Abstract

The paper proposes a focus on the aesthetic paradigm of the relationship that bends “sensible” and “intelligible” in Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy. The essay starts from the comparison with formalism of Clement Greenberg and specially with the theoretical work of Walter Benjamin about the “end of the aura” in the art of the twentieth century; then it deals the most important categories and speculative elements of Aesthetic Theory. Here, Adorno interprets the concept of “autonomy” in a necessary relation with “non-autonomy”, in other words its being a fait social, “social fact”. The capacity that art has to allow unexpressed possibilities to emerge is its ethical value, its utopian dimension; this dimension is always given negatively. Even if Adorno’s defence of modern art, which refuses every reconciliation with reality, seem historically dated, his conceptions continue to have a determinate influence on contemporary aesthetic reflection, although today the idea of crisis has become inseparable from the notion of modern art. It is precisely the ‘critical function’ that characterises the true artwork, whose form is therefore the determinate negation of its own ‘sedimented content’. This theoretical dimension is evident also in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the role of “testimony” of art after Auschwitz and in Adorno and Benjamin’s reflections about ‘non-sense’ in the modern novel.