This edited collection of original essays explores the irreducible role of aesthetic forms of experience and activity in the philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.

Acknowledgments / Introduction: The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory, Nathan Ross / 1. Benjamin and Adorno on Art as Critical Practice, Georg W. Bertram / 2. The Benjaminian Moment in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: Spaciality and the Topos of the Bourgeois Intérieur, Marcia Morgan / 3. Adorno's Critical Theory at the Crossroads of Hegel and Benjamin, Natalia Baeza / 4. The Jargon of Ontology and the Critique of Language: Benjamin, Adorno, and Philosophy's Motherless Tongue, Eduardo Mendieta / 5. 'The Polarity Informing Mimesis': The Social Import of Mimesis in Benjamin and Adorno, Nathan Ross / 6. Walter Benjamin's Critique of the Category of Aesthetic Form: 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility' from the Perspective of Benjamin's Early Writing, Alison Ross / 7. Walter Benjamin and the "highly productive use of the human being's self-alienation", Stéphane Symons / 8. The Composer as Producer, Joseph Weiss / 9. The Aesthetic Experience of Shudder: Adorno and the Kantian Sublime, Surti Singh / 10. Ecological Experience: Aesthetics, Life, and the Shudder in Adorno's Critical Theory, Rick Elmore / 11. 'Enigmaticalness' as a Fundamental Category in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Andrea Sakoparnig / 12. Aesthetic Education, Human Capacity, Freedom, Tom Huhn / Bibliography / Index