Quotes About Adorno

Hatred toward reifying psychology removes from the living that which would make them other than reified.

Is a man who deals with the absolute not necessarily claiming to be the thinking organ with the capacity to do so, and thus the absolute himself?

And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

As Korzybski said once (violating his own ideal of E-Prime) "Allness is an illness." In fact, the F-scale, invented by Adorno and used to measure fascist tendencies, does show a correlation between heavy use of "allness" statements and the fascist personality. Can you imagine a full page by any fascist (or any red fascist) without reckless generalizations about all members of some scapegoat group?

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant. I think even Adorno's fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz.

Just as Schoenberg, in Adorno's phrase, liberated color as a compositional element in music (Schoenberg was himself a painter)

Adorno treated popular culture as a ghastly trick played by capitalism on the masses.

Edward Said y Theodor W. Adorno, que eran refinados musicólogos, dedicaron páginas muy interesantes al contrapunto y la disonancia, una escritura musical y una forma estética fundadas sobre el contraste más que sobre la armonía tonal.[1] Son excelentes metáforas para definir el papel del intelectual.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to us now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority--seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did.

Pessimism and optimism often come as a pair. In Adorno's case, his deep pessimism about the contemporary social world is coupled with a strong optimism about human potential. In fact, it is the latter which explains his negative views about the contemporary social world and his demand that we should resist and change it

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

Refusing what Adorno called that 'comfort in the uncomfortable' taken by the fantastic, surrealism seeks to reintegrate man into the universe.

Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.

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

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

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

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.