It’s as though deindustrialisation and desublimated sexuality are engaged in some hard-faced, glumly raunchy, lubricious lambada across the workplace carpet tiles.

in the literature of advanced industrial society such antinomian characters

Frankfurt School critical theory was not supposed to be like this. Critical theory had something built into it akin to the Jewish taboo on calling God by his name: to do so would be premature since we are not yet in the messianic age. Similarly for critical theory, setting out a utopian vision would be premature; its self-imposed task was to negate the truth of the existing order rather than producing blueprints for a better one. And yet in An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse dared to imagine a new type of man who rejected the values of established societies. This new man was not aggressive, was incapable of fighting wars or creating suffering, and worked happily both collectively and individually for a better world rather than to further his own interests.

[...] When Jean-Paul Sartre and Marcuse arranged to meet at the Coupole in Paris in the late 1960s, Sartre worried how he could get through lunch without revealing the truth. ‘I have never read a word Marcuse has written’, he told his future biographer John Gerassi. ‘I know he has tried to link Marx and Freud. And I know he supports activist students. But I can’t possibly read his books by next week. Besides I don’t want to stop my research on Flaubert. So you join us. And if Marcuse gets too philosophical, if he uses the word reification just once, interrupt and say something provocative and political.’

In the event, over cassoulet, Sartre came up with an ingenious strategy for concealing his ignorance. He asked questions that suggested a greater familiarity with Marcuse’s works than he actually had. ‘Each time he answered, I picked out an apparent flaw in his answer to ask another question. But since the flaw was only apparent, he could answer my question to his great satisfaction. Thus his vanity soared happily.’ Indeed it did: as Gerassi put Marcuse into a taxi, the latter ‘shook both of my hands with genuine gratitude and said: “I had no idea he knew my work so well.”’

The paradoxical German term ‘aufheben’, which means three different and contradictory things – to preserve, to elevate and to cancel – and which, in its philosophical usage, is usually translated as ‘sublate’, is important here

Adorno, very sensibly, waited until he came to edit the book containing these vituperative speeches to deliver his judgement on Albert’s outburst

Adorno rounded on Marcuse for siding with the students, given their outrageous tactics and their jejune politics that his old, misguided friend seemed to share

Dialectics had been brought to a standstill, though not in quite the edifying way Benjamin had hoped for