Precarious Autarky: Adorno on Art and Solipsism

Abstract

This essay focuses on the relationship between solipsism and aesthetic subjectivity, as outlined in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, especially considering the relationship between solipsism and art’s “subjective point of reference”. For this purpose, I reconstruct Adorno’s relevant ideas on the role of subjectivity within art and relate them to his elaborated analysis of the process of aesthetic experience. Finally, I scrutinize the value of the non-apodictic truth, this experience reveals, and also its relationship to particular aspects of “truth-content” and to Adorno’s redemption of the artwork’s fragile ontological status, its semblance character.