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The Sublime Is Only A Step Removed From The Ridiculous.

-Theodor Adorno

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The Sublime Is Only

Theodor Adorno

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The Sublime Is Only A Step Removed From The Ridiculous.

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Happiness Is Obsolete: Uneconomic.

All The World's Not A Stage.

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.

On Their Way Toward Modern Science Human Beings Have Discarded Meaning. The Concept Is Replaced By The Formula, The Cause By Rules And Probability.

The Task Of Art Today Is To Bring Chaos Into Order.

Proletarian Language Is Dictated By Hunger. The Poor Chew Words To Fill Their Bellies.

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.

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.

The First And Only Principle Of Sexual Ethics: The Accuser Is Always In The Wrong.

History Does Not Merely Touch On Language, But Takes Place In It.

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.

The Human Is Indissolubly Linked With Imitation: A Human Being Only Becomes Human At All By Imitating Other Human Beings.

Imitating Others

Lies Are Told Only To Convey To Someone That One Has No Need Either Of Him Or His Good Opinion.

All Satire Is Blind To The Forces Liberated By Decay. Which Is Why Total Decay Has Absorbed The Forces Of Satire.

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.

When All Actions Are Mathematically Calculated, They Also Take On A Stupid Quality.

Quality Is Decided By The Depth At Which The Work Incorporates The Alternatives Within Itself, And So Masters Them.

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.

For A Man Who No Longer Has A Homeland, Writing Becomes A Place To Live.

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.

None Of The Abstract Concepts Comes Closer To Fulfilled Utopia Than That Of Eternal Peace.

The Enlightenment Has Always Aimed At Liberating Men From Fear And Establishing Their Sovereignty. Yet The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant.

It Is Proust's Courtesy To Spare The Reader The Embarrassment Of Believing Himself Cleverer Than The Author.

He Who Has Laughter On His Side Has No Need Of Proof.

In Anglo-saxon Countries The Prostitutes Look As If They Purveyed, Along With Sin, The Attendant Pains Of Hell.

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.

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.

The Jargon Of Authenticity ... Is A Trademark Of Societalized Chosenness, ... Sub-language As Superior Language.

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

The Sublime Is Only A Step Removed From The Ridiculous.

Insane Sects Grow With The Same Rhythm As Big Organizations. It Is The Rhythm Of Total Destruction.

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.

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.

Dissonance Is The Truth About Harmony.

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.

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.

Very Evil People Cannot Really Be Imagined Dying.

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.

He Who Integrates Is Lost.

Art Is Magic Delivered From The Lie Of Being Truth.

Intolerance Of Ambiguity Is The Mark Of An Authoritarian Personality.

The Law Of The Innermost Form Of The Essay Is Heresy

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.

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.

But He Who Dies In Despair Has Lived His Whole Life In Vain.

In The End Indignation Over Kitsch Is Anger At Tis Shameless Revelling In The Joy Of Imitation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In The Age Of The Individual's Liquidation, The Question Of Individuality Must Be Raised Anew.

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.

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.

Knowledge, Which Is Power, Knows No Limits, Either In Its Enslavement Of Creation Or In Its Deference To Worldly Masters.

He Who Has Loved And Who Betrays Love Does Harm Not Only To The Image Of The Past, But To The Past Itself.

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.

Tact Is The Discrimination Of Differences. It Consists In Conscious Deviations.

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.

Anti-semitism Is The Rumour About The Jews.

The Good Man Is He Who Rules Himself As He Does His Own Property: His Autonomous Being Is Modelled On Material Power.

The Empirical Usability Of The Sacred Ceremonial Words Makes Both The Speaker And Listener Believe In Their Corporeal Presence.

Love Is The Power To See Similarity In The Dissimilar.

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.

The Whole Is The False.

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.

It Is Barbaric To Write Poetry After Auschwitz.

Every Work Of Art Is An Uncommitted Crime.

The Specific Is Not Exclusive: It Lacks The Aspiration To Totality.

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.

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.

Modernity Is A Qualitative, Not A Chronological, Category.

Writing Poetry After Auschwitz Is Barbaric.

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.

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

Advancing Bourgeois Society Liquidates Memory, Time, Recollection As Irrational Leftovers Of The Past.

Tenderness Between People Is Nothing Other Than Awareness Of The Possibility Of Relations Without Purpose.

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.

Dialectic Thought Is An Attempt To Break Through The Coercion Of Logic By Its Own Means.

The Important Thing Is Not The Planning Of An Index Verborum Prohibitorum Of Current Noble Nouns, But Rather The Examination Of Their Linguistic Function.

The Expression If History In Things Is No Other Than That Of Past Torment.

The Basest Person Is Capable Of Perceiving The Weaknesses Of The Greatest, The Most Stupid, The Errors In The Thought Of The Most Intelligent.

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.

No Harm Comes To Man From Outside Alone: Dumbness Is The Objective Spirit.

An Emancipated Society, On The Other Hand, Would Not Be A Unitary State, But The Realization Of Universality In The Reconciliation Of Differences.

Words Of The Jargon Sound As If They Said Something Higher Than What They Mean.

The Darkening Of The World Makes The Irrationality Of Art Rational: Radically Darkened Art.

Love You Will Find Only Where You May Show Yourself Weak Without Provoking Strength.

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.

Jazz Is The False Liquidation Of Art - Instead Of Utopia Becoming Reality It Disappears From The Picture.

Only A Humanity To Whom Death Has Become As Indifferent As Its Members, That Has Itself Died, Can Inflict It Administratively On Innumerable People.

The Inadequacy Of The Purely Purpose-oriented Form Is Revealed For What It Is-a Monotonous, Impoverished Boring Practicality.

People Know What They Want Because They Know What Other People Want.

Even The Loveliest Dream Bears Like A Blemish Its Difference From Reality, The Awareness That What It Grants Is Mere Illusion.

Rigour And Purity In Assembling Words, However Simple The Result, Create A Vacuum.

One Must Have Tradition In Oneself, To Hate It Properly.

Everybody Must Have Projects All The Time. The Maximum Must Be Extracted From Leisure ... The Whole Of Life Must Look Like A Job, And By This Resemblance Conceal What Is Not Yet Directly Devoted To Pecuniary Gain.

Not Only Is The Self Entwined In Society; It Owes Society Its Existence In The Most Literal Sense.

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.

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

There Is No True Life Within A False Life.

Only Thought Which Does Violence To Itself Is Hard Enough To Shatter Myth.

The Forms Of Art Reflect The History Of Man More Truthfully Than Do Documents Themselves.

Exuberant Health Is Always, As Such, Sickness Also.

Estrangement Shows Itself Precisely In The Elimination Of Distance Between People.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Laughing In The Cultural Industry Is Mockery Of Happiness.

True Thoughts Are Those Alone Which Do Not Understand Themselves.

Thinking No Longer Means Anymore Than Checking At Each Moment Whether One Can Indeed Think.

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.

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.

Because Thought Has By Now Been Perverted Into The Solving Of Assigned Problems, Even What Is Not Assigned Is Processed Like A Problem.

In His State Of Complete Powerlessness The Individual Perceives The Time He Has Left To Live As A Brief Reprieve.

The Task Of Art Today Is To Bring Chaos Into Order. Artistic Productivity Is The Capacity For Being Voluntarily Involuntary.

Everything That Has Ever Been Called Folk Art Has Always Reflected Domination.

The Straight Line Is Regarded As The Shortest Distance Between Two People, As If They Were Points.

The Power Of The Culture Industry's Ideology Is Such That Conformity Has Replaced Consciousness

The Culture Industry Not So Much Adapts To The Reactions Of Its Customers As It Counterfeits Them.

In The End, The Writer Is Not Even Allowed To Live In His Writing.

The Power Of Works Of Art Still Continues To Be Secretly Nourished By Imitation... Kitsch

The Individual Mirrors In His Individuation The Preordained Social Laws Of Exploitation, However Mediated.

The Thought That Murders The Wish That Fathered It Will Be Overtaken By The Revenge Of Stupidity

Freedom Would Be Not To Choose Between Black And White But To Abjure Such Prescribed Choices.

Black And White

The Recent Past Always Presents Itself As If Destroyed By Catastrophes.

Death Is Imposed Only On Creatures, Not Their Creations, And Has Therefore Always Appeared In Art In A Broken Form: As Allegory.

The Bourgeois ... Is Tolerant. His Love For People As They Are Stems From His Hatred Of What They Might Be.

The Joke Of Our Time Is The Suicide Of Intention.

What Human Beings Seek To Learn From Nature Is How To Use It To Dominate Wholly Both It And Human Beings. Nothing Else Counts.

There's Not Much Need For Prophets Who Are In Synch With Their Society.

The Dialectic Cannot Stop Short Before The Conceptsof Health And Sickness, Nor Indeed Before Their Siblings Reason And Unreason.

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.

The Splinter In Your Eye Is The Best Magnifying-glass Available.

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.

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.

Technology Is Making Gestures Precise And Brutal, And With Them Men.

So The Experience Of Death Is Turned Into That Of The Exchange Of Functionaries, And Anything In The Natural Relationship To Death That Is Not Wholly Absorbed Into The Social One Is Turned Over To Hygiene. In Being Seen As No More Than The Exit Of A Living Creature From The Social Combine, Death Has Been Domesticated: Dying Merely Confirms The Absolute Irrelevance Of The Natural Organism In Face Of The Social Absolute.

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.

The Man For Whom Time Stretches Out Painfully Is One Waiting In Vain, Disappointed At Not Finding Tomorrow Already Continuing Yesterday.

Vague Expression Permits The Hearer To Imagine Whatever Suits Him And What He Already Thinks In Any Case.

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.

Art Is Permitted To Survive Only If It Renounces The Right To Be Different, And Integrates Itself Into The Omnipotent Realm Of The Profane.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In The Abstract Conception Of Universal Wrong, All Concrete Responsibility Vanishes.

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.

The Noiseless Din That We Have Long Known In Dreams, Booms At Us In Waking Hours From Newspaper Headlines.

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.

Advice To Intellectuals: Let No-one Represent You.

There Is No Love That Is Not An Echo.

The Poor Are Prevented From Thinking By The Discipline Of Others, The Rich By Their Own.

When I Made My Theoretical Model, I Could Not Have Guessed That People Would Try To Realise It With Molotov Cocktails.

Molotov Cocktail

In Many People It Is Already An Impertinence To Say 'i'.

If Time Is Money, It Seems Moral To Save Time, Above All One's Own, And Such Parsimony Is Excused By Consideration For Others. One Is Straight-forward.

In The End, Glorification Of Splendid Underdogs Is Nothing Other Than Glorification Of The Splendid System That Makes Them So.

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.

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.

Fascism Is Itself Less 'ideological', In So Far As It Openly Proclaims The Principle Of Domination That Is Elsewhere Concealed.

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.

The Gods Look In Pleasure On Penitent Sinners.

Philosophy ... Must Not Bargain Away Anything Of The Emphatic Concept Of Truth.

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.

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.

To Say 'we' And Mean 'i' Is One Of The Most Recondite Insults.

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.

Auschwitz Begins Wherever Someone Looks At A Slaughterhouse And Thinks: They’re Only Animals.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Intelligence Is A Moral Category.

Art Is The Social Antithesis Of Society, Not Directly Deducible From It.

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.

Art Respects The Masses, By Standing Up To Them For What They Could Be, Rather Than Conforming To Them In Their Degraded State.

Horror Is Beyond The Reach Of Psychology.

Everything About Art Has Become Problematic; Its Inner Life, Its Relation To Society, Even Its Right To Exist.

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.

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.

Truth Is Inseperable From The Illusory Belief That From The Figures Of The Unreal One Day, In Spite Of All, Real Deliverance Will Come.

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.

Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly.

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.

Domination Delegates The Physical Violence On Which It Rests To The Dominated.

Physical Violence

Fear And Destructiveness Are The Major Emotional Sources Of Fascism, Eros Belongs Mainly To Democracy.

Of The World As It Exists, It Is Not Possible To Be Enough Afraid.

Today Self-consciousness No Longer Means Anything But Reflection On The Ego As Embarrassment, As Realization Of Impotence: Knowing That One Is Nothing.

Talent Is Perhaps Nothing Other Than Successfully Sublimated Rage.

The Need To Let Suffering Speak Is A Condition Of All Truth. For Suffering Is Objectivity That Weighs Upon The Subject

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.

The Most Powerful Person Is He Who Is Able To Do Least Himself And Burden Others Most With The Things For Which He Lends His Name And Pockets The Credit.

If Across The Atlantic The Ideology Was Pride, Here It Is Delivering The Goods.

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.

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.

Work While You Work, Play While You Play - This Is A Basic Rule Of Repressive Self-discipline.

Life Has Changed Into A Timeless Succession Of Shocks, Interspaced With Empty, Paralysed Intervals.

Life Has Become The Ideology Of Its Own Absence.

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