“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” wrote Theodor Adorno in 1946–47, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”1