The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay

rather the notion of a subjective dimension itself. Between myth and reconciliation, the poles of his philosophy, the subject evaporates. Before his Medusan glance, man turns into the stage on which an objective process unfolds. For this reason Benjamin’s philosophy is no less a source of terror than a promise of happiness.¹³⁷

      In his persistent stress on nonidentity and contingency, Adorno developed a philosophy that was as “atonal” as the music he had absorbed from Schönberg.¹³⁸