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Once The Last Trace Of Emotion Has Been Eradicated, Nothing Remains Of Thought But Absolute Tautology.
-Theodor Adorno
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Once The Last Trace

Theodor Adorno
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Once The Last Trace Of Emotion Has Been Eradicated, Nothing Remains Of Thought But Absolute Tautology.

Understanding the Quote: "once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of..."

This quote by Theodor Adorno reflects deeply on the theme of lasts. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Lasts, Emotion, Tautology, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Theodor Adorno interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno is celebrated for insightful thoughts on lasts and emotion. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Lasts
Emotion
Tautology
More From Theodor Adorno
The Usual Reproach Against The Essay, That It Is Fragmentary And Random, Itself Assumes The Givenness Of Totality And Suggests That Man Is In Control Of This Totality. The Desire Of The Essay, Though, Is Not To Filter The Eternal Out Of The Transitory; It Wants, Rather, To Make The Transitory Eternal.
Men
Desire
Usual
Only Thought Which Does Violence To Itself Is Hard Enough To Shatter Myth.
Doe
Violence
Enough
The Joke Of Our Time Is The Suicide Of Intention.
Sad
Suicide
Intention
History Does Not Merely Touch On Language, But Takes Place In It.
History
Doe
Language
Proletarian Language Is Dictated By Hunger. The Poor Chew Words To Fill Their Bellies.
Language
Hunger
Poor
In The Products Of The Culture Industry Human Beings Get Into Trouble Only So That They Can Be Rescued Unharmed, Usually By Representatives Of A Benevolent Collective; And Then, In Illusory Harmony, They Are Reconciled With The General Interest Whose Demands They Had Initially Experienced As Irreconcilable With Their Own.
Culture
Demand
Trouble
Advancing Bourgeois Society Liquidates Memory, Time, Recollection As Irrational Leftovers Of The Past.
Memories
Past
Leftovers
For A Man Who No Longer Has A Homeland, Writing Becomes A Place To Live.
Writing
Men
Emigration
Truth Is Inseperable From The Illusory Belief That From The Figures Of The Unreal One Day, In Spite Of All, Real Deliverance Will Come.
Real
One Day
Belief
Culture Is Only True When Implicitly Critical, And The Mind Which Forgets This Revenges Itself In The Critics It Breeds. Criticism Is An Indispensable Element Of Culture.
Revenge
Mind
Criticism
In Psycho-analysis Nothing Is True Except The Exaggerations.
Analysis
Psycho
Exaggeration
Jazz Is The False Liquidation Of Art - Instead Of Utopia Becoming Reality It Disappears From The Picture.
Art
Reality
Becoming
Writing Poetry After Auschwitz Is Barbaric.
Writing
Poetry
Auschwitz
The Aim Of Jazz Is The Mechanical Reproduction Of A Regressive Moment, A Castration Symbolism. 'give Up Your Masculinity, Let Yourself Be Castrated,' The Eunuchlike Sound Of The Jazz Band Both Mocks And Proclaims, 'and You Will Be Rewarded, Accepted Into A Fraternity Which Shares The Mystery Of Impotence With You, A Mystery Revealed At The Moment Of The Initiation Rite.
Giving Up
Symbolism
Sound
Love You Will Find Only Where You May Show Yourself Weak Without Provoking Strength.
Love
May
Weak
In Organized Groups Such As The Army Or The Church There Is Either No Mention Of Love Whatsoever Between The Members, Or It Is Expressed Only In A Sublimated And Indirect Way, Through The Mediation Of Some Religious Imagine In The Love Of Whom The Members Unite And Whose All-embracing Love They Are Supposed To Imitate In Their Attitude Towards Each Other. It Is One Of The Basic Tenets Of Fascist Leadership To Keep Primary Libidinal Energy On An Unconscious Level So As To Divert Its Manifestations In A Way Suitable To Political Ends.
Religious
Attitude
Army
By Abstaining From All Definite Content, Whether As Formal Logic And Theory Of Science Or As The Legend Of Being Beyond All Beings, Philosophy Declared Its Bankruptcy Regarding Concrete Social Goals.
Philosophy
Goal
Legends
In The Innermost Recesses Of Humanism, As Its Very Soul, There Rages A Frantic Prisoner Who, As A Fascist, Turns The World Into A Prison.
Soul
World
Prison
What Has Become Alien To Men Is The Human Component Of Culture, Its Closest Part, Which Upholds Them Against The World. They Make Common Cause With The World Against Themselves, And The Most Alienated Condition Of All, The Omnipresence Of Commodities, Their Own Conversion Into Appendages Of Machinery, Is For Them A Mirage Of Closeness.
Men
Mirages
World
A Thinking That Approaches It Objects Openly, Rigorously ... Is Also Free Toward Its Objects In The Sense That It Refuses To Have Rules Prescribed To It By Organized Knowledge. It ... Rends The Veil With Which Society Conceals Them, And Perceives Them Anew.
Thinking
Veils
Approach
In Anglo-saxon Countries The Prostitutes Look As If They Purveyed, Along With Sin, The Attendant Pains Of Hell.
Country
Pain
Looks
The Phrase, The World Wants To Be Deceived, Has Become Truer Than Had Ever Been Intended. People Are Not Only, As The Saying Goes, Falling For The Swindle; If It Guarantees Them Even The Most Fleeting Gratification They Desire A Deception Which Is Nonetheless Transparent To Them. They Force Their Eyes Shut And Voice Approval, In A Kind Of Self-loathing, For What Is Meted Out To Them, Knowing Fully The Purpose For Which It Is Manufactured. Without Admitting It They Sense That Their Lives Would Be Completely Intolerable As Soon As They No Longer Clung To Satisfactions Which Are None At All.
Fall
Eye
Self
The Recent Past Always Presents Itself As If Destroyed By Catastrophes.
Past
Catastrophe
Ifs
The Straight Line Is Regarded As The Shortest Distance Between Two People, As If They Were Points.
Distance
Two
People
The Only Philosophy That Can Be Practiced Responsibly In The Face Of Despair Is The Attempt To Contemplate All Things As They Would Present Themselves From The Standpoint Of Redemption. Knowledge Has No Light But That Shed On The World By Redemption: All Else Is Reconstruction, Mere Technique. Perspectives Must Be Fashioned That Displace And Estrange The World, That Reveal Its Fissures And Crevices, As Indigent And Distorted As It Will One Day Appear In The Messianic Light.
Philosophy
Light
Perspective
If Philosophy Is Still Necessary, It Is So Only In The Way It Has Been From Time Immemorial: As Critique, As Resistance To The Expanding Heteronomy, Even If Only As Thought's Powerless Attempt To Remain Its Own Master And To Convict Of Untruth, By Their Own Criteria, Both A Fabricated Mythology And A Conniving, Resigned Acquiescence.
Philosophy
Acquiescence
Way
There's Not Much Need For Prophets Who Are In Synch With Their Society.
Needs
Prophet
There Are No More Ideologies In The Authentic Sense Of False Consciousness, Only Advertisements For The World Through Its Duplication And The Provocative Lie Which Does Not Seek Belief But Commands Silence.
Lying
Silence
Doe
Cultural Criticism Finds Itself Faced With The Final Stage Of The Dialectic Of Culture And Barbarism. To Write Poetry After Auschwitz Is Barbaric. And This Corrodes Even The Knowledge Of Why It Has Become Impossible To Write Poetry Today. Absolute Reification, Which Presupposed Intellectual Progress As One Of Its Elements, Is Now Preparing To Absorb The Mind Entirely. Critical Intelligence Cannot Be Equal To This Challenge As Long As It Confines Itself To Self-satisfied Contemplation.
Writing
Self
Long
In So Far As The Culture Industry Arouses A Feeling Of Well-being That The World Is Precisely In That Order Suggested By The Culture Industry, The Substitute Gratification Which It Prepares For Human Beings Cheats Them Out Of The Same Happiness Which It Deceitfully Projects.
Order
Feelings
Culture
The Power Of The Culture Industry's Ideology Is Such That Conformity Has Replaced Consciousness
Culture
Conformity
Consciousness
The Inadequacy Of The Purely Purpose-oriented Form Is Revealed For What It Is-a Monotonous, Impoverished Boring Practicality.
Purpose
Boring
Form
The Empirical Usability Of The Sacred Ceremonial Words Makes Both The Speaker And Listener Believe In Their Corporeal Presence.
Believe
Sacred
Usability
Happiness Is Obsolete: Uneconomic.
Obsolete
But He Who Dies In Despair Has Lived His Whole Life In Vain.
Life
Despair
Vain
The Jargon Of Authenticity ... Is A Trademark Of Societalized Chosenness, ... Sub-language As Superior Language.
Jargon
Language
Authenticity
Freud Made The Discovery- Quite Genuinely, Simply Through Working On His Own Material- That The More Deeply One Explores The Phenomena Of Human Individuation, The More Unreservedly One Grasps The Individual As A Self-contained And Dynamic Entity, The Closer One Draws To That In The Individual Which Is Really No Longer Individual.
Discovery
Self
Individual
In The Age Of The Individual's Liquidation, The Question Of Individuality Must Be Raised Anew.
Birthday
Being Yourself
Inspire
Life Has Changed Into A Timeless Succession Of Shocks, Interspaced With Empty, Paralysed Intervals.
Life
Empty
Timeless
Life Has Become The Ideology Of Its Own Absence.
Life
Absence
Ideology
Dialectic Thought Is An Attempt To Break Through The Coercion Of Logic By Its Own Means.
Mean
Break Through
Coercion
The Error In Positivism Is That It Takes As Its Standard Of Truth The Contingently Given Division Of Labor, That Between The Science And Social Praxis As Well As That Within Science Itself, And Allows No Theory That Could Reveal The Division Of Labor To Be Itself Derivative And Mediated And Thus Strip It Of Its False Authority.
Division Of Labor
Errors
Derivatives
In Many People It Is Already An Impertinence To Say 'i'.
People
Impertinence
Advice To Intellectuals: Let No-one Represent You.
Advice
When All Actions Are Mathematically Calculated, They Also Take On A Stupid Quality.
Stupid
Risk
Quality
All The World's Not A Stage.
World
Stage
All Satire Is Blind To The Forces Liberated By Decay. Which Is Why Total Decay Has Absorbed The Forces Of Satire.
Decay
Blind
Satire
Words Of The Jargon Sound As If They Said Something Higher Than What They Mean.
Mean
Sound
Jargon
Estrangement Shows Itself Precisely In The Elimination Of Distance Between People.
Distance
People
Elimination
Philosophy ... Must Not Bargain Away Anything Of The Emphatic Concept Of Truth.
Philosophy
Bargains
Concepts
In The Abstract Conception Of Universal Wrong, All Concrete Responsibility Vanishes.
Responsibility
Abstract
Concrete
The Basest Person Is Capable Of Perceiving The Weaknesses Of The Greatest, The Most Stupid, The Errors In The Thought Of The Most Intelligent.
Stupid
Intelligent
Errors
The Thought That Murders The Wish That Fathered It Will Be Overtaken By The Revenge Of Stupidity
Revenge
Stupidity
Wish
Technology Is Making Gestures Precise And Brutal, And With Them Men.
Technology
Men
Gestures
Domination Delegates The Physical Violence On Which It Rests To The Dominated.
Violence
Domination
Physical Violence
The Dialectic Cannot Stop Short Before The Conceptsof Health And Sickness, Nor Indeed Before Their Siblings Reason And Unreason.
Sibling
Health
Sickness
Knowledge, Which Is Power, Knows No Limits, Either In Its Enslavement Of Creation Or In Its Deference To Worldly Masters.
Knowledge
Limits
Creation
In The End, The Writer Is Not Even Allowed To Live In His Writing.
Writing
Ends
Lies Are Told Only To Convey To Someone That One Has No Need Either Of Him Or His Good Opinion.
Lying
Deceit
Needs
The Capacity For Fear And For Happiness Are The Same, The Unrestricted Openness To Experience Amounting To Self-abandonment In Which The Vanquished Rediscovers Himself.
Fear
Discovery
Self
It Is Barbaric To Write Poetry After Auschwitz.
Auschwitz
What Human Beings Seek To Learn From Nature Is How To Use It To Dominate Wholly Both It And Human Beings. Nothing Else Counts.
Nature
Use
Humans
Only A Humanity To Whom Death Has Become As Indifferent As Its Members, That Has Itself Died, Can Inflict It Administratively On Innumerable People.
People
Humanity
Culture
On Their Way Toward Modern Science Human Beings Have Discarded Meaning. The Concept Is Replaced By The Formula, The Cause By Rules And Probability.
Way
Causes
Modern
If Across The Atlantic The Ideology Was Pride, Here It Is Delivering The Goods.
Pride
Goods
Ideology
Art Respects The Masses, By Standing Up To Them For What They Could Be, Rather Than Conforming To Them In Their Degraded State.
Art
States
Mass
They [the Critics] Deal With Schoenberg's Early Works And All Their Wealth By Classifying Them, With The Music-historical Cliché, As Late Romantic Post-wagnerian. One Might Just As Well Dispose Of Beethoven As A Late-classicist Post-haydnerian.
Historical
Might
Wealth
Indeed, Happiness Is Nothing Other Than Being Encompassed, An After-image Of The Original Shelter Within The Mother. But For This Reason No One Who Is Happy Can Know That He Is So. To See Happiness, He Would Have To Pass Out Of It: To Be As If Already Born. He Who Says He Is Happy Lies, And In Invoking Happiness, Sins Against It. He Alone Keeps Faith Who Says: I Was Happy.
Mother
Lying
Shelter
The Forms Of Art Reflect The History Of Man More Truthfully Than Do Documents Themselves.
Art
Men
Form
The Work Of Art Still Has Something In Common With Enchantment: It Posits Its Own, Self-enclosed Area, Which Is Withdrawn From The Context Of Profane Existence, And In Which Special Laws Apply.
Art
Self
Law
People At The Top Are Closing Ranks So Tightly That All Possibility Of Subjective Deviation Has Gone, And Difference Can Be Sought Only In The More Distinguished Cut Of An Evening Dress.
Cutting
Differences
People
In Myths The Warrant Of Grace Was The Acceptance Of Sacrifice; It Is This Acceptance That Love, The Re-enactment Of Sacrifice, Beseeches If It Is Not To Feel Under A Curse.
Love
Acceptance
Sacrifice
Everything That Has Ever Been Called Folk Art Has Always Reflected Domination.
Art
Domination
Folks
A Successful Work Of Art Is Not One Which Resolves Objective Contradictions In A Spurious Harmony, But One Which Expresses The Idea Of Harmony Negatively By Embodying The Contradictions, Pure And Uncompromised, In Its Innermost Structure.
Success
Art
Thinking
There Is No True Life Within A False Life.
True Life
Quality Is Decided By The Depth At Which The Work Incorporates The Alternatives Within Itself, And So Masters Them.
Quality
Depth
Alternatives
Thinking No Longer Means Anymore Than Checking At Each Moment Whether One Can Indeed Think.
Mean
Thinking
Moments
Once The Last Trace Of Emotion Has Been Eradicated, Nothing Remains Of Thought But Absolute Tautology.
Lasts
Emotion
Tautology
Auschwitz Begins Wherever Someone Looks At A Slaughterhouse And Thinks: They’re Only Animals.
Animal
Thinking
Holocaust
Dissonance Is The Truth About Harmony.
Harmony
Dissonance
Those Who Cannot Help Ought Also Not Advise: In An Order Where Every Mousehole Has Been Plugged, Mere Advice Exactly Equals Condemnation.
Order
Advice
Helping
What Is Or Is Not The Jargon Is Determined By Whether The Word Is Written In An Intonation Which Places It Transcendently In Opposition To Its Own Meaning; By Whether The Individual Words Are Loaded At The Expense Of The Sentence, Its Propositional Force, And The Thought Content.
Jargon
Determined
Individual
Intolerance Of Ambiguity Is The Mark Of An Authoritarian Personality.
Personality
Tolerance
Mark
Thus Is Order Ensured: Some Have To Play The Game Because They Cannot Otherwise Live, And Those Who Could Live Otherwise Are Kept Out Because They Do Not Want To Play The Game. It Is As If The Class From Which Independent Intellectuals Have Defected Takes Its Revenge, By Pressing Its Demands Home In The Very Domain Where The Deserter Seeks Refuge.
Revenge
Home
Independent
The Body's Habituation To Walking As Normal Stems From The Good Olddays. It Was The Bourgeois Form Of Locomotion: Physicaldemythologization, Free Of The Spell Of Hieratic Pacing, Rooflesswandering, Breathless Flight. Human Dignity Insisted On The Right Towalk, A Rhythm Not Extorted From The Body By Command Or Terror. Thewalk, The Stroll, Were Private Ways Of Passing Time, The Heritage Ofthe Feudal Promenade In The Nineteenth Century.
Heritage
Body
Way
Triviality Is Evil - Triviality, That Is, In The Form Of Consciousness And Mind That Adapts Itself To The World As It Is, That Obeys The Principle Of Inertia. And This Principle Of Inertia Truly Is What Is Radically Evil.
Evil
Mind
Principles
He Who Has Loved And Who Betrays Love Does Harm Not Only To The Image Of The Past, But To The Past Itself.
Betrayal
Past
Doe
The Invocation Of Science, Of Its Ground Rules, Of The Exclusive Validity Of The Methods That Science Has Now Completely Become, Now Constitutes A Surveillance Authority Punishing Free, Uncoddled, Undisciplined Thought And Tolerating Nothing Of Mental Activity Other Than What Has Been Methodologically Sanctioned. Science And Scholarship, The Medium Of Autonomy, Has Degenerated Into An Instrument Of Heteronomy.
Surveillance
Authority
Undisciplined
Suffering Has As Much Right To Be Expressed As A Martyr Has To Cry Out. So It May Have Been False To Say That Writing Poetry After Auschwitz Is Impossible.
Art
Writing
Suffering
The Man For Whom Time Stretches Out Painfully Is One Waiting In Vain, Disappointed At Not Finding Tomorrow Already Continuing Yesterday.
Time
Men
Yesterday
The Good Man Is He Who Rules Himself As He Does His Own Property: His Autonomous Being Is Modelled On Material Power.
Men
Good Man
Doe
Even The Loveliest Dream Bears Like A Blemish Its Difference From Reality, The Awareness That What It Grants Is Mere Illusion.
Dream
Reality
Differences
Art Is The Social Antithesis Of Society, Not Directly Deducible From It.
Art
Social
Art Is
One Must Have Tradition In Oneself, To Hate It Properly.
Hate
Tradition
Oneself
Humanity Had To Inflict Terrible Injuries On Itself Before The Self, The Identical, Purpose-directed, Masculine Character Of Human Beings Was Created, And Something Of This Process Is Repeated In Every Childhood.
Character
Self
Childhood
Of The World As It Exists, It Is Not Possible To Be Enough Afraid.
World
Enough
In His State Of Complete Powerlessness The Individual Perceives The Time He Has Left To Live As A Brief Reprieve.
Individual
States
Perceive
The Very People Who Burst With Proofs Of Exuberant Vitality Could Easily Be Taken For Prepared Corpses, From Whom The News Of Their Not-quite-successful Decease Has Been Withheld For Reasons Of Population Policy. Underlying The Prevalent Health Is Death. All The Movements Of Health Resemble The Reflex-movements Of Beings Whose Hearts Have Stopped Beating.
Taken
Heart
Successful
It Is Incumbent Upon Philosophy ... To Provide A Refuge For Freedom. Not That There Is Any Hope That It Could Break The Political Tendencies That Are Throttling Freedom Throughout The World Both From Within And Without And Whose Violence Permeates The Very Fabric Of Philosophical Argumentation.
Philosophy
Philosophical
Political
In The End Indignation Over Kitsch Is Anger At Tis Shameless Revelling In The Joy Of Imitation.
Joy
Kitsch
Shameless
The New Human Type Cannot Be Properly Understood Without Awareness Of What He Is Continuously Exposed To From The World Of Things About Him, Even In His Most Secret Innervations.
Secret
Culture
World
The Important Thing Is Not The Planning Of An Index Verborum Prohibitorum Of Current Noble Nouns, But Rather The Examination Of Their Linguistic Function.
Important
Noble
Nouns
Freedom Would Be Not To Choose Between Black And White But To Abjure Such Prescribed Choices.
Black And White
Choices
Would Be
The Positive Element Of Kitsch Lies In The Fact That It Sets Free For A Moment The Glimmering Realization That You Have Wasted Your Life.
Lying
Elements
Realization
In Sharp Contrasts To Traditional Art, Modern Art Does Not Hide The Fact That It Is Something Made And Produced: On The Contrary, It Underscores The Fact.
Art
Doe
Facts
And How Comfortless Is The Thought That The Sickness Of The Normal Does Not Necessarily Imply As Its Opposite The Health Of The Sick, But That The Latter Usually Only Present, In A Different Way, The Same Disastrous Pattern.
Health
Opposites
Sick
An Emancipated Society, On The Other Hand, Would Not Be A Unitary State, But The Realization Of Universality In The Reconciliation Of Differences.
Hands
Differences
Culture
Fear And Destructiveness Are The Major Emotional Sources Of Fascism, Eros Belongs Mainly To Democracy.
Emotional
Democracy
Source
Newness Only Becomes Mere Evil In Its Totalitarian Format, Where All The Tension Between Individual And Society, That Once Gave Rise To The Category Of The New, Is Dissipated. Today The Appeal To Newness, Of No Matter What Kind, Provided Only That It Is Archaic Enough, Has Become Universal, The Omnipresent Medium Of False Mimesis. The Decomposition Of The Subject Is Consummated In His Self-abandonment To An Ever-changing Sameness.
Self
Evil
Matter
The Splinter In Your Eye Is The Best Magnifying-glass Available.
Eye
Glasses
Splinters
Everything About Art Has Become Problematic; Its Inner Life, Its Relation To Society, Even Its Right To Exist.
Art
Relation
Inner Life
The Bourgeois ... Is Tolerant. His Love For People As They Are Stems From His Hatred Of What They Might Be.
People
Hatred
Might
The Almost Insoluble Task Is To Let Neither The Power Of Others, Nor Our Own Powerlessness, Stupefy Us.
Tasks
Powerlessness
The Idea That After This War Life Will Continue 'normally' Or Even That Culture Might Be 'rebuilt' - As If The Rebuilding Of Culture Were Not Already Its Negation - Is Idiotic.
War
Ideas
Culture
In The Nineteenth Century The Germans Painted Their Dream And The Outcome Was Invariably Vegetable. The French Needed Only To Paint A Vegetable And It Was Already A Dream.
Dream
Vegetables
Outcomes
Rigour And Purity In Assembling Words, However Simple The Result, Create A Vacuum.
Simple
Vacuums
Purity
The Darkening Of The World Makes The Irrationality Of Art Rational: Radically Darkened Art.
Art
World
Rational
The Specific Is Not Exclusive: It Lacks The Aspiration To Totality.
Aspiration
Totality
Exclusive
Kitsch Evokes A Future Utopia Looking Back At A Past That Is Selectively (mis)remembered, Thereby Helping To Stabilize The Present Toward Which Kitsch Is Otherwise Deeply Anatagonistic.
Past
Kitsch
Helping
The Law Of The Innermost Form Of The Essay Is Heresy
Law
Form
Essays
There Is Something Embarrassing In... The Way In Which, ... Turning Suffering Into Images, Harsh And Uncompromising Though They Are, ... Wounds The Shame We Feel In The Presence Of The Victims. For These Victims Are Used To Create Something, Works Of Art, That Are Thrown To The Consumption Of A World Which Destroyed Them.
Art
Suffering
Way
The Triumph Of Advertising In The Culture Industry Is That Consumers Feel Compelled To Buy And Use Its Products Even Though They See Through Them.
Triumph
Culture
Use
Whoever Is Versed In The Jargon Does Not Have To Say What He Thinks, Does Not Even Have To Think It Properly. The Jargon Takes Over This Task.
Thinking
Doe
Tasks
Every Work Of Art Is An Uncommitted Crime.
Art
Crime
Uncommitted
The Enlightenment Has Always Aimed At Liberating Men From Fear And Establishing Their Sovereignty. Yet The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant.
Men
Earth
Enlightened
In The General Tendency Toward Specialization, Philosophy Too Has Established Itself As A Specialized Discipline, One Purified Of All Specific Content. In So Doing, Philosophy Has Denied Its Own Constitutive Concept: The Intellectual Freedom That Does Not Obey The Dictates Of Specialized Knowledge.
Philosophy
Discipline
Intellectual
Horror Is Beyond The Reach Of Psychology.
Psychology
Horror
He Who Matures Early Lives In Anticipation.
Anticipation
Early Life
The Film Has Succeeded In Transforming Subjects So Indistinguishably Into Social Functions, That Those Wholly Encompassed, No Longer Aware Of Any Conflict, Enjoy Their Own Dehumanization As Something Human, As The Joy Of Warmth. The Total Interconnectedness Of The Culture Industry, Omitting Nothing, Is One With Total Social Delusion.
Joy
Culture
Conflict
Vague Expression Permits The Hearer To Imagine Whatever Suits Him And What He Already Thinks In Any Case.
Thinking
Expression
Suits
Love Is The Power To See Similarity In The Dissimilar.
Love
Love Is
Romance
Very Evil People Cannot Really Be Imagined Dying.
Evil People
People
Evil
People Know What They Want Because They Know What Other People Want.
People
Want
Knows
The Human Is Indissolubly Linked With Imitation: A Human Being Only Becomes Human At All By Imitating Other Human Beings.
Empathy
Imitating Others
Imitation
Tenderness Between People Is Nothing Other Than Awareness Of The Possibility Of Relations Without Purpose.
People
Purpose
Awareness
Insane Sects Grow With The Same Rhythm As Big Organizations. It Is The Rhythm Of Total Destruction.
Organization
Insane
Destruction
The Creed Of Evil Has Been, Since The Beginnings Of Highly Industrialized Society, Not Only A Precursor Of Barbarism But A Mask Of Good. The Worth Of The Latter Was Transferred To The Evil That Drew To Itself All The Hatred And Resentment Of An Order Which Drummed Good Into Its Adherents So That It Could With Impunity Be Evil.
Order
Evil
Hatred
Modernity Is A Qualitative, Not A Chronological, Category.
Categories
Modernity
Qualitative
The Metaphysical Apologia At Least Betrayed The Injustice Of The Established Order Through The Incongruence Of Concept And Reality. The Impartiality Of Scientific Language Deprived What Was Powerless Of The Strength To Make Itself Heard And Merely Provided The Existing Order With A Neutral Sign For Itself. Such Neutrality Is More Metaphysical Than Metaphysics.
Reality
Order
Betrayed
Talent Is Perhaps Nothing Other Than Successfully Sublimated Rage.
Talent
Rage
The Sublime Is Only A Step Removed From The Ridiculous.
Sublime
Steps
Ridiculous
Bourgeois Society Is Ruled By Equivalence. It Makes The Dissimilar Comparable By Reducing It To Abstract Quantities. To The Enlightenment, That Which Does Not Reduce To Numbers, And Ultimately To The One, Becomes Illusion.
Numbers
Enlightenment
Doe
To Say 'we' And Mean 'i' Is One Of The Most Recondite Insults.
Mean
Comeback
Insult
Tact Is The Discrimination Of Differences. It Consists In Conscious Deviations.
Differences
Discrimination
Conscious
Anti-semitism Is The Rumour About The Jews.
Jew
Rumours
Anti Semitism
The Power Of Works Of Art Still Continues To Be Secretly Nourished By Imitation... Kitsch
Art
Kitsch
Imitation
Fascism Is Itself Less 'ideological', In So Far As It Openly Proclaims The Principle Of Domination That Is Elsewhere Concealed.
Principles
Fascism
Domination
What The Philosophers Once Knew As Life Has Become The Sphere Of Private Existence And Now Of Mere Consumption, Dragged Along As An Appendage Of The Process Of Material Production, Without Autonomy Or Substance Of Its Own.
Life
Substance
Spheres
The Whole Is The False.
Truth
Whole
None Of The Abstract Concepts Comes Closer To Fulfilled Utopia Than That Of Eternal Peace.
Utopia
Abstract
Fulfilled
The Individual Mirrors In His Individuation The Preordained Social Laws Of Exploitation, However Mediated.
Mirrors
Law
Individual
In The End, Glorification Of Splendid Underdogs Is Nothing Other Than Glorification Of The Splendid System That Makes Them So.
Underdog
Splendid
Ends
The Task Of Art Today Is To Bring Chaos Into Order. Artistic Productivity Is The Capacity For Being Voluntarily Involuntary.
Art
Order
Tasks
It Would Be Advisable To Think Of Progress In The Crudest, Most Basic Terms: That No One Should Go Hungry Anymore, That There Should Be No More Torture, No More Auschwitz. Only Then Will The Idea Of Progress Be Free From Lies.
Lying
Thinking
Ideas
True Thoughts Are Those Alone Which Do Not Understand Themselves.
Kitsch Parodies Catharsis...it Is In Vain To Try To Draw The Boundaries Abstractly Between Aesthetic Fiction And Kitsch's Emotional Plunder. It Is A Poison Admixed To All Art; Excising It Is Today One Of Art's Despairing Efforts.
Art
Emotional
Effort
Not Only Is The Self Entwined In Society; It Owes Society Its Existence In The Most Literal Sense.
Self
Entwined
Existence
Art As A Whole Is A Riddle. Another Way Of Putting This Is To Say That Art Expresses Something While At The Same Time Hiding It.
Art
Poetry
Way
Thought As Such… Is An Act Of Negation, Of Resistance To That Which Is Forced Upon It; This Is What Thought Has Inherited From Its Archetype, The Relation Between Labor And Material. Today, When Ideologues Tend More Than Ever To Encourage Thought To Be Positive, They Cleverly Note That Positivity Runs Precisely Counter To Thought, And That It Takes Friendly Persuasion By Social Authority To Accustom Thought To Positivity.
Running
Positivity
Being Positive
The Objective Tendency Of The Enlightenment, To Wipe Out The Power Of Images Over Man, Is Not Matched By Any Subjective Progress On The Part Of Enlightened Thinking Towards Freedom From Images.
Men
Thinking
Progress
No Harm Comes To Man From Outside Alone: Dumbness Is The Objective Spirit.
Men
Spirit
Harm
He Who Stands Aloof Runs The Risk Of Believing Himself Better Than Others And Misusing His Critique Of Society As An Ideology For His Private Interest.
Running
Believe
Risk
Exuberant Health Is Always, As Such, Sickness Also.
Health
Sickness
Health Care
Rampant Technolgy Eliminates Luxury, But Not By Declaring Privilege A Human Right; Rather, It Does So By Both Raising The General Standard Of Living And Cutting Off The Possibility Of Fulfilment.
Life
Cutting
Luxury
Philosophy That Satisfies Its Own Intention, And Does Not Childishly Skip Behind Its Own History And The Real One, Has Its Lifeblood In The Resistance Against The Common Practices Of Today And What They Serve, Against The Justification Of What Happens To Be The Case.
Philosophy
Real
Practice
The Taboos That Constitute A Man's Intellectual Stature, Often Sedimented Experiences And Unarticulated Insights, Always Operate Against Inner Impulses That He Has Learned To Condemn, But Which Are So Strong That Only An Unquestioning And Unquestioned Authority Can Hold Them In Check.
Strong
Men
Intellectual
People Have So Manipulated The Concept Of Freedom That It Finally Boils Down To The Right Of The Stronger And Richer To Take From The Weaker And Poorer Whatever They Still Have.
People
Stronger
Stills
Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly.
Life
Life Changing
Wrong Life
It Is Not The Office Of Art To Spotlight Alternatives, But To Resist By Its Form Alone The Course Of The World, Which Permanently Puts A Pistol To Men's Heads.
Art
Men
Office
The Gods Look In Pleasure On Penitent Sinners.
Looks
Pleasure
Sinner
He Who Has Laughter On His Side Has No Need Of Proof.
Happiness
Laughter
Joy
Love Is The Ability To Discover Similarities In The Dis-similar. The Audience Has A Right Not To Be Fooled - Even If It Insists On Being Fooled.
Love Is
Ability
Similarity
He Who Stands Aloof Runs The Risk Of Believing Himself Better Than Others And Misusing His Critique Of Society As An Ideology For His Private Interest. While He Gropingly Forms His Own Life In The Frail Image Of A True Existence, He Should Never Forget Its Frailty, Nor How Little The Image Is A Substitute For True Life. Against Such Awareness, However, Pulls The Momentum Of The Bourgeois Within Him.
Running
Believe
Risk
That All Men Are Alike Is Exactly What Society Would Like To Hear. It Considers Actual Or Imagined Differences As Stigmas Indicating That Not Enough Has Yet Been Done; That Something Has Still Been Left Outside Its Machinery, Not Quite Determined By Its Totality.
Men
Differences
Culture
The Need To Let Suffering Speak Is A Condition Of All Truth. For Suffering Is Objectivity That Weighs Upon The Subject
Objectivity
Suffering
Needs
When I Made My Theoretical Model, I Could Not Have Guessed That People Would Try To Realise It With Molotov Cocktails.
Molotov Cocktail
People
Trying
Laughing In The Cultural Industry Is Mockery Of Happiness.
Laughing
Mockery
Industry
To Hate Destructiveness, One Must Hate Life As Well: Only Death Is An Image Of Undistorted Life ... Organic Life Is An Illness Peculiar To Our Unlovely Planet.
Life
Hate
Peculiar
Death Is Imposed Only On Creatures, Not Their Creations, And Has Therefore Always Appeared In Art In A Broken Form: As Allegory.
Art
Broken
Creation
As Naturally As The Ruled Always Took The Morality Imposed Upon Them More Seriously Than Did The Rulers Themselves, The Deceived Masses Are Today Captivated By The Myth Of Success Even More Than The Successful Are. Immovably, They Insist On The Very Ideology Which Enslaves Them. The Misplaced Love Of The Common People For The Wrong Which Is Done To Them Is A Greater Force Than The Cunning Of The Authorities.
Successful
People
Done
It Is Proust's Courtesy To Spare The Reader The Embarrassment Of Believing Himself Cleverer Than The Author.
Believe
Proust
Courtesy
There Is No Right Life In The Wrong One.
As A Constellation, Theoretical Thought Circles The Concept It Would Like To Unseal, Hoping That It May Fly Open Like The Lock Of A Well-guarded Safe-deposit Box: In Response, Not To A Single Key Or A Single Number, But To A Combination Of Numbers
Numbers
Keys
Circles
The Culture Industry Perpetually Cheats Its Consumers Of What It Perpetually Promises. The Promissory Note Which, With Its Plots And Staging, It Draws On Pleasure Is Endlessly Prolonged; The Promise, Which Is Actually All The Spectacle Consists Of, Is Illusory: All It Actually Confirms Is That The Real Point Will Never Be Reached, That The Diner Must Be Satisfied With The Menu.
Real
Promise
Plot
Because Thought Has By Now Been Perverted Into The Solving Of Assigned Problems, Even What Is Not Assigned Is Processed Like A Problem.
Problem
The Culture Industry Not So Much Adapts To The Reactions Of Its Customers As It Counterfeits Them.
Stupidity
Culture
Reactions
Today Self-consciousness No Longer Means Anything But Reflection On The Ego As Embarrassment, As Realization Of Impotence: Knowing That One Is Nothing.
Mean
Reflection
Self
The Blessing That The Market Does Not Ask About Birth Is Paid For In The Exchange Society By The Fact That The Possibilities Conferred By Birth Are Molded To Fit The Production Of Goods That Can Be Bought On The Market.
Blessing
Facts
Doe
The Poor Are Prevented From Thinking By The Discipline Of Others, The Rich By Their Own.
Thinking
Discipline
Rich
It Is One Of The Basic Tenets Of Fascist Leadership To Keep Primary Libidinal Energy On An Unconscious Level So As To Divert Its Manifestations In A Way Suitable To Political Ends.
Political
Energy
Levels
All Testify To The Coercion And Sacrifice Which Culture Imposes On Man. To Rely On Them And Deny The Decline Is To Become Even More Firmly Caught In Its Fatal Coils.
Sacrifice
Men
Culture
The Hardest Hit, As Everywhere, Are Those Who Have No Choice.
Choices
Hardest Hit
Hardest
He Who Integrates Is Lost.
Integrating
Lost
Work While You Work, Play While You Play - This Is A Basic Rule Of Repressive Self-discipline.
Inspirational
Self
Play
The Lie Has Long Since Lost Its Honest Function Of Misrepresenting Reality. Nobody Believes Anybody, Everyone Is In The Know. Lies Are Told Only To Convey To Someone That One Has No Need Either Of Him Or His Good Opinion.
Lying
Believe
Reality
A German Is Someone Who Cannot Tell A Lie Without Believing It Himself.
Lying
Believe
A Pencil And Rubber Are Of More Use To Thought Than A Battalion Of Assistants. To Happiness The Same Applies As To Truth: One Does Not Have It, But Is In It.
Doe
Use
Rubber
Art Is Magic Delivered From The Lie Of Being Truth.
Inspirational
Life
Art
What Can Oppose The Decline Of The West Is Not A Resurrected Culture But The Utopia That Is Silently Contained In The Image Of Its Decline.
Culture
West
Utopia
The Expression If History In Things Is No Other Than That Of Past Torment.
Past
Expression
Torment
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