Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory at Fifty: Introductory Remarks

“Great works wait. While their metaphysical meaning dissolves, something of their truth content, however little it can be pinned down, does not.” This hopeful remark appears in Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, a work that was first published in 1970, just a year after the author’s death. Fifty years later we can still hear in this remark a double entendre. In both art and personal life, we must surrender any hope for metaphysical eternity, but we can nonetheless affirm the survival of what we might call the “truth content” that is preserved in either an artwork or any “work” that survives long after its creator has passed. It is no less true for great works of philosophy, which are born with an aura at a particular time and place. No doubt this aura, too, is vulnerable to decay, but the work continues to awaken new thoughts well after the aura has dissolved. Wewill never be done reading Aesthetic Theory. It is admittedly the case for any work of philosophical importance that the task of its interpretation is ongoing and potentially infinite. But for a work such as Aesthetic Theory this truismmaycarry an enhanced truth. Because the author left it unfinished, all of us in the community of readers are burdened with the task of completing the work itself, as if each critical encounter were not only an interpretation but also