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.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

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

He who integrates is lost.

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.

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.