'Aesthetic Theory' tag archive

In Beckett’s Endgame – about which Adorno wrote an important essay – nature is in ruins (‘corpsed’, as Clov describes it), yet the weather is still important.* The pathetic story that Hamm tells (and he has to bribe Nagg to listen) about a man crawling to him on his belly to ask for help on […]

Jane Gallop is an American academic whose writings on psychoanalysis, feminism and related topics are as dazzling in their intelligence as they are scintillating in their wit. Their humour is part of the thought processes embodied in her texts. A careful argument, proceeding by tentative steps, will finally reach an explosive and paradoxical conclusion, inducing […]

Childhood experience and the image of utopia The broken promise of Adorno’s Proustian sublimations Matt F. Connell adjustment, amounting to an uncritical internalization of the reality which insists that the infant must only enjoy that which is socially sanctioned. Children must progressively give up earlier forms of happiness and pleasure, which demand everything in an […]

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity Stewart martin Art’s relation to commodification is an unavoidable and entrenched condition for much of the theory, history and practice of art today; so entrenched, in fact, as to have become implicit and assumed for many. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, considerations of this relation have […]