With his Back to the Wall 471prima philosophia it is no longer possible to write in the traditional style
of “only after”, but in a certain sense I can only write paratactically.
This extends right into the microstructure of language.’^108 This was one
reason why Adorno thought he might not be able to publish the book
with Suhrkamp in 1969, although Suhrkamp was very keen to take it.
Instead, as he wrote to Elisabeth Lenk, ‘I shall hurl something else,
something shorter, into Unseld’s jaws.’^109 What he had in mind was the
volume of Stichworte: Kritische Modelle (Catchwords: Critical Models),
which he completed in June 1969.
Adorno was still working on the Aesthetic Theory a few weeks before
his death and had again revised the book, which had now grown to far
more than 300 pages. The final publication, without any division into
chapters, was undertaken by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann and
appeared a year after his death. It remained a fragment. Adorno him-
self would scarcely have approved the text in the form in which we
possess it, even though, with its blend of metaphorical power and con-
ceptual structure, it is a masterpiece of dialectical writing, one that he
had never thought of as a definitive philosophical statement.^110 The
fragmented form of the book is in complete harmony with the discon-
tinuous development of central themes such as the music of Beethoven
and Schoenberg, the painting of Klee and Picasso and the writings
of Beckett and Celan. This work, in which he inquires into the truth
content and exceptional status of the work of art, is one of his most
important.^111 Its subject was closer to his heart than any other. This may
explain the apodictic style that characterizes many passages in the book.
The argument of the Aesthetic Theory circles round the question of
the possibility of autonomous works of art in the present. Adorno’s
approach is to go back to the traditional aesthetic theories of Kant and
Hegel while attempting to bring them up to date by confronting them
with the art of the avant-garde. He concentrated entirely on the aes-
thetics of the works themselves. This led him to posit ‘the primacy of
the object’ as opposed to the subject, in other words, the artistic subject
seemed to him to be of a second order. This led him in turn to ignore
the public reception of art. Adorno understood the priority of the
object not only as a plea for the intrinsic (werkimmanent) analysis of
the text, but also committed art to being an implicit writing of history.^112
As such, it is tied to the reality it finds before it. And yet, by a paradox,
it is also supposed to be the plenipotentiary of a utopia for which, in
line with its riddle-like character, it can never find positive expression.
As a composer of free atonality and a theoretician of the New Music,
as well as a subtle interpreter of modern literature, Adorno treated the
theoretical discussion of aesthetics as a constant in his work. Given that
in this politicized age many people wished to liquidate art in the causeof
revolution, his own desire was to salvage art. In his language, he aimed
at ‘the redemption of semblance’ (Schein). For ‘the emphatic right of
art, the legitimation of its truth, depends on this act of salvaging’,^113