Andrew’s Reviews > Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life > Status Update

"Instead of solving the question of women's oppression, male society has so extended its own principle that the victims are no longer able even to pose the question".

While Adorno is mostly right in this passage about the ceasless ability of capitalism to absorb identity antagonisms into its stucture, as always, he vastly underestimates post war social politics. He cannot even concieve of the 2nd wave occuring.

"The rose-scents of Elysium, much too voluble to be credited with the experience of a single rose, smell of the tabacco-smoke in a magistrate's office, and the soulful moon on the backdrop was fashioned after the miserable oil-lamp by whose meagre light the student swots for his exam".

"Instead of comprehending the facts behind which the others are entrenched, it [irrationalist pseduo-philosophy] snatches those it can reach in its haste and makes off to play so uncritically with apocryphal knowledge, with a few isolated and hypistasized categories, and with itself, that simple reference to unyeilding facts is enough to defeat it."

When Adorno's wrong, hes completely wrong. But when hes right...

"The life style of belated bohemianism forced on the non-academic philosopher is itself enough to give him a fatal affinity to the world of arts-and-crafts, crackpot religion and half-educated sectarianism. Munich before the First World War was a hotbed of that spirituality whose protest against the rationalism of the schools led, by way of the cults of fancy-dress festivities...to Fascism..."

"The hack journalist groaning under his editor's demands for continous brilliance, openly gives voice to the law that lurks tacitly behind all the works on the Cosmogonic Eros and kindred mysteries, the metamorphoses of the gods and the secret of the Gospel according to St.John"

The cealesless infotainment pipeline that converts banal mystic meg tripe into the intellectual foundations of fascist irrationalism.

So far, on the menu of irredeemable misery caused by mass industrial capitalism is our relationships to parents, visits to the cinema, intellectuals in almost all forms, lying, marriage and divorce, eroticism, emigration, tact, dwellings, technology, almost all forms of human relationships and communication, present giving, porn, all german culture pre and post war and the notion of solidarity.

Its only pg.71.