Under the shadow of two world wars and concentration camps, the central question of Adorno’s (1903–1969) philosophy of art is: What is the place of art amidst the ruins of these disasters where civilization has turned into barbarism and Enlightenment into myth? After stating that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, Adorno later explains why he was mistaken: Just as a tortured body has the right to scream, unending social suffering has the right to find expression in art. The focal point of Adorno’s thought is his critique of the destructive social consequences of the domination humans impose on the body and nature. Consequently, in his approach, art, politics, and nature are inseparably intertwined. In this presentation, we will elucidate this problematic at the heart of Adorno’s aesthetics by discussing various ideas and artworks that held a central place in his intellectual life.
Bio:
After having graduated from the German High School of Istanbul and Boğaziçi University, Umur Başdaş completed his Ph.D. at Yale University in political philosophy and started working as an Assist. Prof. at Koç University. In his dissertation, he examined the evolution of the concept of “nature” in the Critical Theory tradition. Through aesthetic readings of Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Adorno, he criticized Habermas’s reduction of nature to a mute object. In his subsequent works, he focused on the intertwinement of being and beauty in Kant and on the relationship between logic and consciousness in Hegel. He currently continues to contemplate on the connection between aesthetics and ontology.
