Talent Is Perhaps Nothing Other Than Successfully

The Task Of Art Today Is To Bring Chaos Into Order. Artistic Productivity Is The Capacity For Being Voluntarily Involuntary.

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. It Is As If The Class From Which Independent Intellectuals Have Defected Takes Its Revenge, By Pressing Its Demands Home In The Very Domain Where The Deserter Seeks Refuge.

Cultural Criticism Finds Itself Faced With The Final Stage Of The Dialectic Of Culture And Barbarism. To Write Poetry After Auschwitz Is Barbaric. And This Corrodes Even The Knowledge Of Why It Has Become Impossible To Write Poetry Today. Absolute Reification, Which Presupposed Intellectual Progress As One Of Its Elements, Is Now Preparing To Absorb The Mind Entirely. Critical Intelligence Cannot Be Equal To This Challenge As Long As It Confines Itself To Self-satisfied Contemplation.

Fascism Is Itself Less 'ideological', In So Far As It Openly Proclaims The Principle Of Domination That Is Elsewhere Concealed.

A Pencil And Rubber Are Of More Use To Thought Than A Battalion Of Assistants. To Happiness The Same Applies As To Truth: One Does Not Have It, But Is In It.