Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetic Theory (1970-) [DE, EN, PT, CZ, ES, IT]

Perhaps the most important aesthetics of the twentieth century appears here newly translated, in English that is for the first time faithful to the intricately demanding language of the original German. The culmination of a lifetime of aesthetic investigation, Aesthetic Theory is Theodor W. Adorno’s magnum opus, the clarifying lens through which the whole of his work is best viewed, providing a framework within which his other major writings cohere.

German edition
Publisher Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1970

English edition
Editors Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann
Newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor
This translation published 1997 by The Athlone Press Ltd
This edition published 2002 by Continuum
ISBN 0826467571
383 pages

Wikipedia (EN)

Ästhetische Theorie (German, 1970, added on 2013-6-11, PDF)
Aesthetic Theory (English, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, 1997/2002, updated on 2013-6-11)
Teoría estética (Portuguese, trans. Artur Morão, 1993, added on 2013-6-11)
Estetická teorie (Czech, trans. Dušan Prokop, 1997, added on 2013-6-11)
Teoría estética (Spanish, trans. Jorge Navarro Pérez, 2004, added on 2013-6-11)
Teoria estetica (Italian, trans. Giovanni Matteucci, 2009, added on 2013-6-11)

Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2009)

Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today’s calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.

Translated by Steven Corcoran
Publisher Polity, 2009
ISBN 074564631X, 9780745646312
176 pages

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Richard Burt (ed.): The Administration of Aesthetics. Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (1994)

Calls attention to the crucial difficulties inherent in censorship when it is used as a tool for cultural criticism.

The “new” censorship of the arts, some cultural critics say, is just one more item on the “new” Right’s agenda, and is part and parcel of attempts to regulate sexuality, curtail female reproductive rights, deny civil rights to gays and lesbians, and privatize public institutions. Although they do not contest this assessment, the writers gathered here expose crucial difficulties in using censorship, old and new, as a tool for cultural criticism.

Focusing on historical moments ranging from early modern Europe to the postmodern United States, and covering a variety of media from books and paintings to film and photography, their essays seek a deeper understanding of what “censorship,” “criticism,” and the “public sphere” really mean.

Getting rid of the censor, the contributors suggest, does not eliminate the problem of censorship. In varied but complementary ways, they view censorship as something more than a negative, unified institutional practice used to repress certain discourses. Instead, the authors contend that censorship actually legitimates discourses-not only by allowing them to circulate but by staging their circulation as performances through which “good” and “bad” discourses are differentiated and opposed.

These essays move discussions of censorship out of the present discourse of diversity into what might be called a discourse of legitimation. In doing so, they open up the possibility of realignments between those who are disenchanted with both stereotypical right-wing criticisms of political critics and aesthetics and stereotypical left-wing defenses.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1994
ISBN 0816623678, 9780816623679
Length 381 pages

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