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FREE MINIMA MORALIA: REFLECTIONS ON A DAMAGED LIFE PDF Theodor W. Adorno | 256 pages | 17 Jan 2006 | Verso Books | 9781844670512 | English | London, United Kingdom Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life – John Pistelli It helps to know that this book, an unclassifiable philosophical masterpiece consisting of divisions ranging in length from the aphorism to the brief essay, was written largely in the light of Southern California. Adorno was a German-Jewish philosopher and member of the Frankfurt School, an institute devoted to the investigation of social phenomena from a neo-Marxist perspective inflected by psychoanalysis and German Idealism. Exiled from Germany by Nazi race laws, Adorno spent the war years, among other exiles like Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg, under and within the even yellow blue-sky sunlight of Los Angeles. Minima Moraliaa book whose ironic title suggests how little remains in the middle of the 20th century of morality or Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life a good life to which it might pertain, radiates a sense of malign benignity, of catastrophe, crisis, and slaughter concealed behind a deceptive pleasantry; Adorno denounces midcentury society as a whited sepulcher whose consumer pleasures and technological marvels mask a process of unremitting domination whose already completed climax was the Holocaust. Adorno was an adept of the philosophical method called dialectics. The dialectic stems from the sophists; it was a mode of discussion whereby dogmatic assertions were shaken and, as the public prosecutors and comic writers put it, the lesser word made the stronger. It subsequently developed, as against philosophia perennisinto a perennial method of criticism, a refuge for all the thoughts of the oppressed, even those unthought by them. But as a means of proving oneself right it was also from the first an instrument of domination…. The dialectic, then, abjures transcendental truth, truth that stands outside the world as posited by Plato and his followers, in Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life of immanent truth consummating itself by ideological conflict within time and collective human experience. Hence its use as a weapon of the oppressed against the dogmas of their rulers, but also its Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life to anyone who would shake any conviction whatever, even in service to the cynicism of power. Ideally, dialectics says that truth would be the progressive self-realization and actualization in history of human reason, until we reach our perfected form in the ethical society, whether conceived as the modern nation-state, a communist future, or our own end-of-history liberal capitalism. In this way, Adorno is faithful to Hegel, presents him with a Valentine bouquet, precisely by criticizing his system. Adorno wrote an earlier book with Horkheimer called The Dialectic of Enlightenment There they describe how Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life human mind seeks to escape the domination of external nature by learning how to dominate nature in turn. This rational mastery of nature is an emancipation, because it frees humanity from subjection to the external world often in the most literal ways: stemming floods, dousing fires, etc. On the other hand, as the mind brings more and more of nature under its command, and enthralls or oppresses as well those human beings the rational ruling classes designate as irrational women, the lower orders, people of other races, etc. This theory is the necessary background to the manifold denunciations of modern culture undertaken by Adorno in Minima Moralia. Often not distinguishing among liberal, fascist, and communist societies, Adorno sees all of 20th-century modernity as a progressive enclosure of the human within mechanical systems that crush thought, spontaneity, complexity, creativity, and individuality. There are passages in this book where he links the dissolution of interpersonal courtesy which, with a respectful concern for beauty and distance, mediates power relations between peoplethe driving of automobiles which accommodates humanity to the inhuman mechanismand even the decline of hotels which, he argues, have become impersonal, sexless prison-clinics to the rise of fascism: everywhere he looks in Adorno sees naked power perfected as an all-encompassing social machine. Elsewhere, he contends, in a passage that would not find a ready reception on Twitter today, that only the educated bourgeoisie can even be trusted to create revolution because only they, as the indigenes of bourgeois society, are capable of its immanent critique:. There is to be found in African students of political economy, Siamese at Oxford, and more generally in diligent art-historians and musicologists of petty-bourgeois origins, a ready inclination to combine with the assimilation of new material, an inordinate respect for all that is established, accepted, acknowledged. He would have little patience for attempts to achieve equality by lowering standards:. Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination. In the end, glorification of the splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. On the one Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, these works, with their model of a richer, more Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, more intense, and even sometimes more just life, implicitly rebuke by contrast the injustice and privation we encounter in the actual world. But the classics are unable to bring about a better state of affairs, existing as they do in the autonomous, thus impotent, realm of art. Moreover, because they themselves become adjuncts of oppression through their contexts as usually the work of elite individuals and through their function as class markers or nationalist props, they testify to the need for actual remediation of our social life. Pop culture, though, as pacifying product prefabricated by the culture industry, offers its audiences only a smooth surface unable to challenge or surprise; beneath its shiny veneer, it is all barbarism, no culture:. The stagnation of the culture industry is probably not the result of monopolization, but was a property of so-called entertainment from the first. Kitsch is composed of a structure of invariables which the philosophical lie Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life to Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life solemn designs. On principle, nothing in them must change, since the whole mischief is intended to hammer into men that nothing must change. Adorno judges socialist utopianism vulgar, merely a power trip that can only produce images of the good life out of experiences of the bad life, leading inexorably to totalitarianism; faithful to Proust, he finds sustenance in the past, in the old bourgeois world eliminated by leveling mass society and fascist politics, and even in the domestic realm from which images of peace and freedom come:. Unpolitical attempts to break out of the bourgeois family usually lead only to deeper entanglement in it, and it sometimes seems as if the fatal germ- cell of society, the family, were at the same time the nurturing germ-cell of uncompromising pursuit of another. With the family there passes away, while the system lasts, not only the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie, but also the resistance which, though repressing the individual, also strengthened, perhaps even produced him. The end of the family paralyses the forces of opposition. The rising collectivist order is a mockery of a classless one: together with the bourgeois it liquidates the Utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love. In the end the tough guys are the truly effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them. Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together. What they subjectively fancy radical, belongs objectively so entirely to the compartment in the pattern reserved for their like, that radicalism is debased to abstract prestige, legitimation for those who know what an intellectual nowadays has to be for and what against. None of this is to say, though, that Adorno is not himself radical; he always goes to the root. When you trace domination and oppression to their roots, you find that their roots are so deep they may never be extirpated, that they are entangled with the very structure of mind and world. Because we met our lover before any other lover, we think we may possess her; because we were born into a nation, we think latecomers like immigrants should be ejected. Even so, totally free love and totally open borders may not be entirely practical solutions; what are we to do about time, in which, after all, we live? What we are not to do, Adorno makes clear, is to seek refuge in the occult. Traditional religions like Christianity and Judaism are superior to occultism, since they take the union of flesh and spirit, secularized in dialectical thinking, much more seriously. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. This unyielding radicalism, this fearlessness of thought and sedulousness of prose, makes Minima Moralia Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life masterpiece. Sold as a contribution to Marxism, it offers little in the way of political advice; it is so political that it is in fact apolitical. He suggests that emancipation might not look like any extant or even imaginable socialist policy, but like the bliss of doing nothing whatever, of having nothing to do, of finding peace at last:. As for the Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life of the philosopher, it is to behold our damaged life in the ever-present consciousness that it is damaged, and that our very ability to imagine its repair accuses and exposes the present in the light of a messianic future portended by thought:.