L’inutile Beauté

From Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, by Theodor Adorno [1951]

Translated by C.L.

Exceptionally beautiful women are doomed to unhappiness. Even those favored by every detail, who have birth, wealth, talent on their side, seem hounded or preoccupied by the urge to destroy themselves and all the human relationships they inspire. An oracle gives them a choice between tragedies. Either they cleverly exchange beauty for success. Then they pay for the exchange with happiness; no longer able to love, they poison any love felt for them and find themselves empty-handed. Or: the privilege of beauty grants them the courage and confidence to reject the exchange agreement. They take the happiness that their person promises seriously, and are unstinting with themselves, assured by the admiration of all that they do not need first to prove their worth. In their youth they can choose anything. This makes them anything but selective: nothing is absolute, everything can be replaced at any time. Quite early on, without much forethought, they marry and thus commit themselves to pedestrian conditions, relinquishing the privilege of infinite possibility, lowering themselves to human beings. At the same time, however, they cling to the childish dream of omnipotence with which their lives have beguiled them, and - un-bourgeois in this - continue to throw away what tomorrow might be replaced by something better. In this way they are the defining type of the destructive character. Just because they were once hors de concours they are unsuccessful in competition, for which they now develop a mania. Only the gesture of irresistibility remains when the reality has passed away; magic dissipates the moment it ceases to represent hope and settles in domesticity. This resistibility makes her also a victim: she becomes subjugated to the order she once soared above. Her generosity is punished. The fallen woman, like the obsessive, is a martyr of happiness. The beauty she incorporates has become a calculable element of existence, a mere substitute for non-existent life, without having ever been anything more. To herself and to others she has broken her promise of happiness. Yet she who keeps it takes on an aura of doom and is herself overtaken by disaster. In this way the enlightened world has completely absorbed myth. The jealousy of the gods has outlived them.

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