19  The Siren Adorno

America, 1944: a place of easy hallucinations, especially for German-speaking refugee intellectuals, who were reduced to the role of “petitioners in mutual competition.” At the same time, they were exposed to their first, brutal contact with pure industrial society, often shuddering and retreating in the face of the “mechanization of the spirit.” There were several suicides in those years, and there was desolate solitude in small apartments in New York and Los Angeles. Many did not give up but became pathetic ghosts of the old Europe, relics of a culture that no one now had any use for. From this humiliating condition, Theodor W. Adorno was able to draw valuable material for his greatest book: Minima Moralia. And his moment of maximum creative strength coincided with his situation of maximum helplessness: An unknown intellectual, desperately melancholy but at the same time highly curious about everything, with bulging eyes and the little hands of a delicate child forced to grow up too soon, he assumed the guise of an empirical sociologist in an effort to be of use and offer some concrete research to the American Jewish Committee.

But the true concreteness lay precisely in his troubled and shifting gaze as it rested on the looming objects in the New World, on scraps of sentences from newspapers, on the professional smiles of his colleagues, on the fortified cottages of horrible, happy families. Adorno revived an aphoristic form that had been Nietzsche’s, then Max Horkheimer’s, Ernst Bloch’s, and Walter Benjamin’s, and now put it to a different use, allowing him to plunge decisively into the private life of the society around him: a life of trivia that emerged already televised and that no philosopher had hitherto thought worthy of consideration.

Adorno allowed his gaze to wander at length over these trivial things, until he saw shining through them the whole past of our culture, a landscape of catastrophes now contracted in hellish harmony and fragmented as in a psychoanalytical case history. Observing glossy advertising images or listening to the words of a popular song that carried the distorted echo of a Brahms lied, Adorno knew it was a question not of protecting “culture” from these horrors but, on the contrary, of recognizing in them the mocking origin of culture itself, finally unveiled in reverse at its end: “In their counterfeit light shines the publicity character of culture.”

For those able to grasp, through the meshes of a prodigiously dense and tense prose, the mechanism of what Adorno called “criticism of culture,” Minima Moralia is a contagious book. I do not think anyone can say he has read it properly unless he has experienced it for some time as an obsession, feeling obliged to look, as though for the first time and often with paralyzing fright, at many everyday situations he had hitherto taken for granted. So eventually it becomes healthier to dismiss this obsession and its widespread intrusiveness, and perhaps even return to a more shortsighted and distracted gaze. But it is an obsession for which one remains ever grateful, and when one reopens this book, certain sentences reemerge like talismans that once helped to cross the enchanted forest. For anyone who has had the good fortune to meet them, they remain silent and charitable witnesses whose power is still intact. I should like here to record only one of these sentences, perhaps the most precise definition of art I know: “Art is magic liberated from the lie of being truth.”

I said that Minima Moralia is a contagious book, a siren book. Of course, to hear that song one must have receptive ears. Otherwise one may end up judging it as did the eminent historian Delio Cantimori: When the publisher Giulio Einaudi requested his editorial opinion of the book, Cantimori pronounced, “It is the belated product of that literature of socio-psycho-philosophical maxims and considerations that were much in vogue during the Weimar period.” Case dismissed: two lines of historical framework, as always required, and an implied contempt for a hybrid literary genre with ancestors as untrustworthy as Georg Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

Speaking of Nietzsche, Cantimori was to have occasion a few years later to spell out his attitude as a responsible educator in a memorable letter published in Conversando di storia. It is a text that ought to be quoted in full, an unsurpassed catechism still inscribed in letters of bronze behind many wrinkled brows. I will confine myself here to one of its utterances: “The good educator, in this case the publisher, should not publish Nietzsche, because Nietzsche leads readers astray.” But—said Cantimori, now arguing against Cesare Vasoli, who had deemed it urgent to rescind forever Nietzsche’s Italian visa—this does not mean that Nietzsche should not be allowed to circulate at all, at least among “people now adult, or in the process of becoming so, or at least intellectually and morally ‘mature.’” To avoid a still-dangerous familiarity, however, the cautious Cantimori advised against keeping Nietzsche’s books handy in one’s own library: “Naturally, I won’t keep Nietzsche on the same shelf as the Einaudi edition of Gramsci or the Einaudi and Feltrinelli editions of Salvemini, and not even with the Laterza edition of Nitti, or with Marx or Plato; I’ll put him with the poets and tragic dramatists and novelists; I’ll put him on the shelf for monstrosities or the one for astrologers, or should I keep him with the philosophers and theologians?”

A truly serious dilemma, and we have no idea how Cantimori resolved it. Many who are much less subtle, complex, and informed than this acclaimed educator and who turn to him as to a secular Madonna of Loreto have instead drawn one simple and rude conclusion from his delicate embarrassment: Whatever he is, astrologer or poet, let’s throw the Plague Bearer out! Well, in both his pedagogic thoughts on Nietzsche and in that now distant editorial opinion on Minima Moralia, I think Cantimori represented a loftier and more troubled version of something quite sordid that we continue to encounter every day: a certain tendency (obviously masked as educational zeal) to police culture on the part of its more enlightened Italian representatives.

Still, the accusations of censorship leveled at the Einaudi edition of Minima Moralia seem to me a bit misguided. It was published in abridged form, leaving out a substantial portion of the original, and the accusations were provoked by the publication by Erba Voglio of the little volume entitled Minima (im)moralia, which offers the very pages so far never translated. (And they are excellent pages, but no better or more radical than those we already had; editor Gianni Carchia’s idea that Einaudi’s criterion for its edition may have been a systematic pruning of Adorno’s “excesses” itself appears rather excessive.)

To publish Minima Moralia in 1954 (that is, only three years after the German edition) and to publish it this way, in translation and with an introduction of such quality, both owing to the enthusiasm and intelligence of Renato Solmi, was in any case a farsighted act, one almost happily foolhardy, given the bleakness of Italian intellectual life in those years. Indeed, this great book at first passed unnoticed, and only after several years did the force of history require that it be recognized for what it is—and to think that it took French, British, and American publishers, so often generally praised, more than twenty years to offer anything comparable.¹ So this episode consoles me once again in thinking that the most daring and inventive part of culture in Italy is represented by the publishing industry, while the most refractory part, hostile to the “labor of the concept” [die Arbeit des Begriffs], may actually be the bloc of big and little academics.