Noel’s Reviews > Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life > Status Update
Noel
is on page 81 of 256
De gustibus est disputandum. – Even someone believing himself convinced of the non-comparability of works of art will find himself repeatedly involved in debates where works of art, and precisely those of highest and therefore incommensurable rank, are compared and evaluated one against the other. The objection that such considerations, which come about in a peculiarly compulsive way, have their
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— Oct 19, 2025 08:49AM
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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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Oct 19, 2025 08:49AM
source in mercenary instincts that would measure everything by the ell, usually signifies no more than that solid citizens, for whom art can never be irrational enough, want to keep serious reflection and the claims of truth far from the works. This compulsion to evaluate is located, however, in the works of art themselves. So much is true: they refuse to be compared. They want to annihilate one another. Not without cause did the ancients reserve the pantheon of the compatible to Gods or Ideas, but obliged works of art to enter the agon, each the mortal enemy of each. The notion of a ‘pantheon of classicity’, as still entertained by Kierkegaard, is a fiction of neutralized culture. For if the Idea of Beauty appears only in dispersed form among many works, each one nevertheless aims uncompromisingly to express the whole of beauty, claims it in its singularity and can never admit its dispersal without annulling itself. Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works, in the unity of the arts and of art, but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing. It is this impulse to self-destruction inherent in works of art, their innermost striving towards an image of beauty free of appearance, that is constantly stirring up the aesthetic disputes that are apparently so futile. While obstinately seeking to establish aesthetic truth, and trapping themselves thereby in an irresoluble dialectic, they stumble on the real truth, for by making the works of art their own and elevating them to concepts, they limit them all, and so contribute to the destruction of art which is its salvation. Aesthetic tolerance that simply acknowledges works of art in their limitation, without breaking it, leads them only to a false downfall, that of a juxtaposition which denies their claims to indivisible truth.
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