Ästhetik im Horizont der Freiheit

This work examines the aporetic structures of a politics of beauty developed by Schiller. In dialogue with Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, it analyzes the problems and crises of representation and then derives from Schiller's later theory of tragedy an idealistic exaggeration of the sublime that testifies to the failure of a fundamentally hopeless anthropopoiesis—a failure that Adorno attempts to render productive once again. Although Adorno rejects a positive anthropology, his aporetic constructions adhere negatively to Schiller's question about human beings in the “full sense of the word.”