Noel’s Reviews > Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life > Status Update
Noel
is on page 67 of 256
Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression, and to oblige the analyst, display indiscriminate enthusiasm for the trashy film, the expensive but bad meal in the French restaurant, the serious drink and the love making taken like medicine as ‘sex’. Schiller’s dictum that
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— Oct 18, 2025 08:51AM
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Noel’s Previous Updates
Noel
is on page 237 of 256
Perhaps the strict and pure concept of art is applicable only to music, while great poetry or great painting – precisely the greatest – necessarily brings with it an element of subject-matter transcending aesthetic confines, undissolved in the autonomy of form. The more profound and consequential an aesthetic theory, the more inappropriate it becomes to such works as the major novels of the nineteenth century.
— Oct 31, 2025 06:29PM
Noel
is on page 219 of 256
In “Wolf as grandmother,” Adorno contests the arguments of those who defend cinema as “popular art” against “the norms of the autonomous work.” According to him, they’re mistaken in comparing the film, with its “lying stereotypes” and its “barbaric cruelty that divides the world into good and evil,” with the greatest fairy-tales, “which have the stepmother dance to death in red-hot iron
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— Oct 29, 2025 11:55PM
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Noel
is on page 206 of 256
The bad comrade.* – In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows. If the bourgeois class has from time immemorial nurtured the dream of a brutal national community, of oppression of all by all; children already
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— Oct 29, 2025 09:47PM
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Noel
is on page 177 of 256
All the little flowers. – The pronouncement, probably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only possessions which no-one can take from us, belongs in the storehouse of impotently sentimental consolations that the subject, resignedly withdrawing into inwardness, would like to believe the very fulfilment that he has given up. In setting up his own archives, the subject seizes his own stock of
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— Oct 27, 2025 03:59PM
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Noel
is on page 176 of 256
Expiry. – Sleepless night: so there is a formula for those tormented hours, drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time’s empty passing. But truly terrifying are the sleepless nights when time seems to contract and run fruitlessly through our hands. We put out the light in the hope of long hours of rest that can bring succour. But as our thoughts run wild the
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— Oct 27, 2025 03:48PM
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Noel
is on page 125 of 256
On American hotels:
The division of labour, the system of automatized facilities, has the result that no-one is concerned for the client’s comfort. No-one can divine from his expression what might take his fancy, for the waiter no longer knows the menu, and if he makes suggestions of his own he must be prepared to face rebuke for having overstepped his limits. No-one hastens to serve the guest, however long
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— Oct 23, 2025 11:31AM
The division of labour, the system of automatized facilities, has the result that no-one is concerned for the client’s comfort. No-one can divine from his expression what might take his fancy, for the waiter no longer knows the menu, and if he makes suggestions of his own he must be prepared to face rebuke for having overstepped his limits. No-one hastens to serve the guest, however long
[…]
Noel
is on page 119 of 256
To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He
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— Oct 21, 2025 11:58PM
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Noel
is on page 117 of 256
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage, the capacity to convert energies once intensified beyond measure to destroy recalcitrant objects, into the concentration of patient observation, so keeping as tight a hold on the secret of things, as one had earlier when finding no peace until the quavering voice had been wrenched from the mutilated toy. Who has not seen on the face of a man
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— Oct 21, 2025 11:55PM
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Noel
is on page 111 of 256
Adorno’s views on race are even more irritating than his views on gender:
Mélange. – The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang. It lays itself open to the simple refutation of the senses, and the most compelling anthropological proofs that the Jews are not a race will, in the event of a pogrom, scarcely alter the fact that the totalitarians know
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— Oct 20, 2025 10:57AM
Mélange. – The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang. It lays itself open to the simple refutation of the senses, and the most compelling anthropological proofs that the Jews are not a race will, in the event of a pogrom, scarcely alter the fact that the totalitarians know
[…]
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Noel
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Oct 18, 2025 08:52AM
‘Life’s good, in spite of all’, papier-mâché from the start, has become idiocy now that it is blown into the same trumpet as omnipresent advertising, with psycho-analysis, despite its better possibilities, adding its fuel to the flames. As people have altogether too few inhibitions and not too many, without being a whit the healthier for it, a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and – inseparable from it – personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold on life inside them, as if it did not already have them firmly enough in its power from outside. … The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment-industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain.
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