Philosophy of despair

I believe two anecdotes are illuminating the nature of critical theory particularly well. One is supposed to have happened in California still during the war. At a party Adorno presented the idea that his philosophy was a message in a bottle. The question what the content of the message was was answered by Fritz Eisler in broad Viennese accent: "Mir is' soooo mies!" (I feel sooo bad)

Another is reported by Benjamin in his Kafka essay: In a conversation Kafka had with Brod he had the idea that we are all suicidal, nihilistic thoughts in the mind of god. This reminded Brod of the gnostic idea of god as the evil demiurge and creation as his sin, which Kafka denied vehemently:"No, nothing like that, we are just the result of a mood, a bad day." "Then there is still hope." Brod concluded from this, at which moment a broad smile crept across Kafkas face:"Hope? Of course! Endless hope, just not for us!"

These two anecdotes reveal a stance towards the world that John Berger has called stance of undefeated despair. Despair shines thorough both anecdotes like a black dawn, a sense that in any conceivable way all is lost. This sense of despair is coupled with an almost boundless hope, a hope for a better world we will never see. That is why Adorno and Horkheimer thought of their philosophy as a sort of time-capsule: it would preserve the emancipatory potential of philophy for a future time, when it would be possible to redeem this emancipatory promise. Like bacteria that form a protective coating when the environment is hostile, so culture was to isolate itself from the social environment, because the world in which Ausschwitz happened for Adorno held no possibility of realizing the emancipatory potential of bourgeois culture. Curiously enough this idea reveals a trace of affirmative fatalims - a belief that things will in and of themselves turn towards the slightly better, a trace of metaphysics that Adorno despised so much.