Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of History - by William S Allen (Hardcover)

About the Book

Examines aesthetics and the ideas of history and development through the work of Theodor Adorno, Peter Weiss, and Immanuel Kant.

Book Synopsis

Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of Historysets the works of Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant and Peter Weiss in dialogue, revealing how an interrogation of the aesthetics of 'the whole' and the conception of history in Western thought reveals new ways of thinking about history and historically.

To conceive of history as such it is necessary to conceive it as a whole, but doing so carries implications about its development and direction. Furthermore, such an idea makes it difficult to consider its parts without subsuming them to the whole, thereby making individuals merely instrumental to achieving the aims of history.

William S. Allen brings the thought of Kant, Adorno and Weiss to bear on these tensions, tracing how Adorno's reconsideration of history through his readings of Kant's Critique of Judgementare distinct from formulations offered by other thinkers (Marx, Hegel, Lyotard). Allen establishes that Kant's Critique of Judgement is not only a sustained analysis of the development of forms, whether aesthetic or organic, but also a tacit interrogation of the form of the whole and the possibilities of thinking it.

Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of Historyargues that Adorno has taken up this interrogation more than any other thinker and through his aesthetics has introduced an alternative thought, which has been modified and extended in the work of Peter Weiss in his last novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance. Within this thought lies the possibility of thinking history without the whole, without unity or purpose, which is a possibility that may offer new insights in the face of imminent environmental, economic and political collapse.

Review Quotes

Allen's latest work constitutes an intellectual contribution of the first order: impeccably written, shrewdly argued, and well informed regarding the existing scholarship. The text is a pleasure to read, as Allen patiently unfolds a fascinating argument that manages to shed new light on the relationship between the philosophy of history and the formal demands of the aesthetic as they emerge in Adorno's complicated inheritance of Kant and post-Kantian thought.
Gerhard Richter, L. Herbert Ballou University Professor, Brown University, USA

William S. Allen masterfully probes the cipher of time in the aesthetic tradition from Kant to Adorno to show how the finitude and aporias of temporality have been figured and put to work. The book provides a novel and convincing demonstration of how thinking - as with aesthetic experience - in its quest for the whole, approximates and approaches it within the confines of finite experience. The forms of history, as well as the form of the artwork, are here a kind of seismographic tracing of the vacillations between the wholeness and fragmentation of the human. This book is a major contribution to the literature on Kant, Adorno, and aesthetic theory.
Tom Huhn, Chair of BFA Visual & Critical Studies and Art History, School of Visual Arts, USA

About the Author

William S. Allen (PhD, University of Warwick) is an independent researcher at the University of Southampton, UK, and the author of the following books: Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot(2007); Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (2016); Without End: Sade's Critique of Reason(Bloomsbury, 2018); Blanchot and the Outside of Literature (Bloomsbury, 2019); Noir and Blanchot: Deteriorations of the Event (Bloomsbury, 2020); and Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance: On Dialectics in Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2022).