What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

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

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.