Deracinated, lonely, struggling to make his philosophy understood in a language that he was just mastering, Adorno took succour
What has long shocked some readers of the Frankfurt School is the apparent blitheness with which they elided Hitlerian fascism, Stalinist communism and Roosevelt’s America
he implies that when it came to the Nazis, they didn't really care about the capitalism element as much as they cared about their own personal lives being more difficult (as Jewish intellectuals)
This leitmotif – sadness in intoxication, catastrophe foreshadowed in the very moment of exultation, death figured in birth pangs – is, for Adorno, utterly German
to name something as a crime is not just to announce its prohibition, but to confer on that act a libidinal cathexis: transgression is sexy
on suicide
Benjamin’s writings in the last eight years of his life were examples of Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, reducing history to rubble the better to find a path through its ruins
