“Even the loveliest dream,” Adorno notes in Minima Moralia, “bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.” It is as if, in the moment of waking, one were to experience the way in which the dream is “damaged,” indeed as if there were already something “damaged” in the dream itself. According to Adorno, the “description of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma in Kafka’s Amerika” captures this experience most acutely.

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