Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.