Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

In Adorno’s postwar reflections on damaged life under late capitalism, he repeatedly treats “health” as an ideological demand rather than a neutral biological state. The line is typically cited from his aphoristic writing in which everyday attitudes—cheerfulness, robustness, “positive” vitality—are read as social symptoms. In that setting, “exuberant health” names a culturally prized buoyancy and energetic normalcy that, for Adorno, often depends on repression: the refusal to register suffering, contradiction, or historical catastrophe. The remark belongs to his broader critique of conformist well-adjustment and the way modern societies convert psychological and bodily norms into instruments of social control.

Adorno’s paradox suggests that “exuberant health” can be pathological when it is unreflective, compulsive, or socially mandated. A display of robust well-being may function as denial of suffering—one’s own or others’—and as an adaptation to an unhealthy social order. In a world marked by domination and alienation, the person who appears perfectly “well-adjusted” may be the most deeply compromised, because their vitality is purchased at the price of numbness, repression, or conformity. The sentence thus turns a common ideal inside out: it implies that genuine health would include sensitivity to what is wrong, not merely energetic participation in it.