The concept of life in its abstraction…is inseparable from what is repressive and ruthless, truly deadly and destructive…Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. Its antidote is a sickness aware of what it is, a curbing of life itself. Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay. If, however, sickness is rejected for the sake of life, then hypostasized life, in its blind separation from its other moment, becomes the latter, destructiveness and evil, indolence and braggadocio. To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.
Theodor Adorno, “For Anatole France” from Minima Moralia, pg. 77-78
Theodor Adorno, “For Anatole France” from Minima Moralia, pg. 77-78