Theodor Adorno Quotes - Page 7

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• Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

  Theodor Adorno

  Laughing, Mockery, Industry

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Doe, Facts

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Success, Art, Thinking

  "Essays on Music".

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Political

  Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.10, Columbia University Press

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• There is no right life in the wrong one.

  Theodor Adorno

  "The Little Red Book for Children" by Jacob Blumenfeld, www.nytimes.com. May 28, 2017.

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• Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

  Theodor Adorno

  Problem

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.196, Verso

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Real, Promise, Plot

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.139, Verso

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Sacrifice, Men, Culture

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.72, MIT Press

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• Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

  Theodor Adorno

  Differences, Discrimination, Conscious

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.37, Verso

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Writing, Suffering

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Running, Positivity, Being Positive

  Theodor Adorno (2003). “Negative Dialectics”, p.19, Routledge

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• Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

  Theodor Adorno

  Doe, Violence, Enough

  Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno (2002). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.2, Stanford University Press

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Taken, Heart, Successful

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.59, Verso

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• In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

  Theodor Adorno

  Individual, States, Perceive

  Theodor W. Adorno (1978). “Minima Moralia”, p.165, Verso

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• Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

  Theodor Adorno

  Mean, Thinking, Moments

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• The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Order, Tasks

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.222, Verso

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• 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

  Theodor Adorno

  Numbers, Keys, Circles

  Theodor Adorno (2003). “Negative Dialectics”, p.163, Routledge

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• One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

  Theodor Adorno

  Hate, Tradition, Oneself

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.81, Univ of California Press

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• In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

  Theodor Adorno

  Birthday, Being Yourself, Inspire

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• Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

  Theodor Adorno

  Health, Sickness, Health Care

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.77, Verso

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, Mirages, World

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Division Of Labor, Errors, Derivatives

  Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.10, Columbia University Press

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Emotional, Effort

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• No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, Spirit, Harm

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.138, Verso

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Self, Evil, Matter

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.238, Verso

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