Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
Theodor W. Adornowas a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth11 September 1903
CountryGermany
talent rage
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
emotional democracy source
Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
analysis psycho exaggeration
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
stupid quality action
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
art successful thinking
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.
writing self long
Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.
heritage body way
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.
order advice helping
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
cutting differences people
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.
sibling sickness reason
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
culture conformity consciousness
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
tasks powerlessness
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
molotov-cocktail people trying
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
looks pleasure sinner
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.