Exact imagination, late work : on Adorno's aesthetics / Shierry Weber Nicholsen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nicholsen, Shierry Weber, author.

Series:

Studies in contemporary German social thought

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969.

Adorno, Theodor W.

Aesthetics.

Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. Ästhetische Theorie.

Aesthetics, Modern--20th century.

Aesthetics, Modern.

Physical Description:

270 pages ; 21 cm.

Edition:

First MIT Press paperback edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London : MIT Press, 1999.

Summary:

Until now, most English-language writing on Adorno has attempted to place him in various contexts and to differentiate him from other thinkers. Such work, while important, masks our failure to imaginatively appropriate Adorno's ideas. In Exact Imagination, Late Work, Shierry Weber Nicholsen begins the process of appropriation through the centrality of the aesthetic dimension.

Adorno uses the term "exact imagination" to describe nondiscursive rationality. Exact imagination, which is the opposite of creative imagination, marks the conjunction of knowledge, subjective experience, and aesthetic form. Unlike exact imagination, "late work" is characterized by the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity.

Exact imagination and late work mark the bounds of Nicholsen's exploration. The five interlocked essays, based on material from Adorno's "aesthetic writings, " take up such issues as subjective aesthetic experience, the historicity of artworks and our experience of them, Adorno's conception of language, the nature of configurational or constellational form in Adorno's work, and the relation between the artwork, aesthetic experience, and philosophy. A subtext is the unraveling of Adorno's use of the ideas of his colleague Walter Benjamin. Nicholsen's essays themselves can be perceived as a constellation of their own around the central issue of the inseparability of form in its aesthetic dimension and nondiscursive rationality.

Contents:

Introduction: Exact Imagination and Late Work 1

1 Subjective Aesthetic Experience and Its Historical Trajectory 15

2 Language: Its Murmurings, Its Darkness, and Its Silver Rib 59

3 Configurational Form in the Aesthetic Essay and the Enigma of Aesthetic Theory 103

4 Aesthetic Theory's Mimesis of Walter Benjamin 137

5 Adorno and Benjamin, Photography and the Aura 181.

Notes:

Originally published: 1997.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0262640406

9780262640404

OCLC:

42214310