This article comprises an effort to establish some points of similarity between the reflections on aesthetics and art present in Jacques Lacan and Theodor Adorno's work. While in the first case the study accounts only for his 7th and 11th seminars, the second takes into account a wider bibliographic sphere; namely his "two dialectics" ?the one from the forties and the one from 1966? and his Aesthetic Theory, published posthumously in 1970. Fundamentally, the article analyses the role of what eludes representation in the constitution of any work of art.