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"How now?
That is enough. Now we are to begin."

Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 1918.

"

Bloch: One thing is certainly against it, and once we take care of some misunderstandings, we shall be in agreement here: hope is the opposite of security. It is the opposite of naive optimism. The category of danger is always within it. This hope is not confidence …

Krüger: Hope can be disappointed.

Bloch: Hope is not confidence. If it could not be disappointed, it would not be hope. That is part of it. Otherwise, it would be cast in a picture. It would let itself be bargained down. It would capitulate and say, that is what I had hoped for. Thus, hope is critical and can be disappointed. However, hope still nails a flag on the mast, even in decline, in that the decline is not accepted, even when this decline is still very strong. Hope is not confidence. Hope is surrounded by dangers, and it is the consciousness of danger and at the same time the determined negation of that which continually makes the opposite of the hoped-for object possible."

Excerpt from Bloch’s conversation in “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing”, in The Utopian Functon of Art and Literature - Selected Essays.

"Destined, to see the illuminated,
not the light."

Goethe, Pandora.

"An analysis of the simple surface manifestations of an epoch can contribute more to determining its place in the historical process than judgments of the epoch about itself. As expressions of the tendencies of a given time, these judgments cannot be considered valid testimonies about its overall situation. On the other hand the very unconscious nature of surface manifestations allows fo direct access to the underlying meaning of existing conditions. Conversely, the interpretation of such manifestations is tied to an understanding of these conditions. The underlying meaning of an epoch and its less obvious pulsations illuminate one another reciprocally."

Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament”, in New German Critique, No. 5 (Spring, 1975), pp. 67-76.

"[T]he easy-going person’s suspicion of the “ticket,” is his awareness of the tendency of any rigid formula to degenerate into a mere piece of propaganda.      
Incidentally, the subject senses clearly what was formulated one hundred years ago in Baudelaire’s Diary: that atheism becomes obsolescent in a world the objective spirit of which is essentially areligious. The meaning of atheism undergoes historical changes. What was one of the decisive impulses of the eighteenth century Enlightenment may function today as a manifestation of provincial sectarianism or even as a paranoid system."

Adorno et al. Ch.18, “Some Aspects Of Religious Ideology As Revealed In The Interview Material”, The Authoritarian Personality.

"There are, to be sure, “agnostic” or “atheistic” persons whose persuasions are part and parcel of a universally progressive attitude which holds for minority questions. The actual meaning of this “progressiveness,” however, may vary widely. Whereas anti-religious progressives are definitely opposed to prejudice under present conditions, when it comes to the question of susceptibility to fascist propaganda, it makes all the difference whether they are “ticket thinkers”1 who subscribe wholesale to tolerance, atheism, and what not, or whether their attitude toward religion can be called an autonomous one based on thinking of their own.
Moreover, it may turn out to be an important criterion of susceptibility whether a person is opposed to religion as an ally of repression and reaction, in which case we should expect him to be relatively unprejudiced, or whether he adopts an attitude of cynical utilitarianism and rejects everything that is not “realistic” and tangible, in which case we should expect him to be prejudiced. There also exists a fascist type of irreligious person who has become completely cynical after having been disillusioned with regard to religion, and who talks about the laws of nature, survival of the fittest and the rights of the strong."

Adorno et al. Ch.18, “Some Aspects Of Religious Ideology As Revealed In The Interview Material”, The Authoritarian Personality.

1. “Ticket thinking is possible only because the actual existence of those who indulge in it is largely determined by ‘tickets,’ standardized, opaque, and overpowering social processes which leave to the "individual” but little freedom for action and true individuation.“ 

- Ch.19, “Types and Syndromes”, Ibid.

"Yet a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern, is the last hope for thought. In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly makes everyone answerable, unanswerability alone can call the hierarchy directly by its name. The circulation sphere, whose stigmata are borne by intellectual outsiders, opens a last refuge to the mind that it barters away, at the very moment when refuge really no longer exists. He who offers for sale something unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange."

Adorno, Minima Moralia I.41, “Inside and outside.’ Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (via adornography)

(via adornography)

"The work, the age, and illusion are all struck by a single blow… Music, compressed into a moment, is valid as an eruptive revelation of negative experience. It is closely related to actual suffering.6"

Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music.

6. Cf. Friedrich Holderlin’s ‘Brevity’:
‘Why so brief now, so curt? Do you no longer, then,
Love your art as you did? When in your younger days,
Hopeful days, in your singing
What you loathed was to make an end!
Like my joy is my song. - Who in the sundown’s red
Glow would happily bathe? Gone it is, cold the earth,
And the bird of the night whirs
Down, so close that you shield your eyes’.

"He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things
We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do"

Etheridge Knight, “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” from The Essential Etheridge Knight.

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)