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List of contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
1. Introduction: The enigma of the rhinoceros, Antonia Hofstätter, (University of Warwick, UK)
2. In the name of the rhinoceros: expression beyond human intention, Camilla Flodin (Uppsala University, Sweden)
3. The rhinoceros at the bottom of the sea: Adorno, Dürer and the silent eloquence of artworks, Antonia Hofstätter (University of Warwick, UK)
4. Just one line: reading T. W. Adorno on humans, artworks and animals, Lydia Goehr (Columbia University, USA)
5. The mute animal, Alexander García Düttmann (Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany)
6. The speaking animal: on a metaphor of humanity, Sebastian Tränkle (Freie Universität, Germany)
7. The gaze of the rhinoceros and the ‘it’ of Aesthetic Theory, Daniel Steuer (Independent Scholar, Austria)
8. The muted animal, Daniel Herwitz (University of Michigan, USA)
9. Epilogue: On the actuality of Adorno’s rhinoceros – extraction, extinction and dignity, Daniel Steuer (Independent Scholar, Austria)
Index
About the author
Antonia Hofstätter 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. Adorno’s aesthetics at the University of Brighton, UK. She has contributed to Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), The “Aging” of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (2021), and Theodor W. Adorno: Ästhetische 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).
Summary
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 Adorno’s texts, and articulates the nuanced interconnections between art, nature and critique in his thought.
By thus illuminating key elements of Adorno’s 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.
Foreword
Taking its cue from Theodor Adorno’s quote, ‘So a rhinoceros, the mute animal, seems to say: I am a rhinoceros’, this book examines the relationship between art, nature and critique in the thinker’s work.
Additional text
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.
