Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and the Autonomy of Art

Theodor W. Adorno worked on Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory) for much of the last decade of his life, leaving it unfinished and not yet fully revised at his death in August 1969; the book was assembled and published posthumously in 1970 by his widow Gretel Adorno and his student and collaborator Rolf Tiedemann, who worked from Adorno's drafts and extensive notes to construct the text's final sequence, a fact reflected in the work's notoriously dense, paratactic, and non-linear style, which deliberately eschews a single sustained argumentative through-line in favor of a constellation of interlocking theses, a mode of presentation Adorno considered appropriate to his own anti-systematic philosophical method (developed at length already in Negative Dialectics, 1966). The book represents the culmination of aesthetic concerns Adorno had pursued since his earliest work, including his 1933 study of Kierkegaard and his extensive writings on music, both as a trained composer (a pupil of Alban Berg in Vienna in the late 1920s) and as a sociologist of music, notably in Philosophy of New Music (1949).