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Quote by Theodor W. Adorno

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Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

Hermann Broch's Minima Moralia is a collection of philosophical essays that delve into the intricacies of human existence and the challenges of contemporary life. The essays, written in German and translated into English, are characterized by their introspective nature and their exploration of the author's personal experiences. Broch's work is known for its depth of thought and its ability to connect philosophical ideas with everyday life. more

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Theodor W. Adorno

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“In Dialektik der Aufklärung discussions of Kant's ideas feature more than those of any other philosopher. Those discussions, however, rarely attempt to understand the argumentative structure of Kant's Philosophy. Kant's ideas are invoked largely as an aide to gaining greater insight into the broader phenomenon of the evolution of modern reason. The text's treatment of Kant's work is, as a consequence, fragmentary and partial. Neither scholarly accuracy nor systematic reconstruction plays a role in Horkheimer and Adorno's methodology.”

MethodologyKantAdornoHorkheimer
Author:Brian O'Connor
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“What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole — rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted from this concrete whole. It must be a question of political and not only of ‘moral’ argument: that is to say, it must be genuine moral argument, which sees the relations between individual qualities and values and our whole material conditions of existence. Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications.”

PoliticsMoralityButlerAdornoPoltical
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
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“In theory of the authoritarian personality, Adorno et al. (1950) argue that paternal punitiveness creates fear and aggressiveness that encourages individuals to seek certainty and environmental control. This motivation leads people to embrace authority, suppress societal difference, and generally endorse attitudes in line with conservatism.”

ConservatismAdorno
Book:Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World
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“The most direct critique [in the TV series The Prisoner] of what might be called the politics-industry of late capitalism, however, is undoubtedly [the episode] “Free for All”, both the funeral dirge for the national mass party and the unofficial founding charter of the New Left. In many ways, “Free for All” is the logical complement to the visual innovations and luminous mediatic strategies of “A., B. & C.”; whereas the latter identifies the space of the editing room as a new kind of cultural zone, and thus transforms a certain visual recursion into a protomorphic video library of images, the former concentrates not on the image per se but on the messages and texts transmitted by such—or what Derrida would identify as the thematic of a dissemination which is never quite identical with what is being disseminated. But where deconstruction and post-structuralism promptly sealed off this potentially explosive insight behind the specialized ghettos of linguistics or ontological philosophy, and thus unwittingly perpetuated precisely the authoritarian monopoly over theory authorized by the ontologies in the first place, the most insightful intellectuals of the New Left (most notably, Adorno and Sartre) would insist on the necessarily mediated nature of this dissemination, i.e. the fact that the narrative-industries of late capitalism are hardly innocent bystanders in the business of accumulation, but play an indispensable role in creating new markets, restructuring old ones, and ceaselessly legitimating, transacting and regulating the sway of the commodity form over society as a whole.”

DerridaSartre2003AdornoPoststructuralismThe PrisonerNew LeftInformation Uprising
Book:The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995
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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.”

PhilosophyMetaphysicsAdorno
Book:Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
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