the positivists – at least those whom Horkheimer characterised thus – suspended facts in aspic and falsely eternalised the status quo

This leitmotif – sadness in intoxication, catastrophe foreshadowed in the very moment of exultation, death figured in birth pangs – is, for Adorno, utterly German

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

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

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

Deracinated, lonely, struggling to make his philosophy understood in a language that he was just mastering, Adorno took succour

Deracinated, lonely, struggling to make his philosophy understood in a language that he was just mastering, Adorno took succour

Perhaps such cartoons are emblematic of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic, and suggest the instability of the existing power relations rather than confirming them.

how the culture industry could be aberrantly, even rebelliously, decoded by its mass consumers and that popular sub-cultures might subvert the culture industry in a form of immanent critique

For Habermas, the inherent aim or telos of language was to reach understanding and bring about consensus