Theodor W. Adorno citations (90 citations, Page 2)

Theodor W. Adorno: 90 citations 0 J'aime

Theodor W. Adorno: Citations en anglais

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

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Theodor W. Adorno livre 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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

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

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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

“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.”

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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.”

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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

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

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Theodor W. Adorno

“Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” (1959)

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno livre 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.”

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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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

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

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

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

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Theodor W. Adorno livre The Authoritarian Personality

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

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

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

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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?”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

“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.”

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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.”

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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

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

“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.”

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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

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno livre Minima Moralia

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

“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.”

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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

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

“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.”

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

“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?”

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Theodor W. Adorno livre 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)

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

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Theodor W. Adorno

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

“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

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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."