Millennia of enlightenment

"The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it. Panic breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature."
Theodor Adorno, "Theses against occultism", Minima Moralia §151, 1951

Frantisek Kupka - Plans Verticaux I - 1912-3

El Lissitzky - Proun 5 - 1919

Theo van Doesburg - Architectural Analysis - 1923

As Homeland

"The quintessential paradox of the epic resides in the fact that the notion of homeland is opposed to myth - which the fascists would falsely present as homeland."

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944
quoted here

Paul Signac - Mont Saint-Michel. Brume et soleil - 1897

via VISION 

Wenzel Hablik - Wonder of the Sea - 1917

Nicholas Roerich - Nagarjuna conqueror of the Serpent - 1925

Adorno at the beach

"“Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together."

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951

via Marxists on Horrible Couches


"A ceremony in which I had been solemnly installed as head of music in a high school. The repulsive old music teacher, Herr Weber, together with a new music teacher danced in attendance on me. After that, there was a great celebratory ball. I danced with a giant yellowish-brown Great Dane – as a child such a dog had been of great importance in my life. He walked on his hind legs and wore evening dress. I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I."
Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes, via Stalin's Moustache