A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
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.
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.
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’.
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.
People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy.
Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.
He who integrates is lost.
That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.
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.