Adornos Rhinoceros: Art, Nature, Critique

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Throughout his work, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno repeatedly invokes the rhinoceros. Taking its cue from one of these passages in Aesthetic Theory, So a rhinoceros, the mute animal, seems to say: I am a rhinoceros, this book explores the life of this animal in Adornos texts, and articulates the nuanced interconnections between art, nature and critique in his thought. By thus illuminating key elements of Adornos work, this volume reveals the invaluable contributions that this classical thinker can make to our current reflections on the various pressing natural and political crises of our times.

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In these probing, eloquent, and sometimes lacerating essays, Adornos continuing fascination with the rhinoceros is the occasion for commentary on his claim that art, at least now, emerges as the stand-in for an absent nature, for a nature facing extinction. A surprising and demanding addition to both Adorno studies, and human reflection on art and the approaching disaster. * J.M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, USA *
Taking Adornos enduring interest in the enigmatic rhinoceros as its starting point, this volume gives us a multi-faceted exploration of crucial dialectics in Adornos thought, from the place of artworks in the dialectic of culture and nature to the distance between language and selfhood and the utopian promise in animals. * Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Psychoanalyst in private practice, USA *
Adornos Rhinoceros is a modern day bestiary of a single and singular animal, whose presence in art and culture stands in stark contrast to its imminent absence from the natural world. At once a marvelous collection of essays, and a collection of marvelous essays, each chapter has an intriguingly tight focus on one motif in Adorno's philosophy, and one line of his Aesthetic Theory. Yet the essays radiate into the diverse topics of 'dumb' animal nature, of the enigmatic nature of artworks and their muteness, and explore philosophical questions of selfhood, transcendence, metaphysics and secularization. * Gordon Finlayson, Professor of Social and Political Thought, University of Sussex, UK *
Centring on the enigmatic image of the rhinoceros, this brilliant volume of essays by established and emerging scholars explores how Adorno's bestiary dialectically configures an anticipation of the as yet unrealized promise of culture as well as the memory trace of its catastrophic failure. * Samir Gandesha, Professor of Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada *

Author Bio

Antonia Hofsttter is a Teaching Fellow in German studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She completed her PhD in 2017 with a thesis on T. W. Adornos aesthetics at the University of Brighton, UK. She has contributed to Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Aging of Adornos Aesthetic Theory (2021), and Theodor W. Adorno: sthetische Theorie (2021). Daniel Steuer is an independent scholar living in Austria. Between 1989 and 2020, he taught European literature and social and political thought at Bangor University, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Sussex, and the University of Brighton, UK. He has published widely on Wittgenstein and Adorno, among other topics. His latest publication is a co-authored book, War and Algorithm (2019).