It’s very hard not to read these novellas as romans à clef.
Horkheimer
he had found at the centre of his intellectual web what critical theorists virtuosically discovered in other thinkers’ theories, namely an aporia (a word taken from the Greek for ‘no passage’, and often signifying perplexity).
on Habermas
For it is in the lifeworld that Habermas finds the potential bulwarks against the evisceration of social life by capitalism, state and what his colleague Marcuse called one-dimensional society
the public sphere
That sounds anodyne, but
Dialectics had been brought to a standstill, though not in quite the edifying way Benjamin had hoped for
