“FROM DAMAGED LIFE”: SUBJECTIVATION AND SUFFERING IN THEODOR W. ADORNO José A. Zamora In 1951, while in exile in the United States, Th. W. Adorno published a series of reflections in the form of brief essays and long aphorisms entitled Minima Moralia, with the eloquent subtitle “Reflections from Damaged Life.” As a man who, by rights, should have been put to death, and according to whom it was only by chance that he escaped the extermination perpetrated by the Na- tional Socialists, he felt “the drastic guilt of him who was spared.” This feeling was born of the inevitable complicity of the survivor and the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity that made such extermination possible in the first place: coldness (Adorno, 1973: 363). In this respect, Th. W. Adorno had no doubts: one cannot continue to live if the enormous suffering brought about by catastro- phe is constantly borne in mind. To continue reproducing one’s own existence under the conditions established by capitalist socialization demands coldness in the face of the suffering of those who were annihilated. Such coldness is not simply an attribute of certain individuals, but rather, it is an objective principle of social relations under which all the members of capitalist society reproduce their existence (Maiso, 2016). Therefore, when rethinking the linkage between subjectivation and suffering, we must not overlook the fact that Adorno writes not about the damaged life but, rather, from it. In Minima Moralia, it is not the sovereign subject, master both of his own will and ability to know, who pontificates on the just life. Rather, it is a subject who is doubly wounded by the violence of the barbarity that blighted Europe and by the keen awareness of the dehumanizing cost of con- tinuing to live during and after the catastrophe. In other words, it is a subject that acknowledges the impossibility of leading a just life in the wrong (Adorno, 2005a: 39) and who therefore recognizes that it is no longer possible to expe- rience the truth about life other than by confronting its alienated form, that is, confronting “the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses” (Adorno, 2005a: 15). Indeed, thought becomes paralyzed when faced with such an unfolding of effective destruction, one that even assumes the irrational price of ultimate self- destruction. Furthermore, many of the great ideas of enlightenment modernity pale in the face of such destruction: reason, the subject, autonomy, emancipa-