The Migration of Metaphysics into the Realm of the Profane
Theodor W. Adorno Reads Gershom Scholem
Series:
IJS Studies in Judaica, Volume: 20
Author: Ansgar Martins
Translator: Lars Fischer
Ansgar Martins’s The Migration of Metaphysics into the Realm of the Profane is the first book-length study focusing on Adorno’s idiosyncratic appropriation of Jewish mysticism in the light of his relationship to Gershom Scholem and their shared intellectual contexts.
Rather than merely posit vague associative connections, as previous authors have often done, Martins’s close reading of specific references in published and private texts alike allows him to highlight both commonalities and differences between Adorno’s and Scholem’s understanding of Kabbalistic tropes and the issue of metaphysics in the modern world, and to demonstrate the extent to which similarities resulted from mutual and/or third-party influences (especially Benjamin). Martins throws the specifics of their respective idiosyncratic appropriations of (Jewish) tradition into sharp relief.
https://brill.com/view/title/54818
A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking: Critical Theory After Adorno as Applied to Jewish Thought (Bloomsbury Studies in Jewish Thought) Kindle Edition
A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking is a search for authenticity that combines critical thinking with a yearning for heartfelt poetics. A physiognomy of thinking addresses the figure of a life lived where theory and praxis are unified. This study explores how the critical essays on music of German-Jewish thinker, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) necessarily accompany the downfall of metaphysics. By scrutinizing a critical juncture in modern intellectual history, marked in 1931 by Adorno's founding of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, neglected applications of Critical Theory to Jewish Thought become possible. This study proffers a constructive justification of a critical standpoint, reconstructively shown how such ideals are seen under the genealogical proviso of re/cognizing their original meaning. Re/cognition of A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking redresses neglected applications of Negative Dialectics, the poetics of God, the metaphysics of musical thinking, reification in Zionism, the transpoetics of Physics and Metaphysics, as well as correlating Aesthetic Theory to Jewish Law (halakhah).
Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem, and the‘German-Jewish Dialogue’
Lars Fischer UCL (University College London)
Abstract
The publication of the correspondence between Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem in 2015 is a major landmark, offering fresh insights into their personalities and the remarkable intellectual relationship and growing personal friendship between them. In this short piece, some of the evidence for the intensity of the relationship between Adorno and Scholem is presented, followed by a discussion of their shared emphatic negation of the notion that any such thing as a ‘German-Jewish Dialogue’ had existed prior to 1933. Henceforth, anyone who wants to continue dismissing Scholem’s remarks about the non-existence of a ‘German-Jewish dialogue’ prior to 1933 out of hand in the cavalier fashion in which it has become common-place to do so will need to reckon not only with Scholem but also with Adorno
The Twilight of Reason: Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and Levinas Tested by the Catastrophe
Orietta Ombrosi
Series: Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah
ISBN: 9781936235759 (hardcover) / 9781644696675 (paper)
Pages: 234 pp.
Publication Date: October 2011
“Think of the disaster” is the first injunction of thought when faced with the disaster that struck European Jews during the Shoah. Thinking of the disaster means understanding why the Shoah was able to occur in civilized Europe, moulded by humane reason and the values of progress and enlightenment. It means thinking of a possibility for philosophy’s future.
Walter Benjamin, who wrestled with these problems ahead of time, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Emmanuel Levinas had the courage, the strength and the perception—and sometimes simply the desperation—to think about what had happened. Moved by indignation and the desire to testify, they felt the urgent need to address the cries of agony of Auschwitz’s victims in their thinking.
Orietta Ombrosi (PhD University of Paris X-Nanterre) is assistant professor of moral philosophy at the Sapienza, University of Rome. She is the author of Le crepuscule de la raison. Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer et Levinas a l’epreuve de la Catastrophe, (Hermann, 2007) and L’umano ritrovato. Saggio su Emmanuel Levinas (Marietti, 2010), and the editor of Tra Torah e Sophia. Orizzonti e frontiere della filosofia ebraica (Marietti, 2011).
Table of Contents
Preface by Catherine Chalier
Foreword
Prelude
THE NOSTALGIA OF ODYSSEUS
Regression: subjugated in order to subjugate
The circle of the Same
Why Odysseus?
Chapter I: FACING BEHEMOTH
I. The Jews, a problem in Horkheimer’s analysis of anti-Semitism
II. Anti-Semitism: a product of civilization, according to Horkheimer and Adorno
III. Hitlerism: paganism according to Levinas
Chapter II: ON THE THRESHOLD: WALTER BENJAMIN
I. From the before to the after: catastrophes
1. Catastrophe and technological progress
2. Catastrophe and the historical continuum
3. Catastrophe and redemption
II. From the after to the before: fl ashes of remembrance
1. Dialectic of remembrance
2. Dialectic of memory and forgetting
Interlude
A PHILOSOPHY OF TESTIMONY
Silences of the witnesses
Words of the saved
The here and the now of testimony
Chapter III: THOUGHTS OF EXILE: THEODOR W. ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER
I. Adorno: a “sad knowledge”
1. Philosophical thought after Auschwitz: a truth of feeling
2. Ethics of physical suffering
3. Theoretical thought in the face of pain and death
4. A death worse than death
5. Education after Auschwitz, or against coldness
II. Horkheimer: between lucid despair and mute hope
1. Reason and its shadow: self-destruction
2. Reason and nomination
3. A Jewish intellectual after Auschwitz
Chapter IV: “THE PRESENTIMENT AND THE MEMORY OF THE NAZI HORROR”: EMMANUEL LEVINAS
I. Philosophizing after Auschwitz: three lessons
II. A subjectivity of fl esh and blood
1. Subjectivity as sensibility
2. Subjectivity as vulnerability
3. Subjectivity as persecution
III. A humanism of the “suffering servant”
1. Auschwitz as a paradigm of useless suffering
2. Ethical resistance afterwards
Conclusion
Indicative Bibliography
ADORNO and the NAME of GOD
by David Kaufmann
Thus God, the Absolute, eludes finite beings. Where they desire to name him, because they must, they betray him. But if they keep silent about him, they acquiesce in their own impotence and sin against the other, no less binding, commandment to name him.1
The critique of metaphysics is by now a venerable tradition in Western thought and has been tied since the end of the eighteenth century to the principle of emancipation. The drive to disenchant the world -- the ongoing tendency to wrest rational control from what previously could only be seen as blind fate -- has always been closely associated with the Enlightenment’s concerted attack on the institutional privileges and intellectual status accorded to revealed religion. The story is well known. Kant saved faith from Hume and philosophy from dogmatism by curtailing the speculative pretensions of the one and the reach of the other. At the same time, he submitted religion to the court of reason and thus left space for autonomy. The Left Hegelians (particularly Feuerbach and Marx) took the humanization of the world a step further by reducing metaphysics to anthropology and religion to need. The history of religion became the history of man’s alienated but authentic hope, a hope that needed to be reclaimed in the name of freedom. Nietzsche -- the apostate son of a Lutheran pastor -- launched his own, anti-Hegelian critique of metaphysics. He sought to psychologize the urge for atemporal, necessary, and universal Truth and thus to cure the nostalgia for a sovereign God and a sovereign Subject by revealing them both to be fictions of grammar and bad faith. And to this day, we find the emancipatory interest in overcoming metaphysics pursued literally by Left Hegelians and rhetorically by Nietzscheans -- by Marxists and Heideggerians, by Leftists and Deconstructionists.
READ ON https://www.flashpointmag.com/adorno.htm
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
(15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, literary critic, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, historical materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and is associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism.
Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Benjamin coined the term "auratic perception", denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays "The Task of the Translator" (1923), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) and his unfinished magnum opus the Arcades Project.
Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis.
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/kabbalistic-kommunism.html
His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism.
Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Benjamin coined the term "auratic perception", denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays "The Task of the Translator" (1923), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) and his unfinished magnum opus the Arcades Project.
Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis.
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/kabbalistic-kommunism.html
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