Posts tagged: excerpts

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  Mike Davis on becoming a Marxist

  After losing a coveted niche in the trucking industry, I started UCLA as an adult freshman, attracted by rumors of a high-powered seminar on Capital led by Bob Brenner in the History Department.

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  Pro domo nostra by Theodor Adorno

  No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bear within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production.

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  Oyer the hills by Theodor Adorno

  When we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath.

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  Morality and style by Theodor Adorno

  The logic of the day, which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech. Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

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  The bad comrade by Theodor Adorno

  In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. Now that they, officials and re­cruits, have stepped visibly out of my dream and dispossessed me of my past life and my language, I no longer need to dream of them. In Fascism the nightmare of childhood has come true.

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  Coming clean by Theodor Adorno

  To find out whether a person means us well there is one almost infallible criterion: how he passes on unkind or hostile remarks about us.

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  Vice-President by Theodor Adorno

  The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

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  Cat out of the bag by Theodor Adorno

  Solidarity was once intended to make the talk of brotherhood real, by lifting it out of generality, where it was an ideology, and reserving it for the particular, the Party, as the sole representative in an antagonistic world of generality.

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  There is nothing innocuous left by Theodor Adorno

  All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and par­ticipation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains.

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  Theodor Adorno on the culture industry's mimetic regression

  The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counter­feits them. It drills them in their attitudes by behaving as if it were itself a customer.

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  Theodor Adorno on our relationship to our parents

  Unpolitical attempts to break out of the bourgeois family usually lead only to deeper entanglement in it, and it sometimes seems as if the fatal germ-cell of society, the family, were at the same time the nurturing germ-cell of uncompromising pursuit of another.

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  Promise me this, my child

  Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality.