• ˚➶ ｡˚ V Deterritorialization Era ❀ ˚｡ ➶˚

“But the opening ceremonies of the Third Reich also heralded its death. In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, written in American exile, Adorno, that virtuoso of immanent critique, wrote: ‘No one who observed the first months of National Socialism could fail to perceive the moment of mortal sadness, of half-knowing surrender to perdition, that accompanied the manipulated intoxication, the torchlight processions and the drum-beating.’7 This leitmotif – sadness in intoxication, catastrophe foreshadowed in the very moment of exultation, death figured in birth pangs – is, for Adorno, utterly German, and it had an historic parallel. In 1870, he notes, as the German Empire was born in victorious military campaign, Wagner wrote Götterdämmerung, ‘that inflamed spirit of the nation’s own doom … In the same spirit, two years before the Second World War, the German people were shown on film the crash of their Zeppelin at Lakehurst. Calmly, unerringly, the ship went on its way, then suddenly dropped like a stone.’8 Like Benjamin, Adorno reimagined history as breaking through what the former called empty, homogeneous time, establishing resonant constellations of disasters or hopes, assembling them into allegories of their own demise.”
― Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

“the task of the propagandist is that of inventing goal symbols which serve the double function of facilitating adoption and adaptation. The symbols must induce acceptance spontaneously…. It follows that the management ideal is control of a situation not by imposition but by divination…. The propagandist takes it for granted that the world is completely caused but that it is only partly predictable….[107]”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the very reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes it impossible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences. It is as though he had a story to tell of another planet, for the status of the inmates in the world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or dead, is such that it is as though they had never been born. Therefore all parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The image of the punishing father was now projected into the authority of the state. Fromm even contended that the criminal justice system did not reduce the crime rate; rather, its function was to intensify oppression and crush opposition. These thoughts are echoed in our time by the American activist and professor Angela Davis, a one-time student of Marcuse. What she and other leftist intellectuals call the ‘prison-industrial complex’, a tawdry if tacit alliance between capitalism and a structurally racist state, results not in a reduction in the crime rate but in profits for business and a withdrawal of democratic rights for the US’s overwhelmingly black and hispanic inmates.”
― Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School