Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.