Theodor W. Adorno: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 123

Love , Way , Imagination

“Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Zartheit zwischen Menschen ist nichts anderes als das Bewußtsein von der Möglichkeit zweckfreier Beziehungen.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 20
Minima Moralia (1951)

People

“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

Thinking

“When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.”

Theodor W. Adorno

As quoted in The Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1973) by M Jay, p. 279.

People

“Bourgeois sport [wants] to differentiate itself strictly from play. Its bestial seriousness consists in the fact that instead of reamaining faithful to the dream of freedom by getting away from purposiveness, the treatment of play as a duty puts it among useful purposes and thereby wipes out the trace of freedom in it. This is particularly valid for contemporary mass music. It is only play as a repetition of prescribed models, and the playful release from responsibility which is thereby achieved does not reduce at all the time devoted to duty except by transferring the responsibility to the models, the following of which one makes into a duty for himself.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 296

Faith , Dreams , Music , Sport

“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 18
Minima Moralia (1951)

Life

“The jargon makes it seem that … the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.”

Theodor W. Adorno

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

“Philosophy … should not imagine that specialized work in epistemological theory, or whatever else prides itself on being research, is actually philosophy. Yet a philosophy forswearing all of that must in the end be irreconcilably at odds with the dominant consciousness. Nothing else raises it above the suspicion of apologetics. 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.”

Theodor W. Adorno

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

Imagination , History

“Traditional philosophy’s claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 7

“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

People , World , Nature

“Music for entertainment … seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 271

People , Music , Communication , Silence

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

Theodor W. Adorno

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 7

Truth

“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."

“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

“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

“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

“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

World , Law , Music , Time

“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

“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)

Marriage , World , Communication , Idea

“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

Knowledge , Thinking , Sense