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‘Not at Home in One’s House’: Adorno and Dwelli

         Minima Moralia, like Adorno’s philosophy as whole, is marked by relentless negativity in a number of respects. In §18, he says that in the contemporary world, “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s house.” Our world—that is in part to say—is not one to which we can, or should, be reconciled and not one in which we can, or should, be “at home.” When we add as well Adorno’s well-known dictum that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” it can seem that sanctioning being at home in a world like ours is a morally inappropriate form of accommodationism. It might thus seem that Adorno’s position is one of wholesale rejection of any notions of being at home (or, relatedly, of “dwelling”) and that he gainsays the related aspirations entirely. Yet Adorno’s position, I want to suggest, is more complicated. For deprivation of home and dwelling, as he is at pains to stress, is itself a moral evil. Adorno thus in fact allows the normative importance of notions of home and dwelling, even as he also problematizes them as potentially suspect and reactionary.  Thus: the home or dwelling ideals are in some sense objectionable, but so too is extirpating the possibility of their realization. Though somewhat unstable, this position is what we should expect from a negative dialectician convinced that tensions remain unresolved.