Theodor W. Adorno: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“… 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

“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

“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)