"Maxima Immoralia? Speed and Slowness in Adorno's Minima Moralia"

I. My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

The fact that inversion or chiasmus is the dominant trope of Adorno’s thinking is so obvious that it scarcely seems worth mentioning. Especially in Minima Moralia, chiasmus is prominently on display from the very beginning: the title itself is an inversion of Aristotle’s Magna Moralia (“Great Ethics”) — though we should note a meta-inversion here at the very beginning, insofar as Aristotle’s ethics (based as it is on everyday exchanges like friendship, household matters, urbanity, and commerce) is itself already an inversion of an even “greater” Platonic ethics. As we open Minima Moralia, the inversions continue in the text’s first sentence, where Adorno famously characterizes his work as a “melancholy science,” in chiasmic contradistinction to Nietzsche’s “joyful science” (again, itself already an inversion of idealism). From the book’s epigraph (Kürnberger’s “Life is not alive”) to Minima Moralia’s most famous sentence, “the whole is false” (50)[1] (an inversion of Hegel’s dialectical dictum that only the whole is true), chiasmic reversal is all over Minima Moralia.

It’s hard not to recognize this, I suppose. But the thornier question concerns the upshot of Adorno’s chiasmic method? One might haltingly begin to address this question by recalling that Adorno’s is a highly performative discourse — the “form” of his thought can hardly be separated from its “content”;[2] and it likewise seems clear that the interruptive and open-ended quality of chiasmus lends itself very well to a thinking dedicated to demonstrating that the whole is false: the chiasmus frustrates any kind of gathering into a unity — even the impossible unity that Hegel posits.[3] In Minima Moralia, it seems that the reader is meant to confront contradiction qua contradiction — on the sentence level as well as the social level.

Indeed, if the bumper sticker or the advertising slogan is ideology writ small — the keenest expression of what Adorno calls “organized tautology” (66) — then the work of ideology critique would almost have to include a kind of negative or critical moment. This moment, a chiasmic slowness, interrupts the smooth movement of tautological self-reassurance. If, as Adorno writes, the culture industry “expels from movements all hesitation” (40), then chiasmus is clearly one way of reintroducing (at the level of form and content) an ethical hesitation into the otherwise too-swift movement to a conclusion. If “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass” (50), then the chiasmic fragments of Minima Moralia would seem to be best understood as little splintering machines, magnifying contradictions by slowing thought down and de-forming closure. And through his interruptive inversions, it seems that Adorno hopes actually to enact (rather than merely describe) his “minor ethics”; through a slowing down and breaking of ideological tautology, Minima Moralia hopes “to teach the norm to fear its own perversity” (97).

Confronting the chiasmic slowdowns of Adorno’s thought, one might be forced to realize, “Damn! My karma is my dogma.” Or, as Adorno puts it, “relativists are the real . . . absolutists” (128).

II. Slower traffic keep right

OK, this makes a certain sense of Adorno’s odd “method” in Minima Moralia, and makes him more recognizable within a series of postmodern family resemblances: this method of chiasmic interruption was, for example, the coin of the realm for American deconstruction;[4] and certainly any Lacanian would recognize these kinds of chiasmic moves, where the rock of the real is finally shown to be contradiction itself.[5] Or one might see Adorno’s method as a kind of ideology critique — a open-ended “minor” critique of cultural hegemonies, in contradistinction to the “major” determinist critique of the economic base.[6]

But Adorno, like a chiasmic inversion of your drunk Uncle Teddy at Thanksgiving dinner, will quickly make you reconsider those postmodern family resemblances. For example, on the deconstructive move of returning rights to the non-privileged term within an opposition, Adorno’s discourse retorts: “In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so” (28). About psychoanalysis, Adorno...