Adorno says is it's due to our sentimentality. We try to be human. But we are talking soupy nonsense talk as if we’re "human" - too uncool for the kids! The Machine Frowns, THEY frown. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory. 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.” It is really strange how influential Adorno is within Marxist circles. He is such a neg-head downer... After I read this text I truly ran to the bookshelves and tried to lift myself out of this book's funk by Re-reading Epictetus and Seneca. Give me Greek Philosophy over this trite bitch-fest any day. Please, if you are thinking of killing yourself, DO NOT READ ADORNO! READ GREEK PHILOSOPHY INSTEAD (and get outside and play) All of these memories spoke of displacement. During his period of exile, first the few, lonely years as a student at Oxford University in the mid-1930s, then in the US where he kept close to the émigré community and looked upon most of American life with a mixture of alienation and disdain, Adorno never felt at home. Aphorism 18 is entitled “Asylum for the homeless”. But it is an argument against the ideal of a permanent home. “Dwelling in the authentic sense,” he writes, “is no longer possible.” Little in Adorno’s work better expresses his mistrust of “dwelling” and “authenticity”, those cherished themes of existentialism. In 1941, after a few years in New York, Adorno followed his colleague, the philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer, out to Los Angeles County, where they lived not far from other artists and intellectuals, including Bertolt Brecht and the composer Arnold Schoenberg, all of them exiles from central Europe.

Between “I dreamt” [ es träumte mir] and “I dreamed” [ ich träumte] lie ages of the world. But which is truer? So little do spirits send dreams, so little is it the ego which dreams. 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. Adorno's philosophy was not only a critique of capitalism, it also offeredan inventory of modernity as a whole. He paid particular attention to the impact of the societal development on the individual, looking into how liberating progress could be, but how it also created new threats.That is why social analysis can garner incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the great historical categories, after all that has been perpetrated with them in the meantime, are no longer above suspicion of fraud. In the one hundred and fifty years which have passed since Hegel’s conception, something of the force of protest has passed over again into the individuated [ Individuum]. Compared with the paterfamilial scantiness, which characterizes its treatment in Hegel, it has won as much richness, differentiation and energy as it has, on the other hand, been weakened and hollowed out by the socialization of society. In the epoch of its disassembly [ Zerfalls], the experience of the individuated [ Individuum] as well as what it encounters contributes once more to a recognition, which it had concealed, so long as it was construed seamlessly and positively as the ruling category. In view of the totalitarian unison, which broadcasts the elimination of difference as immediately meaningful, a measure of emancipatory social power may have temporarily withdrawn into the sphere of the individual. That critical theory tarries in it, is not only due to a bad conscience. This interdisciplinary volume revisits Adorno's lesser-known work, Minima Moralia, and makes the case for its application to the most urgent concerns of the 21st century. Contributing authors situate Adorno at the heart of contemporary debates on the ecological crisis, the changing nature of work, the idea of utopia, and the rise of fascism. Before the eighty-fifth birthday of an in all respects well cared-for man, I dreamed that I asked myself the question, what could I give him which would make him truly happy, and immediately received the answer: a guide through the realm of the dead. Society is now broken and I am damaged by it. I am damaged because I have always believed in true love.

A poem of Liliencron describes a military fanfare. First it goes: “And around the corner crashing brays, like thumping tubas on Judgment Day,” and it closes: “Did a bright butterfly dart / ching-ching boom, around the corner?” A poetic philosophy of history of violence, with Judgment Day at the beginning and the butterfly at the end.bölümü 1946-7 yıllarında yazmış Adorno, yani savaşın bittiği, faşizmin yenilgisinin ardından. Bu bölüm ilk iki bölüme göre hüküm verici metinlerden çok sorgulayıcı metinlere dönüşmüş, daha genel konular yanında uslupta da az da olsa serlikte azalmanın görüldüğü denemeler dikkat çekiyor. In the Anglo-Saxon lands, the whores look as if they dispensed the punishments of hell along with the sins. To children returning from vacation, the home is new, fresh, festive. But nothing has changed in it, since they left. Only because the duties were forgotten, of which every piece of furniture, every window, every lamp is otherwise a reminder, does the Sabbath peace once more repose, and for minutes one is at home in the multiplication table of rooms, chambers and corridors, as it will appear for the rest of one’s life only in lies. Not otherwise will the world appear, nearly unchanged, in the steady light of its day of celebration, when it no longer stands under the law of labor, and the duties of those returning home are as light as vacation play.

All rights reserved. – The signature of the epoch is that no human being, without any exception, can determine their life in a somewhat transparent sense, as was earlier possible by gauging market relationships. In principle everyone, even the mightiest of all, is an object. Even the profession of general affords no sure protection anymore. No defenses are stringent enough in the Fascist era to protect headquarters from air strikes, and commanders who behave with traditional caution are hanged by Hitler and beheaded by Chiang Kai-shek. It follows that anyone attempting to somehow make it through – and even the continuation of life has something nonsensical about it, as in dreams wherein one witnesses to the end of the world and crawls out afterwards from an underground cellar – should simultaneously be prepared, at any moment, to extinguish their life. That is the sad truth which emerges from Zarathustra’s exuberant doctrine of the free death. Freedom has contracted into pure negativity, and what at the time of the Jugendstil [art nouveau] was known as dying in beauty, has reduced itself to the wish to shorten the endless degradation of existence as much as the endless misery of dying, in a world in which there are far worse things to fear than death. – The objective end of humanity is only another expression for that which is the same. It attests to the fact that individual persons have, as individuals – as these latter represent the species-being [ Gattungswesen] of humanity – lost the autonomy through which they could have realized the species. 18 The silent din, long familiar to us from our dream-experiences, blares in our waking hours from the newspaper headlines. 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. 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. But only our MAXIMA MORALIA - our commitment to real human kindness - will give us Love again, and only through the Grace of God.urn:lcp:minimamoraliaref0000ador_p2l6:epub:db9e41a6-5edc-43b4-95e4-491aadeb7f43 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier minimamoraliaref0000ador_p2l6 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7rp4zn02 Invoice 1652 Isbn 1844670511 In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream, and it always turned into a vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable, and it was already a dream. English spoken. [in English in original] – In my childhood I often received books as gifts from elderly British ladies, with whom my parents maintained relations: richly illustrated children’s books, and even a tiny green Bible bound in leather. All were in the language of the gift-givers: none of them thought to ask whether I could actually read them. The peculiar inaccessibility of the books, which sprang at me with pictures, huge titles and vignettes, without giving me any chance to decipher the text, led me to believe that these weren’t really books at all, but rather advertisements, perhaps for machines, like the ones my uncle produced in his London factory. Since I have come to live in Anglo-Saxon countries and to speak English, this consciousness has not dimmed but rather strengthened. There is a girl’s song from Brahm, based on a poem by Heyse, which goes: “Oh heart’s woe, you eternity / only self-other is bliss for me.” In the most popular American version, this is rendered as: “O misery, eternity! / But two in one were ecstasy.” The passionate, medieval-era nouns of the original have been turned into brand names of hit songs, which sing the praises of the latter. In the light they switch on, the advertising-character of culture radiates . 27 Minima Moralia is a book in aphorisms, a genre that Adorno learned from exemplars such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Kraus. Like Nietzsche, it conveys its claims in lightning strikes of paradox and wit; and, like Nietzsche, it occasionally trades in blusterous certitudes. It is perhaps regrettable that Adorno, the critic of all fetishism, is most celebrated for the overstatements that lend themselves to fetishistic quotation. “In psychoanalysis,” he writes, “nothing is true except the exaggerations.” A philosopher less enchanted with hammer-blows might respond that in Adorno’s thinking whatever is true must be salvaged from the exaggerations. The burden is often shifted to the reader, who must complete Adorno’s thoughts for him but can assent only to what survives rational elucidation. “Thinking that renounces argument,” Adorno once said, “switches into pure irrationalism.” My thoughts on this from the bottom up are a bit scattered, but the short summa