“No Individual Can Resist”: Minima Moralia as Critique of Forms of Life (Jaeggi, 2005)
by cominsitu
by Rahel Jaeggi (Constellations, 2005)
Can forms of life be criticized? Can we say whether particular forms of life are good, successful, or even rational? Since Kant it has been broadly accepted that happiness or the good life, in contrast to the morally right, cannot be determined philosophically. And since Rawls the ethical content of forms of life has been regarded, in view of the irreducible ethical pluralism of modern societies, as not up for debate. Philosophy has thus withdrawn from the Socratic question of how one should live and restricted itself to the problem of how, given the multiplicity of mutually incommensurable “comprehensive doctrines,” a just common life can be secured as the “coexistence” of different forms of life. The question of how we lead our lives has been consigned to the domain of unquestioned preferences or irreducible and unchallengeable identities. As with taste, there is no quarreling with forms of life.
This restraint is alien to Adorno’s critical theory.
See also by Jaeggi:
- Alienation (2014)
- Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (2018)
- Critique of Forms of Life (2018)
Minima Moralia by Adorno
communists in situ 