ABSTRACT
The shift in affect to which Harkabi alludes-the intuition that the ‘thinking space’ of realism
cannot be sustained through language alone-tracks well with Frankfurt-School critiques of rei-
fication; the latter, moreover, may offer tools by which to deepen and extend his critique. For
Adorno, this was the sensibility expressed in the second quote that formed this paper’s epigraph:
that ‘the task of thinking’, given the problem of reification, was to fashion perspectives that
would ‘displace and estrange the world’; using ‘the messianic light’ not as a guiding star, but
to illuminate the ‘indigent and distorted’ reality of the present moment-Derrida’s ‘daily,
pathetic landscape’, avant la lettre (Adorno, 1974, p. 247).
