SOURCE: “Guilt by (Un)Free Association: Adorno on Romance et al,” in MLN, Vol. 109, No. 5, December, 1994, pp. 913-37.

In the following essay, Pepper analyzes the aphorisms in Minima Moralia.

It follows from this that anybody who attempts to come out alive—and survival itself has something nonsensical about it, like dreams in which, having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls from a basement—ought also to be prepared at each moment to end his life.¹

But this is to condemn and to love in an abusive way.²

Minima Moralia is a hard book to read all at once, both because it is simply too delicious and at the same time because it is highly repetitious—I, for one, cannot eat chocolate all day—also because it is not quite repetitious enough, but demands a considerable amount of energy to keep alert so as to be...