Reflections from the damaged life
Adorno gave his Minima Moralia the subtitle Reflections from the damaged life. Within, 200 small essays between melancholy, despair, and ridicule in front of an everyday life in the thralls of a hostile, strange, and deadly totality.
As diagnoses of loss and re-encounters of an exiled self, its small texts exhibit the pains of the everyday. Their pathos verges on excess, its anecdotes occasionally flirt with the ridicule (the sound of a car door closing reminiscent of the horrors of domination; the spurt after a missed bus), and yet, they lay witness, in the form of the occasional aphorism or paragraph, to a lucid testimony of a present in its wane.
Almost 70 years later, our epoch is rich in both tragedy, farce, and its reversals. What would it mean to revive the “Reflections from the damaged life”, to collect instants where the crises of meaning we face today span a language between elegy and ode, between self-derision and sincerity?
Unlike Adorno, this experiment of a column is meant to comprise more than one hand, more than one writer, for a collective archive of the moments in which the I resists the we – or vice-versa. Hence, besides my supervision mentioned above, the “I”s that follow will be both mine and yours, seeking to provide a record, beyond the damage, of life.
Chroniques de la vie mutilée #2
Deuxième série des «Chroniques de la vie mutilée» de Pierre Schwarzer, où l’auteur s’intéresse au confort de la catastrophe, aux errances du débat public, au délabrement de l’âge à la tête de la première puissance mondiale et à ce qu’il reste des noms propres.
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Reflections from the damaged life #1
The first series of Pierre Schwarzer’s «Reflections from the damaged life». Inspired by Adorno’s Minima Moralia, these short, tragic-comic texts track everyday life beyond the crises of meaning.
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