Introduction

That part of Adorno's work which we might wish to label his “aesthetics” is not hard to identify. At the time of his death, Adorno was close to completing his Aesthetic Theory, which represents the culmination of his lifelong engagement with the various arts – especially music and literature – and their philosophy. The development of Adorno's aesthetics can easily be traced from his early account in Philosophy of New Music of the rival tendencies in twentieth-century music represented by the composers Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky, through his engagement with a wide variety of literary texts in Notes to Literature, to the posthumously edited and published Aesthetic Theory itself.

However, closer inspection of these works – and perhaps of Aesthetic Theory in particular – quickly complicates such a neat survey of what might be called Adorno's aesthetics. There are a number of significant reasons for this complication. First, the category of aesthetics is itself at issue in Adorno's thought. In his important commentary, Lambert Zuidervaart has described Aesthetic Theory as a “meta-aesthetics”, which is to say that Adorno is concerned, among other things, to question the very possibility of philosophical aesthetics. Adorno's considerations of the meaning of aesthetics do not simply aim at a clearer, sharper definition of this term. Instead, one of the main appeals of Aesthetic Theory is that it seeks to question whether aesthetics can – or ought to – stand alone as a subdiscipline of philosophy.