Christoph

“What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling "leitmotifs", it is Adorno: in his devastating analysis of Wagner, he tries to demonstrate how Wagnerian leitmotifs serve as fetishized elements of easy recognition and thus constitute a kind of inner-structural commodification of his music. It is then a supreme irony that traces of this same fetishizing procedure can be found in Adorno's own writings. Many of his provocative one-liners do effectively capture a profound insight or at least touch on a crucial point (for example: "Nothing is more true in pscyhoanalysis than its exaggeration"); however, more often than his partisans are ready to admit, Adorno gets caught up in his own game, infatuated with his own ability to produce dazzlingly "effective" paradoxical aphorisms at the expense of theoretical substance (recall the famous line from Dialectic of Englightment on how Hollywood's ideological maniuplation of social reality realized Kant's idea of the transcendental constitution of reality). In such cases where the dazzling "effect" of the unexpected short-circuit (here between Hollywood cinema and Kantian ontology) effectively overshadows the theoretical line of argumentation, the brilliant paradox works precisely in the same manner as the Wagnerian leitmotif: instead of serving as a nodal point in the complex network of structural mediation, it generates idiotic pleasure by focusing attention on itself. This unintended self-reflexivity is something of which Adorno undoubtedly was not aware: his critique of the Wagnerian leitmotif was an allegorical critique of his own writing. Is this not an exemplary case of his unconscious reflexivity of thinking? When criticizing his opponent Wagner, Adorno effectively deploys a critical allegory of his own writing - in Hegelese, the truth of his relation to the Other is a self-relation.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

“Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar

“I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections on the French Revolution

“Ever since my school days I've always taken a scunner to businessmen. They'll do anything for money. They are, after all, what they used to be called in the good old days; the very dregs of society." My master, with a businessman right there in front of him, indulges in tactlessness.

"Oh, have a heart. They arent always like that. Admittedly there's a certain coarseness about them; for there's no point in even trying to be a businessman unless your love for money is so absolute that you're ready to accompany it on the walk to a double suicide. For money, believe you me, is a hard mistress and none of her lovers are let off lightly. As a matter of fact, I've just been visiting a businessman and according to him, the only way to succeed is to practice the 'triangle technique': try to escape your obligations, annihilate your kindly feelings, and geld yourself of the sense of shame. Try-an-geld. You get it? Jolly clever, don't you think?"

"What awful fathead told you that?”
― Soseki Natsume