Homo unius libri timeo

Reflections on my apparently substandard reading speed have led me, in turn, to consider the time that we devote to books and the time that those books must have demanded of their authors. How much have we gained from a book which we can encapsulate in a pithy sentence and dismiss immediately afterward? Having written a monograph approaching a book in length, I am more aware of the enormous disparity of effort separating the writing of a text from the cursory readings which we deign to grant to most works - after all, there are so many books to read!

At the same time, to take one example where many could stand in its place, it seems to me that anyone who has carefully read, say, Minima Moralia should be amply equipped to dismiss the many facile misreadings of Adorno as an elitist bourgeois intellectual pontificating ridiculously about the superiority of "high culture" from his rarefied perch in the Grand Hotel Abyss. Or better yet, those easy dismissals of Critical Theory's preposterous faith in progress - that absurd and impossible notion that seems to linger in the very being of every postmodernist thought put to paper (not to mention put through print runs) - that progress whose possibility, incidentally, Adorno seemed very much to doubt even while anchoring his project in its promise.

Even reductio ad absurdum ultimately affirms the logical system within whose limits the contradiction can exist. Against my sense of tact, I find myself returning again and again to the same question: what is the point of theory that ruthlessly undermines its own possibility without at least showing the good taste of ceasing to proliferate?

And the other thought - that anyone who can master - truly master - a single writer's magnum opus should, in doing so, gain so much; the myriad little insights scattered throughout the text, which resist easy summarization but point very precisely and intimately to a way of thinking, a way of seeing the world, not to mention a methodology: in mastering a powerful text - in being able to reconstruct its line of argument - the reader should absorb the thought process that created that text and should then be able to apply that thought process at will. That homo unius libri should have the full powers of his writer at his side in every engagement. But who reads that carefully when one's intellectual vanity demands the accoutrements of so much superficial knowledge?

The Adorno Monument in Frankfurt

The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one's own needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as something still socially substantial and individually appropriate -Minima Moralia, p. 39

Tragic Pessimism

There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent 'How lovely!' becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better [. . .] It is the sufferings of men that should be shared; the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains.

-Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott, pp. 25-26

There is something profoundly heroic in the refusal to be reconciled, in the insistence that one be allowed to remain inconsolable in the face of unspeakable horror. But the question that has been occupying me recently is whether this stance leaves any room for praxis, for emancipatory struggle. I fear that Adorno's stance is mere (if such a thing can be mere) dignified dying.