In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Kyle Baasch about his article “Critical Theory in the Flesh: Adorno and Foucault in San Francisco,” from Telos 196 (Fall 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discussed how Foucault’s aversion to Marxism relates to his notion of the individual as endlessly transfiguring itself through acts of creative self-invention; how Adorno interprets the freedom of the subject within the context of consumer culture and exchange society; the influence of Adorno’s experience as a heartbroken lover on his conception of happiness, particularly in Minima Moralia; how Adorno’s notion of happiness relates to the conception of harmony that Foucault criticizes; and the extent to which the two thinkers can be put into conversation. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 196 are available for purchase in our online store.
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In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Robert Miner about his article “Human Joy and the Subversion of Work/Play Distinctions: A Note on Adorno’s Minima Moralia 2.84,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store. As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lillian Hingley looks at Shannon Mariotti’s “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy” from Telos 149 (Winter 2009).
Roger Foster’s “Lingering with the Particular: Minima Moralia‘s Critical Modernism” appears in Telos 155 (Summer 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here. |
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This essay argues that the ethical claim of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia depends on its being read as an original version of the modernist idea of ethical critique as the aesthetic presentation of individual experience. While contemporary efforts to understand Minima Moralia as a form of substantive critique have merit, they have not fully appreciated the character of this work as a type of ethical performance. The second section of the essay lays out the background of this model of ethical critique in Adorno’s understanding of the system of universal fungibility. Adorno’s ethical performance, I argue, is a way of rescuing the ethical import of particularity. The execution of this idea in Minima Moralia through the rhetorical strategy of exaggeration is then examined in the third section. I then turn, finally, to a discussion of the key conceptual contrast between “lingering” and possessiveness. These terms allow Adorno to theorize injustice as a distortion of particularity, and also provide the model for a form of thinking and comportment that resists that distortion. 
