The Fleeting Promise of Art

[The Fleeting Promise]registers the profound shift in perspectives between [Aesthetic Theory's] initial reception in the context of the left radicalism of 1968 and the present moment. It is a shift which not only invites a return to but also paradoxically entails a historicization of Adorno which reveals an underground history of Critical Theory that can no longer be understood simply in terms of its 'progressive' recovery in the 1960s as part of the student revolt against the silence after 1945 regarding the crimes of the Third Reich...The Fleeting Promise of Art is an invitation to reread Adorno. The challenge of defending Adorno today may not have become easier, but it has become more interesting. -Peter Uwe Hohendahl,Thesis Eleven(2015) The Fleeting Promise of Art is superb. Peter Uwe Hohendahl's scholarship is impeccable, and his prose is pellucid and elegant. Hohendahl has the philosophical acumen to make sense of Adorno's notoriously difficult interpretations of the philosophy of German Idealism, the critical skills to analyze and interpret Adorno's arguments for their overlooked strengths and weaknesses, and the historical sense to look for-but not dwell on-relevant underexplored explanations from the complex and rich intellectual history of Adorno's life and times. -Max Pensky, University of Binghamton, author of The Ends of Solidarity: Discourse Theory in Ethics and Politics This masterful reassessment explores Adorno's standing within philosophical aesthetics (especially Kant), his engagement with visual art (especially primitivist modernism), and his intense, essayistic engagement with literature. Peter Uwe Hohendahl illuminates these divergent components of Adorno's thinking and explains why Adorno is indispensable for thinking about art, literature, and aesthetics today. -Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University, author of Fiction Sets You Free Long admired on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most incisive contributors to the ongoing development of critical theory, Peter Uwe Hohendahl focuses his attention in these essays on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, whose abiding relevance he abundantly demonstrates. With the formidable erudition, analytic acumen, and exemplary lucidity his readers have come to expect, Hohendahl not only illuminates Adorno's debts to predecessors such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud but also shows the power of his readings of artists like Goethe and Balzac. The Fleeting Promise of Art is certain to be recognized as a lasting contribution to twenty-first-century aesthetics. -Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley, author of Essays from the Edge