History Does Not Merely Touch On Language,

Suffering Has As Much Right To Be Expressed As A Martyr Has To Cry Out. So It May Have Been False To Say That Writing Poetry After Auschwitz Is Impossible.

History Does Not Merely Touch On Language, But Takes Place In It.

The Usual Reproach Against The Essay, That It Is Fragmentary And Random, Itself Assumes The Givenness Of Totality And Suggests That Man Is In Control Of This Totality. The Desire Of The Essay, Though, Is Not To Filter The Eternal Out Of The Transitory; It Wants, Rather, To Make The Transitory Eternal.

Technology Is Making Gestures Precise And Brutal, And With Them Men.

The Idea That After This War Life Will Continue 'normally' Or Even That Culture Might Be 'rebuilt' - As If The Rebuilding Of Culture Were Not Already Its Negation - Is Idiotic.