[...] Occultism is a reflex-action to the subjectification of all meaning, the complement of reification. If, to the living, objective reality seems deaf as never before, they try to elicit meaning from it by saying abracadabra [...]
[...] The occultist draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of commodities: menacingly objectified labor assails him on all sides from demonically grimacing objects. What has been forgotten in a world congealed into products, the fact that it has been produced by men, is split off a…
The tendency to occultism is a symptom of the regression in consciousness. This has lost the power to think the unconditional and to endure the conditional. Instead of defining both, in their unity and difference, by conceptual labor, it mixes them indiscriminately. The unconditional becomes fact, …
[...] there is much that is debatable, and a little that is frankly silly, in Adorno's work [...]
The latter advice is sometimes administered under the viewpoint that one is able to overcome one’s own difficulties by identifying oneself with someone even worse off. Thus even humaneness is treated as a means rather than an end. It is as though finally the sphere of the internal itself were to b…
