Someone who perceives the world as anything other than foreign is not perceiving it at all. A negative tension is essential to art; for Adorno, there was therefore no such thing as feel-good art. Likewise, estrangement from the world is an aspect of philosophy. It inheres in spirit itself. Thus spirit, by its very nature, is critique. In the society of the ‘like’, everything becomes likeable – art too. Thus we are unlearning wonder:
