Noel’s Reviews > Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life > Status Update
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’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 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
is on page 103 of 256
(A perceptive, though negative passage I want to comment on.)
Since I set eyes on him.* – The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in woman its own corrective, and shows itself through this
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— Oct 20, 2025 10:19AM
Since I set eyes on him.* – The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in woman its own corrective, and shows itself through this
[…]
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Oct 27, 2025 03:49PM
night’s healing store is squandered, and before we have banished all sights from beneath our burning lids, we know that it is too late, that we shall soon feel the rough shake of morning. In a similar way the condemned man may see his last moments slip away unarrested, unused. But what is revealed in such contraction of the hours is the reverse of time fulfilled. If in the latter the power of experience breaks the spell of duration and gathers past and future into the present, in the hasteful sleepless night duration causes unendurable dread. Man’s life becomes a moment, not by suspending duration but by lapsing into nothingness, waking to its own futility in face of the bad eternity of time itself. In the clock’s over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence. The hours that are past as seconds before the inner sense has registered them, and sweep it away in their cataract, proclaim that like all memory our inner experience is doomed to oblivion in cosmic night. Of this people are today made forcibly aware. In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve. He does not expect to live out his life to the end. The prospect of violent death and torture, present to everyone, is prolonged in the fear that the days are numbered, that the length of one’s own life is subject to statistics; that growing old has become a kind of unfair advantage gained over the average. Perhaps the life quota allocated revocably by society is already spent. Such fear is registered by the body in the flight of the hours. Time flies.
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We put out the light in the hope of long hours of rest that can bring succour. But as our thoughts run wild thenight’s healing store is squandered, and before we have banished all sights from beneath our burning lids, we know that it is too late, that we shall soon feel the rough shake of morning. [...]What a most mighty way to put insomnia into words... It brings back memories from the time I worked as a night receptionist in a hotel in Saint-Nazaire during the Covid pandemic. I appreciate you taking time to share the whole evocative passage, Noel!
Thanks PE :) The book is chock-full of wonderful quotes. (It’s meant to be aphoristic, but really, it’s nothing like, say, Nietzsche or Cioran. Most of the aphorisms are pages long.)
