The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno : Bloomsbury Academic : 9781472579591 : 1472579593 : 17 Jul 2014 : This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition ? Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno ? attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of "aesthetic agency"? art's capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian's attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their