Trevor,
I have to admit that the messianic/redemption current in Adorno and Benjamin leaves me cold. It is alien, especially in its Judaic form.
The Christian form makes no sense to me in living my life. It is an a old cultural form that is all about the deliverance of a new age/salvation/an ideal era of peace that is coupled to deliverance from sin through the incarnation, sufferings and death of Christ or atonement for guilt. The only way that I can relate to all of this is through Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathrustra.
I recoil when I read paragraph 153 in Adorno's Minima Moralia:
"Finale: 'The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique."
But for ethics? Why not Nietzsche's revaluation of values in the face of the process of nihilism. After all Minima Moralia is concerned with the teaching of the good life. Here is opening part of Dedication:
"The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time memorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its etranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses."
The melancholy science links back to Nietzsche's The Gay Science; a book written by someone who knew they lived on the edge of disaster; yet whose title suggests a light-hearted defiance of convention, immoralism and revaluation of values. It is a poetic philosophy that not only sings and sizzles about life, it also affirms life.
Let me quote some of para 377 Bk V of the Gay Science:
"We who are homeless. Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense: it is to them that I especially commend my secret wisdom and gaya scienza. For their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain; it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but what avail? We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its "realities," we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin "realities."We "conserve" nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means "liberal"; we do not work for "progress"; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about "equal rights," "a free society," "no more masters and no servants" has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth...."
"We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the "historical sense." We are, in one word—and let this be our word of honor—good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit. As such, we have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it—precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright: for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We—do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by—a faith!"
I have to admit that in terms of living my life Nietzsche speaks to me in a way that Adorno does not.