Adorno wrote in a luminous and enigmatic passage, was one that contemplated the world as it would look “from the standpoint of redemption.” Rather than offer consolations dressed up in faddish progressive politics, such philosophers should reveal how “indigent and distorted” the world appears when illuminated by “the messianic light.”29 Philosophy done in this way was painful but fruitful, he reasoned, since unrelenting critique inevitably suggested a utopian image of its opposite. If Adorno echoed Randolph Bourne, who had praised “malcontentedness” as “the beginning of promise,”
