The obsolete individual becomes the lonely custodian of truth

Evidence

In the age of the individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew. While the individual, like all individualistic processes of production, has fallen behind the state of technology and become historically obsolete, he becomes the custodian of truth, as the condemned against the victor. For the individual alone preserves, in however distorted a form, a trace of that which legitimizes all technification, and yet to which the latter blinds itself. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 154

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: An inversion that resists summary: what progress has rendered obsolete is the only refuge of what legitimizes progress itself.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘damaged life’ thesis of the whole book and to the reader’s broader critical-theory network (Marcuse’s one-dimensionality). — connects to: Pure logical reasoning thrives in loneliness but produces empty pseudo-truth; The old subject survives as mere for-itself after its substance is dissolved — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 9; Under loneliness, self-evident logical reasoning becomes a self-generating substitute for real thought — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1083

Broader Connections

• The old subject survives as mere for-itself after its substance is dissolved #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 9
• Pure logical reasoning thrives in loneliness but produces empty pseudo-truth #qualifies (0.72)
• Under loneliness, self-evident logical reasoning becomes a self-generating substitute for real thought #qualifies (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1083