Helen Lewis at The New Statesman:

When the anarchist Louise Michel was tried by the French government after the collapse of the Paris Commune in May 1871, she ­demanded to be executed. “Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little lump of lead, I demand my share,” she told them. “If you are not cowards, kill me!”

The council of war refused and instead sent her to New Caledonia, an archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Her revolutionary fervour remained undimmed during her seven years there; she supported the local Kanak people in their rebellion against the French in 1878.

Michel’s imprisonment and exile are the subject of Paul Mason’s new play, Divine Chaos of Starry Things, whose title comes from Victor Hugo’s poem about her. Performed at the tiny White Bear Theatre, it has just six actors (four women playing French prisoners and two men playing Kanaks) and minimal scenery and staging. A few scraps of fabric underpin the narrative – the women remove their formal outerwear as time passes on the sweaty island and climb the hill every year to wave a red flag to the men in the next-door prison camp.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

Photographs, and photographs of photographs; cameras, and cameras pointing at cameras; models, and models posing as models: A kind of brooding over these—and the conundrum of whether, by distancing and framing portions of reality, photography thereby deconstructs itself—typifies a technical formalism that has become widespread of late. Artists in this cohort are not so much concerned with making photographs as with examining them in their manifold and contradictory capacities as objects (sheets of chemically treated paper), manifestations of social praxis (ways of relating to other people and the environment), and immaterial entities circulating freely in the world (as digital information).


Rather than offering viewers immediate access to information about the world or simply how some given portion of it looks, artists working in this mode see the techniques, conventions, and history of photography as an interpretive grid that makes some things harder to see and other things easier. They consider that their work can only reflect on the world by looping back on itself—by rendering visible its photographic character as a pre-interpretation of the world that it claims merely to show. Only by pinpointing the fact of its own fictiveness does this kind of work gesture toward some significant aspect of the world beyond. That’s how it happens that an artist like Paul Mpagi Sepuya, whose photographs are as insistently reflexive and formally refined as any being made today, can nonetheless proclaim that in his work, “the sum total of content lies outside of the conversation about art. It’s better served by gossip and friendship.”


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M John Harrison in The Guardian:

A quiet panic afflicts the male characters in Hemingway’s 1927 collection Men Without Women, that touchstone in the development of both Hemingwayism and the short story. Men should never put themselves in the position where they can lose someone, a bereaved Italian soldier warns Hemingway’s long-running protagonist Nick Adams: instead, a man “should find things he cannot lose”. Ninety years later, Haruki Murakami’s men without women have come to the same conclusion, polishing it into a postmodern lifestyle.Kafuko, a middle-aged character actor, used to be married. Throughout their life together, his wife had affairs, but he loved her, and though it was painful – “his heart was torn and his insides were bleeding” – he never dared ask her what deficiency she was tryng to make up for in their relationship; now it’s too late. In another story, jazz fan Kino blunders in on his wife having sex with his best friend and, apparently more embarrassed than wounded, decides to begin life again as a bar owner in another part of town. He equips the perfect establishment, then sits in it playing his favourite albums and waiting for his first customer, a policy guaranteed to draw in spirits as unquietly defeated as himself.

By the end of the title story, its narrator has concluded, in appropriately Hemingwayesque fashion, that when you lose one woman, you lose them all: you become, somehow, the representative of the category “men without women”, alone but not singular. To be trapped by that “relentlessly rigid plural” is to live at the heart of loneliness. But something about this rhetorical sleight of hand reveals loneliness as a coping strategy in itself. Kafuko the actor, for instance, performs his way into his exchanges with others, taking on the qualities of the person he needs to be in the situation he’s in – but he learned the technique in childhood, long before he got into the profession, long before his wife died. “Why don’t you have any friends?” his new driver asks him one day, in a traffic jam on the Tokyo metropolitan expressway. It’s an interesting question.

More here.

Lily Saint in Africa is a Country:

You might expect unbridled enthusiasm from literature professors for the “One Book, One New York” campaign, a project that claims to be “the largest community reading program in the country.” It champions literature, seeing it as uniquely positioned to bring people together; capable of building connections across difference in a world in which the arts hold an increasingly tenuous foothold. Given U.S. PresidentDonald Trump’s recent proposal to scrap both the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts, this is a particularly timely moment for such a project. And the election of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah, by those New Yorkers who took time to vote for it, suggests a desire for books that reflect the city’s pro-immigrant, cosmopolitan tendencies, as do most of the other works in competition with Americanah. Yet a closer look at the winning choice points to some less than savory truths about the place of African fiction and African writers in the United States and the “Global North.”

The four other books nominated indicate a preference for books concerned with themes of racial, ethnic, and class diversity. Apart from the anomalous choice of the 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, the three others (Junot Diaz’s 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Ta Nahesi-Coates’ more recent Between the World and Me, and 2016’s Booker Prize winner The Sellout by Paul Beatty) suggest a preference for works with clear and current political and racial thematic emphases. This is New York, the subway ads seem to indicate, even while Trump’s photo-ops at the White House depict a more homogeneous United States. The multiculturalism celebrated by New York City depends, regrettably, on well-worn forms of dispossession, re-entrenching global inequality even as its marketing campaign claims to resist it. Julie Menin, the Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, purportedly promoted the “One Book, One New York” program in order to enhance the stature and financial clout of NYC-based publishing houses. This is all very well for Penguin Random House, Americanah’s publisher, and “the world’s largest English-language general trade book publisher,” but what Menin and others ignore as they help fill corporate coffers, is how such behemoths destroy non-Western publishing houses, much as Amazon has destroyed small booksellers, making it impossible for them to compete either for the best African writers’ books, or for the wealth that works like Americanah produce.

More here.

Robert Burton in Aeon:

When mulling over possible reasons for the alarming nastiness associated with the recent presidential election in the United States, I am reminded of my grade-school bully. Handsome, often charming, superbly athletic, the bully (let’s call him Mike) would frequently, usually without clear provocation, kick, punch and shove other classmates. Fortunately, for reasons not apparent at that time, he never bothered me.

Fast-forward 20 years. After his long-time girlfriend left him for another man, Mike stalked and stabbed to death the new boyfriend. Shortly following his murder conviction and incarceration, I ran into Mike’s father, who spontaneously blurted out: ‘Did you know that Mike had severe dyslexia?’

As soon as his father spoke, I recalled Mike’s great difficulty reading aloud in class. As he stumbled over simple words, the other kids fidgeted, snickered and rolled their eyes. In return, they got bullied. I can still sense my classmates’ fear of Mike even as I cringe at the knowledge that, in our collective ignorance, we were at least partially responsible for his outbursts. What if we had understood that Mike’s classroom performance was a neurological handicap and not a sign of general stupidity, laziness or whatever other pejoratives of cognition we threw at him? Would our acceptance of his disability have changed the arc of Mike’s life? Of ours?

Since running into his father, I’ve often wondered if Mike’s outbursts and bullying behaviour might offer an insight into the seeming association between anger, extremism and a widespread blatant disregard for solid facts and real expertise.

More here.

Corey Robin in The Guardian:

A wise psychoanalyst once told me: “Stop looking at what you’re saying, look at what you’re doing.” If only journalists applied the same rule to Donald Trump.

On Friday night, Trump complained that he was being stymied by “archaic rules” in the House of Representatives and the Senate and warned “maybe at some point we’re going to have to take those rules on”.

Aaron Blake, a journalist at the Washington Post, was quick to diagnose the statement:

Now Trump is talking about consolidating his power … Whether this is just him [Trump] blowing off steam or signaling what lies ahead, it’s significant. Because it suggests a president, yet again, who doesn’t agree with his own powers being limited or even questioned. Remember when senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned?” This is more of that kind of attitude. He wants more power – and he wants it quickly. It’s not difficult to connect this to his past admiration for authoritarian leaders, and these comments are likely to give Democrats (and even some in the GOP establishment) plenty of heartburn. This is a demonstrated pattern for him, for all the reasons listed at the top of this post.

This kind of narrative of Trump the authoritarian is popular among journalists such as Vox’s Ezra Klein and academics such as Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It’s the background mood music of a lot of liberal commentary in the US. But it depends on paying almost exclusive attention to what Trump says rather than what he does.

If Trump were actually serious about consolidating his power, he might start by, oh, I don’t know, consolidating his power.

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Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

If you didn't know anything about climate science, about the Earth's temperature, about carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases, but you wanted to, how would you go about doing it? You'd begin by constructing a plan for how you'd accurately scientifically investigate the problem. You'd think about the data you'd need to collect and how you'd gather it. You'd think about the measurements you'd want to make and how to make them. You'd think about the sources of error and how to account for them: how to properly calibrate your data from all over the world and from many different time periods. And then you'd bring it together, under one enormous framework, to try and draw a scientifically robust conclusion.

Your first step would be to go out and try to measure the heat content of the planet. You'd measure the temperature of the air where you are, and you'd attempt to do it all over the world. The continents would be the easiest, and then you'd go after the oceans. The sea-level temperature would be low-hanging fruit, and then you'd have to go beyond the obvious to measure the heat trapped in the upper atmosphere and in the deeper waters of the seas. You'd try and measure it everywhere today, but also to reconstruct what it was in the past, going as far back as you can.

Because you can't go back in time and take measurements that you weren't there to take, you'd then look for proxies, or things you can measure directly that can give you information about past temperature. You'd discover that the science of dendroclimatology — or inferring past climates and temperatures from the properties of trees that were growing at the time — can give you lots of robust information.

More here.

Lorna Scott Fox at the Times Literary Supplement:

The artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) broke her ties so thoroughly with Britain that, until recently, only a cult following in the country knew her name. Two years ago, however, Tate Liverpool brought her playful, arcane visions back to the land she bolted from in 1937, and among the celebratory offerings of this centenary year are a new biography, a new edition of her short stories, and a volume of scholarly essays. And yet much remains unknown about a woman whose life was like a comet, with its bright early flare, tailing off into mystery. Critics pore over the same handful of statements and one letter. It is usually claimed that she lived in Mexico from 1943 onwards, but inThe Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington Joanna Moorhead locates her in the United States from 1968 to the mid-1990s. There are few recorded sightings over those twenty-five years; she hid like one of her imaginary creatures in the shadowy symbolic spaces of her art. Marina Warner first met her in a basement burrow in 1980s New York. The Mexican home Carrington eventually returned to was, belying its exotic surroundings, chill and dark. Back in 1945 she had described herself as “an old Mole who swims beneath the cemeteries”. Whether a surrealist or a pataphysical priestess, she was subterranean rather than celestial.

The misfit daughter of a Lancashire textile magnate, Carrington fed her imagination with words and pictures early on. The sumptuous world of Victorian storybooks is reflected in her teenage paintings of fairies, demons and Sisters of the Moon.

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Virginia Hotchkiss at nonsite:

The most preferable time to do an action is either first thing in the morning when participants can stand in the street long enough to block rush hour traffic, which ups the chances of arrest and news coverage, or at 11am after the press have concluded their morning staff meetings and are ready to head out of the office. Weekend actions make it possible to draw more participants, but make it more difficult to draw the media. These are generally the key concerns around which we plan a demonstration.

The politics that inform these actions, where not entirely opaque, are based on a semi-spiritual belief that the right recipe of symbolism, passion, and powerful visuals will inspire significant political action that will alter the course of this or that unjust policy or state of affairs. Organizers want to inspire the people who view their protest images on their phones. To this end, they reach for clichéd tropes of earlier social movements to galvanize the imagination of onlookers. They sing the familiar songs, sometimes with their own lyrics added in, and steel themselves in the unimpeachable credentials of social justice saints of yore. In one characteristic overreach, an organizer told a crowd that they were the “Harriet Tubmans” of the environmental movement, freeing people from the slavery of fossil fuels. Historical inspiration belongs in these fights, but an equation with Tubman exposes the delusion of demonstrators who believe they are in the midst of a powerful social movement instead of a tired ritual.

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David A. Bell at Dissent:

And then there is the likely next president. Emmanuel Macron is what Americans would call a cultural liberal, who supports gay marriage and is willing to condemn his own country for its past imperialist ventures. But on economic matters he is much more of a technocrat and free-marketer (his resume includes the ultra-elite École Nationale d’Administration and the Rothschild Bank) who will do little to redress growing inequalities or guard against the effects of globalization. The presidential election will be followed in June by a parliamentary election, and while Macron has already gained the endorsement of leading Socialists (including former Prime Minister Manuel Valls), his economic positions will make it impossible for much of the left to support him. Much of the traditional Socialist base of teachers, civil servants, and union organizers frankly despises him. The result could well be a formal split in the Socialist Party created by François Mitterrand in 1971, with a centrist rump joining with Macron’s new En Marche movement and other centrists like François Bayrou to form some sort of new, Blairite “Third Way” party. Hamon’s miserable 6 percent showing (which more or less match Hollande’s miserable approval ratings) has already sounded a likely death knell for the Socialists, whose membership has fallen drastically over the past few years. But can its left-wing elements find common ground with Mélenchon, the Greens, and other, smaller left-wing parties? Can they form a substantial bloc that will support Macron on condition that he take seriously his professed admiration for Scandinavian social democracy? Nothing is less clear.

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Tad Friend in The New Yorker:

On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear’s living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium’s first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. Understandably, then, the Moroccan phyllo chicken puffs weren’t going fast. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists were keeping slim because they’d read—and in some cases done—the research on caloric restriction, and the Hollywood stars were keeping slim because of course.

When Liz Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, took questions, Goldie Hawn, regal on a comfy sofa, purred, “I have a question about the mitochondria. I’ve been told about a molecule called glutathione that helps the health of the cell?” Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that protects cells and their mitochondria, which provide energy; some in Hollywood call it “the God molecule.” But taken in excess it can muffle a number of bodily repair mechanisms, leading to liver and kidney problems or even the rapid and potentially fatal sloughing of your skin. Blackburn gently suggested that a varied, healthy diet was best, and that no single molecule was the answer to the puzzle of aging. Yet the premise of the evening was that answers, and maybe even an encompassing solution, were just around the corner. The party was the kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity, which will award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field. Victor Dzau, the academy’s president, stood to acknowledge several of the scientists in the room. He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks becomes younger.

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Science:

If you’ve used the smartphone application Snapchat, you may have turned a photo of yourself into a disco bear or melded your face with someone else’s. Now, a group of researchers has created the most advanced technique yet for building 3D facial models on the computer. The system could improve personalized avatars in video games, facial recognition for security, and—of course—Snapchat filters. When computers process faces, they sometimes rely on a so-called 3D morphable model (3DMM). The model represents an average face, but also contains information on common patterns of deviation from that average. For example, if you have a long nose, you’re also likely to have a long chin. Given such correlations, a computer can then characterize your unique face not by storing every point in a 3D scan, but by listing just a couple hundred numbers describing your deviation from an average face, including parameters that roughly correspond to age, gender, and length of face.

There’s a catch, however. To account for all the ways faces can vary, a 3DMM needs to integrate information on many faces. Until now that has required scanning lots of people and then painstakingly labeling all of their features. Consequently, the current best models are based on only a couple hundred people—mostly white adults—and have limited ability to model people of different ages and races. Now, James Booth, a computer scientist at Imperial College London (ICL), and colleagues have developed a new method that automates the construction of 3DMMs and enables them to incorporate a wider spectrum of humanity. The method has three main steps. First, an algorithm automatically landmarks facial scans—labeling the tip of the nose and other points. Second, another algorithm lines up all the scans according to their landmarks and combines them into a model. Third, an algorithm detects and removes bad scans. “The really big contribution in this work is they show how to fully automate this process,” says William Smith, who studies computer vision at the University of York in the United Kingdom and was not involved in the study. Labeling dozens of facial features on many faces is “pretty tedious,” says Alan Brunton, a computer scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Darmstadt, Germany, who was also uninvolved. “You think it’s relatively easy to click a point, but it’s not always obvious where the corner of the mouth really is, so even when you do this manually you have some error.” But Booth and colleagues didn’t stop there. They applied their method to a set of nearly 10,000 demographically diverse facial scans. The scans were done at a science museum in London by the plastic surgeons Allan Ponniah and David Dunaway, who hoped to improve reconstructive surgery. They approached Stefanos Zafeiriou, a computer scientist at ICL for help analyzing the data. Applying the algorithm to those scans created what they call the “large scale facial model,” or LSFM. In tests against existing models, the LSFM much more accurately represented faces, the authors report in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computer Vision. In one comparison, they created a model of a child’s face from a photograph. Using the LSFM, the model looked like the child. Using one of the most popular existing morphable models—which is based completely on adults—it looked like an unrelated grown-up. Booth and his colleagues even had enough scans to create more-specific morphable models for different races and ages. And their model can automatically classify faces into age groups based on shape.

More here.

Holly Williams in The Guardian:

“I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter.” He might be celebrated for his epic and allusive novels, but James Joyce came straight to the point when writing to his partner, Nora Barnacle. This was the opening salvo of a letter from 1908 and is just one of scores of explicit missives he sent her.

A new stage show is celebrating such letters of desire sent by famous figures through the centuries, whether explicit or coded, erotic or romantic. Theatre-maker Rachel Mars is curating a selection to be read aloud in the performance which is part of the Hotbed “festival of sex” at Camden People’s theatre in London. These will be interspersed with anonymised modern messages: texts, tweets and dating app sexts.

If emails have done away with the fine art of correspondence, then what future is there for the sex letter compared with the instant gratification offered by a flurry of Tinder messages? There’s a certain sensuality that is surely lost when long-awaited love letters are replaced by auto-destructing Snapchat messages.

“The form of sexting is so immediate,” says Mars. “I am nostalgic for letters. There’s a craft that’s been lost in expressing some kind of desire or passion or bodily experience for someone else.”

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

In his 1824 book, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, the 28-year-old French engineer Sadi Carnot worked out a formula for how efficiently steam engines can convert heat — now known to be a random, diffuse kind of energy — into work, an orderly kind of energy that might push a piston or turn a wheel. To Carnot’s surprise, he discovered that a perfect engine’s efficiency depends only on the difference in temperature between the engine’s heat source (typically a fire) and its heat sink (typically the outside air). Work is a byproduct, Carnot realized, of heat naturally passing to a colder body from a warmer one.

Carnot died of cholera eight years later, before he could see his efficiency formula develop over the 19th century into the theory of thermodynamics: a set of universal laws dictating the interplay among temperature, heat, work, energy and entropy — a measure of energy’s incessant spreading from more- to less-energetic bodies. The laws of thermodynamics apply not only to steam engines but also to everything else: the sun, black holes, living beings and the entire universe. The theory is so simple and general that Albert Einstein deemed it likely to “never be overthrown.”

Yet since the beginning, thermodynamics has held a singularly strange status among the theories of nature.

“If physical theories were people, thermodynamics would be the village witch,” the physicist Lídia del Rio and co-authors wrote last year in Journal of Physics A. “The other theories find her somewhat odd, somehow different in nature from the rest, yet everyone comes to her for advice, and no one dares to contradict her.”

Unlike, say, the Standard Model of particle physics, which tries to get at what exists, the laws of thermodynamics only say what can and can’t be done. But one of the strangest things about the theory is that these rules seem subjective. A gas made of particles that in aggregate all appear to be the same temperature — and therefore unable to do work — might, upon closer inspection, have microscopic temperature differences that could be exploited after all. As the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”

In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems.

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

Kim Ghattas in Foreign Policy:

If ever there were a sign that the world is upside down, it is that a Muslim prince from an Arab royal family is now one of the leading voices defending human rights on the global stage. At a time when the issue seems to be taking a back seat everywhere, Prince Zeid Raad al-Hussein of Jordan, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, has excoriated Western politicians for their xenophobia and requested an investigation into allegations of torture in Bahrain — even as the United States announced it is lifting human rights restrictions on arm sales to the kingdom.

Before the U.S. election, Zeid stood in front of the U.N. General Assembly in September and decried “race-baiting bigots who seek to gain, or retain, power by wielding prejudice and deceit at the expense of those most vulnerable.”

He explicitly called out Geert Wilders and Donald Trump in another speech, decrying Wilders’s “lies and half-truths, manipulations, and peddling of fear.” He added that his own personal background must be a nightmare for xenophobes everywhere, as a “Muslim, who is, confusingly to racists, also white-skinned; whose mother is European and father, Arab.” And since Trump’s ascension to the White House, Zeid has not shied way from criticizing him, calling the new administration’s travel ban “mean-spirited” and illegal under human rights law. In fact, he was the only prominent Arab voice on the world stage denouncing the ban and speaking out about the impact on Arab communities in the United States while Arab governments stayed mum.

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Jennifer Helinek at Open Letters Monthly:

Forgive people for renewing their obsession with Margaret Atwood’s 1985 feminist dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale. Given the release of a special edition audiobook at the beginning of April, a Hulu TV adaptation premiering at the end of April, and the book’s anticipation of Trump-era surrealism, a glut of Handmaid’s Tale articles has been inevitable. The book’s narrator, Offred, tells the story of the first generation of a society called Gilead, built from the ashes of the state once known as America. In Gilead, absolute political, economic, and social misogyny becomes the law of the land, and each woman is given a specific role – housemaid, wife, or breeder. Like all breeders (called “handmaids”), Offred has been renamed for her owner; she now belongs to a powerful man named Fred (but whom the book refers to simply as “the Commander”), and her job is to provide the Commander and his barren wife with a baby.

Offred leads a regimented, tedious existence that barely distracts her from the bittersweet, tormenting influence of memory. She reflects on how Christian extremists massacred the president and Congress, froze women’s bank accounts, and outlawed female employment before completely remolding society. Her thoughts on the transition process offer some of the book’s most prescient lines, like, “They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time,” and, “The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipassses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.”

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Eugene McCarraher at The Hedgehog Review:

Marxists can be the very best theologians, especially when they stare, unbelieving, into the abyss of historical hopelessness. Writing in the wake of the Nazi Judeocide and the specter of nuclear holocaust, Theodor Adorno, for instance, enlisted the eschatological hope of biblical religion. “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair,” he mused in the finale ofMinima Moralia (1951), regards all things “from the standpoint of redemption.” Such a philosophy uncovers the world “with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” To be sure, Adorno was no believer: “The reality or unreality of redemption hardly matters,” he wrote. Thus, the vantage of redemption must be “wrested from what is,” not revealed from outside history; it must be torn from a reality marked “by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.” Yet how could we elicit a promise of deliverance from a world so corrupt and misshapen? Mindful of the ancient Jewish prohibitions against soothsaying and graven images, Adorno insisted that our only purchase on the messianic future lay in “consummate negativity,” a relentless critique of the present that refused any glimpse or blueprint of utopia, a modern, secular surrogate for the prophetic iconoclasm of messianic faith.

Stuart Jeffries quotes this oft-cited passage in his “group biography” of the Frankfurt School, noting of the redemptive perspective only “how precarious it [is] to occupy it.” It’s a missed opportunity for insight. Adorno’s invocation of religion sheds invaluable light on the melancholy Marxism that so significantly informed the thought of the main thinkers among this congeries of dissident intellectuals who, in the 1920s, became informally associated with the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research. Returning to the inaugural moment in the history of the classical Marxist tradition—the repudiation of religion as a form of social criticism—Adorno contravened Marx in seeking to salvage and appropriate the moral authority of the sacred for critical purposes.

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