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

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.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

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

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.