Adorno’s motto ‘life does not live’ inverts vitalist Lebensphilosophie into opposition to it.

Evidence

‘Das Leben lebt nicht’ is placed as a motto before the first section of Minima Moralia; in the authorised English translation of the book, it is rendered as ‘[l]ife does not live’. This sentence is taken from a novel by the eighteenthcentury Austrian writer Ferdinand Kürnberger titled Der Amerikamüde (The One Who Grew Tired of America) – a particularly resonant title for the situation in which Adorno found himself while working on Minima Moralia. Alexander García Düttmann notes that this motto’s ‘almost corny yet also emotionally moving turn against itself’ can also be readily understood as a ‘statement against Lebensphilosophie’. Kürnberger’s sentence, which ‘sounds vitalistic and presumably was also once meant as such … becomes in the context of Adorno’s philosophy the (self-)knowledge that the return of what is always the same can only be recognised from the perspective of what is different’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 918

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s broader inversion strategy documented across this volume. — connects to: By the 1930s, Lebensphilosophie had turned from critical correction into ideological apology — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 207; Horkheimer’s critique of Lebensphilosophie defined Critical Theory’s foundations — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 214