Snapshots of the Impossible: The Image as Critique Lucas Wood University of Pennsylvania Gerhard Richter. ought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reections from Dam- aged Life. Stanford: Stanford UP (Cultural Memory in the Present), 2007. ix, 233 pp. $65.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. Gerhard Richter’s ought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reections from Damaged Life approaches the work of Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Bloch through the genre of the “thought-image” (Denkbild), whose ambiguous situation between philo- sophical argument and aesthetic production makes it a privileged site for the performance of anti-totalizing critique. is review analyzes Richter’s reading of the thought-image as a form of resistance to the premature closure of meaning, and presents the book as an illuminating close reading of the Frankfurt School archive with sometimes problematic debts to Derridean deconstruction. Keywords: thought-image / Denkbild / Frankfurt School / possibility / extra- territoriality T he rst epigraph to Gerhard Richter’s ought-Images is an aphorism taken from Blanchot’s e Writing of the Disaster : “ ‘ Optimists write badly.’ (Valéry) But pessimists do not write.” It is a tting motto for a book that grapples with the ethical, political and aesthetic ramications of optimism and pessimism, utopian hopefulness and sober historical consciousness, as they inform and are informed by philosophical and literary production. But it is equally in keeping with Richter’s subject that the subsequent text should unfold less under the aegis of this quotation than in tension with it, as a problematization of the dichotomies it erects. Richter’s key interlocutors are eodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer, reunited here not as members of a monolithic Frankfurt School, but rather as a constellation of friends thinking in and through fruitful conversation with each other. Indisputably, these men wrote, and wrote prolically, with remarkable eloquence and intensity. However, ought-Images announces in its very subtitle a concern for the ways in which their writing is Journal of Modern Literature 33.1 (2009): 159-63.