Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Intelligence is a moral category.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.