Studi di estetica

Foreword

Giulia Zerbinati, Giovanni Matteucci — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Adorno was a prolific and interdisciplinary thinker whose research lies at the intersection of philosophy, musicology, literary critique and art critique in a broad sense. A significant aspect of his intellectual journey was his confrontation with other key figures from the past and his contemporaries, which, explored through the exercise of immanent critique and dialectical method, contributed to the complex and layered elaboration of his thought.

La natura rammemorata

Francesco Simoncini — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The contribution examines Adorno’s re-evaluation of Kant’s "natural aesthetics" as opposed to Hegel’s “philosophy of art”. Taking as a reference point the pages of Aesthetic Theory on natural beauty, on the one hand, and the discussion of the sublime in the Vorlesungen, on the other, the question of the relationship between art and nature is addressed based on a number of pivotal issues. These include the description of beauty as “determined indeterminability”; the mimetic interplay between reﬂective and determinative judgement; “purposefulness without purpose” as an apparition of natural history; and, again, the paradoxical “aesthetics of resistance” that Adorno sees foreshadowed in the experience of the sublime, whereby man, instead of setting himself up as master of nature, attempts to resist its overwhelming power by recognising himself as part of it. Both the experience of beauty and that of the sublime are thus essential to understanding the concept of an “anamnesis of nature within the subject”, which lies at the heart of Adorno’s later thinking.

Adorno and Hegel

Giulia Zerbinati — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Aim of the paper is to highlight the influence of Hegelian dialectics on the elaboration of Adorno's negative dialectics, focusing, in particular, on the fact that the latter must be read not so much or not only as an uncompromising critique of the first one. Rather, negative dialectics must be read as an immanent critique of the Hegelian model, i.e. as its rethinking from within and, at the same time, as an attempt for its continuation and reconfiguration, on the basis of an initial and profound understanding of it. This becomes clear in a series of Adornian materials dated between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, which constitute a sort of 'constellative' work, where Adorno puts dialectics under analysis in its structure and operativity. Starting from these studies, I reconstruct some moments of this process of elaboration, through which dialectics is put into motion, put to the test, revised from within and, eventually, reshaped according to a negative paradigm.

Adorno e Beethoven

Luigi Casolino — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to present to the reader Adorno's 'Beethovenian' philosophy of music and to analyze, through it, the different stages through which it is possible to retrace the dialectical arc of the aesthetic phenomenon, from the ancestral shudder and the expressiveness of the inexpressible to the forms of compositional rationalization from which the character of authenticity emerges. Behind the intellectual and existential interest that led the philosopher to conceive Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik a complex network of constellations is at work. This framework would have allowed Adorno to formulate a more structured philosophy of music, if the author's death had not intruded into the work and if certain insoluble theoretical problems had not arisen. Bearing in mind several terminological clues, such as the notions of "surplus", "homeostasis", and "tour de force", the aim is to provide alternative and transversal coordinates for a re-reading of Adorno's fragments on Beethoven.

Adorno e Kierkegaard

Elettra Villani — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study offers a reflection on the thought of Theodor W. Adorno, in light of his considerations on the writings of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. This perspective is certainly less common than interpretative trends that associate Adorno's name with other thinkers, foremost among them Hegel, Benjamin, and Heidegger. And yet, the central thesis of this work is that a careful reading of Adorno's comparison with Kierkegaard can be equally illuminating, especially if the focus is on the category of aesthetic. Through a detailed analysis of Adorno's dissertation Kierkegaard. The construction of the aesthetic, this essay will highlight the unfolding of an intertwining of the concepts of the aesthetic, the dialectical and meaning, which may be crucial in understanding what Adorno really meant by the aesthetic and aesthetic theory.

Adorno and Marx

Marvin Ester — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article reconstructs Adorno's engagement with Marx not as a retreat into cultural criticism, but as immanent critique – a transformative actualization of Marxian categories under late capitalism. It identifies four commitments Adorno both inherits from Marx and reworks: human beings as historically formed ensembles of social relations, alienation as a social pathology, the persistence of class antagonism despite waning class consciousness, and ideology as materially rooted misrecognition embedded in social practices. Late capitalist forms of domination are reproduced less by legitimation than by standardized cultural forms that discipline perception, desire, and judgment, rendering conformity "rational" and alternatives unintelligible. Ideology as doctrine becomes ideology as integration, supplementing the theoretical primacy of economic compulsion with the notion of a necessary subjective "surplus" to stabilize a society whose promises contradict experience.

Adorno and Baudelaire

Gabriele Gallina — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article investigates Theodor W. Adorno's engagement with Charles Baudelaire by focusing on three key concepts that structure their dialogue: the nouveau, the inconnu, and the Natur. Drawing on Adorno's published works, archival materials, and aesthetic lectures, the paper argues that Baudelaire occupies a paradigmatic position within Adorno's philosophy of modernity. Adorno reads Baudelaire's rejection of immediacy and his embrace of the unknown as expressions of a negative mimesis that transforms historical alienation into aesthetic truth. The nouveau, inseparable from danger, death, and indeterminacy, emerges as a cryptogram of modernity itself, while the inconnu designates the blind spot through which art gestures toward what does not yet exist. Ultimately, the article shows how Baudelaire's uncompromising negativity covertly sustains a form of negative utopia, in which nature, though denied, is preserved as a promise articulated through aesthetic form.

Adorno and Valéry

Giovanni Matteucci — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores the theoretical nexus between Adorno and Valéry, arguing that their relationship is not one of derivation or borrowing but rather an inseparable consonance rooted in shared conceptual moves. The analysis traces the origins of this nexus, examining how Adorno immediately recognized in Valéry's interweaving of poetry and theory (Dichtung und Theorie) a dialectic of spiritualization that becomes central to his own aesthetic thought. Also, through the catalytic force generated by Adorno's confrontation with Benjamin around 1936, Adorno discovered in Valéry a "second degree materialism" that locates material contradiction within pure form itself, making spirit a kind of material consumed by the very process of aesthetic configuration. Valéry emerges as the Artist – not merely the Künstler but the acrobat of form who, through rigorous submission to the Sache, reveals how absolute spiritualization exposes its own material constraints. This ambivalent figure, politically conservative yet dialectically revolutionary, becomes for Adorno the deputy (Statthalter) of a humanity redeemed through aesthetic wholeness, pointing toward art's transcendence of itself into the true life of human beings.

Adorno e Kafka

Mario Farina — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This essay reconstructs Theodor W. Adorno's interpretation of Franz Kafka as the articulation of a natural history of the human. Rather than treating Kafka's work as a symbolic or existential allegory of modern alienation, Adorno insists on a rigorously literal mode of interpretation, according to which Kafka's images must be taken at face value. This methodological stance, grounded in a critique of symbolic hermeneutics and informed by Benjamin's theory of allegory and Freud's concept of psychic reality, allows Kafka's prose to function as a site where historical processes sediment in material, non-human forms. The essay argues that Kafka's literary universe stages a genetic conception of the human, in which humanity emerges precisely through its deformation, degradation, and proximity to the non-human. Figures such as Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis exemplify this dialectical entanglement of human and non-human, revealing the social origin of individuality and the collapse of the boundary between subject and thing. Kafka's fragmented narrative form thus crystallizes a conception of history as nature and nature as history, offering a paradigmatic instance of art as natural history and preserving, within its bleak imagery, a negative utopian residue of human emancipation.

Adorno and Freud

Matteo Santarelli — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines Theodor W. Adorno's engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis, especially in the late 1940s and in the early 1950s. It argues that Adorno developed a powerful psychoanalytic interpretation of fascist mass phenomena, based on Freud's theory of identification. At the same time, he exposed the limitations of purely psychological explanations of social domination. The paper reconstructs Adorno's critique of two major attempts to integrate psychology and sociology: revisionist psychoanalysis (notably Karen Horney), and Talcott Parsons' theory of social action. In both cases, Adorno rejects integration as theoretically misleading and politically conformist, contending that it neutralizes the critical potential of psychoanalysis. According to Adorno, Freud is "right where he is wrong": his psychological one-sidedness preserves a critical insight into social power that is obscured by later sociological corrections. The article concludes by identifying immanent tensions in Adorno's own position, particularly his underestimation of Freud's dialectical concept of reality and of psychoanalytic practice. It suggests that these neglected dimensions could have strengthened Adorno's critical project.

Differenza tra il sistema filosofico di Husserl e quello di Cornelius

Giovanni Zanotti — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article provides a close reading of Theodor Adorno's 1924 dissertation on Husserl, shaped by the ideas of his academic mentor Hans Cornelius. It opens with a brief overview of Cornelius's transcendental-empiricist theory of knowledge (immediacy, memory, and the object as a law-like nexus of phenomena) and his objections to Husserl. It then reconstructs the dissertation's two movements: first, the critique of the thing's transcendence through an account of subjective constitution; second, the analysis of noema and epoché, where the alleged immunity of sense is challenged by its dependence on experiential change. By analyzing Adorno's rejection of the immediacy of thing-perception and his reinterpretation of objects as immanent relations among experiences, the article highlights an early formulation of themes that will culminate in his later engagement with Husserl and in negative dialectics as a whole: the critique of ontology, the role of mediation, and the historicity of meaning.

Adorno and Lukács

Luiz Philipe de Caux — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article reconstructs Adorno's early concept of the philosophical riddle by situating it in a sustained, though ambivalent, engagement with Lukács' work. Adorno adopts Lukács' analysis of bourgeois antinomies and the commodity-form as the experiential core of modern philosophy, while decisively rejecting Lukács' ontological and totalizing resolutions. Against solutions grounded in the standpoint of totality, Adorno radicalizes the antinomic character of bourgeois thought by insisting on the liquidation of its fundamental questions. Through an immanent deciphering of philosophy itself, social-historical reality emerges within conceptual structures without being reduced to sociological or historicist explanations. The article shows that Adorno remains faithful to the critical impulse of Lukács' early work precisely by refusing its later ontological turn, thereby transforming the riddle of the commodity into a negative, non-ontological model of critique grounded in non-identity.

A curious tribute

Attilio Bruzzone — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper deals with the role reversal between Kracauer and Adorno – a product of their wrecked homoerotic bond in the early 1920s –, which affected their lifetime relationship and approach to philosophy. Although for different reasons, that failure – concealed and revealed in The Curious realist, Adorno's tribute to Kracauer – was experienced by both as an insurmountable trauma, which continued to inform their adult relation yet mutilated of its erotic aspects. Still, the reiteration of that crucial event represents also a kind of paradoxical fulfilment of the promise of happiness of youth. Indeed, in this way, those strange friends partly managed to fulfil the greatest demand of that love so helplessly impossible for them: the miracle of a forever beyond death, with the unwavering hope of being gladly united. Such union is the most powerful cipher of final conciliation, which glimmers on the horizon as a redemption of the suffering that shaped the life and work of Kracauer and Adorno.

The glance of the essay

Thijs Lijster — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For Adorno, the conditions of possibility of philosophical thought strongly hang together with its modes of expression (Ausdruck), or put differently, its aesthetic forms. The form of the essay was, for him, the medium of philosophical critique par excellence. Not only did he write many essays himself, but he also reflected and commented on the essay form throughout his oeuvre. This paper looks at how Adorno developed his ideas on philosophical essayistic writing in dialogue with and in response to Walter Benjamin, his friend and mentor. First of all, I look at Adorno's A portrait of Walter Benjamin, which contains some of Adorno's earliest reflections on the essay as form. Next, I explore how several of Adorno's characterizations of Benjamin return in The essay as form, which can be considered as his most programmatic text, and the theory of essayism he sets out there. In the final section, the "actuality" (another key term in Adorno's writings) of the essay is considered in our own time, by relating it to issues of climate change and by exploring the possibility of the "planetary essay". This notion, inspired by Adorno and Benjamin and complemented by authors like Spivak and Ghosh, entails that a more reciprocal relation to nature requires different modes of thought, and therewith, different expressions of thought.

Presupposing primary experience

Iain Macdonald — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Against Hegelian idealism and certain strands of Marxism, Adorno defends subjective, somatic, and affective experience, not as immediately true, but as a historically mediated reflection of objective social forces. Such experiences are historically caused, but they are also "primary" insofar as theory must presuppose them in order to gain critical traction. The article first looks at Adorno's criticisms of Hegel's mistrust of individuality and Lukács' privileging of objective economic analysis. Subsequently, through readings of Huysmans' Against Nature and Benjamin's Berlin Childhood, the article then shows how primary experience can fail or succeed, according to how it is taken up by critique: decadence fetishizes sensation and stalls in false alternatives, while Benjamin reveals how everyday images preserve missed historical potentials. The aim of the article is to show how primary experience functions as a fragile presupposition for critique and progress.