The central aim of this paper is to examine the possibility of philosophy in today’s world. Adorno and Foucault propose two incompatible answers to this question. According to Adorno, having missed the moment of its realization, philosophy can only contemplate the world from the standpoint of redemption. For Foucault, by contrast, the task proper to philosophy, as it turns to its time, consists in wrenching “something eternal” from the present instant. The key argument put forward by this essay is that, while Badiou and Agamben have taken up the challenge of sustaining the disjunctive tension between these two antinomian paths, they propose divergent strategies in their attempt at solving the problem of the contemporaneity of philosophy. De...