Universal social inhumanity takes revenge on marriages that seemed exempt

Evidence

If marriage offers one of the last possibilities of forming human cells within universal inhumanity, the universal takes revenge in the breakdown of marriage, laying hands on what had seemed excepted from the rule, subjugating it to the alienated orders of rights and property and deriding those who had lived in delusive security. Just what was most protected is cruelly requisitioned and exposed. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 27

Categorization

• XREF: This is the macro-social mechanism the reader tracks: how alienation re-colonizes the exempt private sphere. Parallels the economics-of-social-capital literature read earlier. — connects to: The humane within marriage develops only within the savagery it veils — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 73; Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1179; Exclusionary practices against Others inflict harm by altering people’s social worth — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice: Society,…, 71 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The dialectical claim that the more ‘generous’ a couple had been about possessions, the more abominable their humiliation in divorce — the legal undefined is where strife flourishes — is a profound inversion of how we usually moralize divorce.

Broader Connections

• Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it #expands (0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1179
• Marriage as an institution, not the individuals in it, causes conjugal misery. #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1368
• Marriage’s ethical dignity actually suppresses rather than dignifies women’s sexuality #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1136
• The new morality condemns marriage and prostitution as forms crushing erotic life #corroborates (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 862
• Intense hatred of foes destroys the shared humanity that would evoke compassion #corroborates (0.78)
• Exclusionary practices against Others inflict harm by altering people’s social worth #complicates (0.75) — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 71
• Society punishes impropriety more harshly than inhumanity #exemplifies (0.75)