Theodor W. Adorno Quotes: 90 Quotes on Freedom, Love, and Art's Influence in Society

Works

Aesthetic Theory

Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno: 90 quotes 108 likes

Famous Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”

Theodor W. Adorno

“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”

Theodor W. Adorno

“freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”

Theodor W. Adorno

“Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.”

Theodor W. Adorno

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

Theodor W. Adorno

“Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it. … The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success. … In the service of success they renounce that insubordinate character which was theirs.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 273

Theodor W. Adorno Quotes about the world

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Metaphysics: Concept and Problems

“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. … 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 W. Adorno

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 10

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

Theodor W. Adorno book Aesthetic Theory

Source: Aesthetic Theory

“Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 10
Minima Moralia (1951)

“In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes “nature” to them.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 12

“If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment — twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Philosophy of Modern Music (1973) as translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster

Theodor W. Adorno Quotes about thinking

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

“The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Culture Industry Reconsidered (1963)

“Being, in whose name Heidegger’s philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him—as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness—just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 9

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Denken, das offen, konsequent und auf dem Stand vorwärtsgetriebener Erkenntnis den Objekten sich zuwendet, ist diesen gegenüber frei auch derart, daß es sich nicht vom organisierten Wissen Regeln vorschreiben läßt. Es kehrt den Inbegriff der in ihm akkumulierten Erfahrung den Gegenständen zu, zerreißt das gesel1schaftliche Gespinst, das sie verbirgt, und gewahrt sie neu.
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 13

“We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 45

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Der des Jargons Kundige braucht nicht zu sagen, was er denkt, nicht einmal recht es zu denken: das nimmt der Jargon ihm ab und entwertet den Gedanken.
Source: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity] (1964), p. 9

Theodor W. Adorno: Trending quotes

“Always with Beckett there is a technical reduction to the extreme. … But this reduction is really what the world makes out of us …that is the world has made out of us these stumps of men … these men who have actually lost their I, who are really the products of the world in which we live.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Immer von Beckett ist eine technische Reduktion bis zum äußersten. … Aber diese Reduktion ist ja wirklich das was die Welt aus uns macht … das heißt die Welt aus uns gemacht diese Stümpfe von Menschen also diese Menschen die eigentlich ihr ich ihr verloren haben die sind wirklich die Produkte der Welt in der wir leben.
"Beckett and the Deformed Subject" (Lecture)

Men , World

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

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Die Glorifizierung der prächtigen underdogs läuft auf die des prächtigen Systems heraus, das sie dazu macht.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 7
Minima Moralia (1951)

Theodor W. Adorno

Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
Perennial fashion — Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith, ISBN 0094602204

Star , Sense

Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Section 10
Culture Industry Reconsidered (1963)
Context: 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.

Sense

“There is no right life in the wrong one.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life

Depressing , Good Morning , Life

“Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 290

Children

“The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He … is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 1
Minima Moralia (1951)
Context: The son of well-to-do parents who … engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. … The real resistance lies elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He … is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. 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.

Money , Pleasure , Way , Exercises

“The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Section 14
Culture Industry Reconsidered (1963)
Context: The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives.

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Personality

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”

Theodor W. Adorno

“Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime”

Theodor W. Adorno

Art

“People know what they want because they know what other people want.”

Theodor W. Adorno

People

“Dissonance is the truth about harmony.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Truth

“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Kunst ist Magie, befreit von der Lüge, Wahrheit zu sein.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 143
Minima Moralia (1951)

Truth , Lie , Art

“To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home”

Theodor W. Adorno

Home

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

Theodor W. Adorno

Hate

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 6

Knowledge , Freedom

“The concept of positivity in itself, in abstracto, has become part and parcel of the ideology today. … Critique has started to become suspect, regardless of its content.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 23

Parting

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Furchtbares hat die Menschheit sich antun müssen, bis das Selbst, der identische, zweckgerichtete, männliche Charakter des Menschen geschaffen war, und etwas davon wird noch in jeder Kindheit wiederholt.
E. Jephcott, trans., p. 26
Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment] (1944)

Childhood

“The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Nun gilt für die kürzeste Verbindung zwischen zwei Personen die Gerade, so als ob sie Punkte wären.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 20
Minima Moralia (1951)

People

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Section 14
Culture Industry Reconsidered (1963)

“The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Die fast unlösbare Aufgabe besteht darin, weder von der Macht der anderen, noch von der eigenen Ohnmacht sich dumm machen zu lassen.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 34
Minima Moralia (1951)

“Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. … It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 18

People , Feeling , Imagination , Sense

“… to promote precisely that manner of intellectual freedom that has no place in the regnant philosophical movements”

Theodor W. Adorno

Sie möchte formal und material ebenjener Gestalt geistiger Freiheit helfen, die in den herrschenden philosophischen Richtungen keine Stel1e hat.
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 13

Freedom

“The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general. … Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 20

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Die Berufung auf Wissenschaft, auf ihre Spielregeln, auf die Alleingültigkeit der Methoden, zu denen sie sich entwickelte, ist zur Kontrollinstanz geworden, die den freien, ungegängelten, nicht schon dressierten Gedanken ahndet und vom Geist nichts duldet als das methodologisch Approbierte. Wissenscahaft,das Medium von Autonomie, ist in einen Apparat der Heteronomie ausgeartet.
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 12

Science

“Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.”

Theodor W. Adorno

“Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” (1959)

Memory , Time , Past

“To be sure, exchange-value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods. For in the world of commodities this realm appears to be exempted from the power of exchange, to be in an immediate relationship with the goods, and it is this appearance in turn which alone gives cultural goods their exchange-value. But they nevertheless simultaneously fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 279

World , Way , Appearance

“Negative dialectics … does not presuppose the identity of being and thought, nor does it culminate in that identity. Instead it will attempt to articulate the very opposite, namely the divergence of concept and thing, subject and object.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Negative Dialectics

Negative Dialektik ... handelt sich um den Entwurf einer Philosophie, die nicht den Begriff der Identität von Sein und Denken voraussetzt und auch nicht in ihm terminiert, sondern die gerade das Gegenteil, also das Auseinanderweisen von Begriff und Sache, von Subjekt und Objekt, und ihre Unversöhntheit, artikulieren will.
Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 6

“The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 283

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 6

Science

“The conflicts that tear society apart resemble the distinction between the concept and the particular facts subordinated to it. … Whatever refuses to abide by the unity imposed by the principle of dominion manifests itself not as something indifferent to that principle, but as an infringement of logic: as a contradiction.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 169

Tear , Indifference

“Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Perennial fashion — Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith

Art , Reality , Falseness

“Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.”

Theodor W. Adorno book The Authoritarian Personality

The Authoritarian Personality (1950), p. 976, co-written with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford

Fear , Democracy

“In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Perennial fashion — Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith,

Girl , Star , Sense , Light

“Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity] (1964), p. 9

“Hegel … destroyed the illusion of the subject’s being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. … However, … we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 16

Pain , Youth , Question , Effort

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

"Perennial Fashion — Jazz" (1978), Prisms, p. 129, as translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (1981)

“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 W. Adorno

Falsch am Positivismus ist, daß er die nun einmal gegebene Arbeitsteilung, die der Wissenschaften von der gesellschaftlichen Praxis und die innerhalb der Wissenschaft, als Maß des Wahren supponiert und keine Theorie erlaubt, welche die Arbeitsteilung selbst als abgeleitet, vermittelt durchsichtig machen, ihrer falschen Autorität entkleiden könnte.
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 10

Truth , Error , Science , Falseness

“In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind—“Geist”—was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.”

Theodor W. Adorno

as quoted in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press: 1977), p. 187

Silence , Learning

“When I speak of 'negative dialectics' not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishization of the positive.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 18

“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 that sense the character of the jargon would be quite formal: it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Was Jargon sei und was nicht, darüber entscheidet, ob das Wort in dem Tonfall geschrieben ist, in dem es sich als transzendent gegenüber der eigenen Bedeutung setzt; ob die einzelnen Worte aufgeladen werden auf Kosten von Satz, Urteil, Gedachtem. Demnach wäre der Charakter des Jargons überaus formal: er sorgt dafür, daß, was er möchte, in weitem Maß ohne Rücksicht auf den Inhalt der Worte gespürt und akzeptiert wird durch ihren Vortrag.
Source: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity] (1964), p. 8

Sense

“Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 290

Feeling

“Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of the free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, … but only for the dead God?”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Wer will es schließlich selbst den allerfreiesten Geistern verübeln, wenn sie nicht mehr für eine imaginäre Nachwelt schreiben, deren Zutraulichkeit die der Zeitgenossen womöglich noch überbietet, sondern einzig für den toten Gott?
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 133
Minima Moralia (1951)

God , Dead

“What appears as the positive is essentially the negative, i. e. the thing that is to be criticized.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 18

Appearance

“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Theodor W. Adorno

[N]ach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch...
Full quote: Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft [Cultural Criticism and Society] (1951); this quote is more famously known in the forms "No poetry after Auschwitz" or "There can be no poetry after Auschwitz." Sometimes a more specific proscription is made, such as "No lyric poetry after Auschwitz." The influence of the underlying idea can be seen in such derivative statements as "No history after Auschwitz."