Alex Ross in The New Yorker: ‘Members of the Frankfurt School were prey to what Habermas’s colleague Karl-Otto Apel called the “performative contradiction”: if you have used the tools of reason to dismantle reason, your own work might be compromised in turn.’

And: ‘A few months later, three women staged an infamous Busenattentat, or “breast attack,” baring their chests during an Adorno lecture on the dialectic. One student leaflet read, “Adorno as an institution is dead!” The man himself died, of a heart attack, that summer. Habermas remembered him as “the only genius I have met in my life.”’

Also: ‘According to Habermas, philosophers should present themselves not as “teachers of the nation”—the history of intellectuals in Nazi Germany besmirched that role—but as “dilettantes” who “question the demarcation lines between various realms.”’

Adorno, the last genius. Contemporary philosophers as benign dilettantes. Let’s say, other kinds of novelists.

(a sf 2207)