Adorno

Adorno’s Years in California 307

‘The bourgeois have lost their innocence and have become quite truculent
and malevolent in the process.’^162
A number of aphorisms were evidently highly personal attempts by
Adorno to come to terms with his own unhappy love relationships. He
gathered them together in Part III of the collection, which he prefaced
with a motto taken from a poem by Baudelaire: ‘Avalanche veux-tu
m’emporter dans ta chute?’^163 In these aphorisms he reflected on the
injustice that is experienced by the man who is rejected, but who may
not protest because ‘what he desires can only be given in freedom’.
When affection is withheld, he who is rebuffed

is made to feel the untruth of all merely individual fulfilment. But

he thereby awakens to the paradoxical consciousness of generality:

of the inalienable and unindictable human right to be loved by the

beloved. With his plea, founded on no titles or claims, he appeals

to an unknown court, which accords to him as grace what is

his own and yet not his own. The secret of justice in love is the

annulment of all rights, to which love mutely points.^164

Like Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, these aphorisms constitute an interior
monologue with the beloved that contains secret messages which are,
however, not aimed directly at the addressee; they are messages in a
bottle. This includes the description of sleepless nights, those ‘tormented
hours drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to
forget time’s empty passing. But truly terrifying are the sleepless nights
when time seems to contract and run fruitlessly through our hands....
But what is revealed in such contraction of the hours is the reverse of
time fulfilled. If in the latter the power of experience breaks the spell
of duration and gathers past and future into the present, in the hasteful
sleepless night duration causes unendurable dread.’^165
Jean Paul’s sentence ‘All the little flowers [that she gave me]’ gave
the signal to reflect on memory which is always a blend of past and
present. ‘He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to
the image of the past, but to the past itself.’^166 Did Adorno learn from
his own, sometimes unhappy, love affairs that the relationship between
men and women is entirely based on ‘exchange’? Matters could scarcely
be clearer when he writes:

Love is chilled by the value that the ego places upon itself. Loving

at all seems to it like loving more, and he who loves more puts

himself in the wrong. This arouses his mistress’s suspicion, and his

emotion, thrown back on itself, grows sick with possessive cruelty

and self-destructive imagining.^167

What Adorno revealed to Grab about Charlotte Alexander is reflected
in the aphorism that love falls for the soulless, that it is sustained by ‘its