Finally published: My chapter in "Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism," ed. Marcel Stoetzler (Bloomsbury, 2023) advances a universalist and multidirecitonal reading of Adorno on the interrelation of antisemitism and racism. DM me for the text!
Apparently Hannah Arendt herself would be ineligible for the Hannah Arendt Prize today thanks to a misguided German obsession with policing criticism of Israel, including by Jewish figures like Gessen.
The absolute insanity of contemporary German reason: the impulse to blame Palestinians for their own mass destruction. Really makes one wonder what decades of Holocaust memory accomplished.
My favorite line from Daniel’s intro: “Germany has without question become among the world’s most ridiculous countries: a place where an unrivaled record of ethnic cleansing is credited toward moral authority on the question.”
New Dig on The German Question:
@Emilydische
explains how memory culture led to a wildly narcissistic anti-antisemitism and proxy Israeli nationalism becoming the cornerstone of an official identity firmly dedicated to anti-Palestinian genocide apologia.
Masha Gessen: "if the whole rationale for maintaining Holocaust memory is the promise of 'Never again' ... then how in the world do you learn from history if you place an event outside of history, if you say that it cannot be compared to anything that is going on now?"
500-page monster is now off to my dream team committee: Ed Baring, Peter Gordon, Federico Marcon, Jan-Werner Müller, and Carolyn Dean! Defending 8/25 in Princeton and on Zoom. Finally I grasp the wisdom of Georg Lukacs: “‘Sudden’ catastrophes are actually long in preparation.”
Great new essay by Peter Gordon in
@NewStatesman
on Adorno's Minima Moralia at 70: "The task of Minima Moralia is to assist us in seeing the redemptive surplus that lies unrealised at the interstices of everyday experience."
Judith Butler claims they need bodyguards whenever they speak in Germany, so they've simply stopped coming. Not the first time a Jew in Germany has been excluded from public discourse, "grossly caricatured," and felt an "underlying sense of threat"!
Some exciting life news: I'm moving to New York! This fall I'll begin a two-year term as a postdoc at the University of Rochester Humanities Center. With no teaching obligations, I'll have the time and resources to devote myself to finishing a book—or two! Feeling very grateful.
@PhilippLenhard
@RichterHedwig
There’s a pattern in the German discourse that adds up to a glaring moral failure: The “Gaza ist schrecklich, ABER…” Offloading blame on Hamas is a strategy for evading Western responsibility for funding and supporting the ongoing destruction & ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Fred Moten today
@RemarqueNYU
on Adam Shatz’s new biography of Fanon: “If I could pick just two historic figures to listen to records with, they’d be Adorno and Fanon.”
With Arno Mayer’s passing, here’s a piece I wrote for
@jhideas
on his Princeton course History 500 which aimed to enliven the “deadened” discipline with the theory of Marx, Weber, Freud, Durkheim. Speakers included Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, Joan Scott.
So cool:
@MoishePostoneLP
has started digitizing some of Moishe Postone's notes on major works of social theory he taught in the
@UChicagoCollege
Core sequence "Self, Culture, and Society." Can't wait to check out more at UChicago Special Collections!
Not him, too! “Lagerfeld condemned his native country Germany’s acceptance of refugees from Muslim-majority countries, claiming with bizarre logic that the migrants were “an affront to Holocaust victims.””
My article on analogies between Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS has just been published in
@memorystudies
! I explore the multidirectional memory of how past crises rise up in moments of danger. Photo: 1987 concentration camp float by
@actupny
and Avram Finkelstein.
RIP Arno Mayer. I used to pay him visits in Princeton, and he would tell stories from the OSS and often jestingly exclaim, “shut the hell up!” In addition to his landmark histories, he protested Princeton’s complicity in the Vietnam War and got Marcuse his first job at Brandeis.
Arno Mayer has died. Here is Enzo Traverso’s piece from February on what made him such a brilliant historian
Arno J Mayer’s 20th century
The historian helped transform the writing of history – and with it our understanding of the modern world.
Only now that I've submitted the final version of my dissertation to ProQuest do I grasp the meaning of George Mosse's words of wisdom to his students: "Dissertations are not completed, they are abandoned."
#Monkeypox
racial disparities are growing: Blacks and Hispanics now represent 32.5% of the US population but 70% of monkey cases, a disturbingly similar trend to what
@thrasherxy
lays out for the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis in his essential new book, "The Viral Underclass"
It's homophobic that Berlin CSD weekend has come to an end, but I'm glad to be back at work correcting the proofs for a chapter on the "Multidirectional Adorno" forthcoming in *Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism* (Bloomsbury), ed. Marcel Stoetzler.
Today at the New School Gaza encampment:
@dirkmoses
on the inadequacy of the genocide concept wrt Gaza. We must reject the false privileging of purely racial logics of eliminating innocent victims vs. state justification of massive civilian collateral death tolls in conflicts
In which Martin Jay, our leading American modern European intellectual historian, champions Ankersmit’s notion of “sublime historical experience” as a third way beyond the age-old debate between genesis and validity, contextualism and transcendentalism, historicism and presentism
#ReinhartKoselleck
turns 100 this year! In my latest piece for
@JHIdeas
I highlight the new centennial conceptual history blog Komposita (
@GeTheorie
) and argue that "Begriffsgeschichte for the twentieth century has to look—in a word—a lot more postmodern."
Now available for pre-order! "The Environmental Apocalypse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis," ed. Jakub Kowalewski, and containing my essay "Slow Catastrophe: A Concept for the Anthropocene," which also serves as the conclusion to my dissertation.
On
@thedigradio
Shaul Magid praises Curb Your Enthusiasm’s “The Palestinian Chicken” as a “great episode,” observing that Larry’s character represents the last generation of US Jews who could be non-Zionist, as in not forced to take a position on Israel.
The recording of the colloquium "Critical Theory, Jewishness, and Antisemitism" held at CUNY Graduate Center last week is now on Youtube. ft. Martin Jay, Asaf Angermann, Seyla Benhabib, Jonathan Boyarin, Jonathan Judaken, Lars Rensmann, Liliane Weissberg:
My review essay on Adorno and far-right extremism is now up at
@rphilos
! “Wounds of Democracy: Adorno’s Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism and the German antisemitism debate” — or, why Adorno was not antideutsch
Spent last week with Hayden White’s papers at
@ucsc
. Sharing more soon, but the thing I can’t get over is how he got his first tenure-track job at Rochester in 1957 through the literal boys club: “We are looking for a man [sic!] who would be willing to
teach… medieval history…”
@maxim_k
Many such analogies are crude and flippant, but Gessen’s in their New Yorker essay was not. Here’s Arendt, cited in Seyla Benhabib’s recent letter on Gaza:
Great piece by
@dirkmoses
, drawn from his new book, on the plight of all those "excluded from the contemporary image of authentic victimhood because they aren’t victims of genocide."
Just listening to this brilliant podcast with
@NaomiAKlein
: “The horror of the founding of the state of Israel has always been so impossible for the Zionist project to look at directly… [that] everything that can’t be seen about the self must be projected onto the double.” 1/
On the new episode of our podcast, On the Nose, editor-in-chief
@ArielleLAngel
talks to
@NaomiAKlein
about her new book, Doppelganger, and how the concept of "doubling" can elucidate the present violence in Israel/Palestine.
Smart essay by
@adriandaub
on the misguided response to October 7 and the ensuing genocide in Gaza by Germany’s political and media class, characterized by “… a perverse pride in imposing one’s own categories, as though historical guilt confers true expertise”
“Almost immediately after the October 7 massacre, Germany began a bizarre reckoning, deeply serious in self-conception, absolutely farcical in execution.” New online:
@adriandaub
on recent German Zionism.
For the LRB,
@adamshatz
on the meaning of Trump's four years, invoking Hannah Arendt's fears of a whitelash more violent than any imagined Black violence:
Amazing to finally have this volume in hand the week of Reinhart Koselleck’s centennial! I’ve spent untold hours chasing down all these essays on the political “cult of the dead” and Holocaust memorial debates. Now someone just needs to translate it so I can teach it one day…
Omer Bartov responds to the claim that Hamas is responsible for the bloodshed in Gaza: "An occupying army, even if it is fighting a criminal organization, is responsible for the fate of the civilian population in its areas of operations and occupation."
I'm glad to share my post for the blog
#Komposita
(
@GeTheorie
) on Reinhart Koselleck's confrontation with the concept of "catastrophe"—starting with his personal photos from his travels through the rubble of Auschwitz and many other memorial sites (1/12)
.
@MarxinHell
— a brilliant political theorist who also walks the talk. “Today there’s no more urgent project on the Left than building institutions of freedom for Palestine, building power among and for Palestinians…”
@haymarketbooks
@BostonReview
Tonight at Diffrakt Berlin the brilliant David Scott discussed his relationship to the generation of Caribbean postcolonial thinkers including Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall, & Orlando Patterson before him: “I inhabit as ruin what they looked forward to as possibility.”
Full schedule below🧐
We start on Weds 31 Jan with
@_mlorimer
who will be presenting her new
@OxUniPress
book 'Europe as Ideological Resource'🍾
See you then!🎉
Timely reminder from Susan Neiman that “all the Jews they miss most here in Germany – Moses Mendelssohn, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt – were universalists, none were nationalists.”
Delighted to welcome
@planetdenken
to our
@UoN_CRISPI
Future of Ideologies webinar series tomorrow 5pm GMT to discuss 'Koselleck and Catastrophe'🥳
Sign-up👇and 👀you there!🎉
Today launches the new
#conceptualhistory
blog
#Komposita
I am co-editing with Bielefeld colleagues in honor of the centennial of
#ReinhartKoselleck
! First up: Willibald Steinmetz on Koselleck's metaphorical language and Margrit Pernau on jinns, ghosts, and layers of time.
“The UCLA Jewish historian David Myers does not exaggerate when he warns that the attack on Penslar is not aimed at “just an eminent scholar, but more broadly, the American university as the site of expertise and critical thinking.”
"[The German culture of Holocaust remembrance] has increasingly become a disciplinary instrument for minority policies that have nothing to do with the Shoah." – Max Czollek (
@rubenmcloop
) interviewed about the state of German/Jewish culture (auf Deutsch) by
@LeonieEttinger
"Ich komme nicht ganz umhin, in der ganzen Aufregung seit dem 7. Okt auch eine Strategie zu erkennen, diese deutsche Verstricktheit auf Distanz zu halten"
@rubenmcloop
im Gespräch mit
@LeonieEttinger
über Antisemitismus in D & Gegenstrategien – Teil 3/3
Happy to share a virtual roundtable on "Tha Value of Marx's Capital Today" on 1/31 (12pm EST) ft. Paul Reitter & Paul North on their new translation of Capital, Vol. 1, in discussion with William Clare Roberts (
@MarxinHell
). Poster by Jason Mientkiewicz.
Revisiting Lauren Berlant’s interview with
@HistofViolence
for
@LAReviewofBooks
: “politics is constituted by a disagreement about whose representation of the event will secure protocols and resources for valuing some claims and grievances over others.”
If academia doesn’t work out, I’m gonna create a line of streetwear with this logo called Notorious T.W.A. 😎 From the case containing the 1998
#Adorno
Prize awarded to
#zygmuntbauman
.
The launch of Henrike Kohpeiß’s book *Bürgerliche Kälte* brilliantly ended with dramatic readings of Angela Davis’s biography on her relationship to Marcuse and Adorno, and some Adorno texts as well. It’s telling that today they provoke laughter rather than reverence. Poor Teddy!
It was such a delight to interview
@schuneke
about his "A Queer Theory of the State"! We discuss what historical perspective brings to (literature dominated) queer theory and why we need a stronger yet queerer conception of the state to combat neoliberal abdication of the social
Samuel Huneke (
@schuneke
@GeorgeMasonU
) speaks with Jonathon Catlin (
@planetdenken
) on his new book, "A Queer Theory of the State" (
@ColumbiaUP
), which calls for queer theory to overcome its anarcho-libertarian "Foucauldian hangover."
Becca Rothfeld on Sam Moyn. “No longer the agent of an unfolding plan to produce a better and more fulfilled humanity,” Moyn writes, “liberalism had to be defended as an elemental and eternal set of principles that required the renunciation of ‘progress.’”
Koselleck once wrote that 'monuments, set to last, testify to impermanence more than anything else.' In a new piece cross-published with the Koselleck centennial blog Komposita (
@GeTheorie
), Sébastien Tremblay (
@seb_boo
) reflects on memory activism and toppling colonial monuments
In this joint think-piece with Komposita, Sébastien Tremblay reflects on Canada's settler society and its colonial genocidal past through Reinhart Koselleck's thought on cultural memory.
It’s my third first day of school at
@NorthwesternU
for
@HEF_NU
’s 28th annual institute for faculty in Holocaust studies. Pictured: me at age 16 in the College Prep Program living in the exact same cursed riot-proof dorm, “Plex.”
Yesterday began with a fresh haircut, was sustained by starting McKenzie Wark’s new book *Raving* at the gay beach, and concluded with a Challah Dog at the Jewish Currents launch at Maria’s. I guess Chicago is OK.
Susan Neiman on the past month in Germany: "Germany’s reflexive defenses of Israel while refraining from criticism of its government or its occupation of Palestine can only lead to resentment."
#Koselleck100
: Mit Koselleck über Koselleck hinausdenken!
Das
@ZThF2
und die Abteilung Geschichtswissenschaft der Universität Bielefeld veranstalten am Samstag den 22.04. "die" Feier zum 100. Geburtstag Reinhart Kosellecks im ZiF.
Es wird kreativ, spielerisch, ernst...
Michael Rothberg on the “migrant double bind” and the sad state of German Holocaust memory at
#thegsa2022
panel “Holocaust Memory, Black Life, & Muslim Subjects: Is Universal Inclusion a Failed Project?” with Damani Partridge, Esra Ozyurek, Fatima El-Tayeb, and
@dirkmoses
Glad to be back at my alma mater
@UChicago
for a few days for a workshop on “Culture and Catastrophe in Modern Europe” organized by Alice Goff and Jennifer Allen. First up: yours truly on the conceptual history of the term and its significance today.
Honored that the Brooklyn-based modern orthodox weekly The Jewish Press has recognized my antisemitic bagel tweet as Jewish humor! After all those fancy degrees and hours of watching Seinfeld and Curb, I finally did it!
My upcoming conference presentation tour. Say hi if our paths cross!
March 24-5 - Political Concepts Grad Conf at the New School, NYC
April 22-3 - Koselleck Centennial in Bielefeld
May 12-3 - Critical Emancipations in Leuven
May 6-9 - Critical Theory in Rome (pic from last year)
Spending the week in Leeds digging deeper into the Bauman-Adorno connection for a dissertation chapter. Thread: some cool stuff related to his Adorno Prize.
Nancy Fraser, who is Jewish, has been disinvited from a guest professorship in Cologne for signing the letter “Philosophy for Palestine.” Here Jaeggi, Celikates, Menke, Saar, Lessenich, Honneth et al call for reinviting her in the name of academic freedom
Stellungnahme: Wir fordern, dass die Ausladung Nancy Frasers von der Albertus Magnus Professur an der Universität zu Köln zurückgenommen wird. Ihr findet den gesamten Text hier im Thread und auf unserer Webseite: