The Aging of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: Fifty Years Later

If 2019 was an Adornian year because of the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Theodor W. Adorno in August 1969, also 2020 has been an Adornian year because of the 50th anniversary of the posthumous publication of Adorno’s great but unfinished masterpiece Aesthetic Theory, first published in 1970. Adorno’s intellectual legacy is still alive today and indeed important for the conceptual tools as it still provides to develop a critical, active and negative (instead than acritical, passive and affirmative) relationship with the real. In the vast and complex corpus of Adorno’s entire philosophical oeuvre, his aesthetic theory deserves an especially close and renewed attention today for the variety of intellectual provocations that are still richly offered to us in order to critically understand our age.