Taken from a text composed during the Second World War, the above epigraph is a formulation characteristic of Adorno. Aphoristically interweaving the personal and the philosophical, the particular and the universal, it consciously resists seamless integration into the totality of a philosophical system. Expressing his experience as an exile inhabiting what was for Adorno an especially strange life-world, and like many of the other reflections contained in Minima Moralia, it undermines the idea that Universal History could be construed in terms other than as a catastrophic logic stretching from the “slingshot to the megaton bomb.” In this sense, Adorno’s writing constitutes the literary counterpart to atonal forms of the “New Music,” whose partisan he undoubtedly was. For Adorno, who initially studied under Alban Berg in Vienna, New Music becomes not simply a mere analogue or trope but rather the concrete model for a writing that situates itself at the unstable boundary between art and philosophy. Existing precariously at this threshold, Adorno’s writing is deeply suspicious of the impulse to communicate or reiterate a transparent content determined independently of its form of presentation. Yet, at the same time, it must avoid, lest it risk incoherence, a complete submersion in particularity.