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Most English-language writing on Theodor Adorno has attempted to place him in various contexts and to differentiate him from other thinkers. Such work, while important, marks our failure to appropriate Adorno's ideas imaginatively. In Exact Imagination, Late Work, Nicholsen proposes such an appropriation through a focus on the centrality of the aesthetic dimension in Adorno.Adorno uses the term "exact imagination" to mark the conjunction of knowledge, subjective experience, and aesthetic form. Exact imagination, as distinct from creative imagination, thus describes a form of nondiscursive rationality. According to Adorno, exact imagination discovers or produces truth by reconfiguring the material at hand; thus, knowledge is inseparable from the configurational form imagination gives it. "Late work" is characterized by the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity. In its attempt to grasp late phenomena, Adorno's oeuvre itself takes on the form of late work.Exact imagination and late work mark the bounds of Nicholsen's exploration. The five interlocked essays, based on material from Adorno's "aesthetic writings," take up such issues as subjective aesthetic experience, the historicity of artworks and our experience of them, Adorno's conception of language, the nature of configurational or constellational form in Adorno's work, and the relation between the artwork, aesthetic experience, and philosophy. A subtext is the unraveling of Adorno's use of the ideas of his colleague Walter Benjamin. Nicholsen's essays themselves can be perceived as a constellation of their own around the central issue of the inseparability of form in its aesthetic dimension and nondiscursive rationality.
| Introduction: Exact Imagination and Late Work | 1 | |
| 1 | Subjective Aesthetic Experience and Its Historical Trajectory | 15 |
| 2 | Language: Its Murmurings, Its Darkness, and Its Silver Rib | 59 |
| 3 | Configurational Form in the Aesthetic Essay and the Enigma of Aesthetic Theory | 103 |
| 4 | Aesthetic Theory's Mimesis of Walter Benjamin | 137 |
| 5 | Adorno and Benjamin, Photography and the Aura | 181 |
| Notes | 227 | |
| Bibliography | 249 | |
| Index | 261 |
Overview
Most English-language writing on Theodor Adorno has attempted to place him in various contexts and to differentiate him from other thinkers. Such work, while important, marks our failure to appropriate Adorno's ideas imaginatively. In Exact Imagination, Late Work, Nicholsen proposes such an appropriation through a focus on the centrality of the aesthetic dimension in Adorno.Adorno uses the term "exact imagination" to mark the conjunction of knowledge, subjective experience, and aesthetic form. Exact imagination, ...