ABSTRACT
Through the influence of the Frankfurt School's most audacious writers, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, the pathos of fragmentary and interrupted forms of thought has made itself felt on the stage of present-day cultural criticism. These figures and their texts have taught us to read in the artefacts of modernity ‘the incomparable language of the death's head’, the expressionless grin that hovers not only over the tragic landscape of baroque theatre, but over the Welttheater of twentieth-century history as well. Following their lead, critics may now seek to redeem the allegorical treasure of ruined works, heaping up bits of documentation in the ‘unremitting expectation of a miracle’; 1 and may acknowledge the convulsive beauty occulted in the blemishes and odd fugues of an imperfect body of writing.
