“The Concept of Enlightenment” as Paranoid Reading

One does not go looking for Eve Sedgwick in the old boys’ club. But upon rereading Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Concept of Enlightenment,” I was startled to find traces of her everywhere. I encountered the first only three pages in, where Adorno and Horkheimer, discussing the legacy of Francis Bacon, lament that “There is to be no mystery—which means, too, no wish to reveal mystery.”[1] I returned to “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” and observed that Sedgwick elects to describe the ailing critical landscape with the language of mystery as well,[2] diagnosing the “current near professionwide agreement” to read...

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