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MINIMA MORALIA Theodor
Adorno is often referred to as a Marxist, perhaps because the majority
of his work is a critique of capitalism and its effects on culture, but
in spirit he is a humanist. Like Beckett, he is permanantly
dismayed by everything. His very specific descriptions of what is
wrong with everything, and why precisely it's getting worse, ring truer
than anything postmodern, which is perhaps why he's enjoying a bit of a
resurgence.
Following what I can't imagine is the tremendous commercial success of Routledge's anthology THE CULTURE INDUSTRY comes Seven Stories Press' reprint of MINIMA MORALIA, with the pathetic subtitle REFLECTIONS ON A DAMAGED LIFE, as an installment of their "Radical Thinkers" series. MINIMA MORALIA is a collection of aphorisms, like much of Neitzche's work, and Adorno conceptualized it as a continuation of THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT, but without Horkheimer, from whom he was separated by the Second World War. MINIMA MORALIA also contains several sections of advice for writers-- all of it, in my opinion, extremely good advice: "Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance." And sometimes the advice is more wistful. When discussing the fact that "the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately [the writer] expresses himself, the more obscure the literary result is thought, whereas a loose and irresponsible formulation is at once rewarded with certain understanding, " he laments the fact that readers often prefer to be told what they already know: "Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce... touches them as familiar." This is a great book by a great writer. If you can forgive him for hating popular culture and listen to what he has to say, Adorno may even be able to help you survive popular culture with your soul intact. --C. B. Coble |