¹ Kant's famous phrase, commonly translated “purposiveness without purpose” (Bernard 55). It is more correctly rendered in Paul Guyer's recent translation: “purposiveness can thus exist without an end” (105). To keep Kant's rhythm, we might say “goal-orientedness without goal.”

² This cryptic sentence summarizes twenty-five years of classroom teaching around the problem of socialist ethics. After giving this talk, I felt empowered by a comment from Jody Melamed, a former student now teaching at Marquette University who was present in the audience, that she instantly understood what I meant because she had been in my classroom. A partial explanation is offered at the end of the essay, when I comment on the relation between redistribution and a sympathetic imagination.

³ “[T]o cut or shape with a jig-saw; also, to fit together the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. Freq. fig.” (“Jig-saw”).

⁴ When Adorno writes, “The fragment is the intrusion of death [der Eingriffdes Todes] in the work” (493; trans. modified), it can be read as the death of the author and the invocation of an indefinite chain of readership. It is the work of life/death, what I would call the signature of orature in literature, coming “alive” with each act of reading and “dying” for the next reader.