Sublime

Just what was most protected is cruelly requisitioned and exposed.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

The practical aim of Adorno’s critical theory is to equip individuals with the capacities that would enable them to resist integration into the fateful homogenizing institutions of capitalist society.

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.

Even the neurotic oddities and deformities of our elders stand for character, for something humanly achieved, in comparison to pathic health, infantilism raised to the norm.

The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such.

Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s theory is self-consciously aporetic; it throws a little light on a situation from which there is no way out. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, by contrast, holds up the ideal of free rational discussion between equals as one that, though presently unfulfilled, is nonetheless worthy of pursuit.

There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite.