The Odd Couple

Vivian Liska







Vivian Liska is director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor in humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author most recently of German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife (Indiana University Press).

BOOKS

Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem Correspondence, 1939-1969
Edited by Asaf Angermann
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski and Paula Schwebel
Polity Press, 520 pages, $45

“A stellar hour of German-Jewish intellectual history.” This is how the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas describes the correspondence between Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, published in German in 2015, and now appearing for the first time in English.

In bringing a whole era to life, the epistolary dialogue continuously negotiates the proximity and distance of this “odd couple”: Adorno, a German philosopher of Jewish descent best known for his neo-Marxist, materialist aesthetic theory and social criticism, and Scholem, the German-born Israeli founder of the modern study of Kabbalah. After a jarring start, the more than two-hundred letters between them become more intimate, informed by an authentic respect of each other’s brilliance, a deepening interest in each other’s writing, and a finely tuned conversational style. Yet their relationship is punctuated by discord to the end.

The correspondence begins shortly after their first meeting in New York in 1938 and ends with Adorno’s death in 1969. It centers on their mutual friend Walter Benjamin, on the planning of a jointly edited volume of his letters and other writings, and on their achievements and failures in chasing Benjamin’s letters, dispersed to all corners of the world after his suicide in 1940 while fleeing Vichy France.

The correspondence also offers fresh insights into Adorno’s and Scholem’s shared ambivalence about other figures in their orbit like Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber. It includes occasionally outrageous comments, such as Adorno’s remarks about his “disdain” for Arendt, whom he calls “an old washer-woman.” Yet such cutting comments serve to enhance the mutual complicity between the two friends, and as a code to situate themselves within their shared intellectual landscape.







As their epistolary relationship unfolds, it becomes a fascinating testimony of an exchange of ideas between these two domineering and competitive personalities. Gradually, a common intellectual quest comes to light: an astute attention for what had been repressed by Enlightenment rationality gone awry. Writing after Auschwitz, Adorno and Scholem shared a sense that the Enlightenment—as well as the hopes and expectations attached to it—had proven to be a chimera: instead of bringing freedom and emancipation, it had relapsed into myth. For both, theology plays an important but not unambiguous role in their endeavor to counter this disastrous regression.

One senses just below the surface that the two correspondents’ core beliefs are at stake: the relationship between philosophy and religion, modernity and tradition, and the universal and the particular. Adorno suggests that metaphysical and theological truths can survive in the modern world only if they are secularized, only if they undergo what he calls “a migration into the profane.”

It comes as no surprise, then, that Adorno frequently expresses his admiration of Scholem’s studies into how the forces of Kabbalah intruded into secular history. In 1938, upon his first encounter with Scholem, Adorno reports to Benjamin that Scholem’s belief in the truth content of theology made him think of someone releasing a lifeboat, but then “swamping it with water and getting it to capsize” instead of saving “at least some of the freight: presumably transcendence.” Adorno adds that Scholem’s historical interpretations of the “‘explosions’ of Jewish mysticism” ignored the driving force of social processes. In his letters to Scholem, however, Adorno insists on the closeness of their standpoints. At times, he insists too much. Sentences starting with ingenious variations of “I’m sure you will agree…” become frequent.

Scholem’s idea that heretical mysticism prefigured and eventually transformed into the Enlightenment deeply resonated with Adorno’s premise of his own dialectical understanding of modernity. In one of the first letters of their correspondence, Adorno excitedly expresses the discovery of a common ground between his own philosophy and Scholem’s understanding of Jewish mysticism. It becomes increasingly clear that what Adorno hopes to find in Scholem’s thought is a Jewish version of what will become the core idea of his own theory developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Max Horkheimer): that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.”

“Only thoughts which cannot understand themselves are true.”


At the same time, Scholem is reluctant to express his complicity with Adorno’s thinking, or even to fully disclose his own standpoint. In his answer to Adorno’s enthusiastic letter about the Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms, Scholem dismisses Adorno’s continuing request for additional explanations: “Now you want a commentary – what are you thinking? … I will guard myself against getting into hot water here. One credo that applies to my aphorisms is: every man for himself.”

Scholem, in keeping with the esotericism of his subject matter, hides behind witticisms and every so often keeps the answers to himself. Where Adorno recognizes an agreement at the core of their thought, Scholem more often than not feels the need to set himself apart.







In a lengthy letter responding to Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s magnum opus, Scholem remains too repelled by Adorno’s neo-Marxist terminology to submit to his flattering advances. The same reservations can be felt in Scholem’s response to Adorno’s request to have a look at his musical writings, which he regards as closely related to Scholem’s view of the relationship between mysticism, Enlightenment, and myth. Scholem shirks the issue and protests his ignorance in musical matters. When Adorno calls Arnold Schönberg’s opera Moses and Aron “Jewish music,” Scholem replies that this very notion must be endowed with a perennial question mark. The form of Scholem’s rebuttals ranges from gentle jokes – often about the notorious obscurity of Adorno’s style – to pure provocation. “Who, may I ask,” Scholem writes in a letter from February 6, 1967, “is the author of the lovely line ‘Only thoughts which cannot understand themselves are true’? I presume I would approve if only I understood it.” The author of the line, as Adorno admits in his reply, is none other than himself.

Adorno once remarked to Benjamin that Scholem’s “very conception of mysticism … presents itself … as that same incursion into the profane with which he reproaches both of us.” Three decades later, when Adorno points to the convergence between his own dialectics and Scholem’s sympathies for redemptive transgression, Scholem mischievously borrows the weapons of the adversary to launch his dismissive reply: “It will appeal to your dialectical sensibility when I tell you that my sympathies extend not only to the heterodox but also to the orthodox… You know very well that I’m anything but an atheist.” In the same letter, Scholem rejects Adorno’s rapprochement of their ideas about the question of secularization: “While you are right to point out that I have said much about the secularization of mysticism – and what is more, of religion,” Scholem writes, “it should also be noted that I see secularization not as something definitive.” For Scholem, against Adorno, the Jewish tradition’s modern decline was far from final.

One of the most explicit passages in the correspondence wrestles with what Habermas called “the destiny of the sacred after the Enlightenment.” Adorno writes: “It would seem to me that in the present day, the only possibility of salvaging sacred art and its philosophical truth-content lies in its unflinching migration into the profane.” Adorno adds: “You must also be inclined to this view.” Scholem is not.

Why does Scholem so stubbornly ward off Adorno’s attempts to align their thinking? Scholem’s resistance to submit to Adorno’s embrace might be explained most directly by his rejection of the Frankfurt School’s Marxist leanings, and by his instinct to guard against too great a proximity to someone who in his view could not participate in the renewal of Judaism as a lived reality. One senses in Scholem’s repeated withdrawal from Adorno’s admiring grip a suspicion (spiced with pride and resentment) that his Jewishly particularistic work might be appropriated for Adorno’s larger cause.

Beyond the content of their conversation, however, what makes their correspondence truly enchanting, emerges from the style in which they deal with their affinities and differences. One cannot help admire their art of conversing—their irony and perceptible pleasure in delivering the finest amalgams of German Geist and Jewish wit. A splendid example is one of Scholem’s letters announcing his arrival in the spring of 1966 in Frankfurt, where he hopes to meet Adorno under a clear blue sky:




Please arrange with the dwellers of the Marxian heaven for the sun to shine on the 16th of March. That is, if you don’t maintain any diplomatic relations with the other heavenly inhabitants. I would rather rely on the old angels, especially since I recently looked back over Marx’s pages on the Jewish Question, which, once again, almost made me vomit. The Talmud states that the keys to making it rain were not even entrusted to (Kafka’s?) angels. However, the same Talmud also states that, on the Day of Atonement, as the high priest in Jerusalem entered the holiest of holies, he implored God with particular vigor not to heed the prayers of the tourists (who had asked for good weather) – a purely materialist consideration in the interest of the conditions of agricultural production. So one has a choice between these Talmudic utterances about the weather and its masters.

The urge to check the Frankfurt weather conditions in March 1966 is irresistible, but one looks for this information in vain in Asaf Angermann’s rich annotations. Instead, one finds there one of the many gems that adorn this superbly edited book: the passage from the Babylonian Talmud to which Scholem refers (Ta’anit 2a).

The elegantly translated English edition of this correspondence now allows a wider readership to witness a dazzling dialogue carried out on the peaks of the German-Jewish landscape.

This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/kabbalistic-kommunism.html

The Odd Couple
Through their editorial work on the writings of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem forged an unlikely friendship.

By Peter E. Gordon

THE NATION
JUNE 9, 2016

LONG READ

Walter Benjamin’s Paris address book (1930s). Gersom Scholem’s address is the last in the list. From Walter Benjamin’s Archive. (Verso Books)

In February 1966, the historian Gershom Scholem dashed off a few lines to alert his friend Theodor Adorno of his travel plans. “I’ll arrive Wednesday in Frankfurt, where I’ll touch down at the Park Hotel,” he wrote. “Please arrange with the Marxist heavens, just in case you don’t maintain diplomatic relations with the resident of the other heaven, for sunshine on March 16th. For myself I prefer to rely on the old angel.”

BOOKS IN REVIEW
BRIEFWECHSEL, 1939–1969: “DER LIEBE GOTT WOHNT IM DETAIL.”
By Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem; Asaf Angermann, ed.
$Suhrkamp Verlag. 548 pp. ¤39.95

The collected correspondence between Scholem and Adorno, recently issued by the prestigious German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, doesn’t record the meteorological conditions for the middle of March 1966. Nor do we know whose deity might have proved more responsive. Men of extraordinary erudition and critical acumen, Scholem and Adorno could never truly overcome their philosophical and political differences, though in retrospect it’s clear that both men epitomized a shared style of Central European intelligence, fusing irony with utopian conviction, that emerged in the years before the midcentury catastrophe.

Born in 1897, Gershom (originally Gerhard) Scholem was raised in a well-acculturated German-Jewish family in Berlin. Early in life, he committed himself to the Zionist cause, and by 1923 he’d immigrated to Palestine, where he assumed a post at the newly established Hebrew University of Jerusalem and forged an entirely new field of historical inquiry into the esoteric and half-forgotten texts of the Kabbalah. Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born in 1903 (the “Adorno” is from his mother’s Catholic Corsican side) and was raised in Frankfurt, where he divided his time between philosophy and music. Eventually, he would join intellectuals like Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal to develop the subtle style of neo-Marxist social philosophy known as “critical theory.” The two wouldn’t meet in person until 1938, at the New York home of the socialist theologian Paul Tillich, who had once served as Adorno’s academic adviser

The correspondents disagreed about many things. Scholem, despite his famously large ears, had no gift for music and couldn’t appreciate Adorno’s writings on musicology. He had even less patience for the Marxist orientation of the so-called Frankfurt School. Although Scholem’s older brother Werner had been a communist—he was killed at Buchenwald—Scholem himself tended to see historical materialism as a kind of counterreligion, offering the paradoxical belief that belief can play no independent role in the explanation of world history. But perhaps it was this difference in intellectual temperament that most drew Adorno and Scholem into an endless debate even while they remained on separate continents.

After the war, Adorno returned from his exile in the United States to a newly established professorship in Frankfurt, where he lectured at the Goethe University on social theory and philosophy, and even spoke occasionally on the radio on themes like “Education After Auschwitz,” becoming a gadfly against social conformity and helping to awaken the conscience of a new generation. Scholem remained faithful to the cause of a Jewish homeland and, through his early membership with Brit Shalom, helped promote the cause of Arab-Jewish binationalism. From our own perspective, and after nearly 50 years of occupation, the cause of Zionism that Scholem once admired has grown bellicose and deeply unfamiliar; it can be hard to recall a time when it inspired intellectuals of his caliber.

Even in Jerusalem, however, Scholem retained the habits of a European academic. From 1925 to 1965, he worked as professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University. Unlike Adorno, Scholem found the memory of the Holocaust so painful that for many years he refused all scholarly invitations from Germany. It was only in 1956, thanks to the delicate intercessions of Adorno and Horkheimer, that he agreed to speak at the university in Frankfurt.

Unlikely as their friendship may seem, Scholem and Adorno had one thing in common: They had both been friends of the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, though at first this connection did little to awaken warm feelings between the two. Scholem had known Benjamin since their Berlin days in the Youth Movement during World War I, and he feared that Adorno would lead his friend astray—from Judaism and toward Marxism. He also had little patience for the elaborations of Adorno’s dialectic. On reading Adorno’s early study of Kierkegaard, Scholem wrote to Benjamin that it “combines a sublime plagiarism of your thought with an uncommon chutzpah.”

Despite this initial chill, the mutual suspicion between the two men soon gave way to a shared concern for the fate of their friend. After the Nazi invasion of France, Scholem and Adorno exchanged details on Benjamin’s flight southward from Paris and eventually to Portbou, the town on the Spanish border where he committed suicide. The awful event is reported in a letter dated October 8, 1940, sent by Adorno (then in New York) to Scholem (in Jerusalem). It stands among the earliest letters in their correspondence. Whatever their ideological differences, the tragedy of Benjamin’s death would loom over their friendship for the next three decades, and the bond between them would be forged from the shared experience of mourning. As Asaf Angermann notes in his editor’s afterword, the publication of this volume closes the circuit of correspondence among three of the most esteemed European intellectuals of the 20th century. The letters between Scholem and Benjamin span the years 1932 to 1940; those between Benjamin and Adorno, 1928 to 1940. Those between Adorno and Scholem cover a full three decades, from 1939 to 1969, and are the most extensive of the three collections—a dialogue between survivors.

* * *

Adorno and Scholem immediately understood their unique burden as custodians of Benjamin’s legacy. His writings were scattered everywhere, in newspapers and archives across Europe, some in journals that, in the midst of the war, were extremely hard to find. Many of their exchanges concern the difficult business of assembling the dispersed essays and manuscripts in preparation for their publication after the war. Scholem and Adorno also undertook the no less formidable task of assembling Benjamin’s correspondence. This presented special challenges, because many of those who possessed copies of his letters had either been killed during the war or had dispersed to the furthest corners of the globe. Where was Benjamin’s estranged wife Dora? Where was their son Stefan? Who had survived and who had perished? Did the survivors have copies of this manuscript or that letter—and if so, on which continent could they be found? The details of this editorial work would preoccupy Adorno and Scholem throughout their three decades of correspondence, and in reading their exchanges one can only feel gratitude for the care they took in securing Benjamin’s work a posthumous readership.

The difficulty of the work was compounded by the unreliability of the international post, particularly in wartime but also during the uncertain years of postwar recovery. Some of their letters were perhaps lost or could take over a month to find their way from Palestine to Los Angeles, where Adorno and his wife spent much of the 1940s. With the war’s conclusion and Adorno’s return to Frankfurt, the project assumed a more regular rhythm. Adorno was especially keen to secure a contract with the esteemed publisher Peter Suhrkamp, the guardian angel of West Germany’s rising intelligentsia. Troubled in matters of finances, Suhrkamp briefly withdrew from the project, only to shift course and extend his full support—news that Adorno passed along to Scholem with great relief.

In their correspondence, the memory of Benjamin would persist like a mediating force between extremes. Even today, Benjamin’s intellectual legacy has become the subject of divergent interpretations. Among its most controversial features is an explosive combination of religious and revolutionary commitment. Blending the languages of messianism and historical materialism, early essays like “Critique of Violence” or the “Theological-Political Fragment” and late works like the famous “theses” on history remain poised in indecision as to which authority they mean to serve. Often it seems as though Benjamin wished to overcome the distinction itself as a mere artifact of bourgeois ideology, liberal or social-democratic. Some of Benjamin’s more credulous readers still embrace the combination, presumably because the prospect of a genuinely emancipatory revolution in the postindustrial West has come to seem so improbable that they can justify it only as an irrational faith. Scholem himself, however, found the combination not just unconvincing but also dangerous. Worried by his friend’s flirtations with Marxism, Scholem accused Benjamin of a “self-deception” that would end in catastrophe if Benjamin ever took the final step of joining the German Communist Party. “You would not be the last but perhaps the most incomprehensible victim of the confusion between religion and politics,” Scholem warned, “the true relationship of which you could have been expected to bring out more clearly than anyone else.”

Adorno, too, disliked the populist militancy of Benjamin’s Marxism, in which he detected the unsavory influence of Bertolt Brecht. Nor did he harbor any illusions about the authoritarian bureaucracies of the Soviet bloc. But he could not share Scholem’s dismissive attitude toward dialectical materialism. Schooled in the left-Hegelian tradition, Adorno had an intellectual temperament that welded together two principles that others saw as irreconcilable: an unapologetic devotion to high-modernist aesthetics and an uncompromising critique of capitalist society. His reputation in the canon of Western Marxism remains controversial. The horrors of the 20th century shattered Adorno’s confidence in the narratives of dialectical progress that had once inspired Hegel and Marx, leaving him to face the grim task of crafting a philosophy “after Auschwitz.”

In his writings, Adorno’s emphasis shifted almost entirely from social transformation to social critique: The idea of revolution survives only as a conceptual counterweight to present despair. It is this stance, uncompromising in its stringency, that best explains his allegiance to the “negative,” his steadfast refusal to affirm the world as it is. The urgent task was not class struggle but the mind’s own efforts to resist its absorption into the social whole. Adorno continued to believe in the emancipatory promise of rational criticism, even as he entertained the paradox that reason had lost its critical force and had devolved into a mere instrument of domination. Even mass genocide, he believed, was not an exception to rationalized civilization but rather its culmination. Yet he never allowed himself to disregard the concrete fact of human suffering, even as he grappled with the most difficult questions of literature, art, or metaphysics. Whether he fastened his attention on symphonies by Mahler or lamented the debased offerings of the “culture industry,” his style of analysis remained dialectical, shuttling without resolution between negativity and glimpses, however compromised, of utopia.

* * *

Despite such differences, Adorno’s admiration for Scholem remains palpable throughout their correspondence. Respectful of and even a bit intimidated by Scholem’s erudition, Adorno never hesitated to send along his latest publication, inquiring discreetly in his next letter if Scholem had found time to read what he’d sent. Scholem’s opinion mattered a great deal to Adorno, though one cannot say with confidence that Adorno’s mattered quite as much to Scholem, whose excavations into the subterranean strata of Kabbalistic thought Adorno could only admire from afar, since he lacked the historical and philological knowledge to grasp their importance. Scholem, meanwhile, was a generous reader of Adorno’s work but unsparing in his criticism. The differences between them often revived their older dispute over the religious themes in Benjamin’s work. Upon receiving Adorno’s 1951 collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, Scholem expressed his gratitude and declared it “a remarkable document of negative theology”—a characterization that Adorno found unobjectionable—before adding wryly that it was “just as esoteric as the topic itself.”

In addition to being an accomplished musicologist, Adorno was a composer of some talent and a student of the Second Viennese School. In one letter, he urged Scholem to recognize the affinities between Schoenberg’s music and Jewish mysticism, though, Adorno averred, it “differs from synagogue music as much as Kafka differs from the rabbis.” In 1963, Adorno sent the latest volume of his musicological criticism, Quasi una Fantasia, which contained an essay he’d dedicated to Scholem, on Schoenberg’s unfinished, biblically themed opera Moses und Aron.

In a characteristic gesture of paradox, Adorno speculated that Schoenberg’s failure to complete the opera was revealing: In its very content, the opera was a meditation on its own impossibility. Moses, the tragic hero of Schoenberg’s libretto, is incapable of song; in defending the new religion of an unrepresentable God, he restricts himself to Sprechstimme (a spoken-voice style that Schoenberg had used before in Pierrot Lunaire), lest the sensuous beauty of the human voice transgress the laws of antisensuous monotheism. But Moses fails to inspire his people, and his brother Aron intervenes with signs and wonders. It is not just Moses who has failed, Adorno reasons, but Schoenberg himself: Though the composer imagines himself the new “Moses” of modern composition, he also relies on the very techniques of sensual representation that Moses condemns. Moses und Aron thus raised the question as to whether its unfinished quality was a virtue, even a necessity, and if religious art was at all viable in a profane world: “Is cultic music possible without a cult?” To Adorno, the answer was clear: The opera was no less a masterpiece in its failure but, much like Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, it was a work alienated from its time, an example of what Adorno called “the a priori impossibility of sacred art today.”

Scholem was grateful to Adorno for the dedication but doubtful about the essay’s argument. “Whether you can really deny the possibility of such music, I do not know,” he wrote. “For indeed it cannot be foreseen, where and in what form in our world the tradition of the sacred can find expression. That it is a priori impossible,” Scholem concluded, was something “I would not care to admit.” This dispute runs through their correspondence, with Adorno playing Moses (apodictic, uncompromising) to Scholem’s Aron (moderate, adaptive). In his reply, Adorno momentarily retracted his earlier verdict, admitting that his actual opinion is “more careful than came out in that text.” “An a priori No,” he wrote, lay far from his intentions. But “to me it would seem, and I would have thought you must tend to agree, that the only possibility for the rescue of sacred art, just as for its philosophical truth-content, would lie today in a ruthless migration into the profane.” For Adorno, it was inconceivable that religious values could survive, innocent and unblemished, in a disenchanted world. What Adorno had once called, in a letter to Benjamin, an “inverse theology” wouldn’t allow for any positive affirmation of religion lest its truth give way to ideological complacency. In an unredeemed world, one could glimpse the messianic light only in its photographic negative.

* * *

This paradoxical and rather oblique acknowledgment of religion’s critical promise allowed for moments of surprising agreement between the two men. In 1966, Adorno presented Scholem with a copy of Negative Dialectics, the newly published work he affectionately called his “fat child,” which contained the mature expression of his own philosophy. In response, Scholem confessed that he had nearly broken his head trying to read the book but would gamely offer an opinion. Never before, he said, had he encountered “a more chaste and guarded [verhaltene] defense of metaphysics.” He admired the attempt to wrest from Hegel’s dialectic a new species of “negative” criticism that did not lapse into “false affirmation.” But he couldn’t share Adorno’s continued faith in materialism, and he didn’t see how this materialism could be squared with the book’s closing appeal to metaphysics. He recognized that Adorno had abandoned the Marxist commitment to class struggle, but he still detected in Adorno’s work a materialist belief in the mediation of consciousness through social processes. To Scholem, this unshaken fragment of historical materialism played the role in Adorno’s philosophy of a deus ex machina. Adorno’s response betrays a startling readiness to surrender identifiably Marxist categories: “The salvation of metaphysics,” he wrote, “is in fact central to my intentions in Negative Dialectics.” But this didn’t preclude a commitment to materialism, which, Adorno insisted, was far from a worldview or a “fixed thing.” The path to materialism was “totally different from dogma” and did not prevent but actually guaranteed “an affinity with metaphysics, I might almost have said, theology.”

This counterintuitive suggestion—that materialism and theology might somehow converge—helps to explain why Adorno found a sympathetic reader in Scholem. In his studies of the Kabbalah, Scholem, too, joined the theological and secular categories in an unlikely union. It was the great conceit of his scholarship that messianism, the most volatile force in all of Jewish history, had never vanished but instead constantly reasserted itself in new and unfamiliar forms. Though it lay dormant in ancient visions of the divine chariot (or Merkabah), it gained increased theosophical definition in medieval writings like the Zohar; then, in the 16th-century texts of the Lurianic Kabbalah, it grew into a cosmic theory of redemption. Anarchic and unpredictable, it had inspired the 17th-century heresy of the false messiah, Sabbatai Sevi, and the 18th-century heretical movement of Jacob Frank, until the modernizing proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) and Jewish historical “science” (the Wissenschaft des Judentums) sought to suppress it once and for all.

But the assimilationists failed. The messianic impulse cloaked itself in secular garments only to burst out at pivotal moments of history, first in the antinomian violence of the French Revolution, and, much later, risked a political-theological explosion in secular Zionism itself. This was a boldly revisionist and rather romantic vision of the Jewish past; Scholem ignored the tradition of legal-rationalism that arguably lies at Judaism’s core. But it clearly held a philosophical and personal meaning for him that breached the rules of conventional historiography, as is evident in his “Ten Ahistorical Theses on the Kabbalah” (1958), in which he entertained the idea that his own historical research contributed to a hidden stream of “nihilistic messianism” coursing through Jewish history. In a confessional moment, he wrote to Adorno: “I am anything but an atheist.”

Alongside these bracing deliberations on philosophy and history, the correspondence also contains moments of humor. On December 22, 1963, Scholem sent Adorno news of an important discovery:


Dear Adorno,
As a Jewish Christmas-present, I can now, just in time, bestow upon you, as the result of my strenuous, protracted, and for the most part unsuccessful efforts, a truly authoritative recipe for the preparation of the world-renowned Jewish dish of Cholent [a thick stew, often made with beans, kept warm on the Sabbath]. I secured this through the mediation of a lady in the circles of the Israeli diplomatic service, who for her part inherited it from American-Jewish-Russian sources. I wish you bon appetit.
Yours,

G. Scholem


On January 22, 1964, Adorno wrote the following in response:

Dear Scholem,
Please accept my heartfelt, but, alas, belated thanks for your letter of 22 December and the Jewish Christmas present. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to try it out, because my doctor, who is theologically uneducated, has slapped me with a diet which proscribes precisely this kind of delicacy. We can only hope that this taboo, which has indeed a venerable pre-history—one finds it already in Empedocles—will some day burst out of its mystical trappings into Enlightenment.

Most readers, I suspect, will not be familiar with “the venerable pre-history” of this dietary restriction. Happily, Asaf Angermann has annotated the correspondence with such care that he does not fail to explain even this detail. It alludes to a warning by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles: “Ah, you wretches, utter wretches! Keep your hands off the beans!”

* * *

Adorno and Scholem had the good humor to see through the pretensions of scholarly life. Yet even this exchange bears further scrutiny. The reference to a “Jewish Christmas-present” permits Scholem a playful rejoinder to a passage from Adorno’s 1955 essay on Benjamin, in which Adorno observed that the reader of Benjamin’s work was “bound to feel like the child who catches a glimpse of the lighted Christmas tree through a crack in the closed door.” Scholem, though well acquainted with Christmas trees from his own Berlin childhood, may have resented Adorno’s readiness to adopt a simile that robbed Benjamin’s work of its distinctively Jewish character. Adorno responded in kind: His allusion to Empedocles, citing Hellenism over Hebraism, suggests a reluctance to join Scholem in a homely ritual of Jewish cuisine.

The truth is that Adorno always bristled at communalism. Half-Jewish and half-Catholic by birth, he understood the poisonous consequences of anti-Semitic prejudice; but for that very reason, he couldn’t attach himself to any tribe narrower in circumference than all of humanity, and he extended his moral sympathies to nonhuman animals as well. Like so many refugee intellectuals of his generation who had personally experienced the sting of anti-Semitism, he sided instinctively with the State of Israel against its perceived enemies. In a letter written during the 1956 Suez crisis, he conveyed to Scholem his hopes for Israel’s safety. But it is perhaps no accident that he always found himself too tasked with academic responsibilities in Germany to accept Scholem’s invitations to Jerusalem. Whatever its historical longevity or political utility, ethnonationalism was for Adorno a surrender to the instincts of the horde, not a future ideal.

Scholem’s enduring passion for Zion distinguishes him from Adorno, who is celebrated by many today as the ideal cosmopolite, though others might say that his exacting aesthetic sensibility marks him as the consummate European provincial. Such differences in politics and artistic preference, however, did little to diminish their friendship, which glowed with increasing warmth as the years went by. They never made the transition from the Sie of formal German address to the more intimate du, but they confided to one another about family, gossiped about rivals, and served together as keepers of Benjamin’s flame. The publication of the Adorno-Scholem edition of Benjamin’s writings drew criticism from the far left and from East German Marxists, who accused the editors of intentionally obscuring the late author’s radicalism. Unusually sensitive to such attacks, Adorno wrote resentful letters to Scholem, asking for guidance about how they might respond. Scholem most often counseled restraint.

Such controversies show Adorno at his worst. In one letter, he refers to Hannah Arendt as an “old washer-woman.” (Arendt said no less terrible things about him.) In the late 1960s, Adorno found himself increasingly menaced by student radicals who viewed their aging professors as representatives of a hidebound tradition. He even feared that one revolutionary group was plotting to break into the Benjamin archive and abscond with his papers. To Adorno, these were signs not of revolution but of regression, a return to mythic violence. On April 29, 1969, he wrote to Scholem in despair, reporting on the most recent disruption: During his lecture just a few days earlier, three female students had bared their breasts, and he had fled the hall. In a moment of anguish, the philosopher described the scene to Scholem as Tohuwabohu—Hebrew for primordial chaos.


Peter E. Gordon  teaches philosophy and social theory at Harvard. His newest book is Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization.


SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/kabbalistic-kommunism.html

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

https://archive.org/details/TheodorW.AdornoDreamNotes

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).

https://www.amazon.com/New-Physiognomy-Jewish-Thinking-Bloomsbury-ebook/dp/B00N2MPDUK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1450478412&sr=8-2&keywords=Glazer+aubrey

 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

The Persistence of the Feminine: Negative Dialectics and Feminist Thought

by Ariane McCullough

The women’s liberation movement (WLM) can only produce its positive goal of autonomy if the woman question is not reduced to any principle or system of thought. This paper advances a feminist philosophy as a critique of civilization, understood as capitalist-patriarchy. The introductory section, entitled “Capitalist-Patriarchy and its Discontents”, elaborates on the theory of capitalist-patriarchy (developed by Maria Mies) and outlines modern philosophy, from the Enlightenment to Marxism to postmodernism, as its theoretical reflection. This critique of modernity follows from the contributions of Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, with his conception of 'negative dialectics' as dialectics without identity or system. “’Subjection’ and ‘Subjectivization’” responds with an alternative theory of the subject that escapes the impasse of the object-relation which characterizes patriarchy. The feminist subject is established without object-relation, but as a radically solitary embodiment of the real, borrowing from the contemporary theoretical work of Katerina Kolozova, Alain Badiou, and Francois Laruelle,  as well as from the psychoanalytic discourse of Jacques Lacan. “Feminist Theory and Practice” expands on the theory of the subject to explain the implications of the patriarchal object-relation in the concept of labor and inthe separation of revolutionary theory and practice. The section furthermore discusses feminism as the invocation of “the feminine” as a virtual reality in which the subject appears without object, but as the instance of the real. The final section "The Body in Pain, Care of the Self" considers blackness as social death in relation to the feminist critique of capitalist-patriarchy. Black women occupy an especially vulnerable space incapitalist-patriarchy which is often taken for granted in the WLM. "The Body in Pain" advances a thesis that the critique of capitalist-patriarchy must be enacted with concern to the designation of black bodies as sentient but dead. This paper proposes to struggle with the persistence of the real against identity-thinking.

 STUDIES ON MARX AND HEGEL  PDF

Jean Hyppolite

translated, with an Introduction, Notes,

and Bibliography, by

JOHN O'NEILL

Marx and Lukács: Reason and Revolution inthe Philosophy of Praxis   PDF

Andrew Feenberg 

Table of Contents 

Preface  

The Philosophy of Praxis 

The Demands of Reason 

. Reification and Rationality 

. The Realization of Philosophy 

 History and Nature 

Reconciliation with Nature

Marx at the Margins  PDF

O n  N a t i o n a l i s m ,  E t h n i c i t y , a n d  N o n - W e s t e r n S o c i e t i e s 

Kevin B. Anderson

Marx and Teleology  PDF

SEAN SAYERS

ABSTRACT: 

Marx sees history as a progressive development. This

account is often criticized for portraying history in a Hegelian

fashion as a single teleological process culminating ultimately in

a classless communist society. Is this criticism justified? What role

— if any — do teleological ideas play in Marx’s philosophy? Marx

himself is unclear on these issues. Through a critical discussion

of Althusser’s view that history is a process without a subject, it

is argued that Marxism is best seen as a theory which involves a

naturalistic concept of teleology and which describes the historical

 emergence of the human subject. This interpretation is supported

 by comparison of Marx’s theory of history with Darwinian

evolutionary theory.

LENIN AND HEGEL 

TELOS SPECIAL ISSUE 

OF RADICAL AMERICA

VOL IV  #6, 1970

 NATURE, HISTORY AND THE DIALECTIC OF NEGATIVITY:

THE CATEGORY OF NATURE IN MARX’S WRITINGS

CHRIS DUARTE ARAUJO

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TOTHE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTSFOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIALAND POLITICALTHOUGHTYORK UNIVERSITY

TORONTO, ONTARIO

MAY 2017

MARXISM AND THE ABORIGINAL QUESTION:THE TRAGEDY OF PROGRESS

 David Bedford Department of Political Science University of New Brunswick P.O. Box 4400 Fredericton, New Brunswick Canada, E3B 5A3 

Abstract/Résumé 

Aboriginal concerns are among the least studied areas of Marxist thought. Historically, Aboriginal people have ignored or rejected Marxist ideas. The author suggests that recent events in Canada have given Marxists an opportunity to begin building a practical relationship with Aboriginal people. The left, he notes, must treat Aboriginal demands for cultural survival seriously. 

ADORNO ON NIHILISM AND MODERN

SCIENCE, ANIMALS, AND JEWS

Babette Babich (Fordham University)

Adorno, no less than Heidegger or Nietzsche, had his own critical notions of truth/untruth. But Adorno’s readers are unsettled by the barest hint of anything that might be taken to be antiscience. To protest scientism, yes and to be sure, but to protest “scientific thought,” decidedly not, and the distinction is to be maintained even if Adorno himself challenged it. For Adorno, so-called “scientistic” tendencies are the very “conditions of society and of scientific thought.” And again, Adorno’s readers tend to refuse criticism of this kind. Scientific rationality cannot itself be problematic and E. B. Ashton, Adorno’s translator in the mid-1960s, sought to underscore this with the word “scientivistic.” Rather than science, it is scientism that is to be avoided. So we ask: is Adorno speaking here of scientific rationality or scientistic rationality? How, in general, are we to read Adorno?

Pink Floyd and Philosophy, Careful with that Axiom Eugene!

https://docer.com.ar/doc/n55cv5c

 From Marshall McLuhan to Harold Innis, or From the Global Village to the World Empire

Gaëtan Tremblay Université du Québec à Montréal 

ABSTRACT 

The author presents a personal reading of the pioneering contribution to communication studies made by two Canadian thinkers: Marshall McLuhan and Harold A. Innis. Running countertop the general trend stressing their similarities, he highlights their differences. Rejecting their technological-determinist standpoint, the author proposes a comprehensive and critical summary of their analytical frameworks and methodologies, seeking to assess the influence they have had on his own perspective, tracing the contributions they have made to the evolution of communication research. The author’s viewpoint is condensed in the title: we should go back from McLuhan to Innis, from a framework inspired by the global-village metaphor to one based on the expansion of empire. Keyword's Innis; McLuhan; Media theory; Technology theory; Globalization

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2461/052b29f05b97336a489bdde4f0cd21d7eb3c.pdf

The Toronto School of Communication Theory:

Interpretations, Extensions, Applications

Rita Watson & Menahem Blondheim (Eds.), 

https://www.academia.edu/30222120/Rita_Watson_and_Menahem_Blondheim_Eds_The_Toronto_School_of_Communication_Theory_Interpretations_Extensions_Applications

 Toronto/Jerusalem: University of Toronto Press/The

Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2007, 366 pp., $32.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by

Bob Hanke

York University, Canada

 This book focuses on Harold Adams Innis and Marshall

McLuhan as scholars at the geographical centre of the Toronto School

of communication theory. It thus joins a substantial list of Canadian

works that have examined and assessed the contributions and legacies

of these two foundational thinkers in the field of communication

(Kroker, 1984; Stamps, 1995; Willmott, 1996; Acland & Buxton, 1999;

Babe, 2000; Theall, 2001; Cavell, 2002; Heyer, 2003; Marchessault,

2005; Genosko, 2005). This volume is the product of a transnational

network of 17 authors, two editors and two university presses. It

emerged out of the Toronto School sessions at the 9th Biennial

Jerusalem Conference of the Israeli Association for Canadian Studies,

held at Hebrew University in 2002. It contains a Forward by Elihu Katz,

an afterword by David Olson, and 13 chapters organized into three

parts: Interpretations, Extensions and Applications. The contributors

are mainly from Canada, Israel and the U.S. Four of the five chapters

in Part I were based on previous articles or are reprinted from the

Canadian Journal of Communication. 

For readers who may still be unfamiliar with the academic lives of

 these two towering figures, the editors have provided brief biographies. 

 

texts

Dialectic of Enlightenment - Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer.pdf

 

Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence (Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics) 

Annotated Edition, Kindle Edition

Review

Although Günther Anders (1902-1992) is considered one of the most important philosophers of technology and although he spent many years exiled in the US, he received scant attention within the English-speaking world itself. Christopher John Müller’s comprehensive and sophisticated presentation and his nuanced translation of Anders’ crucial writing “On Promethean Shame” should hopefully change this. It demonstrates vividly the significance of Anders as a shrewd and original thinker who was able to anticipate a number of recent societal and technological developments. Müller’s book is crucial reading for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of the workings of our technology-driven world. (Konrad Paul Liessmann, Professor of Philosophy, University of Vienna)

Who was Günther Anders? In this brilliant book, Christopher Müller not only reconstructs Anders’s crucial place in the history of modern philosophy of technology but shows that Anders still has much to say to us about our own postmodern technological condition. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy of technology and the history of 20th century thought more widely. (Arthur Bradley, Professor of Comparative Literature, Lancaster University)

Building upon (and exceeding) Heidegger on technology, Günther Anders diagnosed the “obsolescence of humanity.” In the posthuman, transhuman era, the Anthropocene dominates obscenity. Departing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s analysis of our technology ‘fetish,’ Christopher Müller’s Prometheanism examines our bodily relation to technology, noting our naked vulnerability, including a cultural critique of the technologies of our lives, our finitude and “Promethean Shame.” (Babette Babich, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, NYC)

Modernity aims at placing mankind in the position of being the divine maker of the world while at the same time condemning human beings to see themselves as out of date. German philosopher Günther Anders remains one of the best thinkers of this tragic paradox. It is a shame that his work is almost unknown in the English-speaking world. Christopher Müller’s admirable book will no doubt fill this blatant gap. (Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Professor of Philosophy, École Polytechnique, Paris; Author of A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis)

Around Anders’s ‘On Promethean Shame’, Müller [describes] the way in which contemporary technology both enhances our perception and obscures our vision, increases our capacity to control while at the same time giving rise to what Gilles Deleuze called a society of control, itself now running out of control. As an attempt at thinking these limits, and at taking thinking to the limit, Müller’s step back to Anders’s finite thinking promises to provide resources for a new thinking in and of the Anthropocene. (Daniel Ross Lo Sguardo)

A book that provides a new inroad to an often overlooked thinker’s work. … When it comes to the great critics of technology Günther Anders is criminally overlooked. … With Prometheanism Müller has done a great two-fold service to Anders – he has provided a wonderful translation of part of one of the key works by Anders, while also providing several chapters that help place Anders’ thought into present discussions … Luckily Müller has done an excellent job of capturing Anders’ wit and pithiness which makes “On Promethean Shame” a pleasure to read despite its considerable pessimism. Yet, what makes Prometheanism particularly noteworthy is the second half of the book wherein Müller considers Anders “in the digital age” – as these four chapters demonstrate the continuing utility of Anders’ thought. This book is a wonderful introduction to a tragically overlooked figure!
The Librarian Shipwreck Blog

This is a very important book, and hopefully it will lead to a higher profile for [Günther] Anders’s provocative and essential thought. We owe Christopher Müller a debt of intellectual gratitude. (Thesis Eleven) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Christopher John Müller is an Honorary Research Associate of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University and an Associate Teacher at the University of Bristol. His recent publications include ‘Desert Ethics: Technology and the Question of Evil in Günther Anders and Jacques Derrida’, Parallax (2015), 21 (1): 42-57 and ‘Style and Arrogance: The Ethics of Heidegger’s Style’, Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy, ed. Ivan Callus, Gloria Lauri-Lucente, James Corby (Continuum, 2013), pp. 141-162. His work draws on Literature, Philosophy and Critical Theory to address the manner in which technological and linguistic structures shape human perception, agency and interaction. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

https://www.academia.edu/27183799/Prometheanism_Technology_Digital_Culture_and_Human_Obsolescence