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Theodor W. Adorno Books

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Aesthetics

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Current of Music

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“If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure. He alone loves who has the strength to hold fast to love.”

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Book:Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
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“If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whisky, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure.”

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Book:Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
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“[...] one cannot understand a music – if it is a highly organized music – as long as one perceives only individual beautiful passages in it, which may even become a virtual wall blocking one's access to an understanding of the work itself. If you add up an important musical work for yourself from such beautiful passages, what you are really making of this work is nothing but a potpourri of itself – or you are moving it in the direction of a smash hit.”

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Book:Aesthetics
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“Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself.”

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Book:Negative Dialectics
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“I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies—preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time—had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.”

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Book:The Culture Industry
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“In truth, the best works of art are by no means the most perfect ones, but rather those whose imperfection bears the most profound witness to their fundamental contradictions. That is why those works, whose success takes its measure from the failure of the world, assume something helpless, frail and disorganized under the gaze of contemporary cultural administration.”

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Book:Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata
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“Совет, что художникам лучше бы следовало не так много думать - а ведь всякая свобода безусловно приводит их к размышлению, - не более чем адаптированный и выпотрошенный массовой культурой траур по утраченной наивности.”

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Book:Philosophy of New Music
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“Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.”

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Book:The Culture Industry
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“Philosophy has the curious characteristic that, although itself entrapped, locked inside the glasshouse of our constitution and our language, it is nevertheless able constantly to think beyond itself and its limits, to think itself through the walls of its glasshouse. And this thinking beyond itself, into openess – that, precisely, is metaphysics.”

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Book:Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
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“It would be rash […] to assume that the dwindling of family authority in present society automatically constitutes an element of progress and liberation. On the one hand, the individual’s most productive powers flourish in a living and direct confrontation with his family, and these powers are now deprived of their target, so to speak; on the other hand, the immediately palpable domination of the individual by society, without any intermediary, is so profound that in a deeper layer of its consciousness, the child growing up ‘authorityless’ is probably even more fearful than it ever was in the good old days of the Oedipus complex. It is precisely this side of the situation that is often overlooked by progressive educators.”

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Book:Current of Music
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“Divertir-se significa que não devemos pensar, que devemos esquecer a dor, mesmo onde ela se mostra. Na base do divertimento planta-se a impotência. É, de fato, fuga, mas não, como pretende, fuga da realidade perversa, mas sim do ultimo grão de resistência que a realidade ainda pode haver deixado. A libertação prometida pelo entretenimento é a do pensamento como negação.”

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Book:Indústria Cultural e Sociedade
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“Gostaria de dizer que a abordagem de Ser e Tempo [...] não é talvez em momento algum mais ideológica do que quando o seu autor procura compreender a morte a partir de um "esboço do ser-todo do ser-aí", uma tentativa pela qual suprime o carácter absolutamente inconciliável da experiência da vida com a morte tal como se nos apresenta com o declínio definitivo das religiões positivas. Heidegger procura, dessa forma, salvar as estruturas da experiência da morte como se fossem estruturas do ser-aí, do próprio ser humano, mas estas estruturas, tal como ele as descreve, só existem no mundo positivo da teologia, em virtude da esperança positiva da ressurreição. Heidegger não compreende que, ao secularizar essa estrutura, que em todo o caso ele assume tacitamente na sua obra, esses conteúdos teológicos não são simplesmente decompostos, mas que, sem eles, essa mesma experiência deixa de ser possível. Aquilo que censuro realmente nessa forma de metafísica é a tentativa de se apropriar sub-repticiamente sem teologia das possibilidades da experiência que foram teologicamente colocadas.”

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Book:Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
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“اگرچه وظیفۀ او (جادوگر) ایفای نقش و تشخص بخشیدن بود، هرگز بر خلاف انسان مدرن مدعی نبود که از روی تصویرِ قدرتی نامرئی خلق شده است، همان انسانی که به لطف این ادعا شکارگاهِ ساده و کوچکش به عالمِ وحدت‌یافته که در آن چیزی جز طعمه وجود ندارد بدل می‌شود.”

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Book:Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
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