Ever since Adorno was reproached by his students in the late 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has been accused of resignation.¹ By determining contemporary society as totally reified, the charge goes, Adorno's critical theory thereby denies its own agency for social change (to reify means to turn subjectivity into a thing). Adorno had already defined his project as "the melancholy science", the only possible philosophy amidst conditions of "damaged life" — and does not melancholy suggest resignation?² Adorno's more recent detractors have included Italian radical thinkers. For Antonio Negri (writing with Michael Hardt), Adorno's critical theory represents a form of "deconstruction" at a time when what is required is "constructing, in the non-place, a new place."³ And for Giorgio Agamben, "negative dialectics is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought, closer to the emotional tonality of Jean Améry than that of Benjamin."⁴ What these statements share is the old charge of a decisive abstraction of theory from practice, understood here as construction and messianic event respectively.