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“... One of the many things that Adorno admired about Beckett’s writing was its ‘scrupulous meanness’, to borrow Joyce’s description of his own literary style in Dubliners. Beckett’s works take a few sparse elements and permutate them with Irish-scholastic ingenuity into slightly altered patterns. Complete dramas are conjured out of reshuffled arrangements of the same few scraps and leavings ...”

“... assembled around him a brilliant coterie of younger intellectuals, of whom Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno were to become the most eminent. In 1934, the Institute, many of whose members were Jews, transplanted itself to the United States and, still under Horkheimer’s mandarin rule, set up home as an adjunct of Columbia University. In a darkening ...”

“... of Benjamin’s papers – or so it seemed. They were sent to New York. As Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno sifted through them he found many things present, and many things absent. Chief among the missing was the book on Baudelaire that had consumed Benjamin during the last three years of his life (and for which he had interrupted his work on the ...”

“... of the Empress Josephine. Wombats have offered solace where little other solace could be found. Theodor Adorno was a frequent visitor to Frankfurt Zoo after the Second World War. He wrote to the director in 1965: ‘Would it not be nice [or ‘beautiful’: ‘wäre es nicht schön’] if Frankfurt Zoo could acquire a pair of wombats? … From my ...”

“... This method of organisation is reminiscent of the collections of brief, aphoristic essays by Theodor Adorno, although Eric Rhode’s intellectual method is rather less rigorous than Adorno’s. Rhode’s speculation centres on work as a psychiatrist in a puerperal breakdown unit – that is, a place where women ...”

“... Adorno once called his writings Flaschenpost, messages in bottles tossed into the ‘flood of barbarism bursting on Europe’ for the benefit of unknown future readers. The floodwaters have now mercifully receded, and the bottles sporadically wash up on foreign shores, thanks to intrepid translators taking on the challenge of Adorno’s idiosyncratic prose ...”

“... explored by Georg Simmel, György Lukács and Alfred Sohn-Rethel. After Greenberg (not to mention Theodor Adorno), we often think of abstraction as a withdrawal from the modern world, almost a safehouse for art, but the converse is just as true: the modern world became too abstract to represent in the old ways. Dickerman revises Barr dramatically, but ...”

“... Adorno​ is easily parodied. Photos on social media show him frog-like, myopic and bald, denouncing the willing consumption of dross, the personal embodiment of a refusal to ‘let people enjoy things’. Another meme features Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons derisively brandishing a copy of Minima Moralia: ‘You ever sat down and read this thing?’ (In the original, it’s the Bible the reverend is holding up to ridicule ...”

“... the Superchief’ – the cross-country train – ‘to meet all his pals. The Frankfurt school. Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse and Thomas Mann.’ Although Adorno helped Mann with Doctor Faustus, Mann had no especial proximity to the Frankfurt School, so Stone is technically wrong. But the little list is wrong ...”

“... triumph of the philistines could be transcended with a Hegelianised Marx. But nor would he, like Theodor Adorno, resign himself to a cultural criticism that could at best reflect the dreadful fractures; or, like the academic phenomenologists, accept the purely private contemplation of essence. He had a picture of an Absolute, and he thought ...”

“... Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor Adorno, whom Jameson does discuss, is another distinguished figure in this lineage, a philosopher for whom pessimism was more utopian than optimism because it kept faith with a suffering so unbearable that it cried out for redemption. In ...”

“... commitment. The present edition of the Correspondence was co-edited in 1966 by Scholem and Adorno, who keep silent on their own priorities (and who had little in common save their friendship with Benjamin, which was obviously supremely precious to each of them). Their attempts both during his lifetime and after it to wrench Benjamin away from bad ...”

“... closer to the ancient sense of tragedy than the carnage they commemorate is. Besides, as both Theodor Adorno and Slavoj Žižek have argued, to describe the inmates of the Nazi camps as tragic is a moral obscenity. It is as though the use of the terms ascribes a meaning, or even a value, to something that resists all intelligibility. Tragedy ...”

“... to pass through ‘the murky reason’ of capitalist reification, and in Aesthetic Theory (1970) Theodor Adorno stressed how central ‘a mimesis of the hardened’ was to modernist art – but Steyerl takes it to an extreme. Apparently, not only the old proletarian or postcolonial claim to be a subject of history, but also the recent feminist or queer ...”

“... Isou and Guy Debord, Larry Clark’s pictures, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, Theodor Adorno (in particular his great and mordant Minima Moralia), Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this book. Marcus uses as well the reminiscences ...”