The main thesis of this study aims to challenge the strongly sedimented line of interpretation that understands Adorno's Aesthetic Theory exclusively as a philosophy or theory of art and, conversely, to emphasise the specifically philosophical core of  the aesthetic theory. This research goal is meant to be achieved through a precise investigation of the category of the aesthetic.Indeed, it will be shown that the aesthetic is a perfect example of a clearly constellative concept whose kaleidoscopic multiplicity of meanings must be taken seriously. This requires an analysis of the theoretical knots that tie the aesthetic to the non-identical, the natural, the artistic as moments of its constellation. Taken individually, however, each of them could not exhaust the scope of the aesthetic. Therefore, only by widening its definitorial spectrum and holding together all the strands of this chain, it will be possible to gain the profound meaning of a theory that becomes aesthetic. The focus of this research is thus to illuminate the theoretical performance that the aesthetic can offer to such a theory. To this end, it is necessary to overcome a strong opposition between the theoretical and the aesthetic, which conceives the latter as irrational and alien to any kind of logic and self-articulation.