…the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims

If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true—if it is to be true today, in any case—it must also be thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims. (365)

…actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience

The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz, and the visible disaster of the first nature was insignificant in comparison with the second, social one, which defies human imagination as it distills a real hell from human evil…actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience. (361-362)

Measured by it, the dialectical state of facts would be the plain logical contradiction

Subjectivity, thinking itself, is called explicable not by itself but by facts, especially by social facts; but the objectivity of cognition in turn is said not to exist without thinking, without subjectivity. Such paradoxicality springs from the Cartesian norm of explication: reasons for what follows—for what follows logically, at least—have to be found in what goes before. This norm is no longer compulsory. Measured by it, the dialectical state of facts would be the plain logical contradiction. (140)

The nonidentical is not to be obtained directly

The nonidentical is not to be obtained directly, as something positive on its part, nor is it obtainable by a negation of the negative. This negation is not an affirmation itself, as it is to Hegel. The positive which, to his mind, is due to result from the negation has more than its name in common with the positivity he fought in his youth. To equate the negation of the negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification; it is the formal principle in its purest form. (158)

the affirmation of power

In the darkened sky of the existence doctrine, however, no star is shining anymore. Existence is sanctified without the sanctifying factor. Of the eternal idea in which entity was to share, or by which it was to be conditioned, nothing remains but the naked affirmation of what is anyway—the affirmation of power. (131)

…to extinguish it in the very negation of negation that will not become a positing

It is a critique of the fact that critique itself, contrary to its own tendency, must remain within the medium of the concept. It destroys the claim of identity by testing and honoring it; therefore, it can reach no farther than that claim. The claim is a magic circle that stamps critique with the appearance of absolute knowledge. It is up to the self-reflection of critique to extinguish that claim, to extinguish it in the very negation of negation that will not become a positing. (406)

Represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought

Represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought. The smallest intra-mundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is helplessly isolated and explodes its identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen. There is solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall. (406)