Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia1 197 Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 1 David Martyn Macalester College Abstract: Readers of Adorno’s Minima Moralia have often asked and debated how this collection of aphorisms, many of which record Adorno’s personal experiences with American society, can claim any degree of objective or scientific validity. This article finds an answer to this perennial question in the peculiar way the book employs the anecdotal as a mode of presenting “actual experience�” After reviewing Adorno’s attitude toward the use of empirical methods in social research, the article contrasts the treatment of anecdotes in Adorno’s contributions to The Authoritarian Personality , an empirical study published in 1950, with his use of fragmentary anecdotal elements - brief descriptions of trivial occurrences, vignettes, highly condensed mini-narratives - in the Minima Moralia � I argue that these “anecdotal remains” constitute a form of empiricism� Seeing them as such allows us to better understand Adorno’s puzzling acknowledgment of empirical research as a needed corrective to traditional philosophy� Keywords: Minima Moralia , The Authoritarian Personality , anecdote as form, empiricism, everyday life, narrative, “Golden Gate” In America I truly experienced for the first time the importance of what is called empiricism� (Adorno, “Scientific Experiences” 370) Looking back from a distance of over two decades on the eleven years he spent in American exile, Adorno relates an “actual experience” in order to illustrate, without resorting to any detailed philosophical explanation, the phenomenon he calls “reified consciousness” (“Scientific Experiences” 347). Adorno has just 198 David Martyn recently arrived in New York and is a few weeks into his new job at the Princeton Radio Research Project� Among the frequently changing colleagues who came in contact with me in the Princeton Project was a young lady. After a few days she came to confide in me and asked in a completely charming way, “Dr. Adorno, would you mind a personal question? ” I said, “It depends on the question but just go ahead.” And she continued, “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert? ” (“Scientific Experiences” 347) The interpretation follows immediately: “It was as if she was already thinking, as a living being, according to the pattern of the so-called ‘cafeteria’ questions on questionnaires, by which she had been conditioned. She could fit herself into such rigid and preconceived categories” (347). Formally, the little story exhibits many of what form criticism has identified as the typical features of a classical anecdote: the opening exposition of the occasio , the situation in the office at the Princeton Project, is followed immediately by the provocatio of a “personal question” that crosses the line between business and personal talk and is then brought to a form-perfect closure with the punch-line dictum of the young lady (“Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert? ”) (Schäfer 29—37). The commentary framing the anecdote subordinates the particularity of this experience to a universal phenomenon for which it is made to serve as an example, namely the “pseudo-individualization” of a “reified, largely manipulable consciousness scarcely capable any longer of spontaneous experience” (Adorno, “Scientific Experiences” 346). It is the same topic that Adorno had dealt with at greater length in the book that is still most closely associated with his personal experiences in America, the Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (1951). The book’s 153 aphorisms, 2 as dense and lengthy as those of Nietzsche, provide a multifarious diagnosis of the “damaged” society of the late capitalist era - the society of which America, as the world’s economically most advanced country, provided a particularly valuable case study to the critical eye� 3 Its symptoms included, along with the reification of consciousness, nothing less than a “withering of experience” / “Absterben der Erfahrung” ( Minima Moralia 40/ 44 4 ) under the weight of a totally administered world� It is thus easy to imagine that the little story about the “are-you-an-extrovert” lady could as well have turned up in the Minima Moralia. But a moment’s reflection shows that this would not have been possible after all, for a simple but irrefutable reason. It is that the Minima Moralia contains no anecdotes at all - at least, not with the level of formal completeness exhibited in the story from the Princeton Project. Instead, what we find are textual elements that produce the effect of the “actual experience” no less than an anecdote does, but which are never actually fleshed out into a full anecdote and are instead left Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 199 to stand alone, with no narrative frame. These are what I propose to call “anecdotal remains”: textual elements below the level of genre that could very well have been part of an anecdote, or that seem like they more properly belonged there, but aren’t, appearing instead like remainders, leftovers, or precipitates of anecdotes that have gone missing or been held back� Why the Minima Moralia gives us no anecdotes, but only such remains or fragments, is the question I would like to pursue here. My answer will be that the particular form of the anecdotal remains provides a unique way of incorporating experience into theory - one that avoids subordinating experience and empirical data to abstract theoretical claims, models, or arguments, and one that can continue to function in the face of the “withering of experience” in the reified age of late capitalism. The anecdotal remains are uniquely suited to the task of accounting for experience under the conditions of its very disappearance� They thus promise to provide new insights not only into the relationship of the anecdotal to knowledge, but also into the role of the empirical in Adorno more generally� With the anecdotal remains of the Minima Moralia , we discover a new dimension of Adorno’s long-ignored empiricism� Remains. - The most obvious examples of the kind of anecdotal fragments or remainders I have in mind are brief descriptions of trivial occurrences� They turn up without warning, right in the midst of some of the densest theoretical passages and the most drastic pronouncements on the state of late-industrial society, sometimes in series and with a concreteness that can produce the comic effect of bathos. Such for example are the often-cited descriptions of the mundane materiality of the everyday: Do not knock. - Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them. […] What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden? Nicht anklopfen . - Die Technisierung macht einstweilen die Gesten präzis und roh und damit die Menschen. Sie treibt aus den Gebärden alles Zögern aus, allen Bedacht, alle Gesittung. Sie unterstellt sie den unversöhnlichen, gleichsam geschichtslosen 200 David Martyn Anforderungen der Dinge. So wird etwa verlernt, leise, behutsam und doch fest eine Tür zu schließen. Die von Autos und Frigidaires muß man zuwerfen, andere haben die Tendenz, von selber einzuschnappen und so die Eintretenden zu der Unmanier anzuhalten, nicht hinter sich zu blicken, nicht das Hausinnere zu wahren, das sie aufnimmt. […] Was bedeutet es fürs Subjekt, daß es keine Fensterflügel mehr gibt, die sich öffnen ließen, sondern nur noch grob aufzuschiebende Scheiben, keine sachten Türklinken sondern drehbare Knöpfe, keinen Vorplatz, keine Schwelle gegen die Straße, keine Mauer um den Garten? (Adorno, Minima Moralia 40/ 43—44) We hear a lot about unhappy experiences with American hospitality: about the central heating in the hotel that never fails to wake one up in the small hours of the morning (117/ 131) or about the hectic atmosphere at the lunch counter: Guests and host are as if spellbound� The former are in a rush� They would prefer to keep their hats on� On uncomfortable seats they are induced by the outheld bills and the moral pressure of the waiting queues behind them to leave the place, still called with mockery a café, at all possible speed. Gäste und Wirt sind verhext. Jene sind in Eile. Am liebsten möchten sie den Hut aufbehalten. Auf unbequemen Sitzen werden sie durch hingeschobene Schecks und den moralischen Druck wartender Hintermänner dazu verhalten, den Ort, der zum Hohn auch noch Café heißt, so schnell wie möglich zu verlassen. (116—17/ 130) Alongside such caricatures of mundane objects and occurrences we find numerous vignette-like character portraits of persons who play no further role: a “woman, who is idolized because appetite shows in her so unalloyed” (77/ 85); “Writers bent on a career” who “talk of their agents as naturally as their predecessors of their publishers” (100/ 111); teenagers (“Halbwüchsige”) who, to show that they have no cause to show anyone deference or respect, “put their hands in their trouser pockets” (110/ 122)� In addition to such descriptive fragments we also find, interspersed in the theoretical prose, extremely short narrative elements, stories that have been abbreviated to the point that they are scarcely recognizable as stories� One such micro-narrative will be the subject of an extended examination at the end of this article� What can one say about the effect of these various fragments or remains of what might have been a full-fledged anecdote? For one, they clearly fit the topos of the “true story” that is a signature feature of the anecdote (Moser 61)� In their frequently comical concreteness, further emphasized by the glaring contrast to the abstract pronouncements on “damaged society” - the most famous dictum of the whole book and perhaps its most universal, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” / “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (39/ 43), immediately pre- Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 201 cedes “Do not knock” - they appear as things that could not have been thought up but must have had their source in the messy contingency of daily life� That people in the technological age have lost the ability “to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly” is an idea the origin of which must have lain, thus at least the effect, in an actual observation: that a customer entering a bookshop, say, fails to shut the door behind him in the expectation that it will close automatically� This would mean that the anecdotal remains - as mediated through theory and the requirements of literary form as they may be - are based in “actual experience.” That is, they function as a form of empirical data for the theory of damaged life Adorno advances in the Minima Moralia. Empiricism. - On its face, of course, this claim will seem counterintuitive. The word “empiricism,” more than, say, “experience,” suggests a scientific ambition that one would not quickly associate with the essayistic, subjective character of the Minima Moralia . However, one of the primary aims of the Critical Theory, and not just in the Minima Moralia , was to demonstrate the incoherence, and thus untenability, of separating the domain of knowledge from that of subjective experience. The question of whether one may speak of empiricism in connection with anecdotes or anecdotal remains cuts to the core of Adorno’s entire theory of knowledge. It is tightly bound up with his critique of American positivism, but also - and this has garnered much less attention from previous readers - with his critique of positivism’s seeming opposite, namely the qualitative, humanistic analysis of social formations in the tradition of European philosophical and critical thought. But to see this, we need first, before turning to the Minima Moralia and their anecdotal remains, to gain some additional clarity on Adorno’s stance toward empiricism in general under the conditions of the “withering of experience” in late industrial capitalism� For the basic question is: what forms of experience can contribute to critical knowledge at all, for Adorno, under the conditions of damaged life - under conditions, that is, that would seem to reify or otherwise vitiate all experience, rendering it useless as a source of knowledge? For anyone with even a superficial knowledge of Adorno, the answer would seem to be obvious: the only experience that would qualify is that of art, or more specifically, the great works of art of high modernity� Only art can resist the logic of exchange which rules over everything in commodity-based societies - not just economic and social relations, but individual life itself in its most intimate nooks and crannies. As “plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange” / “Statthalter der nicht länger vom Tausch verunstalteten Dinge” ( Aesthetic Theory 227/ Ästhetische Theorie 337), art can show itself “as the other of this world, as exempt from the mechanism of the social process of production and reproduction,” 202 David Martyn as “das Andere, vom Getriebe des Produktions- und Reproduktionsprozesses der Gesellschaft Ausgenommene, dem Realitätsprinzip nicht Unterworfene” (311/ 461). Through artworks, experience is freed from “the compulsion of identity” / “Identitätszwang” (125/ 190) - thereby escaping the confines of a rationalism that can comprehend only what can be determined in relation to something else, hence only what can be submitted to the principle of equivalence that has its origin in the act of exchange. With works of art, an intimation of what must lie beyond all possible experience of such exchange rationalism can be gleaned� Adorno’s name for this is the “nonidentical” / “das Nichtidentische” (4/ 19). 5 Under the conditions of damaged society, art thus harbors the possibility of an experience that escapes its noxious instrumentalization and may thus serve as a valid source from which critical knowledge may be gained� But aesthetic experience is not the only form of experience that Adorno acknowledges as allowing for such knowledge� For despite Adorno’s profound skepsis toward the empirical methods he encountered in the US and which he criticized unsparingly, with time his attitude toward them grew more discerning, to the point that he was able, with good conscience, to serve as co-director of an ambitious empirical research project� This project reached fruition in the study for which Adorno would long be best known in the US, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik et al.). 6 Undertaken with members of the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group and begun in 1944, the project was carried out in the same place, California, and at the same time that most of the aphorisms of the Minima Moralia were composed� Following the publication of this study in 1950, Adorno published a sizable number of articles and texts of varying lengths in which, reporting on his American experiences for a skeptical German readership, he refined his critique of positivism in such a way as to allow for a differentiated defense of the use of empirical methods in the social sciences� 7 What exactly it was in the use of empirical methods that Adorno found he could defend is not an easy question to answer. 8 Much easier to grasp, and much easier to fit into our common understanding of Adorno’s Critical Theory, is the other side of his position, his critique of the methods he encountered in America; so it is best to start there and then work back. The critique is directed against what Adorno sees as a false concept of objectivity, as he put it in 1957: “the notion that truth is what remains after the allegedly mere subjective addition, a sort of cost price [ Gestehungskosten ], has been deducted” (“Sociology and Empirical Research” 81-82/ “Soziologie und empirische Forschung” 211)� Such an objectivity is false because subject and object, individual and society are in fact always “mutually mediated” (“On Subject and Object” 246) - neither subject nor object has any kind of independent existence� Instead of bringing what is Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 203 objective to light, the attempt to purge the object under investigation of anything subjective will always be duped, blind to the indelible impact of subject on object and thus to its own subjective dimension. In the process, it will also necessarily lose sight of the social whole, which is both objective and subjective in itself. Or rather, would be a unity of the objective and the subjective, were it in fact a true whole. In reality, under the conditions of exchange rationalism, there is no whole - as Adorno puts it, famously, in the Minima Moralia , “The whole is the false” / “Das Ganze ist das Unwahre” (50/ 55). Ironically, and tragically, the division between subject and object carried out by objectivist empiricism is both a fabrication and true, because “the split between the living subject and the objectivity that governs the subjects and yet derives from them” is, under current conditions, real (“Sociology and Psychology I” 69). Given this state of affairs, any true empiricism would by necessity also be a critical one: the object it strives to reflect is incoherent in itself and cannot be grasped at all without exposing its falsehood and subjecting it to critique. Wherever empirical research strives for “objectivity” by getting rid of the subjective, all it does is to produce a double of damaged society instead of understanding it� This attack on the false objectivity to which empirical research all too often falls prey is only half of the picture, however, for it is paired with an equally radical critique of empiricism’s presumed other, namely the qualitative study of society in the European tradition. For the qualitative methods too, Adorno stresses, have lost sight of the whole. The philosophical concepts these methods rely on had meaning and value only in the context of a philosophy for which the entirety of positive knowledge was accessible, as was still the case with Hegel. When this continuity of philosophy with positive knowledge was broken up, the very same terms that had served well before, now used in isolation, lost their empirical footing. “But as concepts such as that of ‘mind’ [ Geist ] were torn from their context and their connection to the material,” declared Adorno, just recently returned from his 11-year exile, at a conference in Weinheim on empirical methods in 1951, “they were isolated, made absolute, turned into fetishes, to the tools of obscurantism” (“Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung” 480). Examples are Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between “community and society,” which, once it was made to serve as an all-encompassing dichotomy, fell prey to the worst kinds of ideological misuse, or concepts such as “inner connection to the soil” (481) or “the peasant mentality” (482) in the sociology of agriculture� Such concepts lacked both systematic consistency and any concrete reference to a specific “experiential content [ Erfahrungsinhalt ]” (480): they were thus neither theoretically nor empirically founded� Adorno’s affirmation of the use of empirical methods is best understood in the context of this critique of qualitative sociology. In empiricism, Adorno sees 204 David Martyn a corrective to the hypostatization of concepts that have lost their connection to social reality. It can provide an antidote to the “Platonic arrogance,” as Adorno puts it at one point (“Sociology and Empirical Research” 86), that subordinates the social to one’s own concepts� “Sociology is not in the humanities” / “Soziologie ist keine Geisteswissenschaft,” Adorno informs the colleagues who had remained in Germany (“Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung” 481). 9 To be sure, the use of empirical methods that Adorno here envisions diverges sharply from common practice� 10 Objectivity - understood as what is left over after anything subjective has been removed - is not the goal. This means that empirical findings are neither to be used as mere verification of theoretical postulates, nor to disprove them; this would only deepen the gulf between thought and reality, theory and experience� “It all depends on whether the theory is imposed onto the facts dogmatically, without mediation, as it were from on high, or whether a compelling implicative relationship can be constructed” / “Alles kommt darauf an, ob die Theorie dogmatisch, unvermittelt, gewissermaßen von oben her den Fakten oktroyiert, oder ob zwischen ihr und den Erhebungsbefunden eine zwingende wechselfältige Beziehung hergestellt wird” (“Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung” 486). It is precisely when the two sides, the theoretical and the empirical, are not made to agree, but on the contrary are exposed in their incompatibility that the hierarchical relationship between them can be overcome: namely as a telling symptom of a social reality that does not constitute a coherent whole to begin with� 11 In a society “whose unity resides in its not being unified” (“Sociology and Psychology I” 69), “die ihre Einheit daran hat, nicht einheitlich zu sein“ (“Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie” 44), in which human relationships are all ultimately subjected to the dictates of instrumental reason, no coherent identity, neither of the individual nor of their asocial society, can be so much as discerned, let alone made into an object of knowledge. When empirical methods are used to point to this incoherence, it follows that they too, although Adorno never says this explicitly, can occasion an encounter with the “nonidentical” - the very encounter, that is, that readers of Adorno generally see realized only in the domain of the aesthetic� 12 In damaged society, the data and the theory can never be made to agree, no more than the universal can ever, under the conditions of the rationality of exchange, do justice to the particular. Empirical studies can take account of individual experience only to the extent that they expose its very impossibility, thereby bringing to light all of the varied ways in which subject and object, individual and society, the particular and the universal are incompatible in today’s administered world� Anecdote . - Such, at least, is the attitude toward empirical methods that one can glean from Adorno’s methodological reflections. If we now take a look Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 205 at the way in which Adorno actually made use of empirical research himself, namely in the lengthy chapter of the Authoritarian Personality for which he was responsible, two things stand out: first, that the data, namely transcripts of interviews carried out with a variety of subjects by his Berkeley colleagues, quite frequently assume the form of anecdotes; and second, that in the relationship adopted toward the empirical findings, what we find is precisely the kind of “Platonic arrogance” Adorno himself warns against in the methodological metadiscourse� There is really no trace here of the “compelling implicative relationship” between theory and data that Adorno would later call for� 13 Rather, the little stories from their daily lives that the subjects provide in their responses - a dentistry student who tells proudly of how he once cheated a Jewish salesman of $100 (“That was a case where I out-Jewed a Jew” [Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality 636]); a young woman who wordlessly rebuffs the marriage proposal of a boyfriend who, in asking for her hand, also reveals his Jewish descent to her (“She just sat there without saying a word - and that was his answer” [642]) - are summarily diagnosed without further ado, while the participants’ own explanations are attributed part and parcel to their false consciousness� As with the anecdote about the young lady in the radio project (“are you an extrovert or an introvert”? ), the results of Adorno’s little forays into empirical evidence are always basically the same, though always in different and differently interesting variants: the damaged individual, the lack of true experience, and hence the lack of the empirical itself. In the effort to combat the dissemination of anti-Semitic ideas, Adorno writes in The Authoritarian Personality , it is of no use to confront prejudice with reality by providing non-Jews with more opportunity to actually interact with and experience Jews, for the simple reason that one would need first to provide for the very possibility of anything worthy of being called experience at all: one has first “to reconstitute the capacity for having experiences” (617)� 14 It’s not hard to see why readers have found the way Adorno uses and comments on the interview transcripts objectionable ( Jäger 203—05). The rift between society and individual, object and subject, universal and particular is observed and exposed from one side of that divide only, that of the universal, of theory� Instead of doing something to oppose the discrepancy between universal and particular, Adorno’s use of theory in these instances would seem to cement it� Such, at least, is the situation in the Authoritarian Personality . What, then, is the situation in that other book Adorno was writing concurrently, the Minima Moralia ? Given that the anecdotal plays a central role in both projects’ attempts to come to terms with “actual experience,” the question of how the latter book’s use of anecdotal remains functions becomes all the more compelling� In the dedication to Horkheimer, Adorno is at pains to defend and justify the subjective 206 David Martyn nature of the project: the intent is to “present aspects of our shared philosophy from the standpoint of subjective experience” / “von subjektiver Erfahrung her,” renouncing any attempt at “explicit theoretical cohesion” / “expliziten theoretischen Zusammenhang” ( Minima Moralia 18/ 17)� Quite the opposite stance is adopted in the remarks that Adorno had intended to preface The Authoritarian Personality . There, he faults the study for its exclusive focus on the subject, on what the participants in the study have to say, which would include, one assumes, their anecdotes. The roots of the prejudices the study aims to illuminate are to be found not in the subject itself, but rather in the “objective social forces which produce and reproduce bigotry, such as economic and historical determinants” (“Remarks” xlii); leaving the objective analysis out is thus highly problematic� 15 In the Minima Moralia , these reservations toward a focus on the subject are turned on their head� Precisely because the individual has lost its individuality, its constitutive difference to social convention - “society is essentially the substance of the individual” ( Minima Moralia 17/ 16) - its experience can contribute to our knowledge of both: In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category� In face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad conscience� Im Zeitalter seines Zerfalls trägt die Erfahrung des Individuums von sich und dem, was ihm widerfährt, nochmals zu einer Erkenntnis bei, die von ihm bloß verdeckt war, solange es als herrschende Kategorie ungebrochen positiv sich auslegte. Angesichts der totalitären Einigkeit, welche die Ausmerzung der Differenz unmittelbar als Sinn ausschreit, mag temporär etwas sogar von der befreienden gesellschaftlichen Kraft in die Sphäre des Individuellen sich zusammengezogen haben. In ihr verweilt die kritische Theorie nicht nur mit schlechtem Gewissen� ( Minima Moralia 17—18/ 16) The argument made here is not exactly compelling� 16 In The Authoritarian Personality the opinions, convictions and not least the anecdotes of the participants are discounted as sources of knowledge as long as they are not accompanied by insight into the determining “social forces” (“Remarks” xlii), that is, into the objective� In the Minima Moralia , by contrast, subjective experience is said to contribute to knowledge even without any kind of “explicit theoretical cohesion” (18/ 17)� Why is what is possible here not possible there too? In both cases, we are dealing with “damaged” individuals, with the individual in its Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 207 “period of his decay”; but only in the case of Adorno’s collection of aphorisms does this damage provide a source for knowledge, indeed a particularly rich source for knowledge of both the individual and society� One can’t help wondering whether Adorno is simply treating his personal case as an exception - as though he alone were capable of reflecting adequately and objectively on his own “damagedness�” 17 But another conclusion is possible. The two books differ not just in that the one concerns Adorno’s own experiences, while the other reports the experiences of others. There is also, and this is no small matter, a difference in form: where The Authoritarian Personality contains countless anecdotes, the Minima Moralia leaves us only with anecdotal remains� And that Adorno’s thought cannot be separated from the particular constitution of his writing has been convincingly shown more than once (Richter, “Aesthetic Theory”; Thinking with Adorno ). The difference in the way the empirical enters into relationship with theory in the case of the Minima Moralia may also or even primarily have to do with this particular narrative form� Anecdotal Remains: “Golden Gate.” - To further explore this hypothesis, let us examine more closely an aphorism from the third part of the Minima Moralia , one that has to date not been among those to which the many readers of the book have devoted a lot of their attention. This time, the anecdotal element that the aphorism purveys is not taken from the banality of the everyday, as in the examples with which we began, nor does it constitute a vignette-like portrait of a person or character, but rather it takes on the form of one of the micro-narratives alluded to above� The story concerns a shunned lover: Golden Gate. - Someone who has been offended, slighted, has an illumination as vivid as when agonizing pain lights up one’s own body� He becomes aware that in the innermost blindness of love lives that of which it is and must remain oblivious: the demand of the lover who is not blind� He was wronged; from this he deduces a claim to right and must at the same time reject it, for what he desires can only be given in freedom. Golden Gate. - Dem Gekränkten, Zurückgesetzten geht etwas auf, so grell wie heftige Schmerzen den eigenen Leib beleuchten. Er erkennt, daß im Innersten der verblendeten Liebe, die nichts davon weiß und nichts wissen darf, die Forderung des Unverblendeten lebt� Ihm geschah unrecht; daraus leitet er den Anspruch des Rechts ab und muß ihn zugleich verwerfen, denn was er wünscht, kann nur aus Freiheit kommen. ( Minima Moralia 164, translation modified/ 185) The story told here - to the extent there is one at all - is a perfectly unremarkable one of unrequited love. The narrative, stripped of all detail and description, is reduced to the point that it does not extend beyond two verbal nouns in appo- 208 David Martyn sition: “dem Gekränkten, Zurückgesetzten,” literally “the offended, slighted one.” Scarcely has Adorno finished off with this little story, he shifts into diagnostic mode and really lays it on� With the shamelessness that so many readers of the Minima Moralia find offensive and the abyssal structure of which is one of the main strategies of the whole project (Geulen, “Mega Melancholia”), Adorno treats subjective experience as no more than raw material for knowledge production. For the “pain” that is named in the very first sentence, and which one is tempted to attribute to the “protagonist,” the offended-slighted-one, is in fact just a metaphor, the mere vehicle of an analogy - an analogy that applies not to him, nor to his experience, but to his knowledge: what is “as vivid as when agonizing pain lights up one’s own body” is not what has happened to the shunned lover, but rather what he has learned from it, his “illumination.” The nameless protagonist of this torso of a tale is in fact offended not once but twice: once by the object of his blind love, who rejects him, and once by the aphorist Adorno, who says not a word about his personal experience but instead converts it without further ado into the currency of abstract knowledge. The offended one “becomes aware” (“erkennt,” cognizes or recognizes); and what he becomes aware of, what he learns and now knows, is something of universal significance. In the one who loves blindly - who merely imagines his love is requited - lives the demand of him whose love is not blind, who loves happily in the possession of his beloved� The right of the shunned one would thus be the same as that of the one whose love is returned� But this right is in fact no right� For what he demands - and he can deny this no more than he can deny his sense of having been wronged - cannot be compelled but “can only be given in freedom�” It is what by nature can never be the object of a claim. What the offended-one recognizes is thus a real contradiction: that of the inescapable incompatibility of a claim to love with love itself� We tend to take this incompatibility as a fact, as a kind of ontological given - for who hasn’t experienced it? - and therefore give it no further thought� Unless one is a character in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade 18 or a devotee of the “involuntary celebates” or “incels” who arrogate for themselves, out of pure masculinist resentment, a right to sex while leading a lonely existence in the internet� 19 But the abhorrent baselessness of this claim does not change the simple fact that it too, like everything else, is socially mediated and thus capable of showing us something about society if submitted to critique. (We recall the statement from the dedication to the Minima Moralia : “In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge” [17].) Adorno is neither a sadist nor an incel, quite the contrary: he insists here on the contradiction that both, in their egomania, would simply disregard� But the incompatibility of love and the claim to it is for Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 209 him no simple ontological fact, but a symptom or index pointing to an intolerable state of affairs in the erotic dimension of social life as it actually exists - and, more broadly still, in the relationship of the individual to society, of subject to object, of the particular and the universal generally. In a thematically related aphorism from Part One, “Morality and temporal sequence,” Adorno attempts to show why the kind of lovers who seem by their actions to most effectively oppose the principle of exchange - those who out of loyalty deny themselves to a third, however desirable he or she may be - are in fact the kind of lover who turns their beloved into an exchangeable, into a mere commodity. Precisely as the one who is not traded away for a third, the beloved becomes what could be exchanged - a possession: “Whatever is, is experienced in relation to its possible non-being. […] Once wholly a possession, the loved person is no longer really looked at” / “Was ist, wird in Beziehung zu seinem möglichen Nichtsein erfahren. […] Einmal ganz Besitz geworden, wird der geliebte Mensch eigentlich gar nicht mehr angesehen” (79/ 89). The more love attaches itself to the specificity of the other, to “this one unique being” (79/ 88), the more that specificity is seen within the frame of the general, the abstract - the exchangeable. As exaggerated and indeed perverse this categorical rejection of monogamy is, it creates the possibility - and this may be its sole function - to envision, via negation, a utopian state of affairs. This vision, to be sure, is no less exaggeratedly blissful as the caricature of monogamy was grotesque. It is that of a world in which no individual would have reason to fear betrayal simply by virtue of their unique difference, which puts them out of reach of comparison: If people were no longer possessions, they could no longer be exchanged. True affection would be one that speaks specifically to the other, and becomes attached to beloved features and not to the idol of personality, the reflected image of possession. […] The protection of anything quite definite is that it cannot be repeated, which is just why it tolerates what is different. Wären Menschen kein Besitz mehr, so könnten sie auch nicht mehr vertauscht werden. Die wahre Neigung wäre eine, die den anderen spezifisch anspricht, an geliebte Züge sich heftet und nicht ans Idol der Persönlichkeit, die Spiegelung von Besitz. […] Der Schutz des ganz Bestimmten ist, daß es nicht wiederholt werden kann, und eben darum duldet es das andere� ( Minima Moralia 79/ 88) The theme of erotic love retains its specificity here, but it is also the index of a characteristic of damaged life generally, namely a state of affairs that vitiates any possibility of true individuality through the omnipresence of exchange rationality. In the grotesque portrait of betrayal through loyalty one can discern the ugly and absurd features of a rationality that can only comprehend what 210 David Martyn can be measured against and thus exchanged for what it isn’t� We should not be misled by the technique of exaggeration here. 20 As inconceivable as a love may be that, secure in its irreplaceability, would not just tolerate, but see nothing that would so much as call for toleration in the beloved’s love for another, just so inconceivable is a state of affairs “in which people could be different without fear” / “in dem man ohne Angst verschieden sein kann” (103/ 114) - that is, in a truly and not just seemingly emancipated world� What Adorno confronts us with in “Morality and temporal sequence” is an equation with two unknown variables. The exaggeration, and this is perhaps its sole function, serves to mark the terms of this analogy, which reaches into utopia, as lying beyond all presently possible knowledge - in order to shield it from the pretense of understanding� 21 The description of the “slighted” one’s absurd claim to an equitable return on his love functions similarly. By means of its very non-sensicalness, it gestures toward an incomprehensible, utterly different state of affairs: In the senselessness of his deprivation he is made to feel the untruth of all merely individual fulfilment. But he thereby awakens to the paradoxical consciousness of generality: of the inalienable and unindictable human right to be loved by the beloved� With his plea, founded on no titles or claims, he appeals to an unknown court, which accords to him as grace what is his own and yet not his own� The secret of justice in love is the annulment of all rights, to which love points with a mute gesture. “So forever / cheated and foolish must love be�” In der Sinnlosigkeit des Entzuges bekommt er das Unwahre aller bloß individuellen Erfüllung zu spüren� Damit aber erwacht er zum paradoxen Bewußtsein des Allgemeinen: des unveräußerlichen und unklagbaren Menschenrechtes, von der Geliebten geliebt zu werden� Mit seiner auf keinen Titel und Anspruch gegründeten Bitte um Gewährung appelliert er an eine unbekannte Instanz, die aus Gnade ihm zuspricht, was ihm gehört und doch nicht gehört� Das Geheimnis der Gerechtigkeit in der Liebe ist die Aufhebung des Rechts, auf die Liebe mit sprachloser Gebärde deutet. “So muß übervorteilt / Albern doch überall sein die Liebe�” ( Minima Moralia 164—65, translation modified/ 185) The quotation from Hölderlin’s late ode “Tears” (“Thränen”), long discounted as a product of his incipient madness (Bennholdt-Thomsen 336), makes evident how outlandish this utopian vision must appear to those who have not yet lost their senses - the senseless sense, that is, of a reason that can only contrast and compare, reducing the particularity of everything to some combination of properties that thing has in common with other things, thereby subjecting it to the dictates of the commodity form� The absurdity of any universal that a modernity in the thrall of the logic of exchange can so much as think is reflected in that of a supposed Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 211 “human right” not just to love, but to be loved in return. Such a right would be both “inalienable” and “unindictable” / “unveräußerlich[]” and “unklagbar[],” we are told here� The latter term is as rare in German as it is in English and comprises within the span of its antithetical meanings the entire contradiction at issue: “unklagbar” means both “such that it cannot be the object of a legal claim” and “ irreprehensus, crimine carens, innocens, inaccusabilis ,” that is, innocent and above all reproach� 22 True would be only a love that is neither universal - granted to all without distinction - nor particular - denied to all except the one - but that would be exempt from the very logic, from the entire dichotomy of the universal and the particular. This, because it would join human beings that were no longer capable of being exchanged or even compared and who would thus know themselves to be loved in their inimitable difference. The little story about an unhappy love serves not just to illustrate the reification which in the era of late capitalism has colonized the most intimate corners of private existence� It shows too how this colonization has damaged thought itself� Even in its seemingly neutral logical form, the concept of the universal, and with it of the particular, is not given but socially mediated and thus subject to the movement of history� Neither universal nor particular: Adorno without Adorno. - Behind the sketchily told story in “Golden Gate,” according to Adorno’s biographers, lies an autobiographical experience� The “slighted” one is Adorno himself� “A number of aphorisms were evidently highly personal attempts by Adorno to come to terms with his own unhappy love relationships,” Stefan Müller-Doohm writes, including this one (307). A number of these affairs, which Adorno did not conceal from his friends or his wife, took place during Adorno’s time in California. Among them was a lasting romance with Charlotte Alexander, the wife of a friend with whom he stayed whenever his work with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group took him to San Francisco� The Alexanders were in the process of obtaining a divorce. The title “Golden Gate” may allude to this affair, which ended unhappily for Adorno when a rival appeared on the scene (Müller-Doohm 303)� But it is not just the biographers who have made this connection� Alexander García Düttmann, among the most astute of Adorno’s readers, finds the key to the aphorism’s cryptic title in a letter Adorno wrote to his former student Elisabeth Lenk alluding to a love affair with a woman in San Francisco. In the letter in question, Adorno, complimenting Lenk on her afterword to a translation of Louis Aragon’s surrealist novel Paysan de Paris , writes of how profoundly Lenk’s text had affected him, triggering memories of his own erotic experiences: The text leads directly into the thick of questions that for years occupied Benjamin and me in the most intense discussions; you can imagine how deeply your text moved 212 David Martyn me. Some of what I found there - the way cities, in connection with erotic experience, suddenly [ schockartig ] start to become allegorical - reminded me in the same shocklike way of my own experiences; the scene, to be sure, was San Francisco and not Paris� Traces of them can be found in the third part of the Minima Moralia � (Adorno and Lenk 163) Düttmann sees here the “answer to the riddle” posed by the title “Golden Gate” ( So ist es 58). To be sure, Düttmann is not interested in the biographical background for its own sake, but in the deliberately “obstinate” [ widerspenstig ] relationship of title to text� The title “turns on a private allusion that without knowing the circumstances will scarcely be recognized for what it is” (58)� The biographical experience remains hidden, with the effect that it can “remain the experience of an individual” while opening itself to a kind of intuitive recognition that leaves it to the reader to make their own use of it� Adorno “universalizes [ verallgemeinert ] ‘personal experience’ without universalizing it” (58). This is a fascinating result. In Düttmann’s reading, the aphorism provides nothing less than a way out of the logic of the universal and the particular, hence out of logic itself. Still, it is not easy to see why a riddle, which is the form Düttmann sees at work in this use of a “private allusion,” should have this effect. As long as it remains unsolved, a riddle is merely cryptic; once the answer is provided, the riddle loses its indeterminacy. The experience at issue becomes Adorno’s own, a particular that can attain to the status of knowledge only by means of universalization� If the aphorism does indeed show us a way out of the logic of the universal and the particular, this accomplishment is more likely due not to its riddle-like character but to another feature altogether� As we have seen, “Golden Gate” is subtended by an unmistakably narrative frame - reduced, to be sure, to the slightest of diegetic intimations, but recognizable as a story nonetheless� It is to such narrative reductionism - the “chaste compactness” / “keusche Gedrungenheit” with which the consummate storyteller expertly limits their report to the minimum - that Benjamin, in “The Storyteller,” attributes the signature accomplishment of true storytelling (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 91; “Erzähler” 446). For a story is capable of sharing experience in such a way that it becomes a common good; and what allows it to accomplish this feat is precisely the restraint of the teller: [T]he more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 91) Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 213 [ J]e natürlicher dem Erzählenden der Verzicht auf psychologische Schattierung vonstatten geht, desto größer wird ihre Anwartschaft auf einen Platz im Gedächtnis des Hörenden, desto vollkommener bilden sie sich seiner eigenen Erfahrung an, desto lieber wird er sie schließlich eines näheren oder ferneren Tages weitererzählen. (Benjamin, “Erzähler” 446) By means of a “process of assimilation, which takes place in depth” (91), the experience that is stored up and preserved in stories can become the common property of teller and hearer. Or rather: it loses its status as property, belongs forthwith by rights as much to the hearer as to the teller. Seen this way, the story is the antithesis of the commodity form that, for Adorno, lies at the foundation of reified society: it is not exchanged but shared; not sold but reassigned. The experience that is contained in and passed on through what Benjamin calls stories is thus not a particular , at least not in the sense that what is particular can only be assimilated by others through its generalization or universalization� Rather, it exists ab ovo only by dint of its changing hands� Benjamin’s “Storyteller” never explicitly mentions the form of the anecdote� The essay was written on commission for a periodical issue devoted to Russian literature (Helmstetter 295—96). But the effect it attributes to storytelling, to the narrative restraint that forgoes psychological detailing, journalistic “information,” anything that the hearer will not be able to remember and to “integrate[] into his own experience” (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 88—89), is illustrated by the example of an anecdote taken from Herodotus and its reprisal in Montaigne: “Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is the driest” (90). Pointing to the etymology of anecdotos , the “not-given-out,” Thomas Schestag has described the anecdote as the form that simultaneously relinquishes and retains, hence that gives and denies itself at one and the same time� The anecdote “does not hold back that something is being held back�” Anecdotes “reveal over and again that things and people literally go missing in the anecdotal: a disappearance about which anecdotes - they reveal precisely this - have no information to give” (Schestag)� Hence, if “Golden Gate” does in fact succeed in finding a way out of the logic of the universal and the particular, this effect may be best attributed to the way in which the aphorism tells a story: namely, by reducing it to the merest of anecdotal remains� 23 Indeed, “Golden Gate” confronts us with an extreme form of the narrative economy Benjamin describes. The fruit of this technique, here and throughout the Minima Moralia , is a text, saturated in personal, individual experience, the concreteness of which carries the unmistakable mark of things that have actually happened to the author at a specific time and place, but also so utterly denuded of characterizing detail that it allows for no personalization, 214 David Martyn no attribution to a determinate person or even literary figure. The text is as individual as it is anonymous� Of the “slighted” one in “Golden Gate” one could say at most that it is Adorno without Adorno: individual and universal at one and the same time� 24 For the Adorno we know from biographical sources most certainly did not behave like someone who has gained a new insight into the contradiction inherent in a lover insisting on his rights. In his affair with Charlotte Alexander, at any rate, Adorno was not about to renounce his claims - to the point that he enlisted a friend to obtain information about his new rival and, if possible, to introduce him to other women (Müller-Doohm 303). But all of this is entirely beside the point� The “slighted” one of “Golden Gate” is without doubt an autobiographical figure. That fits the genre of the anecdote, which acquired its literary structure in the context of autobiography (Moser)� But the empirical moment that derives from the “individual experience” (Adorno, Minima Moralia 17) at the root of this and other aphorisms in the collection is detached from and thus purged of the “false” that characterizes every life in reified society. What Adorno leaves us with here is the bear bone of a story in which any and all could play the principal role equally well (or rather, poorly). Ultimately, what is narrated here is no more than a feeling: that of the abandoned one who senses that his claim to requital is justified, and also not. The contradiction inherent in this feeling, not the pain actually experienced - for of this we know that it could not have been otherwise than thoroughly reified, without participation in the “true” - is an index of a false universal while pointing, “with a mute gesture,” to a human existence that is neither universal nor particular, neither subjective nor objective, and thus not even thinkable in the current state of affairs. Individual experience figures into this aphorism in such a way as to alter the very relationship between the universal and the particular. In this, the aphorism is paradigmatic for the function of the anecdote in the collection as a whole� The universal is neither exemplified nor documented, let alone symbolized or confirmed; rather, the concept of the universal in its existing form is shattered and thus set into motion. As difficult as it may be to imagine a love that places no claim to exclusivity, to possession, just so difficult to imagine is a society in which individual fulfillment would never curtail the fulfillment of others. Not before such a society is attained will individual experience, and the anecdote along with it, participate in the true. In the meantime - this is the stopgap measure Adorno attempts in the Minima Moralia - one makes due with the remains of what could have been true experience, true empiricism. The anecdote suffers the same fate as experience itself: it withers� Only on this condition can it contribute to knowledge of the true. What the anecdote, under the conditions of damaged society, cannot accomplish it leaves up to what is left of it: its remains. Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 215 Notes 1 An earlier version of this article appeared in German (Martyn, “Anekdotische Reste”)� 2 “Aphorism” is the word Adorno himself uses to refer to the numbered sections of which the book consists (18)� Other generic terms may certainly be used with equal justification, such as “fragment” (Abensour 349—50) or “thought-image” (Richter, Thought-Images 8—13). 3 For example, Adorno sees the exuberant vitality of American society as a particularly telling symptom of damaged life: “Adorno articulates a uniquely modern, American experience of alienation in which damaged life masquerades as exuberant health” (Mariotti, “Damaged Life” 170). 4 German-language sources are quoted in translation, followed by the original wherever doing so did not seem purely redundant� Citations give the page number of the English translation followed by that of the German original� Translations not otherwise credited are my own� 5 Two brief and lucid presentations of this aspect of Adorno’s aesthetic theory can be found in Jameson 15—24 and Hörisch 55—66. 6 Up until at least his death in 1969, Adorno was known in America almost entirely as the co-author of this empirical study, while the theoretical texts he was known for in Europe remained largely unread ( Jay, Permanent Exiles 121)� On The Authoritarian Personality , see Jay, Dialectical Imagination 219—52, as a general presentation still unsurpassed, and Gordon. On the success of the study, see Walter-Busch 127—33; on the marginalization of Adorno’s theoretical work in his earlier American reception, see Rayman. 7 Adorno’s American experiences with empirical methods have been taken up by numerous scholars� The best concise general discussion remains Jay’s Dialectical Imagination , 219—52. Jenemann (1—46) gives a judicious and discerning assessment; Rayman, too, stresses “the complexity of [Adorno’s] theoretical-practical stance, which acknowledges the importance of empirical research without accepting its autonomy, its claimed disinterestedness, or its uncritical constructions” (8)� On the impact of Adorno’s contribution to the authoritarianism study, see Jenemann 1—46. Jay sees Adorno’s contribution as decisive ( Permanent Exiles 125—26), as does Claussen; more generally, Claussen credits Adorno’s use of empirical methods with providing a means of emancipating traditional philosophy from dogma (7)� Wheatland draws on hitherto unmined sources to illuminate the historical context of the authoritarianism study (227—63); Jäger stresses the presumptuousness of Adorno’s attitude toward the study’s participants (195—205). 216 David Martyn 8 Typically, when readers finally get around to addressing this question, the answer they arrive at remains rather vague� Discussing Adorno’s 1951 address in Weinheim on the use of empirical methods, Jay states simply that “Adorno […] cautiously defended the usefulness of public opinion research” ( Permanent Exiles 124)� 9 Some have seen a certain amount of disingenuousness in the way Adorno presents himself on his return to Germany as the advocate of “American” methods. Hence, Offe sees two, incompatible pictures of America in Adorno (92)� Mariotti argues extensively against this view in Adorno and Democracy (15); Berman and Plass are also unconvinced� 10 As can be seen in the criticism of the methodology of the authoritarianism study from an empiricist perspective (McKinney). 11 This, at least, is one takeaway that can be gleaned from a careful reading of the relevant texts� See in particular “Sociology and Psychology”; “Sociology and Empirical Research”; “Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung der empirischen Sozialforschung in Deutschland”; and “Opinion Research and Publicness�” See also the posthumously published “Remarks” that Adorno had intended as a foreword to The Authoritarian Personality , which stress the shortcomings of the study’s one-sided use of empirical methods (nearly disqualifying the entire project even before it had seen the light of day)� For a brief and illuminating acknowledgment of the importance of Adorno’s critique of naive empiricism for the social sciences in the US, see Perrin and Jarko. 12 Two notable exceptions are Bernstein’s Disenchantment and Ethics , which attempts to show how everyday experience - including precisely the kind of insignificant occurrences that will be a focus of this article - can assume the same metaphysical importance for Adorno as the great artistic works of modernism (437—51), and Mariotti’s Adorno and Democracy , which also focuses on the experience of the nonidentical in the context of the everyday (60—62). 13 To be fair, the mutually implicative relationship Adorno had in mind in affirming the use of empirical methods would not necessarily preclude the kind of heavy-handed interpretation on display in The Authoritarian Personality . Adorno’s point was not that empirical findings shouldn’t be interpreted and explained in terms of the theory, but that the explanatory frame and the empirical observation should develop in tandem. Still, it’s hard to shake the impression, when reading the chapter Adorno contributed to The Authoritarian Personality , that the results were all determined from the outset and that the interviews are being made to fit. Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 217 14 On Adorno and Horkheimer’s initial reluctance to focus on anti-Semitism as a subject of research and their gradual embrace of the topic and its importance for critical theory, see Jay, Permanent Exiles 90—100. 15 The one-sided focus on “reactions” at the expense of any analysis of the “stimuli” - for example, of the ways in which the media themselves exert an influence on the opinions being measured - is precisely what Adorno would later criticize so emphatically in recalling his experiences with American social scientific methods: “I oppose stating and measuring effects without relating them to these ‘stimuli,’ i.e. , the objective content to which the consumers in the culture industry […] react” (“Scientific Experiences” 343). On this aspect of Adorno’s critique of public opinion research, see Klingen. 16 On this passage and on reasons one might want to doubt its claim, see Norberg (402)� 17 That Adorno sees his own experience of exile as paradigmatic for damaged life in late capitalism in general is a common theme in Adorno criticism� See, for example, Jay, Permanent Exiles 137; Rosenthal 60; Geulen, “Without Example” 59; Huyssen 280—81. On Adorno’s complex stance vis-à-vis the authenticity of the self, see Jay, “On the Stigma of Inauthenticity.” 18 “S’il devient donc incontestable que nous ayons reçu de la nature le droit d’exprimer nos vœux indifféremment à toutes les femmes, il le devient de même que nous avons celui de l’obliger de se soumettre à nos vœux, non pas exclusivement, je me contrarierais, mais momentanément.” [“If, then, it is incontestably true that we received from nature the right to express our wishes to all women without discrimination, it is equally true that we have the right to oblige her to submit to our wishes, not exclusively - that would be a contradiction - but for the instant.”] (Sade 117). The fictional character in this famous text of Sade, which appeared in 1795, bases his alleged human right on the principles of the Revolution: precisely because a human being cannot be the property of another, no woman has the right to give herself to only one man. Of course, the argument only works on the axiom that the women are by nature the property of the men� It would be a worthwhile exercise to explore the relationship between the two aphorisms from the Minima Moralia at issue here with this text of Sade, on whom Horkheimer and Adorno were both working; see the second excursus on Kant and Sade in their Dialectic of Enlightenment 63—93. The (non-)concept of a “human right” in the domain of eros may very well have been suggested to Adorno by the reading of Sade� 19 See “Incel” on Wikipedia (accessed 15 July 2020)� 20 The function of exaggeration as a deliberately employed rhetorical technique in Adorno has been very illuminatingly explicated by Düttmann ( So 218 David Martyn ist es 50—55; Philosophie der Übertreibung 242—47). See also, with reference to Düttmann, Huyssen 279—80. Closely related to the technique of exaggeration is Adorno’s use of what Burkhardt Lindner refers to as “drasticness” (286)� 21 Gerhard Richter has commented helpfully on the function of utopia in Adorno as what points toward a way out of the entanglement of culture and thought in the barbarism of late capitalist society ( Thought-Images 189—90). 22 See the article “unklagbar” in Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Vol� 24: 1090)� “Unindictable,” while perhaps the best possible translation, captures only one side of this semantic polarity� 23 On the critical potential of Adorno’s focus on the “small” in the Minima Moralia , see Abensour 349—52. 24 Eva Geulen has drawn attention to the tension inherent in Adorno’s attributing an exemplary status to his own biography while propounding a theory that would disavow any recourse to examples: “Adorno presents his own individual fate as exile as exemplary, a lone example looking for others of its kind and unable to find them, insofar as Adorno’s own, contingent and unique life figures there as the damaged life par excellence ” (“Without Example” 59)� But if one disregards everything one has learned about Adorno’s life in America from other sources and sticks solely to what can be gleaned from the Minima Moralia , one is left with an Adorno so thoroughly shorn of the kind of particularities and phenomenological detail that is involved in painting a character portrait that it becomes hard to say who it is, exactly, whose life is said to be exemplary. Of course, the paradoxes of an example “without example” that Geulen sees at work in Adorno’s text and that are her main focus would seem to have very much the same effect. Works Cited Abensour, Miguel. “Postface: Le choix du petit” [1982]. Minima Moralia. Réflexions sur la vie mutilée . By Theodor W. Adorno. Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2003. 335—54. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. ---� Ästhetische Theorie [1970]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019. ---� Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978. ---� Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben [1951]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. ---� “On Subject and Object�” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords � Trans� Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 245—58. Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 219 ---� “Opinion Research and Publicness�” Trans� Andrew J� Perrin and Lars Jarko� Sociological Theory 23.1 (2005): 116—23. ---� “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality �” The Autoritarian Personality � By T� W� Adorno et al. London: Verso, 2019. xli—lxxvii. ---. “Scientific Experiences of a European in America.” The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 � Ed� Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969. 338—70. ---� “Sociology and Empirical Research�” The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology � By Theodor W. Adorno et al. Trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976. 68—86. ---� “Sociology and Psychology I�” New Left Review I, 46 (1967): 67—80. ---� “Sociology and Psychology II�” New Left Review I, 47 (1968): 79—97. ---� “Soziologie und empirische Forschung�” Soziologische Schriften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018. 196—216. ---. “Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie.” Soziologische Schriften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018. 42—85. ---. “Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung der empirischen Sozialforschung in Deutschland.” Soziologische Schriften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018. 478—93. Adorno, Theodor W., and Elisabeth Lenk. Briefwechsel 1962-1969 � Ed� Elisabeth Lenk� Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2001. Adorno, T. W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The Autoritarian Personality [1950] . Introd. Peter E. Gordon. London: Verso, 2019. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Anke. “Nachtgesänge.” Hölderlin-Handbuch: Sonderausgabe � Ed� Johann Kreuzer. N.p.: Springer, 2011. 336—46. Benjamin, Walter. “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows” [1936]. Gesammelte Schriften . Vol. II.2. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019. 438—65. ---. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov.” Illuminations. Trans� Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 83—110. Berman, Russel, and Ulrich Plass. “Introduction.” Adorno and America � Ed� Russel Berman and Ulrich Plass� Special issue of Telos 149 (2009): 3—5. Bernstein, J. M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethic s. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Claussen, Detlev. “Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno’s American Experience.” New German Critique 97 (2006): 5—14. Düttmann, Alexander García. Philosophie der Übertreibung � Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. ---� So ist es. Ein philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos ‘Minima Moralia’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Geulen, Eva. “Mega Melancholia. Adorno’s Minima Moralia �” Critical Theory. Current State and Future Prospects � Ed� Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Jaimey Fisher� Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001. 49—68. 220 David Martyn ---� “Without Example: Adorno�” Trans� Erica Weitzman� Exemplarity and Singularity. Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law . Ed. Michèle Lowrie and Susanne Lüdemann. London: Routledge, 2015. 58—67. Gordon, Peter E. “Introduction.” The Autoritarian Personality � By T� W� Adorno et al� London: Verso, 2019. xxiii—xl. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. 16 vols� in 32 partial vols� Leipzig 1854-1961� Helmstetter, Rudolf. “Aus dem Bereich der lebendigen Rede entrückt: Walter Benjamins Erzählung vom Erzähler und die Mediengeschichte des Erzählens.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 82 (2008): 291—321. Hörisch, Jochen. Es gibt (k)ein richtiges Leben im falschen � Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Huyssen, Andreas. Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film � Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. Jäger, Lorenz. Adorno: Eine politische Biographie . Munich: Pantheon, 2003. Jameson, Frederic. Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic [1990]. London: Verso, 2007. Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 . Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. ---� Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. ---. “On the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness.” New German Critique 97 (2006): 15—30. Jenemann, David. Adorno in America . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Klingen, Henning. Gefährdete Öffentlichkeit. Zur Verhältnisbestimmung von politischer Theologie und medialer Öffentlichkeit . Berlin: LIT, 2008. Lindner, Burkhardt. “‘Il faut être absolument moderne.’ Adornos Ästhetik: Ihr Konstruktionsprinzip und ihre Historizität.” Materialien zur Ästhetischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos: Konstruktion der Moderne � Ed� Burkhardt Lindner and Martin Lüdke� Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. 261—309. Mariotti, Shannon L. Adorno and Democracy. The American Years � Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2016. ---. “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy�” Adorno and America � Ed� Russel Berman and Ulrich Plass� Special issue of Telos 149 (2009): 169—90. Martyn, David. “Anekdotische Reste: Amerika oder die Empirie der Minima Moralia � Anekdotisches Erzählen. Zur Geschichte und Poetik einer kleinen Form. Ed� Christian Moser and Reinhard M. Möller. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. 85—106. McKinney, David W. The Authoritarian Personality Studies: An Inquiry into the Failure of Social Science Research to Produce Demonstrable Knowledge [1973]. De Gruyter online, 2019. Web. 15 July 2020. Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 221 Moser, Christian. “Kontingenz und Anschaulichkeit: Zur Funktion anekdotischen Erzählens in lebensgeschichtlichen Texten (Plutarch und Rousseau).” Show, don’t tell: Konzepte und Strategien anschaulichen Erzählens . Ed. Tilmann Köppe and Rüdiger Singer. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2018. 57—82. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005. Norberg, Jakob. “ Minima Moralia and the Critique of Liberalism.” PMLA 126 (2011): 398—411. Offe, Claus. Reflections on America: Toqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States. Trans. Patric Camiller. Malden: Polity, 2005. Perrin, Andrew J., and Lars Jarko. “Translator’s Introduction.” “Opinion Research and Publicness�” By Theodor W� Adorno� Sociological Theory 23.1 (2005): 116—20. Rayman, Joshua: “Adorno’s American Reception.” Adorno and America � Ed� Russel Berman and Ulrich Plass� Special issue of Telos 149 (2009): 6—29. Richter, Gerhard. “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno.” New German Critique 97 (2006): 119—35. ---� Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze . New York: Fordham UP, 2019. ---� Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life � Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. Rosenthal, Michael A. “Art and the Politics of the Desert: German Exiles in California and the Biblical ‘Bilderverbot’.” New German Critique 118 (2013): 43—64. Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de. La philosophie dans le boudoir. Vol� 2� London: n.p., 1795. Schäfer, Rudolf. Die Anekdote: Theorie, Analyse, Didaktik . Munich: Oldenbourg, 1982. Schestag, Thomas. “Vergraben.” Das Anekdotische: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Geschichte und Poetik einer kleinen Form� Annual conference of the Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main � 26 Sept� 2019� Conference paper manuscript� Walter-Busch, Emil. Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule: Kritische Theorie und Politik � Munich: Fink, 2010. Wheatland, Thomas. The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009�