The Idiom of Crisis
On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno
new version June 2006
Neil Larsen, University of California, Davis
I.
“The whole is the untrue.”1 This phrase, one of the signatures of Adorno’s most unmistakable work, Minima Moralia, points to an irony that perhaps not even its author could have discerned. Notwithstanding the truth of its bitter rebuke to the Hegelian dialectic as apology for capitalist modernity, as a philosophical dictum in its own right it would itself have to be judged false, fatal to any aspiration to dialectical thought. To that much, of course, Adorno testifies, both in practice–for neither Minima Moralia nor any other of his works reflect any doubt that critical theory, as part of its own conceptual movement, must strive for the totalization of its object– but also in theory: one need look no further than to Minima Moralia itself than to have this confirmed: “Dialectical thought opposes reification in the…sense that it refuses to affirm individual things in their isolation and separateness: it designates isolation as precisely a product of the universal.”2 A refusal to isolate means a commitment to totalize, albeit a non-Hegelian one. The alternative would be to succumb to the reified consciousness of the object in its sheer immediacy. The “whole” may be the “untrue,” but that does not make the part the truth. Both become false, at least from the immediate standpoint of “wrong life” reflected, consciously and without apology, by Minima Moralia.