Negative Aesthetics

Intersections in the Poetics of Krasznahorkai and Kertész

Abstract

This study explores the shared aesthetic and philosophical horizon of Krasznahorkai’s Satantango and Kertész’s Fatelessness through the lens of Adorno’s notion of “negative aesthetics.” Both novels construct an autonomous poetics that resists fixed interpretive frameworks of reality, articulating the experiences of fatelessness, failure, and homelessness in dissonant and reflexive linguistic forms. Their ironic and provocatively estranging tonalities not only unsettle established cultural structures of meaning, but also make the limits of representation newly perceptible. The study demonstrates how, in both authors’ works, this negative poetics becomes a means of radically rethinking the possibilities of perceiving and articulating the world.