Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance: On Dialectics in Modernity

Adorno’s aesthetics are one of the most important philosophical analyses of the 20th century, but their development remains unclear. Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance is the first book to provide a detailed study of how Adorno’s thinking of aesthetics developed and to show the different dimensions that came together to make it uniquely powerful. Principal among these dimensions are his intense interest in
music and his historical and materialist approach. In addition, by studying how Adorno’s aesthetics arose through interactions with different thinkers, particularly Kracauer, Horkheimer, and Schoenberg, it becomes clear that his thought changes in its relation to dialectics. As a result, Adorno’s thinking comes to broaden the understanding of aesthetics to include the sphere of sensuality, and in doing so
transforms both aesthetics and dialectics through a notion of dissonance, which in turn has substantial implications for the relation of his thinking to praxis.

William S. Allen is an independent researcher at the University of Southampton, UK, and the author of Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (2016); Without End: Sade’s Critique of Reason (Bloomsbury, 2018); Blanchot and the Outside of Literature (Bloomsbury, 2019); Noir and Blanchot: Deteriorations of the Event (Bloomsbury, 2020); and, Illegibility: Blanchot and Hegel (Bloomsbury, 2021).