Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno was a German philosopher and sociologist associated with the Frankfurt School. With Max Horkheimer he wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, arguing that rationality itself had become a tool of domination. His aesthetic theory linked art and social critique.

Adorno's negative dialectics — his refusal to resolve contradictions into a positive system — was both a philosophical method and an ethical stance in the wake of Auschwitz. His Aesthetic Theory argued that authentic art resists the administered society and preserves the possibility of the not-yet-existing.