The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason. Theodor Adorno More Quotes by Theodor Adorno More Quotes From Theodor Adorno He who matures early lives in anticipation. Theodor Adorno early-lifeanticipation Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture. Theodor Adorno becomingrealityart In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact. Theodor Adorno doefactsart As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers Theodor Adorno circleskeysnumbers 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 humanityculturepeople 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 sickhealthopposites 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 takensuccessfulheart The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic. Theodor Adorno warcultureideas The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations. Theodor Adorno secretcultureworld What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness. Theodor Adorno miragesmenworld Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness. Theodor Adorno selfmatterevil 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 perspectivelightphilosophy The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary. Theodor Adorno tasksorderart What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline. Theodor Adorno utopiawestculture Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness. Theodor Adorno mockeryindustrylaughing Dissonance is the truth about harmony. Theodor Adorno dissonanceharmony There is no right life in the wrong one. Theodor Adorno The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous. Theodor Adorno ridiculoussublimesteps One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. Theodor Adorno oneselftraditionhate 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 riskrunningbelieve
