492021, issue 2

Minima Moralia at 70

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This year is the 70th anniversary of the publication of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Written

on the occasion of Max Horkheimer’s 50th birthday, these “reections on damaged life”

(as the subtitle reads) became, after publication in 1951, widely read also outside of aca-

demic circles, and established Adorno’s reputation as an essayist and public intellectual

in post-war Germany. Jürgen Habermas later referred to it as the author’s “Hauptwerk”,

(“that one can study as though it were a summa”) and while it may have to compete for

this title with the later-written books Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, it is safe to

say that Minima Moralia is in any case the richest of Adorno’s books, in thematic scope,

emotional depth, and most certainly in literary style.

In the canon of philosophical works, it is dicult to nd anything like it. There

are of course precursors, like Pascal’s Pensées, Nietzsche’s Morgenröte, and Benjamin’s

Einbahnstrasse, but still Adorno’s aphorisms are quite unique, weaving together parodies

of poems or lullabies, personal memories, dense philosophical prose, art and literary

criticism, and social and cultural analysis. Some of his most quoted lines, like “The

whole is the false”, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly”, and “The splinter in your eye

is the best magnifying glass”, come from this work, even though Adorno himself would

shudder at the thought of his philosophy being reduced to set of catchphrases.

Adorno’s work has, in recent years, again gained a lot of interest, but one might

argue that his use of the genre of the philosophical aphorism has had little follow-up

(nor, for that matter, by Adorno himself, who did not write anything resembling it in

later life). Today, especially, the practices and institutions of academic publishing, and

the cultural hegemony of analytic philosophy, all but forbid anything diering from the

“steel-hard shell” of the journal-article.

This is why, on the occasion of this anniversary, Krisis decided to make a dossier

devoted to Minima Moralia, which is at the same time dedicated to the aphorism form.

We asked a diverse group of authors to write a short, aphoristic text. The topic was of

their own choosing; it didn’t have to deal with Adorno’s philosophy, let alone would we

dare ask authors to write in an “Adornian” style. Rather, we asked the authors to pick a

quote and/or fragment from Minima Moralia, and use it as a point of departure for their

own reections.

Either explicitly or implicitly, the contributions in this dossier together address

the question whether life, seventy years after publication of Minima Moralia, is still

damaged. Although we might not compare our own time and experiences to the ones

that Adorno lived through, we have in recent years, and are still, faced with numerous

catastrophes, not in the least the ecological catastrophe that puts grim truth to Adorno’s

lines that “even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the

shadow of terror.” (§ 5)

While Minima Moralia was written only by Adorno, such was not the case in

many other texts produced by the Frankfurt School. Following the latter example, we

want to thank the many authors who contributed a text and the four co-editors: Samir

Gandesha, who was a guest editor on this dossier as well as Thijs Lijster, Tivadar Vervoort

and Guilel Treiber from the Krisis editorial board. Finally, a note on referencing: since