All The World's Not A Stage.

Words Of The Jargon Sound As If They Said Something Higher Than What They Mean.

But He Who Dies In Despair Has Lived His Whole Life In Vain.

Cultural Criticism Finds Itself Faced With The Final Stage Of The Dialectic Of Culture And Barbarism. To Write Poetry After Auschwitz Is Barbaric. And This Corrodes Even The Knowledge Of Why It Has Become Impossible To Write Poetry Today. Absolute Reification, Which Presupposed Intellectual Progress As One Of Its Elements, Is Now Preparing To Absorb The Mind Entirely. Critical Intelligence Cannot Be Equal To This Challenge As Long As It Confines Itself To Self-satisfied Contemplation.

The Usual Reproach Against The Essay, That It Is Fragmentary And Random, Itself Assumes The Givenness Of Totality And Suggests That Man Is In Control Of This Totality. The Desire Of The Essay, Though, Is Not To Filter The Eternal Out Of The Transitory; It Wants, Rather, To Make The Transitory Eternal.

The Blessing That The Market Does Not Ask About Birth Is Paid For In The Exchange Society By The Fact That The Possibilities Conferred By Birth Are Molded To Fit The Production Of Goods That Can Be Bought On The Market.