Theodor Adorno, Selections from Minima Moralia
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MINIMA MORALIA REFLECTIONS FROM DAMAGED LIFE Theodor Adorno Translated from the German by E. F. N. Jephcott V E RSO London • New York D~dication z5 I PART ONE 1944 For Marcel Proust 2 z Grassy seat 22 Fish in water 23 Final serenity 24 How nice of you, Doctor 25 Antithesis 26 They, the people 28 If knaves should tempt you 28 Promise me this, my child 30 Divided-united 30 With all my worldly goods 31 Inter pares 32 Protection, help and counsel 33 Le bourgeois revenant 34 Le nouvel avare 35 On the dialectic of tact 35 Proprietary rights 37 Refuge for the homeless 38 Do not knock 40 Struwwelpeter 40 Articles may not be exchanged 42 Baby with the bath-water 43 Plurale tantum 45 Tough baby 45 To them shall no tjloughts be turned 46 English spoken 47 On parle fran?is 48 Paysage 48 Dwarf fruit 49 Pro doma nostra So Briefer expositions 98 Cat out of the bag S 1 Death of immortality 1 oo Savages are not more noble Sa Morality and style 101 Out of the firing-line S.3 Not half hungry 102 Johnny-Head-in-Air 56 Melange 102 Back to culture S7 Unmeasure for unmeasure 10.3 The Health unto Death 58 People are looking at you 1 o5 This side of the pleasure principle 60 Little folk 1 o5 Invitation to the dance 62 Uninformed opinion 106 Ego is Id 6.3 Pseudomenos 108 Always speak of it, never think of it 65 Second harvest 109 Inside and outside 66 Deviation 1 1.3 Freedom of thought 68 Mammoth 115 Unfair intimidation 69 Chilly hospitality 116 For Post-Socratics 70 Gala dinner 1 18 'How sickly seem all growing things' 71 Auction 119 On the morality of thinking 7.3 Over the hills 121 De gustibus est disputandum 75 lntellectus sacrificium intellectus 122 For Anatole F ranee 76 Diagnosis 1 2.3 Morality and temporal sequence 78 Great and small 1 24 Gaps So Keeping one's distance 126 Vice-President 128 Timetable 130 PART TWO Passing muster 131 1945 Little Hans 132 Wrestling club 13.3 Memento 85 Simple Simon 135 Where the stork brings babies from 87 Blackmail 136 Folly of the wise 88 Institution for deaf-mutes 1.37 The Robbers 89 Vandals 138 May I be so bold? 90 Picture-book w•thout pictures 140 Genealogical research 91 Intention and reproduction 141 Excavation 92 All the world's not a stage 143 The truth about Hedda Gabler 93 Damper and drum 145 Since I set eyes on him 95 Palace of Janus 146 A word for morality 96 Monad 148 Court of appeal 97 Bequest 150 Gold assay 152 Wolf as grandmother 203 Sur l'Eau 155 Expensive reproduction 206 Contribution to intellectual history 208 Juvenal's error 209 PART THREE Sacrificial lamb 2 z2 Exhibitionist 21 2 Small sorrows, great songs 2 t 4 Hothouse plant 161 Who is who 215 More haste, less speed z62 Addressee unknown 216 Boy from the heath 163 Consecutio temporum 2.17 Golden Gate 164 La nuance/encor' 219 Expiry 165 By this does German song abide 221 All the little flowers 166 In nuce 222 Ne cherchez plus mon coeur 167 Magic Flute 224 Princess Lizard 169 Art-object 225 L'lnutile Beaute 171 Toy shop 227 Constanzas 172 Novissimum Organum 228 Philemon and Baucis 173 Knackery 23 1 Et dona derentes 173 Don't exaggerate 233 Spoilsport 174 Late extra 235 Heliotrope 177 Theses against occultism 238 Coming clean 178 Warning: not to be misused 244 Just hear, how bad he was 179 Finale 247 11 servo padrone 182 Downwards, ever downwards 183 In.Jex 249 Model of virtue 184 Rosenkavalier 187 Requiem for Odette 189 Monograms 190 The bad comrade 192 Puzzle-picture 193 Olet 195 I.Q. 196 Wishful thinking 197 Regressions 199 Service to the customer 200 Grey and grey 20 1 ./ 27 29 On parle fran;ais. - How intimately sex and language are inter Dwarffrui.t • ....: It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the em twined can be seen by reading pornography in a foreign language. barrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author. When de Sade is read in the original no dictionary is needed. The most recondite expressions for the indecent, knowledge of which In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and no school, no parental home, no literary experience transmits, are the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to understood instinctively, just as in childhood the most tangential paint a vegetable and it was already a dream. utterances and observations concerning the sexual crystallize into a In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they pur true representation. It is as if the imprisoned passions, called by veyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell. their name in these expressions, burst through the ramparts of blind language as through those of their own repression, and forced Beauty of the American landscape: that even the smallest of its their way irresistibly into the innermost cell of meaning, which segments is inscribed, as its expression, with the immensity of the resembles them. whole country. In the recollection of emigration each German venison roast tastes as if it had been felled with the charmed bullets of the Frei 28 schiit,.1 In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations. Paysage. - The shortcoming of the American landscape .is not so much, as romantic illusion would have it, the absence of historical We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It memories, as that it bears no traces of the human hand. This applies warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him not only to the lack of arable land, the uncultivated woods often no from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the higher than scrub, but above all to the roads. These are always in song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has serted directly in the landscape, and the more impressively smooth power over him no longer. and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at track appears against its wild, overgrown surroundings. They are us in waking hours from newspaper headlines. expressionless. Just as they know no marks of foot or wheel, no soft paths along their edges as a transition to the vegetation, no The mythical messenger of doom relives in radio. Important trails leading off into the valley, so they are without the mild, events announced peremptorily are always disasters. In English soothing, un-angular quality of things that have felt the touch of solemn means both ceremonious and menacing. The power of hands or their immediate implements. It is as if no-one had ever society behind the speaker turns of its own accord against the passed their hand over the landscape's hair. It is uncomforted and listeners. comfortless. And it is perceived in a corresponding way. For what The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catas- the hurrying eye has seen merely from the car it cannot retain, and trophes. · the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears The expression of history in things is no other than that of past upon itself. torment. In Hegel self-consciousness was the truth of the certainty of one's self, in the words of the Phenomenology, the 'native realm of truth'. 1. Opera by the German romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber (1821). 49 When they had ceased to understand this, the bourgeois were·self production, of colour films and television, millionaire's magazines conscious at least in their pride at owning wealth. Today self and Toscan'ini. The older media, not designed for mass-production, consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego take on a new timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation. as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is They alone could outflank the united front of trusts and technology. nothing. In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'. press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its The splinter in your eye is th~ best magnifying-glass. repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination. The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent. 31 The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong. Cat out of the hag. - Even solidarity, the most honourable mode of conduct of socialism, is sick. Solidarity was once intended to make The whole is the false. 1 the talk of brotherhood real, by lifting it out of generality, where it was an ideology, and reserving it for the particular, the Party, as the sole representative in an antagonistic world of generality. It was .30 manifested by groups of people who together put their lives at stake, counting their own concerns as less important in face of a Pro domo nostra. - When during the last war, - which like all tangible possibility, so that, without being possessed by an abstract others, seems peaceful in comparison to its successor- the symphony idea, but.also without individual hope, they were ready to sacrifice orchestras of many countries had their vociferous mouths stopped, themselves for each other.