Exact Imagination, Late Work ― On Adorno's Aesthetics

Until now, most English-language writing on Adorno has attempted to place him invarious contexts and to differentiate him from other thinkers. Such work, while important, masks ourfailure to imaginatively appropriate Adorno's ideas. In Exact Imagination, Late Work, Shierry WeberNicholsen begins the process of appropriation through the centrality of the aestheticdimension.Adorno uses the term "exact imagination" to describe nondiscursive rationality. Exactimagination, which is the opposite of creative imagination, marks the conjunction of knowledge,subjective experience, and aesthetic form. Unlike exact imagination, "late work" is characterized bythe disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity.Exact imagination and late work mark the bounds ofNicholsen's exploration. The five interlocked essays, based on material from Adorno's "aestheticwritings," take up such issues as subjective aesthetic experience, the historicity of artworks andour experience of them, Adorno's conception of language, the nature of configurational orconstellational 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 WalterBenjamin. Nicholsen's essays themselves can be perceived as a constellation of their own around thecentral issue of the inseparability of form in its aesthetic dimension and nondiscursiverationality.