Adorno’s Reluctant Emigration 171him intellectually. His focus on dialectical interpretation placed him
outside both the historicizing tradition in the arts and philosophical
scientism. He had long since become familiar with Lukács’s concept
of ‘transcendental homelessness’, and he agreed with Benjamin that
history was a ‘history of catastrophe’. As a philosopher, Adorno was
convinced of the contingent nature of historical reality. To his mind,
the apparently ‘organic’ nature of society was an illusion. The personal
experience of being an alien during his years in emigration was a sub-
terranean component of his way of thinking. Even before his expulsion
from his homeland, the intellectual’s experience of individualloneliness,
isolation and marginalization was part of his make-up. Thus he under-
went a double exile; it was not merely a physical exile in the culturally
distinct countries to which he was forced to emigrate, first Britain and
then the United States. We can say that his place had always been
between two stools; his spiritual exile matched his experience of actual,
physical exile. In this sense, Adorno was both an existential and an
intentional outsider.^10
In this way, the exiled Adorno’s gaze, fixed as it was on the
catastrophic course of history, found appropriate expression in his
‘Reflections from Damaged Life’. These reflections drew much of their
concrete material from the ‘unhomely’ situation and the distancing
it entailed that inevitably accompanied life as a foreigner. Despite their
subjective starting-point and their personal tone, these attempts of an
uprooted intellectual to find his bearings were not motivated either
by his personal experience of enforced emigration or by the shock of
having to adapt to the social and cultural realities of the countries that
gave him refuge. This explains why he applied to himself the command-
ment ‘to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence,
and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively
and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but
by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell.’^11 This metaphorical
description of bourgeois society as hell points to Adorno’s general
belief that the world was in a desperate state. Even if the experience of
exile was not a precondition for this belief, it was a situation in which
his self-definition as an intellectual was mirrored: the identical situation
internally and externally.^12 This intermediate position was a necessary
if not a sufficient condition for his intransigent style of thinking, a style
that was distilled into the density of the aphorism. ‘For the value of a
thought is measured by the continuity of the familiar. It is objectively
devalued as this distance is reduced; the more it approximates to the
pre-existing standard, the further its antithetical function is diminished,
and only in this, in its manifest relation to its opposite, not in its isolated
existence, are the claims of thought founded.’^13
In Minima Moralia Adorno gives an account whose sensitivity about
the loss of language and culture in exile, ‘in which one is always astray’,
is equalled by few of his contemporaries.^14 At the same time, he was
A Twofold Exile 171