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Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Peter E. Gordon)
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Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we're going on a, well, a necessary journey into the really complicated heart of 20th century thought. We're diving deep into Peter E. Gordon's fantastic study, Migrants in the Profane, critical theory, and the question of secularization. Now, this book, it actually agree out of the Franz Rosenzweig lectures, and it presents this profound challenge to how we usually think about modernity. It doesn't just treat secularization, you know, the world turning away from the sacred as some simple historical event. Instead, it makes us confront it as the central, really agonizing philosophical dilemma for three huge figures of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. So our mission today is to trace this single urgent question. through their work. How did these German Jewish intellectuals, all of whom, you know, lived through exile and saw liberal humanism just collapse, how did they grapple with the end of metaphysics? Did all those sacred concepts just vanish? Or were they transformed, migrating, you could say, into the messy, chaotic world of the secular? And that transformation, that migration, that's where all the philosophical heat is. I mean, Gordon's book is just indispensable here. It helps you understand this deep ambivalence these thinkers had. They completely embraced the Enlightenment's promise of emancipation for everyone. Right. But they also felt very acutely what Gordon calls the normative deficit of modernity.
So they had to ask this really terrifying question. Can the ideals we care about, just those freedom, critique, can they even survive if they're completely cut off from their theological or metaphysical roots? Or do you just get a vacuum? Exactly. A vacuum that allows cynical power and authoritarianism and, you know, administered capitalism to just rush in and fill a space. And this whole dilemma, which is so deeply rooted in Jewish theological and historical thought, that's really the engine that's going to drive our entire conversation today. That framing is so important. By placing this whole thing in the context of the Franz Rosenzweig lectures, Gordon is signaling right from the start that this isn't some marginal issue. Understanding the trajectory of Jewish thought, especially its relationship to time and critique, isn't a footnote to critical theory.
No, it's the framework. It's the key you need to unlock what they were even trying to do. So let's start there. Let's unpack this foundational idea. Secularization as a conceptual problem, not just a sociological one. Gordon frames it as this agonizing tension, right, between the colossal promise of modernity, reason, democracy, autonomy and this overwhelming sense of loss. When we study the Frankfurt School, we often focus on the Marxist critique of capitalism. But this anxiety, this fear over the loss of meaning, the loss of any kind of solid normative ground, that's what really animates their darkest and most complex work. And that anxiety is completely inseparable from their unique place in history.
We have to talk about the biographical background first. Gordon calls it the elective affinity between these intellectuals and the Enlightenment. I mean, these men were largely products of the Bildungsbürgerdom, the educated, assimilated Jewish middle class in Germany. OK, so explain that elective affinity. Why were they so passionately committed to those enlightenment ideals? Well, they were its greatest champions, the most ardent proponents of universalist ideals, things like tolerance, progress, objective justice, because they were the ones who benefited most from them.
It was their ticket in. so to speak. It was their only ticket in. The rise of bourgeois universalism in the 19th century is what granted them civic emancipation, access to culture, to the universities. They clung to the promise of universal human rights because it was the only thing that let them transcend their status as historical outsiders. They really, truly believed in the covenant of reason. But that covenant turned out to be incredibly fragile, especially with the rise of modern anti -Semitism and nationalism. Their insider status was always... Conditional. Exactly. They were given a temporary seat at the table, but they were always exposed. They always knew that the traditional exclusionary doors of European society could slam shut on them at any moment. Gordon even cites Max Weber's grim observation about the difficulties that aspiring Jewish students faced in German universities. Weber basically said that for them, when it came to getting ahead in academia, you might as well say, last ghetto in Esperanza. Abandon all hope. Abandon all hope.
And this vulnerability, it created this incredibly distinctive critical perspective because they were simultaneously inside the promise of the Enlightenment and outside the security of European national culture. They could see both sides. They could see both the universal potential and the horrific failures of that society, especially how susceptible it was to just complete irrational violence. And that dual perspective, that feeling of being both a champion and a threatened outsider, that's the perfect introduction to the central metaphor of Gordon's whole analysis, which he gets from Adorno. The migration into the profane or einwandering in his profane. Adorno talks about metaphysics having taken flight into the profane, and he describes the critical thinker as a fluchtling. Refugee. And the power of that word, flistling, is just immense because it connects the abstract philosophical problem, you know, where do our critical concepts go when the sacred is gone? It connects that to the horrifying historical reality these men actually lived through. It turns the intellectual struggle into a literal question of survival and displacement. Gordon then traces the deep historical roots of this idea of displacement, showing that it's much, much older than the 20th century. Oh, yeah. I mean, think about the ancient roots. Deuteronomy 26 .5 famously identifies the Jewish people with Abraham, the wandering Aramean. The core identity is one of exile, of displacement, of not belonging to a fixed territory. It's a theological tradition that's inherently defined by movement. And that idea carries on. It carries on right into Christian thought, especially with Augustine in the City of God. He sees Christians as peregrinanti cyclomigrants or pilgrims in the profane realm who are always aware that their true home is somewhere else.
The idea of not being ultimately at home in the world is just central to these Western traditions. But the 20th century, it strips away the comfort of that metaphysical home and just replaces it with the stark terror of literal physical exile, the staggering number of displaced people after the world wars, the deliberate uprooting of whole populations, and then the horrifying contemporary images we see from refugee crises like the drowned Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi. It forces the metaphor back into this brutal reality. And Gordon argues that this modern migrant becomes a reflection of the constitutive condition of humanity. It's not a choice or a pilgrimage anymore. It's a shared vulnerability. And that provides the philosophical goal for the Frankfurt School. Their whole inquiry wasn't about abstract academic questions. It was about political survival. So their ultimate goal was to find normative resources, moral instruction.
ethical leverage, a basis for political critique within modernity itself. They had to sustain those emancipatory ideals against the rising tide of fascism and cynicism, but without falling back into some nostalgic, otherworldly utopia. They had to be ruthless atheists who were still fighting for justice. Precisely. They were trying to answer, if we embrace this profane world completely, how do we stop it from just dissolving into pure power politics? Where do we find the energy to resist? And the rest of the book is this incredible exploration of how Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno each tried to solve that problem. Okay, so let's begin our methodical look with Walter Benjamin. He stages this conflict between theology and materialist history more dramatically, I think, than anyone else. Gordon starts us off with Benjamin's famous opening image for his theses on the concept of history, the mechanical chess -playing Turk. It's just the perfect way to start a philosophical text. The Turk was this 18th century marvel built by a guy named Wolfgang von Kemplen. It was this life -size figure carved like a Turk in exotic robes sitting behind a big cabinet. And it played chess? And it played chess. Astonishingly, it won against the best players of the day. And so it was hailed as this triumph of enlightenment, science and mechanism, right? Proof that reason and materialist doctrines could explain human intelligence. It's sort of reinforced this idea of society as a self -regulating machine like Adam Smith's invisible hand that didn't need any divine help. But as Benjamin knew. and Edgar Allan Poe famously figured it out later, it was all an illusion. There was a human chess master, a small, ugly dwarf hidden inside the cabinet. He was manipulating the Turk with a complex system of levers and magnets.
The mechanism was a sham. The intelligence was human. And this parlor trick becomes Benjamin's central thesis on historical materialism. So how does he translate this into a theory of history? Well, Benjamin Ryan said the puppet is called historical materialism, and it's designed to win all the time. But... He says it can only succeed if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight. So historical materialism, this seemingly rational, scientific, deterministic analysis of progress that some Marxists loved, is actually animated by a hidden theological core. This just exposes Benjamin's complete rejection of the historical optimism of his time. Precisely.
He is ruthless in his critique of this comfortable idea of the automatism of progress. This was the dominant view among liberals, social democrats like Edward Bernstein, and classical philosophers like Kant and Condorcet. This idea that history just automatically rolls forward toward a better, more rational future. But for Benjamin, that idea of a smooth progression is just. It's utterly demolished by 20th century catastrophe. Right. History, in his famous words, isn't a steady path to improvement. It's a permanent catastrophe, piling ruin upon ruin. And this grim apocalyptic view, it's rooted in his earlier study of the Trauerspiel, the German Baroque drama of mourning.
The drama of mourning. Yeah. This dramatic form depicted history as a cyclical tragedy, a field of ruins where political life is always failure, betrayal, and violence. There's no neat Hegelian happy ending. So if history is really this continuum without teleological significance, then where on earth can you possibly find hope? Well, if the continuum of history is the catastrophe, then hope has to come from outside that continuum. And this brings us to his concept of jetztzeit. The yet sight, the now time. It's a moment of radical rupture. For Benjamin, history in its conventional sense is secularized. It's reduced to homogenous empty time, just a meaningless chronological sequence of events. One thing after another. Exactly. So redemption, therefore, can't be built gradually through that history. It has to arrive as a radical eruption from outside that secular timeline. So the true revolutionary act, the messianic act, it's not the climax of a long political process. It's a sudden violent break that just stops the flow of time. Benjamin calls this the Messiah entering through the small gateway in time. Yes. The revolutionary moment is the only true state of exception. And this introduces this profound methodological ambivalence in Benjamin's thought. He wants to be a materialist, but his entire political theory depends on a theological jumpstart. And we see that same tension in his analysis of aesthetics and secularization, particularly with the artwork's aura. Let's define the aura. What is it and why is its dissolution so central to modernity? The aura is the unique stamp of the cultic. of the sacred. It defines the unique singular appearance of an artwork, which is inherently interwoven with traditional religious or magical ritual. His famous definition was the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be. So the original artwork had this special quality because it was part of a ritual.
Right. The oldest artworks were inseparable from some ritualistic practice, whether it was magical or religious. But modernity dissolves this aura through technical reproducibility, mainly photography and film. When millions of copies of an image can exist, its unique presence, its distance, its cultic origin is just shattered. And this leads to a new mass form of reception based on distraction, which Benjamin at first celebrates as having this revolutionary democratizing potential. It brings art to the masses. But he also warns that the aura doesn't just disappear completely.
It persists in bourgeois society in a kind of secularized form. It mutates. It becomes what he calls a secularized ritual. the doctrine of l 'art, or the theology of art. Bourgeois aesthetics tries to maintain the sacred uniqueness of the artwork by insisting on its aesthetic autonomy, turning it into this self -contained object of reverent contemplation, totally purged of any social function. It's a kind of negative theology, where art itself becomes the ultimate, unapproachable, sacred thing. And Benjamin rejects that nostalgia. He's looking instead for what he calls profane illumination. Yes, he wants to find revolutionary energy, not by restoring the cult, but by celebrating the emancipatory potential that's buried in the ruins of the past. The discarded industrial objects, the outmoded fashions, the urban decay that the surrealists were so fascinated by. He wants a true creative overcoming of religious illumination, a secular materialist revelation. But the paradox just keeps coming back. Why does he keep the dwarf in the machine? Why does he have to rely on theology? Gordon argues that Benjamin's allegiance to this hidden theological dwarf suggests that historical materialism, if you leave it to its own secular devices as a philosophy of steady homogenous time, it just becomes a lifeless mechanism.
This reliance on an external messianic supplement reveals the fundamental normative deficit in its whole conception of secular politics. That sounds dangerously close to the political critique leveled by Carl Schmitt. For anyone listening who might not be familiar, why is bringing up Schmitt's critique of liberalism such a critical philosophical moment here? It's dangerous because Carl Schmitt, a deeply conservative and later Nazi affiliated legal theorist, argued that liberalism was a dead machine. Just a set of neutral procedures that could never produce authentic political life or moral conviction. He wanted something more. He insisted that political existence required a sovereign, decisionistic intrusion, a kind of worldly god, to perform a miraculous, absolute decision. Schmitt's famous thesis was that all significant concepts of modern state theory are just secularized theological concepts. So by saying that historical materialism needs a messianic eruption... Benjamin risks conceding Schmitt's basic point, that secular modernity can't provide its own normative resources, that it needs a supernatural or at least metapolitical intervention to break the deadlock. Benjamin leaves us with this very ambivalent secularization. A critique that can't seem to locate the resources for transformation within the world it wants to redeem. Okay, so if Benjamin left us at an impasse, the machine needing a hidden theologian, we now turn to Max Horkheimer. His relationship with the sacred changed so dramatically over his career. We're talking about the aging director of the Frankfurt School, retreating to Montagnola in his final decades, and explicitly returning to theological themes. It's maybe the most dramatic shift of the three. Late Horkheimer went so far as to claim that critical theory itself got its ethical drive from the Jewish precept, thou shalt make no image of God. The builder of Rabat. This was a foundational clarification for him later in life, proving that the roots of their negative critique weren't just materialist, they were theological. So let's trace that intellectual shift, because the early Horkheimer was a very strong materialist, very pessimistic in a Schopenhauerian way, and rejected metaphysics completely. That's right. The early Horkheimer was a classic materialist, skeptical of any transcendent claims. His moral commitment was strictly imminent. It was about solidarity with men who will come after us in this world. Practical earthly change. The shift really begins in the early 1940s with the dialectic of enlightenment. Here, he and Adorno treat monotheism Judaism as profoundly Janus -faced. On one hand, it represents the apotheosis of subjectivity and rational thought, the domination of myth and nature. It's the beginning of the whole rational project that leads to the enlightenment. But on the other hand, it also introduces the critical principle that resists determinism, that resists idolizing anything finite. Exactly. The critical principle is iconoclasm. The tragedy they diagnose is that the Enlightenment promised freedom through disenchantment and Saboron, but it ultimately failed. It reverted back into a new form of myth and led not to freedom, but to triumphant calamity.
Unheal the horrors of fascism and total war. And the lesson Horkheimer took from this was that the fully rationalized, administered world had lost almost all of its own intrinsic normative potential. Secular reason on its own seemed incapable of resisting the total integration of society. And this is where he argues that atheism itself, which was once the courageous stance of the Enlightenment radical, had become corrupted. He lamented that in the totally integrated society, atheism had become the attitude of those who follow whatever power happens to be dominant. So if the state claims to be purely rational and scientific, the atheist just ends up affirming the existing power structure. Right. And therefore theology.
or at least the concept of theology, becomes the last crucial refuge for critical resistance. He finds that refuge in what he called the longing for the holy other. This holy other, it's a very minimal concept. Deliberately minimal, yes. And noncommittal. When he was pressed on it in an interview, Horkheimer insisted it was non -scientific. It was simply a wish or form of consciousness. A wish for what, though? What does this theological consciousness actually do for a critical thinker? It performs a metaphysical function in a world that's supposed to be post -metaphysical. Theology, Horkheimer argued, is the consciousness that the world as we see it is mere appearance or shine on. That the present reality is not the final word. And most importantly. That injustice shall not have the last word. It's a conceptual resource to maintain absolute critical distance from the crushing reality of the administered world. It's an intellectual engine of despair that actually fuels resistance. This is such a powerful idea, especially when you connect it back to the build of Rabat, that precept against making images. How does he tie this theological iconoclasm directly to the method of political critique, especially in the Marxist tradition?
This is where Horkheimer is so insightful. He argues that the Marxist prohibition against drawing detailed blueprints for the future socialist utopia. That refusal to imagine or depict what the perfect society will look like is itself a secularized version of the Jewish precept against representing the unrepresentable. So, refusing to draw the utopian blueprint is an act of critical theology. Exactly. And why? Because the moment you give the future perfection a specific finite image, you have committed idolatry. You've locked the future into the concepts of the present.
You allow the present state to justify itself as the necessary step to that finite image. The iconoclast refuses to affirm the finite present as the absolute truth. The critical power is in the constant negation of what is, not the affirmation of some picture of what will be. But even with this really ingenious secular translation of the builder verbat, Horkheimer still runs right into that normative deficit problem that plagued Benjamin. He does, and he knows it. Horkheimer ultimately concludes that secular modernity in its totally integrated form has a fatal deficit.
It requires this theological supplement, the holy other, to sustain even the mere possibility of social transformation. It's an admission of failure, in a way. He admits that appealing to this transmundane other is a philosophical embarrassment. He says it's not knowledge, it's just a wish. But for him, in the face of the totally administered society, this non -scientific wish becomes the only viable alternative to just desolate positivism, the philosophical acceptance that the world is simply what it is. So like Benjamin, he risks a self -contradiction. He needs a theological concept to sustain a purely secular, emancipatory project. This leaves him in a position of longing, of just, hoping that the structure of reality is somehow different from the reality we can see. Okay, now we turn to Theodore Adorno, who offers the most conceptually dense and I think you could argue the most resilient response to this crisis of secularization. Adorno, the philosophical musician, he approaches the problem through the lens of failure, artistic and conceptual failure, which is perfectly symbolized by Schoenberg's unfinished opera, Moses and Aaron. Moses and Aaron is the definitive statement on the tragedy of ideas. Moses is the protagonist, and he represents the pure, unrepresentable idea of God, the absolute spirit of the Bilderbad. Aaron, his brother, he's the intermediary, the sensualist, the politician who tries to translate that pure idea into a sign, an image, something tangible for the people.
And he fails. He betrays the idea. He fashions the golden calf. He allows the tables of the law themselves to become these finite, manageable images. The ideal is inevitably corrupted the moment it's manifested in the world. And Moses is left in total despair, crying out, oh, word, you word that I lack. The sacred idea, once you express it, is betrayed and made profane. And this inherent betrayal leads Adorno to his uncompromising demand, which he articulated in his letters with Gershom Skullum. The call for a ruthless migration into the profane. A ruck sicht losen einwanderung ins profane. That word ruthless, rixixlosin, is so crucial. Unlike Horkheimer and Benjamin, Adorno shows no nostalgia, no longing to turn back the clock on disenchantment. For him, secularization isn't a loss to be lamented, it's a necessary, irreversible imperative. He saw himself as a permanent exile, which reinforced the intellectual virtue of being unattached, of not at home in one's home, a truly, you could say, conceptually Jewish intellectual posture. So this migration is a movement away from any attempt at metaphysical restoration. Yes, a spatial and philosophical movement. He rejects all efforts to cling to the sacred past. He embraces a totally unflinching absolute atheism, but he does it to save the critical content of metaphysics for this worldly critique. And he carries out this philosophical imperative through his magnum opus Negative Dialectics.
So how does this method function as a radical critique of Hegelian closure? What are the political stakes here? The stakes are enormous. Adorno is fundamentally rejecting Hegel's entire project. Hegel's dialectic moves toward identity and reconciliation. For Sunim, where the subject reason freedomfully understands and is reconciled with the object, with the world. For Hegel, this leads to rational fulfillment. And for Adorno? For Adorno, in the administered world of modern capitalism, the pursuit of identity, the claim that your concept perfectly matches the object, is the ideological affirmation of unfreedom. To claim that the concept of justice perfectly matches our current legal system is to commit ideological violence. Identity means unfitum because it forces the unique, messy, singular object to conform to the universal abstract concept. So where Hegel is seeking totality and closure, Adorno insists on the persistence of negativity, on non -identity. Exactly. Negative dialectics is a philosophy that insists on the gat, the rift between the concept and the object.
It's like Hegelianism without the happy ending. Its goal is to achieve what he calls solidarity with metaphysics at the moment of its fall. What does that mean exactly? It means salvaging the critical emancipatory potential of metaphysical thought, the promise of a non -repressive whole, without actually affirming the metaphysics itself. Criticism has to expose the rift. It has to insist on the negativity of the world to keep the potential for change alive. This insistence on breaking open conceptual closure leads him to embrace some really surprising allegorical resources, especially Lurianic Kabbalah, which is a radical theological tradition pretty far removed from Marxism. Why this unusual detour? He uses the Lurianic myth of the shavarat hakelem, the shattering of the vessels, as a perfect allegory for critiquing modern ideology. The myth describes how when God tried to create the world, the divine light was too powerful. The vessels broke and fragments of that divine light became trapped inside calipots or shells in the material world. And what does Adorno say the task of the critic is using this allegory? The task of criticism of the philosophical process is to perform a kind of picun olam, a repair of the world by shattering the calipot, the shells of our conceptual categories. Modern ideology builds these neat. cohesive conceptual boxes that give the world its illusory perfection and closure. Adorno's dialectics are designed to violently break open those shells, to expose the fragments of unrealized potential, the messianic light that are trapped inside. The Kabbalah becomes a profound metaphor for the brokenness of our modern conceptual systems. And this brings us to the conceptual pinnacle of Gordy's analysis, negative dialectics as negative theology. Adorno uses philosophical negation, insisting on what a thing is not, to shatter illusion. He's tapping into the ancient tradition of the via negativa, or negative predication, which you see most clearly in Moses' Maimonides. Maimonides insisted that to preserve God's absolute oneness and transcendence, we can't assign positive attributes to him. To say God is powerful is flawed. Instead, we have to use infinite judgment. God is not unpowerful.
It's the logical form of the negation of a privation. And Adorno does the same thing, but in a secular context. Precisely. Both Maimonides and Adorno use philosophical negation as their essential tool to combat idolatry. Maimonides battles theological idolatry, imagining God in human terms. Adorno battles secular idolatry, the reification of social concepts, treating things like the market or progress as absolute, unchangeable truths. So Adorno's atheism isn't just a rejection of God. It's the dialectical culmination, the critical fulfillment of God's own iconoclastic command.
Exactly. Adorno argues that if religion is accepted for the sake of something other than its own truth content, for comfort, for social cohesion, for power, it undermines itself. His radical atheism is the dialectical consequence of negative theology pursued to its absolute limit. Only the negation of religion can fully realize its truth content, allowing that messianic light, the promise of non -identity, to flow into the rigorous critique of imminence. He accepts secularism as a necessary imperative, and he uses the critical tools of theology against the restored metaphysics of religion itself. What an intellectual journey.
We've charted three distinct but conceptually linked approaches to secularization. Benjamin, who's seeking this necessary messianic eruption from outside of history. Then Horkheimer. who's maintaining this minimal, non -scientific longing for the holy other. And finally, Adorno, who demands a ruthless migration into the profane as a secular and critical imperative. And Gordon's great achievement is showing that despite all their differences, all three were engaged in the same desperate salvage operation. How do you preserve the critical edge of thought in a world that's been stripped of sacred meaning, where reason has just devolved into mechanism?
Adorno's approach is the one that's the most enduring because it's the most minimalist and most radical. For him, the memory of religion only survives as this highly pressurized point of critical leverage against social imminence. It's a tool for achieving non -identity in the world, not a separate claim to truth. And this philosophical stance brings us right back around to the political implications that are embedded in that metaphor of the migrant and to Gordon's final argument, which is centered on the critique of dwelling. This is where the academic study becomes really urgent in the real world. It really does. You have to contrast Adorno's thought with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, who was obsessed with authentic dwelling, eigentlichkeit, and finding rootedness in the soil. Heidegger's philosophy often celebrated this longing for a secure, unified home, deeply connected to a specific tradition and a specific land. And that longing for a kind of monocultural purity, the mal du pays, this homesickness for a place that never really existed, that was philosophically dangerous, especially given Heidegger's own historical warnings against Semitic nomads and his association with Nazi ideology. So Adorno's counter thesis is an explicit ethical statement. Dwelling in the authentic sense is no longer possible. The political theological fantasy of a secure, unified home, a place that's wholly our own, is a pathology. This fantasy, Adorno argues, is what fuels the exclusionary nationalism and xenophobia that defined the 20th century and continue to plague us today. It's the desire for closure and identity written onto political geography. So if the Frankfurt School struggled with secularization, it was to make sure that the process of disenchantment led not to nihilism, but to a more sophisticated, more critical, and ultimately more inclusive humanity.
They wanted to redeem the promise of the Enlightenment from itself. Precisely. The core insight that Gordon pulls from Adorno is that we have to embrace multiplicity and internal difference. The historical condition of the stranger, of the refugee, is the constitutive condition of humanity, a humanity that is perpetually displaced from its own truth. Eucopia, in this view, isn't found in belonging or stability or a fixed national identity. It's found in the ongoing, necessary, and sometimes terrifying adventure of the migration into the profane. We have to unbind ourselves from that dangerous romantic dream of a self -identical rooted existence. The truth is found in the restless critical movement of the refugee of metaphysics.
That is a truly revolutionary conclusion. It forces us to redefine what political belonging and critical consciousness even mean in the 21st century. We have methodically navigated the Frankfurt School's complicated relationship with the sacred and the secular, seeing how Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno tried to salvage these essential normative resources from a rapidly disenchanting world, constantly fighting that urge to just let the world be the final word on justice. And that struggle. It really raises a final provocative thought for you, the listener. If critical thinking means recognizing that the stranger is always our own mirror image, that permanent exile is the only authentic philosophical posture, then how must our current political institutions change to institutionalize this migration into the profane?
How do we ensure plurality without dispersal and difference without domination? How do we build a secular society whose critical foundation rests on the knowledge of its own fragility and its own displacement? That is a powerful challenge that Adorno throws at the secular age and a fantastic distillation of the deep insights in Peter E. Gordon's remarkable work. Thank you so much for guiding us through this challenging intellectual landscape. My absolute pleasure. And thank you, the listener, for providing the source material and joining us for this deep dive. We'll see you next time.