Abstract

Ever since Walter Benjamin drafted his theses on the philosophy of history, Critical Theory has attempted to theorize beyond the crisis of modernity and its concept of progress as what Adorno mockingly described as a linear trajectory from Adam and Eve to the Atom Bomb, Auschwitz and the Gulag. Today, over half a century after the defeat of Nazism, in the post-communist age of nuclear disarmament, the telos of progress would have to be updated, at best, to a consumerist wasteland punctuated by McDonalds and Disneylands—an immensely less catastrophic but equally debilitating spiritual outcome. Although the Frankfurt School was always…