Exact Imagination, Late Work – On Adorno′s Aesthetics (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) - Hardcover

Nicolsen, Shierry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262140624 ISBN 13: 9780262140621

Publisher: MIT Press, 1997

Synopsis

Most English-language writing on Theodor Adorno has attempted to place him in various contexts and to differentiate him from other thinkers. Such work, while important, marks our failure to appropriate Adorno's ideas imaginatively. In this text, the author proposes such an appropriation through a focus on the centrality of the aesthetic dimension in Adorno. Adorno uses the term "exact imagination" to mark the conjunction of knowledge, subjective experience, and aesthetic form. Exact imagination, as distinct from creative imagination, thus describes a form of nondiscursive rationality. According to Adorno, exact imagination discovers or produces truth by reconfiguring the material at hand; thus, knowledge is inseparable from the configurational form imagination gives it. "Late work" is characterized by the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity. In its attempt to grasp late phenomena, Adorno's oeuvre itself takes on the form of late work. 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 unravelling 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.

About this title

Review

-- Tom Huhn, College of Letters and Philosophy Department, Wesleyan University " Nicholsen's "Exact Imagination, Late Work" is the distilled, reflected product of countless hours alongside, and deeply within, Adorno's languages. Her brilliant achievement here is to have demonstrated the emphatic intimacy between Adorno's aesthetics and his compositions." -- Tom Huhn, College of Letters and Philosophy Department, Wesleyan University & quot; Nicholsen's Exact Imagination, Late Work is the distilled, reflected product of countless hours alongside, and deeply within, Adorno's languages. Her brilliant achievement here is to have demonstrated the emphatic intimacy between Adorno's aesthetics and his compositions.& quot; -- Tom Huhn, College of Letters and Philosophy Department, Wesleyan University "Nicholsen's "Nicholsen's "Exact Imagination, Late Work" is the distilled, reflected product of countless hours alongside, and deeply within, Adorno's languages. Her brilliant achievement here is to have demonstrated the emphatic intimacy between Adorno's aesthetics and his compositions."--Tom Huhn, College of Letters and Philosophy Department, Wesleyan University

About the Author

Shierry Weber Nicholsen teaches environmental philosophy and psychology in Antioch University Seattle's M.A. Program on Environment and Community and is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Seattle. She has translated several works by Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262140624
• ISBN 13: 9780262140621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280