Adorno’s Aesthetics in the Age of the Anthropocene

Abstract

“Adorno’s Aesthetics in the Age of Anthropocene” (AesthAnth) aims at showing the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics and philosophy of history for the contemporary debate on the Anthropocene. It will propose an original understanding of Adorno’s aesthetic theory that interprets it on the basis of Adorno’s idea of “natural history”. The core idea of the project is that the concept of what is aesthetic relevant, namely what Adorno calls an “aesthetic field”, is produced by the intersection historical and natural dimensions. Thus interpreted, Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy represents a critical alternative to the positions labelled as “new materialism” currently predominant in the studies on the Anthropocene. Whereas new materialist positions try in various way to acquire a “non-anthropocentric” point of view, the point for Adorno is to grasp in a precise and determined way the concrete, dialectical, i.e. reciprocal intertwining of historical, human and social moments with natural ones: in other words, to assume the inescapable centrality of the human so as to be able to reflexively grasp its being nature. Adorno’s program for a “natural history” means thus “to comprehend an object as natural where it appears most historical and as historical where it appears most natural. The idea of natural-history, then, is the dialectic that can be extracted from a literal analysis of the term’s ambiguity: the history of nature is nature grasped as historical; natural history is the historical grasped as natural.” Whitin this perspective, as the project will show in detail, it is the aesthetics the privileged instrument of this natural-historical inquiry: in fact, aesthetic experience is characterized precisely by this intertwinement between historical and natural elements, in which what belongs to our sensation and imagination, and what springs from the aesthetic object, cannot (and should not) be rigidly distinguished.