Adorno’s Years in California 305the culture industry and the responsibility of intellectuals. But he also
treated everyday matters such as dwelling, giving presents, running
down the street and, finally, the impossibility of love, the necessity of
hope and the hopelessness of lying. In the ‘Dedication’, which as in
Goethe’s Faust is aimed at the addressees of his reflections, Adorno
provided information about his ‘melancholy science’. Despite the his-
torical demise of the ‘old subject’, his starting-point was the experience
of individuals: wholly adventitious events, his own observations and
perceptions. Even if this ‘subjective reflection’ has ‘something senti-
mental and anachronistic’ about it, the state of society inevitably transmits
itself to ‘individual experience’. This is why the thinker should trust his
own experiences, experiences that derive from ‘the narrowest private
sphere of the intellectual in emigration’, but which may still possess
philosophical depth.^151
Did the shock of being treated as an ‘enemy alien’ determine the
basic tone of these aphorisms? Taken together, the texts of Minima
Moralia express the melancholy and despair that their author attributed
to his own experience of homelessness. It was not for nothing that he
took as his motto for Part I of the volume a sentence from the novel
Der Amerika-Müde (Tired of America) by the Austrian writer Ferdinand
Kürnberger: ‘Life does not live’. Fatigue with America speaks also from
the aphorism ‘Protection, Help and Counsel’, in which Adorno records
that ‘the continuity of lived life’ has been shattered by expulsion and
exile. The émigré ‘lives in an environment that must remain incom-
prehensible to him.... He is always astray.... His language has been
expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished his knowledge,
sapped.’ And, as if providing a tacit commentary on his quarrel with
Bloch, he goes on: ‘Even the man spared the ignominy of direct co-
ordination bears, as his special mark, this very exemption, an illusory,
unreal existence in the life-process of society. Relations between out-
casts are even more poisoned than between long-standing residents.’^152
Precisely because the domestic sphere has lost its private nature among
the émigrés, and because, at the same time, the indiscreet revelation of
personal confessions has become respectable, utmost caution is called
for, particularly in the choice of private acquaintances. One should
beware of seeking out the mighty or their assiduous helpers. But if you
obey the maxim of living modestly and minding your own business, you
will be threatened by nothing less than ‘starvation or madness’.^153
Apart from his intimate diaries, these aphorisms are the most personal
statements Adorno ever made.^154 They make it clear that exile meant
above all the feeling of exclusion and homelessness. ‘In the recollection
of emigration each German venison roast tastes as if it had been felled
with the charmed bullets of the Freischütz.’^155 On the other hand, the
feeling of being uprooted, of release from one’s bourgeois traditions,
also contained an element of autonomy and freedom. As someone
who had been marginalized, Adorno made the acquaintance of the