorno’s position from the general field of pragma-
tism—judges the disposition of the space of reason itself; this is how
“theological truth crashes down to human level as aesthetic truth and
reveals itself to man as sign of hope” (K: p. 148, Ki: 104).
It may then seem that, based on this explanatory framework, that of
art is a solved problem, with nothing left to do but being better defined.
This would be true if it wasn’t for the pivotal dilemma with which all
post-Kantian aesthetics have tried to come to terms, that of the aesthetic
creation, and to which Adorno attempts to provide an answer by means
of the obscure and prima facie controversial notion of “myth”. Although
the German debate on the question of myth proliferated again in the
17
This is basically the argument of Robert Pippin when he describes Hegel as “the theorist of mod-
ernism, malgré lui and avant la letter” (Pippin 2014, p. 38).
16 M. Farina
second half of the 1920s, what Adorno subsumed under this concept has
much more to do with a reworking of a traditional aesthetic problem
than with the neo-Romantic, and pre-National Socialist, discussion.18
When in 1926 Thomas Mann—the already famous and celebrated
author of The Magic Mountain, almost revered by Adorno19—released a
short reportage on his trip to France, the neo-Romantic wave was already
traveling at full speed and, as Thomas Mann noticed, it was already anti-
parliamentarily oriented.20 A prominent scholar quoted by Mann is
Alfred Baeumler, the future holder of the chair of political pedagogy in
Hitler’s Berlin, one of those who tried to intellectually legitimize
National Socialism by exploiting some obscure argument in Nietzsche’s
late works. Also in 1926, however, Baeumler published an interesting
selection of writings of the, at the time, almost forgotten late-Romantic
author Johann Jakob Bachofen, by giving a new turn to the debate on
myth. In the generous Introduction to the book, Baeumler lays the
ground to an interpretation of mythology according to which myth,
precisely as natural origin of culture, contains the truest essence of peo-
ple. In his own words, this conception of myth leads to the idea that “the
people [das Volk], the race, are always in an arcane relationship with the
‘original cliff’ on which they were sculpted, and they continue to live in
the permanent communion of natural life with it” (Baeumler 1956, p.
CLXXVI). This notion of the original unity of natural and cultural
life—the core notion in Nazi Blut und Boden—clearly shows to what
extent caution should be exerted while handling the notion of myth, but
18
For the purposes of my research, it can be helpful to refer to Peter Davies’ work about the debate
on myth in German culture, especially where he provides an account of the reception of Johann
J. Bachofen between the 1920s and the 1930s thanks to the debate involving Ludwig Klages, Alfred
Baeumler, Carl Albrech Bernulli, Ernst Howald, and Thomas Mann (see, Davies 2012,
pp. 285–309). As the Italian scholar Furio Jesi suggests, the twentieth-century debate can be
divided in a far right-wing (even fascist) attitude that aims to “drink at the spring” of myth (authors
like Baeumler, Klages, and Mircea Eliade), and in a leftist (or Marxist) orientation whose intention
is that to explain the myth; to this latter orientation belongs Benjamin (Jesi 1973, pp. 69–75).
19
As he writes to Mann after they got to know each other in California, when he was eighteen years
old (i.e. in 1921), during a holiday in Kampen, he met the writer and followed him just imagining
a hypothetical conversation with him (BW3: 17, Cor3: 10).
20
Thomas Mann (1926, in particular pp. 59–61) explicitly connected the anti-democratic and anti-
parliamentary feeling of both Germany and French to a full argument about the neo-Romantic
interpretation and, according to him, misinterpretation of the late Nietzsche.
at the same time it specifies how much Adorno borrowed from the
debate of his time—it is also not a coincidence that Benjamin himself
dedicated a study to Bachofen’s mythology, yet disdaining Baeumler by
counting him among the “official exponents of German fascism”.21 The
reader will pardon my decision to introduce the discussion on myth
referencing Baeumler’s controversial account, rather than with other
equally relevant but less contentious authors.22 My decision has been
motivated by the wish to roughly, and thereby clearly, illustrate the basic
structural lines accounting for the German discussion about this topic in
the 1920s and 1930s, in other words the ambiguous braiding of culture
and nature, and in this respect Baeumler’s reference provides a rough but
clear introduction. This is the cultural landscape inspired by which, in
the book on Kierkegaard, Adorno writes that “in the reified world itself,
however, by its history, mythological nature is driven back into the
inwardness of the individual”, and that “for the instant of the pause,
where dialectic comes to a stop, is the same instant where nature, its
mythical basis, reverberates in the depth of the sounding of the hour”
(K: 89, 144; Ki: 60, 101).
As previously anticipated, the reason why Adorno employs the notion
of myth in this context has to be found in the typical aesthetic problem
of artistic creation and, in addition, in the attempt to keep together
Lukács’ Hegelian perspective and Benjamin’s Romantic heritage. I have
also already pointed out some problematic aspects in the attempt to his-
toricize the Kantian argument, in short the issues connected to the imple-
mentation of a notion of aesthetic value derived from a natural ideal of
beauty to a non-natural but broadly speaking cultural product. The fun-
damental theoretical ground of Kant’s third Critique, in fact, is based on
the “as if ” methodological presupposition.23 On this ground, we find
21
The quotation comes from Benjamin’s 1935 essay published under the title, “Johan Jackob
Bachofen” (Benjamin 2006a, p. 19).
22
In the German philosophical debate, the question of Myth was at stake in several authors during
the years of the Weimar Republic. One can mention, for example, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Klages,
Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, as well as Carl Schmitt; one should also add, Sigmund Freud, with
his interpretation of the psychological meaning of myth, and Carl Gustav Jung.
23
This is one of the most relevant aspects of the Critique of the Power of Judgement, not only for the
aesthetic part, but also, and a fortiori, for the teleological one. It would be difficult to isolate some
exemplary passages, given the widespread dissemination of the as if argument in the text. For a
18 M. Farina
nature attractive and beautiful because it seems to be designed precisely

to that purpose, that is, as if it was conceived by a creating intellect. At
the same time, we agree that we cannot know the project of that hypo-
thetical designer, nor can we state the effective existence of that sort of
intellect behind nature’s form. Nevertheless, we must observe that “nature
is represented through this concept as if an understanding contained the
ground of the unity of the manifold of its empirical laws” (Kant 2000,
p. 68; emphasis mine). The dynamics of the reflecting judgment, in fact,
is effective as long as we assume a free will, although it is clear that we can
never intellectually demonstrate an object to be created according to a
“purposiveness without an end” (Kant 2000, p. 111). This is what I have
defined as the normativity of what is absolutely non-normative. But what
happens when we apply this specific idea of aesthetic value to a product
that, instead, is exactly designed in order to be aesthetically appreciated,
as in the case of the artwork?
Coming to the fore in the early stages of the reception of Kant’s work
on aesthetics, it can be argued that this is, in fact, the basic problem of
German aesthetics. As Schiller’s intellectual path clearly shows, in fact,
conceiving artistic creation in terms of nature’s “purposiveness without
an end” leads to the notion of ancient naïve genius, whose determination
as an involuntary aesthetic creator makes nothing but shifting the unin-
tentionality from nature to an idealized and non-historical origin of cul-
ture, that is to a mythical and imaged ancient Greece, as Schiller points
out in the piece Über naïve und senthimentalische Dischtung (One Naïve
and Sentimental Poetry, 1795–96). As nature creates beauty without hav-
ing beauty as its proper aim, the artistic genius shapes the work of art
according to some natural kind of spontaneity and inspiration, like a
naïve child intent to freely play a purposeless game. However, as Peter
Szondi (1972, pp. 174–206) recognizes in his essay “Das Naïve ist das
Senthimentalische” (“The Naïve Is the Sentimental”), the possibility itself
to recognize something as “naïve”, or “natural”, in this context, stems
directly from the modern, sentimental and non-natural attitude.
Therefore, for Schiller poets can be naïve or sentimental, “they will either
general overview, see the way in which Christian Helmut Wenzel (2005, pp. 78–85) accounts for
the Kantian argument.
be nature, or they will seek the lost nature” (Schiller 1993, p. 196), but
the excellence of naivety can be appreciated only by the one who is no
longer naïve and natural.24 Exactly from this kind of tension in the defini-
tion of art’s creator, originates, roughly speaking, the sharpest, most dis-
tinguishing, and irreconcilable split in modern aesthetics, that is between
the Romantic and the Hegelian explanation of art. Based on Schiller’s—
but to some extent also Goethe’s—reception of the Kantian problem, one
is inclined to see the Romantic, especially the early Romantic, and the
Hegelian solutions as two alternative and competing strategies aimed at
solving the same set of questions.25 While being aware of somehow over-
simplifying things here, I take the most significant and representative
notions of both early Romantic and Hegelian aesthetics as a reaction to
the general debate on the role of will in art’s creation.26 Having Kant
actually exposed the theoretical meaning of aesthetic value, and having
defined it as a product whose natural disposition must only seem to be
intentionally designed, artists find themselves in the paradoxical position
of knowing exactly the thing they mustn’t know in order to naturally and
spontaneously, that is, non-intentionally, do their job.
In order to save the naturalness of artistic expression, the Jena Romantic
circle developed the idea of a new kind of symbolic and sedimented
meanings having the same value of the ancient ones. As Friedrich Schlegel
writes in the Dialogue on Poetry: “We have no mythology. But, I add, we
are close to obtaining one or, rather, it is time that we earnestly work
together to create one” (Schlegel 1968, p. 81). According to Hegel, this
24
As Frederick Beiser (2005, pp. 246–249) remarks, Schiller does not share the fanatic enthusiasm
for the inspiration of genius typical of the period of Sturm und Drang.
25
This is a well-established description of aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
to the point that it seems almost a cliché. But a quick look at the histories of aesthetics confirms
that this cliché, in some way or another, comes in handy for a general presentation of the matter.
This happens when Paul Guyer (2014, pp. 106–107) describes late modern aesthetics under the
influence either of Hegel or Schopenhauer; Similarly, Jay Bernstein (2005, pp. vii–ix) presents the
Hegelian and Romantic aesthetics as two alternative and opposed possibilities to approach the
discipline.
26
Although the rightful restrictions connected to this inquiry force me to shorten some of the argu-
ments on this topic, I refer the reader to my paper, “A Kantian Answer to the Romantics. Hegel’s
Idea of Genius and the Unity of Nature and Freedom” (Farina 2019).
20 M. Farina
amounts to a naïve and mystical understanding of art,27 whose sole con-

tribution is that of making clear that art has by now lost its effectual value
due exactly to an overabundant consciousness of its own tasks. As the
self-proclaimed newborn Hegelian Arthur Danto recognizes, “the histori-
cal stage of art is done with when it is known what art is and means”
(Danto 1984, p. 31). Rather than a new form of mythology, romantic art
displays the end of any mythology all together. “In our day”, writes Hegel
in his Lectures on Fine Art, “in the case of almost all peoples, criticism, the
cultivation of reflection, and, in our German case, freedom of thought
have mastered the artists too, and have made them, so to say, a tabula rasa
in respect of the material and the form of their productions” (Hegel 1975,
p. 605). This loss of substantiality is precisely what pushes art to its death.
The way in which Adorno calls into question the notion of myth in the
Kierkegaard book corresponds then to the manner in which he deals with
the problem of the relationship between the I’s artistic creation and its
historical determination on the path of the construction of his aesthetics.
As Adorno says, “creation is reduced to spirit in the self in order to rescue
the self from its fallenness”, and “the natural content of mere spirit, ‘his-
torical’ in itself, may be called mythical”. The notion of myth, therefore,
is called to purpose precisely in order to give something like a natural
basis to the I’s existence and production, something to which the I has to
react when it creates art, “for the mythical […] is not a free creation of the
author” (K: 114,78, Ki: 78, 53). In this sense, Adorno sees what he takes
as a “dialectic” that “transpires between nature and spirit, mythical con-
tent and consciousness, as qualitatively different, strictly contrary pow-
ers” (K: 86, Ki: 58). The myth, in this respect, especially to the extent that
it is defined as “natural”, corresponds to the not-free element of history,
to that quality and moment of historical development that seems to be
completely independent from human free will and that gives the impres-
sion of overcoming human beings as an external pressure; “in the reified
27
Ernst Behler as well, one of the most relevant scholars of German early Romantics, recognizes the
mystical aspect of the new mythology: “This is the ‘mystical’ aspect of early Romanticism which is
strictly abhorred and avoided by A. W. Schlegel. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis liked to indulge in
it, referring to it ironically as their attempt at founding a new religion. The best-known designation
for this new tendency, however, is that of a ‘new mythology’” (Behler 1993, p. 158).
world, however, by its history, mythical nature is driven back into inward-
ness of individual” (K: 89, Ki: 60).
After having made natural beauty “historical”, Adorno’s reference to
the notion of myth aims, ultimately, to the naturalization of history itself.
The notion of myth is connected here to the same semantic field already
prominent in the German debate on mythology. “Mythical” is in this
respect any kind of social sedimented practice, whose fixity, while
accounting for the non-intentional dimension of artistic production,
appears as natural as any other steady element. In 1932, just about when
work on the Kierkegaard was ongoing, Adorno held a conference under
the title The Idea of Natural History. Also in this conference he deals with
the problem of the relationship between history, nature, and mythology,
and he declares that his goal is that to “comprehend historical being in its
most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural
being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as an historical being where
it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature”, and he clarifies that “the
concept of nature that is to be dissolved is one that, if I translated it into
standard philosophical terminology, would come closest to the concept
of myth” (IdN, 355, 345, INH: 117, 111). Aesthetics, as Adorno says in
the conference, is the branch of human knowledge that is able to formu-
late this idea of natural history,28 that is to express the fact that history is
bound to a non-intentional element, and this element corresponds to its
myth. In order to back this interpretation, in his contribution, Adorno
mentions and quotes two texts about aesthetics we have already men-
tioned: Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and Benjamin’s Origin of German
Tragic Drama. To hold these perspectives together is then one of the aims
of both the conference and the book on Kierkegaard.
From Lukács’ Hegelian theory Adorno borrows the critical dimension
of myth as a configuration of natural history. He closely echoes Lukács’
Hegel-inspired notion of “second nature”, as outlined, for instance, in the
following statement: “This second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yet
senseless like the first: it is a complex of senses—meanings—which has
28
That of 1932 is a particularly intricate conference, in which Adorno obscurely presents his idea
of history and nature. Max Pensky (2004, p. 277) has defined it as “troubling”, and Susan Buck-
Morss (1977, p. 53) as “obscure”. Recently, Tom Whyman (2016, pp. 452–472) tried to under-
stand that of natural history as a therapeutic concept.
22 M. Farina
become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority”

(Lukács 1971a, p. 63). The mythical nature is, in this respect, the hidden
(irreconciled) meaning that art brings to light and helps overcome; it cor-
responds to the double character of art, in terms of expression of mythical
naturalness and judgment of its configuration. According to Hegel’s rea-
soning, in fact, art is a cultural production through which the hidden
content of Geist becomes known and therefore ceases to be mythical.
As some Italian scholars have remarked, Hegel presents art as somehow
fluidifying the rigid, mythical, social meaning.29 In this respect Adorno’s
idea of myth as unconscious, rigid, natural dimension of art seems to be
a consistent, and critical, reinterpretation of that dynamics. In the
Kierkegaard, however, one can find also a second, ambiguous, and obscure
meaning of myth as nature, a meaning that derives from the other great
influence in this text: Benjamin.
The last chapter of the book, in fact, is devoted to the awaited
Construction of the Aesthetic, and this is where Adorno mostly deals with
Benjamin’s categories, such as that of melancholy and fragment. By
nuancing the image of a rigid nature with that of natural (dynamic) decay,
what Adorno notably attempts is to provide a viable solution to the
impasse of a merely critical notion of myth. In this respect, Benjamin
appears as the advocate of an allegorical strategy, allowing him to claim,
for instance, that “everything about history that, from the very begin-
ning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face –
or rather in a dead’s head” (Benjamin 1998, p. 166). Along the same
lines, Adorno tries to save the natural, fragmented elements by saying
that “the origin of their luminosity is putrefaction” (K: 181, Ki: 127).
This tactic, however, forces Adorno into a twofold interpretation of myth.
As we have seen, in fact, the mythical nature is what art brings to light in
order to make it known and solved, but now we are told that “the hope
that inheres in the aesthetic is that of the transparence of decaying fig-
ures” (K: 187, Ki: 132), and the reason lies in the fact that “through fan-
tasy, as recollection, genius continuously restores original creation – not
29
For example, this is how Dino Formaggio (1983, pp. 133–136), in the book published under the
title La “morte dell’arte” e l’estetica (The “Death of Art” and the Aesthetics), presents his interpretation
of Hegel’s idea of death of art in the terms of a rebirth of art itself.
as the creator of its reality but by the reintegration of its given elements in
an image. The moments of fantasy are the festivals of history” (K: 197, Ki
139). In order to hold together the critical dimension of myth and the
significance of the disenchanted nature—in order, that is, to hold together
Lukács and Benjamin—Adorno is forced to consider the activity of genius
as an utter, immediate, and natural creation of meaning.
Adorno’s idea is therefore that to conceive in the first place the mythi-
cal side of history as a rigid and fixed nature, by showing in the second
place myth in the light of nature as decaying, that is in its transitory
embodiment. “Natural” decay shows the necessary decay (the transience)
of the natural and mythical side of history. In order to see this second
aspect as “the hope that inheres in the aesthetic”, justified by the genius
who would be able to “restore original creation”, Adorno is however
forced to take art’s production as an immediate creation of an uncor-
rupted and reconciled meaning. This is how the book on Kierkegaard
ultimately holds together two opposite reactions to the same aesthetic
problem: that of the historicization of Kant’s reflecting judgment. On the
one hand, a critical notion of myth is implicitly developed as what has to
be dissolved by means of the construction of the aesthetic; on the other
hand, still prominent is the idea of myth as the “pre-historical” and con-
ciliated nature that the construction of the aesthetic is called to restore. In
what follows, I will show first in which sense the path through which
Adorno accomplishes the construction of his aesthetics corresponds to an
effort to come to terms with this ambiguity, and finally how this leads to
breaking up with some of Benjamin’s concepts and developing the notion
of “Culture Industry”, as outlined in the Dialectics of the Enlightenment.
24 M. Farina
1.3 T
he Anti-Romantic Choice and Its
Consequences: Art and Society
Among the various and heterogeneous influences that make up Adorno’s
natural and mythical image of history—it would be about time to men-
tion Max Weber’s theory of disenchanted and secularized modernity30—
so far, I have neglected possibly the most relevant, if one is to believe the
closing remarks to the conference on The Idea of Natural History: “it could
be demonstrated that what has been said here is only an interpretation of
certain fundamental elements of the materialist dialectics” (IdN: 365,
INH: 124); this influence is obviously that of Karl Marx. In the German
Ideology, Marx, in fact, provides a full account of history in terms of
development. The main features of such a development’s movement rep-
resent a guiding thread for Adorno’s ideas on the natural-mythical deter-
mination of history. According to Marx’s account, one can point to the
“source and theatre of all history”, against which people “become more
and more enslaved under a power alien to them”, and this is “a pressure
which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called
world spirit”, that they have intended “as ‘substance’ and ‘essence of
man’”, and that “hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients” (Marx
2004, pp. 57, 55, 59, 55). In the first book of The Capital, moreover,
Marx takes into account the basic economic laws of said historical pro-
cess, and he claims that they “appear to the political economists’ bour-
geois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed
necessity” (Marx 1990, p. 175). Here lie precisely the first seeds for
Adorno’s idea of history as a natural-mythical development, seeds that
clearly reject the Romantic conception of myth as the harmonic, concili-
ated, origin of history. The artwork, as a historical product, corresponds
in this respect to the exhibition of this contradictory dynamics, but as an
aesthetic product—that is, as a disposition of social contradictions in a
successful aesthetic form—it corresponds also to the demonstration of
the irreconciled character of society. The growing awareness of this
30
Weber, with the ideas of disenchantment of the world and secularization, was one of the most
influential authors between the first and the second decade of the nineteenth century; for the rel-
evance of Weber in Adorno’s youth, see Axel Honneth (2003, pp. 175–187).
conceptual principle drives Adorno on the path of the resolution of the

tension between a Romantic and a social-historical interpretation of
myth, as shown by his writings on the sociology of music.
In 1932, Adorno wrote a two-part essay for the first issues of the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the official journal of the Institute for
Social Research—the institutional affiliation of the group that will even-
tually be renowned as Frankfurt School. The journal, strongly wanted by
the director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer,31 was principally devoted
to collect “factors, that are determining for the co-existence of human
beings in present day” (Horkheimer 1932, p. i). Adorno contributed to
the project with a piece On the Social Situation of Music, which also paves
the way to the development of his overall sociology of music. As far as
this research is concerned, the essay is of great relevance inasmuch as it
establishes, ex negativo, the impossibility to hold together—or rather to
mediate between—the Romantic and the Hegelian stance toward art.
As Richard Leppert recognizes, the essay lays out a diagnosis of the
process of commodification of music (and art in general) —of the absorp-
tion of music in the economic process of production and consumption—
by isolating what Adorno takes as the real autonomous music, in other
words music that “escapes complete commodification, but only to be
exiled from a society that has no use for it” (Leppert 2002, pp. 332).
Despite being constantly exposed to the socio-economic pressure of com-
modification, music has to preserve its own aesthetic quality in order to,
according to Adorno’s Freudian lexicon (ZgL: 771, EoM: 427), “subli-
mate” social contradiction. The relation between art and society is there-
fore built upon a continuous process of mediation. Art is socially mediated
in the sense that it exists only for the sake of social conflicts, and society
itself is artistically mediated inasmuch as art allows knowledge of social
conflicts from within, without being simultaneously projected beyond
them. This is why art is granted the character of cognition, consequently
demanded of “any music”, as of any form of art, “which today wishes to
preserve its right to existence” (ZgL: 732, EoM: 393). The kind of con-
ciliation that art can claim for itself is just the aesthetic and therefore
A reconstruction of the birth and of the early years of activity of the Frankfurt Institute under the
31
direction of Horkheimer can be found in Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 150–158).

26 M. Farina
formal composition of social conflicts, achieved precisely by depositing

those tensions in a successful aesthetic form; on the contrary, art cannot
produce any effective social resolution of contradiction. Only in the light
of real, effective, antinomies art appears conciliated; not in the light of an
alleged image of social harmony.
Having clarified this issue, it is now possible to explore how Adorno
comes to terms with the seeds of his critique of the Romantics. While
describing the attempt to build a form of autonomous music in the time
of late expressionism, he writes that
radical freedom from all objective norms imposed upon music from the
exterior is coordinated with the most extreme rigidity of immanent struc-
tures, so that music by its own forces eliminates at least within itself alien-
ation as a manner of subjective formation and objective material. […] To
be sure, music overcomes inward alienation only through the perfected
expression thereof on its exterior. And if one were to assume that the imma-
nent overcoming of aporias of music were consistently possible, this would
be nothing more than a romantic transfiguration of craftsmanship. (ZgL:
739, EoM: 399–400)
The “romantic transfiguration of craftsmanship” would be therefore the

supposition that art—in this case, music—could somehow overcome its
own time out of its own efforts and independently produce the concilia-
tion of social antagonisms.32 What art can do, according to Adorno, is
instead to reproduce contemporary social contradictions and—by show-
ing their possible conciliation in the aesthetic element—express the
necessity of their historical overcoming. What an artwork could never do
is, conversely, to normatively indicate the solution of antagonisms. It
would then fall under the same contradictions it wants to protest, inas-
much as it would (somehow) presuppose the existence (somewhere) of
conciliation and the possibility to use it as its normative model. This is,
in brief, the Romantic assumption on art, the presumption to own the
image of conciliation and to be able to socially communicate it by means
of artworks. As already recalled, Schlegel would claim that: “We have no
mythology. But, I add, we are close to obtaining one or, rather, it is time
that we earnestly work together to create one”. By contrast, Adorno says
The relationship between the autonomy and the social character of music in the essay of 1932 is
32
defined in this way also by Max Paddison (1993, pp. 98–99).

that “if the immanent development of music were established as an abso-

lute – as the mere reflection of social process – the only result would be a
sanction of the fetish character of music […]. On the other hand, it is
clear that music is not to be measured in terms of the existing society of
which it is the product and which, at the same time, keeps music in a
state of isolation” (ZgL: 73, EoM: 393).
Romantic, in a broad sense, is therefore any attempt to conceive art in
the terms of an harmonic and conciliated model that can be opposed to
social antagonism as a normative framework. From generic Marxian the-
ory, one learns that, assuming that historical society presents an unrecon-
ciled and antagonistic structure, then the normative value of art entails
necessarily crediting to the aesthetic an immediate value, the ability, that
is, to evoke something like a pre-historical (or even post-historical, mes-
sianic) conciliated harmony. In this respect, Adorno talks about the “force
of reification which constituted music as art” that “could not simply be
reconverted to immediacy without returning art to the state in which it
found itself before the division of labour” (ZgL: 730, EoM: 392).
Although these words might not sound particularly familiar today, in the
1930s most people would have read the state “before the division of
labour” as the conservative, fascist, ideology of corporative work, and as
a regression to an idealized and mythical age before capitalistic division,
in this sense very close to the romantic ideal of mythical harmonic ori-
gins, expressed for example by Novalis’ medieval provocative utopia of
Christianity or Europe. As is well known, in fact, the Nazi movement took
advantage of a mis-(or over-)interpretation of some Romantic, as well as
Nietzschean, ambiguous theoretical elements33—basically, of the idea
that the past corresponds to an idyllic age sheltered from modern division
of labor—and this is the reason why any kind of past-oriented mythology
always runs the risk of being accused of conservatism, obscurantism, or
33
Christa Kamenetsky (1972, pp. 198–199) stresses for example the origin in Herder and in
Romanticism of the idea of Volk as natural, organic, unity rooted in the past, although she under-
lines (pp. 203–206) the difference between the Romantic idea of community (Gemeinschaft) and
the Nazi theory of race. Lawrence Birke (1999, pp. 34–35) shows in which terms the German
Jewish writer Victor Klemperer conceived the Nazi idea of their boundless power as a heritage of
the Romantic image of progressive universality.
28 M. Farina
even fascism, as in the case of Tolkien’s novels.34 To the opposite, Adorno

has always been attracted by Benjamin’s interpretation of Karl Kraus’
powerful line “origin is the goal [Ursprung is das Ziel]” (Kraus 1952–1964,
vol. 7, p. 59),35 that fits well into the Marxian idea according to which
conflicts and contradictions are endemic to society, rather than coming
from outside, as external crisis factors (such as modernity, minorities, and
migrants). Kraus’ quotation is therefore integrated as a stimulus to set the
idea of harmonic origin not in a mythical past, but rather as a goal to be
historically achieved. As a result, rather than being the real place of con-
ciliation, myth corresponds to the ideological structure that covers up the
endemic social antagonism by passing off its idealized and abstract image
for something to be effectively achieved, and by diverting in this way the
attention from the real social contradiction, which remains unsolved.
Art, real radical art, is a critique precisely of this ideological dynamics.
Having this idea in mind, Adorno outlines what he intends as the most
radical opposition of modern music, that is to say, that among Arnold
Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky, which also provides the ground material
of the 1949 monograph The Philosophy of Modern Music, as I will show in
the next chapter. For the time being, suffice it to say that Stravinsky’s
objectivist classicism is equated to the attempt to restore an ancient and
harmonic dimension of music, whereas Schönberg’s twelve-tone tech-
nique—in analogy with the striving toward the rough disenchantment of
Kraus’, Freud’s, Kubin’s and Schiele’s “Great Vienna” —supports the idea
that a fragmented and disharmonious form is the essence of the properly
modern work of art. Diametrically opposite to Schönberg’s acknowledge-
ment of the conflictual fragmentation of modernity, Stravinsky would try
instead to heal social antagonism by means of a violent repackaging of
ancient harmony. One may then conclude that Stravinsky is in music
what fascism was in politics. As Adorno writes: “The estate-corporative
organization of a highly industrial economic context is manifested, which
34
David Oberhelman (2006, pp. 410–411) sheds some light on the overview of Marxist critical
readings of Tolkien’s narratives as a conservative set of ideology.
35
On Kraus’ quotation about the origin, see the analysis of Hent de Vries (2005, pp. 214–218). As
Robert Hullot-Kentor shows the motto has an ambiguous sense, as, with seemingly conservative
meaning, it alluded to the need to restore in the future the damaged origin (Hullot-Kentor 2006,
pp. 5–7).
in objectivist music appears as a conforming image: it appears that the

sovereign composer stands in free control of the supposed musical organ-
ism, in much the same way that in fascism a ‘leadership elite’ [Führerelite]
appears to be in control, while in truth power over social ‘organism’ lies
in the hands of monopoly capitalism” (ZgL: 743–744, EoM: 404). As we
have seen in the historical interpretation of reflecting judgment, accord-
ing to Adorno, art as “model” should emerge directly from its being ori-
ented toward particularity and historical newness, not as a normative
stance that the author can somehow assume toward reality.
Under these circumstances, it is possible to pinpoint a crucial conse-
quence of Adorno’s anti-Romantic position in the essay “On the Social
Situation of Music”, a consequence that goes in the direction of a critique
of some developments of Benjamin’s aesthetics. What I have outlined as
the core of Adorno’s critique of Romanticism—the idea that the author
can aesthetically promote the resolution of social antagonism by some-
how tracing the harmonious image of conciliation—paradoxically leads
to take politically engaged art as internal to the broad field of the Romantic
framework. I say “paradoxically” because Romanticism in nineteenth-
century art is generally labeled as a conservative attitude, whereas political
engagement is normally traced back to the field of progressive Marxism.
The analogy between Romanticism and artistic political engagement is
clearly laid out, though, when Adorno observes that engaged art shares
some fundamental aspects with Wagner’s great Romantic project for a
Zukunftsmusik (The Music of the Future). As much as the Romantic ideal
is based on the assumption that immediate knowledge of the archaic
model is possible, as well as on its mythological repackaging, engaged
art—although opposed to any regressive position—supports the aesthetic
enactment of political values which are able to establish social harmony.
The name mentioned here by Adorno is that of Bertolt Brecht.
What Adorno wishes to criticize in both the Romantic and the politi-
cally engaged understanding of art is nothing but their wrong attribution
of meaning to aesthetic immediacy.36 Adorno’s essay on Wagner,
36
See Adorno about Kurt Weill’s and Brecht’s works Three Penny Opera and Rise and Fall of the City
of Mahagonny, where after a general appreciation of the spirit, Adorno recognizes two kind of
ambiguities: “The misunderstanding of the audience which peacefully consumes the songs of the
30 M. Farina
especially the parts written in the 1930s,37 notably develops the key ele-
ments of the critique of immediacy. Adorno, in fact, traces Wagner’s anti-
semitism back to a distorted understanding of the concept of immediacy.
Needless to say, Wagner and his Zukunfstmusik represent for Adorno the
point of convergence of Romantic and engaged art. Wagner’s music
would, in this respect, try to solve social mediated antagonisms as if they
qualified as biological immediate ones, since “if in the social process of
life ‘ossified relationships’ form a second nature, then it is this second
nature at which Wagner gazes transfixed, mistaking it for the first” (VüW:
22–23, SoW: 16). Immediacy is here the theoretical category that fosters
a misunderstanding of the naturalness of history. As a result of such a
misunderstanding, history would not appear as the ossification of social
relationship, but as the immediate expression of an original, biological
nature. Consequently, the subject’s sacrosanct intolerance for the pressure
of social conflicts may even turn into antisemitism, that is a resentment
against the race, ideologically conceived as an immediate natural feature
in the sense of an original nature. According to an immediacy-based
interpretation of its meaning, and against the confusion generated by the
modern and cosmopolite melting pot, also myth as petrification of social
relationships becomes the myth of a natural, harmonic, and pre-historical
unity of race. In Hegelian terms, Adorno always understands immediacy
as an abstract, partial, deficient way to understand reality, and the need
for immediacy as the bare sign of a general cultural loss of wholeness and
sense. In reference to what Hegel states in the Phenomenology of Spirit,
immediacy for Adorno resembles “spirit [which] has shown itself to be so
impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meager
feeling of divinity, very much like the wanderer in the desert who longs
for a simple drink of water. That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit’s
needs is the full measure of the magnitude of its loss” (Hegel 2018,
pp. 7–8). Along this line of thinking takes place also Adorno’s departure
from some theoretical assumptions in Benjamin’s thought. Obviously, it
would be foolish to deny the huge, determining, and long-lasting
Three Penny Opera as hit tunes” and the fact that “illusion blends into false positivity, destruction
into communal art within the realm of status quo” (ZgL: 750, EoM: 409–410).
37
The entire book has been published in 1952, but the core of the text (chapters 1, 6, 9, and 10)
was written during the 1930s and published in 1939 on the journal of the Frankfurter Institute.
influence of Benjamin in all of Adorno’s works until his death.38 Benjamin’s

ideas of constellation and allegory play a pivotal role in the entire devel-
opment of Adorno’s philosophy. But whereas the Benjamin of The Origin
of German Tragic Drama remains a guiding light, the same cannot be said
of the essays written during the second half of the 1930s. In this period,
we are witnesses to a heated epistolary exchange between the two authors,
that culminates in the letters from November and December 1938 about
Benjamin’s accounts on Baudelaire; as it has been suggested, “no other
debate in Western Marxist aesthetics has received more commentary than
that between Adorno and Benjamin in the 1930s” (Zuidervaart 1991,
p. 29).39 It should be pointed out that, starting in 1934, Adorno ventured
in a long process of emigration caused by the Nazi persecution of Jewish
people, which brought him to Oxford, New York, and finally to Los
Angeles, whereas Benjamin preferred at first to stay in Europe, notably in
Paris, only to try to find refuge in the USA at the end of 1939, meeting
instead his death near the border between France and Spain in 1940.
Against this historical backdrop, in the following, I will outline the theo-
retical reasons of Adorno’s critique of Benjamin.
A key role in the discussion with Benjamin is played by Adorno’s gen-
eral notion of the artwork, that is, by the pivotal outcome of what we
have seen as his construction of the aesthetic. At this point, it may be
helpful to sum up the state of the art. At the beginning of this chapter I
have introduced the historicization of Kant’s reflecting judgment as the
key aporia in Adorno’s aesthetics. Now, all the elements of Adorno’s strat-
egy to overcome said aporia should be clear. How the aesthetic element
can work as a model, that is to say, its universal and general dimension,
can be grasped only in the light of its historical changing. What is univer-
sal in history is only the fact that it keeps changing; the historical chang-
ing, however, is comprehensible only because it appears in a figure, in a
38
Still in Negative Dialectics (1966), in fact, Benjamin’s is one of the most quoted names and
Benjamin’s notion of constellation plays a pivotal role in the argument of the book.
39
The debate between Adorno and Benjamin has been summarized and analyzed several times by
the scholars. The mentioned text of Zuidervaart (1991, pp. 28–28) contains a careful reconstruc-
tion of critical studies on the quarrel. For more recent sources one should also mention the works
of Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 214–226), that of Eiland and Jennings (2014, pp. 490–496), and
that of Thijs Lijster (2017, pp. 71–107).
32 M. Farina
rigid “petrified, primordial landscape” (Benjamin 1998, p. 166). The art-

work represents then the objective structure in which the aesthetically
successful form expresses the antinomic nature of society by showing it in
a reconciled, aesthetically fully successful image, and simultaneously by
judging its social non-conciliation. Furthermore, the work of art is always
oriented in the direction of the resolution and disenchantment of what
seems to be an original, mythical, dimension of society, but that is instead
the determinate social product of capitalist production. Based on this
idea of the artwork, Adorno engages in a discussion with Benjamin, a
discussion that revolves entirely around the notions of archaic—in the
sense of mythical—newness—in the sense of historical—and aesthetic
immediacy.
In January 1935, Benjamin writes a letter to Adorno in which he agrees
with some of the remarks made by his friend about his essay on Kafka.
He thanks Adorno for his accurate recognition of “where I went wrong”,
and states that “this applies first of all to your observations on my inade-
quate mastery of the archaic; it thus perfectly applies to your reservations
about the question of the eons and of forgetting” (BW1: 99, Cor1: 471).
What tends to separate the two authors is, in fact, the interpretation of
the relationship between the archaic notion of myth and that of historic
newness. According to Adorno the mythological element is already per se
and in itself a historical one; it represents the rigid dimension of develop-
ment. Differently, archaic nature is better described by the category of
appearance, in the same way Marx describes the objective character of
commodity as an appearance.40 Precisely concerning the notion of
archaic, along with its relationship with the natural-mythical ground,
Adorno points to a dangerous ambiguity in Benjamin. Broadly speaking,
he is afraid that Benjamin is unable to distance himself from the most
regressive fringes in the debate on myth, especially given the fact that in
1935 he managed to finish his essay on Bachofen, a topic of investigation
40
As I will show in the following, Marx’s theory of exposing value of commodity plays a decisive
role in Adorno’s conception of the artwork. For the moment, it will suffice to quote a well-known
passage from The Capital: “The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore
simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as
objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of
these things” (Marx 1990, pp. 164–165).
he shared with the by then fully aligned Nazi professor Baeumler. One of
the distinctive qualities of the neo-Romantic notion of myth is its being
separated from the historic development, or rather its super-historical
nature, its existence beyond history; as Baeumler writes, “myth is abso-
lutely non-historical. It has its own value and meaning just as testament
of pre-historical spiritual conditions” (Baeumler 1956, p. XCI). It is pre-
cisely this separation between myth and history, judged by Adorno as
false and abstract, what turns myth into a useful, manipulable tool, in an
instrument that can be arbitrarily and ideologically modified, or rather in
a vehicle of political propaganda, especially in reference to how the Third
Reich employed the myth of the Aryan race to solidify and strengthen the
frayed German society of the late Weimar Republic. To be fair, it is not
the case that Adorno sees in Benjamin something close to a fascist pen-
chant, but he somehow fears that his friend might make a too naïve and
too imprudent use of a notion, that of myth, whose ambiguity makes it
politically dangerous.
The quarrel between the two officially opens with a letter from August
2, 1935, in which Adorno states some critical arguments against the
exposé that Benjamin sent him to illustrate what should have been his
masterpiece, that is the Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project).41 Of particular
interest is Adorno’s underlying of some aspects of the notion of “dialecti-
cal image” —a sort of aesthetic figural crystallization of the age, theorized
by Benjamin in his text—in particular of those that Adorno sees as undia-
lectical elements; as he writes to his friend, he is not convinced by: “The
view of the dialectical image as a content of consciousness, albeit a collec-
tive one; its linear and, I would almost say, ontogenetic dependence on
the future as utopia; the conception of the ‘epoch’ as the pertinent,
41
The philosophical project to which Benjamin refers as the Passagen-Werk was supposed to be an
enormous collection of quotations able, so to say, to form a constellation of modernity and, there-
fore, to resolve its enigmatic figure. This work has always attracted the critique’s attention precisely
because of its enigmatic nature. Susan Buck-Morss (1989, p. X) was fascinated by its being “a
‘Copernican revolution’ in the practice of history writing”. Benjamin’s idea to reconstruct modern
age through the collection of his fragment has influenced large part of twentieth-century philoso-
phy, especially thanks to the mediation of Michel Foucault’s archeological method. Although
Foucault scarcely quotes Benjamin (e.g. Foucault 1990, p. 12), the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben sees the whole project of biopolitics as an attempt to put together the affinities between
Benjamin’s and Foucault’s ideas of life and bios (Agamben 1998, pp. 4–5).
34 M. Farina
self-contained subject of the content of consciousness” (BW1: 139, Cor1:

495). In a word, what Adorno detects as the critical point in Benjamin’s
idea of dialectical image is its exclusively static character, which allows a
utopian interpretation of its contents; as we have seen, in fact, it is pre-
cisely the image of the archaic as static that paves the way to the Wagnerian
utopian art of the future, the romantic projection of a new mythology,
the fascist use of myth, and the engaged art as a normative proposition of
values. Through the concept of intérieur, as developed in the book about
Kierkegaard (BW1: 140, Cor1: 496), Adorno aims moreover to indicate
in which terms he understands the undialectical elements in Benjamin,
that is as a direct and immediate concordance between the “epoch” and
its “content of consciousness” in the dialectical image. The concept of
intérieur, in fact, requires, as we have seen, a process of mediation between
inwardness and society, being the former an outcome of the pressure of
the latter.
By analogy to this approach, Adorno explicitly stigmatizes what he
perceives as Benjamin’s tendency to think the present in the terms of a
decay from the wholeness of the past, in particular through “the mythic-
archaic category of the ‘Golden Age’”, according to which, if its “crucial
‘ambiguity’ […] is suppressed, the commodity as the substance of the age
[…] is negated in a way that would in fact make the immediacy of the
primal state appear as truth” (BW1: 142, Cor1: 497). In the same letter,
moreover, Adorno writes that “the formulation that ‘the new is permeated
by the old’ seems highly dubious to me, given my critique of the dialecti-
cal image as regression” and he proposes instead “the very important
Hegelian concept of second nature […] adopted by Georg Lukács” (BW1:
145, Cor1: 499–500); it is then in the light of this kind of considerations
that he can hold against Benjamin that “you construe the relationship of
the oldest to the newest […] as one of utopian reference to the ‘classless
society’. Thus the archaic becomes a complementary addition instead of
itself being the ‘newest’—and is thus dedialecticized” (BW1: 141, Cor1:
496). The utopia of society without classes is nothing but the presupposi-
tion of an immediate aesthetic conciliation, whose normative value
should be applied to society, and this dynamics, as Adorno shows, has
much more in common with the mystical and ambiguous ideas of neo-
Romanticism, than with a materialistic dialectical approach that sees in
what appears as archaic and mythical nothing but the newest product of
historical development. This is why in his letter Adorno warns Benjamin
of the risk of falling in both the conservative, obscure, position of Jung
and Klages—despite the fact that it has been suggested that in his later
production Adorno embraces some of Klages’ ideas42—and the utopic,
engaged, conception of Brecht. What Adorno sees in Benjamin is ulti-
mately the tendency to conceive the artwork as something that refers to a
mythical and non-historical dimension, by statically and immediately
opposing society, and not as an autonomous form, whose autonomy is
the result of a continuous mediation of social reality.43
The reader will start to notice a certain elective affinity between the
aesthetic form of art, as understood by Adorno, and the notion of com-
modity, especially in their activity of production of meaning. A real con-
cern in Adorno is, however, how to radically pinpoint the concrete
difference between these two forms, and his fear is that Benjamin, because
of his penchant toward immediacy, risks mixing up the two levels.
Romantic and engaged art, in fact, manage the aesthetic immediacy pre-
cisely in the same way capitalism presents the commodity as a peaceful
and conciliated vehicle of meaning.
In the epistolary exchange here taken into consideration, although
focusing on Benjamin’s immense, and at the end unfinished, Arcades
Project, Adorno starts to become conscious of the outcomes of his con-
struction of the aesthetic. In 1937, instead of producing a final draft of
the Arcades, Benjamin began to work on a book about Baudelaire, for
which he envisaged publication in the Journal for Social Research (BW1:
360, Cor1: 576), at the time issued in America. Between September and
October 1938, Benjamin concluded the second part of the Baudelaire
and sent the text to the Institute. The following month, he received a
long and very dense letter from Adorno, which has been the object of
42
Wellmer (1991, p. 3) considers the Dialectic of Enlightenment as the attempt to merge two dis-
tinct philosophical traditions, namely the Hegel and Marxian tradition and that which leads from
Schopenhauer, via Nietzsche, to Klages. See also Habermas 1982, pp. 13–30.
43
The legitimacy of Adorno’s critique has been recently recognized also by some of Benjamin’s
scholars, for instance, by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Eiland and Jennings 2014,
pp. 490–495).
36 M. Farina
several historical and conceptual investigations and interpretations.44

This is a letter of the greatest relevance. Despite huge expectations for
Benjamin’s essay, which Adorno declares having “literally devoured”, he
admits, in fact, that the text “caused me a certain degree of disappoint-
ment” (BW1: 364–365, Cor1: 579–580). This very feeling of disap-
pointment turns out to mark an important threshold in Adorno’s
intellectual history, and therefore also in this research. In reaction to
Benjamin’s attempt to elucidate his enigmatic Arcades Project through
Baudelaire, Adorno formulates indeed a set of methodological questions
that will contribute to increase his distance from Benjamin, but also to
fully clarify the definitive outline of his determination of aesthetics.
In his letter Adorno comes straight to the point. He refers in fact to the
problematic dialectical connection established by Benjamin between
some economic elements (e.g. the wine tax) and their aesthetic transposi-
tion in Baudelaire’s lyrics: “Let me express myself here in as simple and
Hegelian manner as possible. If I am not mistaken, this dialectic lacks
one thing: mediation. The primary tendency is always to relate the prag-
matic content of Baudelaire’s work directly to proximate characteristics of
the social history of his time, and preferably economic characteristics
when possible” (BW1: 366–367, Cor1: 581). In one of the first and most
prominent interpretations of this epistolary exchange, the Italian philoso-
pher, Giorgio Agamben (1993, pp. 115–116), explains Adorno’s critique
in reference to its conformity to Marxian orthodoxy. As he calls into
question materialist dialectics, Adorno may well leave the reader with this
impression. He writes, in fact, that he “consider[s] it methodologically
unfortunate to give conspicuous individual characteristics from the realm
of the superstructure a ‘materialistic’ twist by relating them to corre-
sponding characteristics of the substructure in an unmediated and even
causal manner. The materialistic determination of cultural characteristics
is possible only when mediated by the total process” (BW1: 367, Cor1:
44
The epistolary exchange was published in Adorno’s and Scholem’s edition of Benjamin’s letters
(1966). One of the first great interpretations is that of Agamben in the chapter The Prince and the
Frog in Infancy and History (1978), where he tries to defend Benjamin from Adorno’s critique by
opposing the alleged orthodox and Hegelian Marxism of the latter to the genuine interpretation of
the former (Agamben 1993, pp. 107–124). In 1977, moreover, Fredric Jameson wrote the after-
word to a collection under the title Aesthetics and Politics, where the epistolary exchange between
Adorno and Benjamin forms one of the four chapters (see Jameson 1980, pp. 196–213).
581–582). Adorno’s critique, however, is not aimed at reestablishing the

dogmas of orthodox Marxism, as much as at correctly accounting for the
relation between the single economic, or empirical, fact and its artistic,
aesthetic, literary transposition. As the same letter clarifies, in fact,
Adorno’s interest lies precisely in how economic and social reality becomes
aesthetically signifying. In a passage that Agamben overlooks in his com-
mentary, Adorno writes that “direct inference from the tax on wine to
L’ame du vin ascribes to phenomena just that kind of spontaneity, tangi-
bility, and density that they have relinquished in capitalism. There is a
profoundly romantic element in this kind of unmediated and, I might
almost repeat, anthropological materialism”. Accordingly, Adorno’s cri-
tique does not concern simply the general relation between structure and
superstructure, as Agamben maintains, but rather that between the single
economic element and the meaning it is given within artistic elaboration;
it should also be added that the artistic meaning of the economic fact,
according to Adorno, requires the conceptual mediation of the aesthetic
critique in order to be understood, and precisely this is said to be missing
in Benjamin’s account on Baudelaire: “The ‘mediation’ I miss”, Adorno
writes, “and find obscured by materialistic and historiographic invoca-
tion is, however, nothing other than precisely the theory from which your
work abstains. Bypassing theory affects the empirical evidence” (BW1:
368, Cor1: 582).
The only way out for Benjamin, the only way to solve the problem of
aesthetic meaning without exposing it to the mediation of the theory—
this is the charge moved by Adorno—is, then, to presuppose the archaic
dimension, the “spontaneity”, of the empirical elements, a spontaneity
that the historical process has now seized from disenchanted phenomena.
The presupposition of the immediate spontaneity of the empiric world
corresponds, however, to an alignment with the mythical neo-Romantic
approach which “settled the crossroads of magic and positivism” (BW1:
368, Cor1: 582). According to Adorno, there is in Benjamin a tendency
toward the mysticism of materiality, that is, the inclination to conceive
the material level as immediate vehicle of meaning: “you almost supersti-
tiously ascribe to the enumeration of materials a power of illumination,
but this power is never reserved for a pragmatic reference but only for
theoretical construction” (BW1: 369, Cor1: 583).
38 M. Farina
Thanks to his discussion with Walter Benjamin during the second half
of the 1930s, Adorno manages to complete the process of construction of
his aesthetic theory and, in particular, is able to solve the tensions still
prominent in the book on Kierkegaard. The notion of myth, in fact, can
now be understood in its critical potential, without being mistaken for a
mystical call upon a Romantic idea of the origins. Myth, finally, is noth-
ing but the way in which history appears to us as an oppressive, natural,
force, similar to how the Greeks understood mythical fate. Under
Adorno’s Marxist gaze, this oppressive, rigid, natural dimension of his-
tory matches closely the social contradictions of capitalistic society, which
appears to men with the same inevitability of an ancient myth. Art,
instead, is defined in opposition to the natural myth of history. Art, in
fact, is that one human activity which is able to host social conflicts and
to sublimate them in an aesthetic form, by making them object of frui-
tion. Then, art criticizes society not because it qualifies as a normative
model, but just on behalf of its bare aesthetic existence.
1.4 The Model of the Culture Industry

After having described the path through which Adorno defined his own
aesthetics, it is now time to outline the actual outcome of this determina-
tion. What I want to suggest in the last paragraph of this chapter is then
to read one of the most prolific concepts in Adorno’s contributions—that
of culture industry—as the direct, consistent, result of his work on the
aesthetic, and, moreover, as the answer to Benjamin’s opposite argument
laid out in the essay “The Artwork in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility”. In order to do this, I should first devote a few words to
the question of the artwork in the light of its concrete relation with social
production.
The artwork, in fact, is not the only element able to aesthetically expose
social contradictions. There is another typical capitalistic product that
due to its perceptive, exterior form qualifies as receptacle of social con-
flicts. This product is the commodity. In the fourth paragraph of the first
chapter of The Capital, Marx takes into account what he labels as The
Fetishism of the Commodity, a notion that becomes pivotal in
twentieth-century Marxism, not least because of the influence of Freud’s

accounts on psychological fetishism.45 “A commodity”, writes Marx,
“appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing”, even though its
investigation brings out that it is “a very strange thing”. A normal prod-
uct of human labor, in fact, “as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it
changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness”; rather than stand-
ing with its feet on the ground, “it stands on its head, and evolves out of
its wooden brain grotesque ideas far more wonderful than if it were to
begin dancing of its own free will”. This is what Marx calls “the mysteri-
ous character of the commodity-form”, that is the fact that “the com-
modity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective
characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural
properties of these things”. Commodities become, therefore, “sensuous
things”, that is, real objects of the world, “which are at the same time
suprasensible or social”, in other words, able to sensibly communicate
social reality. In this sense, “it is nothing but the definite social relation
between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the phantasma-
gorical form of a relation between things”.46 The fetishism of commodity,
exactly as the fetishism of “the misty realm of religion”, amounts to mis-
takenly taking the social character of commodities for a natural, empiri-
cal, relation among things. As in the fetishism of religious phantasmagoria
“the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed
with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other
and with the human race”, in the social fetishism of the phantasmagoria
45
Adorno, along with great part of twentieth century’s Marxism, has been largely influenced by
psychoanalysis, and he sees a close bond between Marx’s socio-economic notion of fetishism and
Freud’s psychological one. For this reason, Donovan Mioyasaki (2002, 429–443) detected a sort of
confusion, in both Adorno and Benjamin, between the two fields. Although Fredric Jameson
(1990, p. 254) suggests that the critique has overstressed Adorno’s so-called Freudo-Marxism, he
cannot deny the relevance of the psychoanalytic method in Adorno’s sociology. As Simon Jarvis
(1998, pp. 81–82) stresses, Adorno’s skepticism toward psychoanalysis is clear, in particular within
the framework of of his critique of Fromm’s social psychology and its American reception in
authors like Karen Horney; finally, as he writes, “Adorno’s use of psychoanalytic categories raises as
many problems as it solves” (Jarvis 1998, p. 84).
46
I have slightly modified the translation. I have namely translated the word phantasmagorische
“phantasmagoric”, rather than “fantastic”.
40 M. Farina
of commodity, social conflict between labor and capital appears as a natu-

ral propriety of the products (Marx 1990, pp. 163–165).47
In the light of Adorno’s definition of aesthetics, one would claim then
that, whereas commodities’ autonomy resembles religious projection,
art’s autonomy is a historical quality of the product; whereas commodity
immediately reproduces myth in a sensible object, art dissolves it in an
aesthetic form; whereas commodity empirically covers social conflict by
disguising it as a natural quality of things, art reveals it by aesthetically
showing its unreconciled effectuality. This explains why the distinction
between artistic and everyday objects requires a critique of immediacy
and of mythical-archaic perspectives, along with the evaluation of theo-
retical mediation. As Adorno writes in his essay on Wagner, “the occulta-
tion of production by means of the outward appearance of the product
[…] is the formal law governing the works of Richard Wagner”, or in
other words “Wagner’s operas tend towards magic delusion, […] in short
towards phantasmagoria” (VüW: 82, SoW: 74).
Consistently with this line of thinking, Adorno criticizes also
Benjamin’s aesthetics and sees in it the seed of a Romantic and neo-
mythological idea of the artwork, from which he makes sure to take dis-
tance. According to a general aesthetic pattern, then, one can read
Adorno’s notion of “culture industry” as a Hegelian reaction against the
Romantic elements detected in Benjamin’s essay about technological
reproduction. First outlined in the text, the notion of culture industry
delineates the broader set of cultural products that belong to the enter-
tainment industry and that shape the cultural frame of reference of what
can be taken as the Western collective imagination, or as what Guy
47
This is one of the most vexed questions of Marxism in general, especially that of twentieth cen-
tury, whose tendency to face the “super structural” problems not as a mere effect of structure’s
motions brought the attention on all the most spectacular elements in the display of economy,
hence on the phantasmagory of commodity too. One can mention, for instance, History and Class
Consciousness, where Lukács writes that “It might be claimed […] that the chapter dealing with the
fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism”
(Lukács 1971b, p. 170), or Guy Debord’s notion of spectacle, or even Jacques Derrida, whose idea
of “phantomalization of social bonds” calls into play precisely the process of phantasmagory of
commodity (Derrida 1993, pp. 199–201). Among the most recent research, it is interesting to
quote Aesthetic Marx, the collected volume edited by Samir Gandesha and Johan Hartle and in
particular the essay of Sami Khatib (2017, p. 49–72) where the scholar analyzes the aesthetic
dimension of commodity fetishism in the terms of formal and sensible exhibition of exchange value.
Debord has called The Society of Spectacle. In this respect, Adorno broad-

casts the deadly crisis of art against what he perceives as the threats of a
neo-mythological project. In the already mentioned letter from 1935,
Adorno criticizes Benjamin for a set of principles that will actually become
increasingly prominent in his production. In reference to Benjamin’s
accounts on photography and the technical backwardness of painting, for
instance, he remarks that “your credulous acceptance of the Ur-appearance
of technology seems to me to be connected to your overestimation of the
archaic as such”. He notices moreover that, according to what both
Adorno and Benjamin should agree, “myth is not the classless longing of
the true society, but rather the objective character of the alienated com-
modity itself ” (BW1: 146, Cor1: 500). As made clear by Adorno’s quota-
tion in the letter, the targeted passage from Benjamin’s exposé is here the
following: “in the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its
successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history
[Urgeschichte] – that is, to elements of a classless society” (Benjamin
2006b, pp. 33–34). Adorno finds here a dangerous correlation between
the classless society and the appearance of what is original in technique;
as if the abolition of class struggle could be an effective reestablishing of
humanity’s original condition in the technical newness. In this respect, he
points precisely to the “mythologizing or archaicizing tendency of the
précis” (BW1: 146, Cor1: 500). What Adorno detects in Benjamin’s aes-
thetics is the same danger detected in the Wagnerian theory of the music
of the future, that is to say the aspiration to produce social conciliation
by means of an immediate appearance of the archaic myth in the work of
art itself. While Wagner, however, eludes Romantic positions in favor of
ancient Germanic mythology, Benjamin tries to avoid the Romantic
impasse by relying on a distinctive cultural form, one already mentioned
here, namely political engagement. As Benjamin writes to Adorno while
summing up his own recent intellectual development, in fact, “it was the
end of rhapsodic naïveté. This romantic form had been surpassed in a
raccourci of development, but I had no concept of another form at that
time […]. My decisive meeting with Brecht followed, bringing with it
the high point of all aporias relating to the project” (BW1: 118, cor1: 489).
On these very premises develops the debate on what is maybe the most
famous and influential essay by Benjamin. Two months after Adorno’s
42 M. Farina
critical reaction, Benjamin announces in fact to Max Horkheimer his

intention to begin a new project for the Journal for Social Research, and he
does that in these terms: “Art’s fateful hour has struck for us and I have
captured its signature in a series of preliminary reflections entitled Das
Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, that is “The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. Without
fully retracing the contorted history of the essay,48 the text about “The
Work of Art” is a compendium of everything Adorno warned Benjamin
about. While being well aware of the wide appeal of Benjamin’s essay in
contemporary aesthetics, new-media theory, sociology of art, and so on,
I will limit myself to pointing to the most relevant arguments in the dis-
cussion with Adorno. Well known is Benjamin’s interpretation of the cri-
sis of art between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not as a
crisis of art’s intellectual consciousness, as Croce’s well-known interpreta-
tion of Hegel’s claims about the death of art would have it,49 but rather as
the outcome of a revolution in the artistic means of production. The
technological reproducibility of art, in fact, does not mean the ability to
technologically reproduce an existing painting—as in the case of a pic-
ture of Leonardo’s Gioconda, that still presupposes the existence of the
original artifact—it rather means the birth of forms of art whose prod-
ucts are essentially reproducible by means of technology, that is photog-
raphy and cinema. And equally well known is the consequence of this
argument that states the loss of originality in technological art—since
there is no such a thing as the original of a photograph of a film—and the
resulting loss of “aura” and of “authenticity”. The work of art in the age
of its technological reproducibility corresponds therefore to a work of art
that has lost its own unicity, and therefore its aura of authenticity, by
48
The first version of the text read by Adorno has been drafted between October and December
1935, immediately followed by a second and revisited version in 1936 that was sent to the journal.
On the basis of this version, Benjamin translated the text in French with the help of Pierre
Klossowski, and he mitigated its meaning by amending the most radical references to Soviet
Marxism. The last version (written in 1939 and published by Adorno in 1955) was entrusted to
Georges Bataille before Benjamin ran away from Paris. On the vicissitudes of the text, see Eiland
and Jennings 2014 (pp. 512–514, 520–522, 667–668).
49
See for example what writes Benedetto Croce (1922, p. 302) in his Aesthetic as Science of Expression
and General Linguistic: “The Aesthetic of Hegel is thus a funeral oration: he passes in review the
successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption, and lays the whole in
its grave, leaving Philosophy to write its epitaph”.
obtaining in this way the status of a copy without original. The way in
which the loss of authenticity becomes a form of liberation of some of the
artwork’s potentiality is part of the antinomies ensuing from Benjamin’s
theory on technological reproducibility, as Miriam Hansen (2012,
pp. 73–83) has pointed out.
As he writes to Horkheimer that “art’s fateful hour has struck for us”,
it is pretty clear that Benjamin is thinking about the same phenomenon
that the nineteenth century took as the crisis, or death, of art. But rather
than giving rise to a nostalgic and pessimistic analysis, he tries to under-
stand this crisis as a paradigmatic change in art’s structures of production.
If art in the traditional sense finds itself now in a position of rearguard,
then the artistic avant-garde has to be investigated in art’s changing
dynamics. As Benjamin writes, “film has freed the physical shock effect –
which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral shock effect –
from this wrapping” and this is why “Dadaism attempted to produce with
the means of painting (or literature) the effects which the public today seeks in
film” (Benjamin 2008, pp. 39, 38). Technological art, therefore, achieves
the goal of modern art, but in a non-artificial way. Without being moral-
istic, it shocks more than Dadaism, and literally makes the public physi-
cally run out the cinema when the train appears on the screen; it
realistically reproduces objects in movement, or from all possible angles,
as pictorial avant-garde was trying to do at the expenses of realistic expres-
sion, for example in the case of Boccioni’s Futurism and Picasso’s cubism.
It is precisely this trait of technological art—that is to say, its ability to
strike and shock the public, along with the loss of unicity of the authentic
copy—what allows to take artistic communication as a vehicle of revolu-
tionary political values.
Needless to say, Benjamin was aware of the Nazi and Fascist propagan-
distic use of cinema. In fact, he declares that “such is the aestheticizing of
politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art”
(Benjamin 2008, p. 42). That of Benjamin, however, is not a mere
description of art in his own time. It rather corresponds to some sort of
Marxian-inspired prognosis of the function of art in the already trans-
formed world, in the world beyond Fascist and capitalistic oppression
(Benjamin 2008, p. 33). Moreover, what Benjamin sees in the collective
“reception in distraction” of cinema (Benjamin 2008, p. 40) is the chance
44 M. Farina
to build a political consciousness of the mass by means of a historically

transformed perception (see S. Buck-Morss 1992, pp. 5–7). And this is
precisely what Adorno defines as the “credulous acceptance of the
Ur-appearance of technology” that is connected to “overestimation of the
archaic as such”, and that according to him leads directly to a neo-
mythological project with a terrifying Romantic outfit.50 Approaching
technological innovation in terms of structural change in the artwork,
assessing this mere empirical fact as the spontaneous creation of revolu-
tionary aesthetic values, means, according to Adorno, taking the work of
art as depository of an original and conciliated nature that can be norma-
tively imposed to society. If artistic production is conceived in these
terms, be it the Wagnerian project of a total work of art, or the engaged
idea of a political one, then the idea of art is based on Romantic mytho-
logical and reconciled presuppositions, thus turning into an aesthetic
phantasmagoria, namely in the aesthetic form of commodity.51
To sum up: as the Romantic, organic idea of a classless society as the
mythical origin of history dialectically degenerates into the commodity’s
ideological phantasmagoria, the same happens to the engaged presuppo-
sition of a normative harmonic paradigm to be applied to society. In
order to criticize real society, art has to fulfill the double character ensuing
from its autonomy, thus qualifying as reception of social conflict and
non-violent (i.e. abstract), aesthetic conciliation of contradictions expos-
ing their unreconciled nature in the social world. Whereas Benjamin
maintains an ambiguous stance toward the notion of myth, according to
Adorno art is a form of critique and a means for the dissolution of the
mythical, natural, rigid side of society. While Benjamin counts Mickey
Mouse among the “figures of collective dream” and describes Disney’s
films as triggers of a “therapeutic release of unconscious energies”
50
Although in his accurate reconstruction he tends to underestimate Benjamin’s Romantic heritage,
Thijs Lijster (2017, pp. 71, 120–123) takes into account both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s positions
concerning the question of the death of art.
51
These critiques, along with the charge of Romanticism, can be found in the letter written by
Adorno to Benjamin on March 18, 1936, and sent from London, after having read the essay on
technological reproducibility; see in particular the explicit correlation between Benjamin’s Brechtian
idea of engagement and the mythological Romantic assumptions (BW1: 168–172).
(Benjamin 2008, p. 38), Adorno spots there the mere reproduction of the
old and rigid myth of late capitalism.
Within this framework, it is possible then to understand the notion of
“culture industry” outlined in the Dialectics of Enlightenment as an answer
to the pivotal arguments of Benjamin’s essay on technological reproduc-
tion, as Thijs Lijster (2017, p. 98) has aptly recognized. Despite the fact
that the book co-authored with Horkheimer was completed only in 1944
(and published in 1947), and despite the fact that the official answer to
Benjamin’s argument is included instead in the essay “On the Fetish-
Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938)”, where he
criticizes the “romanticizing of particulars” (ÜFM: 28, EoM: 298), one
can still argue that the relevance of the concept of culture industry, along
with the obstacles that have been hampering and slowing down the writ-
ing of the book,52 makes the parallel much more stimulating and
consistent.
In line with the general anthropological idea that sees human subjec-
tive, instrumental reason as the generator of a dominion over nature that
turns into a dominion over the subject (Habermas 1984, pp. 379–380),53
the central claim of the Dialectics of Enlightenment is the idea that any
attempt to intellectually explain myths is bound to capsize and become,
in turn, a new form of mythology. The “self-destruction of enlighten-
ment” and “the germ of regression” of freedom in society (DdA: 13, DoE:
xvi) are therefore connected to the leading question of the book: “why
humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new
kind of barbarism?” (DdA: 11, DoE: xiv). As Odysseus’ tricks against
mythical powers turn into violence against nature itself, the moral exalta-
tion of freedom reverts to the repression of instinct, and the liberation of
the cultural market leads to the destruction of culture and the
52
As Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 271–272) claims, Adorno and Horkheimer began to plan the book
about dialectics already in 1940, and in 1941 the title Dialectics of Enlightenment appears for the
first time in a letter. In the same year, however, Horkheimer and Adorno moved to Los Angeles and
started new projects and collaborations. All these changes prevented a faster drafting of the text.
53
This pivotal argument of the Dialectics of Enlightenment makes the text a turning point of the
so-called Frankfurt School, as it marks its departure from orthodox Marxism, as stated by Martin
Jay (1973, p. 256) and Susan Buck-Morss (1977, p. 59). Martin Jay (1984, 37) suggests moreover
that the arguments of the Dialectics of Enlightenment hark back as much to Nietzsche and Max
Weber as to Marx.
46 M. Farina
commodification of every artistic quality. In this respect, whereas the

notion of culture industry agrees with Benjamin’s (and, broadly speaking,
the Marxist) diagnosis of the late capitalistic cultural world, it disagrees as
far as the prognosis is concerned. According to Horkheimer and Adorno,
precisely the activity of technically reproducible products, along with the
absent-minded reception they dictate, is what allows the construction of
a new mythology that, however, instead of triggering the liberation of
people’s potentiality, seems to reiterate a new embodiment of the rigid
and oppressive side of history: “the sociological view that the loss of sup-
port from objective religion […], in conjunction with technical and
social differentiation and specialization, have given rise to cultural chaos
is refuted by daily experience. Culture today is infecting everything with
sameness” (DdA: 141, DoE: 94). Far from being a way out from social
constriction, what sensibly appears in technical products of culture repro-
duces to a higher level the principle of exchange value, being simply
another phenomenon of the apparently incessant dialectics of
enlightenment.
Whereas Benjamin advocated the therapeutic value of Mickey Mouse,
Adorno writes that “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate
victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accus-
tom themselves to theirs” (DdA: 160, DoE: 110). In this sense, the cul-
ture industry corresponds to an element of that dynamics in which,
instead of being the medium through which myth can be artistically dis-
solved and judged, the sensible and aesthetic element becomes vehicle of
a new and oppressive mythology. Adorno’s argument, however, does not
resort to the demonization of technique. Technique is just the quantita-
tive increase and acceleration of a process already at work in historical
society. “Culture industry” is therefore just the notion through which
Adorno tries to answer that kind of questions that Benjamin is confronted
with in his essay on technical reproducibility. The industrial production
of culture corresponds ultimately to the process that bestows on cultural
creations the same quality of industrial products, that of being an amuse-
ment able to distract people from their life and “amusement, free of all
restraint, would be not only the opposite of art but its complementary
extreme” (DdA: 164, DoE: 113). The products of the culture industry
are therefore the contrary of art inasmuch as they turn into the
phantasmagory of commodity, by concealing with amusement the con-

tradictions of society. What the notion of culture industry describes is the
risk art faces in the world of technical reproducibility of becoming a com-
modity among the others, and therefore ceasing to be art.
Based on what I have shown in this chapter, the construction of the
aesthetic in Adorno begins with the definition of the success of the art-
work and culminates with a theory of its failure. The notion of cultural
history, in fact, consists in the progressive definition of the inability of
cultural and artistic products to be what they are meant to be, that is, the
expression of social tensions and the critique of their unreconciled struc-
ture. This determination of the success of the artwork, hence, contains
the seeds of its failure. The work of art, as cultural object, is defined
through the mediation of its universal and normative element and its
being a particular historical product, without submitting one to the
other. As the culture industry shows, however, since society strongly
denies any kind of autonomy to its products, the work of art increasingly
runs the risk of falling in the “a priori of art” (ÄT: 131, AT: 84). As
Adorno begins to show in the essay “On the Fetish-Character in Music”,
the principle through which society threats the artwork is nothing but
the sensible aesthetic element of music (ÜFM: 21–23, EoM: 294–295).
What I will show in the next chapter is, then, the concretization of this
process, namely the development through which Adorno’s aesthetics,
consistently with its construction principles, in order to save art’s auton-
omy, dissolves the very sensible aesthetic element that defines art.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience.
Trans. L. Heron. London: Verso.
———. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Baeumler, Alfred. 1956. Einleitung. In Der Mythus von Orient und Occident.
Eine Methaphysik der alten Welt, aus den Werken von J.J. Bachofen, mit einer
Einleitung von Alfred Baeumler, hrsg. Manfred Schröter, i-cxciv
München: Beck.
48 M. Farina
Behler, Ernst. 1993. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press.
Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Schiller as Philosopher. A Re-Examination. Oxford:
Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J. Osborne.
London/New York: Verso.
———. 2006a. Johan Jakob Bachofen. In W. Benjamin. Selected Writings.
Volume 3. 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 11–24.
Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 2006b. Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century. In W. Benjamin.
Selected Writings. Volume 3. 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael
W. Jennings, 32–49. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 2008. In The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,
ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge,
MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Bernstein, Jay M. 2005. Introduction. In Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics,
ed. Jay M. Bernstein, vii–xxxiii. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Birke, Lawrence. 1999. Prussianism, Nazism, and Romanticism in the Thought
of Victor Klemperer. The German Quarterly 72 (1): 33–43.
Bloch, Brandon. 2017. The Origins of Adorno Psycho-Social Dialectic:
Psychoanalysis and Neo-Kantianism in the Young Adorno. Modern Intellectual
History 16 (2): 1–29.
Buben, Adam. 2016. Meaning and Morality in Heidegger and Kierkegaard.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. Hassocks: Harvester.
———. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Projects.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1992. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay
Reconsidered. October 62: 3–41.
Budd, Malcolm. 2002. The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Essays on the
Aesthetics of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coulson, Shea. 2007. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Critique. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Scholar Publishing.
Croce, Benedetto. 1922. Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic.
Trans. Douglas Ainslie. London: Macmillan.
Danto, Arthur C. 1984. The End of Art. In Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang, 5–35.
New York: Haven.
Davies, Peter. 2012. Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity. Johann Jakob Bachofen on
German culture. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter.
de Vries, Hent. 2005. Minimal Theologies. Critique of Secular Reason in Adorno
& Levinas. Trans. Geoffrey Hale. Baltimore/London: The John Hopkins
University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London/New
York: Routledge.
Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. 2014. Walter Benjamin. A Critical
Life. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Farina, Mario. 2019. A Kantian Answer to the Romantics. Hegel’s Idea of
Genius and the Unity of Nature and Freedom. In Natur und Freiheit. Akten
des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Violetta L Waibel, Margit
Ruffing, and David Wagner, 3403–3410. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Feher, Ferenc. 1985. Lukács and Benjamin: Parallels and Contrasts. New German
Critique 34: 125–138.
Formaggio, Dino. 1983. La «morte dell’arte» e l’estetica. Bologna: il Mulino.
Foucault, Michel. 1990. The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York:
Vintage Books.
Ginsborg, Hannah. 2015. The Normativity of Nature. Essays on Kant’s Critique of
Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Guyer, Paul. 1997. Kant and the Claim of Taste. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 2014. A History of Modern Aesthetics. Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1982. The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment. New
German Critique 26: 13–30.
———. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1. Reason and the
Realization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hall, Timothy. 2006. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and Lukács Theory of the Novel.
In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp, 145–158.
London/New York: Continuum.
Hampson, Daphne. 2013. Kierkegaard. Exposition and Critique. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hansen, Miriam. 2012. Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter
Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Harding, James M. 1997. Adorno and “A Writing of the Ruins”. Essays in Modern
Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture. Albany: SUNY.
50 M. Farina
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans.
T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge, UK:
Honneth, Axel. 2003. Eine Physiognomie der kapitalistischen Lebensform.
Skizze der Gesellschaftstheorie Adornos. In Dialektik der Freiheit. Frankfurter
Adornos Konferenz 2003, hrsg. Axel Honneth, 165–187. Frankfurt a.
M.: Suhrkamp.
Horkheimer, Max. 1932. Vorwort. In Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, I, 1: i–iv.
Hullot-Kentor, Robert. 2006. Things Beyond Resemblance: On Theodor W. Adorno.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1980. Reflection and Conclusion. In Aesthetics and Politics,
ed. Ronald Taylor, 196–213. London: Verso.
———. 1990. Late Marxism. Adorno, or the Persistence of Dialectics.
London: Verso.
Jarvis, Simon. 1998. Adorno. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Jay, Martin. 1973. The Dialectical Imagination. A History of Frankfurt School and
the Institute of Social Research. Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown.
———. 1984. Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jesi, Furio. 1973. Mito. Milano: Isedi.
Kamenetsky, Christa. 1972. Political Distortion of Philosophical Concepts: A
Case History – Nazism and the Romantic Movement. Metaphilosophy 3
(3): 198–218.
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Trans. P. Guyer, and
E. Matthews. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Khatib, Sami. 2017. “Sensuous Supra-Sensuous”: The Aesthetics of Real
Abstraction. In Aesthetic Marx, ed. Samir Gandesha and Johan F. Hartle,
49–97. London/Oxford/New York/New Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 2009. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical
Crumbs. Trans. A. Hannay. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kraus, Karl. 1952–1964. Werke, hrsg. Heinrich Fischer. München: Kösel.
Leppert, Richard. 2002. Commentary. In Th.W. Adorno. Essays on Music. Trans.
S.H. Gillespie, 85–112, 213–250, 327–372, 513–563. Berkeley/Los Angeles/
London: University of California Press.
Lijster, Thijs. 2017. Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Lukács, György. 1971a. The Theory of the Novel. A Historico-Philosophical Essay
on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: The
Merlin Press.
———. 1971b. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mann, Thomas. 1926. Pariser Rechenschaft. Berlin: Fischer.
Marquard, Odo. 1989. Indicted and Unburdened Man in Eighteenth-Century
Philosophy. In Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies. Trans.
R.M. Wallace, 38–63. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2004. The German Ideology. Part One, ed. Christopher John Arthur.
New York: International Publishes.
Menke, Christoph. 1999. The Sovereignty of Art. Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno
and Derrida. Trans. N. Solomon. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
Mioyasaki, Donovan. 2002. The Confusion of Marxian and Freudian Fetishism
in Adorno and Benjamin. Philosophy Today 46 (4): 429–443.
Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno. A Biography. Trans. R. Livingstone.
Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Oberhelman, David D. 2006. Marxist Readings of Tolkien. In Tolkien
Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout, 410–411. London: Routledge.
Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Pensky, Max. 2004. Natural History: The Life and Afterlife of a Concept in
Adorno. Critical Horizons 5 (1): 227–258.
Pinkard, Terry. 2002. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism.
Pippin, Robert B. 2014. After the Beautiful. Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial
Modernism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ryan, Bartholomew. 2014. Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics. Interludes with Lukács,
Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.
Schiller, Friedrich. 1993. On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. In F. Schiller, Essays,
ed. Walter Hinderer, and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, 179–260. New York:
Continuum.
Schlegel, Friedrich. 1968. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Trans.
E. Behler, and R. Struc. University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Szondi, Peter. 1972. Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische. Zur Begriffsdialektik in
Schillers Abhandlung. Euphorion 66: 174–206.
Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. The Persistence of Modernity. Essay and Aesthetics, Ethics
and Postmodernism. Trans. D. Midgley. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
52 M. Farina
Wenzel, Christian Helmut. 2005. An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core

Concepts and Problems. Malden/Oxford/Victoria: Blackwell.
Whyman, Tom. 2016. Understanding Adorno on ‘Natural-History’.
International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (4): 452–472.
Zuidervaart, Lambert. 1991. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. The Redemption of Illusion.
Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
2
The Philosophy of Music
and the Dissolution of the Aesthetic
“How can things which are ugly and disharmonious […] induce aesthetic
delight?”, wonders Nietzsche, and his answer to this question heavily
relies on the idea that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and
the world appear justified” (Nietzsche 1999, p. 113). In The Birth of
Tragedy, in fact, the true artistic activity, namely the aesthetic appearance
of truth, is defined as the balance of the painful, pessimistic, passionate
Dionysian impulse and the formal, clear, delightful Apollonian drive.
The universal dimension of the abstract form, in other words the peaceful
element of artistic pleasure is, according to Nietzsche, what allows the
magmatic drive of will to aesthetically present itself in the appearance of
an individual image. This relation between the two Nietzschean impulses
is also the core of the model determining what we have seen as the “suc-
cess of the artwork”, understood by Adorno in terms of an aesthetic rec-
onciled exposition of social conflicts; nevertheless, a critical revision of
some Nietzschean assumptions—in particular, his positive evaluation of
the notion of myth—drives Adorno to a complete redefinition of the role
of the sensible aesthetic element in the interpretation of the artwork.
This chapter aims to pinpoint this kind of redefinition of the aesthetic
in terms of its artistic dissolution. According to my argument, the text in

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_2
54 M. Farina
which Adorno best elucidates this path of dissolution of the aesthetic is

also the only monographic text on aesthetics he managed to publish dur-
ing his life, that is Philosophy of New Music (1949). The Aesthetic Theory,
in fact, is released only in 1970, that is after the death of the author
(1969). In order to accomplish the above outlined task, in this chapter I
will first present the basic guidelines of the Philosophy of Music and then
I will point to what I see as the “failure of the artwork” in Adorno’s defini-
tion of new music. Finally, I will shed light on the forces at work in the
dissolution of the aesthetic, in particular by focusing on the notions of
naturalization or neutralization of the material, as well as on the liquida-
tion of art as an autonomous form.
2.1 A
Philosophy of Art as Philosophy
of New Music
The clear Hegelian orientation of Adorno’s aesthetic thought is fully at
work in the Philosophy of New Music, not only due to the three Hegelian
epigraphs opening the three sections of the book—to which I will come
back in the course of this chapter—but also due to the structural argu-
ment of the text. Arguably, Adorno presents here an Hegel-inspired
attempt to come to terms with his own critique of Benjamin’s aesthetics
by means of an intense discussion of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. On the
one hand, in fact, the Philosophy of New Music lays out a dialectical diag-
nosis of the historical condition of music in particular—and of art in
general—whose methodological toolbox is borrowed from Hegelian aes-
thetics, here qualifying as an example of objective philosophy of art inter-
preting the artwork based on the form-content relationship. On the other
hand, however, Adorno’s attempt to isolate two musical principles—the
first of which, exemplified by Schönberg’s atonal music, stands for the
drive to a disharmonious expression of artistic content, whereas the sec-
ond, typified by Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, attempts to recover the lost
pure harmony of music—is strongly reminiscent of the Nietzschean
notion of tragedy as an unstable, painful, and violent contrast among two
impulses, that is a “pervasive stylistic opposition: language, colour,
2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the Aesthetic 55
mobility, dynamics, all of these diverge into distinct, entirely separated

spheres of expression, into the Dionysiac lyric of the chorus on the one
hand and the Apolline dream-world of the stage on the other” (Nietzsche
1999, p. 46). Because of its dyadic and non-harmonizable dialectics, the
Philosophy of New Music can be taken as a Nietzsche-inspired interpreta-
tion of Hegel’s objective aesthetics, or rather as a Hegelian attempt to
rethink Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.1
With regard to the general structure, the book is divided in two parts,
each of which exposes one of the two above-mentioned principles of new
(or modern) music:2 the “progress” of Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique
and the “restoration” of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. As one might already
expect based on his biography, Adorno’s predilection is radically leaning
toward Schönberg’s atonal music, whereas Stravinsky is harshly criticized
as a byproduct of musical conservatism, a mere nostalgic and anti-
progressive reaction against modernity. Adorno goes as far as comparing
neoclassicism and Fascism,3 thereby causing the outraged reaction of
Schönberg himself in defense of his alleged enemy. Schönberg’s statement
is: “it is disgusting, by the way, how he treats Stravinsky”.4 The Philosophy
of New Music, however, has to be considered primarily as a book of phi-
losophy of art, that is as a philosophical investigation of the historical
conditions of possibility of music as art, and not from the point of view
of its particular musicological judgments, as Luciano Berio implicitly
recognizes when he admits that Adorno’s philosophy of music provides
1
While none of Adorno’s scholars forgets to mention Hegel’s influence in Philosophy of New
Music (see, among others, Blumenfeld 1991, p. 263; Paddison 1993, pp. 109–115; Witkin 1998,
pp. 61–63; Chua 2006, p. 4), strangely enough the influence of the Nietzschean theory of impulses
is generally underestimated.
2
It should be remarked that the German title of the book—Philosophie der neuen Musik—has no
unequivocal translation. The English equivalent of the German expression neue Musik, in fact, is
“modern Music”, and hence the first translation of the text (New York: Seabury, 1973) was titled
Philosophy of Modern Music. Hullot-Kentor justifies, however, his translation choice as stressing the
open value of the category of “new” against the historical and definite meaning of “modern”
(Hullot-Kentor 2006, pp. 58–59).
3
E.g., “the saying attributed to Hitler – that one can only die for an idea that one does not under-
stand – could be inscribed over the gateway of the neoclassical temple” (PnM: 189, PNM: 52).
4
Included in a letter from December 5, 1949, that Schönberg wrote to Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
and quoted by the addressee himself (Stuckenschmidt 1977, p. 508). See also Heinz-Klaus Metzger
(1979, p. 9).
56 M. Farina
brilliant instruments to read contemporary music, but at the cost of loss

of musical sensibility (Berio 2006, p. 72). The two principles that make
up the new music cannot be seen simply as different tendencies, trends,
or even schools; they rather stand for a radical dialectical opposition,
exemplifying the two irreconcilable extremes in which new music has to
be divided. As Adorno sees it, this radical opposition is not the result of
his own view, but rather it corresponds to the objective historical condi-
tion of music. Adorno originally drafted only the first part about
Schönberg and progress, but “after the war […] it seems to him neces-
sary”, writes Adorno about himself in third person, “to add to the section
on Schönberg5 another on Stravinsky” and this because “only in the
extremes does the essence of music take shape distinctively; only they
permit knowledge of its truth content” (PnM: 10, 13, PNM: 4, 7).
The extremes in which Adorno recognizes the true content of new
music are, then, the twelve-tone atonality and what he sees as the har-
monic regression of neoclassicism. As John Covach concisely puts it, “the
‘twelve-tone idea’ can be defined as a systematic circulation of all the
twelve pitch classes (pcs) in which no pc is repeated before all twelve have
been sounded” (Covach 2002, p. 604). Therefore, the composer has first
to decide a specific row of all the twelve pitches (the seven notes and the
five semitones), and then he has to combine it by expressing all the poten-
tial of musical material, especially by exploring dissonance. On the oppo-
site corner, there is Stravinsky, whose “neo-classicism too can only be
explained in the light of his pursuance of clarity and balance” (de Leeuw
2005, p. 23).
As Adorno describes it, however, the twelve-tone technique does not
arbitrarily create its own rules, but rather “they are configurations of his-
torical constraint in the material. They are at the same time schemata of
adaption to this constraint” (PnM: 65, PNM: 52); by contrast Stravinsky’s
neoclassicism is horrified by the late capitalistic human condition, by the
loss of significance of musical material, and tries to dominate it with the
domination of material itself through the demand of a restoration of har-
mony, and this is “the authoritarian claim of Stravinsky’s music” (PnM:
5
Although the English translation opts for the spelling “Schoenberg”, I prefer to use the German
one “Schönberg”.
186, PNM: 149). Adorno’s account on the historical condition of new

music consists, then, in a dialectical opposition between the impulse of
adaptation to the constraint of the material, in order to expose it and
therefore criticize it, and the authoritarian attitude to reproduce in the
midst of late capitalism something as the harmony of the classical bour-
geois era. It is fair to argue that, through the elaboration of the Philosophy
of New Music, Adorno becomes master of the theoretical significance of
the aesthetic tools he develops. His first monographic book produced, in
fact, long-lasting and crucial results; it made display of a set of theoretical
elements that had great influence on a significant part of twentieth-
century philosophy of art.6 Therefore, rather than as Adorno’s final word
about contemporary musicology, the opposition between Schönberg and
Stravinsky should be understood in light of the basic elements of his aes-
thetics, which I suggest to identify with the three following determina-
tions: (i) the philosophy of (art)history as a consequence of the cognitive
value of art—that is, the definition of history as the content of art; (ii) the
artistic form-content relationship as a formal sedimentation of historical
content; (iii) the notion of aesthetic “material” as condition of possibility
of the aesthetic process of formal sedimentation of historical content.
(i) Adorno clearly suggests that “the forms of art register the history of
humanity with more justice than do historical documents” (PnM: 47,
PNM: 37); he strongly believes, then, that the work of art makes it pos-
sible to know historical reality. Far from being original, the idea that art
registers the history of humanity, however, is a theoretical principle that
may well be found in one of Lukács’ late texts—that Adorno considers
trivial—or in any general Marxian research on art history or art critique
of the twentieth century. On top of this statement, Adorno further char-
acterizes his position as he points to the loss of history in contemporary
music, especially when he describes new music as a “ahistorical stasis”, or
as he defines “musical ahistoricity” as one of the pivotal features of con-
temporary art (PnM: 66, 81, PNM: 53, 65). These apparently contradic-
tory positions—art as knowledge of history and music as ahistorical
6
For example, Peter Szondi, one of the pioneers of comparative literature, whose influence in liter-
ary critique and in the constitution of the comparative method is hard to overestimate, explicitly
declares the foundational value of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music for his method (see, Szondi
1987, pp. 4, 96).
58 M. Farina
phenomenon—have to be taken both as a critique of a naïve interpreta-

tion of the cognitive value of art and as the consequence of the Hegelian
interpretation of art as a historical deployment of truth, being the latter
an undisputed tenet of Hegel’s philosophy of art.7 On the one hand, in
fact, the statement concerning twelve-tone musical ahistoricity challenges
naïve realism, which takes art as the direct expression of what history and
society actually are, on the other hand the cognitive value of art has to be
understood according to the general and Hegel-inspired idea of the rela-
tionship between a work of art and philosophical theory: “The idea of the
artworks and their nexus is to be philosophically constructed even if this
sometimes goes beyond what the work has immediately achieved” (PnM:
34, PNM: 24). The historical dimension of the artwork is therefore some-
thing to be philosophically determined beyond the work itself, beyond its
direct connections. It is in this sense that music’s ahistoricity can be
understood as a recording of human history. Based on the same paradox,
the subject’s non-historical interiority, in Kierkegaard, was the sign of
historical pressure, since “reality finds expression only in the internally
contradictory temporal course of the monologue, that is, as history” (K:
49, PNM: 32). It is not a coincidence, in this respect, that in Philosophy
of New Music Adorno calls into question the “social character of loneli-
ness” in order to explain Schönberg’s attitude toward subjectivity (PnM:
48, PNM: 38, see also Witkin 1998, pp. 131–132).
This also explains why the single work is not the place in which history
realizes itself in a normative production of historical purposes. History is
rather the condition of possibility of the work itself, it is the framework
in which the work becomes knowable as such. By determining itself as
work, by being philosophically reconstructed as such, the work of art
brings into light history as its condition of possibility, even in modern
art’s static ahistoricity.
This set-up of the relationship between history and art is underlined by
Hegel’s three epigraphs with which Adorno opens the sections of his
7
Even scholars who are hostile to Adorno’s interpretation of Hegel recognize this definition of
Hegel’s philosophy of art. Paradigmatic is the position of Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert when she
defines Hegel’s aesthetics as an “experience of historical truth”, since art consists in “presentation of
the truth of what exists” (Gethmann-Siefert 1984a, p. 7). Gethmann-Siefert (1984a, pp. 259,
397–398) dismisses Adorno’s position as a non-historical, messianic, idea of reconciliation.
book. The Introduction is preceded by Hegel’s quote from the Aesthetics

according to which “in art we have to do, not with any agreeable or useful
child’s play, but […] with an unfolding of the truth” (Hegel 1975,
p. 1236). The section about Schönberg and progress, instead, is opened
by words taken from the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel pres-
ents the movement under which empty intelligence obtains a content:
“pure insight is at first without content; instead, it is the pure disappear-
ance of content, but by its negative movement towards what is negative
to it, it will realize itself and give itself a content” (Hegel 2018, p. 314).
In so doing, what Adorno aims to highlight is the fact that the alleged
intellectual, abstract character of which atonal music has been accused,
along with its ahistorical loneliness, shows to be the historical content of
serial music itself. Finally, before the beginning of the third section on
Stravinsky, Adorno quotes again Hegel’s Aesthetics, and more precisely a
passage where Hegel makes fun of the Romantics attempt to recover the
ancient majesty of art by writing that “it is therefore no help to him to
adopt again, as that substance, so to say, past world-views, i.e. to propose
to root himself firmly in one of these ways of looking at things, e.g. to
turn Roman Catholic as in recent times many have done for art’s sake”
(Hegel 1975, p. 606). These three quotations explain more than any
other explicit airing why a philosophy of music, as a philosophy of art, is
possible only within the framework of a philosophy of history. History is
in fact what works express in their connection, even when superficially
they seem to express the absence of historical movement. This concep-
tion, by the way, is a sort of metacritique of Benjamin’s idea of intensive,
and therefore non-historical, relation between the works of art. Following
Adorno, in fact, the effective absence of history in the work is itself an
achievement of history and, as historical, changeable.8
(ii) The second theoretical tool applied by Adorno’s aesthetics, that is
the definition of the form-content relationship, has been clearly formu-
lated for the first time by Peter Szondi in Theory of Modern Drama (1956).
8
As Benjamin writes in 1923 to Florens Christian Rang, “the attempt to place the work of art in
the context of historical life does not open up perspectives that lead us to its innermost core”, as
“the essential relationship among works of art remains intensive”, and therefore “the specific histo-
ricity of works of art is the kind that can be revealed not in ‘art history’ but only in interpretation”
(Benjamin 1994, p. 224).
60 M. Farina
In his brilliant dissertation, Szondi mentions the Philosophy of New Music

as a theoretical source to his own dialectical notion of content-form rela-
tionship. In particular, the idea that “form could be conceived of as ‘pre-
cipitated’ content” (Szondi 1987, p. 4) seems to him to offer a clarification,
or even revelation, of the real meaning of Hegel’s notion of artistic iden-
tity of form and content. To the alleged and abstract formulation of the
identity of form and content that would demonstrate Hegel’s classicism
in the Aesthetics (see Hegel 1975, p. 440), Szondi opposes “their turning
over and into one another” testified by the Logic (Hegel 2010, § 133,
p. 200, Szondi 1987, p. 4) as the first example of the expression of the
historicization of form. His understanding of the crisis of modern drama
is therefore a way to implement Hegel’s notion of form as communica-
tion of content, filtered by Adorno’s radical account pointing out that, for
instance, “all forms of music, not just those of expressionism, are sedi-
mented [niedergeschlagene, precipitated] contents” (PnM: 47, PNM: 37).
This is the reason why one can only abstractly refer to form and con-
tent as two separated determinations. Form is such, in aesthetic sense,
just to the extent that it is a crystallization, a fixation, a sedimentation of
historical content, and history becomes an aesthetic content just as far as
it sediments itself, or precipitates itself, in the form. As Szondi sees it, this
would be Adorno’s consistent development of Hegelian aesthetics.
Moreover, Adorno’s definition of artistic form as “sedimented content”
resembles the Nietzschean idea of the successful relation between the two
artistic impulses, laid out in particular where it is said that “the Apolline
appearances in which Dionysos objectifies himself are no longer an ‘eter-
nal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life’, […] now the clarity and
firmness of the epic shaping speak to him from the stage” (Nietzsche
1999, p. 46). Form is therefore the element in which the indeterminate
content of art—according to Nietzsche, the Dionysian irrational impulse;
for Adorno, the world’s configuration in the social-historic condition—
fixes itself in an exterior configuration and individualizes its proper
dynamic and elusive nature. Based on this kind of determination, one
can finally fully grasp the seminal notion of the “success of the work of
art” in Adorno, precisely as the success of the sedimentation of the con-
tent in an aesthetic form. As Adorno writes at the end of the Introduction
to Philosophy of New Music, “the works themselves are successful to the
extent that they shape the contradiction and in this shaping allow the
contradiction to reappear in the marks of their own imperfection” (PnM:
34, PNM: 24).
With Nietzsche and unlike Hegel, therefore, Adorno conceives the
success of the artwork as the fragile balance in which a painful content
(i.e. historical social contradictions) aesthetically appears without pacify-
ing its conflictual nature; with Hegel and unlike Nietzsche, however, he
does not think art as a reconstitution of myth itself, but rather as a fluidi-
fication of its mythical, that is, conflictual content, or better as the dem-
onstration that social contradictions are unsolved in historical reality and,
at the same time, as the promise that such contradictions could once be
reconciled.
(iii) Finally, in order to outline the third theoretical element that
emerges in Philosophy of New Music, I will now take into account the role
and definition of the notion of the aesthetic “material”. The very fact that
Adorno defines the concept of material starting from the field of music,
that is from a form of art that based on common understanding does not
consist in a material expression of meaning, calls for a careful interpreta-
tion of the issue at stake. Although scholars such as Alfred Schmidt
(1983, pp. 26–27) tend to minimize the influence of Marxian
materialism,9 according to my analysis Adorno’s musical notion of “mate-
rial” has much more to do exactly with Marx’s conception of historical
materialism than with any kind of matter, substance, or stuff. As I will
show, indeed, the fact that “the ‘material’ is itself sedimented spirit” is
what allows to recognize that “society has migrated into the work” (PnM:
39, PNM: 32).
As far as my goal is concerned, it can be helpful to quote a passage
from the essay “The Function of Counterpoint in New Music”, pub-
lished in 1958 in the journal Merkur, where Adorno defines the notion of
material in the context of his monograph about new music: “The concept
9
Alfred Schmidt sees Adorno’s aesthetic materialism as a departure from Marx’s materialistic
method because the latter requires “to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in
which these have been apotheosized” (Marx 1990, p. 494n.), whereas in Adorno’s aesthetics “art
works were for him in the strict sense ‘monadological’ formations; they mirror the social whole
within themselves, but they do not mirror it externally” (Schmidt 1983, p. 16). This may be true.
Still, the quotation from Marx refers to materialism as critique of what can be called “ideology”,
whereas Adorno’s aesthetic materialism sees art precisely as a critique of ideology.
62 M. Farina
of musical material in the Philosophy of New Music should not be used to

refer to any naturally given material, to physical and technological pos-
sibility that can be displayed absolutely and at any point in time. Instead
the thinking there was mediated through and through: every musical
language contains the entire history of music and ultimately the whole of
society” (FdK: 147–148, SF: 125). Adorno introduces here a distinction
between natural elements of sounds and musical material by saying that
the former is as different from the latter “as is language [Sprache] from the
inventory of its sounds” (PnM: 38, PNM: 31).10 “Material” in music
does not refer to natural and sensible qualities of the work, but rather to
the structural correlation of those elements and how this structure comes
out as historically justified. A clear indication of the process of de-
substantializing of what is understood as material is included in state-
ments about music such as: “All of its specific traits are marks of historical
process” (PnM: 38,, PNM: 31). According to said de-substantializing we
are on no account to attribute something as an ontological right to exist
to the tonal material itself, inasmuch as “this is precisely what occurs in
arguments that want to conclude, for instance […] that the triad is the
necessary and universal condition for any possible musical understand-
ing”, and “this argumentation […] is nothing but a superstructure for
reactionary compositional propensities” (PnM: 39, PNM: 31–32).
It will now be clear in what respect Adorno is keen to claim that “the
‘material’ is itself sedimented spirit”. This definition, in fact, does not
amount to some sort of “spiritualization” of material stuff, but it rather
refers to the same dynamics that Marx understands as the fetishism of
commodity and through which the sensuous thing that commodity is
becomes “suprasensible or social” (Marx 1990, p. 165). This does not
mean that Adorno thinks art per se in terms of commodity. Nevertheless,
the attribution of social characters to a sensuous thing follows the same
materialist model already unveiled both in the spiritualization of artistic
material and in the recognition of the suprasensible dimension of com-
modity. Based on the same model, a sensuous thing becomes expression
10
I have changed the translation, since Hullot-Kentor’s version says “speech”, and I prefer to under-
line the structural dimension of language instead of the practical element of speech. In some other
passages, the translation is slightly modified.
of the society’s material and historical conditions of production. This is

the reason why traditional musical means, as for example the diminished
seventh chord, sound trivial in the context of late capitalism, and not
only because “these sounds [are] obsolete and unfashionable”, but inas-
much as “they are false” (PnM: 40, PNM: 32). The latter sentence should
not be taken as some sort of normative prohibition of tonal chords, since
“no chord is simply ‘in itself ’ false, because no chord exists in itself and
because each chord bears in itself the whole, indeed the whole of history”
(PnM: 42, PNM: 33).11
This leads to the justification of Adorno’s preference for atonal, serial,
music. In such a historical modification of musical material, the com-
poser cannot be considered a creator anymore. Whereas Beethoven, along
with all classical composers, could still expect to dominate his material
and to impress in it his own subjective personality, the present historical
condition forces the author to follow the material—namely, historical—
pressure over the subject and to express it. “The state of technique pres-
ents itself to him as a problem […]: In every measure technique as a
whole demands of him that he do it justice and give the one right answer
that technique in that moment permits. Compositions are nothing but
such answer, nothing but the solution of technical puzzles” (PnM: 42,
PNM: 33). The composer, however, is not the mere executor of the mate-
rial tendencies of society. Music, in fact, needs the critical dimension of
judgment in order to be defined as art and “for such obedience” to its
material “the composer requires all possible disobedience, all indepen-
dence and spontaneity: The movement of musical material is just that
dialectical” (PnM: 42, PNM: 34).
To the purposes of this inquiry, the three basic elements that I have
identified in Philosophy of New Music are to be taken not as an abstract
definition of what an artwork is, but rather in terms of the conceptual
frameworks in which the conditions of possibility of any work of art are
given. A work of art consists, hence, in the formal crystallization of a
11
This idea does not correspond, in fact, to a prohibition of tonal and traditional chords. Indeed,
they are fully justified musical means within framework of particular contexts: “In Wozzeck as well
in Lulu, the C-major triad occurs—in context that are otherwise remote from tonality—whenever
the issue is money. The effect is that of both patent banality and obsolescence. The small-change
C-major coin is denounced as counterfeit” (PnM: 60n., PNM: 179).
64 M. Farina
historical content that, by means of its own material, sensibly expresses

social reality and criticizes its unreconciled structure. What I intend to
show in the following is that, precisely on the basis of this definition of
art, Adorno—maybe inadvertently—ends up uncovering new music’s
feeling to substantiate its own aesthetic drives in something that can be
taken as a real work of art.
2.2 The Failure of the Artwork

As we have already seen in the letter to Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt,
Schönberg himself did not appreciate the way in which Adorno addresses
Stravinsky. Schönberg’s defense of his alleged musical antagonist, how-
ever, is not merely a matter of courtesy due to a worldwide esteemed
colleague. In the same letter, in fact, he further clarifies his own misgiv-
ings about Adorno’s philosophy of new music. “So modern music has a
philosophy—it would be enough if it had a philosopher”, writes the
Viennese composer to his friend and musicologist, and he adds that “he”
(the “philosopher” of new music) “attacks me quite vehemently in it” and
finally observes that “now I know that he has clearly never liked my
music” (Stuckenschmidt 1977, p. 508). According to the most represen-
tative twelve-tone composer, then, Adorno—that is, the person who is
commonly regarded, also by opponents, as the great philosophical advo-
cate of atonal serial music and of “his hero Arnold Schönberg” (Scruton
2018, p. 49)12—not only disrespectfully attacks Stravinsky, but even
despises Schönberg’s own music, that is the object of his praise. The rea-
sons of Schönberg’s surprising reaction could maybe be found in how the
composer, due to his undisputed musical sense, understood the latent
threat of collapse that in Adorno’s argument enwraps all the new music,
that is to say, both Stravinsky’s regressive neoclassicism and the serial
twelve-tone progress. Eventually, what emerges from Adorno’s account
on new music, in fact, is nothing but the image of the crumbling of
12
The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton may be well regarded as one of the opponents of
Adorno. See, for instance comments of his such as: “the least we might say is that his contributions
to musicology are flawed by a narrow-minded obsession with ideas whose time has passed” (Scruton
2009, p. 205).
music, or better the sinking of new music “beneath the a priori of art”, if
one is to borrow from Adorno’s own prose (ÄT: 246, AT: 164–165).
As a matter of fact, in a passage concerning the notion of “form” at the
end of the chapter about Schönberg, Adorno observes that “these works
are magnificent failures” (PnM: 96, PNM: 77). Peeved by this kind of
prognostications about the failure of new music, Schönberg writes to
Joseph Rufer stating his remonstrations against the musicologist judg-
ments of somebody “who as I say needs an eternity to compose a song”
and “naturally has no idea how quickly a real composer writes down what
he hears in his imagination” (Stuckenschmidt 1977, p. 508). Nevertheless,
there is an argumentative consistency in Adorno’s declaration of the fail-
ure of new music, a consistency that follows his own determination of
aesthetic theoretical concepts. I therefore intend to investigate the rea-
sons of the failure of new music as art by exposing beforehand the way in
which it fails. As I have previously anticipated, Adorno infers the crum-
bling of the notion of artwork in new music with respect to three factors:
(i) the historical failure of its unitary cohesion; (ii) the split in the form-
content relationship; (iii) the impossibility, for the artwork, to fulfill its
own double character in terms of historical progress. These three points,
however, have to be understood as the negative counterparts of the three
theoretical determinations of the artwork that I have outlined in the pre-
vious paragraph—namely, the cognitive value of art, the relationship of
form and content, and the notion of artistic material—and they can be
seen as an explication of why “it seems to him [Adorno] necessary to add
to the section of Schönberg another on Stravinsky” (PnM: 10, PNM: 4),
or better why it is necessary to deal with a regressive musical form in
order to fully account for the new music.
(i) As to the first point, the shredding of the unitary cohesion of the
artwork ensues from the historical failure of the work as individual prod-
uct. As we have already seen, since the particular or individual aspect of
the work of art is always mediated through the universal dimension of
form, the work of art can be regarded as a particular product in which the
expression of society goes hand in hand with a critical judgment of it. In
these terms, Adorno introduces the autonomy of the artwork as a result
of the external pressure of society. Now, it is precisely this notion of
autonomy what is challenged by the progressive side of new music. When
66 M. Farina
he talks about the distortions of musical harmony in serial music, Adorno

states for example that “real suffering left them behind in the artwork as
a sign that it no longer recognizes its autonomy; their heteronomy defies
the self-sufficient semblance of music” (PnM: 44–45, PNM: 35). Then,
atonal music works find themselves in a very peculiar position toward the
general artistic framework, inasmuch as they seem to dissolve the dialecti-
cal tension that defines art’s autonomy in general. On the one hand, in
fact, “no works could demonstrate greater density and consistency in
their formal structure than do Schönberg’s and Anton Webern’s briefest
movements”; on the other hand, they are proof of “the deduction of the
artwork from society” (PnM: 43, 32, PNM: 34, 23). Phrasing it this way,
it seems that, according to Adorno, twelve-tone compositions effectively
realize the image of the work of art as a monad, whose being a close, non-
historical, and autonomous product precisely reflects, at the same time,
the nature of society as static ahistorical present. If this was the case,
however, Jean-François Lyotard (1989, pp. 181–195) would be right to
argue that Adorno’s idea of the artworks presents nothing but a set of
boundless objects without any mutual relation, and Adorno and
Horkheimer would be wrong claiming that the culture industry is not a
collection of arbitrary and autonomous products, but the expression of a
historical ideology (DdA: 141–142, DoE: 94–95). History has not
stopped, as postmodern theory states; on the contrary, the mythological
side of history—the rigid and oppressive element, currently represented
by the ideology of culture industry—still needs a historical artistic form
able to unveil its hidden and mythological meaning. Only commodity is
really pacified with its social origin; in an antagonistic world, on the con-
trary, art opposes itself to society.
Based on Adorno’s account, the idea of atonal compositions as the final
resolution of the artistic double character would be true only in the event
that they were regarded as fulfilled, accomplished works of art. The start-
ing point of this argument, however, should not be forgotten. Adorno
clearly states in fact that “these works are magnificent failures” and he
adds, namely, that “it is not the composer that fails in the work: history
denies the work” (PnM: 96, PNM: 77). One is to conclude then that the
representation of a world without history, the idea of an artwork as the
final pacification of the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy,
is justified only by the failure of the artwork as such. Progressive music

then is no longer the ideal fulfillment of a work of art, but it is rather
compelled to express itself by means of aesthetic failure, that is, through
the lack of history.13
Consequently, based on the general framework within which Adorno
conceives his philosophy of new music, the combination of historicity
and progressive composition is not viable. The new musical pieces would
be indeed proof to the fact that history rejects every progressive artwork,
to the extent that “history denies the work”. For instance, it is clear that
the mere description of serial atonality would eventually end up with the
recognition of music as a static phenomenon devoid of history, that is
devoid of its condition of possibility as art. This is why, in order to define
an aesthetic philosophy of history from the point of view of progressive
art and for the sake of progressive art itself, Adorno needs to join to
twelve-tone technique the opposite movement, that is the regressive res-
toration. Without musical regression, it would be impossible to under-
stand the progress. The connection between Schönberg and Stravinsky is
therefore much closer than Adorno cares to admit. In a philosophy of
new music Stravinsky’s restoration is in fact key to the identification of
Schönberg’s progression as art. It may be possible that Adorno’s violent,
and sometimes unmotivated, attacks on the author of the Histoire du
soldat are aimed to emphasize the gap between Schönberg and Stravinsky.
Their theoretical intimate connection would risk otherwise to present
them as the two artistic sides of the same historical coin. In other circum-
stances, Adorno is certainly less keen on emphasizing distinctions, but
here he intends to explicitly stress the affinity of neoclassicism and fas-
cism—a parallelism that, to be fair, Stravinsky itself has somehow
encouraged.14
13
Günter Seubold (1997, pp. 118–124) integrates Adorno’s interpretation of serial music within
the paradigm of the end of art, and not only in the case of Schönberg, but also in the continuation
of the Viennese school in Boulez, Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono, as opposed to John Cage’s alea-
toric music.
14
As Harvey Sachs (1988, p. 168) reported, Stravinsky declares to an Italian journalist: “I don’t
believe that anyone venerates Mussolini more than I do”, and, after a private audience with the
Duce, “I told him that I felt like a fascist myself ”.
68 M. Farina
In order to fully understand why atonal music needs to be explained in

the light of neoclassical regression, or better why art produces the phe-
nomenon of regression in order to progressively explain the historical
situation, one should clarify in which terms the neoclassical restoration
(paradoxically) unleashes historical movement. As we have seen, in fact,
progressive atonal music is described as an “ahistorical stasis”, “the end of
the musical experience of time”, and as the image of a world that “no
longer knows history” (PnM: 66, 68, 62, PNM: 53, 65, 50); but, upon
closer inspection, such a description of a cultural product is not that of
an artwork, but that of product of culture industry, or rather of a com-
modity, that is of a reproduction of social conflicts without any kind of
judgment or opposition to them. In order to be regarded as art, music
needs therefore to bring out history, to bring out the fact that social con-
flicts are historical, changeable, not natural, and therefore transitory. This
task, paradoxically enough, is carried out exactly by musical restoration,
that is by the neoclassical apparent denial of historical process.
I have called this movement paradoxical, but it would be actually bet-
ter to say “dialectical”, since Adorno sees Stravinsky as a Romantic get-
away from historical process. As the Romantic movement attempted to
find the truth in the past and through a conservative stance toward
modernity, Stravinsky succumbs “to the temptation of using stylistic pro-
cedures to reinstill the binding quality in music” (PnM: 127, PNM:
105). However, it is precisely in this kind of escape from history that
Adorno recognizes the emergence of history itself. The historical charac-
ter of the artwork comes out as soon as Adorno delves deeper into the
artistic trend that attempts to escape in an eternal and ahistorical style.
While Schönberg’s loyalty to historical progress turns art into an ahistori-
cal product, Stravinsky’s restoration conversely expresses history. As in
the case of the non-historical inwardness of monologue that allows
Kierkegaard to expose history, Stravinsky’s refusal to follow the progres-
sive process shows itself as historically determined.
Step by step, Adorno’s argument runs as follows. “The belief that the
archaic lies immediately available to aesthetic control of the ego”—that
is, the theoretical assumption of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism—“is superfi-
cial wish fulfillment”, namely a subjective attempt to recover a pre-
historical state of art; but as Adorno contends, “the force of historical
process, which crystallized the resilient ego, has been objectified in the
individual, maintains his cohesion, and divides the ego from what is pre-
historical in the individual” (PnM: 155, PNM: 125). As the reader can
see, history is what compels an alleged pure ego to search for a non-
historical past and nothing more than this attempt bears testimony to the
power of the historical process. This leads to the necessity of Stravinsky’s
regression in the framework of new music, that is to say, in order to
release history in art. “There is no music”, writes Adorno, “that bears
anything of the power of the historical hour that is not touched by the
collapse of experience”, and what he understands as the “passing away of
subjective time in music”, that is, the difficulty of the musical piece to
subjectively express the historical process, can be complementarily
observed at the extreme poles of composition. As Adorno states, in fact,
“the expressionist miniature of the new Viennese school contracts the
dimension of time […] and in the major twelve-tone constructions time
is introduced by means of an integral procedure that therefore appears to
be without any development because it tolerates nothing external to itself
on which development could be tested” (PnM: 177, PNM: 142). Clearly,
this external thing on which development could be tested is nothing but
Stravinsky’s regression, that the philosopher places in with a view to com-
plete new music’s partiality, inasmuch as “the idea of the artworks and
their nexus is to be philosophically constructed even if this sometimes
goes beyond what the work has immediately achieved” (PnM: 34,
PNM: 24).
In order to be recognized as work of art, therefore, the atonal progress
has, so to say, to produce its own dialectical counterpart, the artistic neo-
classical restoration. In this way, however, the work of art fails as single,
individual, product. Its double character—its procedural, progressive,
changing nature, that at the same time maintains a normative, universal,
a-temporal dimension—cannot be fulfilled in a single, individual prod-
uct. What I have introduced as the historicization of the Kantian reflect-
ing judgment can no longer be realized except in the whole historical
movement in general. Rather than in the single composition, music as
form of art crystalizes itself in the whole historical movement of progress
and restoration, while the work of art as single product inevitably fails.
70 M. Farina
(ii) The second characteristic that defines the failure of the work of art
is the split of form and content in the context of aesthetic disharmony. As
previously mentioned, the conciliation and the success of the artwork are
not connected to the harmonic form of the product. Adorno follows,
indeed, Hegel—and also Nietzsche—in disengaging the success of the
artwork from the aesthetic category of beauty. According to Hegel, the
aesthetic category of beauty expresses the identity of form and content—
that is, the successful work of art—only when the historical (or spiritual)
content can be harmonically sedimented in the sensuous form, that is,
when the spiritual development is so simple and so exterior to find its
own adequate home in the sensuous artistic expression of meaning,
namely at the age of classical Greece. After that period, after the collapse
of the Greek naturalness and the resulting Christian development of inte-
riority, after the historical relationship between family and state was com-
pleted by the mediation of civil society, and after modernity made life
complicated and prosaic, the spiritual content can be sedimented and
crystallized in exterior form only by means of a no longer harmonically
beautiful superficial presentation. This is the explanation of the two
apparently contradictory statements made by Hegel, according to which
“nothing can be or become more beautiful” than classic art, but at the
same time “we may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to
perfection” (Hegel 1975, pp. 517, 103). Artistic progress is not a conse-
quence of the production of beauty as harmony.15 It is only due to histori-
cal and cultural heritage that Hegel keeps using the category of beauty in
order to identify the successful work of art; indeed, it is by one of his
most orthodox scholars, namely Karl Rosenkranz, and as an application
15
The question of the so-called negative aesthetic categories (such as that of ugly) has drawn the
attention of Hegelian scholars especially in the last thirty years, in particular thanks to the general
project of revision of Hegel’s traditional image as a conservative thinker. In this context, scholars
attempted to reshape Hegel’s alleged classicism by highlighting his use of negative categories. See,
for example, the argument of Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (1984b, pp. 205–258). Morover,
Francesca Iannelli (2007, pp. 52–57) stresses in which terms Hegel’s notion of “ideal” necessarily
comprehends negative aesthetic categories. In one of the most referenced Italian studies on Hegel’s
philosophy of art, Paolo D’Angelo (1989, in particular pp. 188–190) criticizes the image of a “clas-
sicist Hegel” by demonstrating the genetic role of the notion of symbol in Hegel’s determination of
aesthetics. In the same direction, see also my argument in Farina 2015, pp. 11–16.
of the Hegelian aesthetic pattern, that in 1853 the first example of an

Aesthetics of Ugliness was published.
This kind of Hegelian arguments, along with the Nietzschean notion
of the Dionysian origin of tragedy, leads Adorno’s line of reasoning
toward the ideas of dissonance and disharmony. As we have seen, art has
to preserve social conflicts in order not to deny the real suffering, and
every attempt to anesthetize human pain turns into an ideological form,
that, especially as entertainment, serves to conceal social conflicts; this is
the meaning of the vexed quotation whereby “to write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric” (KuG: 30, Pr: 34) and of Adorno’s vehement pro-
tests against verses of joy written “only a few years closer to us than the
time when Jews who had not been completely killed by the gas were
thrown living into the fire, where they regained consciousness and
screamed” (JdE: 429, JoA: 24).16 Disharmony, however, does not consist
in any case in the feeling of disgust, conceived as the aesthetic sense of
total repulsion;17 artistic disharmony is a kind of formal, or rather, aes-
thetic, sublation—in the sense of Hegel’s Aufhebung, or determinate
negation18—of contradictions, namely an artistic conciliation that man-
ages to maintain the reality of conflicts, while overcoming it.
Given the previous theoretical account of aesthetic categories, and on
the basis of what I have emphasized about serial music, it should be clear
to what extent the principle of conciliation through dissonance and dis-
harmony is suitably embodied by the twelve-tone technique. In this light
16
This is a quotation from the 1964 pamphlet, Jargon of Authenticity, where Adorno vehemently
attacks a group of poets and philosophers (in this case, Werner Bergengruen), that he presents as
part of the intellectual Heideggerian circle.
17
So Winfried Menninghaus understands the category of disgust, as he claims that “everything
seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of
self-preservation in the face of an unassimilable otherness, a convulsive struggle, in which what is
in question is, quite literally, whether ‘to be or not to be’” (Menninghaus 2003, p. 1). On this
problem in Kant, see Feloj 2013, pp. 175–185.
18
“Sublation” is one of the most common English translations of the German technical Hegelian
word Aufhebung (see, Pinkard 2018, p. xl). Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung corresponds to the deter-
minate negation as opposed to abstract (or absolute) negation and it designates the movement
according to which consciousness negates its own old theoretical stance toward the world, but it
maintains nevertheless the memory of what it has negated without deleting its experience. See, for
example, when Hegel rejects the abstract negative of the “merely clever argumentation”, that simply
negates, and the speculative one, in which negation (as sublation) “is the determinate negative
which emerges out of this movement and is likewise thereby a positive content” (Hegel 2018, p. 37).
72 M. Farina
should also be read Adorno’s statement according to which “under the

constraint of its own objective logic, music critically canceled the idea of
the consummate [runden] artwork” (PnM: 36, PNM: 29). As we have
seen, the critique of tonality of harmonic chords is not brought about by
the subjective taste of the artist. The matter is not only that these sounds
are obsolete and unfashionable, but rather that they are false. Moreover,
as Adorno claims, “the sickness that has befallen the idea of the work may
stem from a social condition that does not offer what would be binding
and confirming enough to guarantee the harmony of the self-sufficient
work” (PnM: 42–43, PNM: 34). It is according to such kind of argu-
ments that, when it comes to new music, “twelve-tone technique is truly
its fate” (PnM: 68, PNM: 54), or more prosaically the consistent product
of its historical path. In this regard, Adorno writes that “dissonance, and
its related categories of melodic composition based on ‘dissonant’ inter-
vals, are the veritable bearers of depositional expression” (PnM: 62, PNM:
49), and therefore the harmonic element can be accepted only to show its
falsity, as in the case of Alban Berg’s use of C-major triad whenever the
issue is money in order to demonstrate its objective falsity (PnM: 60n.,
PNM: 179).
This is nothing new. In fact, already the age of Baudelaire conceived
the disturbing element of art as a reaction to the alienated condition of
the subject, and Rosenkranz expressed the social origin of aesthetic ugli-
ness connecting its own philosophical research to Fourier’s rubrics about
the division of labor (Rosenkranz 2015, p. 26). What is groundbreaking
in Adorno’s theory is the reframing of dissonance—and of all the negative
aesthetic categories in general—as means to understanding the relation-
ship between form and content. Dissonance, in fact, should not be seen
as a divergence of form and content, as the previous aesthetic tradition
would have it, but rather as the way in which the historical content for-
mally sediments itself at the age of the universalization of social suffering;
in Adorno’s words, “all forms of music”—that is to say, all the successful
forms of music—“are sedimented contents. In them survives what is oth-
erwise forgotten and is no longer capable of speaking directly” (PnM: 47,
PNM: 37). It is precisely this definition of the form-content relationship
what describes the necessary dissonance of new music as an aesthetic con-
ciliation and conservation of social conflicts. Only through dissonance,
in fact, one can accomplish that kind of aesthetic presentation of contra-

dictions that characterizes the new art. It seems that Adorno takes the
Hegelian idea of art as historical presentation of the ideal more seriously
than Hegel himself. In this regard, the work of art always produces the
identity of form and content—to the point that “form” is “sedimented
content” and it is therefore impossible to separate them—despite the fact
that sometimes—namely, in modernity—that sedimentation can be exe-
cuted only by means of disharmony and dissonance, as the unreconciled
world cannot be aesthetically sublimated through harmony.
Just as in the case of the historical definition of the artwork (i), also in
its formal determination we can see the emergence of a tension that leads
to the failure of the work of art as individual product. If the atonal music
is able to aesthetically conciliate a disharmonious form, “this is only suc-
cessful at the price of its own freedom, and thus it fails”, as “the new
order, twelve tone technique, virtually extinguishes the subject”.
According to Adorno, in serial compositions—despite their being the
“fate” of music—the tendency toward failure is always present, and, in all
likelihood, this is why Schönberg states “that he [Adorno] has clearly
never liked my music”. The tendency to failure, moreover, is clearly visi-
ble in the development of the most representative serial composer him-
self, as “what is great in the late Schönberg was won as much in opposition
to twelve-tone technique as through it”, especially given that “the miscar-
riage of technical artwork, however, is not simply a failure with regard to
its aesthetic ideal; rather, it is a failure in the technique itself. The radical-
ism with which technical artwork destroys aesthetic semblance ultimately
consigns technical artwork to semblance” (PnM: 70, PNM: 56). The art-
work itself, therefore, necessarily and individually fails right in the art
form that represents its fate, and it fails as it destroys its own aesthetic
dimension of semblance, namely the quality that makes the formal sedi-
mentation of social conflicts “aesthetic”—and therefore conciliated. The
twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schönberg, that is the progress, the
future, and the fate of music, radically fails exactly in its being a work of
74 M. Farina
art, namely a product whose semblance turns the documentation of his-

torical contradictions into their critique.19
In order to be saved as art, a progressive artwork needs to be integrated
with its regressive counterpart. The artistic restoration, however, is not
relevant merely within an external comparison with progressive failure; it
is rather the whole aesthetic determination of the artwork as such what
causes the restoration itself. What in the historical determination con-
demns the work to the absence of history, in its formal definition turns
the work into something arbitrary. In this case, the work would actually
be a monad, something closed off to the world. But as we have seen,
Adorno’s idea of autonomy is dialectical, and it depends on heteronomy.
Otherwise, art would be part of the “anarchy of commodity production”
of the culture industry (DdA: 230, DoE: 169). In other words, only the
existence of Stravinsky’s attempt to restore harmony is able to justify
musical disharmony as art.
The Philosophy of New Music corresponds then to a philosophical
construction that, based on Adorno’s standpoint, is supposed to account
for the idea of the artworks and their nexus, even beyond what the
single work has superficially achieved. In this respect, Stravinsky’s music
is not simply a random example of a modern attempt to write tonal
music. As Robert Witkin (1998, pp. 146–148) suggests, Adorno picks
Stravinsky, and not, for example, Sibelius, because of his being inte-
grated into the historical process, because of his being “modern” insofar
as he is regressive; in other words, because of the purity in which the
regressive tendency of art is shown in his neoclassical compositions. As
I have already suggested, according to Adorno, the trend detected in
Stravinsky’s tonal music leads to the clear realization that new music is
historically determined. On this ground atonal music can be acknowl-
edged as art. The regression of Stravinsky, in fact, is able to express the
integration of the subject in what Adorno conceives as social totality,
namely the objective structure in which single phenomena, while
19
Although I suggest the failure of twelve-tone music in Adorno’s aesthetics, how Robert Witkin
(1998, p. 139) speaks of Adorno’s “opposition to twelve-tone technique”, in terms of a “castigation
of it”, or “attack” upon serial composition, seems to me an exaggeration. I find the judgment of the
Italian scholar, Sara Zurletti (2006, pp. 140–142), more balanced, especially when she points to the
sinking of new music beneath the proper concept of art in the Philosophy of New Music.
appearing as arbitrary, discover themselves as determinate. Indeed, as

Adorno writes, “the element of appeasing and harmonious, this ele-
ment in art of the displacement of the dreaded, […] triumph as the
herald of the iron age in Stravinsky’s scornful and cutting tone” (PnM:
156, PNM: 126–127). The category of totality—that Adorno inherited
from Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and on which he kept rely-
ing up to his debate with Popper in 1969, right before his death20—is a
critical category and therefore fits neoclassical restoration, as what
allows progressive music to appear as art. In a critical sense, totality
alludes to the same Hegelian gaze to the whole dialectical connection,
but without the positive and affirmative sense of conciliation stated by
Hegel. Totality expresses, hence, the social oppressive conflicts and
fragmentations that define the single subject, here conveyed by
Stravinsky’s violent restoration.
Stravinsky’s neoclassicism is thus the artistic movement through which
ideology becomes evident. “The aesthetic discipline and order”, “the
claim to authenticity”, that “is ceded to an authoritarian comportment”,
the “unperturbed obedience”, proclaimed as “aesthetic principle of style”,
“the negation of the negativity of the subject in this authoritarian atti-
tude”, “its seductively anti-ideological quality, establishes itself as a new
ideology” (PnM: 183, PNM: 146). Thereby, Adorno intends to empha-
size the affinity of neoclassicism with two apparently opposed social
(regressive) trends, namely the diffusion of the culture industry and the
sinking into fascism. As to the first, Stravinsky is “a Wagner who has
come fully into his own”, and just like Wagner he wants to “hammer the
music into the head of the musically stupid”, that is into “the kind of
listener for industrial cultural mass”; as to the second, Stravinsky is
devoted to a regressive utopia “of a close society guilelessly oriented to a
guild economy and the early manufacturing period” (PnM: 174, 184,
PNM: 140, 148).
The musical regression is then what is able to show the ideological
framework that embraces together fascism and culture industry, and in
20
In 1969, Adorno wrote the introduction to a selection of writings that provided an overview of
the debate between the dialectical and the positivist approach to sociology. In that context, he
claims that “totality is not an affirmative but rather a critical category. […] There is nothing socially
factual which would not have its place in that totality” (EzP: 192, IPD: 12).
76 M. Farina
relation to which the dissonance stands out as a distinctively artistic fea-

ture; the relevance of the neoclassical restoration lies in that, unlike full-
fledged fascism propaganda and culture industry, it is one of the extremes
of the artistic overview. In this respect, dissonance is the fate of music
only inasmuch as it produces a dialectical and harmonic counterpart, and
inasmuch as it shapes in this manner what I have defined as the double
character of art. The singularity—the dissonance and fragility—of twelve-
tone compositions is so individual that it does not have the strength to
singularly elevate itself to the status of successful artwork; the universal-
ity—the conceptual harmony and violence—of neoclassicism suppresses
any individual and conflictual element to the point that artistic expres-
sion escapes from its wide hands. Only inasmuch as one side is identified
with the antagonist degeneration of the other, new music can be recog-
nized as art; and this only at the price of the formal failure of any indi-
vidual work from each side.
(iii) After all, the work of art fails to fulfill its double character also as
expression of historical progress, or even as dissolution of historical myth.
Paul Valéry (1958, p. 52), one of Adorno’s most beloved poets, judges
as “scholarly” the opposition of abstract thought and poetry. Artistic cre-
ation, in fact, cannot be fulfilled by the mere romantic cult of immediate
inspiration, as it rather needs the interpenetration of aesthetic feeling and
the formal activity of “organization”, so that the former could be “sized,
fixed, and reshaped” (Valéry 1958, p. 63). As we have seen, according to
Adorno the artwork possesses a double character exactly because of the
presence of both a sensuous particular element and a universal concep-
tual dimension, of both the expression of social conflicts and their cri-
tique. This determination of the artwork is clearly expressed in the
Introduction to Philosophy of New Music, where Adorno presents the
methodological tools of his aesthetic research: “it is necessary to trans-
form the strength of the universal concept into the self-unfolding of the
concrete object and to revolve the social puzzle of its image by the powers
of its own individuation. In this, the aim is to provide not social justifica-
tion but a theory of society by virtue of explication of what is aesthetically
right and wrong at the heart of the objects” (PnM: 33, PNM: 23). The
philosophy of new music, therefore, requests from the artwork the same
double character that Adorno defined in his early aesthetic reflections.
Thus, the double character of aesthetic presentation remains the most

basic and essential qualification of the artworks, and no wonder the lines
of failure I have defined above tend to converge in the failure of the art-
work as a double-character product. A work that gives up that antinomic
structure, gives up at the same time its own artistic character, insofar as it
either tends to pander to social development, becoming thereby a prod-
uct of culture industry, or it abstractly opposes itself to society without
showing its own social origin, becoming then a conceptual (non-aesthetic)
theoretical critique, namely an essay. As we have seen, this is why art cor-
responds to that social product able to critically interpret what in society
appears as fixed, rigid, and natural, and therefore as mythical, namely the
sedimentation of social conflicts. A form of art unable to dissolve the
mythical meaning of society cannot be conceived as a progressive cultural
element, but just as a mere standard repetition of society itself.21 The
double character of art is, hence, the point of convergence of all the aes-
thetic tensions of art and the antinomies we have seen in this chapter
reappear in this context in their most radical form.
As cutting-edge outcome of progressive art, atonal music ought to be
able to express the aesthetic tension that embodies the artistic double
character. At the end of his study on Schönberg, in fact, Adorno reads the
twelve-tone technique simply in reference to the aesthetic tension of uni-
versal and particular. Given the relevance of the problem, I will present
his reasoning step by step. About art in general, reasserting what we have
seen as distinctive in art’s structure, Adorno writes that “its depth is that
of judgement on the bad. But that through which it – as knowing –
judges is aesthetic form”. He then goes on to say that “in the act of know-
ing that art carries out, its form criticizes the contradiction by indicating
21
Although beyond the purpose of this research, it should be noticed that the standardization fea-
tures Adorno recognizes in any popular or mass product are precisely what seems to hamper the use
of Adorno’s aesthetic in the interpretation of pop culture. Among the several interpretations of
Adorno’s theory of standardization, see the first chapter, Cultural nemesis, in Witkin 2003, pp. 1–15.
More recently, though, against the “orthodox”, or rigid interpretation of his philosophy (see,
Marino 2017, pp. 36–38), some attempts have been made to read popular music phenomena
through the lenses of Adorno’s toolbox. In a previous Italian publication, Stefano Marino has pur-
sued an “Adornian” interpretation of Frank Zappa in the book La filosofia di Frank Zappa:
Un’interpretazione adorniana (The Philosophy of Frank Zappa: An Adornian Interpretation,
Marino 2014).
78 M. Farina
the possibility of its reconciliation and thus what is contingent, sur-

mountable, and dependent in the contradiction”. This is the reason why
art can be such a unique social product that is able to mirror and criticize
society itself; and this is also the reason why “as the concretion of the pos-
sible, art has always repudiated the reality of the contradiction on which
is based”, that is, inasmuch as it shows its possible (and necessary) resolu-
tion. Right after this description of what art should be, Adorno writes
that “as knowledge, however, it [art] becomes radical in the moment in
which it is no longer content with itself as such. This is the threshold of
new art” (PnM: 119, PNM: 97). What is described in this passage is
nothing but Adorno’s recognition of a structural change in new art—or
rather, in new music—compared to the classical function of aesthetic
products. New music, in fact, “is no longer content” with its aesthetic
relation of particular and universal; it rather aspires to knowledge and
therefore it forgoes its double character. With reference to new music, in
fact, one reads that “it so deeply grasps its own contradictions, that they
no longer permit solution” and even more clearly, “new art leaves the
contradiction standing and exposes the barren bedrock of its categories of
judgement, the form. It casts away the dignity of the judge and abdicates,
stepping down to take the side of the plaintiff who can be reconciled only
by reality. Only in the fragmentary work, renouncing itself, is the critical
content liberated” (PnM: 119, PNM: 97). It is not a coincidence, then,
that in the footnote to this passage Adorno calls into question Benjamin’s
arguments about aura and technical reproducibility, that is, those argu-
ments that according to Adorno present the artwork in the light of “the
appearance of original in technique”.
Only by accepting a Romantic evaluation of the sense-based particu-
lar, new music can appear as art, but according to its method of overall
mediation, Adorno is forced to recognize new music structurally as
“antipathy toward art”, along with its own activity of “liquidation of art”
(PnM: 118, 120, PNM: 96, 97). New music rejects any relationship not
only with the critical intention to philosophically interpret its structure,
but also with the public, which is indeed unable to understand it as art.
This kind of radical elitist character turns new music in what Adorno
conceives as its “absolute oblivion”, as “it is the true message in a bottle”,
that can be maybe useful for a future and liberated humanity, but not for
the contemporary alienated society.22 This is how new music fails as art in
the most radical way, that is to say, as expression and critical judgment of
social conflicts. However, as we have seen for the other two misgivings of
serial music, also in this case Stravinsky’s neoclassicism corresponds to a
means of recognition of twelve-tone technique as art. Music, in fact, fails
as individual product, both in Stravinsky and Schönberg, but since “all
art stands opposed to mythology” (PnM: 126, PNM: 102), it must some-
how succeed to produce its double character as dissolution of myth. And
the way in which it succeeds, if not in the single work, comes about in the
new age itself, as philosophically accounted for. The double character of
the work is now to be found in the general movement of music, accord-
ing to which, on the one hand, Schönberg so deeply expresses social con-
tradictions that he cannot anymore oppose himself to them, and, on the
other hand, Stravinsky reacts against those contradictions, he judges
them, without being able to find a possible solution in this world and
taking thereby refuge in the old classical style. This is why the story of
new music is, according to Adorno, the story of the failure of the work of
art as such, namely as individual, single, product. Only the gaze of the
philosopher is able to see the artistic antinomic movement of universal
and particular that determines art. As we have seen, in fact, is Stravinsky’s
escape from modernity what shows the emergence of history, as “nothing
perhaps demonstrates so clearly how in Stravinsky modernism and
archaic are two sides of the same thing” (PnM: 146, PNM: 118). New
atonal music as single work fails to such a degree that, in order to be
thought as art, it needs a counterpart that negates any aesthetic presup-
position of technical music, that is, the reactionary neoclassicism.
2.3 The Dissolution of the Aesthetic

According to my account, in his work on music, Adorno defines his aes-
thetics as a philosophy of history and ends up presenting something like
a Hegel-inspired diagnosis of the end of art. Although it would
According to James Hellings (2014, pp. 56–57), Adorno’s metaphor of the message in a bottle
22
came from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Ms. Found in a Bottle”.
80 M. Farina
be probably more accurate, though, to define Adorno’s account as a radi-

cal interpretation of Hegel’s thesis about the end of art23—like Hegel,
Adorno would argue for the inability of art to express and fulfill human
cultural needs. The work fails as individual product and it becomes an
empty shell unable to autonomously sustain its own artisticity. This
would be true if Adorno’s diagnosis of artistic crisis was supported by a
metaphysical theory of the bond between art and history, like the one
that has been detected by standard interpretations of the Hegelian idea of
the death of art as based on the metaphysics of absolute consciousness.
Differently, as I will argue in this paragraph, Adorno’s conclusion has
nothing to do with an epochal verdict about an invariant, or absolute,
idea of art, but it rather revolves around an aesthetic principle that I iden-
tify with the notion of the dissolution of the aesthetic element and that
expresses the consistent conclusion of a materialistic interpretation of the
artwork. Art, in fact, is not treated by Adorno as an ideal determination
that can somehow disappear when its metaphysical value ceases to be
significant—as still the young Lukács (1971, p. 37) seems to suggest; art
is rather a human cultural function, a way in which humanity presents its
social contradictions by judging their being oppressive, and therefore it
cannot disappear until those conflicts are still real and urgent. As Adorno
writes, “only for a pacified humanity would art come to an end” (PnM:
24, PNM: 16). What we have seen in the failure of new music corre-
sponds therefore to how art reacts to a given historical change in the
making and to a certain rearrangement of social relationships. In what
follows, I will present the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic as a
23
As we have seen, one of the classical interpretations, namely that of Benedetto Croce, suggests a
radical reading of the end of art in Hegel’s aesthetics. Not only the Aesthetics of 1912, but also in
his polemic against the English philosopher, Bernard Bosanquet, Croce asserts that in Hegel art
dies and dissolves itself in philosophy (Croce 1934, pp. 425–434); this is the traditional explana-
tion of Hegel’s idea of the end of art as it was supported for example by Edward von Hermann in
his study about German Aesthetic from Kant (see especially, Hartmann 1886, pp. 124–125). In the
second half of the twentieth century, the debate about the end of art has flared up again. In particu-
lar, scholars from the Hegel-Archiv in Bochum have supposed a new interpretation of the end of
art, namely as a secondary problem in Hegelian aesthetics, as an exaggeration of the classicist
interpretation, and as an attempt to overestimate the role of the philosophical system in Hegel by
diminishing the value of the interpretation of concrete phenomena (for a general account of this
position, see Gethmann-Siefert 2005, pp. 347–360). For a different take on this problem, see the
lecture of Eva Geulen on Hegel’s end of art as a dialectical movement of birth and rebirth (Geulen
2006, pp. 19–40).
variation of artistic conditions in the framework of a materialistic com-

prehension of art’s expression.
In 1957, that is almost ten years after the Philosophy of New Music,
Adorno writes an essay about Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. Composed in
the last years of Beethoven’s life, Adorno considers this great mass as the
“Alienated Magnum Opus” of his late style. The relevance of this essay—
beside the fact that it represents one of the few visible results of Adorno’s
forty-year effort to write a book about the composer of the Ninth
Symphony24—lies in the fact that Beethoven’s late style forms the breaking
point of traditional music, and therefore it is historically located right at
the border of the artistic change that leads to the failure of modern music.
This also explains why Adorno met some major difficulties writing about
Beethoven. It seems indeed that the fragility he recognizes in Beethoven’s
compositions reflects itself in his own difficulties to write a proper book
about it, as he intended to already in the 1930s.25 Adorno, moreover, sees
in Beethoven a sort of musical pendant of Hegelian philosophy, as if the
dialectical notion of totality would find artistic expression in Beethoven’s
non-abstract conciliation of tones in harmony.26
Of great relevance is how Adorno approaches Beethoven’s mass as a
masterpiece, clearly a work in a traditional sense, but also a masterpiece
which is about to become a new fragmented work. There is no doubt, in
fact, that the Missa is a work of art in a traditional sense, and this is why
Adorno describes it as an example of the artistic double character. More
precisely, “the puzzle posed by the Missa Solemnis”, writes Adorno, “is the
deadlock between an archaic procedure which implacably sacrifices
Beethoven’s achieved techniques, and a human tone which seems to
24
The others are two short essays, both written in 1934. The first, “Beethoven’s Late Style”, has been
published for the first time in 1937 (now, in GS, 17, pp. 13–17), the second, “Ludwig van
Beethoven: Six Bagatelles for Piano, op. 126”, has been published for the first time in the edition
of Adorno’s writings (GS, 18, pp. 185–188).
25
In 1993, Rolf Tiedemann edited a collection of Adorno’s writings under the title Beethoven. The
Philosophy of New Music. The volume consists in a collection of fragments and notes that Adorno
wrote along the years in order to figure out how to structure his Beethoven monograph. As the
editor claims, Adorno planned to write a philosophical work on Beethoven since 1937 (Tiedemann
1998, p. vii).
26
The parallelism between Beethoven and Hegel has been largely investigated by the critique. See
for example Michael Spitzer (2006, pp. 45–47) and Markus Ophälders (2001, p. 148).
82 M. Farina
mock these archaic means”; and this “puzzle” that makes the Missa a real
work of art consists in “the linking of the idea of humanity to a somber
aversion to expression” (VH: 155, B: 148). The tension that typically
identifies the work of art according to Adorno’s determination is particu-
larly perceptible in Beethoven. The radical enigmatic nature of his work
makes it a borderline case between traditional and new art. Although,
clearly still art in a traditional sense, thanks to the fragility of its totality,
Beethoven’s music already alludes to the fragmentation of new art, exactly
as Hegel’s dialectical whole refers to negative and fragmented totality, as
Adorno says in Hegel. Three Studies.27 It is furthermore to such comments
in Adorno’s texts that one refers when pointing to Adorno’s secularization
of Hegelian categories (Bozzetti 1996, pp. 9, 59–67). The openness of
Beethoven’s late style is therefore said to ensue from the impossibility for
the author to prevail over the objectivity and to master musical material.
According to Adorno, “the Missa is a work of omission, of permanent
renunciation” and it mirrors the “efforts of the later bourgeois, which no
longer hoped to conceive and express the universally human in the con-
crete form of particular” (VH: 157, B: 151). In this sense, Beethoven’s
Missa revels its being on the way to become new music and it shows “that
the principle of musical development has run its course historically”
(VH: 160, B: 153).
In a pretty hidden passage of the essay from 1957, however, Adorno
hints in passing at the aesthetic principle of failure concerning new music.
Once become deaf, Adorno writes, Beethoven “did not, as might be
thought, follow the dictates of his inner ear”, but rather he “made master-
ful use of all the possibilities which had grown up during the history of
his composing; suppression of the sensuous was only one of them” (VH:
149, B: 144). Already during Beethoven’s time, then, one of the possibili-
ties of music as art was that of giving up the sensuous element, that is the
element that has always been the decisive characteristic of the artistic
27
In the first of the Three Studies on Hegel, Adorno clearly states the distinction between the
Hegelian notion of totality and its abstract development by Köhler’s theory of Gestalt: “He does not
make the parts, as elements of the whole, autonomous in opposition to it; at the same time, as a
critic of romanticism, he knows that the whole realizes itself only in and through the parts, only
through discontinuity, alienation, and reflection-through, in short, everything that is anathema to
Gestalt theory” (DSH: 253, HTS: 4).
communication of meaning as aesthetics.28 Therefore, since aesthetics can

no longer be defined as a sensuous communication of human truth, the
entry of music into the realm of its failure as individual work corresponds
to a determining change in the role of the sensuous (or sensory) as aes-
thetic principle. This is not the case for Beethoven, whose compositions
draw the line between classical and new music, but rather that of contem-
porary music, taken as the expression of the late capitalistic decay of aes-
thetic sensibility. It seems, then, that art can do without its sensuously
perceptible character, in other words what traditionally has ensured its
being part of the realm of aesthetics by making it precisely artistic and
not, for example, philosophical. This principle shows its effects precisely
in the determination of new music.
Adorno’s verdict about the failure of new music can be theoretically
justified only from the point of view of its material constitution. In fact,
the dimension of music that goes into crisis is its objective ability to
autonomously communicate its meaning, namely its material element.
Musical material, in fact, is not simply the sum of sounds available to the
composer, but rather something that is as different from it “as language
from the inventory of its sounds”. Musical material does not directly con-
sist in the sounds, but it is rather the formal grammar through which
sounds become meaningful, and this grammar historically changes, as in
the material “all of its specific traits are marks of the historical process”
(PnM: 38, PNM: 31). The split of new music into the two extremes of
progress and regression results therefore from a paradigm shift in musical
material, or rather in the artistic material in general. Progressive music, in
fact, shows that artistic material turned into natural material, to the point
that musical meaning is something to be “retrospectively” reconstructed,
28
Aesthetics, in fact, corresponds to the modern philosophical discipline (Ritter 1971, cols.
555–557) whose name has been used for the first time by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten as the
title of his book from 1750 in order to define what he intended as “theory of liberal arts”, gnoseolo-
gia inferior, “science of sensory cognition” (Baumgarten 1986, p. 1). Even if one wants to follow the
English-speaking tradition and backdate the proper beginning of the discipline with Addison’s
essay “Pleasures of Imagination” (see Kivy 1989, p. 255), the question of sensuous knowledge is still
pivotal, as Addison begins his text with the observation about aesthetics that “our sight is the most
perfect and most delightful of all our senses” (Addison 1712, No. 411). Since the beginning, aes-
thetics has been conceived as the study of sense-based knowledge and this part of Baumgarten’s
definition has never been denied to this day (Guyer 2014, vol. I, p. 6).
84 M. Farina
as if one could apply Kantian natural teleology to the artwork (see

Paddison 1993, p. 57). The traditional and tonal canon of music, that
appeared solid and firm like it was natural, gave way to atonal music. The
naturality of the canon turned out to be nothing but “an illusion origi-
nating in history”; thanks to atonal music, however, it has been demon-
strated that “the material is reduced to mere nature, to the physical
relation of tones, and it is above all this relapse that subjects twelve-tone
music to the constraint of nature” (PnM: 20, 85, PNM: 13, 68).
If the apparent naturality of the canon was a historical product, the
historicity of atonal music is a relapse of historical artistic material into
naturality. This process, however, is possible inasmuch as “the ‘material’”
of art, as we have seen, “is itself sedimented spirit”, in the same sense in
which for Marx commodity “theologically” reflects social relationships.
What Adorno defines as the naturality of the material of new art consists,
then, in the fact that social spirit, social Geist in the sense we have seen in
the previous chapter, sediments in artistic material and, as if it was a natu-
ral force, it imposes its law on the author and forces him to obey its serial
row. This dynamics is made possible thanks to the absorption of artistic
material into the social production process. At the beginning of the
Introduction to the Philosophy of New Music Adorno is pretty clear about
it. “Modern painting’s departure from the object”, he writes, “that in
painting marks the same branch as does atonality in music, was an act of
defense against mechanized art merchandise”, in fact “in its origins, radi-
cal musical reacted no differently to the commercial debasement of the
traditional idioms. It was the antithesis of the spreading of the culture
industry in its own domain” (PnM: 15, PNM: 9).
According to what I have shown, the failure of new music, namely its
incapacity to become a successful individual work, is a process that occurs
in the material element of music, as the author can no longer find a form
in which the spirit can be sedimented as a critique of its own conflicts; to
the opposite, conflicts are directly transferred in artistic material itself as
a commercial debasement of its traditional forms. Musical material, thus,
is the element in which society sediments itself and absorbs the work in
its own processes “at the cost of the passive perception of the sensual
sound” (PnM: 21, PNM: 14). What characterizes art at the age of late
capitalism is therefore a social absorption of material that “is called in
concepts of art neutralization of the material”, and “the liquidation of

art – of the closed artwork – becomes an aesthetic problem, and the
increasing neutralization of the material brings with it the renunciation
to the identity of content and appearance in which these traditional ideas
of art come to terms” (PnM: 115, 120, PNM: 93, 97). The work of art,
hence, fails as individual product inasmuch as its material has been neu-
tralized, it has lost its own sensible qualification that would allow it to be
a medium of aesthetic experience. As a result, the work of art is com-
pletely absorbed by conceptual mediation; it is conveyed entirely through
philosophical reasoning and it loses its own aesthetic ability to autono-
mously reflect and criticize society. Finally, what defines the work as “aes-
thetic”, that is its ability to sensuously express society and to dissolve its
mythical oppression, has been in turn dissolved and neutralized.
Artistic and aesthetic material becomes then neutralized material that,
in Marxian terms, is no longer expression of the artwork as “thing”, but
rather of the conflicts of capitalistic society, as the “capital is not a thing,
but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things”
(Marx 1990, p. 932). The aesthetic principle that defines the failure of
new music as work of art is, then, the desensitization of the material, the
fact that the sensuous quality of the work can no longer be the base on
which art acquires its own aesthetic quality. This happens based on the
same principle that I have called the dissolution of the aesthetic: the tra-
ditional sensible element of the work has lost all autonomous aesthetic
meaning due to the absorption of art’s “thing” dimension in the social
relation that capital is. Hence, following a Marxian argument, Adorno
sets himself in the twentieth century’s discussion about the musealization
of art and about its objective loss of any binding qualification in the
sphere of perception. That art has lost its immediate sensuous qualifica-
tion as art, in fact, is something that in twentieth century’s debates has
been suggested by different theoretical lines, for example by Dickie’s
institutional theory according to which “works of art are art as the result
of the position they occupy within the institutional framework or con-
text” and not as bearers of specific sensuous and perceptive qualities
(Dickie 1989, p. 196); or by Danto’s idea that the dilemma of art’s dis-
cernibility “is going to be forever inescapable so long as we attempt to
define art in terms of features that either compare or contrast with
86 M. Farina
features of the real world” (Danto 1981, p. 30); or even by Giorgio
Agamben’s statement that art has been definitely “consigned to the atem-
poral aesthetic dimension of the Museum Theatrum” where “it begins its
second and interminable life, which, while it will keep increasing its
metaphysical and monetary value, will also eventually dissolve the con-
crete space of the work” (Agamben 1999, p. 51). Something along these
lines, that is something like the contemporary reshaping of the idea of the
end of art, is suggested also by Adorno, when in the Philosophy of New
Music he asserts that “its death, which now threatens, would be exclu-
sively the triumph of bare existence over the consciousness that has the
audacity to resist it” (PnM: 24, PNM: 16). Following my argument,
however, what Adorno hypothetically suggests corresponds rather to his
own effective diagnosis of the condition of music as a product that has
lost all aesthetic qualification and whose artistic quality can only be “phil-
osophically constructed […] beyond what the work has immediately
achieved”.
If that is the case, Adorno’s historical analysis of art has to be taken as
part of the general postmodern idea of the end of any historical binding,
of the triumph of arbitrariness in art’s creation, and of the identification
of works, as things, with common objects. The statement about the death
of art I have quoted above is indeed preceded by another pivotal observa-
tion: “Only for a pacified humanity would art come to an end”. Despite
all the accounts of new music as a failed product, despite its loss of any
critical dimension, Adorno continues to conceive art as the product of a
non-pacified humanity, that is of humanity that struggles to dissolve its
mythical and oppressive meaning. However, if one is to accept that the
mythical element that art should critically present (and dissolve) is for
humanity a second nature, that is to say, a product of natural history,
then it is clear that it will never be dissolved by the musical material,
namely a material “reduced to mere nature”. The most radical and consis-
tent conclusions of Adorno’s philosophy of new music—and this explains
why musicology has always be disinclined to accept Adorno—is that
twelve-tone technique is the fate of music, and this fate corresponds to
the demonstration of the failure of music itself (Witkin 1998,
pp. 132–138). As artistic material is not simply superficial materialities,
but rather “what they have become in any particular instance” (Paddison
1993, p. 65) music material has lost its “linguistic character” and it sinks
into a mere physiologic phenomenon (see Seubold 1997, p. 123, Zurletti
2006, pp. 15, 37–41, 57). This loss of linguistic quality in artistic mate-
rial corresponds, hence, to the dissolution of the aesthetic element. In
this context, I say “artistic” and not merely “musical” because Adorno’s
conclusions do not exclusively concern musical sensuous materiality, as if
the latter was a special kind of material, but also the sensuous material
dimension of art in general, as it is shown in various parallelisms between
music and painting.29 In this sense, and thanks to their sensuous material
dimension, music and painting undergo the same process of dissolution
of the aesthetic element. The process of neutralization of the artistic
material affects therefore all the artistic forms that have their ground in
the aesthetic sensible side. The sensuous material element, the work as
thing, becomes part of the process of social mediation that defines the
production’s framework and it loses therefore its ability to fulfill its own
task, namely that of reflecting and together criticizing social conflicts.
As we have seen, however, “only for a pacified humanity would art
come to an end”, and this means that art didn’t finish its historical pur-
pose. It is not art in general what sinks beneath its own purpose, but
rather the sensuous material, absorbed as it is in the capitalistic produc-
tion of commodities. In order for art to fulfill its critical task, as according
to Adorno it necessarily has to do, a form of art has to be identified whose
formal and material dimension could resist the objective reification of the
sensuous artistic element. This art can only be a form of art whose mate-
rial sensuous side does not immediately corresponds to what makes it
artistic. As I will show in what follows, this art corresponds to the literary
paradigm of the work.
29
As we have seen, Adorno uses the example of “modern painting’s departure from the object” to
clarify the atonal renunciation of harmony, as if realistic representation would be the visual analo-
gous of harmonic naturality. Testament to this is the fact that Adorno considers Picasso’s technique
as a visual exemplification of atonal dynamics (PnM: 109–110, PNM: 89). See also how, under the
threat of technology, “plastic art” reacts in a way that remembers the musical one (PnM: 175n.,
PNM: 191).
88 M. Farina
References
Addison, Joseph. 1712. Pleasures of Imagination. Spectator, Nos. 411–421.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The Man Without Content. Trans. G. Albert. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. 1986. Aesthetica. Hildesheim/Zürich/New
York: Olms.
Benjamin, Walter. 1994. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. Trans.
M.R. Jacobson, and E.M. Jacobson. Chicago/London: Chicago
University Press.
Berio, Luciano. 2006. Remembering the Future. Cambridge, MA/London:
Harvard University Press.
Blumenfeld, Harold. 1991. Ad Vocem Adorno. Musical Quarterly 74
(4): 263–284.
Bozzetti, Mauro. 1996. Hegel und Adorno. Die kritische Funktion des philoso-
phischen Systems. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber.
Chua, Daniel K.L. 2006. Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New
Music. In Apparitions. New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century
Music, ed. Berthold Hoeckner, 1–17. London/New York: Routledge.
Covach, John. 2002. Twelve-tone Theory. In The Cambridge History of Western
Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen, 603–627. Cambridge, UK:
Croce, Benedetto. 1934. La “fine dell’arte” nel sistema hegeliano. La Critica
32: 425–434.
D’Angelo, Paolo. 1989. Simbolo e arte in Hegel. Roma-Bari: Laterza.
Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of
Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
de Leeuw, Ton. 2005. Music of the Twentieth Century. Study of Its Elements and
Structure. Trans. S. Taylor. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Dickie, George. 1989. The New institutional Theory of Art. In Aesthetics: A
Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Donald Roblin,
196–205. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Farina, Mario. 2015. The Symbolic Role of Art in Hegel Versus the Absolute
Function of Beauty. Hegel-Jahrbuch 2015: 6–11.
Feloj, Serena. 2013. Is there a Negative Judgment on Taste? Disgust as the Real
Ugliness in Kant’s Aesthetics. Lebenswelt 3: 175–185.
Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. 1984a. Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte.
Bonn: Bouvier.
———. 1984b. Hegels These vom Ende der Kunst und der “Klassizismus” der
Ästhetik. Hegel-Studien 19: 205–258.
———. 2005. Einführung in Hegels Ästhetik. München: Fink.
Geulen, Eva. 2006. The End of Art. Readings in a Rumor after Hegel. Trans.
Guyer, Paul. 2014. A History of Modern Aesthetics. Volume 1: The Eighteenth
Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hartmann (von), Eduard. 1886. Die deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant. Leipzig:
W. Friedrich.
———. 2010. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I:
Science of Logic. Trans. K. Brinkmann, and D.O. Dahlstrom. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hellings, James. 2014. Adorno and Art. Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory.
London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Iannelli, Francesca. 2007. Das Siegel der Moderne. Hegels Bestimmung des
Hässlichen in den Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik und die Rezeption bei den Hegelianern.
München: Fink.
Kivy, Peter. 1989. Recent Scholarship and the British Tradition: A Logic of
Taste – The First Fifty Years. In Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George
Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Donald Roblin, 254–268. New York: St.
Martin’s Press.
Lukács, György. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. A Historico-Philosophical Essay on
the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: The
Merlin Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1989. Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their
Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity. In The Lyotard
Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, 181–195. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Marino, Stefano. 2017. Writing Songs After Auschwitz. Rethinking Adorno’s
Concept of Commitment and Aesthetics of Popular Music. Zeitschrift für
Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 62 (1): 25–40.
Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans.
90 M. Farina
Menninghaus, Winfried. 2003. Disgust. Theory and History of a Strong Sensation.

Trans. H. Eiland, and J. Golb. Albany: SUNY.
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus. 1979. Adorno und die Geschichte der musikalischen
Avantgarde. In Adorno und die Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch, vol. 12, 9–14.
Graz: Studien zur Wertungsforschung.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans.
R. Speirs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ophälders, Markus. 2001. Der Weltgeist am Klavier. Adorno interpreta
Beethoven. Note per una critica. Materiali diestetica 4: 147–165.
Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Pinkard, Terry. 2018. Translator’s Note. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The
Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Ritter, Joachim. 1971. Ästhetik. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed.
Joachim Ritter, cols. 555–557. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe.
Rosenkranz, Karl. 2015. Aesthetics of Ugliness. Trans. A. Pop, and M. Widrich.
London/New York: Bloomsbury.
Sachs, Harvey. 1988. Music in Fascist Italy. New York: Norton.
Schmidt, Alfred. 1983. Begriff des Materialismus bei Adorno. In Adorno-
Konferenz 1983, ed. Ludvig von Friedeburg, and Jürgen Habermas, 14–34.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Scruton, Roger. 2009. Understanding Music. Philosophy and Interpretation.
———. 2018. Music as Art. London: Bloomsbury Continuum.
Seubold, Günter. 1997. Das Ende der Kunst und der Paradigmenwechsel in der
Ästhetik. In Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Adorno, Heidegger und Gehlen
in systematischer Absicht. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber.
Spitzer, Michael. 2006. Music as Philosophy. Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style.
Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press.
Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1977. Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work.
Trans. H. Searle. London: Calder.
Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of Modern Drama. Trans. M. Hays. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Tiedemann, Rolf. 1998. Editor’s Preface. In Theodor W. Adorno. Beethoven: The
Philosophy of Music. Trans. E. Jephcott. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Valéry, Paul. 1958. Poetry and Abstract Thought. In The Collected Works of Paul
Valery, ed. Jackson Mathews, vol. 7, 52–81. Trans. D. Folliot. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Witkin, Robert W. 1998. Adorno on Music. London/New York: Routledge.
———. 2003. Adorno on Popular Culture. London/New York: Routledge.
Zurletti, Sara. 2006. Il concetto di materiale musicale in Th.W. Adorno. Napoli:
Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici.
3
Literature and the Reconstruction
of the Aesthetic
In the light of the account provided so far, Adorno’s aesthetics expresses a

harsh judgment, in general, on the chances of art to preserve its own
artistic quality. What I have carved out as the principle of the “dissolution
of the aesthetic” conveys in fact the idea of a somehow necessary material
failure of the work of art as sensuous communication of social truth. This
theoretical outcome—inferred from a close reading of Adorno’s philoso-
phy of music—has never been openly acknowledged by Adorno himself,
whose aesthetic remarks seem instead to perpetually swing between his
complaining about art’s loss of unity and compactness and the penchant
for a progressive attitude toward new art. His wobbling about in the
interpretation of contemporary artistic developments might even justify
the self-contradictory understanding of Adorno’s philosophy of art in the
nineteenth-century debate about aesthetics. For example, the postmod-
ern Marxist scholar, Pierre Bourdieu (1984, p. 386), describes Adorno’s
aesthetics as a nostalgic and conservative example of art criticism, while
Marx-inspired criticism of postmodernism generally considers Adorno as
one of the main sources of the postmodern attitude itself (McLaren and
Farahmandpur 2002, p. 43). These contradictory interpretations ensue
notably from the fact that the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_3
94 M. Farina
structurally determines Adorno’s aesthetics without being ever explicitly

thematized, to the point that his philosophy of art can be seen both as a
nostalgic longing for traditional art and as an apologia of modern artistic
fragmentation. Against the first interpretation speak the many statements
through which Adorno supports radical new art, along with his sharp
dismissal of any aesthetic conservatism; against the second, however,
speaks his critique of what Adorno intends as “aesthetic nominalism”,
that is, the theoretical origin of modern aesthetic relativism.
In several passages of his aesthetic production, Adorno attacks what he
takes as a dull, philistine, petty bourgeois, in one-word conservative
approach to new art, as for instance in a short piece titled “Vorschlag zur
Ungüte” (“Proposal for a Disagreement”), published for the first time in
1959 and subsequently collected in the 1967 volume, Ohne Leitbild.
Parva Aesthetica.1 At the same time, however, the opposition toward any
kind of relativism and nominalism is equally clear. By borrowing the lexi-
con developed by the medieval debate on the problem of universals,
Adorno takes aesthetic nominalism to be the theory that asserts the
inconsistency of artistic genres—namely, the universal concepts that
abstractly define single works, such as that of “tragedy”, “epos”, or
“lyric”—or rather their being mere flatus vocis. In modern times, this line
of thinking has found an eminent supporter in the Italian philosopher
Benedetto Croce.2 According to Adorno, this approach leads to a relativ-
istic vision of art, corresponding to the full removal of any kind of uni-
versal dimension. As universal and static forms of art, artistic genres shall
be critically looked at, but not abstractly and absolutely removed (Geulen
2006a, pp. 56–57).
By following this tension, the aim of this chapter is to show in which
terms Adorno’s aesthetics actually outlines an alternative to the regressive
deprecation of new art and to the relativistic loss of all judgment, namely
a dialectical alternative to both the nostalgia for the ancient tradition and
the excitement for the transformation of art in everyday life, which, for
1
The title “Vorschlag zur Ungüte” is a play on words with the idiomatic German sentence Vorschlag
zur Güte: “proposal of an agreement”. The Italian translator chooses Proposta di non conciliazione,
“proposal of non-conciliation”.
2
See for example his Breviary of Aesthetics (Croce 2007, p. 38).
example Danto seems to embrace.3 In order to accomplish this task, how-

ever, some preliminary explanation is due, notably, on the steps to under-
take in order to trace a principle of reconstruction of the aesthetic after its
dissolution, in other words the ability of the aesthetic element to ensure
the double character of art must be reestablished in some way. In what
follows I will argue that this reconstruction is possible exclusively by
means of a literary conception of the artwork. This is so inasmuch as lit-
erature provides art with a way out of commodification; it helps art escape
its destiny of turning into a common thing, namely of turning into a
mediator of the social relation between people, like the Marxian concept
of capital. In this respect, the literary character of the aesthetic is what can
make up for the fact that art “abjures its autonomy and proudly takes its
place among consumer goods” (DdA: 180, DoE, 127). However, it must
be clearly stated that what I have in mind has nothing to do with a sup-
posed unification of all the arts within literature, as this is something
Adorno explicitly rejects (KuK: 442, AaA: 377); one should rather argue
that literature ultimately forms the conditions of possibility in which art
survives not as commodity, but as expression and critique of social
conflicts.
In order to make my point, I will take into account especially those
texts written during the last twenty years of Adorno’s life, that is, after his
return from the American exile. The heterogeneous nature of these texts,
their paratactic style of argumentation, and the circumscribed point of
view from which each essay is written require an overall examination of
the material with all its cross-references and mutual implications. What I
have defined as the dissolution of the aesthetic, in fact, permeates almost
all of Adorno’s late production without being ever explicitly thematized.
This topic therefore must be patiently drawn from the skein of his argu-
mentative wire. Moreover, as is well known, the reader who approaches
the Aesthetic Theory is met by a magmatic unfinished text, that according
to its author “still needed a desperate effort”, namely the “organization”
of the book’s material, as Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann make (ÄT:
3
See, for example, the merit he recognizes to pop-art when he writes that “That art, from my per-
spective, showed the way to bring to the muddles of aesthetics the clarities of high analytical phi-
losophy” (Danto 2009, p. xv).
96 M. Farina
542, AT: 361) quoting from a letter of the author himself. The principle
of literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, then, needs to be extracted
form a variegate, inhomogeneous, textual material, without presupposing
a definitive and accomplished doctrine, inasmuch as Adorno’s aesthetics
consists more in an open project than in a stable system of thoughts
(Marino and Matteucci 2016, p. 24).
As things stand, Adorno’s late essayistic production seems to consist in
an overall project made of paratactic arguments. As Theresa Kelly has
remarked, in fact, Adorno’s idea of parataxis is that of “a mode of presen-
tation that insists […] that the intelligibility of the truth on offer lies in
the cavities between statements, not zipped up inside the seams of the
discourse” (Kelly 2010, p. 102). Consequently, the principle of the recon-
struction of the aesthetic will never be unearthed as an explicit argument,
but rather as a possible conceptual configuration that justifies some enig-
matic points in Adorno’s aesthetics: how can one understand the neces-
sity of art, if all artistic material has been deprived of its very aesthetic
meaning?
3.1 A
rt, Its Right to Exist,
and Aesthetic Conservatism
The most pressing question in Adorno’s late aesthetic writings concerns
what he perceives as the problematic, precarious status of art in general
(Bertram 2014, pp. 60–63). As the opening line of the Aesthetic Theory
states, in fact, “it is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident
anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right
to exist” (ÄT: 9, AT: 1). Art exists, and this is a fact, but its theoretical
status as cultural product can no longer be taken as given, and it has to be
justified through the process of interpretation. In the last part of his aes-
thetic investigation, in fact, Adorno explicitly deals with what he per-
ceives as a deep crisis in the artistic practice. What I intend to show is to
what extent the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic defines the
way in which Adorno conceives the present and the future of art. On the
one hand, in fact, (i) he theoretically insists that art, if it has to exist as art,
must be thought as new art, namely in terms of a critique of society; on

the other hand, (ii) Adorno shows great difficulty in the actual interpreta-
tion of contemporary art. This tension, as I will argue in this paragraph,
ensues from the dissolution of the aesthetic and from the neutralization,
or de-substantialization of the artistic material.
(i) Well before Danto could formulate the question, “why is something
a work of art when something exactly like it is not?”,4 Adorno worried
about the risk of the transformation of art in a mere product of everyday
life. Unlike Danto, however, Adorno cannot find a solution in formulat-
ing the perceptual identity among art and ordinary products—as in the
case of Warhol’s Brillo Box—and by supporting a conventionalist practice
of art’s definition. According to his idea of art as “sedimented spirit”,
what is at stake is not merely the superficial identity of art and industrial
products, but rather a deepest affinity between the two. As Adorno claims
in one of his essays about Paul Valéry, the French poet acknowledges “the
paradoxical relationship of the autonomous work to its commodity char-
acter” typical of late capitalistic production (VA: 174, NtL1: 150). This
is why, according to Adorno, art’s right to exist has much more to do with
the crisis of its autonomy as cultural product than with something as its
superficial indiscernibility from ordinary objects. As we have seen, in fact,
art and commodity share the same mode of reference, namely the fact
that they both sensuously express society. What discerns art from com-
modity, though, is the formal autonomy of the first, that is, notably, what
is threatened by late capitalism.
Nevertheless, in line with Adorno’s idea, humanity must continue to
produce art, although the latter cannot be taken as a prescriptive state-
ment. In a conference held in Berlin in 1966 at the Akademie der Künste
under the title Art and the Arts, Adorno clearly declares that “while the
present situation no longer has room for art – that was the meaning of
the statement about the impossibility of poems after Auschwitz – it nev-
ertheless has need for it”. What Adorno understands as “the reality with-
out images”, in fact, “is the counterpart of another condition without
4
For this argument see, for example, the formulation Danto provided in his first essay about art’s
discernibility (Danto 1964, pp. 571–184); the question I quote comes from his famous essay “The
Disenfranchisement of Art” (Danto 1986, p. 15).
98 M. Farina
images: the condition in which art disappears because the utopia encoded
in every work of art has been fulfilled”. Art, however, is not the means by
which its own utopia could be realized, as “in itself art is not capable of
such a demise. This is why the arts eat away one another” (KuK: 452–453,
AaA: 387). This leads to the consideration of art as an impossible but
necessary activity of humanity. Impossible, since the realization of its
own goals would bring to the dissolution of art itself; but necessary, inas-
much as humanity needs to make display of the unpacified dimension of
society.
Art is consistently introduced in oppositional terms. The structure
itself of each work of art is said to stand in opposition to both historical
trends and other artworks. In Aesthetic Theory, for instance, the general
attitude of art toward society is condensed in the idea that “the revolt of
art, teleologically posited in its ‘attitude to objectivity’ toward the histori-
cal world, has become a revolt against art; it is futile to prophesy whether
art will survive it”; upon close inspection, art is to such a degree geared
toward the production of the new that Adorno is forced to recognize that
“each artwork is the mortal enemy of the other” (ÄT: 13, 59, AT: 3, 35),
here quoting in all likelihood Paul Valéry.5 What Adorno ultimately sug-
gests is that art has to be conceived as a product that opposes itself to
social reality by means of an agonistic struggle for the achievement of the
new. In this sense, each artwork is the enemy of the other, inasmuch as
each artwork has to assume a radical orientation toward the new, and
each artwork would condemn the others to get old and out of date. In
this respect, due to its radical originality and novelty, art is an immanent
critique of myth, precisely in the sense that “in the course of such criti-
cism the concept of myth becomes secularized” and it turns into a con-
crete historical condition. “So long as one beggar remains, there is still
myth” (CWB: 243, Pr: 233), writes Adorno, here taking up
Benjamin’s words.6
5
In an essay of 1923, “The Problem of Museums”, Valéry writes that works of art are “mutually
exclusive marvels, which are more inimical to each other when they are most alike” (Valéry 1971,
p. 203). We know that Adorno read this essay because he compares Valéry’s and Proust’s concep-
tions of museum in his writing “Valéry Proust Museum”, collected in the volume Prisms.
6
“As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth” (Benjamin 1999, [K6,4]
p. 400).
Art’s right to exist is therefore justified in the light of its double char-
acter, namely as the expression and critique of social antinomies. In a
conference of 1967 titled Culture Industry Reconsidered, Adorno reiterates
his assessment of the nature of artistic and cultural products in general.
“Culture” writes Adorno “did not simply accommodate itself to human
beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified
relations under which they lived, thereby honouring them” (RüK: 338,
CI: 100). In another public conference hosted by the Deutsche Werkbund
(German Association of Craftsmen) in 1965, drawing on the example of
the Bauhaus and of Adolf Loos, Adorno investigates the notion of func-
tionalism in design and architecture and suggests that “art, in order to be
art according to its own formal laws, must be crystallized in autonomous
form. This constitutes its truth content; otherwise, it would be subservi-
ent to that which it negates by its very existence” (Fh: 390, FT: 14).
Along the same lines, the idea that art draws its right to exist from its
double character is reinforced in the pages of Aesthetic Theory. In his last
unfinished masterpiece, in fact, Adorno states that “cultural phenomena
cannot be interpreted without some translation of the new into the old”;
he speaks about artworks as a “nonjudging judgment”, and he takes artis-
tic activity as the production of “what is blind, expression, by way of
reflection, that is, through form; not to rationalize the blind but to pro-
duce it aesthetically, ‘To make things of which we do not know what they
are’” (ÄT: 36, 37, 174, AT: 19, 20, 114). It is clear, then, that if art shall
still exist, then it has to exist in the terms of a product in which society
sees its own image along with the painful effectiveness of its distorted and
conflictual nature.
(ii) The reader might have already noticed that, according to the above
outlined account, art’s right to exist would coincide exactly with those
features that Adorno denies to new art, as stated in the Philosophy of New
Music. So, one might well think that Adorno’s philosophy of art suffers
the effects of an abstract separation between theoretical and practical
analysis: while Adorno insists in taking art as an exceptional product able
to maintain a critical relation toward society, he concretely dismisses any
existing work of art by declaring their non-artistic character. There is in
fact a tendency in Adorno to deny the attribute of “artisticity” to contem-
porary works of art. What I wish to argue is that the principle of the
100 M. Farina
dissolution of the aesthetic comes consistently to the fore precisely in this

tension between a progressive theory of art and conservative artistic judg-
ments. Right after the above quoted passage, Adorno writes in fact that
“in so far as culture becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those
petrified relations, human beings are once more debased” (RüK: 338, CI:
100). Along similar lines, in the text about functionalism, he remarks
that nowadays “when art obliterates its own memory, forgetting that it is
only there for others, it becomes a fetish, a self-conscious and thereby
relativized absolute” (Fh: 390, FT: 14–15). Also in this case, though,
Aesthetic Theory is the place where the argument is conclusively developed:
What is qualitatively new in recent art may be that in an allergic reaction it

wants to eliminate harmonizations even in their negated form, truly the
negation of negation with its own fatality: the self-satisfied transition to a
new positivity, to the absence of tension in so many paintings and compo-
sitions of the postwar decades. False positivity is the technological locus of
the loss of meaning. (ÄT: 238, AT: 159)
From this fundamental tension in his aesthetics descends what the cri-
tique has identified as Adorno’s artistic conservatism,7 or rather his
embarrassment in the interpretation of contemporary art. Adorno’s anal-
ysis of art, that is to say, his methodical and theoretical definition of art’s
conditions of possibility, loses in fact its sharpness when he approaches
some phenomena of contemporary mass culture. According to his late
account on aesthetics, in fact, art consists in “the illusion that life goes
on”, and it corresponds to “the experience […] that life no longer exists”
(ÄT: 40, 333, AT: 22, 224). Adorno clearly tries to define the value of art
by referring to wide concepts such as “life” and “experience”, but he
avoids to theoretically define them. Then, when it comes to mass culture,
embodied for instance in organized tourism and ads in personal column,
7
I have already mentioned Bourdieu’s opinion on the matter (1984, p. 386); also Eva Geulen
(2006b, p. 103) insists on Adorno’s aesthetic conservative taste, by certifying a “certain anachronic-
ity” in his determination of new art in the context of culture industry. It is also worth mentioning
Peter Uwe Hohendahl (2013, pp. 133–136) and his study of the charges of aesthetic conservatism
against Adorno’s philosophy of art as primarily coming from the new German Marxist left, right
after the release of Aesthetic Theory, as the text supported the idea of the autonomy of art, which
contradicts direct political engagement as well as the basic requirements of the young left movement.
Adorno suggests that there is hardly anything left of true experience in

them, as mass products are per se “testimonies of impoverished experi-
ence” (ÄT: 108, AT: 68). In these kinds of descriptions Adorno seems to
linger over a nostalgia for the old time when experience was still possible,
and when life was still full and precious. He also seems thereby to violate
all basic assumptions of his anti-Romantic idea of history and society, as
outlined, for instance, in the short essay published under the title
“Amorbach”, where he remembers the small Bavarian town of his youth
and compares it with the loss of experience in technified society (e.g.
A: 304).
Adorno’s difficulties in pinpointing the principle that I have defined as
the dissolution of the aesthetic are also what explains his unease in the
interpretation of new art. What he understands as the loss of life and
experience, in fact, is nothing but the recognition of the impossibility, for
new art, to fulfill its autonomy, and it is at odds with Adorno’s theoretical
statements that strongly support progressive art. This tension, finally,
explains Adorno’s embarrassment in front of the most advanced artistic
products.
On the one hand, Adorno is a passionate supporter of new art. In sev-
eral essays of the last decade of his philosophical production he sharply
criticizes what he sees as a “backward attitude toward contemporary art”.
In these writings he charges with slowness, dullness, philistinism the aes-
thetic conservatism of those who take contemporary art as an immoral
offense of sacrosanct values of yore. On the other hand, however, the
concept of new art that Adorno identifies, and advocates, is more or less
analogous to that of the historical avant-gardes, or rather to the frame-
work of what in English-speaking culture is defined as artistic modern-
ism.8 Based on Adorno’s description of contemporary art, in fact, what is
new and provocative in the cultural landscape seems to be the kind of
distortion of representation that defines the path of pre- and
8
I refer here to how modernism has been defined, for example, in the debate about postmodernism.
According to Art Berman, for instance, by following Lyotard’s account, while modernity corre-
sponds to the era in which humanity produced a set of narrative descriptions of history as a progres-
sive movement, modernism is the aesthetic movement in which “a set of modernity turns its critical
attention toward itself ” (Berman 1994, p. 7). As Patrizia McBride writes, “the critical impulse of
modernism has been traditionally located in its self-understanding as a critique of modernity”
(McBride 2007, p. 2).
102 M. Farina
post-avant-garde in terms of a mirror of the “recurrent polarity of futur-

isms and archaisms across the whole epoch of modernism”, as David
Roberts (2011, p. ix) has remarked in his critique of Adorno’s explanation
of new art. One should nevertheless be aware that the identification of
modernism and avant-garde as well as the idea of postmodernism as the
mere overcoming of modernism are mostly challenged by scholars.9 In
the already mentioned essay “Vorschlag zur Ungüte” (“Proposal for a
Disagreement”), Adorno dismissively addresses those who he takes as the
opponents of new art, as representatives of the “idiosyncratic resistance
toward the new” (VzU: 331). What Adorno aims to show in this text is
what he takes as the element of truth included in any conservative reac-
tion toward new art. All outrage and indignation in front of the most
contemporary examples of artistic provocation, in fact, hide in disdain an
indirect allusion to the true content of art. Art, in fact, and especially new
art, has to cause in the subject a protest against existence, notably by
means of “anxiety (Unruhe), raised with experience”. Paradoxically
enough, the opponents of new art would be those who subconsciously
appreciate and somehow promote its provocative value, as their conserva-
tive attitude would be nothing but the sign that new art hits the mark of
its provocation. Surprising, however, is the example that Adorno gives to
illustrate his idea: “I know that among the enemies [of new art] there is
someone who clearly understands. But I just can’t help: if I read, for
example, in one of their major texts a subtle, precise, highly appropriate
analysis of Cézanne, in that understanding I feel the sympathy, labori-
ously hidden under the argument” (VzU: 331). In 1967, when Adorno
published Ohne Leitbild, he identified the enemy of new art with those
who are shocked by Cézanne, one of the most representative members of
post-impressionism and already dead for sixty years back then.
Something similar can be seen in the essay about functionalism (1965).
In this text, contemporary artistic production is linked to the critique of
ornament, to Schönberg’s early compositions, to Adolf Loos’ design and
Karl Kraus’ writing style, in other words, to the expressionistic tendencies
of the first thirty years of the century. In Aesthetic Theory, moreover,
9
See for example how Hilton Kramer (2006) understands modernism as a more vital impulse than
simple avant-garde epoch and conceives postmodernism in continuity with modernism itself.
expressionism is summoned as to illustrate the schema of new art. Adorno

writes, in this regard, that “artworks not only produce imagines as some-
thing that endures. They become artworks just as much through the
destruction of their own imagerie” and, while mentioning the avant-
gardes’ efficacy in upsetting the public, he adds that “the shocks inflicted
by the most recent artworks are the explosion of their appearance”, here
echoing Wols’ paintings (ÄT: 131, AT: 84). Particularly explicative, how-
ever, is the way in which Adorno characterizes figurative art by means of
the ideal of black: “Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its
primary color is black […]. That the world, which, as Baudelaire wrote,
has lost its fragrance and since then its color, could have them restored by
art strikes only the artless as possible” (ÄT: 65–66, AT: 39–40). According
to Adorno, radical new art, the only proper art, is the art that pursues the
destruction of image, the shock of the public, the estrangement from the
object, and the darkness of the picture10; conversely, when art “comes to
resemble realia it assimilates itself to that reification against which it pro-
tests” (ÄT: 159, AT: 103). One should bear in mind that this kind of
account of art has been put together and written down while, at the same
time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Warhol’s exhibitions featured the
Brillo Box and Marilyn’s serigraphy, Lichtenstein’s Mickey Mouse’s car-
toons, and Richard Hamilton developed the technique of collage well
beyond the merely critical stance that Adorno finds in Picasso’s collages.11
In his understanding of contemporary art, Adorno fails then to go
much further than the historical avant-gardes, notably expressionism,
cubism, and surrealism. His idea of radical new art is accordingly that of
the modernist critique of traditional art, which by definition entails a
dialectical relationship between new and traditional art. Within this
framework, disharmony maintains nevertheless a reference to harmony,
since fragmentation can be understood as art just in its allusion to
10
Gutiérrez Pozo (2009, pp. 481–491) carefully analyzes the ideal of black in Adorno’s comprehen-
sion of art. In turn, however, he understands “contemporary art”, and “radical art”, according to the
conceptual framework of historical avant-gardes.
11
“The subjectivization of objective reality relapsed into romanticism, as was soon blatantly obvious
not only in Jugendstil but also in the later stages of authentic impressionism. It was against this that
montage protested, which developed out of the pasted-in newspaper clippings and the like during
the heroic years of cubism” (ÄT: 232, AT: 155).
104 M. Farina
totality. This attitude is fully endorsed by the Italian philosopher and pas-
sionate reader of Adorno, Dino Formaggio, when for instance he claims
that, as unprecedented work of art, Guernica elevates itself “over the death
of art as beauty, as natural or theological beauty, as academic and rhetori-
cal narrative, as celebration of sacred values, only to give birth from its
hashes to a fully human art, an art that is a naked and rough testament to
the inner truth of man, society, and world” (Formaggio 1983, p. 22).
While Adorno has never seriously dealt with pop-art, or in general with
what Michel Tapié has called arte informale, it is not difficult to imagine
what he would have said about an artistic trend that insisted on the iden-
tity of art and everyday life. Art has to be understood as a protest against
reality, not as a copy of superficial life, we hear him saying. In his own
words: “art, with its definitive protest against the dominance of purpose
over human life, suffers once it is reduced to that practical level to which
it objects”, here glossed by Hölderlin’s verses “For never from now on /
Shall the sacred serve mere use” (Fh: 377–378, FT: 6). Among the several
passages in which Adorno declares the necessary opposition between art
and common life, the most incisive can perhaps be found in Aesthetic
Theory, where he states that “precisely by virtue of its absolute autonomy
the rational, purely elaborated artwork would annul its difference from
empirical existence; without imitating it, the artwork would assimilate
itself to its opposite, the commodity. It would be indistinguishable from
completely functional works except that it would have no purpose, and
this, admittedly, would speak against” (ÄT: 324, AT: 217).
Surprisingly enough, Adorno’s aesthetics reaches the same descriptive
conclusion of Danto’s philosophy of art: (a) contemporary art has the
tendency to turn itself into a product of everyday reality; (b) once art
becomes a common object, it interrupts its connection with historical
life. These tenets match closely two basic ideas in Danto’s philosophy of
art, namely the indiscernibility of artistic products, and the idea that
pop-art is the demonstration of art’s entry into a post-historical phase.
These ideas are also accepted and elaborated further within the frame-
work of the institutional theory of art.12 Along the same lines, in Adorno’s
12
Although Danto keeps his distance from institutional theory of art, Thijs Lijster (2017, p. 130)
sees a general continuity between the two, especially when it comes to focus on the affinities
account, art—as “sedimented spirit”—maintains a connection with his-

tory just as long as it can be discerned from everyday life. Moreover,
Danto sees a connection between the new post-historical art and philo-
sophical progress—since pop-art “showed the way to bring to the mud-
dles of aesthetics the clarities of high analytical philosophy” (Danto 2009,
p. xv). Similarly, Adorno interprets this development as proof of the fact
that artworks have ceased to be the “self-unconscious historiography of
their epoch” (ÄT: 272, AT: 182). Like Danto, he also finds a parallel
between this artistic outcome and the status of philosophical debate, as
“it is inevitable that we should find a parallel in the ousting of philosophy
in the Anglo-Saxon world by logical positivism: the utter renunciation of
meaning of any kind” (KuK: 449, AaA: 384); with the expression “logical
positivism” Adorno derogatorily refers approximately to what is com-
monly understood as analytic philosophy.
Although very close in their descriptive conclusions, Adorno’s and
Danto’s evaluations are clearly rather different. According to Danto, the
fact that “the Pop artist had no inner secrets” (Danto 2009, p. 9) is the
demonstration that art has turned into philosophy, that is to say it
expresses its crystal-clear meaning in a free, arbitrary space of reasons. As
Danto puts it, “the historical stage of art is done with when it is known
what art is and means” (Danto 1986, p. 31), and now we know what art
is and means. In Adorno’s view, as previously explained, this would be the
case of a “pacified humanity”, in which art would “come to an end”
(PnM: 24, PNM: 16). Contemporary society, instead, is neither pacified,
nor harmonic. On the contrary, social life is a complex of conflicts and
antagonistic behaviors that reduce the individual to mere function in the
economic process of production. In Adorno’s aesthetics, therefore, the
transformation of art in common reality is nothing but the outcome of
what I have defined as the dissolution of the aesthetic, the fact that aes-
thetic material is in no condition to express the aesthetic as the autono-
mous reflection and critique of society. The absorption of aesthetic
material in the economic process of production and reproduction, that is
between the pragmatistic interpretation of art and dialectical explanations. For the idea of post-
historic art, see for example the Introduction to his book Beyond the Brillo Box, where he clearly
explains the beginning of the end of art as a historical discipline (Danto 1992, pp. 5–10).
106 M. Farina
the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic permeating Adorno’s

reflection, is what causes his difficulty in understanding contemporary
art and his backward taste toward products of contemporary art. As he
sees things, contemporary visual art, while being sensuous, it dissolves its
aesthetic value and, what’s more, fails to identify the ongoing process of
neutralization—or better deaestheticization, deartification
(Entkunstung) —of art.
13
3.2 The Deaestheticization

of Artistic Material
In his aesthetic reflections, Adorno dwells more than once on the seman-
tic field of the death of art, being anyway careful not to indulge in prog-
nosis, or prophecy, about the definitive end of artistic practice. In Aesthetic
Theory, for example, he claims that “the deaestheticization of art is not
only a stage of art’s liquidation but also the direction of its development”
(ÄT: 123, AT: 79). In these words, Adorno’s ambiguous attitude toward
the future of art is noticeable: on the one hand, art seems to be liquidated
by modern sociality and technology; on the other hand, this kind of liq-
uidation can be seen as an integral part of art’s development itself.
According to my interpretation, his aesthetic account contains all the
conceptual tools needed to explain both the liquidation and the survival
of art, that is, its deaestheticization and dissolution as sensuous material,
and its reconstruction in the literary one. In order to understand this pas-
sage, however, it is necessary to fully explain in which terms the dissolu-
tion of the aesthetic involves the dissolution of visual and sound art as a
deaestheticization of material.
Adorno has never explicitly and directly thematized the deaestheticiza-
tion of art in terms of deaestheticization of the sensuous (visual and
sound) constitution of the material, nor the possible literary
13
The German word Entkunstung is one of Adorno’s neologisms made of the negative prefix “Ent-”,
the substantive “Kunst” (art), and the suffix “-ung” which has the same grammatical function of the
English suffix “-ation” (e.g. form, formation). The process of Entkunstung der Kunst goes therefore
in the same direction of the deartification of art.
reconstruction of the aesthetic. Nevertheless, in the Aesthetic Theory there

are at least two passages where this connection appears as the theoretical
leitmotiv of the argument. In these passages, Adorno presents a historical
process in which to the dissolution of the artistic nature of senses corre-
sponds the possibility to reconstruct the aesthetic element in a non-sen-
suous art, namely in literature. In the first passage Adorno writes that
“many works of contemporary music and painting, in spite of the absence
of representational objectivity and expression, would rightly be subsumed
by the concept of a second naturalism. Crudely physicalistic procedures
in the material and calculable relations between parameters helplessly
repress aesthetic semblance and thereby reveal the truth of their posited-
ness” (ÄT: 158, AT: 103). Upon reading these words, one might be
inclined to say that it is only his lack of familiarity with the most recent
among the products of art of his time that prevents Adorno from turning
that “many” in an “all”. Few pages before, however, he suggests that “there
is no sensuous intuition, no set of images, that corresponds to what litera-
ture says; on the contrary, its concretion consists in its linguistic form
rather than in the highly problematic optical representation that it sup-
posedly provokes”; then, on this ground, “literature does not require
completion through sensuous representation; it is concrete in language
and through it, it is suffused with the nonsensuous, in accordance with
the oxymoron of nonsensuous intuition” (ÄT: 150, AT: 97–98). A status
of exception, then, is granted to literary products. I will therefore insist
on this tension between the deaestheticization of artistic material and its
reaestheticization in the literary form in order to define the space for the
reconstruction of the aesthetic in Adorno’s philosophy of art. In the rest
of this paragraph, then, I will present the process of deaestheticization of
sensuous material only to expose in the next one its reconstruction in the
literary form of the artwork.
Having already addressed the naturalization of sound in the philoso-
phy of music, the process of deaestheticization of sensuous material can
be now appreciated as part of Adorno’s argument especially in those
essays in which he deals with the visual arts. As most of his late produc-
tion on aesthetics is focused on the theory of literature, the interpretation
of visual art is almost entirely to be found in the essays published in the
collection Ohne Lietbild. Parva Aesthetica (1967), and in some passages of
108 M. Farina
Aesthetic Theory. Ohne Lietbild, in particular, consists in a collection of

texts written during the 1950s and the 1960s and devoted to various
cultural topics. The common thread of the volume is the idea that con-
temporary artistic production is an activity that is pursued, precisely,
Ohne Leitbild, namely without guiding principle, or model, and the chal-
lenge of art is therefore that of remaining artistic also in the age in which
aesthetic, cultural, religious canons no longer provide a framework for
artists to look at in their productions. Whereas modern art embodies a
structural critique of the notion of tradition (Hohendahl 2013,
pp. 129–134), to which canons and models are necessarily connected, in
the programmatic opening of his book, Adorno insists that “the particu-
lar, to which all work of art holds to, should be revealed as universal”
(OL: 298–299). In the first essay, whose title is the same as that of the
collection itself, Adorno focuses then on the relationship between par-
ticular and universal in the context of visual and sound art, and he prob-
lematizes it by means of the notion of sensuous material. “Only who is
able to distinguish in the material itself what is historically expired and
irrevocably obsolete” writes Adorno “can produce as the material
requires”, inasmuch as “colors, forms, sounds […], because of certain
historical relationships, contrast with what the artist has to do”. The
material is what “introduces relationships in the work” and therefore “the
concept of artistic material that destroys and ignores the determinations
of what it aims to comprehend, has to become poor and lose its own
objectivity” (OL: 299–300). As artistic material cannot be understood as
inert, but rather as what determines the work of art in its essential consti-
tution, the deaestheticization of artistic material can be taken as a histori-
cal process that affects sound and colors. The tendency toward the
deaestheticization of sensuous material can furthermore be observed in
that Adorno describes the failure of art especially based on the example of
sensuous artworks, that is to say, through the analysis of paintings and
music compositions. About works of art in general he writes, for instance,
that “their transcendence is their eloquence, their script […]. Art fails its
concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it loses the quality
of being art”, and in order to illustrate this dynamic he adds that “com-
positions fail as background music or as the mere presentation of mate-
rial, just as those paintings fail in which the geometrical patterns to which
they are reducible remain factually what they are”. Hence, the material is
what can guarantee art’s right to exist, and this is why Adorno can claim
that “whether art is in any way still possible depends precisely on this.
The concept of form marks out art’s sharp antithesis to an empirical world
in which art’s right to exist is uncertain” (ÄT: 122, 213, AT: 78, 141).
Adorno’s problematization of the empirical and sensible dimension of
the artwork, therefore, is deeply connected to the peculiar form of his-
torical materialism that he supports. Historical materialism, in Adorno’s
case, means mainly a critical understanding of the historical development
of society, and within the framework of aesthetics, the notion of material
as “sedimented spirit” (PnM: 39, PNM: 32). In this respect, as soon as
what Adorno understands as “spirit” sediments itself in the work, and thus
expresses nothing but the absorption of art in the social process of pro-
duction and reproduction, art turns into the mere empirical material that
negates its artistic character. This is why, when Adorno tries to identify a
sensuous artistic example of what he takes as real art—that is, in terms of
expression and critique of social reality—he tends to use examples from
nineteenth or early twentieth century’s production. In an essay originally
published on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dedicated to the Galerie
nationale du Jeu de Paume, he describes the process according to which
the artistic particular element, from its essence as “material fact, immedi-
ately sublimates in a pure pictorial fact”. This process is said to fulfill the
“recovery of optical life in the sensuous element”. The concrete artistic
example, however, comes from French painting of the end of the nine-
teenth century, as he refers to Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro (JdP:
321–322).
Granted that visual art has to realize an aesthetic sublimation of empir-
ical material, these are Adorno’s conclusions, then the material is what
allows the creation of an expressive or at least constructive relationship
between sensibility and meaning, and this is possible only if the material
can be conceived of as different from the mere empirical element. One of
Adorno’s aesthetic dogmas is in fact the distinction between materiality
and objectivity, based on which he criticizes Hegel for confusing “the
material elements of art with its objectual content” (ÄT: 119, AT: 76); In
even clearer terms, Adorno states that “aesthetic expression is the objecti-
fication of the non-objective, and in fact in such a fashion that through
110 M. Farina
its objectification it becomes a second-order non-objectivity” (ÄT: 170,

AT: 111). Along the path toward nonobjectivity, the material should not
take prevalence over the subject that creates the work; otherwise, art
would express nothing but the mere empirical materiality, as the objects
of everyday life actually do.
In the conference titled Culture Industry Reconsidered, also part of Ohne
Leitbild, one finds an interesting remark on the relationship between art
and objectual reality: “Only their deep unconscious mistrust, the last
residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual
make-up of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since
perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the
culture industry” (RüK: 344, CI: 105). For the artwork, hence, essential
is the separation from empirical reality. Far from being just an incidental
element of his thought, the distinction between art and empirical reality
is a pivotal feature of Adorno’s aesthetics. Right at the beginning of the
Aesthetic Theory, in fact, he suggests that “only by virtue of separation
from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the
whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork
achieve a heightened order of existence” and—even more clearly—he
adds that “artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help
the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby
free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experi-
ence” (ÄT: 14, AT: 4). The distance of art from empirical life is then
repeated in several passages of Aesthetic Theory: “The empirical subject has
only a limited and modified part in artistic experience tel quel, and this
part may well be diminished the higher the work’s rank”; “artworks
diverge from empirical reality”; and finally, “today the socially critical
aspect of artworks has become opposition to empirical reality” (ÄT: 26,
113, 379, AT: 13, 86, 255).
This is why the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic that I have
isolated in Adorno’s aesthetics affects precisely those works for which
empirical and sensuous material make up for their essential constitution.
The very fact that “today the socially critical aspect of artworks has
become opposition to empirical reality” means that in this historical
period the work of art—as thing—has been completely absorbed in the
capitalistic process of production, and it has become one of the mediators
in that social relation between people that the capital is, namely it has
become a declination of the form of commodity. As we have already seen
in the case of the philosophy of music, the dissolution of the aesthetic
element turns the work in an object of ordinary capitalistic production
and the capital, that is “not a thing, but a social relation between persons
which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p. 932), absorbs the
“thing” dimension of the artwork—its empirical and sensuous life—as
one of those mediators.
It should be made clear that this process, as is, has never been clearly
described by Adorno, maybe due to the peculiar variant of Marxism he
adopts, which, unlike standard interpretations of Marx’ thought, rather
than the relation between capital and labor, places center stage the cate-
gories of exchange and distribution.14 Moreover, Adorno has always been
very careful to separate his own stance from Eastern dialectical material-
ism, known under the name of Diamat, a theory that he saw as rude,
dogmatic, and apologetic of Eastern dictatorships. This is notably also
what has earned Adorno the title of distinguished champion of what
Perry Anderson celebrates as Western Marxism (Anderson 1979).
Lack of clarity about this structural dynamics in his aesthetics is what
explains also some of Adorno’s disproportionate statements concerning
the sensuous character of the artwork. In the Aesthetic Theory, for exam-
ple, he states that “the concept of aesthetic pleasure as constitutive of art
is to be abrogated [abzuschaffen]” (ÄT: 30, AT: 15). As a matter of fact,
the two paragraphs from which this quotation comes (named “The
Pleasure of Art” and “Aesthetic Hedonism and the Happiness of
Knowledge”) seem to be a sort of censorship of any kind of artistic enjoy-
ment (Kunstgenuss), as if the very fact of taking pleasure in an artistic
phenomenon would be the sign of its objective commodification. This
kind of idealization of art, the exasperated criticism of any form of plea-
sure and enjoyment of art, ensues from Adorno’s persistence in stating
that “art is not an object” (ÄT: 27, AT: 13), while failing to clarify, though,
14
This is what the Italian scholar Marzio Vacatello maintains in his interpretation of Adorno’s phi-
losophy as a sort of deferral of praxis (Vacatello 1972, pp. 59–60); the same remark has been made
by Frank Böckelmann (1998, p. 143). Nevertheless, Deborah Cook suggests that Adorno keeps
upholding the primacy of the economic dimension, unlike Habermas who asserts that the eco-
nomic level could not corrupt the lifeworld (Cook 1995, p. 9).
112 M. Farina
the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic. This is why the aesthetic
enjoinment itself, namely one of the artistic qualities par excellence, is
irrevocably banned as what in late capitalism turns art in commodity:
“While the artwork’s sensual appeal seemingly brings it close to the con-
sumer, it is alienated from him by being a commodity”. Adorno also
makes clear that this is what separates new and traditional art, since “no
naked Greek sculpture was a pin-up” (ÄT: 27, 28, AT: 13, 14).15 As I will
show in what follows, a clarification of the principle of the dissolution of
the aesthetic allows to understand that Adorno’s harsh rejection of artistic
enjoyment is less a puritan and conservative censorship of pleasure than
an awareness of the problematic relationship between the sensuous ele-
ment of art and late capitalistic dynamics.
Adorno’s opposition to any kind of aesthetic pleasure in the enjoyment
of art, against any “culinary consumption of art” (ÄT: 143, AT: 92), goes as
far as to accuse the Aristotelian theory of catharsis of being sympathetic to
the basic principles of culture industry: “The doctrine of catharsis imputes
to art the principle that ultimately the culture industry appropriates and
administers” (ÄT: 354, AT: 238). This sort of interpretation of the relation-
ship between art and aesthetic enjoyment is clearly expressed in Adorno’s
private notebook of 1955, written during the same period in which he was
drafting the project of the Aesthetic Theory, where one can read that “aes-
thetic enjoyment, in the superficial sense of the enjoyment of the artistic
object as if it were a piece of sensuous world, in general does not exist and
any aesthetics that starts with that is dull. I have never enjoyed an artwork”;
in the same notebook, but in the following year, Adorno comes very close
to what I have defined as the dissolution of the aesthetics as he asserts that
with the disposal of the object in painting and in plastic art, with the
expressive conventionalism carved in music, is almost necessarily con-
nected the fact that the unleashed elements – colors, sounds – express
something already in themselves. This is however an illusion. […] The
superstition in the elementary, immediate, to which expressionism pays
tribute, expresses arbitrariness and randomness in its relationship toward
sense and material. […] In itself, as a ‘natural material’, all this is empty
15
Eva Geulen (2006b, pp. 99–101) notes how, in Adorno, culture industry is not simply a degen-
eration of art, but it corresponds to the behavior of serious art itself in the dynamics of the late capi-
talistic social communication of artistic value.
The only way to produce art with this dead material, Adorno says, is the
“construction according to freedom, that bestows ‘on things new names’,
and sense on material” (TWAA: TS. 20, 688–89).
This kind of dismissal of the sensuous appreciation of art, therefore, is
strictly correlated to the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic. The
overaccumulation of social relationships in artistic material makes the
latter incapable of being a bearer of the necessary process of sublimation
of social conflicts that turns art into a critique of society itself. According
to my interpretation, then, the difficulties of Adorno’s aesthetics in giving
a convincing interpretation of contemporary art, the aesthetic conserva-
tism of which it has been accused, are nothing but a side effect of the lack
of clarity in the structural conclusions of his own aesthetic though. At
times he openly tries to defend contemporary art in the name of his pro-
gressive intentions, as, for example, when he includes a “Defense of Isms”
in his Aesthetic Theory, in appreciation namely of cubism, expressionism,
surrealism. In this defense, though, he makes a very problematic point.
Those kinds of artistic movements, in fact, are usually connected to the
practice of art manifestos, that is to normative declarations of intentions,
which violates Adorno’s very idea of spontaneity of creation, which is also
what makes artworks the “self-unconscious historiography of their epoch”
they should be. This problem strikes a nerve of his aesthetics, to such an
extent that Adorno’s way of referring to it, as a “faint contradiction” (ÄT:
44, AT: 24), ends up integrally violating the very pivotal core of his philo-
sophical theory. Adorno, the philosopher of the radicalization of Hegel’s
objectivity of contradiction, of the marked distance between “mediation”
and “middle element”,16 in order not to follow the most radical but con-
sistent conclusions of his thought, is forced to define as “faint” the con-
tradiction that permeates his aesthetics, namely that between art and its
sensuous character, as if contradiction could be understood as having
intermediate degrees.
16
On the radicality of contradiction, see what Adorno says in the Introduction of Negative Dialectics
when about contradiction he writes that “this law is not a cogitative law, however. It is real” (ND:
18, ND: 6); about mediation and the middle element, see his book about Hegel where he suggests
that “mediation is never a middle element between extremes, as, since Kierkegaard, a deadly mis-
understanding has depicted it as being” (DSH: 257, HTS: 8).
114 M. Farina
As one follows Adorno’s determination of the historical condition of

new art, no escape from the deaestheticization or deartification
(Entkunstung) of the artistic material is to be found. When he mentions
art’s “loss of metaphysical meaning” (KuK: 448–449, AaA: 383), for
example, he echoes in all likelihood what Hegel has in mind when he says
that “we have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worship-
ping them” (Hegel 1975, p. 10). Similarly, in his essay about the techno-
logical reproducibility of art, Benjamin sees the crisis of art as expressed
“as clearly as possible within the limits of Idealism” (Benjamin 2008,
p. 44n.). However, whereas Hegel could insert art into a rational and
metaphysical, and hence conciliated, history of spirit’s development, and
whereas Benjamin could drift, according to Adorno, into an immediate
re-enchantment of aesthetic material, Adorno—being the harshest critic
of both these options17—needs to follow a different path. As we have
already seen, in fact, art cannot die, as humanity is not pacified. In one of
the fragments of the Aesthetic Theory, collected by the editor at the end of
the volume, Adorno drafts a text on the “Theories on the Origin of Art”
and in these pages he sketches a sort of evolutionary theory of man’s aes-
thetic relationship toward reality. “Aesthetic comportment”, writes
Adorno, “set itself off from magical practices, however rudimentarily, this
distinction has since been carried along as a residue; it is as if the now
functionless mimesis, which reaches back into the biological dimension,
was vestigially maintained”; the aesthetic, in fact “contains what has been
belligerently excised from civilization and repressed”, for being resistant
to rationalization. Nevertheless, continues Adorno, since it keeps produc-
ing myth, “the obstinacy of aesthetic comportment […] testifies rather
that to this day no rationality has been fully rational” (ÄT: 487, AT:
329–330). From this belligerent, residual nature of the aesthetic, one
may conclude that there must be a form of aesthetic comportment that is
able to escape the deaestheticization of the material. Of such a form of art
Adorno avoids to say more, as he lingers on the fall of art into
17
I have already investigated in the first chapter to what extent Adorno criticizes Benjamin’s idea of
technological reproducibility of art. By taking into account Hegel’s and Jochmann’s notion of the
end of art, Adorno investigates the critical position of naïveté in the context of new art and he says
that “they were compelled to understand it in the context of their classicism and so attributed the
end of art to it” (ÄT: p. 501, AT: 337).
c ommodification. Nevertheless, he often uses references to such a form of

art as a counterexample of commodification itself. What is at stake here
is a form of art whose formal dimension—namely, the place where art
shows its autonomy—cannot be attacked by the process of deaesthetici-
zation and, hence, by the dissolution of the aesthetic. The main feature of
such a work of art is, finally, that of not being a thing, but namely
literature.
That his aesthetics was bound to a redefinition of the concept of art-
work, and that this redefinition was rooted in aesthetics, was somehow
clear to Adorno himself: “The many interrelations with technocracy give
reason to suspect that the principle of construction remains aesthetically
obedient to the administered world; but it may terminate in a yet
unknown aesthetic form, whose rational organization might point to the
abolition of all categories of administration along with their reflexes in
art” (ÄT: 334, AT: 225). Along the same lines, in a personal note of 1968,
he writes that nowadays art “is immediately no longer possible and truly
not even object of experience. It is however possible that at a certain
stage, where it does not exercise anymore an ideological function, it
would regain its own naïveté and it would become able of an immediate
relationship” (TWAA: Ts. 20,682). The suppression of the classical con-
ception of the work of art and its rebuilding at a different level is, clearly,
one of the structural tendencies of Adorno’s aesthetics. In what follows, I
will investigate in what sense this tendency pushes in the direction of a
literary definition of the work of art.
3.3 T
he Literary Reconstruction
of the Aesthetic (i): Three Examples
Adorno’s philosophy of art, one should bear in mind, does not include
any system of arts. It differs then from eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century models of aesthetics, especially those influenced by Charles
Batteux’ Aristotelian idea to reduce fine arts to a single principle, as the
116 M. Farina
title of his famous monography suggests,18 which is usually taken as “a

good summary of 18th century thinking on the arts” (Saisselin 1965,
p. 4). Nothing is further from Adorno’s notion of the arts than the inten-
tion to reconnect them to a single theoretical principle and thus create a
final and systematic hierarchy of single artistic forms. Differently, while
pursuing the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic element in Adorno’s
aesthetics, it should be clear that it has very little to do with claims con-
cerning an alleged systematic superiority of poetry as artistic expression
in general. Rather, the prominence granted by Adorno to literature has to
do with the relation between art and the conditions of late capitalism,
promoting the incessant absorption of the material in the social process
of production.
In this paragraph, what I intend to show is in which terms, according
to Adorno’s aesthetic concepts, literature can be seen as the chance to save
the aesthetic, and therefore art itself, from what appears as its unstoppa-
ble commodification. In what follows, I will present three examples of
literary reconstruction of the aesthetic: (i) the literary reconstruction of
natural beauty; (ii) the literary reconstruction of music; (iii) the literary
reconstruction of visual art through the example of museum institutions.
(i) As is well known, after Hegel’s dismissal of natural beauty, Adorno
attempts to return to nature its aesthetic dignity. According to Adorno, in
fact, rather than dialectically elevate natural beauty to the level of the
artistic one, as he asserts in his Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel has idealisti-
cally “repressed” it (ÄT: 97, AT: 61). The task of aesthetics, therefore, is
now to restore nature, in the same sense that true enlightenment entails a
comprehension of nature without repression, and true dialectics respects
the right of the non-conceptual moment.19 That of natural beauty, how-
ever, is in Adorno a thorough and thoroughly mediated, historical, cate-
gory (Marino and Matteucci 2016, pp. 32–34). Generally speaking, in
18
I refer to The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, published by Charles Batteux in 1747 (see,
Batteux 2015). For the relevance of Horace’s and Aristotle’s poetics in Batteux, see the Translator’s
Introduction (Young 2015, in particular pp. xxiv–xxv).
19
As Deborah Cook noted, this role of natural beauty in Adorno’s aesthetics is the only sense in
which nature can be identified with the dialectical category of non-identical (Cook 2011, p. 43).
According to this interpretation, both Bernstein’s (2001, p. 193) and Jameson’s (1990, pp. 9–10)
ideas of the equivalence of nature and non-identical are based on Adorno’s description of natural
beauty as “the trace of the nonidentical” (ÄT: 114, AT: 73).
fact, the evaluation of natural beauty corresponds to the silent protest of

nature against the wounds inflicted by intellectual rationality. What is
interesting here, nevertheless, is how Adorno tries to rescue natural
beauty, and in particular the example he finds to describe it.
Would be strongly disappointed, in fact, he who seeks in Aesthetic
Theory the glorification of wild landscapes, the appreciation of romantic
sunsets, or even the noble fear in front of magnificent tempests. In the
paragraph about natural beauty, Adorno focuses on those kinds of art-
works that, without abstractly imitating natural forms, have managed to
return dignity to nature after civilization trampled and mutilated it.20
Quite obviously, Adorno’s examples are taken from French expression-
ism. Sisley, Monet, and Pissarro shape, hence, the figurative imagery in
which “along the trajectory of its rationality and through it, humanity
becomes aware in art of what rationality has erased from memory and of
what its second reflection serves to remind us”. In visual art, however, the
image of nature itself is doomed to follow the path toward the commodi-
fication of the aesthetic, and Adorno is forced to admit that “the green
forest of German impressionism is of no higher dignity than those views
of the Königssee painted for hotel lobbies”, since “natural beauty, in the
age of its total mediatedness, is transformed into a caricature of itself ”.
Nevertheless, insists Adorno, the dimension of natural beauty—what
civilization has repressed and forgotten—has to be enclosed in the work
of art, since otherwise art would be totally rationalized, or at least absorbed
in the form of commodity. Face to this impasse—the belligerent resis-
tance of natural material to artistic reproduction, and the need for its
aesthetic evaluation—Adorno finds a clever way out, as he claims that:
“Proust’s insight that Renoir transformed the perception of nature not
only offers the consolation that the writer imbibed from impressionism,
it also implies horror: that the reification of relations between humans
would contaminate all experience and literally become absolute” (ÄT:
105–106. AT: 67).21
20
“This is also the basis for Adorno’s inversion of the theory of imitation, according to which art
does not imitate reality, but at most that aspect of the real world which itself point beyond reality”
(Wellmer 1991, p. 7).
21
According to Owen Hulatt (2018, p. 160) this quotation exemplifies Adorno’s instrumentaliza-
tion of Proust’s novels. Hulatt argues that Adorno employs here a shorthand quotation in order to
118 M. Farina
Here, one discovers that it is not impressionist painting what has been
able to aesthetically turn nature to an artistically enjoyable object, Proust’s
prose did it. In other words, the artistic elevation of nature, as Adorno
understands it, is not the work of Monet, Helleu, Whistler, or Renoir,
whose Le déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party) is so accu-
rately described in the Recherche; rather, it is the work of Elstir, namely
their ideal and literary synthesis created by Marcel Proust, a literary char-
acter who is able to narratively recreate the real and undamaged life of
nature in his description of paintings. In the second marine book of the
Recherche, Proust offers a powerful description of impressionist paintings.
The narrator meets Elstir the painter during his journey in the small sea-
side town of Balbec and has the chance to see his work. One learns then
that: “what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at
Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of
them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analo-
gous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had
created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or
giving them other names that Elstir created them anew”. The experience
of nature, hence, is always an artistic experience, as the artist is able to
form anew what nature immediately creates, but at a higher level. Most
importantly, after a few lines, Proust offers one of the most dense and
attractive descriptions of the relation between art and nature of the entire
history of literature:
Sometimes in my window in the hotel at Balbec, in the morning when

Françoise undid the fastenings of the curtains that shut out the light, in the
evening when I was waiting until it should be time to go out with Saint-
Loup, I had been led by some effect of sunlight to mistake what was only a
darker stretch of sea for a distant coastline, or to gaze at a belt of liquid
azure without knowing whether it belonged to sea or sky. But presently my
reason would re-establish between the elements that distinction which in
my first impression I had overlooked. […] But the rare moments in which
we see nature as she is, with poetic vision, it was from those that Elstir’s
work was taken. One of his metaphors that occurred most commonly in
the seascapes which he had round him was precisely that which, comparing
make a point and with little consideration of the novel itself.

land with sea, suppressed every line of demarcation between them. It was
this comparison, tacitly and untiringly repeated on a single canvas, which
gave it that multiform and powerful unity, the cause (not always clearly
perceived by themselves) of the enthusiasm which Elstir’s work aroused in
certain collectors. (Proust 1992, vol. 2, pp. 264–265)
From the point of view of Elstir, the painter, nature is what causes his
art, but from the point of view of Proust, the poet, painting is an eleva-
tion of nature to its own ideal and effectual level, and finally from the
point of view of Adorno, the philosopher of art, literature is what can
assign nature its own aesthetic dignity. Literature, in fact, incorporates
nature and gives to its materiality a new life, far from the immediate
objectual—and commodifiable—dimension. In the paragraph of
Aesthetic Theory dedicated to natural beauty, Adorno suggests that “the
sensibility needed to recognize that genuine experience of art is not pos-
sible without the experience of that elusive dimension whose name – nat-
ural beauty – had faded”, whereas “in Proust, whose Recherche is an
artwork and a metaphysics of art, the experience of a hawthorne hedge
figures as a fundamental phenomenon of aesthetic comportment”. It
should then be added that, nowadays, this is the only way to give life to
“authentic artworks, which hold fast to the idea of reconciliation with
nature by making themselves completely a second nature”. In the same
page, furthermore, artistic evaluation of natural beauty finds another
exemplification, thanks to Karl Kraus, another master of literature, who
“sought to rescue linguistic objects as a part of his vindication of what
capitalism has oppressed: animal, landscape” (ÄT: 99–100, AT: 63).
Literature, in first instance, is then the artistic form able to incorporate
natural beauty and to reshape it in a form that returns aesthetic dignity
to nature.
(ii) This process of literary elevation of art—here taken as some sort of
reaestheticization of deaesthetified material—does not concern just visual
arts. In the case of Adorno’s most beloved artistic expression, that is to
say, music, the same kind of dynamics takes place. As we have seen in the
Philosophy of New Music, the works of contemporary music are judged as
“magnificent failures”; in the Aesthetic Theory, instead, we read that “the
concept of an artwork implies that of its success. Failed artworks are not
120 M. Farina
art” (ÄT: 280, AT: 188). The isolation, the fragmentary character, of new
music is the cause of its failure as art, of its inability to create an artistic
whole, and to become a proper work of art. In contrast, about Beethoven’s
Adagio of the Sonata in D Minor, op. 31, no. 1, Adorno suggests that “it
only requires playing the passage first in context and then alone to be able
to recognize how much its incommensurableness, radiating over the pas-
sage, owes to the work as a whole” (ÄT: 280, AT: 188). In this case, too,
the example reminds of Proust—quoted in the same page—and espe-
cially of “the part of Vinteuil’s Sonata that contained the little phrase of
which Swann had been so fond” (Proust 1992, p. 113) and whose descrip-
tion shows the relationship between the single piece and the whole of
the work.
Other than this simple assonance between Adorno’s and Proust’s deter-
minations of the relationship of part and whole in composition, the real
contribution of literature in the reconstruction of the aesthetic element
of new music can be inferred from a revealing event of Adorno’s own
biography. During the years of his emigration to the USA, he personally
got to know, and became close to, one of the greatest German writers of
the century, namely Thomas Mann. Almost thirty years his senior, Mann
was revered by Adorno in his youth, and, during the period they both
lived in Los Angeles, Adorno played the role of “the real Privy Councillor”
in the writing of Doktor Faustus, as Thomas Mann himself wrote as dedi-
cation on the copy he personally sent to Adorno in 1947 (Müller-Doohm
5, p. 314). “All his life”, as Thomas Mann observed, Adorno “has refused
to choose between the professions of philosophy and music” (Mann
1961, p. 39), although eventually he had much more relevance as a phi-
losopher than as a composer. Even though some contemporary musicians
somehow acknowledge his compositions, as in the case of Frank Zappa,
who about Adorno’s music would say that “you can think of it as enjoy-
able Schönberg” (Volpacchio and Zappa 1991, p. 124),22 Adorno’s
22
Zappa’s quite sarcastic comment comes from an interview he gave to Florindo Volpacchio for the
journal Telos in 1991, where he comments on Adorno’s music by saying that it “sounds like what
happens if you tried to write something just like Webern and filled in all the empty spaces. Some
of the things I liked, but I liked them because they reminded me of Webern. […] The piece I liked
the best was the most old fashioned one, the tonal chromatic piece. It sounds more like what
Wagner would have sounded like if he knew what he was doing. […] The other stuff seems to be
aesthetically in the region of Webern’s aesthetic with the aroma of Berg minus the turgid flux. You
influence on modern music is not comparable to his impact on twenti-

eth-century’s philosophy. If Adorno’s musical talent has become artisti-
cally relevant, in fact, it is not due to his activity as composer, but rather
to the literary transposition of his musical sensibility.
As “Privy Councillor” of Thomas Mann, Adorno’s task was to unravel
those passages of the novel where the author makes reference to the
twelve-tone technique and thereby check the musical correctness of the
descriptions. Doktor Faustus, in fact, tells the story of a fictional com-
poser, Adrian Leverkühn, who sells his soul to the devil not to acquire
knowledge—as in the case of the classic Germanic legend written among
others by Marlowe, Goethe, Lessing, and Bulgakov—but to create the
perfect composition. In order to literarily describe the final composition
of the protagonist, however, Mann needed to “hear” it and that’s when he
asked Adorno’s help. In order to create a realistic image of a dodecaph-
onic, Schönberg-inspired composition, Mann calls on Adorno for help
and via letter asks: “Would you consider, with me, how such a work –
and I mean Leverkühn’s work – could more or less be practically realized,
and how you would compose the music if you yourself were in league
with the devil?” (BW3: 21, Cor3: 13). One could then claim that the
violin concert composed by Leverkühn roughly corresponds to the liter-
ary description of one of Berg’s pieces which Adorno knew inside out.
Roughly, because it is nevertheless Adorno’s interpretation of Berg’s
compositions.
Adorno’s musical sensibility, his dodecaphonic competence, his inti-
mate acquaintance with Schönberg and Berg, finally finds an artistic
form in which can be crystallized, namely the literary transposition in the
work of Thomas Mann. Curiously enough, Adorno himself finds a liter-
ary transposition in the pages of the novel, precisely where the author
describes the appearance of the devil: “He has a white collar and a bow-
tie, spectacles rimmed in horn atop his hooked nose […]; pale and
vaulted the brow, from which the hair indeed retreats upward, whereas
that to the sides stands thick, black, and woolly-an intellectualist, who
writes of art, of music, for vulgar newspapers, a theorist and critic, who is
can think of it as enjoyable Schoenberg. But it did not come off to me as scholastic” (Volpacchio
and Zappa 1991, p. 124).
122 M. Farina
himself a composer, in so far as thinking allows” (Mann 1997, p. 253).23

Besides the anecdotic nature of this episode, what is interesting is how the
dodecaphonic artistic “magnificent failures” ultimately find a successful
artistic configuration in how literature reshapes it into a true artistic form.
(iii) The third example of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, as
previously anticipated, consists in the literary reconstruction of the
museum, as the existing space where visual art rests. Nowadays, in fact,
we are accustomed to think the museum as a positive cultural institution,
as a framework of evaluation of art, or rather as space in which artistic
heritage can be preserved for acculturation or education. Nevertheless, in
modern art’s history there is no shortage of sharp critique of the museum
institution as such. “We will destroy the museums, libraries, and acade-
mies of every kind” wrote for example Tommaso Filippo Marinetti in The
Futurist Manifesto; “Museums: cemeteries! Identical, surely, in the sinister
promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to another” (Marinetti 2001,
pp. 187–188), he would claim. Also in the present days, the French
author, Jean Clair, sharply criticizes the transformation of the museum in
a public space where the actual exhibition consists in all the commercial
services against which art is nothing but a pretext (Clair 2007). If the
French tradition has always been prone to critically scrutinize the notion
of museum, also the English-speaking world is not immune to the kind
of cultural tensions that are inscribed in the museum practice to collect
art in a well-protected space, separated from the rest of society.24 The
23
Can be interesting to observe that Thomas Mann is not the only writer who has hidden Adorno
behind horn-rimmed spectacles. Kurt Mautz, in fact, was a student in Frankfurt right before the
Nazi-time and in his book, The Old Friend (Der Urfreund) he describes the young Adorno by using
the pseudonym of Amorelli: “His roundish head with the curly black hair, already beginning to
recede, and his large dark eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles gave him a frog-like appearance.
Sometimes he was accompanied by a young lady with golden hair, gold-brown eyes, and rosy
cheeks. She would sit next to him like a princess in ‘The Frog-Prince’, but she never uttered a single
word” (Mautz 1996, p. 44; see also Müller-Doohm 5, pp. 141–142).
24
See, for example, the editor’s introduction to the volume From Museum Critique to Critical
Museum where more than ten years of debate are sketched (Murawska-Muthesius and Piotrowski
2015, pp. 1–12). From an aesthetic point of view, as Charls Tagliaferro (2016, pp. 48–50) shows,
also American pragmatism criticized the institution of museum as overshadowing the art of ordi-
nary life. The reference here is to Dewey’s argument according to which “our present museums and
galleries to which works of fine art are removed and stored illustrate some of the causes that have
operated to segregate art instead of finding it an attendant of temple, forum, and other forms of
associated life” (Dewey 1980, p. 8).
museum institution itself is often seen as the end of an artwork’s life, shut
behind glass, being the need for collection itself the result of the death of
art’s vitality.
Adorno approaches the question of art institutions in an essay col-
lected in Prisms under the title “Valéry Proust Museum”. In this essay
Adorno compares the way in which the two authors face the deartifica-
tion of artworks in a museum, as “like Valéry, Proust returns again and
again to the mortality of artefacts”, and his reflection about art is part of
a “death symbolism” (VPM: 185, Pr: 178). In Valéry, the essayist, how-
ever “art is lost when it has relinquished its place in the immediacy of life,
in its functional context […], threatened by reification and neutraliza-
tion. This is the recognition that overwhelms him in the museum”; on
the other hand, “Proust, the novelist, virtually begins where Valéry, the
poet, stopped”, as “for him works of art are from the outset something
more than their specific aesthetic qualities. They are part of the life of the
person who observes them; they become an element of his consciousness”
(VPM: pp. 187–189, Pr: 180–181). In so doing, Proust absorbs the aes-
thetic quality that according to Valéry artworks lose in the museum and
in his Recherche rebuilds it in the literary dimension of the novel. Behind
Adorno’s words on Proust’s reaction to works of art in a museum, one can
find something like a subjective recollection of deartified objects, which
implicitly leads to the possibility to collect them in a new artistic form
which is supposed to be able to express their artisticity. This form, and at
this point it should be clear, is the literary one, namely the artistic form
which is able to express art’s being part of the consciousness of the
observer who, in the act of writing, becomes at the same time the pro-
ducer. Adorno has probably in mind Proust’s description of Elstir’s paint-
ings, where the writer imagines an ideal impressionist work of art, by
ideally collecting together the style of the greatest painters of that time.
The museum that Adorno contemplates is accordingly an ideal museum,
where the power of literary description rebuilds the aesthetic element that
has been socially dissolved, namely a sort of “Jeu de Paume, where […]
Proust’s Elstir and Valéry’s Dégas live peacefully near each other in dis-
crete separation” (VPM: 194, Pr: 185).
124 M. Farina
3.4 T
of the Aesthetic (ii): The Form
of Literature
After having discussed a few concrete examples of the literary reconstruc-
tion of the aesthetic element, I intend to focus my analysis on the theo-
retical reasons of this process. Contrary to what Adorno claims for
example in Aesthetic Theory—namely, that the “immanent character of
being an act establishes the similarity of all artworks, like that of natural
beauty, to music, a similarity once evoked by the term muse” (ÄT:
123–124, AT: 79)—Adorno’s aesthetics is marked by a progressive prior-
ity given to literature. As I have already made clear, however, this is not
about thinking all the arts, and art’s genres, in a sort of confluence into
literature; on the contrary, what I have identified as the literary recon-
struction of the aesthetic consists in thinking literature—the concrete
literary works of art—as a framework in which aesthetic success (Gelingen)
can be realized. What I have presented as the crisis of sensuous artworks,
that is the impossibility to single-handedly achieve aesthetic form and
thereby the simultaneous expression and critique of existing society, is
something the literary form seems immune to. Literature, and this is
what I am going to show, has the power to instantiate a work in which
the aesthetic element finds its own formal expression. In the 1970s,
Giulio Carlo Argan, one of the most influential Italian art historians,
dealt with the issue of the end of visual art, especially face to the success
of industrial design, and he declared: “I would like to answer that art is a
sacred enclosure, in which it will never be possible to penetrate the tech-
nicality that we ourselves have set in motion, the place where the indi-
vidual will always be sovereign. In conscience I cannot say: art is only a
bastion already invested, on which we still fight” (Argan 1965, p. 16).25
According to Adorno, art has never been a “sacred enclosure”. Art, on the
contrary, is a historical instantiation of the aesthetic behavior of human-
ity, and therefore it has always been “invested” and “penetrated” by social
relationships and technique. This is also why, however, art can never be
On the issue of the end of art in Italian aesthetics, in particular on Giulio Carlo Argan and Dino
25
Formaggio in comparison with Adorno, see Farina (2015, pp. 291–305).

taken as a universal and fixed form, but rather as a different expression

each time of the same aesthetic need. And this, according to his aesthetic
model, is the time of literary aesthetics.
Literature, to say it otherwise, is in the condition to instantiate itself in
an autonomous form, according to the dialectics between universal and
particular, the double character that Adorno has identified in the con-
struction of his aesthetics and preserved as guiding principle of his
thought about art; literature, in this sense, realizes “the distance of art
from the crudely empirical in which its autonomy developed” (ÄT: 303,
AT: 203), since its formal means, that is to say, language, as suggested by
Eva Geulen (2006a, p. 58), allows to artistically express the dialectical
relationship of universal and particular.
This explains why, especially in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno often relies on
literary examples when he wants to describe successful works of art, but
he tends to exclude them when the obstacles in the achievement of a
fulfilled artistic form are at stake. This happens, for instance, in the essay
“Art and the Arts”, where Adorno is interested in the fraying of art’s
board, especially in the case of visual arts; this essay has been quite rele-
vant in the contemporary debate about the dissolution, or rather the cri-
sis, of artistic genres.26 In this regard, Adorno takes as examples the
techniques of Dadaism and Surrealism, in particular that of montage,
and he points to the tendency of those kinds of arts to fall beneath the a
priori of art. “The fraying of art genres [Kunstgattungen]” writes Adorno
“is almost always accompanied by the attempt by works of art to reach
out toward an extra-aesthetic reality. This element is strictly opposed to
the principle of reflecting reality”; the more this dynamics takes place,
“the more it participates in alien, thinglike matter, instead of imitating it.
It therefore becomes virtually a thing among things, a something we
know not what”. There is, however, a positive function of this “not know-
ing”, a function that the visual technique of montage stresses to the point
of dissolving the work of art in a mere thing, but that literature is able to
26
For example, Stewart Martin (2006, pp. 18–22) dwells on it in order to identify in Adorno the
sources of a literary criticism of the modern system of arts; moreover, Juliane Rebentisch (2003,
pp. 120–130) dedicates a substantial part of her relevant essay about the aesthetics of installation
art to Adorno’s essay, in particular discussing the fringing of art’s border in Adorno as a progressive
concept.
126 M. Farina
use for true artistic purposes: “The not-knowing of explicitly absurdist

works of art, such as Beckett’s, marks a point where meaning and non-
meaning become identical. Admittedly, we would distort this identity if,
having a sigh of relief, we were to read a positive meaning into his writ-
ings” (KuK: 450–451, AaA: 385).
In a similar context, Adorno calls often the work of Samuel Beckett
into question as an example in which the literary form has been able to
prevent the individual crisis of sensuous works of art. This happens, for
instance, in Aesthetic Theory. When he focuses on the end of historical
avant-gardes—Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism, as exem-
plification of new art—Adorno suggests that all the artists had to come to
terms with reality and made concessions, even “artists with the integrity
of Picasso and Schoenberg went beyond the subjective point” in order to
overcome difficulties that “developed into the difficulties of art as such”.
As counterbalance to this condition, Adorno takes again the example of
literature, since “[in] recent years it has been fashionable to accuse Samuel
Beckett of simply repeating his basic idea; he exposed himself to this
accusation in a provocative fashion. In this his consciousness was correct
that the need for progress is inextricable from its impossibility”. He thus
points to the one contradiction that can only be solved by literature, since
only in the chronological development of literature the “fulfilled moment
reverses into perpetual repetition” (ÄT: 52–53, AT: 30).
Beckett’s plays, novels, and short stories do not need to give up their
artistic form in order to face social reality, like visual techniques do, since
his works “touch on fundamental layers of experience hic et nunc, which
are brought together into a paradoxical dynamic at a standstill”, without
having to superficially imitate “things”; this is how Beckett realizes “all
the attempts to free oneself from the illusion of a subjectivity that bestows
meaning” (ÄT: 53, AT: 31), thus avoiding to fall into the material failure
of sensuous works or in the Brechtian idea of artistic creation as subjec-
tive conferring of meaning.27 Meaningfully, though, one could say that
27
In a conversation of 1967, Samuel Beckett told Adorno that before dying Bertolt Brecht was
planning to write an “anti-Godot”. As Rolf Tiedemann says, after the conversation Adorno takes a
personal note about Brecht’s project in which he remarks: “My God, what a piece of crap that
would have been” (Tiedemann 1994, p. 24). On Adorno’s Beckettian and anti-Brechtian position,
see Klasen (2018, 1024–1037).
Beckett’s literary form shows the possibility to succeed in failure (Berger

2014, p. 214). Analogously, literary examples abound when the focus
shifts on the relationship between aesthetic transcendence and disen-
chantment, namely on the possibility that a disenchanted—deartified—
material could anyway result in an artistic one. In this regard, Adorno
says that “aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment converge in the
moment of falling mute: in Beckett’s oeuvre”; and this happens also in
“good poems by Brecht” and primarily in Baudelaire, in whose poetics
“the transcendence of the artistic appearance is at once effected and
negated” (ÄT: 123–124, AT: 79).
Hence, the historical difficulty of sensuous art to carry out this aes-
thetic transcendence is connected to “the illusion of a subjectivity that
bestows meaning”, since “the plastic arts speak through the How of
apperception. Their We is simply the sensorium according to its historical
condition” (ÄT: 251, AT: 168). The historical condition of this material,
as I have repeated enough, is that of disenchant and deartification, that of
the assimilation in the social process of exchange and production; there-
fore, when the subject of contemporary art tries to make art by using
simple empirical material, he or she cannot escape the mere and insignifi-
cant exposition of deartification itself. Sensuous material is so deprived of
any kind of possible meaningfulness that is only able to communicate its
own reduction to the social process of production, its own being part of
capital reproduction, and in this way it gives to the subject the illusion of
domination, as “even progressive mastery over the material is sometimes
paid for with a loss in the mastery over the material” (ÄT: 314, AT: 211).
Within this scenario, literature manages to guarantee to art its own for-
mal autonomy, its double character, and its anti-mythological activity, all
elements that discriminate art from the object of everyday empirical life.
Upon careful inspection of Adorno’s aesthetic production, moreover, it is
also possible to carve out the precise function assigned to literature in the
operating of this specific aesthetic activity, this function being that, as
Adorno puts it, of an epic narrator. What is at stake is nothing but the
formal structure of literature, especially of the novel, that consists in the
pure voice where the literary space is located, what in Lukács’ analysis of
the form of the novel was “the empirical ‘I’” of the epic (Lukács 1971,
p. 47), and that Szondi (1987, p. 9) called “Epic I”. According to Adorno,
128 M. Farina
the narrator is precisely the formal structure that allows literature to per-
form its aesthetic behavior, since its “naiveté is not only a lie intended to
keep general reflection at a distance from blind contemplation of the
particular”, but rather “an anti-mythological enterprise, epic naiveté
emerges from the enlightenment-oriented and positivist effort to adhere
faithfully and without distortion to what once was as it was, and thereby
break the spell cast by what has been, by myth in its true sense”. The
activity of the literary ‘I’, hence, is that “to recover from the negativity of
its intentionality, the conceptual manipulation of objects, by carrying its
defining intention to the extreme and allowing what is real to emerge in
pure form […]. The narrator’s stupidity and blindness […] expresses the
impossibility and hopelessness of this enterprise” (ÜeN: 36, 37, NtL1:
25, 27).
In this sense, it is fair to argue that precisely the most subjective ele-
ment of literature, that is its structure given by the “Epic I” as the formal
law of literary material, is what allows it to obtain that objective, autono-
mous, meaning through which Adorno designates art. In the next section
I intend to show how he theoretically understands this process.
3.5 T
of the Aesthetic (iii): The Reflection
of the ‘I’ and the Literary Material
By taking the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic seriously, a question
spontaneously arises, namely how can it be that the least empirical among
the forms of art is the one that is able to solve an aesthetic empirical prob-
lem? As we have already seen, this is typical of Adorno’s dialectical argu-
ments. As the isolation of individual inwardness expresses the influence
of the historical moment, the autonomy of art is nothing but the out-
come of social external pressure. In the same sense, the “historical and
social content” is signified “in the work of Valéry, work that forbids itself
any kind of shortcut to praxis”; always accused of elitism, in fact, “Valéry
expresses the contradiction between artistic work and the current social
conditions of material production” (AaS: 115, 121, NtL1: 99, 104).
Literary form realizes the double character of art precisely by sublating

the empirical dimension of art and by reproducing the aesthetic element
beyond mere sensuous existence.
The reason why literature is able to accomplish this task—and this is
what I will show in this paragraph—has to do with the specific kind of
aesthetic material it uses. Whereas sensuous art fails in its material ele-
ment, literature obtains the tools for its aesthetic success in its material
constitution. That of literature, in fact, is a highly mediated form of
material, a form of material that qualitatively differs from the empirical
one and that turns out to be the outcome of a subjective operation of
reflection. This formal structure is finally what confers to literature its
resistance to myth, its aesthetic autonomy, its artistic formality, and its
double character. As Adorno writes in his pathbreaking essay about
Hölderlin:
For demythologization itself is nothing other than the self-reflection of the

solar Logos, a reflection that helps oppressed nature to return, whereas in
myth nature was one with the oppressing element. Only what gives myth
its due can provide liberation from myth. The healing of what the romantic-
mythologizing thesis conceives reflection to be guilty of is to occur, accord-
ing to the Hölderlinian antithesis, through reflection in the strict sense,
through the assimilation of what has been oppressed into consciousness
through remembrance. (P: 486–487, NtL2: 145)
In Aesthetic Theory Adorno takes into account the process of deartifica-

tion of art by means of what he understands as the “crisis of semblance”,
namely the difficulty of the artworks to express a meaning through the
aesthetic constitution of their material, although aesthetic “semblance is
indeed their logic”. The crisis of semblance is to such a point serious that
Adorno admits that “if the question as to the future of art were not fruit-
less and suspiciously technocratic, it would come down to whether art
can outlive semblance”; as a solution to the critical condition of art, how-
ever, Adorno calls upon an example which is well suited to what we have
seen about literary reflection: “The beginning of Proust’s Recherche is to
be interpreted as the effort to outwit art’s illusoriness: to steal impercep-
tively into the monad of the artwork without forcibly positing its
130 M. Farina
immanence of form and without feigning an omnipresent and omni-

scient narrator” (ÄT: 155–156, AT: 101–102).28 As in the case of
Hölderlin, also in Proust the literary form finds an aesthetic realization
through “the assimilation of what has been oppressed into conscious-
ness”, namely by reflecting through consciousness on the empirical con-
stitution of aesthetic material.
When we consider literature, hence, we are not dealing with the
empirical material for how it presents itself to the senses, but rather with
the elaboration of the sensuous material by means of the individual expe-
rience of the author. This is why literature does not express the empirical
world but instead how the author understands the empirical world. In
this way, it realizes the paradoxical ideal which according to Adorno
describes the relationship between the musical score and its performance,
as “scores are not only almost always better than the performances, they
are more than simply instructions for them; they are indeed the thing
itself ” (ÄT: 153, AT: 100). This is why music has an ideal form—namely
the score—that every time it is executed, it decays, as in a type-token
distinction. The literary work, on the contrary, cannot fall into this
equivocal relationship, as it is identified by no empirical element. Neither
ink stains, nor the paper or the graphic aspect of the text determine the
aesthetic material. The latter, instead, is defined by the amount of repre-
sentations that the text communicates to the reader, according to the
classic Hegelian argument.29 It is a pure consciousness material that
results from a mediation of empirical world. As Adorno writes in an
unpublished fragment of 1961/62, “artistic experience is the subjective
unfolding of works’ objective processes, that the latter contain their own”
(TWAA: TS. 20680).
28
In this quotation, Adorno refers to the incipit of Proust’s famous novel: “For a long time I would
go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time
to tell myself: ‘I’m falling asleep’. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for
sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my
hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just
been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was
the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles
V” (Proust 1992, vol. 1, p. 1).
29
“What, in default of musical notes, will now be the exteriority and objectivity in the poetry?”,
asks Hegel in the Aesthetics, “We can answer quite simply: it is the inner representing [Vorstellen]
and intuiting [Anschauen] itself ” (Hegel 1975, p. 964).
This theoretical point is something on which Adorno insists during the

last decade of his reflection, in particular in the essays he collected
between 1958 and 1965 in the first three volumes of the Notes on
Literature and in the fourth posthumous volume published in 1974.
Besides that, the Aesthetic Theory contains various remarks in the same
direction.
In this regard, of particular interest is a group of comments that
Adorno includes in his polemical essay against Lukács’ late production.
As is well known, Adorno has never forgiven the author of History and
Class Consciousness for his subsequent accession to Eastern Marxism, and
to the orthodoxy of the Soviet intellectual system. This is also the main
reason for his frequent contemptuous and dismissive judgments concern-
ing The Destruction of Reason, as for example when he asserts that “it was
probably in his The Destruction of Reason that the destruction of Lukacs’
own reason manifested itself most crassly” (EV: 252, NtL1: 217). In
order to counterclaim Lukács’ apology of socialist realism, Adorno devel-
ops the idea of art’s autonomy—that, ironically enough, he had first out-
lined through the influence of Lukács himself. “Art”, writes Adorno,
“does not come to know reality by depicting it photographically […], but
by expressing, through its autonomous constitution, what is concealed by
the empirical form reality takes”; this is why “even the assertion that the
world is unknowable […] can become a moment of knowledge, knowl-
edge of the gulf between the overwhelming and unassimilatable world of
objects, on the one hand, and experience, which glances helplessly off
that world, on the other”. In the work of art, in fact, “nothing empirical
remains unaltered” (EV: 264, NtL1: 227). If art corresponds to the activ-
ity of human life that transforms empirical material, ensuring that the
latter, once it has been configured in an aesthetic autonomous form,
becomes meaningful; if, however, the empirical material is so disen-
chanted that it cannot anymore be a sensuous expression of meaning;
then, just a form of art able to shape aesthetic material into a pure medi-
ated form can, in doing so, be a vehicle of artisticity. As Adorno writes, in
fact, “its antithetical relationship to empirical reality […] consists pre-
cisely of the fact that, unlike intellectual forms that deal directly with
reality, it never defines reality unequivocally as being one thing or
another” (EV: 270, NtL1: 232). It is exactly this kind of literary process
132 M. Farina
what instantiates the artistic logic that Adorno describes in the opening
page of his Aesthetic Theory, according to which “Artworks detach them-
selves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one
opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autono-
mous entity” (ÄT: 10, AT: 1).
The principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic element—that is, the
common thread of my interpretation—acts in the core structure of
Adorno’s philosophy of art. The final aim of his aesthetics, hence, is that
of the reconstruction of the aesthetic element through the mediation of
the creating subject. Without making this operation explicit, Adorno
deals with the conceptual tensions of his own aesthetics. On the one
hand, the work of art has to be thought as a form of knowledge—even if
only as a “knowledge sui generis” (EV: 264, NtL1: 227)—and this is why
it needs to be defined according to the notion of autonomy, namely as a
mediation of society itself; on the other hand, the autonomy of the work
goes into crisis due to the social transformation of images and materials
in phantasmagories and to the commodification of the sensuous element.
The critical condition of art in Adorno is the result of the “precariousness
of the thing-character in art” (ÄT: 153, AT: 100), caused by the tension
between the work of art—as empirical object—and the commodified,
disenchanted empirical world. In other words, this is the tension between
the necessity of artistic expression and criticism of society, and the absorp-
tion of all empirical things in the economic process that turns art into a
form of mediation of the social relation of capital. To this tension, how-
ever, Adorno reacts with the idea that “only for a pacified humanity
would art come to an end”, and he elaborates an aesthetic model in which
literary mediation restores the aesthetic element in its non-empirical form.
For these reasons the literary aesthetic model is an answer to the his-
torical necessity to de-sensualize art, without turning art into a pure con-
ceptual expression of meaning. The idea of the truth of art as a cultural
product, in fact, is that “of the nonexistent as if it existed”, and it corre-
sponds to the principle according to which “what spirit promises, not the
sensual pleasure of the observer, is the locus of the sensual element in art”
(ÄT: 128, AT: 82). In order to conceptually explain these kinds of achieve-
ments either we have to think about some sort of re-enchantment of the
sensuous element—as the one that Adorno criticizes in Benjamin—or we
have to imagine another way to understand the sensuous, namely through

a literary model. The particular qualities of literary material consist,
indeed, in the fact that literature allows what Adorno describes as the
process in which “the artwork suspends empirical reality as an abstract
and universal functional nexus”, being anyway determined through “the
indispensable sensual element of artworks” (ÄT: 204, AT: 135). Literary
material, in fact, is made of the various representations that the text
causes, since the reader relates to the text not as a collection of direct
information about reality, but as an artistic form in general, namely as an
aesthetic sediment of historical and social content. Therefore, in literature
the actual external material—the paper, the ink, the font, and so on—
according to the already mentioned Hegelian argument,30 is reduced to a
simple and arbitrary bearer of a representational, subjectively mediated,
content.
These characteristics allow the literary material to get to the bottom of
the splittings that torment new art. As we have seen, in fact, new art is
marked by persistent and contradictory tensions, that in the case of music
are represented by the split of progression and regression, and in the
visual art by that of imitation of reality and expression of subjective inten-
tions, as it can be seen in the so-called Brecht-Lukács-Debate between
expressionism and realism in art.31 In literature, instead, it seems that this
split can be solved, as in the case of Proust’s novel, in the terms of a syn-
thesis of realism and psychologism (SdE: 44, NtL1: 32). In the essay
“The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel”, Adorno
makes this point clear by writing that “the more strictly the novel adheres
to realism in external things, to the gesture that says ‘this is how it was’,
the more every word becomes a mere ‘as if ’, and the greater becomes the
contradiction between this claim and the fact that it was not so” (SdE:
30
David James (2009, p. 45) notes that in Hegel “the development that the romantic form of art
undergoes is thus one that, in poetry, reaches the stage at which the sensory material serves merely
as the sign of the representations and feelings that now form the real content of art”.
31
With the expression Brecht-Lukács-Debate scholars indicate a huge discussion during the 1930s
between the two Marxists about the value of art as direct communication of reality or as expression
of subjective pain toward social conflicts, where Bertolt Brecht was the supporter of the latter solu-
tion and Lukács that of the realistic option. Fredric Jameson takes the debate as a reproduction in
the twentieth century of an incessant division of art, like that of the querelle des anciens et des mod-
ernes (Jameson 1980, pp. 196–213).
134 M. Farina
44, NtL1: 33). Mediated by the subjective forms of consciousness (mem-

ory, thought, representation, etc.), empirical material is reconstructed in
the aesthetic form of literature and, in this very form, it gets that kind of
aesthetic sedimentation that its immediate sensuous form is unable to
reach. In reference to the double character of literature, about Proust it is
said that “it coaxes mythical images out of modernity at the points where
it is most modern” (KPK: 208, NtL1: 178).
The essay “The Position of the Narrator” includes, in this regard, some
remarks that are of primary importance. The novel, Adorno observes,
allows the artistic activity to create an illusory form in which the empiri-
cal matter exists indeed as semblance, namely as the Schein (semblance,
illusion, appearance) that forces the mythical nature to show its transi-
tory, and therefore historical, character. When about artworks Adorno
writes that “semblance is indeed their logic” (ÄT: 155, AT: 101), in fact,
he is quoting, by overturning its meaning, the traditional Hegelian idea
of beautiful as “the pure appearance [scheinen] of the Idea to sense” (Hegel
1975, p. 111). This definition has been long understood as the demon-
stration of Hegel’s Platonic classicism, as art would consist in a mere illu-
sion of real truth. What Adorno is suggesting, on the contrary, is that
appearance is indeed the category that makes art able to express society’s
truth, as in the moment in which the social conflictual nature shows itself
as apparent, it reveals its transitory, that is, historical essence.32 In the
literary form of the novel, hence, it is the empirical itself what appears as
semblance, by expressing its illusory, ideological, and commodified
nature, as “during the 19th century aesthetic semblance was heightened
to the point of phantasmagoria” (ÄT: 156, AT: 102). In the essay
“Narrator”, Adorno mentions Flaubert, whose linguistic purity brings
the historical reality to appearance and at the same time, “by spiritualiz-
ing language, removes it from the empirical realm to which it is commit-
ted” (SdE: 45, NtL1: 33).
32
This argument calls into question what we have seen in the previous chapter when I mentioned
the role of illusion in the appearance of myth in art. When Adorno writes that “the second nature
of tonal system is an illusion [Schein] originating in history” (PnM: 20, PNM: 13), he means
exactly the fact that the artistic expression of social contradiction, in the moment in which it
appears as Schein, shows its own transitory and historical nature.
This is how literature is able to create those “things of a second order”

(ÄT: 152, AT: 99) that according to Adorno define the works of art and
that empirical material holds back. To make this possible, then, the activ-
ity of reflection, as we have seen concerning Hölderlin, is what presents
the empirical material as mediated by consciousness. What Adorno
means when he talks about reflection, however, has nothing to do with
the conceptual operation of intellectual reflection, but rather with the
fact that “the new reflection takes a stand against the lie of representation,
actually against the narrator himself, who tries, as an extra-alert commen-
tator on events, to correct his unavoidable way of proceeding”. Right
after this passage, Adorno clearly describes the very literary nature of this
process, when he asserts that the author—in this case, Thomas Mann—
“acknowledges the peep-show element in the narrative, the unreality of
illusion, through his use of language. By doing so, he returns the work of
art […] to the status of a sublime joke, a status it had until, with the
naiveté of lack of naiveté, it presented illusion as truth in an all too unre-
flected way” (SdE: 43–46, NtL1: 34).
What literature realizes, hence, is a critical form of realism (Hohendahl
2013, pp. 113–116). Literature, in fact, testifies the power of objectivity
toward the subject, but instead of flatly reproducing it, it has the force to
reproduce it in an aesthetic form “of a second order” in which that objec-
tive power of social conflict declares its own appearance, transitoriness,
namely the historical nature of the essential myth he would like to be,
and in this way he can be dissolved as myth. Always in the essay “Narrator”,
Adorno writes that “[there] is a tendency inherent in form that demands
the abolition of aesthetic distance in the contemporary novel and its
capitulation thereby to the superior power of reality – a reality that can-
not be transfigured in an image but only altered concretely, in reality”; as
Karl Kraus recognizes, this result can be achieved “solely under the law of
language” (SdE: 47–48, NtL1: 36). Language, hence, is the artistic
medium in which the historical content, by means of subjective media-
tion, “with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language
until language itself acquires a voice”. This key position of language
prompts Eva Geulen to wonder whether Adorno’s philosophy of art can
be even conceived as having art, or rather any kind of aesthetic experi-
ence, as its object, or whether all its concerns are outcomes of a latent
136 M. Farina
philosophy of language (see Geulen 2006b, p. 92 and Martin 2006,

pp. 15–16); this is why, literary expressions of meaning “owe their quality
to the force with which the ‘I’ creates the illusion of nature emerging
from alienation” (RüL: 56, 53, NtL1: 43, 41); and this is also why litera-
ture can operate a reconciliation in the fragment, that is the kind of
paratactic composition that visual arts attempted to realize with collage
technique and music with a-tonal system. According to Adorno, new art
is subjected to the “shadow of fragment”, as “all the works are fragments,
and the highest of them – those in which their contradiction is most
deeply impressed – are even more fragments” (TWAA: Ts. 20673,
20675).33 In this regard, Hölderlin can be seen as an ante litteram exam-
ple of literary fragmentation of the work of art, as he shows in his anti-
Heideggerian interpretation of the poet in the essay “Parataxis”.
Thanks to the function of the I’s representational consciousness, what
in empirical reality would be mere natural material, if not an ideological
expression of social relationships as commodities, can be literarily pre-
sented in artistic form. On this ground, the literary work, here that of
Valéry, can “refuse the opiate that great sensuous art has become since
Wagner, Baudelaire, and Manet; to fend off the humiliation that makes
works of art media and makes consumers victims of psychotechnical
manipulation” (AsS: 125, AeA: 107). After the so-called modernism,
insists Adorno, “everything sensually pleasing in art, every charm of
material, has been degraded to the level of the preartistic”. Art is possible
only as “radical spiritualized art”, namely in the case that the objective
realm is mediated through what Adorno calls, with a Hegelian term,
“subjective spirit”, that is, the interiority of the individual. This is how in
the artwork “the external must pass by way of spirit and has increasingly
become the appearance of the inward” (ÄT: 142, AT: 92), that according
to the notion developed in the Kierkegaard is equivalent to the manifesta-
tion not of the simple inwardness but of what the objectivity of society
has done with the subject; Adorno seems therefore to repeat Karl Kraus’
verse of despair, when in the poem “Flieder” he bitterly observes “was hat
die Welt aus uns gemacht [what the world has made of us]” (Kraus 1959,
These quotations come from an unpublished text written during the composition of Aesthetic
33
Theory named Fragment als Form und Zufall (Fragment as Form and Accident).
p. 235). Art as material thing, however, can no longer oppose its own
meaningful structure to the social process that absorbs it as a mediator in
the social relationships between people. The society of late capitalism
needs a form of art “that leaves no material untransformed” (SdE: 41,
NtL1: 30) and, thereby, that presents social reality as mediation. This art
is literature, not just in itself, but as a sort of assurance of survival for art
in general.
This is, hence, the most radical outcome of Adorno’s literary aesthetics.
The fact that literature, thanks to the mediation of the I as the formal
structure in which aesthetic material is produced, is in the position to
reconstruct the aesthetic principle that social production has historically
dissolved in the empirical world. Literature, in this sense, can be seen not
as the only art that survived to the dissolution of the aesthetic, but as I
have already remarked, as the assurance of survival of art itself. While
dealing with contemporary debates about the end of art, about the insti-
tutional explanation of art’s essence, or even about the seemingly post-
historical condition of art, Adorno’s aesthetics would answer with the
notion of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic: what seems to be
non-artistic in contemporary art, what in art seems to be undistinguish-
able from everyday life, what appears as the post-historical condition of
art, or even its death can still be seen as artistic; this is so, however, only
as far as it is framed in a literary paradigm, which defines art in terms of
its inclusion in a narrative framework.
References
Anderson, Perry. 1979. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso.
Argan, Giulio Carlo. 1965. Progetto e destino. Milano: il Saggiatore.
Batteux, Charles. 2015. The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle. Trans.
J.O. Young. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. H. Eiland, and
K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, ed.
Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge,
MA/London: Harvard University Press.
138 M. Farina
Berger, Maxi. 2014. Von der Höhle des Löwen. Arbeit, Kunst und
Selbstbewusstsein zwischen Autonomie und fait social bei Hegel, Beckett
und Adorno. In Das Versprechen der Kunst. Aktuelle Zugänge zu Adornos ästhe-
tischer Theorie, ed. Marcus Quent, and Eckardt Lindner, 203–222. Wien/
Berlin: Turia + Kant.
Berman, Art. 1994. Preface to Modernism. Urbana/Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.
Bernstein, Jay M. 2001. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge, UK:
Bertram, Georg W. 2014. Kunst und die Möglichkeit des Scheiterns. In Trial
and Error. Szenarien medialen Handelns, ed. Andreas Wolfsteiner, and Markus
Rautzenberg, 57–69. München: Fink.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Clair, Jean. 2007. Malaise dans les musées. Paris: Flammarion.
Cook, Deborah. 1995. The Culture Industry Revisited. Theodor W. Adorno in Mass
Culture. Laham/Boulder/New York/Toronto/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
———. 2011. Adorno on Nature. London/New York: Routledge.
Croce, Benedetto. 2007. Breviary of Aesthetics. Four Lessons. Trans. H. Fudemoto.
Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. The Artistic Disenfranchisement of Real Objects: The
Artworld. The Journal of Philosophy 61 (19): 571–584.
———. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia
University Press.
———. 1992. Beyond the Brillo Box. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University
of California Press.
———. 2009. Andy Warhol. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Dewey, John. 1980. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee.
Farina, Mario. 2015. Der Tod der Kunst in der Ästhetik von Dino Formaggio
und Giulio Carlo Argan. In Das Ende der Kunst als Anfang freier Kunst, ed.
Francesca Iannelli, Federico Vercellone, and Klaus Vieweg, 291–305.
München: Fink.
Formaggio, Dino. 1983. La «morte dell’arte» e l’estetica. Bologna: il Mulino.
Geulen, Eva. 2006a. Adorno and the Poetics of Genre. In Adorno and Literature,
Continuum.
———. 2006b. The End of Art. Readings in a Rumor After Hegel. Trans.
Gutiérrez Pozo, Antonio. 2009. Utopia in Black. The Negative Aesthetics of

Adorno and the Contemporary Black Art. Filozofia 64 (5): 481–491.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. 2013. The Fleeting Promise of Art. Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory Revisited. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Hulatt, Owen. 2018. Seeing In, Seeing Through: Adorno and Proust. In
Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature, ed. Corey McCall and
Nathan Ross, 159–178. New York/London: Routledge.
James, David. 2009. Art, Myth and Society in Hegel’s Aesthetics. London/New
York: Continuum.
———. 1990. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. London/
New York: Verso.
Kelly, Theresa M. 2010. Adorno–Nature–Hegel. In Language Without Soil.
Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter, 99–116.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Klasen, Isabelle. 2018. Rather No Art then Socialist Realism. Adorno, Beckett,
and Brecht. In The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed.
Beverly Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, 1024–1037. Los Angeles/
London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington, DC/Melbourne: SAGE
Publications.
Kramer, Hilton. 2006. The Triumph of Modernism: The Artworld, 1987–2005.
Lanham/Boulder/New York/Toronto/Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kraus, Karl. 1959. Worte in Versen. München: Kösel Verlag.
Lijster, Thijs. 2017. Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Merlin Press.
Mann, Thomas. 1961. The Genesis of a Novel. Trans. C. Winston, and R. Winston.
London: Sacker & Warburg.
———. 1997. Doctor Faustus. The Life on the German Composer Adrian
Leverkühn As Told by a Friend. Trans. J.E. Woods. New York: Knopf.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 2001. Manifesto of Futurism. In Manifesto. A
Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws, 187–189. Lincoln/London: University
of Nebraska Press.
140 M. Farina
Marino, Stefano, and Giovanni Matteucci. 2016. The Dark Side of the Truth.
Nature and Natural Beauty in Adorno. Discipline Filosofiche 2 (XXVI): 5–45.
Martin, Stewart. 2006. Literature and Modern System of Arts: Sources of
Criticism in Adorno. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and
Nigel Mapp, 9–25. London/New York: Continuum.
Mautz, Kurt. 1996. Der Urfreund. Paderborn: Ingel Verlag.
McBride, Patrizia C. 2007. Introduction: The Future’s Past – Modernism,
Critique and the Political. In The Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in
Northern Europe, 1890–1950, ed. Patrizia C. McBride, Richard
W. McCormick, and Monika Žaga, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McLaren, Peter, and Rami Farahmandpur. 2002. Breaking Signifying Chains: A
Marxist Position on Postmodernism. In Marxism against Postmodernism in
Educational Theory, ed. Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, Mike Cole, and Glenn
Rikowski, 35–66. Lanham/Boulder/New York/Oxford: Lexington Books.
Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno. A Biography. Trans. R. Livingstone.
Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna, and Piotr Piotrowski. 2015. Introduction. In
From Museum Critique to Critical Museum, ed. Katarzyna Murawska-
Muthesius, and Piotr Piotrowski. Farnham: Ashgate.
Proust, Marcel. 1992. In Search of Lost Time. 7 vols. Trans. C.K.S. Moncrieff,
and T. Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright. New York: The Modern Library.
Rebentisch, Juliane. 2003. Ästhetik der Installation. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Roberts, David. 2011. The Total Work of Art in European Modernism. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Saisselin, Rémy G. 1965. Taste in Eighteenth Century France: Critical Reflections
on the Origin of Aesthetics or an Anthropology for Amateur. Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press.
Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of Modern Drama. Trans. M. Hays. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Tagliaferro, Charles. 2016. The Open Museum and its Enemies: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Museums. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79: 35–53.
Tiedemann, Rolf. 1994. “Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn”. Eine
Dokumentation zu Adornos Beckett-Lektüre. In Frankfurter Adorno Blätter
III, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, 18–77. München: Text+Kritik.
Valéry, Paul. 1971. The Problem of Museums. In The Collected Works of Paul
Valery, ed. Jackson Mathews, vol. 12. Trans. D. Paul, 202–206. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Volpacchio, Florindo, and Frank Zappa. 1991. The Mother of All Interviews:
Zappa on Music and Society. Telos 87: 124–136.
and Postmodernism. Trans. D. Midgley. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Young, James O. 2015. Translator’s Introduction. In The Fine Arts Reduced to a
Single Principle, ed. C. Batteux. Trans. J.O. Young. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Vacatello, Marzio. 1972. Th. W. Adorno: il rinvio della prassi. Firenze: La
Nuova Italia.
Böckelmann, Frank. 1998. Über Marx und Adorno. Schwierigkeiten der spät-
marxistischen Theorie. Freiburg: Ça Ira.
4
Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature:
A Theory of Literary Interpretation
So far my aim has been to follow the trace left by a fundamental argu-
ment underpinning Adorno’s understanding of aesthetics as philosophi-
cal interpretation of art. The principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic
element—or deaestheticization as “final dissolution of the essential aes-
thetic qualities which have until this century been inseparable from the
concepts of art itself ” (Wolin 2004, p. 11)—has been recognized as the
pivotal issue around which Adorno tries to establish a consistent theory
accounting for the nature and structure of that intricate cultural product
that an artwork is. The outcome of my interpretation has been the defini-
tion of the process of literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, a process
that makes literature what guarantee that art—and the aesthetic com-
portment of humanity in general—can still perform its task of expression
and critique of the social condition. This is notably meant as embodi-
ment of the hope for a different set up of social reality. In this way,
Adorno’s aesthetics justifies the peculiar role of literature in the general
field of artistic activity.1 Conversely, in this chapter, I will investigate the
1
Stewart Martin points out that literature plays a key role in post avant-gardist art since the critique
of art itself has been developed in the very field of literature, turning literature in a sort of meta-
artistic framework of art critique (see Martin 2006, p. 10).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_4
144 M. Farina
most basic elements of Adorno’s aesthetics from the viewpoint of a philo-

sophical determination of literary products. In other words, I will test the
possibility to take Adorno’s aesthetics as a philosophy of literature.
The kind of philosophy of literature that I believe could fit the frame-
work of Adorno’s philosophy is less an abstract definition of the qualities
of literature as a collection of utterances and propositions than a determi-
nation of its properties by means of a philosophical interpretation of con-
crete literary products. This means that we cannot expect Adorno to
undertake a definitory analysis of literature as, for example, the contem-
porary analytic debate on the topic does.2 In the current academic divi-
sion of labor, in fact, philosophy of literature corresponds to a specific
branch of aesthetics, in turn a specific branch of philosophy, whose pur-
pose is to establish how literature can be conceived as an object on which
philosophy can be applied. This approach to philosophy of literature
aims to find conceptual legitimacy for utterances like “literature is writ-
ing that has a certain property, or certain properties, of literariness” (New
1999, p. 16), or to investigate the conditions of possibility of literature in
general (Lamarque 2009, p. 8).3 It may then come as a surprise that,
despite his rejection of any definitory approach to art, Adorno’s
consideration and interpretation of literature provides interesting answers
to some essential questions typical of the philosophy of literature as out-
lined above, namely to the questions concerning what a literary text is,
what kind of relationship literature has with reality, what does it mean to
interpret a literary product, what is the form, and what is the content.
2
Ulrich Plass suggests that Adorno’s avoidance of conceptual definitions does not imply an ambiva-
lent concept of language, but rather a precise argumentative strategy based on a critique of the
intellect’s abstract conceptuality (Plass 2007, p. xxii).
3
This kind of definitory approach to literature includes definitions like “Anna Karenina is the dis-
course consisting of the concatenation of (mainly) Russian sentences uttered by Tolstoy in the
writing of a certain sequence of inscriptions which was completed, or at any rate published” (New
1999, p. 15). Adorno’s philosophy rejects any definitory approach to art as it applies the instru-
ments of abstract thought to concrete objects. As it will become clear in the section in which I deal
with the issue of interpretation of literature, even a broader and socially oriented definition such as
“a text is identified as a literary work by recognizing the author’s intention that the text is produced
and meant to be read within the framework of conventions defining the practice (constituting the
institution) of literature” (Lamarque, and Olsen 1994, pp. 255–156), would be understood by
Adorno as an anti-historical, abstract attempt to cut away literature from the concrete activity of
critique of the existing society.
4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary… 145
Adorno’s approach to literature differs from that of the mainstream of

contemporary debate also in that it is critical and evaluative when the
other is programmatically neutral. Another effect of the academic divi-
sion of labor, coupled with the Humean tradition of English aesthetics,
consists hence in the sharp division between the role of philosopher and
that of critic. The critic is the one whose evaluative judgment establishes
the field of literary objects, that is, the critic is the one who decides which
texts among the considerable amount of those produced are worth to be
considered as part of the literary canon; differently, the philosopher of
literature has the task to conceptually justify the literariness of literature
(Lamarque 2009, p. 275). According to Adorno, by contrast, the process
of art critique is, simultaneously, the philosophical demonstration of its
nature and essence. By following the romantic and the Hegelian tradi-
tion, as a peculiar elaboration of Kant’s notion of critique, Adorno con-
ceives the process of art critique as a demonstration of art being part of
what the Romantics called absolute and Hegel called spirit. Adorno him-
self picks up the word “spirit”, but understands it—negatively—as the
historical (un)truth of social reality,4 according to the famous statement
included in Minima Moralia by which “the whole is the untrue” (MM:
55, MM: 50), or what one reads in Negative Dialectics, that truth is the
“ontology of false condition” (ND: 22, ND: 11).5 Art critique, hence, is
the demonstration that art is part of the world’s untruth.6 While distin-
guishing philosophy of literature and literary theory Noël Carroll and
John Gibson assert that the former is a narrower field “not restricted to
but in practice often coextensive with the work produced by professors of
philosophy who pursue their interests in literary aesthetics in
4
This concept of spirit as social labor is clearly outlined in the first of the three studies that in the
1950s Adorno devotes to Hegel (see, DSH: 264–266, HTS: 17–18). Zuidervaart (1991,
pp. 93–121) places particular emphasis on Adorno’s notion of art as social labor.
5
The translation of both texts has been modified. Jephcott translates the quotation from Minima
Moralia as “the whole is the false”, where “false” translates Unwahre (untrue) and not Falsch (false);
moreover, Adorno’s quotation explicitly plays, by overturning it, with Hegel’s line “the true is the
whole” (Hegel 2018, p. 13). In his edition of Negative Dialectics, Ashton translates Adorno’s expres-
sion Ontologie des falschen Zustandes with “ontology of the wrong state of things”, by erasing this
way the reference to falsity.
6
The idea that Adorno’s notion of aesthetic critique consists in the negation—or in the critical ver-
sion—of Hegel’s positive notion has been suggested by Raymond Geuss (2004, pp. 41–42).
146 M. Farina
conversation with debates in the core areas of professional philosophy”;

and while introducing a companion on the topic, they suggest that
“whatever philosophy of literature precisely designates as a field of
research in the Anglophone academic world, this volume acts as a very
good representative of its concerns and boundaries” (Carroll, and Gibson
2016, p. xxii). In stressing Adorno’s non-differentiation of critique and
philosophy of literature, my aim is not to delegitimize the analytic phi-
losophy of literature, but rather to put into question the full identifica-
tion of philosophy of literature with one distinctive approach. My inquiry
on Adorno’s interpretation of literature has the goal to show that the basic
questions of philosophy of literature can be answered also by following a
different aesthetic approach, without being thereby propelled out of the
field of the genitive that connects philosophy and literature in the expres-
sion philosophy of literature, and without identifying philosophy with a
specific branch of the academic labor, as it happens in the mostly unchal-
lenged division between “philosophy” and “the Theory”.7
4.1 W
hat Literature Is About: Reality, Truth,
and Ontology
Since its first appearances in Western philosophical thought, what we
nowadays call literature—especially thanks to Romanticism and, pre-
cisely, to what has been defined as the Romantic “theoretical institution-
alization of the literary genre” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988,
p. 3)—has been assessed on the basis of its relationship toward reality and
truth. As is well known, in the second book of The Republic, Plato con-
demns fictional stories precisely because of their relationships to reality,
by referring to the stories that “Hesiod and Homer both used to tell us –
and the other poets. They made up untrue stories, which they used to tell
people – and still do tell them” (Plato 2000, 377d 5–7, p. 62). To an
7
David Shusterman, for example, refers to T.S. Eliot and emphasizes his proximity to “what is
today in the academy often called ‘theory’, a genre where non-professional philosophers like Walter
Benjamin can be studied for their philosophical import and where Eliot himself deserves a better
place” (Shusterman 1994, p. 31).
opposite outcome, but according to a similar interpretation of the rela-

tionship between text and world, in the first great philosophical treatise
on fictional writing—namely, the Poetics—Aristotle conceives the stance
of literature—or better, of tragedy and epic—toward real actions as a
form of imitation, and he assesses the result of such imitation in terms of
“what is possible as being probable or necessary” (Aristotle 1985, 1451b
3–4, p. 2323). This approach to the problem of the relationship between
text and reality has been pivotal in the great modern revival of the debate
on literature, to the point that Aristotle has been recently defined as “the
father of the philosophy of literature” by Carroll and Gibson (2016, p.
xxi). Questions concerning how literature can give rise to emotions in the
audience despite its fictional nature, or to what extent can aesthetic illu-
sion be taken as a sort of reality, have been occupying center stage in the
modern discipline of aesthetics, especially during the Enlightenment, as
they call upon the relationship between the aesthetic effect and the sub-
jective faculties of knowledge.8 According to this conceptual framework,
how literature relates to reality can be linked to the denotative power of
language, as exemplified, for instance, by Victor Hugo’s description of
French revolution in Les Misérables and its relation to the real historical
event that the text is about. The interweaving of truth and ontology of
fiction with their relationship with textual references to external reality
can be found, for example, in the contemporary discussion of literary
realism in terms of verisimilitude and in questions about the adequacy of
real cities and their representation in fictional contexts.9
8
See what the popular German philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, writes on November 23, 1756,
in his famous epistolary exchange with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Christoph Friedrich Nicolai
known as Correspondence Concerning Tragedy (Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel): “Above all, we want
to let ourselves out more broadly once we have put in order our thoughts of the effect of the theatri-
cal illusion, and of the contrast of it with the clear knowledge” (Lessing et al. 1973, p. 169).
Frederick Burwick (1991, pp. 81–94) shows how the discussion among the three rose from the
eighteenth-century concern to rationalize emotions as pivotal problem of the Enlightenment’s aes-
thetics. Serena Feloj (2017, pp. 69–73) highlights the connection of this issue with the theoretical
faculties of knowledge.
9
When I talk about realism and verisimilitude in the context of the question concerning the truth
of literature, I think about, for example, how Peter Lamarque frames the issue in the fifth chapter
of his book, The Philosophy of Literature. I am not interested here in reconstructing Lamarque’s
argument, but only in how he understands the problem of the truth of literature in terms of its
adequacy to the description of the external world (Lamarque 2009, pp. 220–253). About the
ontology of fictional elements taken as reference to objectual things, see how Kroon and Voltolini
148 M. Farina
In this section my intention is to present Adorno’s position with regard

to the issue of literary realism, truth, and ontology, a position that embod-
ies an implicit criticism of the reality, or truth, of literature in terms of
verisimilitude, correspondence, or adaequatio of a text to an alleged exter-
nal reality. What I intend to show is the fact that, according to Adorno’s
aesthetic model, literature is not a pure universe of meaning separated
from reality, but it has instead a realistic dimension. This entails a clear
stance concerning truth and ontology in literary texts. In what follows, I
will mainly outline Adorno’s position as a critical response to the idea that
literary reality, truth, and ontology could ever be conveyed by how a text
depicts the world. Instead of being a matter of style or reference, realism
is, in Adorno’s eyes, the specific manner in which literature autonomously
takes position in relation to how reality should be according to its truth.
First of all, the issue of realism. As everyone who has gone into the
literary debates of the nineteenth century knows, Lukács and Brecht are
two of the most prominent authors who fought the cultural war between
the realistic and the expressionistic idea of literature, to the point that the
quarrel took the name of Brecht-Lukács-Debatte.10 At the same time, as
everyone who dealt with those issues equally knows, Adorno criticized
both parts of the quarrel. Brecht, as we have seen, because of his norma-
tive idea of literary pedagogy, Lukács on the contrary for what Adorno
felt as a narrow, blunt, and ideological notion of realism; and precisely in
this critique of Lukács’ realism, it is possible to get a glimpse of Adorno’s
understanding of the realistic dimension of literature. The notion of real-
ism, in this context, has to be carefully handled. Indeed, it is not always
easy to clearly distinguish between realism as a literary style (e.g. that of
Émile Zola), and realism as a specific position of literature toward reality.
My idea is that Adorno’s interpretation of the first reveals his own con-
ception of the second.
discuss the problem: “neither London nor Napoleon are fictional entities in the sense in which we
are using the term, since both exist. By contrast, some think that the London of the Holmes stories
and the Napoleon of War and Peace are different from the real London and Napoleon and should
be considered distinctive fictional entities” (Kroon and Voltolini 2018, p. 386).
10
The expression Brecht-Lukács-Debatte has been coined by the German literature scholar, Werner
Mittenzwei as title of an article published in 1967 on the journal Sinn und Form (Mittenzwei 1967,
pp. 235–269), and it indicates the debate between the two authors started in 1938 about the value
of socialist realism in literature.
In the November 1958 issue of the journal Die Monat, a polemical

article was published under the title “Erpresste Versöhnung” (“Extorted
Reconciliation”), in which Adorno harshly criticized Lukács’ essay,
“Wider den missverstandenen Realismus” (“Against Misunderstood
Realism”), published in the same year in West Germany.11 The essay is
packed with disdainful judgments about Lukács’ late production, and
sometimes Adorno goes beyond the valley of good taste, for examples
when he asserts that “it was probably in his The Destruction of Reason that
the destruction of Lukacs’ own reason manifested itself most crassly”
(EV: 252, NtL1: 217); nevertheless, the argument is clear and it concerns
less realism in itself as a literary style than the normative meaning of the
category imbedded into Lukács’ idea of literature. In the essay about real-
ism, Lukács insists on his theory of literature as reflection (Widerspiegelung)
of social reality, and already in the Introduction he writes that “the strug-
gle between socialism and capitalism is still […] the fundamental reality
of modern age. We would expect literature and criticism to reflect this
reality” (Lukács 1963, p. 13). What Adorno rejects in this idea is precisely
what he includes in the title of the essay, namely the idea that a reconcili-
ation can be extorted. From his point of view, Lukács would in fact take
the faithful representation of reality as the reflection of things as they
ought to be; this extorted reconciled point of view would notably be that
of socialist republics, in defense of which Lukács’ realistic idea of litera-
ture speaks. In other words, what Adorno criticizes in Lukács is the
assumption that a pacified reality, as in theory that of Soviet Socialism,
does not need the critical element of art, but just the reflective one.
Broadly speaking, Lukács lays emphasis on an element of the Hegelian
Marxist aesthetic model according to which literature is knowledge of
reality, but in so doing he downplays the fact that literary forms have the
power to put reality to trial and uncover its inadequacy compared to their
formal reconciliation. Indeed, as Marx himself knew, “the difficulty we
11
Lukács’ essay is best known under the title of the original talk, that is to say, “Zur
Gegenwartsbedeutung des kritischen Realismus”, translated into English in 1963 by John and
Necke Mander with the title “The Meaning of Contemporary Realism” (see the already mentioned
Lukács 1963). To my knowledge, the first publication of the essay has been edited by Paolo Chiarini
for the Italian edition (Lukács 1957) with the title “Il significato attuale del realismo critico” (“The
Present Meaning of Critical Realism”), after a round of conferences held by Lukács in Rome,
Florence, Bologna, Turin, and Milan in 1956.
150 M. Farina
are confronted with is not, however, that of understanding how Greek art
and epic poetry are associated with certain forms of social development.
The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain
respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal” (Marx 1970,
p. 217). Along the same lines, Hegel’s so-called classicism—his alleged
nostalgia for ancient Greece—consists less in the uncritical evaluation of
traditional forms than in the power of aesthetic dimension to show the
unreconciled side of modernity. Lukács, according to Adorno, decides to
cut off the critical potential of literature and to pursue only its expres-
sive nature.
The core of Adorno’s criticism hinges upon Lukács’ normative realism
and, at the same time, upon the source of that normativity. Realism, in
fact, is conceived as the correct manner in which literature purifies itself
from all the decadent, bourgeois, subjective formalism of modern avant-
garde, as Eastern socialist dogma would say, and the power of this norma-
tive stance derives from the particular position of the critic, rooted in not
antagonistic reality as that of achieved communism.12 Accordingly,
Adorno is of the opinion that, instead of interpreting concrete literary
works, Lukács “issues decrees” and they are “symptomatic of the stultifi-
cation that befalls even the most intelligent when they fall in line with
directives like those ordaining socialist realism” (EV: 245, 273, NtL: 219,
234). This kind of normative attitude toward literature follows the sharp
differentiation between realism and avant-garde, the first being the cor-
rect way in which the world has to be depicted by literature, whereas the
second corresponds to a formalist and existentialistic deformation of real-
ity. As Adorno points out, moreover, Lukács uses a violent and discrimi-
nating vocabulary, to the point that his description of realism is that of an
art that comes from “what is socially healthy” (Lukács 1970, p. 103),
opposed to a sick artistic stance, thus echoing the Nazi definition of
expressionism as degenerate art. In order to be able to so sharply divide
art into a correct and a wrong way to express reality, and this is what
Adorno insists on, Lukács has to be convinced that he could read litera-
ture from the standpoint of that reality whose values need to be r ealistically
As Bela Kiralyfalvi underlines, the notion of ‘realism’ in the Brecht-Lukács debate is not simply a
12
matter of style, or trend, but it is instead methodological (Kiralyfalvi 1985, pp. 340–341).

expressed, in other words from the point of view of a reconciled world.

As Adorno says in the last page of the essay, “the postulate of a reality that
must be represented without a breach between subject and object and
which must be ‘reflected’ […] for the sake of that lack of a breach: that
postulate, which is the supreme criterion of his aesthetics, implies that
that reconciliation has been achieved, that society has been set right, that
the subject has come into its own and is at home in its world” (EV: 280,
NtL1: 240).
As we have already seen, this is the basic argument of Adorno’s critique
of Lukács’ realism: the social reality of the Soviet Union is not the achieve-
ment of the pacified humanity in which art would dissolve itself, and the
defense of realism as the only healthy art is nothing but a refined form of
brutal propaganda. In this kind of criticism, generally formulated espe-
cially by English-speaking critique,13 however, it is possible to understand
what Adorno is effectively interested in when he speaks about realism as
a peculiar quality of any literary text. In other words, through Adorno’s
critique of Eastern realism it is possible to understand what he takes true
realism to be, meaning by that literature’s necessary form of—indirect—
reference to reality.
Without being explicitly thematized in these terms, Lukács’ realism
consists in the idea that literature can faithfully represent reality, without
inventing or deforming it by means of subjective interiority as in the
modernist style of Proust and Joyce. Differently, while taking a more
mediated approach to realism, Adorno does not see in realism—namely,
literature’s chance to show reality—the textual ability or inability to be
more or less identical to the world. Lukács harshly criticizes modernist
literature because of what he presents as the universalization of the sub-
ject’s interiority as a metahistorical fact. The way in which Proust explores
his own inwardness would suggest, in this regard, that only the subject’s
interiority is worth to be literarily expressed, whereas historical reality is
13
Fredric Jameson, in his “Reflections and Conclusion” to the collection Aesthetics and Politics
published in 1977 (that I quote from the Verso edition of 1980), highlights what he perceives as
“the equivocal rhetoric of Adorno’s attack on Lukacs” (1980, p. 209). David Cunningham and
Nigel Mapp remark that, since this publication, Adorno’s aesthetics is most famous in English-
speaking debates precisely for this kind of dispute with Lukács (Cunningham, and Mapp 2006,
pp. 4–5).
152 M. Farina
locked out of pure intimacy. As in the case of Kierkegaard’s inwardness,

Adorno shifts the focus on the historical origin of the interior loneliness,
since “certainly Lukacs, who claims to think in radically historical terms,
ought to see that in an individualistic society that solitude is socially
mediated and essentially historical in substance” (EV: 259, NtL1: 223).
Literature, hence, is not realistic when it represents the way in which
things are, or when it directly describes the external world, but rather
when it allows reality to emerge from its aesthetic means; as Adorno
explains it, “art exists within reality, has its function in it, and is also
inherently mediated with reality in many ways. But nevertheless, as art,
by its very concept it stands in an antithetical relationship to the status
quo” (EV: 260, NtL1: 224).
Reality, in this sense, is not something to which literature simply refers.
It is not some kind of essence external to literature that maintains with
the text a more or less close relationship. Strictly speaking, there is no
difference between literature and reality. Literature is a way in which real-
ity expresses itself without being a direct and immediate representation of
its empirical exteriority but by showing itself through a subjective aes-
thetic mediation. This is why also “realistic” literature, as in the case of
Balzac, cannot be taken as an immediate exposition of reality, but as “an
imaginative reconstruction of an alienated reality, that is, a reality that
can no longer be experienced by the subject” (EV: 265, NtL1: 228).14
Then, “art does not come to know reality by depicting it photographically
or ‘perspectivally’ but by expressing, through its autonomous constitu-
tion, what is concealed by the empirical form reality takes” (EV: 264,
NtL1: 227). Regardless of the fact that literature faithfully depicts reality,
literature can always be seen as realistic. As artistic expression, in fact, art
is necessarily a way in which social reality expresses its own nature and
criticizes the way in which things are. Realism, as literary style, is nothing
but one of the possibilities in which literature accomplishes its task, a
possibility that was particularly effective during the decay of the grande
bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century and that gave way to the modernist
distortion of life in the early twentieth century. The realistic dimension of
14
In a forthcoming article I investigate the notion of literary realism in Adorno by reconstructing
its complex relationship with realism as literary style (Farina 2019).
literature, hence, is not based on a stylistic depiction of reality as it reveals

itself, but instead on the way in which literature, thanks to its aesthetic
formal sedimentation of historical content, reveals the antagonistic struc-
ture of society. When Émile Zola describes Balzac’s realism by saying that
“Cousine Bette, for example, is simply the report of the experiment that
the novelist conducts before the eyes of the public” (Zola 1964, p. 9), he
comes very close to Adorno’s idea. Realism is not, or it is not necessarily,
the depiction of reality, but it is a quality that expresses reality by means
of the subjective experience of the writer.
As Adorno writes in the Aesthetic Theory, “thoroughly formed artworks
that are criticized as formalistic are the most realistic works insofar as they
are realized in themselves and solely by means of this realization achieve
their truth content” (ÄT: 196, AT: 129). Based on this account of the
relationship between text and reality, the issue of literary realism has cru-
cial consequences for what can be taken as the truth of literature. When
Adorno defines the objective, historical, result of the apparently subjec-
tive narrative of Proust, he follows the complex interweaving of truth and
illusion in the context of literary expression.15 As the description of per-
sonal interiority becomes a concrete representation of historical reality,
the illusion (or semblance) of subjective loneliness can be taken as the
truth of the collective condition:
The monologue intérieur […] is both the truth and the illusion [Schein] of a
free-floating subjectivity. The truth, because in a world that is everywhere
atomistic, alienation rules human beings and because […] they thereby
become shadows. But the free-floating subject is an illusion, because the
social totality is objectively prior to the individual; that totality becomes
consolidated and reproduces itself in and through alienation, the social
contradiction. (EV: 262, NtL1: 225)
The truth of literature—and this is one of the most qualifying ele-

ments of Adorno’s idea of literary aesthetics—can be understood just in
terms of indirect, mediated, reference to things, that is to say, as a
15
Roger Foster shows that it is in the deep interiority of Proust’s self and not in the external social
self that Adorno sees genuine artistic expression, being the social self the mere representation of a
superficial self-projection (Foster 2018, pp. 143–158).
154 M. Farina
reference that applies the tools of illusion, or semblance (Schein), in order

to reveal reality.16 The truth of literature, in this sense, entirely eludes the
question concerning the extent to which literature communicates propo-
sitional or non-propositional truth, as formulated by contemporary ana-
lytic philosophy;17 it rather expresses the historical condition of the world
inasmuch as it exposes the illusional nature of semblance. By showing the
apparent essence of the free-floating subject in comparison with the social
antagonistic order that oppresses it, Proust sheds light on the truth of a
world that is everywhere atomistic. This nexus between semblance and
truth is investigated in Aesthetic Theory in a fragment dedicated to the
truth content of art. The question Adorno tries to answer concerns what
he understands as the enigmaticalness of art, that is, the fact that every
work of art produces an enigma to which philosophy tries to find a solu-
tion. What is at stake is the “indefatigably recurring question that every
work incites”, namely “the ‘What is it all about?’” that becomes “is it
true?” (ÄT: 192, AT: 127). Works of art—and based on the dissolution
and reconstruction of the aesthetic element, one could to equal effect say
literary works—consist in this regard in a formal structure that alludes to
a sense, without immediately expressing it. Their enigmatic character is
therefore the fact that the observer perceives this meaning without con-
ceptually understanding it. This meaning is the truth of art and in what
follows I will show why it must be taken as the untruth of the reality it
expresses.
Since art always maintains a connection to the reality from which it
emerges, and since the above outlined notion of truth in literary sense is
non-referential,18 “great artworks” writes Adorno “are unable to lie”. In
16
As Jay Bernstein suggests, the notion of semblance is related to truth since “the question of aes-
thetic semblance is the question of the possibility of possibility, of a concept of possible experience
that transcends what is now taken to be the parameters of possible experience” (Bernstein 1997,
p. 195).
17
See, the summary of the contemporary debate about propositional and non-propositional theo-
ries of literature within the field of the “cognitivist” positions about literary truth included in
Mikkonen 2013, pp. 9–12.
18
Andrew Bowie insists on the relevance of Adorno’s non-referential conception of truth in the
twentieth-century critique of the classical idea of literary truth as substantial meaning. What he
suggests is that Derrida’s idea of a non-substantiality of meaning is a theoretical result that has been
bought at too high price, namely the risk of the disappearing of truth in general, and he takes
Adorno’s dialectical idea of literary truth as a reduction on that price (Bowie 2006, pp. 40–52).
fact, “even when their content is semblance, insofar as this content is

necessary semblance the content has truth, to which the artworks testify;
only failed works are untrue” (ÄT: 196, AT: 130). The dynamics that
Adorno outlines in this passage is based on the same dialectics that, in the
aesthetic conciliation of social conflict, shows the antagonistic structure
of reality, as by “reenacting the spell of reality, by sublimating it as an
image, art at the same time liberates itself from it” (ÄT: 196, AT: 130).
This is why the truth content of art is not simply the reality that the art-
works represent, but rather the fact that they distance themselves from
social reality as it is, create a different organized structure, and show the
untruth of the social order, since “the spell with which art through its
unity encompasses the membra disjecta of reality is borrowed from reality
and transforms art into the negative appearance of utopia” (ÄT: 196, AT:
130). This process corresponds to what Adorno conceives as the spiritu-
alization of art, that has nothing to do with the irrational or transcendent
meaning of the term. Aesthetic spiritualization is rather the process that
turns reality into pure aesthetic meaning by showing this way the untruth
of social organization.
Artistic semblance, hence, can be seen as the aesthetic counterpart of
what a negative dialectics theoretically is, since “regarding the concrete
utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology of false condition” (ND: 22,
ND: 11). Ontology cannot be seen as the conceptual definition of what
things, broadly speaking, “are”; on the contrary, ontology is the demon-
stration of the falsity—in the sense of its unreconciled and antagonistic
structure—of social reality. Ontology of aesthetic semblance corresponds
therefore to its capacity to show in which terms a historical condition is
false, as it is not adequate to its own concept.19
When Adorno criticizes Lukács for his praise of realism, his intention
is less to delegitimize realism in general as literary style than to question
the normative perspective according to which literature needs to be real-
istic. The realistic element of literature is not its adequacy to things as
they are, but its capacity to show the untruth of a historical social
19
Albrecht Wellmer takes the relationship between the categories of semblance and truth as pivotal
to fully understand Adorno’s aesthetics within the framework of a non-overcome modernity. In
Wellmer’s interpretation, the critical notion of the truth of art ensues, hence, from what I have
presented as its dialectical relationship with semblance (Wellmer 1991, pp. 1–35).
156 M. Farina
condition. There are historical moments in which this process can be trig-
gered by the precision of the realistic description, like in Balzac’s time,
where the writer “needs, in reaction, permanent assurance that it is so and
not otherwise”, in a sort of “realism on the basis of a loss of reality”; in the
twentieth century, by contrast, “literary realism became obsolete because,
as a representation of reality, it did not capture reality” (B-L: 147–148,
NtL1: 128). The same thing happens in Dickens’ realism, whose realistic
depiction is the most effective way to dissipate the world he presents,
since “[the] prebourgeois form of Dickens’ novels becomes a means of
dissolving the very bourgeois world they depict” (RüR: 516, NtL2: 172).
4.2 T
he Interpretation of Literature
and Its Unity
After having defined the relationship between literature and reality, a sec-
ond question arises within the framework of a philosophy of literature,
namely that of how this kind of relationship can be detected in a literary
product. This question corresponds to the issue of the interpretation of
literature. Since “hermeneutics” and namely interpretation “of artworks
is the translation of their formal elements into content” (ÄT: 210, AT:
139), and since in a literary work one cannot presuppose a clear-cut divi-
sion between the formal dimension and the content—as the content is
always mediated by the form—this relationship requires further explana-
tion. Before having a clear understanding of what “form” and “content”
are, what I propose is to show in which sense to “interpret” a literary
work means to separate what appears as an inseparable unity, namely that
of form and content as the dialectical structure of the work.
In order to determine how what in the previous section I have described
as the “truth content” of the work can be recognized in a literary and
therefore not conceptual product, one necessarily has to interpret the
literary product itself; “the need of artworks for interpretation” corre-
sponds indeed to “their need for the production of their truth content”.
Interpretation, hence, is the critical activity in which a product is scruti-
nized as to verify its possession of a “truth content” (ÄT: 194, AT: 128).
What Adorno has in mind is a sort of theoretical interweaving in which

a literary product is conceived as having an enigmatic character that con-
sists in its truth content, or rather in the way in which it expresses objec-
tive reality; this truth content, in turn, can be isolated by means of art
critique, that is through the activity that recognizes a text as a genuine
literary product; critique, finally, is part of the most general philosophical
attempt to interpret literature by defining at the same time its conceptual
limits and meanings. As Adorno asserts in the Aesthetic Theory:
The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed
by each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its
truth content. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This
alone is the justification of aesthetics. Although no artwork can be reduced
to rationalistic determinations, as is the case with what art judges, each
artwork through the neediness implicit in its enigmaticalness nevertheless
turns toward interpretive reason. (ÄT: 194, AT: 127–128)
As is well known, Adorno opposes his own theory to what he under-

stands as a definitory or systematic ideal of philosophy. Faithful to Hegel’s
criticism of any methodological introduction to philosophical concepts,20
he rejects in fact the practice of abstract definition. “The movement that
begins with Kant”, writes Adorno thinking of himself as an epigone of
that philosophical stream, “a movement against the scholastic residues in
modern thought replaces verbal definitions with an understanding of
concepts in terms of the process through which they are produced” (EaF:
19, NtL1: 12). This means that it is impossible to find in Adorno a defin-
itive description of how, for example, interpretation should be under-
taken; he would rather claim that the practice of interpretation has to be
identified starting from its activity. In order to clarify the practice of liter-
ary interpretation, then, it is necessary to shed light on how its constitu-
tive elements effectively work; and since “hermeneutics of artworks is the
20
See what Hegel says in his first public writing (The difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System
of Philosophy, 1801) about Reinhold and his attempt to introduce the philosophical method: “His
love of, and faith in, truth have risen to an elevation so pure and so sickening that in order to found
and ground the step into the temple properly, Reinhold has built a spacious vestibule in which
philosophy keeps itself so busy with analysis, with methodology and with storytelling, that it saves
itself from taking the step altogether” (Hegel 1977, p. 88).
158 M. Farina
translation of their formal elements into content” (ÄT: 210, AT: 139),
what needs to be preliminarily done is to define the form-content rela-
tionship in literature. Adorno’s notion of interpretation consists in the
analytical demonstration that a literary form is indeed a concretization of
content. His idea that a philosophy of literature necessarily includes a
practical activity of critical interpretation proving that a work belongs to
the general realm of literature is the most striking historical embodiment
of the early Romantic aesthetic model,21 that Adorno reinterprets in a
non-mystical, and non-divinatory,22 but materialistic way. The “absolute”
as the divine content of Romantic literary interpretation becomes in
Adorno the denial of the absolute as reconciled content and the demon-
stration of the social origin of absoluteness as oppression of individuality.
This is why form-content relationship can be conceived as the core struc-
ture of the practice of literary interpretation. This relationship is under-
stood by Adorno as a unity, or better as a dialectic unity. To define literary
interpretation means then to define how what is taken as a unity can be
expressed as divided, namely how form can be explained through the
conceptual language of the content.
What is difficult, but crucial, is to explain the nature of form-content
relationship in terms of reciprocal correspondence, and this is particu-
larly true in the case of Adorno, given his careful elaboration of that
relationship. As Peter Szondi has aptly pointed out, in fact, the most
consistent outcome of Adorno’s rethinking of Hegel’s aesthetics is the
notion of form as “sedimented contents” (PnM: 47, PNM: 37). Adorno’s
contribution makes explicit the idea according to which form and con-
tent cannot be independently grasped, as the content is just the expres-
sion of a meaningful concept by means of an aesthetic form, and its sense
21
This pathbreaking interpretation of the notion of art critique in early Romanticism has been
given by Walter Benjamin in his dissertation of 1919: “the Objective grounding of the concept of
criticism provided by Friedrich Schlegel has to do only with the objective structure of art as idea,
and with its formations, its works” (Benjamin 1996, p. 118). Precisely because of these method-
ological implications, the German literature scholar, Ernst Behler, takes Adorno’s aesthetics as an
actualization of the early Romantic idea of critique (Behler 1993, p. 8).
22
See how Friedrich Schlegel presents the Romantic notion of critique in the number 166 of the
Athenäums-Fragmente: “The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact,
is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by
no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal” (Schlegel
1971, p. 32).
is given by the fact itself that only this very aesthetic and formal crystal-
lization can communicate the content. The fact that form and content
constitute a unity by not being at the same time identical is what Adorno
understands as a dialectical relationship.
In the already mentioned assay about Hölderlin, Adorno suggests that
form and content should be thought according to a dialectical relation-
ship, in the sense that, on the one hand, they give rise to a unity and, on
the other hand, they present themselves as opposites. As Adorno writes:
In contrast to the crude textbook separation of content and form, contem-

porary poetology has insisted on their unity. But there is scarcely any aes-
thetic object that demonstrates more forcefully than Hölderlin’s work that
the assertion of an unarticulated unity of form and content is no longer
adequate. Such a unity can be conceived only as a unity across its moments;
the moments must be distinguished from one another if they are to harmo-
nize within the content and be neither merely separate nor passively identi-
cal. (P: 469, NtL2: 128)
According to this reconstruction of the relationship between form and

content, hence, it must be remarked that their unity consists in the fact
that it is impossible to speak about literary content without thematizing
its form, where at the same time to analyze form means to describe what
form communicates, that is its content. As Josh Robinson writes, Adorno’s
treatment of poetics “in terms of form and content is not an endorsement
of a metaphysic separation between the two, but a conceptual separation
that is necessitated” by conceptual, that is, abstract, thought (Robinson
2018, p. 41). Despite their unity, however, their relationship is articu-
lated by the fact that they represent two different moments of the work,
and this is why critique can refer to them as separate, even if said separa-
tion has to be seen as an abstraction. Broadly speaking, the content cor-
responds to what the work is about, and the form is the “how” of that
being about; at the same time, content is about something only inasmuch
as it is the formal sedimentation it is, and form is such to the extent that
it is the “how” of something, namely of the content. Stripped to its core,
this is what has to be regarded as the dialectical interrelation of form and
content.
160 M. Farina
In Aesthetic Theory Adorno insists on the fact that “aesthetic success is

essentially measured by whether the formed object is able to awaken the
content sedimented in the form”, and as we have seen, “in general, then,
the hermeneutics of artworks is the translation of their formal elements
into content” (ÄT: 210, AT: 139). Form, hence, is what appears as logi-
cally connected into the work, or, rather, what gives the impression of
coherence without following an intellectual link of causality. This is why
Adorno calls into question the “logic of dreams” (ÄT: 206, AT: 137),23
where every step gives the impression of an internal consistence, by dis-
tancing itself at the same time from external “awake” logic. The content
of a literary work has therefore a relationship with the form analogous to
that of the latent content of a dream with its explicit narrative. It is clearly
not a coincidence, in this regard, that Adorno insists on the notion of
aesthetic interpretation (Deutung), as the same notion that Freud has
elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung). Form, then, is
the legal space that defines the literary work, is the principle of coherence
that connects the single elements, is the legislation that rules on the mate-
rial. The content, on the contrary, is the translation of that aesthetic legal-
ity into a conceptual position toward reality. The dialectics of form and
content is less the mechanical image of a relationship between two dis-
tinct objects, than the concrete attempt to explain what appears as an
inextricable unity that, however, presents the need of being thought as
made of two distinct elements. Thereby, the interpretation of literature
consists in the transposition of a literary form—since all what can be
perceived in literature is part of the form—into the language of the con-
tent—as “hermeneutics of artworks is the translation of their formal ele-
ments into content”. This is why literary interpretation can be seen as the
recognition of the dialectical structure of the work and, at the same time,
as the isolation of its elements through the interruption of that dialectics.
An interpreted literary work is a work that has been understood in its
dialectical structure and thereby resolved in its tension, and any literary
interpretation is a critical activity that is applied to the formal dimension
23
Richard Wolin (1997, pp. 106–119) emphasizes how Adorno takes the technique of surrealistic
avant-garde as a fetishization of dreams. In fact, according to Adorno the parallelism between
dream and art is simply logic, whereas the imitation of dreams, as surrealism did, is to be conceived
as a form of fetishism.
of the work in order to make its contentment explicit. This is what

Adorno means when he says that “in the dialectic of form and content,
the scale also tips toward form” (ÄT: 218, AT: 145). Since “everything
appearing in the artwork is virtually content as much as it is form, whereas
form remains that by which the appearing determines itself and content
remains what is self-determining” (ÄT: 218, AT: 145), a study on the
notion of literary interpretation—again, the resolution of form-content
unity—has to begin from the comprehension of what in the work appears,
namely the form.
4.3 The Form

The notion of form, and this is made clear by how Adorno refers to it, is
not an abstract and eternal structure—as the word “formalism” would
suggest—but a historical concretion of the social condition in an indi-
vidual product. Adorno’s understanding of literary form as always histori-
cally mediated, and not as some static and normative notion according to
which there is an ideal form that has to be applied, has awaken a new
wave of interest in Adorno especially in the field of so-called new formal-
ism, or better in the most recent attempt to rework it.24 Even though it
may appear contrived, in what follows I will attempt to provide a con-
crete exemplification of what literary form is. If one is to faithfully follow
Adorno’s perspective, the elements of a dialectic tension can be caught
just as they are into that tension, and not as isolated objects. Dialectical
mediation, in fact, “is never a middle element between the extremes, […]
mediation takes place in and through the extremes, in the extremes them-
selves” (DSH: 257, HTS: 8–9). This is why Adorno is very thorough
about not giving an abstract and definitive definition of what form, the
sedimentation of content, abstractly is. In the fragment of Aesthetic Theory
about the notion of form, he almost limits himself to a negative defini-
tion of the concept, by excluding for example the flattening of the idea of
24
In the Introduction to his recent research, Josh Robinson shows how deeply Adorno’s notion of
form is related to the debate of New Historicism—identified in particular with the works of schol-
ars such as Susan Wolfson, Marjorie Levinson, Stephen Cohen, and Anna Kornbluh—against what
is felt as the empty notion of form of New Criticism (see Robinson 2018, pp. 1–26).
162 M. Farina
form on symmetry or on mathematical relations. The latter, in fact, “are

not form itself but rather its vehicle” (ÄT: 214, AT: 142). What is closer
to a definition of form can be found in the same fragment, precisely when
Adorno writes that “form is the artifacts’ coherence, however self-
antagonistic and refracted, through which each and every successful work
separates itself from the merely existing” (ÄT: 213: AT: 142). According
to this minimal description, form can be understood as the legal principle
that allows literary material not to appear as a random collection of ele-
ments. In this sense, a literary form has not to be understood just in terms
of harmony or pacified unity, since also the contrast between the ele-
ments can be seen as a kind of legal principle.
If it is true that Adorno has no intention of giving any definition of the
concept of literary form, there is anyway the chance to approach its func-
tional structure thanks to what Adorno suggests in one of his most piv-
otal papers on literary interpretation, namely the “Essay as Form”.
Thought as retrospective response to Lukács’ paper “On the Nature and
Form of the Essay”,25 the text results in an accurate reflection on the
notion of form in general. Although the text is specifically devoted to the
form of the essay, it sheds some light also on what the interpreting activ-
ity of the essay is exerted on, namely “what others have done”, the “intel-
lectual [geistigen] phenomenon” (EaF: 11, NtL1: 4), in this case literary
works. According to Adorno, in fact, the essay is a peculiar form of writ-
ing whose aim is to interpret existing products, not to invent concepts or
ideas. Since philosophical thought cannot directly address the world, as
its systematic concepts are unable to conceive the fragments of reality, the
essay is the only way to indirectly conceive the world by means of the
interpretation of cultural products, in turn originated by historical condi-
tions of reality itself; in Adorno’s own words, “the paradises of thought
too are now only artificial ones, and the essay strolls in them” (EaF: 29,
NtL1: 20). Even though one might object that Adorno’s argument is
25
The essay is the first chapter of Lukács’ Soul and Form (1911) and it is written in the form of a
letter to his friend, Leó Popper, who died the same year. In the text Lukács complains about how
difficult it is for the essay to find an autonomous form: “The essay form has not yet, today, traveled
the road to independence which its sister, poetry, covered long ago—the road of development from
a primitive, undifferentiated unity with science, ethics, and art” (Lukács 1974, p. 13).
much more complex than I have just accounted for,26 what I am inter-
ested to show is the correspondence between the form of the essay and
the form of what the essay is devoted to, being for Adorno the essay the
privileged form of literary interpretation.27 As Adorno writes:
The word Versuch, attempt or essay, in which thought’s utopian vision of

hitting the bullseye is united with the consciousness of its own fallibility
and provisional character, indicates, as do most historically surviving ter-
minologies, something about the form, something to be taken all the more
seriously in that it takes place not systematically but rather as a characteris-
tic of an intention groping its way. The essay has to cause the totality to be
illuminated in a partial feature, whether the feature be chosen or merely
happened upon, without asserting the presence of the totality. (EaF:
25, NtL1: 16)
What is suggested in this passage is the existence of a peculiar formal

isomorphism between the essay and its object, namely the fact that both
are dominated by the same logical structure. Regardless of what the form
expresses—in this case, the untruth of social totality—of great interest is
the way in which the form is conceived, that is to say, by means of the
recognition of a logical principle. The form of the essay, writes Adorno,
“is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like.
[…] more closed, because it works emphatically at the form of its presen-
tation. Consciousness of the non-identity of presentation and subject
matter forces presentation to unremitting efforts. In this alone the essay
resembles art” (EaF: 26, NtL1: 17–18). This means that what defines
form, both in the case of essays and in that of literature in general, is the
unitary principle that keeps together the elements of what is made with-
out being conceptually expressed.
26
In addition to the fragmentary structure of the essay in correspondence to that of reality, as Ulrich
Plass (Plass 2007, pp. 25–29) remarks, the essay maintains a sort of openness, an asymptotic rela-
tionship to an accomplished form that remembers the logic of the utopia. See also Christian Scharf
Schärf (1999, p. 275).
27
As Shierry Weber Nicholsen suggests, hence, it is precisely the formal quality of the a-conceptual
linking of particulars what forms the affinity of essays with art and literature (Nicholsen 1997,
p. 110). Analogously, Hullot-Kentor (2006, p. 130) points out that according to Adorno’s writing
the essay “shares with art its aspect of presentation”, that is, its formal structure.
164 M. Farina
Based on what we have seen, namely the idea that the form corre-
sponds to the ground logical principle that keeps together the elements of
the work, in other words the most essential and necessary law that rules
on the space of the product, it is now possible to give a concrete example
of what literary form can be, even though Adorno has never explicitly
bothered to do this. Form corresponds to the identifying principle of the
work. It is thanks to the form that we can distinguish different literary
products, for example Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse—
being form “everything appearing in the artwork”, or rather “that by
which the appearing determines itself ”—and the very individuality of
these particular forms is precisely what Adorno considers as conceptually
indefinable, discernible just through the critical exercise of literary analy-
sis. The formal dimension, however, has also a more general connotation;
it is in fact the form what allows to identify different literary genres,28
types, and forms, and in this case, thanks to its generality, intellectual
thought—that operates through abstract and general concepts—has a
handhold to concretely exemplify what form is. Therefore, instead of
focusing on the specific form of one particular literary product, I believe
that the comparing of the three traditional literary forms, drama, poetry,
and novel, will allow to make headway in the investigation of the nature
of the formal element Adorno has in mind in his accounts.
It cannot be said that Adorno has been very concerned with the dra-
matic form, surely not as much as his friend Benjamin. Nevertheless, as
is well known, one of his most beloved authors is the playwright, Samuel
Beckett, to whom he has dedicated the essay, “Trying to Understand
Endgame”, that depicts what life means in the late capitalistic disen-
chanted condition.29 The main argument of the text concerns “the explo-
sion of the metaphysical meaning” taken as the content of Beckett’s piece,
a content that does not simply convey a negative meaning as in existen-
tialist writings, but rather the impossibility to understand something as a
28
As I will show in the next chapter, Eva Geulen derives her theory of literary genre in Adorno from
the idea that according to him, “the dialectic of particular and universal, of general genre and indi-
vidual work, is immanent to each (authentic) artwork” (Geulen 2006, p. 57).
29
This is how Alastair Morgan (2007, pp. 112–114) presents Beckett as one of the figures of the
exhaustion of life that for Adorno defines the late modern age.
meaning in general,30 and that content, “however, disrupts the dramatic

form down to its linguistic infrastructure”. Unlike what happens in
Sartre, where the negativity of existence is conveyed through a traditional
form as the explicit intention of the author, in Beckett’s composition is
the form itself that is permeated by the absence of sense, a process that
Adorno describes as follows:
The explosion of the metaphysical meaning, which was the only thing
guaranteeing the unity of the aesthetic structure, causes the latter to crum-
ble with a necessity and stringency in no way unequal to that of the tradi-
tional canon of dramatic form. […] Through its own organized
meaninglessness, action must model itself on what has transpired with the
truth content of drama in general. (VE: 282–283, NtL1: 242)
What matters to Adorno is the fact that in Beckett what can be taken
as the content is not directly said through the voice of the characters—as
in Sartre’s engaged theater he harshly criticizes in the essay
“Commitment”—but it aesthetically emerges from the literary form, that
in the case of the drama consists in the action. In this respect, when
Adorno employs the word “form” in the context of drama, what he means
is strictly speaking the chaining of actions that happens in the play. This
is the unitary principle of the drama, namely the fact that to an action
corresponds a reaction, or even the absence of reaction, and the form of
the play can be identified with the exposition of actions, in line with the
modern elaboration of the Aristotelian theory of drama.31
Adorno’s characterization of drama provides then a first concrete
example of what a literary form can be. Its purpose is increasingly clear
30
Nigel Mapp (2006, pp. 161–162) points out that Adorno takes the process of disenchantment as
extended to the sphere of language, and therefore of meaning, as exemplified by Samuel Beckett’s
dramas and novels.
31
In the Poetics, Aristotle writes that “this in fact […] is the reason for plays being termed dramas,
because in a play the personages act the stories” (Aristotle 1985, 1448a 28–29, p. 2317).
Analogously, Hegel in the Aesthetics says that drama “displays a complete action as actually taking
place before our eyes” (Hegel 1975, p. 1158). The central role of the action in the determination of
the form of drama, especially in relationship with Aristotle’s definition, is clearly exemplified in one
of the most relevant literary treatises of German classical aesthetics, namely Lessing’s Hamburg
Dramaturgy, for example, where the poet discusses the role of history in dramatic actions (Lessing
1962, pp. 51–52).
166 M. Farina
especially if we compare the interpretation of drama with that of other

literary forms, in which the action does not consist in the pivotal formal
element, as in the case of poetry. Adorno’s conception of the poetic form
can be found in the essay, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”, where he tries
to explain how an individual, intimate product such as lyric poetry can
be taken as the expression of a social content. This transition from an
isolate inwardness to the external social world is possible, according to
Adorno, not through the explicit argument about how the world dam-
ages the subject, but rather by means of the creation of a formal space in
which the subject finds itself at home and that, once compared with the
external world, reveals the alienated condition of social reality. In the
lyric, writes Adorno, “a second immediacy is promised: what is human,
language itself, seems to become creation again, while everything external
dies away in the echo of the soul”, since it is only in this way that “in
every lyric poem the historical relationship of the subject to objectivity, of
the individual to society, must have found its precipitate in the medium
of a subjective spirit thrown back upon itself ” (RüL: 54, 55, NtL1: 41,
42). Even more explicitly, while describing the way in which lyric poetry
expresses its social content, that is, according to what we have seen, while
describing its form, Adorno suggests that
the medium of this is language. The paradox specific to the lyric work, a
subjectivity that turns into objectivity, is tied to the priority of linguistic
form […]. Hence the highest lyric works are those in which the subject,
with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until
language itself acquires a voice. The unself-consciousness of the subject
submitting itself to language as to something objective, and the immediacy
and spontaneity of that subject’s expression are one and the same: thus
language mediates lyric poetry and society in their innermost core. (RüL:
56, NtL1: 43)
Obviously, literature is always made of language. The specificity of

poetry, however, is that of having the language itself, the juxtaposition of
every single word, of every single linguistic atom, as the essential element
of the form.32 The form, in poetry, is the language itself, in the sense in
which a syntactic structure, namely the parataxis, defines Hölderlin’s
poetry better than any other quality, as in his late compositions “the
transformation of language into a serial order whose elements are linked
differently than in the judgment is music like”, without being at the same
time musical.33 By means of parataxis—namely, the composition of
words that refrains as much as possible from conceptual and judgmental
correlation—“the indictment of an act of violence on the part of spirit
[…] searches for a linguistic form that would escape the dictates of spirit’s
own synthesizing principle”, and it is always the paratactic structure what
“puts explication without deduction in the place of a so-called train of
thought”. The structural correlation of linguistic elements, therefore, is
precisely what defines poetry as such, as in the case of Hölderlin where
the paratactic consecution “gives form its primacy over content, even the
intellectual content. The content is transposed into the poetic substance
in that form accommodates to it and decreases the weight of the specific
moment of thought, the synthetic unity” (P: 472, NtL2: 131–132).
The prevailing position of language in poetry, of the syntactic disposi-
tion itself, and the formal centrality of action in drama clearly do not
exclude that dramatic writings could have a focus on language, as for
example in Beckett, or that poetry could expose actions. What I intend
to show is the fact that form, as the distinctive element of an artwork, can
be identified with a predominant legislating tension that gives a coher-
ence to a literary product, a tension that in the case of poetry is deter-
mined by the logic of language, whereas in the case of drama by action.
Moreover, a predominant legislating principle can be recognized also for
one literary product that more than others seems to defy any kind of
formal structure, that is, the novel. As Adorno opens his essay about
the novel,
32
This is why Eva Geulen suggests the pivotal role of lyric in Adorno’s literary theory, precisely “on
account of its ostentatious linguisticality, what Adorno calls ‘the primacy of language’” (2006, p. 59).
33
As Simon Jarvis remarks, Adorno does not escape from the obvious musical element that distin-
guishes poetic language. What he means, however, is that such musicality is something that has to
be listened into poetry, namely by means of the structure, and not through the external sound (see
Jarvis 2006, pp. 82–90).
168 M. Farina
the task of compressing some remarks on the current status of the novel as
form into the space of a few minutes forces me to select, albeit by doing
violence, one aspect of the problem. This must be the position of the nar-
rator. Today that position is marked by a paradox: it is no longer possible
to tell a story, but the form of the novel requires narration. (SdE:
41, NtL1: 30)
In Adorno’s view, the form of the novel—as I will investigate in more

detail in the next chapter—has to be defined in light of the modifications
recorded by the issue of the narrator, or rather by the problem of the
“Epic I”, namely the guarantee of the unity of the narration itself, that is,
what defines the novel as form. The “I”, the voice that seems to tell a
story, corresponds then to the most decisive formal element of the novel,
or rather to what is able to discern the novel from the other kinds of liter-
ary forms.
As far as we have seen, even if the notion of form cannot be isolated
from the content in a concrete literary product, it is possible to get close
to it by means of a particularization of the general notion of literary form.
The form of a single literary product, in fact, is a particular configuration
that is not identical to the general literary form to which it belongs, but
that shares with the general form its own basic normative law.34 As I have
already pointed out, Adorno does not negate the rule of general artistic
forms and genres, as he also never denies the individuality of the work in
relation to its general concept. Taking up the example that I have men-
tioned, the formal distinction between the Ulysses and To the Lighthouse is
something to be extracted through the analysis of how the particular
form of those novels reflects a concrete modification of the general liter-
ary form of the novel, being the decisive issue of the novel the issue of the
I’s capacity to institute a legality that hosts and keeps together the ele-
ment of a story.
34
This kind of relation between particular and universal in the work of art has been addressed by
Adorno in the already quoted essay “Art and the Arts”. Although in that context what is at stake is
the relationship between the single art form, and the single work, with the general idea of art, based
on what is suggested by Stewart Martin (2006, pp. 18–10), it is fair to say that Adorno’s argument
follows the same logic I have exposed in this paragraph.
4.4 The Content and the Author

After having clarified how literary form is understood by Adorno, one
needs to focus on the other—and apparently less problematic—pole of
literary dialectics, namely the content. If form is the how of literature, the
content can be understood as its what, that is as what a literary text
means. In the first section of this chapter, I have marked the boundaries
of something like the aboutness of literature, namely the portion of real-
ity that literature alludes to. In this sense, the issue of content has already
been sketched. In this section, however, what I intend to do is to specify
precisely the notion of content and, in particular, to clear the field of
some misunderstandings concerning how the content should be taken.
In particular, I will come back to the vexata quaestio affecting any content-
related approach to literature, that is to say, the role of the author, or
creator, in the determination of the content. This clarification will hope-
fully allow to understand how the notion of content should instead be
taken in Adorno’s terms.
It would be no exaggeration to suggest that one of the main problems
in a philosophical comprehension of literature concerns the role of the
author. Among the greatest turns in literary aesthetics has to be counted,
in fact, what the contemporary debate still defines as the issue of “the
death of the author”, as announced by the title of Roland Barthes’ essay
from 1968. Taken as one of the many turning points between modernism
and postmodernism,35 Barthes’ text actually explicitly and clearly states
something that was in the air already in T.S. Eliot’s idea of depersonaliza-
tion. While speaking about Mallarmé’s poetry Barthes suggests that “it is
language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite
impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of
the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘per-
forms’, and not ‘me’” (Barthes 1977, p. 143), his words echo in fact Eliot’s
theory of the impersonality of poetry. In his 1919 essay, “Tradition and
Individual Talent”, indeed, Eliot suggests that
35
See, for example, Peter Lamarque (2009, p. 107), who suggests that Barthes’ essay is the end of a
literary critique based on the author’s intention.
170 M. Farina
there are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in
verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical
excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant
emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of
the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this
impersonality without surrounding himself wholly in the work to be done.
(Eliot 1986, p. 58)
Both in Eliot and Barthes—despite of how the modernist critique of

Romanticism and structuralism may differ in their determination of what
the effective content of poetry is36—the issue of the author’s contribution
in the determination of the content is sharply addressed. Moreover, it
would not be foolish to assert that the notion of a philosophical critique
of literature starts exactly from the idea of the author as genius. This idea
was developed along the lines of a certain unaccountability of the subjec-
tive individuality behind the work of art, as testified, for example, by the
early Romantic rhetoric of geniality, as well as by the Hegelian “inspira-
tion of the artist” as an “unfree passion, like an alien power within” him
or her (Hegel 2007, § 560, p. 260).
The role of the creator/author in the determination of literary content
is also a recurrent issue in the modern philosophical investigation of lit-
erature, as the current debate between anti-intentionalism and intention-
alism in analytic philosophy clearly shows.37 An issue that plays a decisive
role also in Adorno’s determination of literary content, especially in
defining how literary works have to be interpreted, namely, how “the
translation of their formal elements into content” has to be accomplished.
In particular, in the already quoted text about “The Essay as Form”,
Adorno addresses the process of literary interpretation through the redef-
inition of Hegel’s idea of the objective content of the work, and he
36
Remarks on the modernist, namely Eliot’s, heritage in the general issue of the death of the author
can be found in Bora 2017, pp. 45–51.
37
For example, when Jerrold Levinson writes that “the core meaning of a literary work is given by
the best hypothesis, from the position of an appropriately informed, sympathetic, and discriminat-
ing reader, of authorial intent to convey such and such to an audience through the text in question”
(Levinson 2006, p. 302), he is proposing what he defines as a “hypothetical intentionalism”, that is
an answer to anti-intentionalism, namely to the theoretical positions that sharply distinguish
between author’s intention and work’s meaning. For a reconstruction of this debate, see Lamarque
2009, 115–128.
e laborates an argument that, to an extent, anticipates Barthes’ theory of

the death of the author, with the difference that, while Barthes’ concept
can be taken as the description of authorship in the historical context
created by late capitalist conditions,38 Adorno understands the separation
between the author’s intention and the literary content as constitutive of
the autonomy of literature itself. What is distinctive of his position, in
fact, is the persistence with which he states the necessity of literary inter-
pretation, conceived as the attempt to go beyond the superficial character
of the text, namely beyond what the text explicitly says. Adorno’s essay
can be taken both as a refinement of Lukács’ theory of essay and as a
polemical blow against the conservative cultural philistinism of post-war
Germany which, instead of developing an accomplished theory of liter-
ary interpretation, blamed any genuine hermeneutics as impotent specu-
lation.39 At variance with the “prohibition against saying more than was
meant right then and there”, Adorno takes literary interpretation as “the
subject’s efforts to penetrate what hides behind the facade under the
name of objectivity” (EaF: 10, NtL1: 4), having thereby access to what he
takes as the proper content of the work. What Adorno wants to discard is
the idea that literary interpretation—again, the translation of formal ele-
ments into content—could be identified with the isolation of a linear
conceptual message that someone has decided to communicate through
an aesthetic literary form, since “interpretation then becomes nothing
but removing an outer shell to find what the author wanted to say, or
possibly the individual psychological impulses to which the phenomenon
points”; on the contrary, and this is a consequence of Adorno’s core
notion of literature, “the author’s impulses are extinguished in the objec-
tive content they seize hold of ” (EaF: 11, NtL1: 4), and this objective
content is nothing but the crystallization of individual impulses in a liter-
ary form. Form, as we have seen, is in fact what defines literature and art
against other phenomena, and any literary interpretation has to begin
with the assumption of form as the autonomy structure that defines
38
See how Graham Allen (2003, 73–77) defines “The Death of the Author” as the main turning
point of Barthes from a structuralist to a post-structuralist comprehension of cultural phenomena.
39
The relevance for Adorno of the issue of conformism of literary criticism in post-war Germany
has been highlighted by Ulrich Plass (2007, p. xxv), by scrutinizing the question in the essay “On
the Crisis of Literary Criticism”, also published in the Notes to Literature.
172 M. Farina
literary content. Differently, to identify the content with the subjective

intentions of the author would amount to identifying what literature
means with what a single man has thought and instrumentally designated
in a literary form; this is precisely what according to Adorno the engaged
conception of art does, thereby earning strong criticism.
One of the most representative models of the practice of objective
interpretation of literature can be found, for example, in Hegel’s famous
understanding of the Greek tragedy Antigone. In a remarkable section of
the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel conceives Sophocles’ tragedy as the
literary expression of the basic social conflict of the polis, that is of the
historic condition of spirit in ancient Greece.40 The conflict that the trag-
edy presents, that between Antigone’s law of family and Creon’s law of
State,41 consist in the literary formal crystallization of a structural and
intimate division within Greek society itself that, being still devoid of the
modern mediation tool of civil society, is unable to peacefully settle its
conflicts. Since the author is rooted in that social—or in Hegel’s terms
spiritual—framework, the nature of the historical contradiction can be
expressed by him. What is clear, however, is that Hegel does not imagine
Sophocles sitting at his desk with the intention to express the polis’ con-
flicts. On the contrary, what Hegel calls in some sort of mystic terms
inspiration, that is, the author’s unfree pathos, is essentially shaped by the
social tensions in which he has grown up. The author acts, therefore, as a
middle term, which by means of personal choices and taste gives shape to
the particular form that the historical content acquires. In this sense, in
opposition to any psychological understanding of literature, the content
of the work does not correspond to the author’s intentions. With Adorno’s
words, the author is a deputy (Statthalter), as the title of one of his essays
about Valéry suggests (“The Artist as Deputy”), namely someone who
represents something else. This is why “the artist is to remake himself into
an instrument, to become a thing himself if he does not want to succumb
to the curse of anachronism in a reified world”, and “with this, Valery
40
As Robert R. Williams asserts, “in ancient Greek tragedy which is our focus here, Tragedy is a
conflict between important substantial interests, e.g., the main institutions of ethical life such as
family and state” (Williams 2012, p. 126).
41
For a short recap of Antigone’s plot and for its meaning in Hegel’s Phenomenology, see Terry
Pinkard 2002, pp. 234–235.
attacks the extremely widespread conception of the work of art that

ascribes it, on the model of private property, to the one who produces it”
(AaS: 122, NtL1: 104). By following this notion of author and author-
ship, one can see in which sense Adorno’s theorization of literature dispels
the idea that the content of literature could be identified with the theo-
retical position of the author or directly with the idea expressed by the
characters, as “mouthing profundities will no more make a man pro-
found than narrating the metaphysical views of its characters will make a
novel metaphysical” (ND: 28, ND: 16). The personality of the author
disappears hence behind the work, as in the famous saying by Flaubert,
who wanted to write a book about “nothing”.42
Therefore, literary content is not a philosopheme taken from a novel,
a pill of wisdom, a brilliant sentence, or a commonsense quotation, as
those that can be written on motivational posters. To interpret literature,
hence, does not mean to isolate a meaningful idea expressed by a charac-
ter, or by the narrator, and identify the content with it. For example,
Stephen Dedalus’ idea of Irish art as “the cracked looking-glass of a ser-
vant” (Joyce 2000, p. 6) is by no means the meaning of Joyce’s Ulysses, it
is rather one of the elements that compose the cosmos of the novel and
that collaborates in creating its content.
In order to clarify what literary content is, it can be helpful to compare
how Adorno discriminates, although not rigorously, the two different but
similar words that express in German the notion of content, namely:
Inhalt and Gehalt.43 In his essay on Hölderlin, “Parataxis”, in fact, he
writes that “only through the hiatus, the form, does the content [lnhalt]
become essential content [Gehalt]” (P: 470, NtL2: 129).44 Regardless of
the particular issue Adorno is arguing for in this passage,45 what he
42
The quotation comes from the letter dated January 19, 1852, that Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet
(see Flaubert 1980, p. 154).
43
Robinson 2018, pp. 41–41 takes the difference between Inhalt and Gehalt as a technical termi-
nological choice. It is true that, when Adorno wants to differentiate two different levels of content,
he applies the distinction of Inhalt (content as argument) and Gehalt (essential content), but in his
works he does not follow the distinction as technical terminology.
44
I have slightly modified the translation, since the English version translates “Gehalt” with “sub-
stance”, whereas I prefer to maintain the assonance with “Inhalt”.
45
In this passage Adorno wants to show to what extent the conceptual argument of Hölderlin’s
poem, “Mnemosyne” (the Idealistic conception that spirit can attain itself only by means of dis-
174 M. Farina
s uggests is that only the literary element of the form is able to turn con-
tent, in the sense of topic, argument, idea, or opinion into content as the
strictly aesthetic literary content, which he is philosophically interested
in. In the quotation from “Parataxis”, the Inhalt represents the concep-
tual argument of the poem, but it can also be understood as the general
representation that the author has in mind, whereas the Gehalt, as the
essential literary content, is the expression of the argument as it is com-
municated by means of literary form. I can image, for example, that any
brilliant observer of U.S. society in the early 1950s could easily glimpse
the problem of young writers destroying their creativity buying heroin in
New York’s ghettos, but what turns this notion into a literary content is
the form in which Ginsberg says
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hys-

terical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an
angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night. (Ginsberg 1980, p. 126)
Far from being the bare statement of a sociological—or emotional,

subjective, natural, and so on—condition, literary content is the sedi-
mentation in a literary form of what German idealism called “spirit”, and
that Adorno with his twentieth-century sensibility considers as the world’s
historical condition, in other words, what it means to be human in a
certain time and under certain conditions. In short, the notion of inter-
pretation that I have outlined in this section, namely the translation of
the formal element into content, amounts to recognizing a literary form
as the expression of the human situation, being at the same time a cri-
tique of that historical reality, as we have seen in the theory of the double
character of art. Now, it should be clear why Adorno criticizes any psy-
chological explanation of literary content and why the content cannot be
identified with the following argument:
tance) becomes a proper literary content only through the formal, linguistic, element of the hiatus.
what artists can say they say only through the configuration [Gestaltung],
not by letting that form deliver a message. Among the sources of error in
the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disas-
trous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to
say, with the content [Gehalt] of the work. In reaction, the content of the
artwork is increasingly lodged in what has not been cathected by the artist’s
subjective intentions, whereas content is blocked in works in which inten-
tion, whether as fabula docet or as philosophical thesis, demands primacy.
(Ä: 226, AT: 150)
4.5 Interpreting Literature: The Case

of Franz Kafka
Based on what I have pointed out in this chapter, a philosophy of litera-
ture has to be taken as that concrete exercise of philosophical thought
that elucidates the nature of literary products in the framework of a his-
torical understanding of reality. A philosophy of literature, according to
Adorno, is therefore not a discipline that asserts something about litera-
ture and its abstract—that is, forever valid—conditions of possibility, but
rather it is a critical practice in which philosophy, by specifying literature
as a philosophical problem, takes position toward reality itself; literature,
in fact, is a product of human social labor and for this reason it cannot be
neutrally conceived. The best way to understand this process, however, is
to show how it concretely works in the interpretation of a particular liter-
ary product. Among the many authors that Adorno takes in account, my
choice has fallen on the work of Franz Kafka for many reasons. First of
all, Adorno takes Kafka as one of the most paradigmatic authors for the
genre of novel, similar to what is Schönberg for new music, Beckett for
theater, and Hölderlin for lyrical poetry. Furthermore, his essay on Kafka,
because of its exceptional clarity and argument delimitation, is one of the
best examples of what it means for Adorno to turn literature into a philo-
sophical problem. Moreover, in spite of the relevance of Kafkian themes
in Adorno, in this book I have so far given priority to other authors—like
Mann, Beckett, and Proust—and now it seems fair to restore to Kafka the
centrality he deserves. By reviewing Adorno’s philosophical account on
176 M. Farina
Kafka’s novels, my aim is to present a concrete paradigm of literary inter-

pretation as one of the outcomes of a philosophy of literature.
Written in the form of nine fragments, the only essay that Adorno
explicitly dedicated to Kafka has been drafted between 1942 and 1953,
and published in 1955 as closing text of the collection, Prisms, under the
title “Notes on Kafka” (“Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka”). What makes this
essay particularly relevant from a methodological point of view is the fact
that in its pages Adorno directly faces up to the challenge of interpreta-
tion by insisting on the risk of “confounding the abstract thesis of Kafka’s
work, the obscurity of the existent, with its essential content [Gehalt]”
(AzK: 255, Pr: 246).46 As Adorno remarks, Kafka’s “two great novels, The
Castle and The Trial, seem to bear the mark of philosophical theorems”,
and this makes it remarkably hard to discern the content of his literary
work, as “Kafka’s works protected themselves against the deadly aesthetic
error of equating the philosophy that an author pumps into a work with
its metaphysical content [Gehalt]”, while at the same time “the artist is
not obliged to understand his own art, and there is particular reason to
doubt whether Kafka was capable of such understanding” (AzK: 256, Pr:
247). In Kafka, hence, is notably relevant to differentiate the philosophy
of the author—namely, the particular concept that the author wishes to
insert in the writing—from the essential content of the work, that is what
formally results from the author’s work. This is why, according to Adorno,
the existentialist interpretation of Kafka’s works amounts to a superficial
understanding that takes him for “an information bureau of the human
condition” (AzK: 254, Pr: 245), precisely inasmuch as it mistakes Kafka’s
own idea of the grayness of life he effectively expresses in The Trial with
the substantial content of the novel.
Thus, in order to overcome the problem concerning how to conceive
the elements of Kafka’s writing that may be subjected to an existentialist,
ontological, or directly philosophical explanation, Adorno states what
can be understood as the first methodological point of his literary inter-
pretation: “Take everything literally; cover up nothing with concepts
invoked from above. Kafka’s”—but in general literature’s—“authority is
Also in this case, I have modified the translation of Gehalt (“substance” in Weber’s English
46
version).
textual” (AzK: 257, Pr: 247). This means that, in reading a literary text,
at first sight one should not give in to the temptation to symbolically read
every enigmatic element, being a symbolic interpretation based upon the
principle according to which individual moments of the work of art point
beyond themselves by virtue of their interrelations.47 On the contrary,
when a literary text presents something that shows the necessity to be
interpreted, the reader has firstly to try and understand it in its literal
sense. Instead of taking the mythical court of The Trial as the symbol of
human power in general and the condition of the defendant, Joseph K.,
as that of the misery of the individual, the novel should be taken as rep-
resenting nothing but the mere fact that a man has been accused by an
unknown tribunal for a crime he is not guilty of. This methodological
principle is crucial as “without the principle of literalness as criterion, the
ambiguities of Kafka would dissolve into indifferent equivalence”; accord-
ing to Adorno, literalness serves its purpose inasmuch as it “invalidates
the most commonly held conception of the author, one which seeks to
unite in him the claim to profundity with equivocation”. Furthermore it
is precisely according to this kind of literalness that the prose of Kafka
produces a shock, as “it is not the horrible which shocks, but its self-
evidence” (AzK: 258, Pr: 248).
To deal with Kafka’s prose is not the attempt to solve its enigma by
dissolving it through an artificial explanation that makes the meaning
clear and explicit; instead, “the attitude that Kafka assumes towards
dreams should be the reader’s towards Kafka. He should dwell on the
incommensurable, opaque details, the blind spots” (AzK: 258, Pr: 248).
Arguably, the principle of literalness—and this can be seen as the sec-
ond methodological point of literary interpretation that Adorno displays
in his essay—has the same role that in psychoanalysis is played by the
notion of reality of psychic phenomena. In an explicit parallelism between
the psychoanalytic method and the literary significance of Kafka’s ele-
ments, Adorno remarks that “Freud conceived of an archetypal scene
such as the murder of the primal father, a pre-historical narrative such as
that of Moses, or the young child’s observation of its parents having
47
This definition can be found in Adorno’s essay on Kafka (AzK: 254–255, Pr: 245) and it alludes
to Benjamin’s debasement of symbol in Trauerspiels Buch (see, Benjamin 1998, pp. 159–160).
178 M. Farina
sexual relations, not as products of the imagination but in large measure

as real events” (AzK: 261, Pr: 251). The primal violent scene to which
Adorno refers here is often presented by Freud not by highlighting its real
occurrence in front of the child, but rather as a psychological phenome-
non that has to be taken as real according to its effect on child develop-
ment, regardless of its external effectiveness.48 The use of Freud’s notion
of interpretation as paradigmatic is a common thread in Adorno. Already
in his first conference, The Actuality of Philosophy, he insists on the inter-
pretation of the enigmatic nature of reality in a stark parallelism with
Freud’s example of rebus as an example of interpretation of dreams.49 In
this case, suggesting an analogy between the Freudian account of the real-
ity of the psychological dimension and Kafka’s literariness, Adorno is
defining a specific methodological point. As the reality of the primal
scene consists in its effect on individual development, the literariness of
Kafka’s writings does not mean an actual belief in the existence of what it
represents, but rather it indicates the fruitfulness and effectiveness of the
interpretation that takes Kafka literally, since “this is the function of
Kafka’s literalness. As though conducting an experiment, he studies what
48
As Freud writes in his essay, “On the Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), “I have not been able
to ascertain that children recognize this behavior which they have witnessed between their parents
as the missing link needed for solving the problem of babies; it appears more often that the connec-
tion is overlooked by them for the very reason that they have interpreted the act of love as an act of
violence” (Freud 1959, pp. 220–221).
49
Adorno describes the philosophical notion of interpretation as follows: “Anyone who interprets
while searching for a world-in-itself behind the phenomenal world, a world that underlies and sup-
ports the latter, is acting like someone who hopes to find in the puzzle the likeness of a Being sited
behind it, a likeness that mirrors the puzzle on which it is based; whereas the function of the solu-
tion to the puzzle is to illuminate the shape of the puzzle for the briefest of instants and to sublate
it, not to cling to it and mimic it. Authentic philosophical interpretation does not hit upon a mean-
ing that is already clinging to the other side of the question; rather, it suddenly and momentarily
illuminates the question and consumes it at the same time” (AdP: 335, PRP). It is interesting to
compare this with what Freud says about dreams interpretation as the resolution of a rebus: “The
dream-content on the other hand is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the character of
which has to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted
to read these characters according to their pictorial values instead of according to their symbolic
relation, we should clearly be led into error. Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me.
It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, […] and so on […]. We can only form a proper judge-
ment of the rebus if we […] try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be
represented by that element in some way or other. The words that are put together in this way are
no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase or the greatest beauty and significance. A
dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort” (Freud 1953, IV, pp. 277–278).
would happen if the results of psychoanalysis were to prove true not

merely metaphorically but in the flesh” (AzK: 262, Pr: 251).
In this way, by taking literature not as a symbolic system of meanings
but literally throughout, any form of subjectivism is blown away from
interpretation, as only the text has authority. This is the ultimate similar-
ity of Kafka’s prose with psychoanalysis, the fact that “personality is trans-
formed from something substantial into a mere organizational principle
of somatic impulses” (AzK: 262, Pr: 251).
By interpreting Kafka this way, his novels cease to simply appear as the
symbolic representation of a bureaucratic power, as the adjective “Kafkian”
seems to indicate in feuilleton’s language, and they begin to literally—in
the sense that I have described—express the real historical condition of
humanity. Only literariness allows to recognize the most prominent ele-
ment of shock, the fact that in Kafka “the déjà vu is declared permanent”,
as “each sentence says ‘interpret me’, and none will permit it. Each com-
pels: the reaction, ‘that’s the way it is’, and with it the question, ‘where
have I seen that before?’” (AzK: 255, Pr: 246). All the creatures of Kafka’s
world have literally been already seen by the readers and can be easily
recognized by them. “The sameness”, observes Adorno, “or intriguing
similarity of a variety of objects is one of Kafka’s most persistent motifs;
all possible demi-creatures step forward in pairs, often marked by the
childish and the silly, oscillating between affability and cruelty like sav-
ages in children’s books”, and this is the literariness in which the world
appears in Kafka: “the realm of the déjà vu is populated by doubles, rev-
enants, buffoons, Hasidic dancers, boys who ape their teachers and then
suddenly appear ancient, archaic” (AzK: 264, Pr: 252–253). What
Adorno suggests is the fact that Kafka’s literary images, precisely in the
seriousness of their literal buffoonery, are able to show what the world
really is. In The Trial, Joseph K. has the impression that his executors
resemble tenors (Kafka 2009a, p. 162), by bringing this way to the
extreme the cruelty of an execution depicted as a vaudeville’s running
gag. I bet that no one of Kafka’s readers has ever been really escorted to
the scaffold, but I guess that each one of them has familiarity with the
dream-association mode based on which a couple of executioners could
be taken for tenors because of their large double chin.
180 M. Farina
The world that Kafka depicts in his writings, as any reader immediately
remarks, gives the impression of being placed somewhere between the
past and the future, without being recognizable as the actual present. It is
not the image of an alternative present, but rather the realistic feeling of
the way in which things are going bad. This is why, for Adorno, Kafka’s
world is in no way a non-historical one, since his demi-creatures are able
to show “the social origin of the individual” that “ultimately reveals itself
as the power to annihilate him”. Kafka does not try to stage a critique of
social power, as engaged literature does by virtually setting outside the
ties of that power; he rather “scrutinizes the smudges left behind in the
deluxe edition of the book of life by the fingers of power” (AzK: 264–265,
268, Pr.: 253, 256). The way to express history, as Beckett’s dramas teach,
is not to bring on stage Mother Courage fighting for her children and
allegorically describe the inhumanity of power, but instead to show the
literal condition of humanity in its parasitic and mimetic resistance to
power. Joseph K. and the land surveyor K. are doomed to be punished
right from the beginning exactly as they oppose their strength of will to
what they perceive as an injustice. Differently, only literally becoming a
parasite—as Gregor Samsa does in The Metamorphosis—human beings
can still hope for salvation, not for themselves but for someone else, as it
happens at the end of the short story, when Gregor’s death frees his family
from the oppression of the typically childish cruelty of Kafka’s side char-
acters, the gentlemen-lodgers:
Leaning on the banisters, they watched as the three gentlemen went slowly
but steadily down the long staircase, disappearing at a bend in the stairs at
each floor and reappearing after a few moments; the lower they went, the
more the Samsa family lost interest in them, and when a butcher’s boy
came climbing proudly towards them and then higher up above them, tray
on head, Herr Samsa soon left the landing with the women and they all
returned, as if relieved, into their apartment. (Kafka 2009b, p. 73)
History does not emerge in the representation of an identifiable power

that can be actively defeated—maybe hit with a pan, as in Chaplin’s Great
Dictator50—on the contrary, it emerges in the social origin of the indi-

vidual in the apparently non-historical world of Kafka’s negative utopia.
This is how Adorno shows in which sense literary interpretation consists
in the translation of formal elements into content. My reconstruction of
Adorno’s argument, in fact, has started from the observation of the enig-
matic character of single formal elements, as literary images are, only to
end up with the expression of their content, namely the literary represen-
tation of the historical social world. This content does not limit itself to
be expressed in the enigmatic figure from which I have taken my move,
but it crystallizes itself in the very form of the novel, as Adorno shows in
the final part of the essay. The content—as Gehalt—of Kafka’s novels, in
fact, cannot be expressed by the whole pacified unity of the form, but
instead it has to be obtained through the fragment. As it has been sug-
gested, the universe of The Trial resembles the Third Reich, says Adorno
repeating Klaus Mann’s opinion, and this similarity has been felt to such
an extent that one of the most relevant Italian translations of the book has
been made by Primo Levi, writer and Jewish deportee in Auschwitz.51
What Adorno aims to clarify, however, is that this resemblance is made
possible not by means of a whole symbolic correspondence of the Trial’s
society to political fascism, but through the enigmatic fragments that
compose the novel’s form. It is not fascism as an invincible power what
emerges from the novel, but its historical origin in the violence of the
power on the demi-creatures of the world, as Nazism was really “the
smudges left behind in the deluxe edition of the book of life by the fin-
gers of power”; as Adorno writes, “acts of unbridled violence are per-
formed by figures in subordinate positions, types such as non-commissioned
officers, prisoners-of-war and concierges. They are all déclassés, caught up
in the collapse of the organized collective and permitted to survive” (AzK:
272, Pr: 259), and this is why, from a formal point of view, “the fact that
Leni’s fingers are connected by a web, or that the executioners resemble
50
As Adorno writes in his essay “Commitment”: “The Great Dictator also loses its satirical force and
becomes offensive in the scene in which a Jewish girl hits one storm trooper after another on the
head with a pan without being torn to pieces” (E: 418, NtL2: 84).
51
The author of If This Is a Man (1947) translated Kafka’s novel in 1983, four years before taking
his own life.
182 M. Farina
tenors, is more important than the Excursus on the law” (AzK: 258, Pr:
248), as the fragment takes prevalence over the whole.
This is the formal crystallization of the content in the novel, the crum-
bling of the form into “a parabolic system the key to which has been
stolen” (AzK: 255, Pr: 245), as the linear compactness of the form is
unable to host it. The fragments, the single elements, and in particular
the constant shrilling and contrast between them are what defined the
form of Kafka’s novels in general, in this respect qualifying as the literary
translation of musical twelve-tone dissonance. In Adorno’s own words,
“the fragmentary quality of the three large novels, works which, more-
over, are hardly covered any more by the concept of the novel, is deter-
mined by their inner form. They do not permit themselves to be brought
to an end as the totality of a rounded temporal experience” (AzK: 279,
Pr: 265). What defines the form of the novel, in fact, and this is some-
thing to which I will come back in the next chapter, is the I of the narrat-
ing voice, the “Epic I” of the subject that holds together the world of the
novel, its principle of legality. But the subject of Kafka’s novel is oppressed
by the power of the world, is the subject of expressionism, that screams
out of fear of reality. This kind of subject, as one can see, is unable to
catch his or her world in a linear form, as the world is much more power-
ful as it is. Material things are charged by the power of social produc-
tion—that is, of the social labor that spirit is—and as commodities
commend over the I of the subject:
The more the I of expressionism is thrown back upon itself, the more like
the excluded world of things it becomes. By virtue of this similarity Kafka
forces expressionism – the chimerical aspect of which he, more than any of
his friends, must have sensed, and to which he nevertheless remained faith-
ful – into the form of a torturous epic; pure subjectivity, being of necessity
estranged from itself as well and having become a thing, assumes the
dimensions of objectivity which expresses itself through its own estrange-
ment. The boundary between what is human and the world of things
becomes blurred. (AzK: 275–276, Pr: 262)
The interpreting of literature, as shown by Kafka’s case in the clearest

terms, means therefore for Adorno to commit oneself to develop both a
literary critique and a philosophy of literature. As I have shown in this

paragraph, in fact, any question about the condition of possibility of the
text, about the role of the author, the form, the content, and so on is
inseparable from the practice of critically evaluative literature. Through
the example of Franz Kafka, what I aimed to clarify was that, from
Adorno’s point of view, a philosophy of literature is possible only in terms
of concrete interpretation of literature as a historical product, that is, as a
product of human social labor. In full honesty, one should admit that
literature is a very peculiar example of social labor, since its artistic nature
makes it both an expression and a critique of the social condition from
which it originates. In the next chapter my account will go beyond
Adorno’s own analysis, trying to prove its method on literary products
that are historically subsequent to his life, namely on contemporary
American novels.
References
Allen, Graham. 2003. Roland Barthes. London/New York: Routledge.
Aristotle. 1985. Poetics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes,
vol. 2, 2316–2340. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Death of the Author. In R. Barthes. Image Music
Text, Stephen Head, 142–148. London: Fontana Press.
Behler, Ernst. 1993. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge, UK:
Benjamin, Walter. 1996. The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. In
W. Benjamin. Selected Writings. Volume 1. 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock,
and Michael W. Jennings, 116–200. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard
University Press.
———. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J. Osborne.
Bernstein, Jay M. 1997. Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and
the Possibility of Ethics. In The Semblance of Subjectivity. Essays in Adorno’s
Aesthetics, ed. Tom Huhn, and Lambert Zuidervaart, 177–212. Cambridge,
MA/London: Cambridge University Press.
184 M. Farina
Bora, Sumi. 2017. Is the Author Dead? Juxtaposing the Poet and the Person to
Understand T. S. Eliot, a Notable Modernist. In Spring Magazine on English
Literature III (1): 45–51.
Bowie, Andrew. 2006. Interpretation and Truth: Adorno on Literature and
Music. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp,
40–52. London/New York: Continuum.
Burwick, Frederick. 1991. Illusion and Drama. Critical Theory of Enlightenment
and Romantic Era. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Carroll, Noël, and John Gibson. 2016. Introduction. In The Routledge Companion
to Philosophy of Literature, ed. Noël Carroll, and John Gibson, xxi–xxiii.
New York: Routledge.
Cunningham, David, and Nigel Mapp. 2006. Introduction. In Adorno and
Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 1–5. London/New
York: Continuum.
Eliot, Thomas S. 1986. Tradition and the Individual Talent. In T.S. Eliot. The
Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London/New York: Methuen.
Farina, M. 2019. The Question of Literary Realism: Adorno and the Form of
Novel. In Aesthetic Investigation 3 (2): 65–82.
Feloj, Serena. 2017. Estetica del disgusto. Mendelssohn, Kant e i limiti della rap-
presentazione. Roma: Carocci.
Flaubert, Gustave. 1980. In Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, ed. Francis
Steegmuller. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Foster, Roger. 2018. Adorno and Proust. Memory, Childhood, and the
Experiential Grounds of Social Criticism. In Benjamin, Adorno, and the
Experience of Literature, ed. Corey McCall, and Nathan Ross, 143–158.
New York/London: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund. 1953. The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IV–V, ed. James
Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, 209–226. London-Hogarth.
———. 1959. On the Sexual Theories of Children. In The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IX, James Strachey, in
collaboration with Anna Freud, 209–226. London: Hogarth.
Geulen, Eva. 2006. Adorno and the Poetics of Genre. In Adorno and Literature,
Continuum.
Geuss, Raymond. 2004. Art and Art Criticism in Adorno’s Aesthetics. In Theodor
W. Adorno, ed. Gerard Delanty, vol. II, 137–159. London/Thousand Oak/
New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
Ginsberg, Allen. 1980. The Howl. In Collected Poems 1947–1980, ed.

A. Ginsberg. New York: Harper & Row.
———. 1977. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy.
Trans. H.S. Harris, and W. Cerf. Albany: SUNY.
———. 2007. Philosophy of Mind. Trans. W. Wallace, and A.W. Miller, Rev.
M. Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jarvis, Simon. 2006. The Truth in Verse? Adorno, Wordsworth, Prosody. In
Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 82–98.
Joyce, James. 2000. Ulysses. London/New York: Penguin.
Kafka, Franz. 2009a. The Trial. Trans. M. Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
———. 2009b. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Trans. J. Crick. Oxford:
Kiralyfalvi, Bela. 1985. Georg Lukács or Bertolt Brecht? British Journal of
Aesthetics 25 (4): 340–348.
Kroon, Frederick, and Alberto Voltolini. 2018. Language, Ontology, Fiction. In
The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Barry Stocker, and
Michael Mack, 385–406. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nanay, 1988. The Literary Absolute.
The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. P. Bernard, and
C. Lester. Albany: SUNY.
Lamarque, Peter. 2009. The Philosophy of Literature. Malden: Blackwell.
Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. 1994. Truth, Fiction, and Literature.
A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lessing, Gotthold E. 1962. Hamburg Dramaturgy. Trans. H. Zimmern.
New York: Dover Publications.
Lessing, Gotthold E., Christoph F. Nocolai, and Moses Mendelssohn. 1973.
Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel. In G.E. Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert
G. Göpfert, vol. IV, 155–227. München: Hanser.
186 M. Farina
Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections,

and Replies. In Contemplating Art. Essays in Aesthetics, 302–311. Oxford:
Lukács, Georg. 1957. Il significato attuale del realismo critico. Trans. P. Chiarini.
Torino: Einaudi.
———. 1963. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Trans. J. Mander, and
N. Mander. London: Merlin.
———. 1970. Healthy or Sick Art?. In Writer & Critic and Other Essays. Trans.
A. Kahn, 103–109. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
———. 1974. Soul and Forms. Trans. A. Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mapp, Nigel. 2006. No Nature, No Nothing: Adorno, Beckett, Disenchantment.
In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 159–170.
Martin, Stewart. 2006. Literature and the Modern System of the Arts: Sources
of Criticism in Adorno. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham
and Nigel Mapp, 9–25. London/New York: Continuum.
Marx, Karl. 1970. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed.
Maurice Dobb. Trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya. New York: International Publishers.
Mikkonen, Jukka. 2013. The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction. London/
New Delhi/New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury.
Mittenzwei, Werner. 1967. Die Brecht-Lukács-Debatte. Sinn und Form 19
(I): 235–269.
Morgan, Alastair. 2007. Adorno’s Concept of Life. London: Continuum.
New, Christopher. 1999. Philosophy of Literature. An Introduction. London/New
York: Routledge.
Nicholsen, Shierry W. 1997. Exact Imagination, Late Work. On Adorno’s Aesthetics.
Plass, Ulrich. 2007. Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to
Literature. New York/London: Routledge.
Plato. 2000. The Republic. Trans. T. Griffith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Robinson, Josh. 2018. Adorno’s Poetics of Form. Albany: SUNY.
Schärf, Christian. 1999. Geschichte des Essays: Von Montaigne bis Adorno.
Göttingen: Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Schlegel, Friedrich. 1971. Athenaeum Fragment. In F. Schlegel. Philosophical

Fragments. Trans. P. Firchow, 18–93. Minneapolis/London: University of
Minnesota Press.
Shusterman, Richard. 1994. Eliot as Philosopher. In The Cambridge Companion
to T.S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody, 31–47. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
and Postmodernism. Trans, D. Midgley. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Williams, Robert R. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. Studies in
Hegel and Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolin, Richard. 1997. Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism. In The Semblance of
Subjectivity. Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetics, ed. Tom Huhn, and Lambert
Zuidervaart, 93–122. Cambridge, MA/London: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2004. The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Aesthetische Theorie.
In Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Gerard Delanty, vol. II, 5–30. London/Thousand
Oak/New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
Zola, Émile. 1964. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans.
B.M. Sherman. New York: Haskell House.
Zuidervaart, Lambert. 1991. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. The Redemption of Illusion.
5
Beyond Modernism: The American
Postmodern Novel
Adorno’s aesthetics has been oftentimes read either as an outdated cul-

tural product, namely as one of the last attempts to write an aesthetics
along the lines of the German classical tradition, or as an example of fully
modernist theory of art.1 In both cases, Adorno’s theory is deemed unable
to deal with the most advanced products of late- or postmodernity. In
this concluding chapter, my aim is to show in which sense Adorno’s
aesthetics, taken as a philosophy of literature in the sense outlined in this
book, could be a valid conceptual framework to understand one of the
most debated, influential, and radical literary phenomena of the last fifty
years, namely the so-called postmodern American novel. Although ques-
tionable as a category, the label “postmodern” applied to novels has, in
my opinion, some encompassing advantages, mainly linked to its refer-
ence to a loose historical delimitation (more or less the three decades
1
As to exemplify this abundantly widespread opinion, it will suffice to refer to Max Paddison’s argu-
ment included in a long review of Lenhardt’s translation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (London
1984). Paddison writes that “Aesthetic Theory represents the culmination of Adorno’s lifelong preoc-
cupation with philosophical interpretation of works of art and with the critique of traditional aes-
thetic theories. It is an attempt, from what would now be called a modernist” (Paddison 1987,
p. 357). Famously, the “modernist” imputation is also key to Peter Bürger’s criticism of Adorno’s
aesthetics, by him described as a modernist, pessimistic, theory unable to understand political
avant-garde (see Bürger 1987, p. xix, and in general Bürger 1990, pp. 49–60).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_5
190 M. Farina
between the 1970s and the 1990s) as well as to a given cultural milieu
and sensitivity. An otherwise hard to define literary product is thus cap-
tured and can be discussed as such. After the long cultural war to post-
modernism has come to end, finally becoming a standard intellectual
item, the expression “postmodern novel” can now be used without imply-
ing cultural fetishism, militancy, or affiliation to one of the two sides of
the battle.
While testing an Adorno-inspired conceptual toolbox,2 what I will try
to do in this chapter is to contribute to the clarification of the status of
novels as contemporary literary form, namely through a philosophical
interpretation of three contemporary American novels. This is meant to
show to what extent such an approach allows us to convincingly gather
all three novels under a general literary category, that of American post-
modern novel. The novels I have chosen are Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), and Don
DeLillo’s Underworld (1997).
The reader should know that the case studies here chosen fall within
the problematic coordinates of a concrete literary constellation that I
define, here, as postmodern novel. Other attempts have been made to
find a conceptual framework for this kind of novel and define a literary
genre while explaining their status. I refer here to the work of Tom
LeClair, Frederick Karl, and more recently Stefano Ercolino. Similar to
LeClair’s “systems novel”, Karl’s “mega-novel”, and Ercolino’s “maximal-
ist novel”, my idea of the constellation of postmodern novels aims to find
a general category that explains how different single works can be col-
lected under a common concept; unlike them, I do not intend to isolate
a number of definite characteristics that are supposed to be shared by all
the novels that belong to the constellation of postmodern novels. In his
Maximalist Novel, Ercolino takes the relay from LeClair’s and Karl’s
attempts only to argue that they both fail to grasp some aspects of what
he defines as maximalist novel (Ercolino 2014, pp. 1–10). Whereas
LeClair sees systems novel as dominated by “mastery” and “system
2
From an Hegelian point of view, something similar has been recently attempted by Francesco
Campana in his book The End of Literature, especially in the fourth and fifth chapters where he
draws “from Hegel’s work interpretative elements that will be central to demonstrating the resis-
tance of literature to Danto’s claim for the ‘transgenerical character’ of the thesis” (Campana 2019,
p. 127).
5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel 191
theory” as expression of a liberating utopia face to the economic power

(LeClair 1989, pp. 1–31), Ercolino points out that what is described by
Pynchon is anything but liberating; whereas Karl hinges his idea of mega-
novel—as an open, apparently incomplete, and chaotic form—upon its
being originated by the “American spirit” (Karl 2001, p. 162), according
to Ercolino this does not explain both the world-wide diffusion of such
novels and their appearance outside the USA, as in the case of Roberto
Bolaño’s 2666, or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
Instead of trying to find a different list of characteristics and build a
competing literary category to identify those novels,3 I will attempt to
follow the path I have identified within Adorno’s philosophy of literature,
namely that of an interpretation of postmodern novels from a strictly
“formal” point of view, according to the special meaning of “form”
retrieved within Adorno’s accounts. In so doing, rather than contributing
to the field of history (or theory) of literature, my intention is, more nar-
rowly to provide a philosophical account on the issue of contemporary
novels. Inspired by Adorno’s aesthetics, form is the legal principle of a
literary product and, at the same time, the answer to a historical set of
problems. Along these lines, the American postmodern novel can be
understood as a category that collects a number of works that somehow
react to the same state of affairs by offering a formal answer and develop-
ing the same problematic field. The interpretation of concrete literary
products might then provide the chance to grasp what kind of answer has
been formulated to what kind of material.
Before undertaking the actual scrutiny of the selected novels, a meth-
odological clarification is due. In the light of the previous chapter’s
remarks on form, the reader might still wonder why an Adorno-inspired
philosophy of literature should apply to novels in particular and in what
respect it might yield a theory of the novel. More precisely, the issue of
the normativity of the novel as literary form requires, in my opinion,
some additional comments.
3
From a philosophical point of view, the risk, in fact, is that of a recursive definition of the category.
For example, when Stefano Ercolino defines the category of maximalist novel (Ercolino 2014, pp.
xiii–xiv), he isolates ten characteristics “chosen after intense close readings and syntheses of the
seven novels in question”. The same seven novels are also taken as representative of the category of
maximalist novel, since they comply with those categories.
192 M. Farina
5.1 A Theory of the Novel as Literary Genre

As I have mentioned at the beginning of the third chapter, Adorno deals
with the issue of literary genre by taking into account what he conceives
as the limits of aesthetic nominalism. Borrowing this lexicon from the
Epistemo-Critical Prologue of Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch and developing
his argument through a rigorous study of Croce’s Aesthetics,4 Adorno
traces the persistence of the notion of genre in aesthetics as an instantia-
tion of the relationship between particular and universal. As Eva Geulen
(2006, pp. 53–66) has shown, though, reducing Adorno’s interpretation
of literary genre to the complete depletion of its validity based on the
fraying and fragmentation of art’s borders, as displayed in the essay “Art
and the Arts”—something Juliana Rebetisch and Christine Eichel are
inclined to do5—is too simplistic. There is much more to this question
than “the death of literary genre”. Instead of thoroughly reconstructing
Adorno’s argument—for which I refer the reader to Geulen’s essay—I will
limit myself to highlighting some relevant aspects. First of all, Adorno has
a dialectical idea of literary genre, and this means that the relationship
between each single work and its genre is neither a dissolution of the
former in the latter—as pure rational classicism would assert—nor a
negation of the value of the universal dimension of genre in the particu-
larity of the work, as a strict form of nominalism would maintain. On the
contrary, every production of a particular and completely new work—
namely, what art structurally aims to do—carries with it a reference to the
genre, if only in the form of an opposition. Judging from how Adorno
develops his argument, this dialectical aspect is less influenced by Kant’s
theory of regulative ideas and reflecting judgment—as it is the case for
Benjamin’s notion of “idea” in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue—than by
the dialectics of particular and universal at the very beginning of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, in fact, Hegel shows that when the
4
Benjamin talks about the nominalist approach of Konrad Burdach in historical studies and of
Benedetto Croce in the field of aesthetics in terms of the attitude that negates any kind of general-
ization of particular phenomena (Benjamin 1998, pp. 43–44).
5
Geulen argues that Juliana Rebentisch’s (2003) and Christine Eichel’s (1993) accounts on Adorno’s
aesthetics as negation of artistic genre fail to grasp the dialectic interweaving of universal and par-
ticular put forward by Adorno in particular in Aesthetic Theory.
consciousness affirms the validity of the “Sensuous-Certainty” and tries

to identify truth with the singular thing it deictically alludes to (this
thing), the consciousness always implies a universal element (that of this,
and that of thing), failing this way in purely grasping a simple
particular.6
In his argumentatively dense section about Sensuous-Certainty, Hegel
hints to the necessarily conceptual—namely universal—dimension of
every supposed immediate intuition.7 Along the same lines, Adorno
writes that “the more specific the work, the more truly it fulfills its type:
The dialectical postulate that the particular is the universal has its model
in art” (ÄT: 300, AT: 202). This passage is part of the section of Aesthetic
Theory where Adorno discusses the notion of genre by insisting both on
the need not to identify the work with its type and on the fact that, with-
out a reference to the genre, the work cannot even be thought. Otherwise
stated, the radical individuality to which every work aims—the individu-
ality that has been registered by Croce’s nominalism—can be thought as
such only to the extent that it alludes to a universal dimension in which
it cooperates to fulfill the notion of genre, and this is why “the simple
disjunction of nominalism and universalism does not hold” (ÄT: 299,
AT: 201). It is therefore in the dialectics of universal and particular that
Adorno sees the theoretical key to the explanation of the notion of genre,
since “just as the arts as such do not disappear tracelessly in the general
concept of art, the genres and forms do not merge perfectly into the indi-
vidual art forms. Unquestionably, Attic tragedy was also the crystallization
of no less a universal than the reconciliation of myth. Great autonomous
art originated in agreement with the emancipation of spirit; it could no
more be conceived without an element of universality than could the lat-
ter” (ÄT: 297, AT: 199–200).
6
“If I say: ‘A singular thing,’ then instead I say something entirely universal about it, for everything
is a singular thing. Likewise, this thing is anything one pleases. To characterize it more precisely: As
this piece of paper, every and each bit of paper is a ‘this piece of paper,’ and I have only spoken, as
usual, of the universal” (Hegel 2018, 70, p. 67). On this topic, see Gianluca Garelli’s interpretation
that takes this property of the Sensuous-Certainty as the proper trigger of the phenomenological
movement (Garelli 2010, pp. 60–63).
7
Interestingly, Willem A. deVries sees a parallel between Hegel’s account on Sensuous-Certainty
and Sellars’ notion of intuition not as a mere representation of this, but of this-such, namely as the
particular this within a predicative relationship with a general category (deVries 2008, pp. 65–68).
194 M. Farina
According to what Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, the genre

(Gattung) corresponds to the universal dimension of the formal element
of the particular work, as made clear by the musical example of the fugue.
Adorno, in fact, suggests that “the substantial element of genres and
forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials”, and the
“fugue is the form in which polyphony that has become tonal and fully
rationalized is organized”, polyphony being here the material element of
music in the seventeenth century.8 In this sense, then, the formation of
genres corresponds to the organization of the aesthetic materials around
a historical question, being the material—in the sense of dialectical mate-
rialism—not the raw sensible thing, but rather the expression of power
relationships in the production of social labor.9 Hence, the genre is the
answer to a specific question that originates from the historical state of
affairs, and it can be represented as the way in which a set of works react
to that question. A very peculiar example of genre, a decisive exemplary
instantiation of the universal element of art, according to what is asserted
in the Aesthetic Theory, is the genre of novel. As Adorno says, “the authen-
ticity of individual works is stored away in the genre”, since “the dialectic
of the universal and the particular does not, as does the murky concept of
the symbol, eliminate their difference”, and it turns every work in a cri-
tique of the genre to which it belongs and—precisely by means of this
opposition—in a consolidation and reassertion of genre; “prototypical of
this”, writes Adorno, “is the rise of the novel in the bourgeois age, the rise
of the nominalistic and thus paradoxical form par excellence; every loss of
authenticity suffered by modem art derives from this dialectic” (ÄT: 299,
AT: 201). The novel, hence, is what Adorno understands as a nominalis-
tic form, that is a form at its highest peak of singularity, a literary work in
which is almost impossible to denote what the form is, since its form is
8
On the notion of musical material in Adorno, Max Paddison says that “it is not what ‘musical
sounds’ are in themselves—their natural, physical qualities—that is significant, but rather what
they have become in any particular instance” (Paddison 1993, p. 65). Music material, and aesthetic
material in general, consists in the development of the historical conditions of production under
which the work has been created.
9
This is Adorno’s undogmatic interpretation of Marx’s materialism, as it is presented also by Simon
Jarvis (2004, pp. 91–94). Deborah Cook (2006, 719–721) mentions the Italian communist and
materialist school’s, in particular Lucio Colletti and Sebastiano Timpanaro’s, biologist reduction of
Marx’s notion of material, as the counterpart of Adorno’s critical notion.
the form of the unformed, or as Bakhtin suggests, a form that is yet

uncompleted, qualifying the novel as “the only developing genre”
(Bakhtin 1981, p. 4). Moreover, confirming the theory of the dissolution
and literary reconstruction of the aesthetics, the dialectic of particular
and genre is the intrinsic cause of art’s loss of authenticity, to which litera-
ture reacts with the paradoxical form of the novel.
After having shown the validity of the notion of genre, it is now pos-
sible to outline the basic elements of a theory of the novel as literary
genre. Adorno’s arguments on the topic, which I will outline in what fol-
lows, are laid out in two essays of the first volume of the Notes to Literature,
namely “On Epic Naiveté” (an at the time unpublished fragment of the
Dialectic of Enlightenment), and “The Position of the Narrator in
Contemporary Novel” (published for the first time in 1954 in the journal
Akzenten). What the first essay suggests is a sort of assimilation of the
novel within the story of the epos, or rather the idea that the novel should
be conceived as the modern version of what the epos was for ancient
society. If the Homeric epos consisted in a peculiar form of fluidification
of mythical meaning, modern epos—the novel—is a fluidification of
what in modernity has replaced myth, namely social antagonism. With
this idea, Adorno follows a long-lasting tradition supporting, in various
ways, an analogy with the form of epos and that of the novel, from
Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic predilection for the novel,10 to Lukács’
Theory of the Novel assessing novels as dialectical modification of the epos’
form,11 up to Franco Moretti’s idea of “world texts” as modern epic.12
What I am interested in, however, is how Adorno defines the novel as
genre, namely how—based on the assumption that “the substantial ele-
ment of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their
10
In the “Letter About the Novel”, included in the Dialogue on Poetry, Friedrich Schlegel writes that
“just as our literature began with the novel, so the Greek began with the epic and eventually dis-
solved in it” (Schlegel 1968, p. 101).
11
In Theory of the Novel, Lukács’ idea is that “tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived
in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to
an entirely new form: the novel” (Lukács 1971, p. 41).
12
More precisely, Franco Moretti’s idea is that there is a group of texts (Goethe’s Faust, Joyce’s
Ulysses, Melville’s Moby-Dick, etc.) that exceed the form of the novel, escape the genre, and become
a form of modern epic (see Moretti 1996, pp. 1–3).
196 M. Farina
materials”—he sees the historical materials being organized and giving

rise to the novel as the modern form of the epos.
What Adorno calls epic naiveté, hence, is precisely the organization of
the historical materials into the form of the novel, defined in turn through
the description of “the sound of epic discourse, in which what is solid and
unequivocal comes together with what is ambiguous and flowing, only to
immediately part from it again”, as the “beating of the sea on the rocky
coast” (ÜeN: 34, NtL1: 24). With these words—which bring to mind
Benjamin’s review of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, where exis-
tence, from the point of view of epic, is depicted as the ocean13—Adorno
tries to determine the epic balance between the “amorphous flood of
myth” and the “telos of narrative”, namely the paradoxical form of the
novel as expression, by means of the logical continuity of the plot, of the
rigid and non-fluid—in his vocabulary, mythic—social antagonism. The
continuity that Adorno sees between epic and novel, in fact, consists in
the paradoxical structure of their form, namely the logical-narrative pro-
cess that produces a static and rigid content. This tension, as Adorno
suggests, is expressed by the position of the narrator. “As long as great epic
poetry has existed” writes Adorno “this contradiction has informed the
narrator’s modus operandi” (ÜeN: 35, NtL1: 25), since the ancient epic
process of fluidification of myth consisted in the presentation of it as
something past, shown for example in Homer’s practice of invoking the
muses. In the modern epic, and this is what makes up the continuity
between the two forms, the narrators maintain this kind of naïve attitude,
not toward myth, but toward the history of their own society, inasmuch
as in the process of telling a story they perform an aesthetic presentation,
namely a conciliated exposition, of the events as if they had actually hap-
pened. The narrator’s presentation qualifies therefore as an apology for
how things are not.
This latter aspect allows me to argue that the formal aspect thanks to
which the novel qualifies as a literary expression of history coincides with
the position of the narrator, namely of what can be defined as the “Epic
“From the point of view of epic, existence is an ocean. Nothing is more epic than the sea. One
13
can of course react to the sea in different ways, for example, lie on the beach, listen to the surf, and
collect the shells that it washes up on the shore. This is what the epic writer does” (Benjamin 2005,
p. 299).
I” that holds together the world of the novel. And this is what Adorno
argues in his essay “The position of the Narrator”. Pressed to briefly pres-
ent the key aspects most generally and consistently defining the formal
problem of the novel, Adorno states that: “The task of compressing some
remarks on the current status of the novel as form into the space of a few
minutes forces me to select, albeit by doing violence, one aspect of the
problem. This must be the position of the narrator” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30).
Whereas the essay on epic naiveté explores the continuity between ancient
and modern narrator, here Adorno examines the formal variation of the
“Epic I” within the context of late capitalism, and consequently outlines
how the organization of the material inside a specific genre can be altered
in time. Just like the epic subject, the position of the narrator in the con-
temporary novel “is marked by a paradox: it is no longer possible to tell a
story, but the form of the novel requires narration” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30).
What Adorno has in mind is the issue of the narrator in the so-called
modernist literature; rather than describing the world’s objectivity as it is,
the modernist narrator feels in fact the need to distort its perspective.
Contrary to what the realism-oriented criticism of Kafka, Proust and
Beckett argue, this is not an attempt to build an imaginary world away
from the roughness of reality, but it rather corresponds to a reaction trig-
gered by the historical state of affairs and eventually expressed by the
formal organization of the novel. When Adorno writes that “nowadays,
anyone who continued to dwell on concrete reality […] and wanted to
derive his impact from the fullness and plasticity of a material reality
contemplated and humbly accepted, would be forced into an imitative
stance that would smack of arts and crafts” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30), he is
suggesting that in the contemporary circumstances, the very attempt to
tell a story in the way in which the great bourgeois novel did either fails,
or falls into kitsch, or it is a mere product of culture industry’s
entertainment.
The historical development of the novel corresponds then to its formal
modifications as literary genre, and the formal modifications of the novel
feature the reconfiguration of the position of the narrator. A disenchanted
world, as that felt by modernist subjects, gives rise to a hyper-subjectivist
“Epic I”, since the world cannot be narrated as it is, but only by following
the wounds it leaves on the subject’s interiority. If the narration is always
198 M. Farina
the narration of an experience of the world, in late capitalism “a narrative

that presented itself as though the narrator had mastered this kind of
experience would rightly meet with impatience and skepticism on the
part of its audience” (SdE: 42, NtL1: 31). This is the reason behind what
is supposed to be the crisis of the novel—namely, the crisis of the har-
monic and ordered plot—that is nothing but the formal reaction and
reorganization of the matter of the novel. The incessant reasoning of the
narrator about himself, about the world, social relationships, and even
metaphysical theories is not to be taken as the end of narrative in the
name of philosophical literature, but as the demonstration of the “his-
torical changes in the form” (SdE: 43–44, NtL1: 32), whose needs push
the formal organization of materials—namely, the position of the narra-
tor—toward the dissolution of the alleged world’s objectivity.
This is not, however, some kind of normative command imposed on
the author, nor it is the identification of contemporary novel with the
intimist narrator in the first person. In the narrative technique of Adorno’s
most quoted and beloved novelists—Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce,
Mann—the stance of the narrator differs significantly. What they have in
common, however, is an astonishment in the narrator, in other words,
the inability to master the world. In Proust’s paradigmatic first-person
narrator, this is attested by the extremely stratified role played by habit,
“that skillful but slow-moving arranger” (Proust 1992, vol. 1, p. 8), whose
veil gradually covers the world making the subject unable to have a vivid
experience of reality, “for if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from
knowing our original nature, whose cruelties it lacks and also its enchant-
ments” (Proust 1992, vol. 4, p. 208). Nevertheless, it is exactly the blunt-
ing of sensibility created by habit that allows, once the veil is ripped off,
to have access to a higher level of world experience, that awakes from
habit. The same formal shift in the I’s position can be observed also in
Kafka’s third-person technique, where the novel’s world seems to slip
through the narrator’s fingers. The reader will remember that the narrator
of The Castle is upset to observe that K. has been surprised by the sun set-
ting too soon (Kafka 2009, p. 18). Whereas in the traditional, bourgeois
novel “the narrator raises a curtain: the reader is to take part in what
occurs as though he were physically present” (SdE: 45, NtL1: 33), in late
modern novels “the literary subject who declares himself free of the
conventions of concrete representation acknowledges his own impotence

at the same time; he acknowledges the superior strength of the world of
things that reappears in the midst of the monologue” (SdE: 47, NtL1: 35).
Based on what we have seen in this section, then, an interpretation of
the novel as form, namely an interpretation that aims to understand the
position of the novel as literary genre, is required to investigate mainly
how its formal law organizes the elements. Being the “Epic I” the legislat-
ing principle of the novel, this interpretation should be mostly concerned
with how the narrator reacts to the historical development of the aes-
thetic material. In the interpretation of postmodern novel as literary
problem I undertake precisely this task. In what follows, I will use the
literary categories of “Epic I” and “narrator” as de facto synonyms. I
indeed take the voice of the narrator as the literary expression of the for-
mal principle of the novel, namely the “Epic I”. The “Epic I”, in this
sense, cannot be identified with the neutral third person, or with other
possible declinations of narration; rather, being the “Epic I” the formal
principle around which the literary material of the novel coagulates, it
can change its shape, right as the iron powder disposes its grains in differ-
ent patterns by following the tension of a magnetic field. The “Epic I”,
hence, is the magnetic field that gives a form to the literary material of
the novel.
5.2 T
he American Postmodern Novel
as Literary Form
Why is there form instead of chaos? This is the first and most urgent
question raised by those literary products generally gathered under the
label American postmodern novel. The second question, however, is even
more radical, and it asks if it is at least possible to identify something as
the category of American postmodern novel itself, given the lack of a lit-
erary manifesto, of a shared set of intentions among the authors, of any-
thing allowing to discriminate postmodern novels from the broad range
of contemporary literature. According to what I suggest in this closing
chapter to this book, the two questions are interrelated, and the answer
to the first offers the solution of the second.
200 M. Farina
Why is there form instead of chaos? This question is posed by the very
first attempt to identify the nature of postmodern novel. Its superficial
aspect, in fact, is that of a collection of fragments, without a common
thread that can be identified as the center of the novel. Jack London’s
Martin Eden, for example, tells the story of an ignorant Seaman who, for
the love of an educated bourgeois girl, becomes a refined man of letters.
But what is the story told by DeLillo’s Underworld? Granted that there is
no narrative center, how can we recognize that novel as a unitary prod-
uct? It is just the fact that it is written on a certain number of pages
bound in a single volume? Gogol’s Petersburg’s Tales, even though printed
in a single volume, is not a unitary product, but a set of short stories.
Nevertheless, when we read what we recognize as a successful product of
postmodern literature, we perceive a literary form instead of a chaotic
group of fragments. It is not just the fact that a publisher presents the
text as a novel, but the effective presence of a general issue to which the
single fragments of the text are related. According to the interpretation
that I will give in the following pages, this issue corresponds to the strug-
gle of the formal principle of the novel—namely, what I have defined as
the “Epic I”—in maintaining its unitarian structure as a reaction to a
historical context that negates the autonomy of the subject. At the same
time, however, this is the answer also to the second question, namely the
question that asks for a delimitation of postmodern novel as a liter-
ary genre.
Literary genres are not universal concepts decided in advance once and
for all. As it has been shown by Szondi, the genre of tragedy, for example,
is constituted each time by the works whose aesthetic issue proved to fall
into the same literary framework of the other works that the literary
canon recognizes as tragic.14 According to my analysis, that of postmod-
ern novel is the genre that collects those novels whose literary elements
are put together in the desperate attempt of solving the problem of a
dissolving form, namely the dissolving unity of the “Epic I” as formal
principle of the novel. The fact that postmodern novels share a common
thematic field—language theory, popular culture, mass media, paranoia
14
This is what Peter Szondi (2002, pp. 49–55) alludes to when he claims that there is no such a
thing as the tragic, at least not as an essence.
for technology, and so on—has to be seen more as a consequence of the

development of a literary principle than as the starting point for the defi-
nition of the genre.
What I will do in what follows is to present the issue of postmodern
novels as the issue of the narrator, and then to show a possible historical
and morphological development of the attempt to solve it. In so doing, I
do not intend to develop in few pages a literary interpretation of three of
the most read and studied novels of the second half of the last century. It
would be foolish to attempt to do so. Rather, my intention is to set up a
suitable framework for the discussion of postmodern novels in relation
with the philosophical tradition of critical theory. I hope the reader will
concede that, to this aim, it still makes sense to retrieve an intellectual
enterprise whose most relevant members happened to die right before the
first instances of the literary phenomenon of postmodern novels. The last
part of this chapter is dedicated, in other words, to an investigation of
American postmodern novels in light of the philosophy of literature that
I have extracted from the study of Adorno’s aesthetics.
The Narrator
“Young white overeducated males” (Wallace 1998, p. 65). With these
lapidary words David Foster Wallace describes the authors of postmod-
ern novels in one of the most lucid analysis of what writing meant at the
beginning of the 1990s,15 and to a white young overeducated male seems
to belong also the voice of the narrator of that singular literary phenom-
enon that is the American postmodern novel. “White” since white are the
problems of the characters, for instance the estate of a Californian rich
man; white is the sport they practice, tennis; white is the milieu of
U.S. North-Eastern campuses, and white is the bored middle class with
nothing more to ask for, directly called upon by the narrator’s words: “he
speaks in your voice, American”, used to introduce an Afro-American
15
I have quoted Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, from its 1998
version in the collection, A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. In the 1993 edition of the
text, in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the line is just “young white males” (Wallace 1993,
p. 182).
202 M. Farina
boy (DeLillo 1997, p. 11). “Young” since young is the energy needed to
write a thousand pages, but young is also the impossibility to grow up,
and once and for all become an adult who doesn’t need to ironically
elbow up the reader to justify the fact that one may genuinely believe in
something weird, as the narrator of postmodern novel constantly does.
“Overeducated” since the characters that the narrator shapes speak with
the linguistic register of a highly educated person, regardless whether he
or she is an ignorant former thief, a child, or a young member of a savage,
almost extinct Namibian population. To read the great American post-
modern literature means to get acquainted with the voice of an ironic,
often irritating, know-it-all “I”, who pretends the readers are as smart and
brilliant as “he” is to the only aim of gaining their trust; but at the same
time, it also means learning to see, and appreciate, the cracks in the giant
ideological construction of the narrator, namely the not so rare moments
in which the “I” fails in keeping together the neurotic system under con-
struction. These cracks, what we can call the narrator’s honesty moments,
are all the more capable to express the historical problem to which the
form of the novel is trying to react, the more the super-construction the
“Epic I” builds around its core has the appearance of an inviolable enigma,
like an apparently impenetrable magic puzzle box. David Foster Wallace,
who welcomed the comparison between the form of Infinite Jest and the
geometric figure of the fractal,16 must have been more aware than anyone
else of the bluff he was holding. Whereas the fractal is a consistent, sym-
metrical figure in which a definite shape is constantly repeated and can be
expressed through a mathematical formula, Infinite Jest, resembles much
more the organic image of what a fractal would be if it were the expres-
sion of the real world, namely a patched fractal. And this—that is, the
way in which literary material escapes the cage of an abstract and geo-
metrical structure—is its literary greatness.
More than any clever observation about the relationship between cyni-
cism and desperation—“sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which
16
See the interview that Wallace gave to Michael Silverblatt for the literary talk show, Bookworm on
April 11, 1996, where he explicitly compares Infinite Jest to a fractal structure (here, the link to the origi-
nal registration: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/david-foster-wallace-infinite-jest).
clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to
care and help them” (Wallace 1996, p. 7)—more than any brilliant the-
ory about the nostalgia for the limited choice of the dear old cathodic TV
compared to the unlimited absence of choice of the web—“I miss sneer-
ing at something I love. […] Sneer at the commercial vapidity of broad-
cast stuff. […] The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you
were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now”
(Wallace 1996, pp. 599–600)—the formal logic of Infinite Jest is exempli-
fied by the dynamics of Eschaton, an unbelievably complicated and
abstract war game played by a group of children from the Enfield Tennis
Academy. After twenty pages painstakingly describing a boring, pointless
game, where a dozen boys are completely engrossed in an extremely com-
plex system of rules, the situation promptly worsens because of a misin-
terpretation of the relationship between the reality of the game (what the
game represents) and the external reality of the players (what the body of
each player is outside the game). Suddenly, all falls into chaos and the
readers find themselves in the position to understand the seriousness of
the matter just as they have trawled through the previously twenty pages
of neurotic description of the pointless game. Likewise, the fact of trust-
ing the non-credible virtuosity and irritating irony of the narrator is back
paid by the moments in which the “I” of the novel loses the control over
its own system and shows its weakness. Without this weakness, the nar-
rator of American postmodern novel would be nothing but a mannerist
deployment of empty virtuosity, a brilliant blabbermouth who would
leave the reader spent, “as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted
ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy
sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow…
oppressed” (Wallace 1993, p. 183).
According to my interpretation, the “Epic I” of postmodern novel—
namely, its formal principle—should be understood in the light of its
weakness in relation to the world of the narration, and not as the expres-
sion of the narrator’s omniscience and omnipotence, as the narrator
would deceivingly invite us to do. Needless to say, I do not intend to
negate the fact that the narrative technique of postmodern novel includes
the presence of an omniscient narrator, if not in all passages of the text, at
204 M. Farina
least at a macrostructural level.17 What I intend to show is rather the fact

that, as formal principle that keeps the world of the novel together, the
postmodern “Epic I” is forced to demonstrate omniscience, to pretend to
be omnipotent, to ironically comment the facts, as expression of its loss
of autonomy in the real world. The I of the novel, as a paradigmatic liter-
ary expression of how the subjectivity rules itself in reality and interprets
its own position in the world, gives rise to a labyrinthine space where one
pretends to be in charge only to compensate for the loss of autonomy one
experiences in life. The greatness of some products that belong to post-
modern literature, however, rests on how they unveil their own ideologi-
cal constructions. The cracks in the gargantuan buildings of postmodern
novels are precisely the sign that the “Epic I” allows historical reality to
penetrate the force of the construction. There, the detached cynicism of
the narrator connects itself to society and history. The subject, surrounded
by objects whose “supersensible or social” (Marx 1990, p. 165) nature
makes them ungovernable, is reflected in the alleged literary omnipo-
tence of the postmodern narrator, whose effective weakness becomes con-
versely visible where it gives in to the power of the world of the objects.
The narrator of postmodern novels, hence, seems to be some kind of
secularization of Benjamin’s historic interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus
Novus, as
his face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before
us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing
from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel
can no longer close them. (Benjamin 2003, p. 392)
By scrutinizing the formal principle of the American postmodern

novel, a morphological evolution becomes visible which can be suitably
outlined in the chosen sequence of novels: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
17
This distinction is made by Stefano Ercolino in his investigation of the narrator’s omniscience in
maximalist novel. He points out that large sections of Infinite Jest and Underworld are written in the
first person, but he anyway links the narrator’s omniscience to the macrostructural level of the novel
as a collection of fragments (see Ercolino 2014, pp. 97–104).
Rainbow, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Don DeLillo’s

Underworld. This evolution corresponds to one of the possible ways in
which postmodern novels organize their matter under the law of their
formal literary principle, namely the “Epic I”. According to my interpre-
tation, this path corresponds to the progressive renunciation, by the nar-
rators, to their own unity in order to allow the historical omnipotence of
the objects over the subject to be expressed in a literary form. In this
argument the reader can spot the fingerprints of the principle of the liter-
ary reconstruction of the aesthetic element after its sensuous dissolution
in the realm of things, as outlined in the previous chapters of this book.
American postmodern novel is then the way in which literature saves the
aesthetic from its dissolution, namely by renouncing to the unity of its
formal, subjective, principle face to the emergence of the power of the
objects.
Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow
Postmodern novel, and this is particularly true in the case of Thomas

Pynchon, puts a great emphasis on the theoretical ideas communicated in
the narration. What makes its interpretation so difficult is the wall erected
by the author around the core of the novel, a bastion, an impenetrable
fortress made by a patchwork of media theory, psychoanalysis, linguistic
theory, sociology, Marxism, new age philosophy, and pop-culture studies.
This is a sort of entertainment screen for the prototypical overeducated
reader to which the author refers, an amusement park in which cultural
professionals, academics, and the increasing sector of workers in the
advanced tertiary—namely, the main readership of postmodern novels—
play with a tantalizing parody of those cultural ideas that, meanwhile, far
from being the beloved objects of their life choice as the idealized model
of intellectual existence would demand, have become as alienated as the
tools of hand labor from which they intended to escape. As the readers of
Goethe’s Werther sought in the cult of feeling and sensitivity an imagi-
nary way out of the cage of the alienated traditional society in the heroic
years of the beginning of the modern novel, as the decadent grande bour-
geoisie found in Madame Bovary’s attempt to escape from the emptiness
206 M. Farina
of her life a confirmation of the pointlessness of its own existence, the

increasingly precarious, absorbed in the economic process, members of
the intellectual lower-middle class find in Pynchon’s sophisticated reason-
ing over the naturalizing power of history through war destruction—
“straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding
pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding,
like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort” (Pynchon 2006, p. 379)—a
reassurance on the supposed immortal value of their studies.
Behind the philosophical theories, behind the analogy of technology
and religion through the mystic value of the rocket—“every bit and piece
a sacred relic, every scrap of manual a verse of Scripture” (Pynchon 2006,
p. 397)—behind the proud feeling of getting the reference to Walter
Benjamin,18 the literary problem of Gravity’s Rainbow has to be found in
the strenuous efforts of the narrator to present himself as a unitary subject
right in the middle of the crumbling of the storyline. The emphasis on
the problems entailed by the description of reality by means of a linear
and harmonious plot, coupled with the intuition that the meaning of
history is better understood by means of a fragmentary representation, is
all in all the most pervasive insight of large part of modernism. The post-
modern literature features instead the loss of unity experienced to the
highest degree by the formal principle of the novel, the I itself. This is
why the narrator is forced to build an apparently overthought structure,
a legal system of which one pretends to be the master. Along these lines
18
Surprisingly, the presence of references to Walter Benjamin in Pynchon’s works is often underes-
timated. Bernard Duyfhuizen (2003, pp. 235–249) employs Benjamin’s concepts to understand
the disrupting story in The Crying of Lot 49, and John Heon (2003, p. 157) quotes Benjamin’s lines
over laughter and thinking to explain Mason & Dixon’s position in relation to history, but direct
references to Benjamin’s passages do not find the same attention. In an oneiric description of the
utopia of the Raketen-Stadt in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon introduces Marcel, “a mechanical chess-
player dating back to the Second Empire”, and then the narrator asks to himself, “but where inside
Marcel is the midget Grandmaster, the little Johann Allgeier? where’s the pantograph, and the
magnets? Nowhere. Marcel really is a mechanical chessplayer” (Pynchon 2006, pp. 688–689). It is
hard in the case of a novel about a theological metaphor explaining history and technology not to
think about the first of Benjamin’s accounts On the Concept of History: “There was once, we know,
an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with
a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. […] Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf – a
master at chess – sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a
philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called ‘historical materialism,’ is to win all
the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we
know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight” (Benjamin 2003, p. 389).
one can explain, for instance, Pynchon’s obsession for the logic of con-
spiracy. Conspiracy, that is to say, the paranoid feeling of the characters
of being puppets of an invisible and possibly unconscious power, is the
fear of the narrators themselves; it is a sense of impotence that, in an
extreme attempt of transfiguration and exorcising, is depicted as comical,
grotesque, stupid, and unlikely. When the narrators undertake the
description of the conspiracy, they react like the viewers of a horror movie
who make fun of the scene to downplay their being frightened:
Bodine finds him sitting inside a coat closet, chewing on a velvet ear of his
mask. “You look bad, Rocky […]”.
“This is some kind of a plot, right?” Slothrop sucking saliva from vel-
vet pile.
“Everything is some kind of a plot, man,” Bodine laughing.
“And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways,” Solange illus-
trating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors. (Pynchon
2006, p. 613)
But also:
Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but

because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into par-
anoid situations.
“Now how on earth,” elaborately uncorking a fresh bottle of Nordhäuser
Schattensaft, thoppp, best Gary Grant imitation he can summon up with
bowels so echoing tight, suavely refilling glasses, handing one to her,
“would a sweet, young, thing, like you, know anything, about rocket,
hahd-weah?” (Pynchon 2006, p. 297)
The ironic reaction of the narrator in front of the manifestly grotesque

aspect of conspiracy, the necessity to comment with detachment on the
characters’ beliefs, is the hysterical laughter of someone who is afraid of
getting caught while disguising their fears. Since reality is intolerable—
namely what deep down everyone, even the most faithful conspiracist,
knows, namely that there is nothing as comforting as an intrigue, and
that no evil plot behind history can be simply removed to fix all the prob-
lems—the narrator stages the parody of his or her own powerlessness,
208 M. Farina
hoping to be thus able to control it. The form of the “Epic I” in Gravity’s
Rainbow has something in common with the form of the conspiracy, that
is the fact that it cannot sustain itself without the external support of an
ironic laughter. And it is in this process that the narrator shows signs of
cracked unity.
It is especially in those passages in which the narrative approaches the
most delicate and unbelievable episodes that the voice of the “I” needs to
be supported by a sort of self-detachment, and self-ironic comment on
what is actually being told. Paradigmatic is the vicissitude that leads to
the actual dissolution of Tyrone Slothrop, namely the character who
comes the closest to having the leading role in Gravity’s Rainbow. In the
final part of the novel, in fact, the more the plot loses consistency and
linearity, eventually becoming a collection of fragments, the protagonist
of the novel dissolves, by gradually turning into an imaginary creature
dressed as a distorted superhero until he effectively disappears, breaking
up into fragments scattered through the entire world. The destiny of the
form of the novel, hence, is the destiny of the protagonist himself, namely
that of a man who loses unity. Long before the character effectively dis-
solves, the narrator observes that “Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as
the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter” (Pynchon 2006, p. 517).
The essayistic parenthesis—“as noted…”—is the sign of the detachment
of the narrator, who makes a step back and stops the description to reas-
sure the readers about what they are reading. As a result, the readers no
longer merge in the form of the narration, but, in the company of the
narrator, they find themselves watching the scene. The narrator, in fact,
needs to break the illusion of realism in order to be credible. This behav-
ior of the narrator can be observed by comparing the last appearance of
the dissolving Slothrop with the description, a few pages later, of the
place in which he has by now disappeared:
It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one
night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that
fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If
so, there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present-day population are off-
shoots of his original scattering. There’s supposed to be a last photograph
of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock
group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones,

near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It
is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the
cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble.
There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop’s: the only printed
credit that might apply to him is “Harmonica, kazoo—a friend.” But
knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among
the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the
sky, the darkness of the sea….) (Pynchon 2006, 757)
And
In a field, beyond the clearing and the trees, the last horse is standing, tar-
nished silver-gray, hardly more than an assembling of shadows. The hea-
then Germans who lived here sacrificed horses once, in their old ceremonies.
Later the horse’s role changed from holy offering to servant of power. By
then a great change was working on the Heath, kneading, turning, stirring
with fingers strong as wind. (Pynchon 2006, p. 764)
In the first passage the narrator cannot maintain the unity of descrip-
tion and drifts on a long digression, an actual parenthesis in which a
change of tone occurs, becoming ironic and breaking the illusion: the
story of Tyrone Slothrop in 1945 is written in the present—“Slothrop’s
Visitor by this time may be scrawled lines of carbon on a wall” (Pynchon
2006, pp. 756–757)—but the voice of the narrator tells of a last photo-
graph taken in the 1960s—“seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style
of the early Stones”—as an event occurred in the past. In the second pas-
sage, on the contrary, where the problem is solved, and the character has
already disappeared as the unity of the “Epic I” itself, the narrator does
not need to comment the scene, and provides a regular description as in
a traditional novel.
The examples I have given here bear testimony to the constant ambi-
guity of the role of the narrator in Pynchon’s novel. Plenty of other exam-
ples are nevertheless available. See for example the description of the
dialogue between the Seaman Bodine and Roger Mexico, where the nar-
rator says “they are grinning at each other like fools. Their auras, for the
record, are green. No shit” (Pynchon 2006, p. 729). In full detachment
210 M. Farina
from the scene (“for the record”, “no shit”), as to reassure the readers
about the truth of what they are reading, the narrator unveils the trick.
Adorno would observe that in Kafka’s Castle “no sooner has the surveyor
driven the bothersome assistants from his room in the inn than they
climb back through the window without the novel stopping for one word
more than required to communicate the event” (AzK: 258, Pr: 248); and
thus accounts for the déjà-vu feeling of the scene, namely something that
everyone has at least once experienced in the illogic logic of one’s dreams.
The green aura of Pynchon’s characters, to the contrary, is directly taken
from the acid special effects of sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 1960s
and a realistic touch is—supposedly—achieved by means of the com-
ment: “no shit”. Said comment exploits the same ironic cynicism of the
material from which it derives, that is TV’s scenes. Already in The Crying
of Lot 49 is clear that TV imagination has the upper hand over dream’s logic:
“What were you dreaming about him?”

“Oh, that,” perhaps embarrassed. “It was all mixed in with a Porky Pig
cartoon.” He waved at the tube. “It comes into your dreams, you know.
Filthy machine. Did you ever see the one about Porky Pig and the anar-
chist?” (Pynchon 1966, p. 91)
Pynchon’s novel, hence, maintains a formal union at the cost of a frac-

ture in the narrator itself, namely in its formal principle. The irony, the
virtuosity, that is, of the detached narrator—generally presented as the
expression of a powerful and omniscient “Epic” I19 that, as the author of
the Romantic humor of Jean Paul, flies over the world by judging it and
19
Paradigmatic is the way in which Hegel describes the function of Jean Paul’s narrator as the power
which is able to arbitrarily connect novel’s material: “Jean Paul’s humour often surprises us by its
depth of wit and beauty of feeling, but equally often, in an opposite way, by its grotesquely combin-
ing things which have no real connection with one another, and the relations into which his
humour brings them together are almost indecipherable. Even the greatest humourist has not rela-
tions of this kind present in his memory and so after all we often observe that even Jean Paul’s
interconnections are not the product of the power of genius but are brought together externally.
Thus in order always to have new material, Jean Paul looked into books of the most varied kind,
botanical, legal, philosophical, descriptive of travel, noted at once what struck him and wrote down
the passing fancies it suggested; when it was a matter of actual composition, he brought together
the most heterogeneous material-Brazilian plants and the old Supreme Court of the Empire. This
is then given special praise as originality or as humour by which anything and everything is excused.
But such caprice is precisely what true originality excludes” (Hegel 1975, pp. 295–296).
laughing at it20—is nothing but a strategy to hide the real impotence of

the narrator, the impotence to reconnect the world of things in a mean-
ingful picture. The formal principle of the novel, in fact, has the task to
organize under its law the material, that has meanwhile become ungov-
ernable by the subject. As a result, the narrator comes across as constantly
uncertain of what is being told and tries to arouse the interest of the read-
ers by means of direct questions: “what message, what possible greeting
or entente will flow between the king and the infant prince? Is the baby
smiling, or is it just gas? Which do you want it to be?” (Pynchon 2006,
p. 133).
The only element which does not require any kind of explanation by
the narrator, in other words what the narrator realistically observes and
describes, by holding on to its solid reality, is the existence of the objects.
Endless series of objects, products of human labor, objectified figures of
collective imagination, in fact, stare at the “Epic I”, who holds to their
indubitable reality, disseminating them in the plot:
In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the Straits,
here’s thousands of old used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings,
thousands of somber man-mornings made tolerable, transformed to mint
fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors
from Harrow to Gravesend […] as one by one these old tooth-paste tubes
are emptied and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phan-
toms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed
by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns,
hand against hand, waiting now—it is true return—to be melted for sol-
der, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek
linings the children of that other domestic incarnation will never see.
(Pynchon 2006, pp. 132–133)
This is what is collected under the formal law of the America postmod-
ern novel: a collection of objects, whose historical reality overcomes the
power of the subject, that in order to think about itself as meaningful
I am referring to the book Des Luftschiffers Giannozzo Seebuch (The Airship Pilot Giannozzo Sea
20
Book (1801)), where Jean Paul tells the fictional story of a hot-air balloon’s pilot who flies over
German territory laughing at the culture of his time.
212 M. Farina
principle, has to give up its autonomy and split itself in obedience to the
commodified objective reality. And it is for this reason that the form of
the novel resembles a collection of fragments, whose value is that of petri-
fied objects, that anyway seem to create a literary form, which is ensured
by the astonished, overwhelmed gaze of the narrator, unable to find a
meaningful plot face to the preponderance of objects. The grotesque,
ironic, comical idea of conspiracy thus expresses the idea of unity of a
number of single scenes kept together by the fears of a neurotic I.
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest
While qualifying as an answer to the problem of how it is possible to lit-

erarily and aesthetically structure the preponderance of the objects,
Infinite Jest is a radicalization of Pynchon’s Epic I’s position. If the dissolu-
tion of the narrative in Gravity’s Rainbow, in fact, concerns the clutter of
different storylines without a center and the progressive loss of consis-
tency in the novel’s reality, Infinite Jest couples a form of realism of literary
description with the explosion of all idea of storyline. As the reader of
Infinite Jest knows, the pivotal formal feature of the novel concerns not
merely the interweaving of different stories, but rather the continuous
jumps through the timeline of each plot, the absence of any kind of refer-
ence point, and the impression of having to do with something randomly
written. Within the apparently chaotic mess of the narrative, however,
the figure of the narrator stands out with an intriguing personality, an
eyebrow constantly raised, and the air of someone who finds it hard to
believe in what one is staring at but that also reassures the reader that all
that mess is really there in front of them all. That the nature of postmod-
ern literature consists in vision and spectation, in fact, has been one of the
most incisive remarks of Wallace himself when, analyzing a passage of
DeLillo’s White Noise, he points out that “the narrator’s ‘extended silence’”
is the only possible response to the blathering of “the would-be tran-
scender of spectation” (Wallace 1993, p. 170). As in Pynchon, the formal
principle of the novel is split in two, being the narrator on the one hand
the one who tells the story and on the other hand the one who ironically
comments on it.
The layering of vision and the stratification of reality’s uncontrollability

have become to such an extent intricate that the “Epic I” even deems as
plausible a character who is afraid to forget to blink,21 and in the frustrated
efforts in which the narrator tries to govern the objects in the world, it
comes across as an obsessive-compulsive and depressed counterbalance to
Pynchon’s conspiracist “Epic I”. Whereas in Pynchon the narrator could
still point to the presence of a hidden power, or at least allude to a parody
of what the subject effectively perceives behind the way in which single
objects give the impression to conspire against personality—as the opening
scene of Falling Down (1993) has perfectly recorded—in Infinite Jest there
is just the terrifying presence of the objects, that the narrator attempts to
make familiar by qualifying them through the industrial process from
which they stem,22 through the typical postmodern affection to name the
brands, or through the often pointless specification of their technical fea-
tures.23 Only this maniacal tendency of the narrator to gain control over
every single object can explain the passage in which the entire population
of the Enfield Tennis Academy falls prey of a mass psychosis for the pres-
ence of neutral and ordinary objects out of their usual place:
inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere
appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple
months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-
crew lawnmower sitting clean and silent and somehow menacing in the
middle of the dawn kitchen […]. Yesterday A.M. there’d been a cannon-
esque ball machine […]. The inappropriate found objects have had a
tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular prankster-
ism; they’re not funny. To varying degrees they’ve given everyone the fan-
tods. (Wallace 1996, p. 632)
21
“He’s got your autodidactic orator’s way with emotional dramatic pauses that don’t seem affected.
Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail and chooses con-
sciously to believe it isn’t affected, the story’s emotive drama. Her eyes feel sandy from forgetting to
blink” (Wallace 1996, p. 710).
22
The word “anodized” appears six times in the novel, and I’m pretty sure that it can be considered
a record for a non-chemistry related story.
23
“About a month later, an envelope arrived in the A.D.A.’s home’s exquisite wrought-iron mail-
box. In the envelope were a standard American Dental Association glossy brochure on the impor-
tance of daily oral hygiene—available at like any dentist’s office anywhere—and two high-pixel
Polaroid snapshots” (Wallace 1996, p. 56).
214 M. Farina
Nothing has more literary power to generate meaning in Infinite Jest

than the bare and threatening objects that seem to come up from every-
where, as for the maniac and depressed feeling of the narrator “everything
becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world
becomes a map of the world” (Wallace 1996, p. 693).
Against the power of the objects, the “Epic I” as formal principle of the
novel tries anyway to vindicate for itself the position of unitarian ground-
ing, but at the cost of a schizophrenic behavior. The role of the footnotes
in Infinite Jest is that of having a reassuring voice in the middle of the
dissolution of the form, like a whimsical man that constantly unveils the
trick of the narration and its illusion. Somehow, Infinite Jest’s footnotes—
way more than a simple stylistic affectation—have anticipated by a dozen
years the experience of reading a novel by holding a smartphone, namely
the compulsive drive to have full control over reality, even the fictional
one, coupled with the impossibility to immerse entirely in the reading, to
get lost in the book like in the old ideal image of the bookworm, as if the
readers were now in the grip of an attention deficit disorder. If Proust’s
narrator was in the condition to analyze his fear to lose grip on the world’s
object in the moment in which he tries to fall asleep, Wallace’s “Epic I” is
constantly attacked by the obsession of having forgot something. This
obsession for the threat that comes from the world of things is what
makes plausible the identification with a boy—named The Darkness—
who thinks he has been “somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or
possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in
and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The
Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game
to like a supernatural level, to help his game” (Wallace 1996, p. 943). The
morbid attention for the object, for their technical features and produc-
tion, the sense of anguish they are able to provoke is condensed in pas-
sages like the one where the narrator decides to enumerate all the blue
objects in the room, by observing finally that
Each chair had a 105-watt reading lamp attached to the back on a flexible
metal stalk that let the reading lamp curve out from behind and shine right
down on whatever magazine the waiting person was looking at, but since
the curved lamps induced this unbearable sensation of somebody feverish
right there reading over your shoulder, the magazines (some of whose cov-
ers involved the color blue) tended to stay unread, and were fanned neatly
out on a low ceramic coffeetable. (Wallace 1996, p. 509)
The crumbling of the narrative, the disruption of the storyline, the

apparent impossibility to find a logic in the 1079 pages of the novel, all
these superficial characteristics are the result of the impossibility to gov-
ern the world of objects by collecting them in a meaningful image. The
only chance the narrator has to constitute the formal principle of the
novel is the obsessive way in which what is told is commented, an ironical
stance toward what the narrator is afraid of, namely the power of the bare
objects that are transfigured not by the mystic assertion that they have a
soul, but by telling that someone thinks they have a soul, as if that impres-
sion would be somehow understandable. Hence, the narrator has the
need to constantly interpret what is being told, since images left free to
generate associations that would be impossible to control are intolerable.
This is clear, for example, when Ms. Tawni Kondo’s morning aerobic
exercise program is described in terms of an “upwards of 60 million
North Americans daily kicking and genuflecting with Tawni Kondo, a
mass choreography somewhat similar to those compulsory A.M. tai chi
slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China—except that the Chinese
assemble publicly together” (Wallace 1996, p. 620). The association of
images of sixty million people alone at home in front of the TV making
exercise—that came from reality and not from a dystopic world—is
blocked by the allusion to what Western audiences perceive as the parody
of a regime, namely “slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China”.
This role of the narrator, namely that of making the effort to keep
together the mass of objects, is at the origin of the modesty with which
the narrator withdraws from the most evident excesses, namely those pas-
sages in which Wallace is most influenced by the postmodern virtuosity
of Mark Leyner’s cynical style.24 In the episode in which Hal tells he has
24
“I crack open an ampule of mating pheromone and let it waft across the bar, as I sip my drink,
a methyl isocyanate on the rocks – methyl isocyanate is the substance that killed more than
2000 people when it leaked in Bhopal, India, but thanks to my weight training, aerobic work-
outs, and low-fat fiber-rich diet, the stuff has no effect on me” (Leyner 1990, p. 6), writes
Leyner six years after almost double of the people he mentions died in a disaster caused by the
U.S. company Union Carbide.
216 M. Farina
found the body of his self-murdered father with the head exploded in the
microwave, in the passage where Joelle reveals to Gately that she covers
her face with a veil as a member of U.H.I.D. (Union of the Hideously
and Improbably Deformed) since “I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive
anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. […] I’m so
beautiful I am deformed” (Wallace 1996, p. 538), in the scene where the
teenager Pemulis explains to a blindfolded Pakistani boy the implausible
technology of annihilation and the resulting Great Concavity inhabited
by “rapacial feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile
giganticism” (Wallace 1996, p. 573), in all these textual passages the
novel—the literary form governed by the “Epic I” as its principle—gives
in to the form of drama: the narrator disappears and the text becomes a
pure dialogue without description. The material that is expressed without
comment, without the narrator’s obsession for sense in an overabundant
reality, is the material that belongs to the logic of TV sitcoms, namely
brilliant and implausible dialogues whose empty cynicism anesthetizes
any commitment toward reality. Only the absence of the narrator can
excuse the tale of a young kid that finds his father suicided with the head
in a microwave and whose first thought is that something smelled delicious
(Wallace 1996, p. 256).
Now, if the novel is how the historical material organizes itself under
the attractive pole of the “Epic I”, according to the already evoked image
of the iron powder that disposes its grains according to the tension of a
magnetic field, more than anywhere else, the weakness of the I in the
Post-Reagan era is perceivable in the difficulty to govern the objects,
without these sneaking around in a chaotic absence of sense. It is not
because of a stylistic trend that in Infinite Jest the brand Gatorade is
named fourteen times; this mirrors instead the meaningless of a mineral
sport beverage that is simply linked to its quality, namely to its effect on
the subject, being its value connected to the entire economic process
imposed over the subject. And this economic process is what is brought
into light in Infinite Jest, whose formal principle is the everlasting effort
of the narrator to keep together the mass of objects. His ironic detach-
ment, his exhibition of virtuosity, is not the omnipotence of the narrator
over the world of the novel, but rather the final attempt of a unitary “Epic
I” to be the law under which the narrative content organizes itself. All
what remains of the traditional great unity of the “Epic I” of the novel is
a stream of ironic comments on an objective reality that imposes its own
power on the subject. Infinite Jest is not just a novel about desire and
addiction, about the substitution of desire through the schema of addic-
tion and satisfaction. Infinite Jest is the novel whose form is that of depen-
dence, that of a subject that desperately tries to vindicate its existence by
imposing an addiction on itself, the writing addiction, the addiction to
commenting the objectual world.
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Read in line with the development of the American postmodern novel,

the position of the narrator in Don DeLillo’s Underworld seems to achieve
Hegel’s recommendation in the Introduction to The Phenomenology of
Spirit, “the only thing that remains to us is purely to look on [das reine
Zusehen]” (Hegel 2018, p. 56). If Pynchon and Wallace have given rise to
the attempt to unify a recalcitrant historical material under the unity of a
legislating subjective principle, Underworld is the demonstration of how
the subjective claim on the novel is in a position of rearguard and, with-
out the need to constantly wink at the reader, without any ironic stance
against the world, DeLillo succeeds in the construction of a literary unity
precisely by giving up the subjective legal pretension and by accepting, on
the contrary, the law of the objects. What is missing in DeLillo’s novel is
in fact the very existence of something as a unitary “Epic I”. Even though
I am obviously aware to which generation DeLillo as author actually
belongs—he is six months older than Pynchon, and his first novels, for
instance Americana (1971), belong to the atmosphere of early postmod-
ernism, while his books from the 1980s, such as White Noise (1985) and
Libera (1988), form some sort of cultural common canon, a starting
point, for the authors of Wallace’s generation25—I do anyway recognize
25
I have already mentioned Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Pluram” (Wallace 1993), where he declares
his debt to DeLillo’s White Noise. In a famous article for the Los Angeles Times, Richard Rayner
wrote about White Noise that “without it, writers such as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem,
Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an
excellent introduction here) don’t happen – or don’t happen in the same way” (Rayner 2010).
218 M. Farina
in Underworld a morphological change in the position of the narrator

that can be conceived as in continuity with the form of Infinite Jest. In
fact, while the novel is made of the same matter of what in terms of con-
tent and atmosphere is generally recognized as postmodern literature—as
Harold Bloom says “Pynchon’s cosmos of paranoia, indispensable waste,
plastic consumerism is the literary context of Underworld” (Bloom 2003,
p. 1)—the way in which he problematizes the “Epic I” represents an
answer to the previous attempts to save the unity of the narrator toward
the preponderance of the objective reality.
It should be noted that Underworld, unlike Gravity’s Rainbow and
Infinite Jest, appears as the final outcome of the previous literary activity
of his author. Pynchon’s and Wallace’s novels are the great works with
which the subsequent production of the authors has been inevitably
compared, literary masterpieces that marked a before and an after in the
literary careers of their writers; one needs only to think about the almost
twenty years of silence of Pynchon after his 1973 novel, accompanied by
a clear thematic variation in his production, and to the fact that, in the
nine years between Infinite Jest and Wallace’s death, the writer has not
been able to publish another novel. On the contrary, Underworld is placed
at the top of a wide literary production, and its formal structure can be
seen as the outcome of the impact between the mature writing style of the
author and an uncontrollable literary material. As a result, a formal prin-
ciple can only be found in the absence of unity. One should also notice
how the direct, intimate, and honest first-person narrator typical of
DeLillo’s narrative technique—the first-person voice of Americana, End
Zone, The Names, and White Noise—if dealing with historical arguments,
necessarily switches to the third person, namely the only viable perspec-
tive in which, for instance in Libra, something like Kennedy’s murder—
the most viewed murder of history—can be told. “The narrator’s ‘extended
silence’” of White Noise is no longer enough, although Wallace would
present it as a distinctive trait in the attitude of DeLillo’s “Epic I” against
the “poor schmuck of a popologist” (Wallace 1993, p. 184). History
requires then a position to take on, preferably one guaranteeing the
objectivity of the direct view. With Libra, hence, DeLillo deals with direct
historical material in the novel, shifts the narration into a neutral third
person, but—even in a very determinate, non-fictional, universally
known story—he feels the need to problematize the reluctant autonomy

of the objects, the impossibility to govern their schizophrenia by means
of an almost external character, whose intimacy with the reader resembles
that of the close first person, namely the CIA archivist Nicholas Branch,
whose task is that of piecing together the fragments of Kennedy’s murder.
What Branch regrets is the lack of a general meaning in the historical
event, the fact that every piece seems to have its own life impossible to
reconnect to a general sense that the subject is able to understand, as
“there is no formal system to help him track the material in the room. He
uses hand and eye, color and shape and memory, the configuration of
suggestive things that link an object to its content” (DeLillo 1988, p. 15).
Jewel novel of American postmodern literature, Underworld is the
release of what Adorno would call “the history locked in the object” (ND:
165, ND: 163), the dissolution of any subjective pretense to build a for-
mal unity starting from the grounding principle of the “Epic I”. There is
in Underworld a latent materialistic motive, namely the constant acknowl-
edgment of the priority of the object, that does not amount to the enthu-
siastic glorification of objectivity, and neither to the projection of a
conspiracy, but rather to the recognition that the only way to recover
something like subjectivity has to pass through the admission of its impo-
tence toward the world of things and objects. If in Pynchon, Slothrop,
the main character, disappears by alluding to the dissolution of the mean-
ing of the narration, in Underworld it is the voice of the I itself that
undergoes disintegration. The transitions between third and first person
in Underworld are not occasional insertions, exceptional portions almost
external to the corpus of the novel—as in the case of the opening internal
monologues of Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest, to which apply Ercolino’s
comments about a generally omniscient and omnipotent narrator that
collects the fragments26—but it is the formal principle of the novel itself,
that constitutes its unity right in the dissolution of a solid union. What
happens at a formal level, namely the dissolution of a unitarian “Epic I”,
is the coagulation of the literary material not in the voice of the narrator,
26
“It is an omniscience attained through the recomposition of the single points of view adopted by
the narrator at various times at the microstructural level” (Ercolino 2014, p. 100). If this is true for
Infinite Jest, my point is that it is not the case for Underworld, where the composition is not to be
searched in the narrator, but in the objects of the narration.
220 M. Farina
but in the need for it to change, in the need to follow the characteristics
of what is described, that is, the objects.
The dissolution of the subjectivity of the narrator in the name of the
objectivity of the external things, however, is an ideal that cannot be fully
achieved, since the novel has always still the form of something told. But
the way in which Underworld makes the unity of the narration waver
testifies to the instability of a definite point of view on the things to the
highest degree that was passible at the end of the 1990s, given the histori-
cal development of productive force and technology at the time. Possibly,
the task of the narration in the immediate future will be linked to the fact
that capital has ceased producing value from labor, and to the consequent
development of technology not as means of satisfaction of desire, but as
a self-referential structure for which desire itself is a means. But in the
years in which Underworld has been written, the way in which the novel
dissolves the narrator, coupled with a non-ironical and genuine lyrical
description of a humanized landscape, has marked a seminal passage in
the development of American postmodern novel.
The way in which the dissolution of the narrator is pursued in
Underworld can be understood by observing the formal principle that
organizes the material of the novel, that is, the ideal of the object itself. If
not the “Epic I”, in fact, the only common thread of the novel is a mythi-
cal baseball, an object whose adventure coagulates in itself the entire his-
tory of America in the second half of the twentieth century, from the first
Soviet nuclear test to the Chernobyl disaster. A ball that passes from hand
to hand, condensing in itself an incredible amount of desires, hopes, and
projections, becoming what Wallace, quoting Domyns, calls the result of
the metastasis of watching (Wallace 1993, p. 170). An object whose ideal
and legendary nature is clear from the beginning of the novel:
“Tell them about the baseball,” Classic said.

[…]
“Nick owns the baseball. The Bobby Thomson home-run ball. The actual
object.”
Sims took his time lighting the cigar.
“Nobody owns the ball.”
“Somebody has to own it.”
“The ball is unaccounted for,” Sims said. “It got thrown away decades ago.
Otherwise we’d know it.”
“Simeon, listen before you make pronouncements. First,” Classic said, “I
found a dealer on a trip I took back east some years ago. This guy con-
vinced me that the baseball in his possession, the ball he claimed was the
Thomson home run, was in fact the authentic ball”. (DeLillo 1997, p. 96)
After all nobody can know for sure the secret of the ball. The Underworld
of the title alludes, in fact, to what lies beneath the surface of reality, to
the essence of Pynchon’s conspiracy and Wallace’s paranoia. DeLillo’s
answer is, in this respect, very simple: nothing. Rather than conspiracy,
rather than the paranoid fear of the objects, rather than everything toward
which the narrator dissimulates his impotence by means of irony, what
remains in DeLillo’s narrative is the sluggish legend of a baseball ball,
nothing but a rumor that, however, represents the nature of historical
development taken as destiny. The dissolution of the narrator, hence, is
the dissolution of the figure of the “poor schmuck of a popologist”, of any
enthusiasm toward the sublimity of chemical sunsets of White Noises; it
is—in DeLillo’s own words—“the revenge of popular culture on those
who take it too seriously” (DeLillo 1997, p. 323).
The ball, as the center around which the material of the novel orga-
nizes itself, forms the concrete image of the objectified human relation-
ships. As the capital is “not a thing, but a social relation between persons
which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p. 932), the baseball—a
useful waste of consumption economy—is the mediator par excellence,
being at the same time a real and an idealized thing, a bare material object
and a humanized social thing. The role of the ball as an amphibious
object, hence, is what is able to turn it in the legal field that structures the
novel, and this peculiar power of the world of the things is visible in how
the narrator is obsessed by the presence of objects, to the point of becom-
ing lyrical just in front of the death of material things:
It was reddish brown, flat-topped, monumental, sunset burning in the

heights, and Brian thought he was hallucinating an Arizona butte. But it
was real and it was man-made […]. It was science fiction and prehistory,
garbage arriving twenty-four hours a day […]. Specks and glints, ragtails of
222 M. Farina
color appeared in the stratified mass of covering soil, fabric scraps from the
garment center, stirred by the wind, or maybe that teal thing is a bikini
brief that belonged to a secretary from Queens, and Brian found he could
create a flash infatuation, she is dark-eyed and reads the tabloids and paints
her nails and eats lunch out of molded styrofoam, and he gives her gifts and
she gives him condoms, and it all ends up here, newsprint, emery boards,
sexy underwear, coaxed into high relief by the rumbling dozers – think of
his multitudinous spermlings with their history of high family fore-heads,
Stranded in a Ramses body bag and rollered snug in the deep-down waste.
(DeLillo 1997, pp. 183–185)
This lyrical funeral oration to consumption objects, the declamation of

the cemetery of the inorganic receptacles of human history’s desires, is
together the acknowledgment of the power of the things and the last shot
tail of the subjectivity, that remembers what the destiny of objects is:
Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store
shelves, yet unbought. We didn’t say, What kind of casserole will that
make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat,
easily disposed of? (DeLillo 1997, p.121)
It is only by playing on the border of this intricate relationship to the

objects that Underworld’s dissolution of the unitary formal principle does
not crumble in a chaotic mass of meaningless fragments. The role of the
“I”, in this sense, is that of an objects collector, who renounces to its own
integrity on behalf of the object’s salvation, but at the same time it is the
pot in which the objects can be seen as something instead of nothing. As
in contemporary institutional theory of art the work of art is such as it is
placed into a museum, in the postmodern novel the “Epic I” is nothing
but the collector of the objects, but the objects are subjects just as they are
watched by the narrator. In front of the dissolution of the narrator, the
great “Epic I” of the traditional novel, source of any possible literary
meaning, is just like Brian—one of DeLillo’s stereotypes of pop-culture
enthusiasts, like Murray in White Noise—in the words of the resigned
baseball collector, “you used to have the same dimensions as the observ-
able universe. Now you’re a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a
purpose, a destination” (DeLillo 1997, p. 170).
5.3 Conclusion: The Novel

as Postmodernist Genre
In the opening lines of his essay about U.S. fiction and TV, David Foster
Wallace describes fiction writers as watchers, viewers, as persons who
“tend to lurk and to stare” (Wallace 1993, p. 151). Himself being some-
one who tends to lurk, and a self-declared TV addict, Wallace points to
the link between the main issue of contemporary novel and that con-
stantly open window in every Western living room that television is. No
doubt, Wallace touches a nerve explaining the success of postmodern
fiction, namely the accumulation of visual layers placed by television—as
a narrative of reality—between things as they are and things as they are
told. What Wallace does not say, precisely as a fiction writer himself, is
that in American postmodern novels the narrator tends to progressively
disappear and leave the job of unitary principle in the narrated world
unattended.
What can be seen in the morphological development that I have pre-
sented here is certainly not, then, a final answer to the question on what
a postmodern novel is, a question that would be even naive to think it
might have a final answer. Rather, by following the historical turn in the
formal principle of postmodern novels, these latter emerge as a genre,
namely as a general literary category which collects under its legal sover-
eignty a number of individual products. The American postmodern novel
is in this sense the literary phenomenon that, through the progressive
dissolution of the figure of the unitary “Epic I”, aesthetically reacts to the
economic, social, and historic power of the objects toward the subject.
Postmodern novels are tied, therefore, to the history of twentieth-century
novel in general. As is well known, modernist literature, as conveyed by
products stemming from the broad context of German-speaking post-
expressionism, and in the productive contrast between French symbolism
and realism, was confronted by the issue of how to close the form of the
novel itself. Exemplary in this regard are the struggles of Franz Kafka,
Robert Musil, and Marcel Proust in closing their masterpieces. Their fail-
ures are the result of a modernist attempt to incorporate the alienated,
disenchanted world of late capitalism within the realm of an “Epic I”,
224 M. Farina
which is still regrettably structured according to the formal law of the

narrator of classic novels, namely as a subject able to meaningfully
describe reality by hosting it in its interiority. In his essay “The Position
of the Narrator in Contemporary Novel”, Adorno correctly defines post
avant-garde narration as a modification of the traditional one. As previ-
ously already remarked, whereas the traditional narrator “raises a curtain”
over an illusion depicted for the reader (SdE: 45, NtL1: 33), the narrator
in late capitalism “acknowledges the superior strength of the world of
things” (SdE: 47, NtL1: 35), and, in this regard, it acknowledges its own
inability to describe reality, even though its formal law and task is still “to
tell a story” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30). Probably for lack of historical distance,
Adorno fails to pinpoint, though, the paradoxical nature of the task of
modernist writers, which indeed leads to a narration that is impossible to
conclude, as in Kafka’s and Musil’s novels, where no ending can be
imaged, or in Proust’s Recherche, where there is no possible consistent pas-
sage from the youth of the narrator to his old age in the last volume, since
the steadfastness of adulthood is incompatible with a world that is fragile
as a childish, or senile, narration. The missing piece in Adorno’s account,
perhaps just for biographical reasons, is the historical turn that occurred
in the form of the Roman with the emergence of the American postmod-
ern novel. Postmodern novels, in fact, renounce the very idea of a closed
form, and in so doing achieve the most consistent result of this renuncia-
tion, namely the dissolution of the unitary “Epic I” as formal principle of
the novel. According to this exquisitely formal development, postmodern
novels boldly articulate the literary answer to the structural question that
undermines the genre of the novel itself—“the nominalistic and thus
paradoxical form par excellence” (ÄT: 299, AT: 201), or “the only devel-
oping genre” in Bakhtin words (Bakhtin 1981, p. 4)—namely, the ques-
tion about the possibility to shape, in the sense of giving form, to a reality
that is refractory to any meaningful aesthetic form.
In 1773, the German philosopher, literary critic, and theologist,
Johann Gottfried Herder published a seminal volume titled Von Deutscher
Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art), which includes, among other
things, Goethe’s piece “On German Architecture”. The volume bears tes-
timony to Harder’s effort to present the distinctive character of German
culture, art and poetry, despite the fact that “Germany”, as an
autonomous institutional entity, did not yet exist, and it would not have
existed for—almost—another hundred years. In one of the essays of the
book, Herder sharply polemicizes, in Winckelmann’s spirit, against the
French-inspired German classicism of authors such as Johann Christoph
Gottsched, who saw poetics as the normative application of the so-called
Aristotelian rules, or unities, to modern tragedies. Herder’s idea, on the
contrary, was to elevate the peculiarity of modern dramatic poetry, whose
greatest representative is identified in Shakespeare—precisely the name
against which all the normative classicism would speak. What Herder
highlights is the fact that, to his mind, writing a tragedy in the spirit of
Sophocles—the most beloved Greek classical model—does not mean to
imitate his works, but rather to imitate his own originality, and become
per se original. In this notion Shakespeare’s demolition of Sophocles’
unity is fully justified, inasmuch as for the modern world another form is
required, namely that of totality:
If in Sophocles a single action prevails, then Shakespeare aims at the total-

ity of an event, an occurrence. If in Sophocles’ characters a single tone
predominates, then Shakespeare assembles all the characters, estates, and
ways of life that are necessary to produce the main melody of his sym-
phony. […] And if Sophocles represents and teaches and moves and culti-
vates Greeks, then Shakespeare teaches, moves, and cultivates northern
men! (Herder 2006, pp. 298–299)
As one of the authors that most contributed to feed the seeds of German
Romanticism,27 Herder places right at the beginning of his theorization
of the novel as an autonomous literary form a strong acknowledgment of
the distinctive quality of modern poetry in the break of unity in the name
of a more extensive and comprehensive category such as that of totality;
the modern destiny of the novel is first anticipated by the problematiza-
tion and rupture of the unity. The novel will indeed go through the real-
ism of totality outlined by Herder, through the crashing of the harmonic
totality in the modernist age, and finally through the postmodern disso-
lution of the “Epic I” as the formal principle of the novel.
On Herder’s influence on early Romanticism, see for example the account provided by Terry
27
Pinkard (2002, pp. 132–134).

226 M. Farina
The formal development that I have described in this chapter, hence,

has to be understood in terms of the morphological path undertaken by
the postmodern novel facing its defining challenges. In its attempt to
achieve an autonomous aesthetic form, while responding to those dynam-
ics of social dissolution and literary reconstruction of the aesthetic that I
have outlined in the first chapters of this book, novels become postmod-
ern. The development of the American postmodern novel can in this
regard be seen as an experimental test for Adorno’s theory of literature.
The sequence that I have presented, with Pynchon, Wallace, and DeLillo,
should not, under any respect, be understood as a rigid schema, as if it
were the expression of a historical ontology of the novel. Many of the
thoughts that I have extracted from those authors can be found in other
writers and novels, taken not only from the broad context of postmod-
ernism, or even of American literature.28 The sequence that I have cho-
sen, however, has the advantage to clearly, and radically, expose the
development of a problem—that of the dissolution of the “Epic I” as the
unitarian formal principle of the novel—that is connected to what is
generally taken as postmodern shared sensitivity: the collapse of great
narrations; the paranoid attitude toward reality; the hysterical stance
toward realism; the cynicism of the subject as reaction to its fragility. The
postmodern ideas about the end of ideology, the downfall of the narra-
tion, and the meltdown of historical and social sense are presented, in this
way, in readable form in a literary figure, namely in the constellation of
postmodern novels as a specific development of the formal problem of
the novel as a literary genre. An otherwise elusive historical category such
as that of postmodernism can in this way be caught in a constellation of
products, namely the constellation of postmodern novels, being the
28
Besides Jonathan Franzen, I can surely mention, as Ercolino does, Zadie Smith and Roberto
Bolaño, but also Marx Leyner and—as I do not include the quantitative length of the book in the
decisive qualities of the literary phenomenon I am interested in—the Italian writer Pier Vittorio
Tondelli, at least the novel Camere separate (Separate Rooms). However, what I have presented as
the breakup of the “Epic I” as the legal principle of the novel, or at least its problematization, shows
its effects in many other literary products, even far from what is generally taken as the postmodern
cultural framework, as for example in Emmanuel Carrère’s non-fictional way to cross the line of the
story with personal interventions, or in the obsession with which the narrator of Philip Roth’s
American Pastoral lingers in the description of the technical production of leather gloves, as if it
were the only firm point in the middle of the crumble of American history.
latter—or rather, the difficulties with which they grew into a determinate
literary form—the figure, in terms of philosophy of history, of an age that
thinks of itself as a meaningless layering of illusions. In this operation, I
have tried to stay true to the method applied by Szondi when he reads the
formal development of modern drama. By applying to the form of the
novel his Adornian approach to the relationship between literary form
and history, my aim has been that of remaining “within the realm of aes-
thetics rather than branching out into a diagnosis of the period. The con-
tradictions between dramatic form and the problems of contemporary
life should not be set down in abstracto. Instead, they should be examined
as technical contradictions, as ‘difficulties’, internal to the concrete work
itself ” (Szondi 1987, p. 5).
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaı ̆lovic. 1981. Epic and Novel. In M.M. Bakhtin. The
Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, 3–40. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J. Osborne.
———. 2003. On the Concept of History. In W. Benjamin. Selected Writings.
Volume 4. 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland, and Michael W. Jennings,
389–400. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 2005. The Crisis of the Novel. In W. Benjamin. Selected Writings.
Volume 2, Part 1. 1927–1930, ed. Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings, and
Gary Smith, 299–304. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Bloom, Harold. 2003. Introduction. In Don DeLillo, ed. Herold Bloom, 1–3.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publisher.
Bürger, Peter. 1987. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis:
———. 1990. Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism. Telos 86: 49–60.
Campana, Francesco. 2019. The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary
Novel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cook, Deborah. 2006. Adorno’s Critical Materialism. Philosophy & Social
Criticism 32 (6): 719–737.
228 M. Farina
de Vries, Willem A. 2008. Sense-Certainty and the “This-Such”. In Hegel’s

Phenomenology of Spirit. A Critical Guide, ed. Dean Moyar, and Michael
Quante, 63–75. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
DeLillo, Don. 1988. Libra. New York: Viking.
———. 1997. Underworld. A Novel. New York/London/Toronto/Sydney/
Singapore: Scribner.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard. 2003. “Hushing Sick Transmissions”: Disrupting Story in
The Crying of Lot 49. In Thomas Pynchon, ed. Harold Bloom, 235–249.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publisher.
Eichel, Christine. 1993. Vom Ermatten der Avantgarde zur Vernetzung der Künste:
Perspektiven einer interdisziplinären Ästhetik im Spätwerk Theodor W. Adornos.
Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Ercolino, Stefano. 2014. The Maximalist Novel. From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Trans. A. Sbragia. New York/London/New
Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury.
Garelli, Gianluca. 2010. Lo spirito in figura. Il tema dell’estetico nella
“Fenomenologia dello spirito” di Hegel. Bologna: il Mulino.
Geulen, Eva. 2006. Adorno and the Poetics of Genre. In Adorno and Literature,
Continuum.
Heon, John. 2003. Surveying the Punch Line: Jokes and their Relation to the
American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner
Notes to Spiked! In American Postmodernity. Essays on the Recent Fiction of
Thomas Pynchon, ed. Ian D. Copestake, 147–171. Oxford/Bern/Berlin/
Bruxelles/Frankfurt a. M./New York/Wien: Peter Lang.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. 2006. Selected Writings on Aesthetics. Trans. G. Moore.
Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Jarvis, Simon. 2004. Adorno, Marx, Materialism. In The Cambridge Companion
to Adorno, ed. Thomas Huhn, 79–100. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Kafka, Franz. 2009. The Castle. Trans. A. Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Karl, Frederick R. 2001. American Fictions 1980–2000. Whose America is it
Anyway? Philadelphia: Xlibris.
LeClair, Tom. 1989. The Art of Excess. Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Leyner, Mark. 1990. My Cousin. My Gastroenterologist. New York:
Harmony Books.
Merlin Press.
Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans.
Moretti, Franco. 1996. Modern Epic. The World-System from Goethe to García
Marquez. Trans. Q. Hoare. London: Verso.
Paddison, Max. 1987. Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory’. Music Analysis 6 (3): 355–377.
———. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Proust, Marcel. 1992. In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols. Trans. C.K.S. Moncrieff,
and T. Kilmartin, Rev. D.J. Enright. New York: The Modern Library.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1966. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
———. 2006. Gravity’s Rainbow. London/New York: Penguin.
Rayner, Richard. 2010. Tuning Back in to ‘White Noise’. Los Angeles Times,
January 3, 2010.
Rebentisch, Juliane. 2003. Ästhetik der Installation. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a. M.
Schlegel, Friedrich. 1968. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Trans.
E. Behler, and R. Struc. University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of Modern Drama. Trans. M. Hays. Minneapolis:
———. 2002. An Essay on the Tragic. Trans. P. Flaming. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Wallace, David Foster. 1993. E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (2): 151–194.
———. 1996. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
———. 1998. A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments.
London: Abacus.
Index1
A Baudelaire, Charles, 12, 31, 35–37,

Addison, Joseph, 83n28 72, 103, 127, 136
Agamben, Giorgio, 33n41, 36, Baumgarten, Alexander
36n44, 37, 86 Gottlieb, 83n28
Allen, Graham, 171n38 Beckett, Samuel, 126, 126n27, 127,
Amis, Martin, 217n25 164, 165, 167, 175, 180,
Anderson, Perry, 111 197, 198
Argan, Giulio Carlo, 124, 124n25 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 63, 81–83,
Aristotle, 116n18, 147 81n24, 81n25, 81n26, 120
Behler, Ernst, 20n27, 158n21
Benjamin, Walter, 11, 11n13, 12,
B 12n14, 16n18, 17, 17n21,
Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 16, 21–23, 28–38, 31n38, 31n39,
16n18, 17, 32 33n41, 35n43, 36n44, 39n45,
Baeumler, Alfred, 16, 16n18, 17, 33 40–46, 42n48, 44n50, 44n51,
Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 195, 224 54, 59, 59n8, 78, 98, 98n6,
Balzac, Honoré de, 152, 156 114, 114n17, 132, 146n7,
Barthes, Roland, 169–171 158n21, 164, 177n47, 192,
Bataille, Georges, 42n48 192n4, 196, 196n13, 204,
Batteux, Charles, 115, 116n18 206, 206n18
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0
232 Index
Berg, Alban, 2, 72, 120n22, 121 Chua, Daniel K.L, 55n1

Bergengruen, Werner, 71n16 Clair, Jean, 122
Berio, Luciano, 55, 56 Cohen, Stephen, 161n24
Berman, Art, 101n8 Colet, Louise, 173n42
Bernstein, Jay M., 19n25, Colletti, Lucio, 194n9
116n19, 154n16 Cook, Deborah, 111n14,
Bernulli, Carl A., 16n18 116n19, 194n9
Bertram, Georg W., 96 Cornelius, Hans, 3, 9, 9n10
Bloch, Brandon, 9n10 Covach, John, 56
Bloch, Ernst, 6n6 Croce, Benedetto, 42, 42n49,
Bloom, Harold, 218 80n23, 94, 94n2, 192,
Blumenfeld, Harold, 55n1 192n4, 193
Boccioni, Umberto, 43 Cunningham, David, 151n13
Böckelmann, Frank, 111n14
Bolaño, Roberto, 191, 226n28
Bosanquet, Bernard, 80n23 D
Boulez, Pierre, 67n13 D’Angelo, Paolo, 70n15
Bourdieu, Pierre, 93, 100n7 Danto, Arthur C., vii, 20, 85, 86,
Bowie, Andrew, 154n18 95, 95n3, 97, 97n4, 104,
Bozzetti, Mauro, 82 104–105n12, 105, 190n2
Brecht, Bertolt, 29, 29n36, 35, 41, Davies, Peter, 16n18
126n27, 127, 133, Debord, Guy, 40, 40n47
133n31, 148 DeLillo, Donald R., ix, 190, 200,
Buben, Adam, 4 201, 205, 212, 217–222,
Buck-Morss, Susan, 2n1, 21n28, 217n25, 226
33n41, 44, 45n53 Derrida, Jacques, 40n47, 154n18
Bulgakov, Mikhail A., 121 deVries, Willem A., 193n7
Burdach, Konrad, 192n4 Dewey, John, 122n24
Bürger, Peter, v, vi, 189n1 Dickie, George, 85
Disney, Walter E., 44
Döblin, Alfred, 196
C Duyfhuizen, Bernard, 206n18
Cage, John, 67n13
Campana, Francesco, 190n2
Carrère, Emmanuel, 226n28 E
Carroll, Noël, 145–147 Eggers, Dave, 217n25
Cassirer, Ernst, 17n22 Eichel, Christine, 192, 192n5
Cézanne, Paul, 102 Eiland, Howard, 12n14, 31n39,
Chaplin, Charles S., 180 35n43, 42n48
Index 233
Eliade, Mircea, 16n18 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 225

Eliot, Thomas S., 146n7, 169, 170 Gutiérrez Pozo, Antonio, 103n10
Ercolino, Stefano, 190, 191, 191n3, Guyer, Paul, 7, 19n25, 83n28
204n17, 219, 219n26, 226n28
H
F Habermas. Jürgen, v, vn1, 35n42,
Farahmandpur, Ramin, 93 45, 111n14
Farina, Mario, 19n26, 70n15, Hall, Timothy, 2n1
124n25, 152n14 Hamilton, Richard, 103
Feher, Ferenc, 12n14 Hammer, Espen, vi
Feloj, Serena, 71n17, 147n8 Hampson, Daphne, 4
Flaubert, Gustave, 134, 173, 173n42 Hansen, Miriam, 43
Formaggio, Dino, 22n29, Harding, James M., 13n16
104, 124n25 Hartmann, Edward von, 80n23
Foster, Roger, 153n15 Heath, Stephen, 209
Foucault, Michel, 33n41 Heidegger, Martin, 4
Fourier, Joseph, 72 Helleu, Paul César, 118
Franze, Jonathan, 226n28 Hellings, James, 79n22
Freud, Sigmund, 17n22, 28, 39n45, Heon, John, 206n18
160, 177, 178, Herder, Johann Gottfried, 27n33,
178n48, 178n49 224, 225
Hesiod, 146
Hirst, Damien, 9
G Hitler, Adolf, 16, 55n3
Garelli, Gianluca, 193n6 Hobsbawm, Eric J., vi
Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 100n7,
58n7, 70n15, 80n23 108, 135
Geulen, Eva, viii, 80n23, 94, 100n7, Hölderlin, Friedrich, 104, 129, 130,
112n15, 125, 135, 136, 135, 136, 159, 167, 173,
167n32, 192, 192n5 173n45, 175
Geuss, Raymond, 145n6 Homer, 146, 196
Gibson, John, 145–147 Honneth, Axel, 24n30
Ginsberg, Allen, 174 Horkheimer, Max, vn1, 25, 25n31,
Ginsborg, Hannah, 7n9 42, 43, 45, 45n52, 46, 66
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, Horney, Karen, 39n45
121, 195n12, 205, 224 Howald, Ernst, 16n18
Gogol, Nikolai V., 200 Hugo, Victor, 147
234 Index
Hulatt, Owen, 117n21 Kennedy, John F., 218, 219

Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 4n5, 10n12, Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye, 3–23, 58,
28n35, 55n2, 62n10, 163n27 68, 113n16, 152
Kivy, Peter, 83n28
Klages, Ludwig, 16n18, 17n22,
I 35, 35n42
Iannelli, Francesca, 70n15 Klasen, Isabelle, 126n27
Klee, Paul, 204
Klemperer, Victor, 27n33
J Klimt, Gustav, 15
James, David, 133n30 Klossowski, Pierre, 42n48
Jameson, Fredric, v, 36n44, 39n45, Köhler, Wolfgang, 82n27
116n19, 133n31, 151n13 Kornbluh, Anna, 161n24
Jarvis, Simon, 39n45, Kracauer, Siegfried, 6n6
167n33, 194n9 Kramer, Hilton, 102n9
Jay, Martin, 45n53 Kraus, Karl, 28, 28n35, 102,
Jean Paul (Paul Friedrich Richter), 119, 135–137
210, 210n19, 211n20 Kroon, Frederick, 147n9, 148n9
Jennings, Michael W., 12n14,
31n39, 35n43, 42n48
Jephcott, Edmund, 145n5 L
Jesi, Furio, 16n18 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 146
Jochmann, Carl Gustav, 114n17 Lamarque, Peter, 144, 144n3,
Joyce, James, 151, 164, 173, 145, 147n9
195n12, 198 LeClair, Tom, 190, 191
Jung, Carl Gustav, 17n22, 35 Leeuw, Ton de, 56
Jünger, Ernst, 17n22 Leonardo da Vinci, 9, 42
Leppert, Richard, 25
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim,
K 121, 147n8
Kafka, Franz, 32, 175–183, 197, Levi, Primo, 181
198, 210, 223, 224 Levinson, Jerrold, vi, 170n37
Kamenetsky, Christa, 27n33 Levinson, Marjorie, 161n24
Kant, Immanuel, 6–9, 7n9, 9n10, Leyner, Mark, 215, 215n24, 226n28
9n11, 17–19, 23, 31, 145, Lichtenstein, Roy, 103
157, 192 Lijster, Thijs, 13n15, 31n39, 44n50,
Karl, Frederick R., 190, 191 45, 104n12
Kelly, Theresa M., 96 London, Jack, 200
Index 235
Lukács, George, 34 Murawska-Muthesius,

Lukács, György, 1, 2, 11, 21–23, Katarzyna, 122n24
40n47, 80, 127, 195, 195n11 Musil, Robert, 223, 224
Lyotard, Jean-François, v, 66, 101n8 Mussolini, Benito, 67n14
M N
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 169 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 146
Manet, Édouard, 15, 136 Nehamas, Alexander, vi
Mann, Klaus, 122n23, 135, 175, Nicholsen, Shierry W., 163n27
181, 198 Nicolai, Christoph F., 147n8
Mann, Thomas, 16, 16n18, 16n19, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 16n20,
16n20, 120–122 35n42, 45n53, 53–55,
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 122 60, 61, 70
Marino, Stefano, 77n21, 96, 116 Nitsch, Hermann, 14
Marlowe, Christopher, 121 Nono, Luigi, 67n13
Marquard, Odo, 7, 7n8 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg),
Martin, Stewart, 125n26, 136, 20n27, 27
143n1, 168n34
Marx, Karl, viiin3, 24, 32, 32n40,
38–40, 39n45, 45n53, 61n9, O
62, 84, 85, 111, 149, 150, Oberhelmen, David D., 28n34
194n9, 204, 221 Olsen, Stein Haugom, 144n3
Matteucci, Giovanni, 96, 116 Ophälders, Markus, 81n26
Mautz, Kurt, 122n23
McBride, Patrizia C., 101n8
McLaren, Peter, 93 P
Melville, Herman, 195n12 Paddison, Max, 26n32, 55n1, 84,
Mendelssohn, Moses, 147n8 86, 189n1, 194n8
Menninghaus, Winfried, 71n17 Pensky, Max, 21n28
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, 55n4 Picasso, Pablo, 43, 87n29, 103, 126
Mikkonen, Jukka, 154n17 Pinkard, Terry, 15, 71n18,
Mioyasaki, Donovan, 39n45 172n41, 225n27
Monet, Claude Oscar, 117, 118 Piotrowski, Piotr, 122n24
Moretti, Franco, 195 Pippin, Robert B., 15n17
Müller-Doohm, Stephen, 2n1, 3n4, Pissarro, Camille, 109, 117
6n6, 25n31, 31n39, 45n52, Plass, Ulrich, 144n2,
120, 122n23 163n26, 171n39
236 Index
Plato, 146 Scholem, Gershom, 36n44

Popper, Karl R., 75 Schopenhauer, Arthur,
Powers, Richard, 217n25 19n25, 35n42
Proust, Marcel, 98n5, 117–120, Scruton, Roger, vi, 64, 64n12
117n21, 123, 129, 130, Seubold, Günter, 67n13, 87
130n28, 133, 134, 151, Shakespeare, William, 225
153n15, 154, 175, 197, 198, Shusterman, Richard., 146n7
214, 223, 224 Sibelius, Jean, 74
Pynchon, Thomas, ix, 190, 191, Silverblatt, Michael., 202n16
204–212, 226 Sisley, Alfred, 109, 117
Smith, Zadie, 191, 217n25, 226n28
Social, 145
R Sophocles, 172, 225
Rayner, Richard, 217n25 Spengler, Oswald, 17n22
Rebentisch, Juliana, 125n26, Spitzer, Michael, 81n26
192, 192n5 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 67n13
Reinhold, Karl L., 157n20 Szondi, Peter, 18, 57n6, 59, 60, 127,
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 117, 118 158, 200, 200n14, 227
Ritter, Joachim, 83n28
Roberts, David, 102
Robinson, Josh, ixn4, 159, T
161n24, 173n43 Tagliaferro, Charles, 122n24
Rosenkranz, Karl, 70, 72 Tapié, Michel, 104
Roth, Philip, 226n28 Tiedemann, Rolf, 81n25,
Ryan, Bartholomew, 11n13 95, 126n27
Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 194n9
Tolkien, John R.R., 28, 28n34
S Tolstoy, Leo, 144n3
Sachs, Harvey, 67n14 Tondelli, Pier Vittorio, 226n28
Saisselin, Rémy G., 116
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 165
Scährf, Christian, 163n26 V
Schiller, Friedrich, 18, 19, Vacatello, Marzio, 111n14
19n24, 20n27 Valéry, Paul, 76, 97, 98, 98n5, 123,
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 20n27 128, 136, 172
Schlegel, Friedrich, 19, 26, 158n21, Volpacchio, Florindo, 120, 121n22
158n22, 195, 195n10 Voltolini, Alberto, 147n9, 148n9
Schmitt, Carl, 17n22 Vries, Hent de, 28n35
Index 237
W Witkin, Robert W., 55n1, 58, 74,

Wagner, Richard, 29, 30, 40, 41, 75, 74n19, 77n21, 86
120n22, 136 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15
Wallace, David F., ix, 201–203, Wolfson, Susan, 161n24
201n15, 202n16, 205, Wolin, Richard, vi, 143
212–218, 217n25, 220, 221, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang
223, 226 Schulze), 103
Warhol, Andy, 9, 97, 103 Woolf, Virginia, 164
Weber, Max, 24, 24n30, 45n53
Webern, Anton, 66, 120n22
Weitzman, Erica., vin2 Y
Wellmer, Albrecht, 35n42, Young, James O., 116n18
117n20, 155n19
Wenzel, Christian Helmut, 18n23
Whistler, James A. McNeill, 118 Z
Whyman, Tom, 21n28 Zappa, Frank, 77n21, 120,
Williams, Robert R., 172n40 120–121n22
Winckelmann, Johann Zola, Èmile, 148, 153
Joachim, 225 Zurletti, Sara, 74n19, 87

Adornos Aesthetics As A Literary Theory of Art PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Adornos Aesthetics As A Literary Theory of Art PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Adorno’s Aesthetics

ISBN 978-3-030-45280-3 ISBN 978-3-030-45281-0 (eBook)

Generally deemed inadequate to account for the postmodern issues of

regression as part of the same progressive and developmental movement

According to this framework then, the difficulties Adorno objectively

What I suggest in this book is in particular to read Adorno’s reaction

exemplified also by other recent contributions to the critical debate.4

Firenze, Italy Mario Farina

1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the

2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the

3 Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic 93

3.3 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (i): Three

4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary

5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel189

A Amorbach. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und

BW4 Th.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927–1969, 4 Vols., ed.

Pei Prefazione all’edizione italiana [Preface to the Italian Edition].

ND Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London-New York:

In one of the most influential books for Adorno’s philosophical educa-

© The Author(s) 2020 1

expression of that reification” (WnK: 825–826, EoM: 128). To be fair,

However, it is worth mentioning that the book’s aim is twofold: to over-

objectivity, the late capitalistic oppression of the individual cannot be

environment6 form the theoretical structure of Adorno’s interpretative

showcased in the text can be seen, in fact, as the attempt to provide an

universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting.

Pupil of the neo-Kantian scholar Cornelius, and certainly fascinated

This transition toward the historicization of the Kantian judgment

Kierkegaard, in contrast to Hegel, failed to achieve historical concretion—

In this passage Adorno sums up the overall problem of history in his

being submitted to the metaphysical and idealistic determination of the

ness, see the interpretation of Bartholomew Ryan (2014, pp. 177–179).

idea of intérieur in the light of the typical nineteenth-century figure of

nature attractive and beautiful because it seems to be designed precisely

amounts to a naïve and mystical understanding of art,27 whose sole con-

become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority”

conceptual principle drives Adorno on the path of the resolution of the

direction of Horkheimer can be found in Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 150–158).

formal composition of social conflicts, achieved precisely by depositing

The “romantic transfiguration of craftsmanship” would be therefore the

defined in this way also by Max Paddison (1993, pp. 98–99).

that “if the immanent development of music were established as an abso-

even fascism, as in the case of Tolkien’s novels.34 To the opposite, Adorno

in objectivist music appears as a conforming image: it appears that the

influence of Benjamin in all of Adorno’s works until his death.38 Benjamin’s

rigid “petrified, primordial landscape” (Benjamin 1998, p. 166). The art-

self-­contained subject of the content of consciousness” (BW1: 139, Cor1:

several historical and conceptual investigations and interpretations.44

581–582). Adorno’s critique, however, is not aimed at reestablishing the

1.4 The Model of the Culture Industry

twentieth-­century Marxism, not least because of the influence of Freud’s

of commodity, social conflict between labor and capital appears as a natu-

Debord has called The Society of Spectacle. In this respect, Adorno broad-

critical reaction, Benjamin announces in fact to Max Horkheimer his

to build a political consciousness of the mass by means of a historically

commodification of every artistic quality. In this respect, whereas the

phantasmagory of commodity, by concealing with amusement the con-

Behler, Ernst. 1993. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge, UK:

———. 1971b. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone.

Wenzel, Christian Helmut. 2005. An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core

© The Author(s) 2020 53

which Adorno best elucidates this path of dissolution of the aesthetic is

mobility, dynamics, all of these diverge into distinct, entirely separated

Firenze, Italy Mario Farina

1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the

2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the

3 Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic 93

3.3 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (i): Three

4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary

5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel189

self-contained subject of the content of consciousness” (BW1: 139, Cor1:

1.4 The Model of the Culture Industry

twentieth-century Marxism, not least because of the influence of Freud’s

2.2 The Failure of the Artwork

2.3 The Dissolution of the Aesthetic

post-avant-garde in terms of a mirror of the “recurrent polarity of futur-

3.2 The Deaestheticization

c ommodification. Nevertheless, he often uses references to such a form of