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What has long shocked some readers of the Frankfurt School is the apparent blitheness with which they elided Hitlerian fascism, Stalinist communism and Roosevelt’s America

This leitmotif – sadness in intoxication, catastrophe foreshadowed in the very moment of exultation, death figured in birth pangs – is, for Adorno, utterly German

to name something as a crime is not just to announce its prohibition, but to confer on that act a libidinal cathexis: transgression is sexy

Benjamin’s writings in the last eight years of his life were examples of Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, reducing history to rubble the better to find a path through its ruins

the positivists – at least those whom Horkheimer characterised thus – suspended facts in aspic and falsely eternalised the status quo