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Henry Pickford: Theodor W. Adorno on Art and Judgment

In his lecture, Henry Pickford seeks to reconstruct Adorno’s understanding of the relationship between art and aesthetic experience on the one hand, and forms of cognitive judgment on the other.


Exactly how is ›difficult art‹ difficult, and what value does it have? Adorno famously but obscurely attributed such characteristics as »riddle-character« (Rätselcharakter), »emphatic experience,« and »non-identity« to artworks by writers like Hölderlin, Kafka, and Beckett, and composers like Beethoven and Schönberg. This lecture seeks to reconstruct Adorno’s understanding of the relationship between art and aesthetic experience on the one hand, and forms of cognitive judgment on the other. As »synthesis without judgment«, successful artworks for Adorno criticize conventional, subsumptive, categorial judgment in favor of a kind of existential judgment. The contour of Adorno’s aesthetic critique of categorial judgment is established through recourse to the philosophers and thinkers informing this view, from German Idealism to phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The reconstruction of Adorno’s view aims to justify the enormous importance he ascribed to high modernist art within this critical social theory.