Adorno's 'Minima Moralia' in the 21st Century

This interdisciplinary volume revisits Adorno's lesser-known work, Minima Moralia, and makes the case for its application to the most urgent concerns of the 21st century. Contributing authors situate Adorno at the heart of contemporary debates on the ecological crisis, the changing nature of work, the idea of utopia, and the rise of fascism.

Exploring the role of critical pedagogy in shaping responses to fascistic regimes, alongside discussions of extractive economies and the need for leisure under increasingly precarious working conditions, this volume makes new connections between Minima Moralia and critical theory today. Another line of focus is the aphoristic style of Minima Moralia and its connection to Adorno's wider commitment to small and minor literary forms, which enable capitalist critique to be both subversive and poetic. This critique is further located in Adorno's discussion of a utopia that is reliant on complete rejection of the totalising system of capitalism. The distinctive feature of such a utopia for Adorno is dependent upon individual suffering and subsequent survival, an argument this book connects to the mutually constitutive relationship between ecological destruction and right-wing authoritarianism.

These timely readings of Adorno's Minima Moralia teach us to adapt through our survival, and to pursue a utopia based on his central ideas. In the process, opening up theoretical spaces and collapsing the physical borders between us in the spirit of Adorno's lifelong project.

Auteur

Caren Irr is Professor of English at Brandeis University, USA.

Contenu

Foreword by Peter E. Gordon (Harvard University, USA)

Introduction

1. An Adorno for the 21st Century: Introduction
   Caren Irr and and Diana Filar (Brandeis University, USA)

Part I Thought After Fascism

2. Minima Moralia and the Contradictions of Post-War Pedagogy
   Jakob Norberg (Duke University, USA)

3. Breathtaking Leaps," or from Doorknobs to Fascism
   Oshrat C. Silberbusch (author of Adorno's Philosophy of the Nonidentical)

Part II The Effects of the Aphorism

4. Gesture, Survival, Utopia: Adorno's Senses of Critique
   S.D. Chrostowska (York University, Canada)

5. Negative Dialectics, Negative Events: Aphoristic Knowledge as Melancholy Historicism in Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia
   Wyatt Sarafin (Harvard University, USA)
   
   Part III A Labor Theory of the Present
   

6. "The Whole of Life Must Look Like a Job": Minima Moralia, Utopian Idleness, and the Capitalocene
   Clint Williamson (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

7. Self-Preservation, Self-Destruction
   Caleb Shaoning Fridell (CUNY, USA)
   
   Part IV Adorno's Ecology
   

8. Adorno and Animality After Auschwitz
   Andrea Dara Cooper (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA)

9. Living with Damage: Adorno in the Anthropocene
   Caren Irr (Brandeis University, USA)

Bibliography

Index