Tom Huhn Livres

Theodor W. Adorno, who passed away in 1969, left behind his last major work, Asthetische Theorie, published posthumously in 1970. Renowned for his deep understanding of contemporary art, particularly music, Adorno's writings have only recently gained significant attention in the English-speaking academic community. This collection of essays represents a vital contribution to the ongoing discourse surrounding Adorno's aesthetics within Anglo-American scholarship. The essays, authored by leading Adorno scholars from the U.S. and Germany, revolve around the themes of semblance and subjectivity. Semblance, or illusion, connects Adorno to thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, while subjectivity reflects his enduring engagement with a philosophy of consciousness influenced by Kant, Hegel, and Lukacs. Adorno's exploration of these concepts unfolds through complex dialectical movements. He argues that, despite its association with illusion since Plato's Republic, art possesses a unique ability to critique illusion, including its own. His aesthetic theory underscores the interplay between aesthetic and social theory, showcasing how traditional concepts can be transformed into innovative theoretical tools.

This book reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. Standard accounts of the aesthetic theories of this era hold that the idea of mimesis was supplanted by the far more robust and compelling doctrines of taste and aesthetic judgment. Since the idea of mimesis was taken to apply only in the relation of art to nature, it was judged to be too limited when the focus of aesthetics changed to questions about the constitution of individual subjects in regard to taste. Tom Huhn argues that mimesis, rather than disappearing, instead became a far more pervasive idea in the eighteenth century by becoming submerged within the dynamics of the emerging accounts of judgment and taste. Mimesis also thereby became enmeshed in the ideas of sociality contained, often only implicitly, within the new accounts of aesthetic judgment. The book proceeds by reading three of the foundational treatises in aesthetics&—Burke&’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Hogarth&’s Analysis of Beauty, and Kant&’s Critique of Judgment&—with an eye for discerning where arguments and analyses betray mimetic structures. Huhn attempts to explicate these books anew by arguing that they are pervaded by a mimetic dynamic. Overall, he seeks to provoke a reconsideration of eighteenth-century aesthetics that centers on its continuity with traditional notions of mimesis.