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Theodor Adorno

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 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.
— Theodor Adorno knowledge
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.
— Theodor Adorno art
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.
— Theodor Adorno world
Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.
— Theodor Adorno freedom
Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
— Theodor Adorno democracy
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
— Theodor Adorno poetry
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
— Theodor Adorno people
Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
— Theodor Adorno art
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 Adorno war
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 wihout 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 Adorno happiness
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
— Theodor Adorno time
Immer von Beckett ist eine technische Reduktion bis zum
— Theodor Adorno
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 Adorno love
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
— Theodor Adorno society
The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.
— Theodor Adorno change
The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.
— Theodor Adorno art
Furchtbares hat die Menschheit sich antun m
— Theodor Adorno die
Die traurige Wissenschaft, aus der ich meinem Freunde einiges darbiete, bezieht sich auf einen Bereich, der f
— Theodor Adorno die
F
— Theodor Adorno
The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
— Theodor Adorno love
Die Glorifizierung der pr
— Theodor Adorno die
Das Zentrum der geistigen Selbstdisziplin als solcher ist in Zersetzung begriffen. Die Tabus, die den geistigen Rang eines Menschen ausmachen, oftmals sedimentierte Erfahrungen und unartikulierte Erkenntnisse, richten sich stets gegen eigene Regungen, die er verdammen lernte, die aber so stark sind, da
— Theodor Adorno art
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 Adorno war
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
— Theodor Adorno life
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
— Theodor Adorno war
The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
— Theodor Adorno people
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
— Theodor Adorno power
All the world's not a stage.
— Theodor Adorno world
isdelivered from the lie of being .
— Theodor Adorno live
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 Adorno science
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.
— Theodor Adorno purpose
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.
— Theodor Adorno truth
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 Adorno culture
Published in Critical Models (1998)
— Theodor Adorno
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 Adorno philosophy
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 Adorno philosophy
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 Adorno life
Traditional philosophy’s claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.
— Theodor Adorno philosophy
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
— Theodor Adorno truth
The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature, the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to be nature, primordial experience.
— Theodor Adorno nature
In both positivism and Heidegger—at least in his later work—speculation is the target of attack. In both cases the thought that autonomously raises itself above the facts through interpreting them and that cannot be reclaimed by them without leaving a surplus is condemned for being empty and vain concept-mongering.
— Theodor Adorno work
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 Adorno philosophy
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 Adorno truth
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 Adorno truth
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 naivet
— Theodor Adorno power
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 Adorno science
... to promote precisely that manner of intellectual freedom that has no place in the regnant philosophical movements
— Theodor Adorno freedom
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 Adorno knowledge
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
— Theodor Adorno language
The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
— Theodor Adorno fun
Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
— Theodor Adorno words
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 Adorno words
The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.
— Theodor Adorno sin
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 Adorno think
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
— Theodor Adorno words
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
— Theodor Adorno you
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
— Theodor Adorno action
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
— Theodor Adorno men
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
— Theodor Adorno work
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
— Theodor Adorno strength
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
— Theodor Adorno art
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
— Theodor Adorno present
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
— Theodor Adorno man
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
— Theodor Adorno society
There is no love that is not an echo.
— Theodor Adorno love
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
— Theodor Adorno power
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
— Theodor Adorno truth
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
— Theodor Adorno peace
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
— Theodor Adorno self
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
— Theodor Adorno time
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
— Theodor Adorno choices
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
— Theodor Adorno self
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
— Theodor Adorno society
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
— Theodor Adorno thought
The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.
— Theodor Adorno power
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
— Theodor Adorno live
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
— Theodor Adorno ego
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
— Theodor Adorno
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
— Theodor Adorno violence

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