Abstract
Regarding how art exists after Auschwitz, Adorno argues that the legitimacy of post-war art is based on representing the memory of accumulated intergenerational suffering, which reflects on and criticizes Auschwitz and its roots in modernity with reference to Walter Benjamin's methodology of theological redemption. Memories of sufferings exist in artworks in a constellation-like structure, causing explosive production of meaning and breaking the monopoly of meaning and value by the identity system. With remembrance as the means, art presents the memory of suffering concerning Auschwitz, and offers a new understanding of the development of contemporary capitalism and possibilities for imagining a new social institution. This is an opportunity to construct an aesthetic utopia. From the perspective of negative dialectics, aesthetic utopia transforms the ethical appeal of the memory of suffering, including the accusation against capitalist oppression and the recognition of its own value and status, into a discourse of epistemology without the option of revolution, which contains both ideological criticism and the reconstruction of the subject. In general, Adorno's arguments expand the reflection on Auschwitz from the perspectives of ethics and aesthetic politics.
First Page
207
Recommended Citation
Ding, Wenjun. 2019. "The Ethics of Memory in Adorno's Aesthetic Utopia and Its Transform." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 39, (3): pp.207. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol39/iss3/15
