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

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.

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.

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.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.