Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Adorno doesn't have the illusion that rightist leaders could be converted to join the conversation. That thought would certainly have made the generation that experienced World War II frown. Instead, he recommends clearly pointing out the consequences of far-right politics, theirdestructive aspects and consequences. Most of all, he wants youth to draw away from these movements — and that, in retrospect, was something that worked quite well at the time.
urn:lcp:minimamoraliaref0000ador_p2l6:epub:db9e41a6-5edc-43b4-95e4-491aadeb7f43 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier minimamoraliaref0000ador_p2l6 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7rp4zn02 Invoice 1652 Isbn 1844670511 The silent din, long familiar to us from our dream-experiences, blares in our waking hours from the newspaper headlines.The others with whom we share our lives, on the other hand are VALUABLE to us. Through them we Regain Value - OBJECTIVELY... Adorno’nun 153 adet kısa, birbiriyle bağlantılı olmayan, bir sıra takip etmeyen ama ucu bir şekilde ahlak ile (etik) iliştirilen denemelerinden oluşan bu kitabı çok sıkı bir metin. Zor bir okuma oldu, içeriğinin yoğunluğundan dolayı bazı cümleleri birkaç kez okumak zorunda kaldığım felsefik/sosyolojik metinler çok yordu beni. Inter pares. – [Latin: among equals] In the realm of erotic qualities, a revaluation seems to be occurring. Under liberalism, well into our day, married men from high society who were unsatisfied with their strictly brought up and correct spouses absolved themselves in the company of female artists, bohemians, sugar babies [ süsse Mädeln: sweet maidens] and cocottes. With the rationalization of society this possibility of unregimented happiness has disappeared. The cocottes are extinct, the sugar babies probably never existed in Anglo-Saxon countries and other lands of technical civilization, while the female artists and those bohemians who exist parasitically in the mass culture are so thoroughly permeated with the latter’s reason, that those who flee in longing to their anarchy, to the free accessibility of their own use-value, are in danger of waking up to the obligation of engaging them as assistants, if not at least recommending them to a film-executive or scriptwriter they know. The only ones who are still capable of something like irrational love are precisely those ladies who the spouses once fled on excursions to Maxim’s [Maxim: famous restaurant in Paris]. While they are as tiresome to their own husbands, due to the latter’s fault, as their own mothers, they are at least capable of granting to others, what all others have withheld from them. The long since frigid libertine represents business, while the proper and well brought up lady represents yearning and unromantic sexuality. In the end, the ladies of society garner the honor of their dishonor, in the moment when there is no more society and no more ladies. 13
Jaeggi, Rahel (March 2005) "“No Individual Can Resist”: Minima Moralia as Critique of Forms of Life" Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory 12(1): pp.65–82; The thought that after this war life could continue on “normally,” or indeed that culture could be “reconstructed”– as if the reconstruction of culture alone were not already the negation of such – is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is supposed to be only the intermission and not the catastrophe itself. What exactly is this culture waiting for anyway? And even if there was time left for countless people, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe would have no consequences, that the sheer quantity of victims would not recoil into a new quality of the entire society, into barbarism? As long as like follows like, the catastrophe perpetuates itself. One need only consider retribution for the murdered. If just as many of the others were to be killed, then the horror would turn into an institution and the precapitalist schemata of blood for blood, which from its inception in prehistoric times still reigns only in the most distant mountain provinces, be reintroduced and expanded, only with entire nations as subjectless subjects. If however the dead are not avenged and mercy is shown, then an unpunished Fascism has despite everything stolen its victory, and after it has once been shown how easily it is done, it will be perpetuated [perpetrated?] in other places. The logic of history is as destructive as the human beings which it begets: wherever their inertia tends to go, it reproduces the equivalent of past calamities. Normality is death. When Benjamin remarked, that the dumb language of things is translated in painting and sculpture into a higher, yet related one, then one can assume in the case of music that it rescues the name as pure sound – but at the price of its separation from things. On parle francais. [French: one speaks in French, French is spoken] How closely sex and language are intermingled becomes apparent when reading pornography in another language. No dictionary is needed to read Sade in the original [i.e. French]. Even the most refined expressions for that which is indecent, whose awareness is imparted by no school, no parents’ house, and no literary experience, are understood intuitively, just as in childhood, when the most euphemistic expressions and observations regarding sexual matters shoot together into the correct representation. It is as if the imprisoned passions explode, upon being called by these names, blind words like the wall of one’s own repression, striking violently and irresistibly into the innermost cell of meaning, which it itself resembles. 28 Sleep in peace, sleep / close your little eyes so sweet / listen to the rainfall drip / hear the neighbors’ doggy yip / Doggy bit the beggar man / tore a hole in his pants / past the gate, the beggar flees / sleep in peace, sleep.” The first line of Taubert’s lullaby is terrifying. And yet both its final lines bless sleep with the promise of peace. This is not entirely due to bourgeois hardness, the comforting thought, that the intruder was scared off. The sleepily listening child has already half-forgotten the exile of the foreigner, who looks in Schott’s song book like a Jew, and intuits in the verse “past the gate, the beggar flees” peace without the misery of others. So long as there is even a single beggar, goes a fragment in Benjamin, there is mythos; only with the disappearance of the latter would mythos be reconciled. Would not violence itself be forgotten as in the onrushing wave of the child’s sleep? Would not in the end the disappearance of the beggar nevertheless entirely compensate, for what was done to him and which could not be compensated for? Doesn’t there lurk in all persecution by human beings, who, along with the little dog, incite the whole of nature against the weak, the hope that the last trace of persecution would be extirpated, which is itself the share of what is natural? Would not the beggar, who is forced out of the gates of civilization, find refuge in his homeland, which is emancipated from the bane [Bann] of the Earth? “Now rest and let your worries pass, the beggar comes home at last.”He wants to clearly reveal the impasse of modern man. But he has proved to me that my way of overcoming that impasse in myself has worked. Negative Dialectics, Negative Events: Aphoristic Knowledge as Melancholy Historicism in Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia The immediate occasion for writing this book was the fiftieth birthday of Max Horkheimer on February 14, 1945. The composition transpired in a phase in which, due to external circumstances, we had to interrupt our common work. The book wishes to proffer thanks and fidelity, by refusing to recognize the interruption. It is testimony to a dialogue interiéur [French: internal dialogue]: there is no motif herein, which does not belong as much to Horkheimer as to the person who found the time for formulation. If one has even the slightest qualms about a completed work, regardless of its length, then one should take such with inordinate seriousness, out of all proportion to the level of relevance which it might register. The affective investment [ Besetzung] in a text and vanity tend to minimize such misgivings. What is passed over with the tiniest doubt, may well indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole.
Even though the concept of the "modern era" is now seen as outdated — we now rather refer to diversified,various "modernities" — Adorno's core questions remain relevant today. Historian Volker Weiss Image: picture-alliance/dpa/C. Charisius The only alternative, I think, is to see the Machine as irrelevant alterity. It is not us. It would strip away all loving emotion from us! As a smart Marxist, he knew that it was not possible or desirable to stop technological development. Still, he didn't fall into the naive optimism that for a long time dominated the left. Still, Adorno always remained alert to the hidden links between innocence and brutality. No island of perfection escaped his critical eye. Dreams of the “authentic” are turned into harbingers of terror. In one aphorism, Adorno writes that, “I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood.” He recalled schoolyard bullies who teased him as a boy, who beat him and took delight when he, the top of his class, made an occasional error. He saw in them an anticipation of those who would later torture their prisoners. The bull-headed kids who interrupted the teacher and “crash[ed] their fists on the table” hardened into a Männerbund, whose members preached “worship for their masters”. In such passages Adorno leaps across the decades. Untroubled by the scruples of historicism, he sees the catastrophe that was prepared long ago. The wounds of the sensitive child had not yet healed when the adult took up his pen to condemn the mindless collective, whose brutality had metastasised into the modern state. “In Fascism,” he concludes, “the nightmare of childhood has come true.” Dwarf fruit. –It is the courtesy of Proust to spare the reader the embarrassment of thinking themselves more adroit than the author.The tragedies which keep themselves the furthest away from mere existence through “style,” are simultaneously those which most accurately preserve the memory of the demonology of savages, through collective processions, masks and sacrifices. V. The violence of the occult, just like Fascism, to which it is linked by thought-schemata of the sort which purvey anti-Semitism, is not only pathic. It consists rather of the fact that in the lesser panaceas, cover-pictures, as it were, the consciousness hungry for truth thinks it can grasp the dimly present cognition, which official progress of every type assiduously withholds. It is that society, by virtually excluding the possibility of the spontaneous recoil, gravitates towards total catastrophe. The real absurdity is the model for the astrological one, which puts forward the impenetrable context of alienated elements – nothing is more foreign than the stars – as knowledge about the subject. The threat which is read out of the constellations, resembles the historical one, which rolls on in unconsciousness, in what is subjectless. They can bear the thought that everyone is a prospective victim of a whole, which is merely formed from themselves, only by transferring that whole away from themselves onto something similar, something external to it. In the miserable idiocy which they propagate, the empty horror, they allow themselves to let out the clumsy misery, the crass fear of death and nevertheless to continue to repress it, as they must if they wish to continue to live. The break in the life-line which indicates a hidden cancer is a fraud only in the place where it is asserted, in the hand of the individual [ Individuums]; where it would not give a diagnosis, in the collective, it would be correct. Occultists rightly feel drawn to childishly monstrous natural-scientific fantasies. The confusion they create between their emanations and the isotopes of uranium, is ultimate clarity. The mystic rays are modest anticipations of the technical ones. Superstition is cognition, because it sees all of the ciphers of destruction together, which are scattered on the social surface; it is foolish, because in still clings to illusions, in all of its death-drive: glossing the answer, from the transfigured form of society, displaced into the heavens, which can only be provided by the real transfiguration of society. No improvement is too small or piddling to be carried out. Out of a hundred changes, a single one may appear trifling and pedantic; together they can raise the text to a new level.
Great Deal 
New Comment