THEODOR ADORNO MINIMA MORALIA REFLECTIONS ON A DAMAGED LIFE
MINIMA MORALIA REFLECTIONS ON A DAMAGED LIFE Theodor Adorno Translated from the German by E. F. N. Jephcott VERSO London· New York
a d promise Originally published as Minima Moralia by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1951 O Suhrkamp Verlag 1951 Translation first published by New Left Books 1974 O NLB 1974 This edition published by Verso 2005 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted 3579108642 UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIF OEG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York NY 10014-4606 wwversobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN184467-051-1 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom by Bookmarque
Dedication 75 RT O For Marcel Proust 2 Fish in water 23 How nice of you, Doctor 25 Antithesis 26 They, the people 28 If knaves should tempt you 28 Promise me this, my child 3o With all my worldly go ter elp and counsel 33 Le Le nouvel aware 35 On the dialectic of tact 35 Propn Refuge for the homeless 38 Do uwwelpeter 4o Articles may not be exchanged Baby with the bath Plurale Tough baby 45 To them shall no thoughts be English On parle francais 48 Dwarf fruit
Pro doma nostra 5o Briefer expositions 98 Cat out of the bag 52 Death of immortality 100 Savages are not more noble 5 Morality and style Out of the firing-line 53 Not half hungry 102 Johnny-Head-in-Air 56 Melange Back to culture 37 Unmeasure for unmeasure 103 The Health unto Death 58 People are looking at you 105 This side of the pleasure principle Little folk 105 Invitation to the dance 62 Uninformed opinion 106 Ego is ld 63 LOs 108 Always speak of it, never think of it65 Second harvest 109 Inside and outside 66 Deviation 113 Freedom of Unfair intimidation 6g Mammoth 415 Chilly hospitality For Post-Socratics 70 Gala dinner I How sickly seem all growing things'zI Auction 119 On the morality of thinking 33 Over the hills 121 De gustibus est disputandum 35 Intellectus sacrificium intellectus 722 For Anatole France 76 Diagnosis 123 Morality and temporal sequence j8 Great and small 124 es distanc Vice- President 128 Timetable PART TWO Passing muster 131 Little Hans Wrestling club 133 Memento 85 ple Simon 135 Where the stork brings babies from 8: Folly of the wise 88 Institution for deaf-mutes 137 The Robbers 89 Vandals 138 May I be so bold?9o Picture-book without pictures 14o Genealogical research 91 Intention and reproduction t4l Excavation 92 All the world s not a stage 143 The truth about Hedda Gabler 93 Damper and drum 14 Since I set eyes on him95 Palace of Janus 146 A word for mo 48 Court of
Gold assay 152 Wolf as grandmother 203 ive reproduction 206 Contribution to intellectual history 208 PART THREE Juvenal's error 209 Sacrificial lamb 212 I946-1947 Exhibitionist 212 Small sorrows, great songs 214 Hothouse plant 161 Who is who 215 More haste, less speed 162 Addressee unknown 216 Boy from the heath 163 Consecutio temporum 217 Golden Gate 264 La nuance/encor' 2t9 By this does German song abide 221 All the little fowers 166 In nuce 222 Ne cherchez plus mon coeur 167 Magic Flute 224 Princess Lizard 169 Toy shop 227 Constanza (72 Novissimum o ganim 228 Philemon and Baucis 173 Et dona derentes 173 Don' t exaggerate 233 Spoilsport 174 Late extra 235 Heliotrope 17 Coming clean 178 Warning: not to be misused 244 Just hear, how bad he was 179 Finale 82 Downwards, ever downwards 183 Model of virtue 184 Rosenkavalier 187 Requiem for Odette 189 Monograms 190 The bad comrade 192 Puzzle-picture 193 I.Q. Is Wishful thinking 197 Regressions 199 Service to the customer 200
Publisher’ s Note The german text of Minima Moralia has no footnotes. Adorno's Ilusions is, however, an integral device of the whole formal struc ture and style of the book Expl nations of these has seemed essen- tial, where prior knowledge could not reasonably be assumed in English-speaking readers. This edition therefore includes brief decipherments of those implicit or explicit references or citations where a clarification appeared to be necessary. All such footnotes have been added by NlB. The decision when to insert them has often proved difficult. But in general, familiarity with works or figures in German literary history has been assumed to be less wide- pread among Anglo-Saxon audiences than French references: hence, at risk of superfluity for readers conversant with the forme more information has been provided where echoes of it are con- cerned. A special problem has arisen with the titles to the aphorisms. comprise six languages in the original-German, English, d greek. The latter four have be ly in the form in which Adorno composed them, with accom- panying notes. The titles in English, no longer directly visible in translation,are the following: They, the people, Tough Baby, English spoken, Golden Gate, 1. Q, Wishful thinking, and Who is who (Nos. 7, 24, 26, 104, 126, 127, 138). Whether in titles or text, the great majority of the allusions in Minima Moralia, as will be seen, involve irony or inversion All actual quotations-for example, from Hegel or Nietzsche, Goethe or Proust-have been newly translated from the original, and footnoted to standard native editions; to help English-speaking readers locate the passages concerned, however, translated editions have been added in brackets in the notes. The onk e, are where existing English-language translations have been us e quotations from Marx and Lukacs towards the end of the book
Dedication The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's con- ersion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objec tive powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer. But the relation between life and production, which in reali ases the former to an ephemeral appearance of the latter, is totally absurd Means and end are inverted. a dim awareness of this perverse quid pro quo has still not been quite eradicated from life Reduced and degraded essence tenaciously resists the magic that transforms it into a fagade. The change in the relations of produc tion themselves depends largely on what takes place in the'sphere cature of true life: in the consciousness and unconsciousness of ndividuals. OnI by virtue of opposition to production, as still not wholly encompassed by this order, can men bring about another more worthy of human beings. Should the appearance of life, which the sphere of consumption itself defends for such bad reasons, be once entirely effaced, then the monstrosity of absolute Nevertheless, considerations which start from the subject remain false to the same extent that life has become appearance. For since the overwhelm g objectivity of historical movement in its present
phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases enough from his necessary entanglement in liberalistic thinking i self on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still The conception of a totality harmonious through all its antagonisms for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The subject still feels sure of its compels him to assign to individuation, however much he may autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the con- designate it a driving moment in the process, an inferior status in centration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity the construction of the whole. The knowledge that in pre-history he objective tendency asserts itself over the heads of human beings, itself. Subjective reflection, even if critically alerted to itself, has ndeed by virtue of annihilating individual qualities, without the something sentimental and anachronistic about it: something of a reconciliation of general and particular-constructed in thought lament over the course of the world, a lament to be rejected not for ever yet being accomplished in history, is distorted in Hegel: with its good faith, but because the lamenting subject threatens to become serene indifference he opts once again for liquidation of the par- Boosted in its condition and so to fulfl in its turn the law of the ticular. Nowhere in his work is the primacy of the whole doubted world,s course. Fidelity to one's own state of consciousness and experience is forever in temptation of lapsing into infidelity, by The more questionable the transition from reflective isolation to glorified totality becomes in history as in Hegelian logic, the more denying the insight that transcends the individual and calls his eagerly philosophy, as the justification of what exists, attaches itself substance by its name. to the triumphal car of objective tendencies. The culmination of the Thus Hegel, whose method schooled that of Minima Moralia gued against the mere being-for-itself of subjectivity on all its philosophy occasion enough to do so. Hegel, in hypostasizing both levels. Dialectical theory, abhorring anything isolated,cannot bourgeois society and its fundamental category, the individual, did admit aphorisms as such. In the most lenient instance they might, not truly carry through the dialectic between the two. Certainly he to use a term from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, be perceives,with classical economics, that the totality produces and tolerated as'conversation'. But the time for that is past. Neverthe- reproduces itself precisely from the interconnection of the anta- less, this book forgets neither the systems claim to totality, which gonistic interests of its members. but the individual as such he for would suffer nothing to remain outside i, nor that it remonstrates the most part considers, naively, as an irreducible datum-just against this claim. In his relation to the subject Hegel does not what in his theory of knowledge he decomposes. Nevertheless, in respect the demand that he otherwise passionately upholds: to be an individualistic society, the general not only realizes itself through in the matter and not always beyond it,, to penetrate into the the interplay of particulars, but society is essentially the substance immanent content of the matter, If today the subject is vanishing, of the e Individu aphorisms take upon themselves the duty 'to consider the evan- For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from escent itself as essential,. They insist, in opposition to Hegel's prac- dividual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the tice and yet in accordance with his thought, on negativity: The life large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been per- of the mind only attains its truth when discovering itself in absolute petrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud. In desolation. The mind is not this power as a positive which turns the hundred and fifty years since Hegel's conception was formed, away from the negative, as when we say of something that it is null, some of the force of protest has reverted to theindividual. Compared or false, so much for that and now for something else; it is this power to the patriarchal meagreness that characterizes his treatment in only when looking the negative in the face, dwelling upon it. a Hegel, the individual has gained as much in richness, differentiation The dismissive gesture which Hegel, in contradiction to his own and vigour as, on the other hand, the socialization of society has insight, constantly accords the individual, derives paradoxically enfeebled and undermined him. In the period of his decay, the I. Phanom ie des geistes, Warke 3, Frankfurt 1970, P. s2(The Pheno individuals experience of himself and what he encounters con- menology of Mind, London 1966, p. 112) tributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as a. Phanomenologie des Geistes, p. 36(The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 93). long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the
dominant category. In face of the totalitarian unison with which the Minima moralia eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily with- drawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it not only with a bad conscience. PART ONE All this is not meant to deny what is disputable in such an attempt. The major part of this book was written during the war, under conditions enforcing contemplation. The violence that expelled me hereby denied me full knowledge of it. I did not yet admit to my- lf the complicity that enfolds all those who, in face of unspeakable collective events, speak of individual matters at all In each of the three parts the starting-point is the narrowest private sphere, that of the intellectual in emigration. From this follow considerations of broader social and anthropological scope: they concern psychology, aesthetics, science in its relation to the subject. The concluding aphorisms of each part lead on thematically also to philosophy, without ever pretending to be complete or definitive: they are all intended to mark out points of attack or to furnish models for a future exertion of thought. The immediate occasion for writing this book was Max Hork heimer's fiftieth birthday, February 14th, 1945. The composition took place in a phase when, bowing to outward circumstances, we strate gratitude and loyalty by refusing to acknowledge the inter- Life does not live ruption. It bears witness to a dialogue interieur: there is not a motif in it that does not belong as much to Horkheimer as to him who Ferdinand Kiirnberger found the time to formulate it The specific approach of Minima Moralia, the attempt to pres pects of our shared philosophy from the standpoint of subjective experience,necessitates that the parts do not altogether satisfy the demands of the philosophy of which they are nevertheless a part. The disconnected and non-binding character of the form, the renunciation of explicit theoretical cohesion, are meant as one expression of this. At the same time this ascesis should atone in some part for the injustice whereby one alone continued to perform the task that can only be accomplished by both, and that we do not
