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Things that create the appearance of deep emotion – The sound of your voice when you’re constantly blowing your runny nose as you talk.

Plucking your eyebrows.

(Finally on my reading break after days of being sleep deprived, so hopefully I’ll get through this the next week.)

Perhaps the strict and pure concept of art is applicable only to music, while great poetry or great painting – precisely the greatest – necessarily brings with it an element of subject-matter transcending aesthetic confines, undissolved in the autonomy of form. The more profound and consequential an aesthetic theory, the more inappropriate it becomes to such works as the major novels of the nineteenth century.

In “Wolf as grandmother,” Adorno contests the arguments of those who defend cinema as “popular art” against “the norms of the autonomous work.” According to him, they’re mistaken in comparing the film, with its “lying stereotypes” and its “barbaric cruelty that divides the world into good and evil,” with the greatest fairy-tales, “which have the stepmother dance to death in red-hot iron

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The bad comrade.* – In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows. If the bourgeois class has from time immemorial nurtured the dream of a brutal national community, of oppression of all by all; children already

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All the little flowers. – The pronouncement, probably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only possessions which no-one can take from us, belongs in the storehouse of impotently sentimental consolations that the subject, resignedly withdrawing into inwardness, would like to believe the very fulfilment that he has given up. In setting up his own archives, the subject seizes his own stock of

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Expiry. – Sleepless night: so there is a formula for those tormented hours, drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time’s empty passing. But truly terrifying are the sleepless nights when time seems to contract and run fruitlessly through our hands. We put out the light in the hope of long hours of rest that can bring succour. But as our thoughts run wild the

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Part Three 😮‍💨

On American hotels:

The division of labour, the system of automatized facilities, has the result that no-one is concerned for the client’s comfort. No-one can divine from his expression what might take his fancy, for the waiter no longer knows the menu, and if he makes suggestions of his own he must be prepared to face rebuke for having overstepped his limits. No-one hastens to serve the guest, however long

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To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He

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Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage, the capacity to convert energies once intensified beyond measure to destroy recalcitrant objects, into the concentration of patient observation, so keeping as tight a hold on the secret of things, as one had earlier when finding no peace until the quavering voice had been wrenched from the mutilated toy. Who has not seen on the face of a man

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Adorno’s views on race are even more irritating than his views on gender:

Mélange. – The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang. It lays itself open to the simple refutation of the senses, and the most compelling anthropological proofs that the Jews are not a race will, in the event of a pogrom, scarcely alter the fact that the totalitarians know

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(A perceptive, though negative passage I want to comment on.)

Since I set eyes on him.* – The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in woman its own corrective, and shows itself through this

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In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, rearranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he

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Part Two.

De gustibus est disputandum. – Even someone believing himself convinced of the non-comparability of works of art will find himself repeatedly involved in debates where works of art, and precisely those of highest and therefore incommensurable rank, are compared and evaluated one against the other. The objection that such considerations, which come about in a peculiarly compulsive way, have their

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Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression, and to oblige the analyst, display indiscriminate enthusiasm for the trashy film, the expensive but bad meal in the French restaurant, the serious drink and the love making taken like medicine as ‘sex’. Schiller’s dictum that

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The Health unto Death. – … No science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind. There is reason to suppose that these characteristics are laid down at even earlier phases of childhood development than are neuroses: if the latter

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Protection, help and counsel. – Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem. He lives in an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him, however flawless his knowledge of trade-union organizations or the automobile industry

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How nice of you, Doctor.* – There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent ‘How lovely!’

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On to Part 5. (Part 4 was entirely concerned with human experience and values, and Spinoza’s conclusions are relatively uncontroversial today… All the stuff about God in the first half seems to have been mostly scaffolding…)

In 3P4, Spinoza claims that “no thing can be destroyed through an external cause” (which is “evident through itself”). He then claims, in 3P5, that “things are of a contrary nature, that is, cannot be in the same subject, insofar as one can destroy the other.” “Dem.: For if they could agree with one another, or be in the same subject at once, then there could be something in the same subject…

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Rare things – A son-in-law who’s praised by his wife’s father. Likewise, a wife who’s loved by her mother-in-law.

A pair of silver tweezers that can actually pull out hairs properly.

A retainer who doesn’t speak ill of his master.

A person who is without a single quirk. Someone who’s superior in both appearance and character, and who’s remained utterly blameless throughout his long…

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Shōnagon finds it “unsuitable” that snow falls on the houses of the common folk. “Moonlight shining into such houses is also a great shame.”

Finally done with Part 2! I have neglected everything else…

After reading up on it, I’ve changed my mind about whether “God insofar as he is affected by finite modifications ad infinitum” and “God insofar as he is infinite” are in conflict with each other. Spinoza seems to hold that even while substance (or God) is indivisible, substance’s modes are divisible. His demonstrations of substance’s indivisibility, in 1P12 and 1P13, don’t apply to modes since they depend on…

In P28, Spinoza shows, by referencing previous propositions, that whatever has been determined has been so determined by God, and that a finite thing couldn’t have been produced by the absolute nature of an attribute of God, nor by an attribute of God affected by a modification which is eternal and infinite. It must, he concludes, have been produced by an attribute of God affected by a modification which is…

Things that make your heart beat fast – A sparrow with nestlings. Going past a place where tiny children are playing. Lighting some fine incense and then lying down alone to sleep. Looking into a Chinese mirror that’s a little clouded. A fine gentleman pulls up in his carriage and sends in some request.

To wash your hair, apply your makeup and put on clothes that are well-scented with incense.

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I was looking through a book of Van Gogh’s paintings in my college library and someone had gone through every painting marking them as “OK” or “vals,” taping their own photos or—horror of horrors!—cutting out the book’s reproductions, scribbling marginal comments in Dutch, English, and French—or simply “hee hee!” or “hou hou!”—and underlining sentences.



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Footnote: “Only cats of fourth and fifth rank were permitted in the Emperor’s palace.”