Theodor Adorno Quotes on Knowledge
Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966) and the earlier Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, with Max Horkheimer) develop the most ambitious twentieth-century critique of the cognitive forms of advanced industrial society. The framework treats "identity-thinking" — the systematic subsumption of the particular under the abstract universal that the Enlightenment generalized into the dominant form of knowledge — as itself the philosophical correlate of the social domination it claims to dissolve, and the corresponding programme of negative dialectics seeks to do justice to the non-identical particular through the careful arrangement of concepts in cognitive constellations whose total form circumscribes the object without dissolving its specificity. The Aesthetic Theory (1970) extends the analysis to the knowledge proper to the modernist work of art.
Quotes
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Attributed to Theodor Adorno:
“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.”
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“On high culture and popular culture, in a letter to Walter Benjamin (18 March 1936)”
Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up. -
“Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.”
The Authoritarian Personality (1950), p. 976, co-written with Else Frenkel-Brunswik , Daniel Levinson , and Nevitt Sanford -
“Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch”
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. | Full quote: Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. | Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft [ Cultural Criticism and Society ] (1951); this quote -
“When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.”
As quoted in The Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1973) by M Jay, p. 279. -
“In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon heari”
Perennial fashion — Jazz , as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith, ISBN 0094602204