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Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno's Minima Moralia
Ist Teil von
Colloquia Germanica, 2023-11, Vol.56 (2), p.197
Ort / Verlag
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co.KG
Erscheinungsjahr
2023
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag Zeitschriften und Jahrbücher
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Readers of Adorno's Minima Moralia have often asked and debated how this collection of aphorisms, many of which record Adorno's personal experiences with American society, can claim any degree of objective or scientific validity. This article finds an answer to this perennial question in the peculiar way the book employs the anecdotal as a mode of presenting "actual experience." After reviewing Adorno's attitude toward the use of empirical methods in social research, the article contrasts the treatment of anecdotes in Adorno's contributions to The Authoritarian Personality, an empirical study published in 1950, with his use of fragmentary anecdotal elements --brief descriptions of trivial occurrences, vignettes, highly condensed mini-narratives--in the Minima Moralia. I argue that these "anecdotal remains" constitute a form of empiricism. Seeing them as such allows us to better understand Adorno's puzzling acknowledgment of empirical research as a needed corrective to traditional philosophy. Keywords: Minima Moralia, The Authoritarian Personality, anecdote as form, empiricism, everyday life, narrative, "Golden Gate"