Theodor Adorno Quotes - Page 8

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• The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

  Theodor Adorno

  Believe, Sacred, Usability

  Theodor Adorno (2013). “The Jargon of Authenticity”, p.19, Routledge

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• The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.

  Theodor Adorno

  Real, Promise, Plot

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.139, Verso

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• All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

  Theodor Adorno

  Sacrifice, Men, Culture

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.72, MIT Press

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• The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Self, Law

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.19, Verso

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• In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

  Theodor Adorno

  Writing, Ends

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.87, Verso

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• The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

  Theodor Adorno

  Heritage, Body, Way

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• The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy

  Theodor Adorno

  Law, Form, Essays

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• 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

  Art, Survival, Different

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.132, MIT Press

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• Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

  Theodor Adorno

  Dream, Reality, Differences

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• The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

  Theodor Adorno

  Philosophy, Light, Perspective

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• 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. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

  Theodor Adorno

  Revenge, Home, Independent

  "Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschadigten Leben (Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life)". Book by Theodor Adorno (1951) translated by E. Jephcott (§ 1), 1974.

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• They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

  Theodor Adorno

  Historical, Might, Wealth

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.148, Univ of California Press

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• In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

  Theodor Adorno

  Individual, States, Perceive

  Theodor W. Adorno (1978). “Minima Moralia”, p.165, Verso

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• The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

  Theodor Adorno

  Sibling, Health, Sickness

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.73, Verso

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• 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

  Important, Noble, Nouns

  Theodor W. Adorno (1973). “The Jargon of Authenticity”, p.6, Northwestern University Press

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• The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

  Theodor Adorno

  Past, Expression, Torment

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.49, Verso

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• Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

  Theodor Adorno

  People, Humanity, Culture

  Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann (2003). “Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader”, p.89, Stanford University Press

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Jargon, Determined, Individual

  Theodor W. Adorno (2003). “Adorno”, p.5, Psychology Press

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• In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

  Theodor Adorno

  Dream, Vegetables, Outcomes

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.49, Verso

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• The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, Thinking, Progress

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• If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

  Theodor Adorno

  Pride, Goods, Ideology

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.196, Verso

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• The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

  Theodor Adorno

  Taken, Heart, Successful

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.59, Verso

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• And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.

  Theodor Adorno

  Health, Opposites, Sick

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.60, Verso

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• The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

  Theodor Adorno

  Looks, Pleasure, Sinner

  Theodor W. Adorno (1978). “Minima Moralia”, p.174, Verso

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• Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Reality, Becoming

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.132, MIT Press

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