I've finally been able to gain access to a laptop and internet access long enough to make a post. Even though I have been lugging my books around with me, I have been finding it difficult to post when on the road without owning a laptop. Until now.

In Minima Moralia, Adorno shows how the smallest changes in everyday behavior stands in relation to the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century. J.M. Bernstein, in his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, says that Adorno is attempting to:

"...reveal the ethical complexion of the practices of individual existenced as.....spheres of practice that posses ethical significance and salience open to ethical judgement of the precise moral intentions and willings through which we consiously put ourselves into them ... Because of the conditioning of the practices composing private existenced by productive relations in their widest significance, our intentions and actions must systematically backfire."

"Adorno seeks to show how the pattern of deformation these practices suffer; their systematic forms of misfiring, points o a general derangement of modern ethical life; the fatal antagonism or failure of coherent articulation of universal and particular. To say that there is a fatal antagonism between universal and particular is to claim that the anonymous rule systems that are meant to provide the conditions of possibility for individual existence,to be the mediums through which individuals are able to attain self-realization, have in fact become obstacles."