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May 15, 2008
Although Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, published some twenty years after Dialectic of Enlightenment, were regarded as proof of Adorno’s hostility toward political praxis by the generation of the
New Left, these texts open up the categories of cognition and subjectivity to the promise of a reconstructed reason by presenting a phenomenology of what cannot be reduced to the terms of instrumental reason and what, in the object, is non-identical with the subject and totality.
Adorno argued that human beings, in their interaction with nature, should understand that objects are not made fully transparent o humans through concepts. And it is what remains outside the grasp of concepts, the particular, that must be preserved. Within such a cognitive ramework, human beings, who are also objects, are also irreducible to abstract universal categories.
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Gary, Please find a completely different understanding of aesthetics and the nature of the subject-object relationship via this essay.
1. http://www.adidabiennale.org/curation/index.htm