Staatsvrouw, boven de partijen staan, de kiezer houdt niet van bekvechten - je hoort de spindoctor in ieder woord terug

“Facts of murder and even genocide […] are the themes of preference of this obscene language of denial. [E]ven this denial retains an element of sadistic sweetness: the denial itself becomes a kind of ‘second murder’, eliminating even the undesired facts of murder from the world.”

A theory of the libidinal investment in the language of disinformation, lies, denial – and one of the rare occasions Anders draws on psychoanalytic terminology

“Facts of murder and even genocide […] are the themes of preference of this obscene language of denial. [E]ven this denial retains an element of sadistic sweetness: the denial itself becomes a kind of ‘second murder’, eliminating even the undesired facts of murder from the world.”

Anders calls this function of disinformation the “seduction to repression post festum”: the enabling of a “repression of contents that had once already become ‘conscious’”, facilitating the desire “to undo one’s own state of having-actually already understood something”

An outline for a genealogy of the category of progress from 1940/41 (discussed in his letters with Arendt and included in the collected correspondence between them)

Anders traces this back to the fantasy of a self independent from the world: a genealogy that passes through alchemical attempts at forging an artificial human being (homunculus) through the bourgeois ideal of the self-made man and, finally, the “I” of German Idealism – a “transcendental homunculus”

“Unreadable rhythm betrayed the socially marginalised who no longer spoke to anyone, not even to themselves; unmotivated inversions became the symptom of a bad consciousness; the wrongly inserted clause in a government address the circumstantial evidence for an excuse, and he predicted betrayal.”

Anders to Adorno: “Through the absence of fermatae [musical pauses] in your texts, through the principled avoidance of new paragraphs, you resentfully disallow the reader to breathe. […] You seem to want to punish your reader for always being inferior to you, for basically being the wrong reader.”

The correspondence between Bloch and Anders – this quote is from the letter of August 12, 1959

Bloch recognises the impetus of Anders’ “book of mourning” on the antiquated human being while pointing out that this mourning “is not [his] own”: “precisely because it testifies, as an inverted utopia, to that which does not age – not because it was never there but because it is not yet”

Minima Moralia: "In the hasteful sleepless night, duration causes unendurable dread. The human being's life becomes a moment [...] waking to its own futility in face of the bad eternity of time itself. [...] What is revealed in such contraction of hours is the reverse of time fulfilled."