The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art

Introduction

This chapter claims that Holocaust artworks must maintain at least two relations: artistic (lest they be merely historical documents) and historical (lest they distort the past or become merely artworks). It locates this problematic within philosophical aesthetics, as a version of the conflict between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy, and argues that Adorno's dialectic of aesthetic semblance describes the normative demand that artworks maintain a dynamic tension between the two. Furthermore, the language of postmodernism on the one hand, and Adorno’s own terms from German Idealism on the other, should be augmented by the more precise concepts and arguments of contemporary analytic philosophy.