The Trinketization blog quotes Adorno's Minima Moralia on the capacity for happiness. As Trinketization says Adorno says, "It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces...."
Elliptical as I'm being here (I hope), I spoke in Klartext there. My only profit on it is, I am cursed. Or pitied.
Trinketization's quotation led me back to Adorno, so I'll quote a different part of that same aphorism, "Invitation to the dance."
Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for happiness did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further encroachment of institutionally planned behaviour-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience. [...] Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression...
And, further,
... a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and --inseparable from it--personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold of the life inside them, as if it did not have them firmly enough in its power from the outside.
Not that we're pessimists, Theodor and I. Adorno writes very movingly about happiness somewhere in Negative Dialectics. Wherever it is that he quotes that same parable about the kingdom of the messiah, which parable turns up in Bloch, in Benjamin, and in Agamben's The Coming Community.
Since this blog has gone all-quotations and no commentary, let me close by saying, you know who else has thought about happiness? Roger at Limited, Inc, and also Claire Colebrook. Colebrook wrote this great essay on happiness-through-the-ages (ages of philosophy), which was published in a slightly obscure journal of contemporary fiction called symploke. I look forward to the book version. I quote it in advance.
2 comments:
ahh, thanks for the pointer to CC's happy thoughts, and of course the gratifying citation (illusory grits to the mill no doubt, but thanks all the same). I agree with you that Adorno was no pessimist, and ,though its not evidence, if the Jager volume is to be believed, he was quite a jolly raconteur and teller of jokes. Time to restart and Adorno-funnies cycle - which of course would be another admonition for him not to be grumpy.
Trinketization
You're welcome. I really do like the CC essay.
I never heard about Adorno the raconteur. But it makes sense; Thomas Bernhard (truly a pessimist) was supposed to have been jolly, too. Even in that Youtube clip where he's talking about the "Todesangst" that sits on his shoulder, he's laughing.
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