T HE initial reception of Adorno's posthumously pub-
lished Aesthetic Theory ( 1970) was both ambiguous and
controversial. Although it emerged as his most impor-
tant contribution to the 1980s debate in aesthetic theory and liter-
ary criticism, its first German readers were frequently puzzled by
the presentation and the structure of the text. Of course, Adorno's
German audience was used to his complex and convoluted style
and the opacity of his terminology, yet this late work appeared
to go even beyond Negative Dialectics. Critics felt that the text
ultimately failed to present a coherent, systematic argument; it
looked more like a collection of heterogeneous fragments put
together in an idiosyncratic manner. For the uninitiated reader it
was not easy to define Adorno's position, since there seemed to be
many contradictory claims which were not worked out within a
consistent and logical system.

By the standards of the early. 1970s, Adorno Aesthetic Theory
was an untimely work. Beyond not satisfying traditional expecta-
tions of a positive treatment of the aesthetic that would affirm the
role of the arts in the modern world, the study disappointed even
Adorno's disciples, especially those from the radical left, because it
refused to support the politicization of aesthetic theory that they
demanded. On the whole, the book was more positively reviewed
by conservative critics than by members of the Marxist camp. In
fact, it raised once more the fundamental question as to whether
Adorno could be considered a Marxist at all. During the early
1970s, by and large, the answer to this question was negative, and
thus Adorno's late work was excluded from the corpus of master
texts that informed the critical left discourse of the early 1970s in
West Germany.

The neglect of Adorno's posthumous work in the United States
had rather different causes. Apart from the severe problem of
linguistic inaccessibility (the first translation did not appear until

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