Adorno’s Ascetic Formula

In 1945 Adorno published two essays in The Review, one on the broadcasting of classical music on the radio, the other on the need for a continued separation between art and religion. Adorno was not then a modern master—Martin Jay’s excellent volume on Adorno appeared in a British series with this title in 1984—and had published none of the works on which his current, late-blooming fame rests. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer, appeared in 1947; the wondrous Minima Moralia in 1951; Negative Dialectics only in 1966. Adorno died in 1969. But even in 1945 the forty-two-year-old exile was a distinguished figure, billed in The Review as a person who “formerly taught philosophy at Frankfurt University and edited Anbruch, the Viennese periodical for modern music. His books include works on Kierkegaard, Richard Wagner, George, and Hoffmannsthal.” Philosophy, music, literature: they came together in what Jay calls Adorno’s aesthetic modernism, and we have a haunting picture of Adorno from another source, Thomas Mann’s notes on the making of his Doctor Faustus. Pacific Palisades, 1943: Adorno gives Mann the manuscript of his book on Schonberg, plays Beethoven’s opus 111 piano sonata to Mann, talks brilliantly about the music. Mann, chiefly through Adorno, partly through his reading of Harry Levin’s book on Joyce—Joyce had died in 1941—realizes that he is more of a modernist than he thought he was.

Minima Moralia, a collection of epigrams, essayistic fragments, and miniature essays, is subtitled “Reflections from Damaged Life,” Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, and Adorno wrote in that book that “every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself.” When the intellectuals are Mann and Adorno, it is hard to imagine what their unmutilated minds would be like, but of course we cannot measure the private sense of harm and loss of those forced out of a world they thought was theirs. And in Adorno’s and related cases, the mutilation was the echo of something that had happened to the thought and sensibility of their time and place. Adorno’s translator undoubtedly takes the best option with the slightly odd “damaged life” where one would expect “a damaged life,” but the German article is subtly untranslatable. Das Leben is both life and the life. There would be no other way of saying just “damaged life,” but the title could mean reflections from the damaged life, and Adorno almost certainly intended both meanings. What’s the difference? Well, the damaged life is a life that has been damaged—mutilated, as Adorno says. Damaged life suggests that life itself, the business of being alive at all, apart from any individual life course, has been damaged.