Owen Hulatt (University of York) has written to us letting us know about the publication of his new book, Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth. The book promises to be an important and powerful new approach to Adorno and art. Here is the blurb from Columbia University Press:

In Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth, Owen Hulatt undertakes an original reading of Theodor W. Adorno’s epistemology and its material underpinnings, deepening our understanding of his theories of truth, art, and the nonidentical. Hulatt’s novel interpretation casts Adorno’s theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth as substantially unified, supporting the thinker’s claim that both philosophy and art are capable of being true.
For Adorno, truth is produced when rhetorical “texture” combines with cognitive “performance,” leading to the breakdown of concepts that mediate the experience of the consciousness. Both philosophy and art manifest these features, although philosophy enacts these conceptual issues directly, while art does so obliquely. Hulatt builds a robust argument for Adorno’s claim that concepts ineluctably misconstrue their objects. He also puts the still influential thinker into conversation with Hegel, Husserl, Frazer, Sohn-Rethel, Benjamin, Strawson, Dahlhaus, Habermas, and Caillois, among many others.

And here are some author reviews of the book:

A strikingly original reconstruction and defense of Theodor W. Adorno’s account of truth.

Fabian Freyenhagen, author of Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly

Diligent, precise, honest, and rigorous—a superb piece of philosophical scholarship that brings the sophistication of Adorno studies to a new level.

Brian O’Connor, University College Dublin

There is no other book that more lucidly and compellingly reconstructs the difficult relationship between epistemology and aesthetics in Adorno’s work. Although Adorno vigorously dismissed systematicity, the many connections that unite his central concerns are here made manifest in ways that are likely to move the debate over his legacy substantively forward. For anyone interested in the status and fate of art in modernity, this book will be a landmark.

Espen Hammer, author of Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe