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

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

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.