[FRA:] Adorno & ethics

[Ralph Dumain]

"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."
          -- Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, section 18

Of late this aphorism keeps popping up in my head, as a spontaneous 
counterpoint to social/cultural input.  I can't recall the contexts 
that spur these thoughts, but they may have something to do with the 
self-help industry, Oprah, Obamamania, the culture industry, American 
individualism, upper middle class liberalism . . . vs. the larger 
perspective that challenges the false immediacy of popular 
ideology.  I also have in mind Adorno's notion of theory and 
practice, of his lectures on Kant's morality, on his obsession with 
Auschwitz.  Otherwise, I am just considering this sentence in 
isolation from its context in Minima Moralia.

I keep coming back to this quote as a challenge to the veil of 
falsity that hangs over American life, which this insane fetishism of 
President Obama perpetuates. There should be a way of explaining 
accessibly what is at stake in Adorno's view, or in any 
intellectual's that does not join in with the crowd.

Now I am curious about who has written what on the ethical dimension 
of Adorno's thought, indeed, that lies behind Adorno's thought. I 
haven't read it, but the first thing that comes to mind is . . .

Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics by J. M. Bernstein
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521003094

Contents
Introduction;
1. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly;
2. Disenchantment: the skepticism of enlightened reason;
3. The instrumentality of moral reason;
4. Mastered by nature: abstraction, independence, and the simple concept;
5. Interlude: three versions of modernity;
6. Disenchanting identity: the complex concept;
7. Toward an ethic of nonidentity;
8. After Auschwitz;
9. Ethical modernism.

You can also read some of the intro via amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521003091/ref=sib_dp_pop_ex?ie=UTF8&p=S01N#reader-link

Also there are two essays in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno.  I 
don't have this volume either.

Beyond that, I haven't delved into this aspect of the literature.