The problem of Autonomy of art in Adorno’s aesthetic is one of the most valuable and impressive subjects in contemporary aesthetic. On the one hand, Adorno uses “monad” metaphor (in Leibnizian meaning) for describing autonomous art work, and, on the other hand, he introduces art work as an absolute commodity. This study wants to answer this question: according to Adorno’s idea, how autonomous art works are to be realized under the condions where commodified relation are dominated? Understanding this subject is dependent on conceiving the theoretical basis of Adorno’s philosophy and especially his negative dialectic theory. In the first part of this study I would try to prove the necessity of Adorno’s dialecticalhistorical defense of autonomy of art with a short explanation of his non- identical thinking approach and negative dialectic theory, as a basis of his philosophy. In the second part, while explaining the aspect of political economy in the theory of negative dialectic and by elucidating the dominant commodified logic in art, I would try to clarify that the art work reveals the absolute commodity to be an aspect of autonomy.

Warburg is one of the most inspiring figures in the German tradition of art historiography. Although one of the well-known aspects of Warburg’s intellectual work is its relation to iconology, this article seeks to go beyond the conventional understanding of Warburg to mapping a picture of his “special” view of the image as a whole. To this end, by re-reading the classic Warburg texts and new interpretations of those texts, an attempt has been made to examine the place of his approach to the “image” in the tradition of German art historiography and the key concepts of his intellectual system in this field. The findings of the article show that in this system of thought, we can see the traces of the ideas of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jakob Burckhardt and Robert Vischer. In this context, Nietzsche’s “Apollonian-Dionysian” dichotomy, Fisher’s concept of “empathy” and Hegelian Burckhardt’s totalitarianism were influential in formulating Warburg’s particular conception of the Renaissance art. In this regard, Warburg devotes himself to the study of a concept called the “afterlife” of antiquity and other concepts such as pathos formula, dialectic, and empathy in Renaissance art and thought. It seems that most of these concepts revolve around the idea of “survival.” According to Warburg, since art has a history, images also had remnants, remnants that reveal themselves in connection with the concept of memory and in connection with a concept called pathos-formula. In this sense, Warburg focuses on gestures and their transmission through art. The result of such an effort is a silent language design free from argument. Expressive gesture analysis offers an unusual way of looking at past shapes and allows the audience to find images of the past in the present. This is the meaning of the afterlife and the survival of the images.