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.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

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

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.