Jonathon Catlin | University of Rochester (original) (raw)

Research Articles and Chapters by Jonathon Catlin

Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism, 2023

This chapter reconsiders the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory’s, and particularly Theodor W. A... more This chapter reconsiders the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory’s, and particularly Theodor W. Adorno’s, theories of antisemitism and racism in light of recent debates about global memory of the Holocaust vis-à-vis other genocides and forms of racialized and colonial violence. It reconstructs how the first-generation critical theorists came to recognize the significance and distinctiveness of modern antisemitism through their own experience of persecution as Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, but by the 1960s came to see ‘Auschwitz’ in a global and comparative framework of history, memory and
social theory. This chapter thus contests interpretations of Adorno as defending an exclusive focus on the Holocaust and antisemitism at the expense of other historical events with which he repeatedly claimed they were joined in a ‘hellish unity’ as part of the ‘permanent catastrophe’ of the same modern capitalist social order, including the Armenian genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima, war atrocities in Vietnam and ‘torture as a permanent institution’. Instead, it argues for reading Adorno as advancing what
Michael Rothberg (2009) has called ‘multidirectional memory’ of antisemitic violence and the Shoah, and for using the understanding of social pathologies arising from these traumatic histories to advance ‘differentiated solidarity’ between contemporary forms of oppression in order to move beyond national, ethnic and identity-based ‘competitive memory’ that Adorno would have rejected as provincializing the truly universal significance of the Holocaust and the ‘new categorical imperative’ he coined in its aftermath: for ‘unfree mankind … to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’ (1973: 365).

The Environmental Apocalypse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis, 2022

This chapter analyses competing rhetorical and conceptual framings of global warming as a crisis,... more This chapter analyses competing rhetorical and conceptual framings of global warming as a crisis, catastrophe, disaster, or apocalypse in contemporary climate fiction and critical theory, and intervenes by developing an expanded, dialectical notion of slow catastrophe that encompasses ‘social’ as well as ‘natural’ processes. This concept takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s conceptions of the history of modern capitalist society as ‘one single catastrophe’ or a ‘permanent catastrophe’. With theoretical updating, the framework of slow catastrophe provides a dialectical middle ground between the overly optimistic view of climate crisis as a progressive political opportunity (articulated by Nancy Fraser), and the fatalistic view of climate apocalypse as an apolitical and unending cycle of violence (articulated by Étienne Balibar). A dialectical notion of slow catastrophe holds in view the often invisible, long-term, and structural effects of global warming while also demanding responses to the acute disasters or ‘flashpoints’ to which this enduring condition gives rise. Apocalyptic representations of ongoing climate catastrophe such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future can be mobilized to support the imperative of ‘thinking against catastrophe’ advocated by earlier critical theorists, so long as they politicize apocalypse and render it contingent rather than succumb to climate fatalism.

Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions, 2022

Zygmunt Bauman's landmark 1989 book *Modernity and the Holocaust* theorised a fundamental problem... more Zygmunt Bauman's landmark 1989 book *Modernity and the Holocaust* theorised a fundamental problem in thinking about the nature of social catastrophes ‘after Auschwitz’. For Bauman, the Holocaust was not an aberration from the technical progress of modern civilisation but rather a possibility thereafter immanent within all modern societies. While Bauman developed this radical thesis to its furthest extent, his work openly drew inspiration from a number of earlier social theorists, philosophers, and historians, notably Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Raul Hilberg. Despite their different and at times conflicting intellectual approaches, these thinkers collectively constitute a strand of critical social theory I call ‘enlightened catastrophism'.

Memory Studies, 2021

This article critically interrogates historical analogies made between the Covid-19 pandemic and ... more This article critically interrogates historical analogies made between the Covid-19 pandemic and HIV/AIDS epidemic in American public discourse, highlighting the role of cultural memory and normative frameworks of 'crisis' and its temporalities in shaping collective responses. It situates the Covid-19 pandemic in a multidirectional mnemonic frame by analysing borrowings from other usable pasts, particularly the HIV/ AIDS epidemic in the United States, which in turn drew upon memory of the Holocaust. A reading of Susan Sontag's 'The Way We Live Now' affirms the value of multidirectional cultural borrowing while also revealing its limits. Notably, the ever-growing AIDS Memorial Quilt may serve as a model for memorializing victims of Covid-19. While analogies between pandemics may be comforting or mobilizing, their meaning must remain open to contestation and also preserve particularities and differences. The history of HIV/AIDS centres the question, 'crisis for whom?' and cautions against prematurely declaring the 'end' of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Book Reviews & Review Essays by Jonathon Catlin

History & Theory, 2021

Literary scholar Eva Horn's The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age inves... more Literary scholar Eva Horn's The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age investigates why modern Western culture so often imagines its own end. Through insightful readings of modern literature, film, and philosophical and sociological discourses, Horn argues that our hunger for apocalypse narratives-chief among them those about the so-called Last Man-is rooted in a deep-seated but diffuse mood of risk and crisis that has been generated by contingent and often imperceptible threats, such as impending nuclear disaster and climate change. Without concrete events to anchor it, this anxiety grows and paralyzes action. Representing these possible catastrophes through fiction provides us with cathartic, vivid, and plausible depictions of discrete events. Imagining such scenarios also serves as a practical means of preparing ourselves individually and collectively for possible threats, in turn helping to make them self-defeating prophecies. One of Horn's central claims is that fiction's capacity to imagine and capture affect, nuance, and detail offers a uniquely powerful means of thinking about the future. This essay challenges that position by arguing that fiction (though it is, as Donna J. Haraway has quipped, often the best political theory) on its own lacks the capacity for critique that connects imagined future catastrophes to their latent causes in presently catastrophic social conditions. Horn illustrates that imagined future catastrophes often illuminate the latent vulnerabilities of the societies that produced them, but her focus on apocalyptic scenarios reproduces, rather than challenges, cultural patterns that obscure more quotidian and destructive forms of "slow violence" and "slow disaster." If historians and critics are to achieve the consciousness of catastrophic threats against which Horn seeks to mobilize apocalypse fiction, such narratives must also be folded back into a critical history of the present that asks a more pointed political question: for whom is life already catastrophic?

Radical Philosophy, 2021

Using Theodor W. Adorno's 1967 lecture "Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism" and other writin... more Using Theodor W. Adorno's 1967 lecture "Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism" and other writings as a guide, this essay explores recent debates about the meaning and deployment of the term "fascism," German debates about antisemitism, and ultimately argues for the relevance of the Frankfurt School in combating the new right.

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2020

This is an extended review essay on "The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origi... more This is an extended review essay on "The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism" by Lars Rensmann (2017), the new Verso edition of "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor W. Adorno et al. (2019), and "Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus" by Theodor W. Adorno (2019). It principally reconstructs psychoanalytic conceptions of the authoritarian or potentially fascist subject that ground the Frankfurt School's empirical and theoretical studies from the 1930s to the 1950s. It assesses Rensmann's overall theory of antisemitism and criticizes it for being overly concerned with the specificity of antisemitism and Jews, which unfortunately closes off close psychological, sociological, and historical links between antisemitism and other forms of racism and othering that the Frankfurt School illuminated in their studies conducted in exile in America. It also goes further than Rensmann's book in contrasting Horkheimer and Adorno's influential theory of antisemitism as "false projection" with alternate theories of their time offered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt. The essay concludes that other cultural approaches to antisemitism like that of David Nirenberg, who is more sympathetic to Horkheimer and Adorno than Rensmann, are ultimately more compelling.

Antisemitism Studies, 2017

"In 1943, while in exile in California, the German-Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer griped in a ... more "In 1943, while in exile in California, the German-Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer griped in a letter to his colleague Friedrich Pollock that his assistant had written out “Anti-Semites,” with a hyphen, instead of “Antisemites” (closer to the German Antisemiten). He was repelled by the former term, finding it “so ugly” that he had it changed. “I know we used to write it that way ourselves,” he admitted,” but “the Antisemites are not ‘Anti-Semites’; they are rather Anti-Jews” (154). Like many today calling to put the hyphenated term “anti-Semitism” to rest, Horkheimer wished to dispense with the vestiges of nineteenth- century racial science holding out in the notion that there is some dubious entity “Semitism” that “anti-Semitism” opposes."

Conferences Organized by Jonathon Catlin

This interdisciplinary series of virtual seminars on “Adorno and Identity,” convened by Jonathon ... more This interdisciplinary series of virtual seminars on “Adorno and Identity,” convened by Jonathon Catlin (Princeton University), Eric Oberle (Arizona State University), and Fumi Okiji (University of California, Berkeley), revisits Adorno’s thought at a moment in which political, cultural, legal, and psychological notions of identity have expanded relevance and vexed public meaning. Across these sessions, scholars from diverse fields will return to Adorno’s theoretical framework in order to collectively develop more robust notions of identity, nonidentity, and negative identity, and to advance critical theory by connecting Adorno’s work to broader conversations about identity in adjacent fields, including the study of race, gender, sexuality, and technology.

This interdisciplinary symposium took place on the 80th anniversary of the November Pogroms and b... more This interdisciplinary symposium took place on the 80th anniversary of the November Pogroms and brought together leading scholars from around the world to explore intersections between legacies of racialized historical violence, trauma, and memory across African American, Jewish, and Native American traditions. The scholars invited have done pioneering scholarship on these connections from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The notion of “comparative memory” they helped develop is not principally concerned with comparison of historical events. Rather, it suggests that memory of different historical events can be mutually illuminating and reinforcing. By borrowing from and synthesizing different historical cases and cultural traditions, participants presented innovative ways to work through, narrate, creatively represent, and atone for collective crimes, and to ultimately work toward forms of reparation and justice based upon solidarity across conventional social fault lines. This comparative approach reflects the shared imperative, in the words of symposium participant Susan Neiman, “to understand how all kinds of ordinary…people commit murder, whether in Majdanek or in Mississippi,” and to reckon with continuing legacies of racial violence today.

The concluding keynote panel, "Dare We Compare Historical Atrocities? Comparative Approaches from Genocide Studies to Multidirectional Memory," featuring lectures by Carolyn J. Dean, Naomi Mandel, A. Dirk Moses, and Susan Neiman, is viewable on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/B9f3dfT6P44

This workshop took place at KU Leuven in the fall of 2019. Included is the program of presentatio... more This workshop took place at KU Leuven in the fall of 2019. Included is the program of presentations and the selection of short texts on new conceptions of catastrophe that were discussed in the closing roundtable discussion on "slow catastrophe and the Anthropocene."

Interviews by Jonathon Catlin

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2023

Andrew I. Port's latest book, *Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust* (Harvard/Be... more Andrew I. Port's latest book, *Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust* (Harvard/Belknap, 2023), examines how divided postwar Germany mobilized the memory of its National Socialist past as it confronted other genocides abroad. From the mid-1970s, as harrowing reports of mass killings in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda reached Germany, different political factions recognized aspects of their history and drew often-conflicting lessons from it: Germans had to collectively ask whether “Never Again” meant “Never Again Auschwitz,” and thus entailed support for humanitarian military interventions to prevent genocide, or “Never Again War,” proposing “total peace” as the antidote to “total war.” The question was: “Did the Nazi past oblige Germans to take action to prevent atrocities—or compel them to refrain from intervening at all?”

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2022

Press, 2021), casts Jewish thought and politics in a new light by tracing their recurrent tropes ... more Press, 2021), casts Jewish thought and politics in a new light by tracing their recurrent tropes of survival and redemption back to the representation of Jews and Judaism in a long tradition of Christian political theology. Tracking the discourse of survival in writers such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida, Stern argues that survival serves as a powerful index for the secularized traces of Christianity that define Western modernity. His book compellingly highlights the persistence of the trope of "the survivor as a universal figure for death-in-life" up to the present day (149). Contributing Editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed Stern about his book.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2022

Three leading scholars of the historical imagination, D. Graham Burnett (History of Science, Prin... more Three leading scholars of the historical imagination, D. Graham Burnett (History of Science, Princeton University), Catherine L. Hansen (Comparative Literature, The University of Tokyo), and Justin E. H. Smith (Philosophy, University of Paris 7), recently published an unusual co-edited volume, In Search of The Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021 (Strange Attractor Press, 2021). This “very strange book” (Hal Foster) is at once history and fiction, scholarship and a poetic archive of performance art centered on cultivating practices of attention. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed Burnett about this weighty (at nearly 800 pages) experiment in historical thinking and writing, and what lessons it might offer for a discipline in an identity crisis in the age of “post-truth”—and a world seemingly plagued by a deficit of attention in the age of social media.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2022

In this conversation I speak to Sultan Doughan, A. Dirk Moses, and Michael Rothberg about recent ... more In this conversation I speak to Sultan Doughan, A. Dirk Moses, and Michael Rothberg about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialism. Part one explores the central issues at stake in the latest debates and their relation to the German Historians' Debate of the 1980s. Part two engages the relationship of minorities to official Holocaust memory in a diversifying Germany, the role of scholarly positionality, and the relationship between scholarship and activism.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021

Power and Time's seventeen chapters span disciplinary approaches ranging from history, to law, to... more Power and Time's seventeen chapters span disciplinary approaches ranging from history, to law, to anthropology, to the history of art, and each illustrates how political authority is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically-specific ways: The expansionist futurity of the Nazi "New Man" meets the apocalyptic presentism of the Manson Family "cult," meets the "deep time" of our Age of Plastic. In their introduction, the editors propose a new theoretical model of historical

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021

Sebastian Truskolaski's book *Adorno and the Ban on Images* investigates, across three chapters, ... more Sebastian Truskolaski's book *Adorno and the Ban on Images* investigates, across three chapters, Theodor Adorno's "imageless materialism," "inverse theology," and "aesthetic negativity," which together "reorganize Adorno's uneasily systematic 'anti-system' around the notion of imagelessness." Grounded in nuanced close readings, the book also illuminates the status of theological figures in critical theory after they have "migrat[ed] into the realm of the secular, the profane." In Adorno's thought, Truskolaski ultimately finds "a restless and incessant dismantling of established philosophical dogmas that throws into relief a mode of thinking, and-by extension-living, that escapes the violence and coercion of the present."

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021

An interview with the Harvard modern European intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon about his la... more An interview with the Harvard modern European intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon about his latest book, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization, which is based on the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures in Jewish Thought he delivered at Yale University in 2017. It explores the work of three of the most esteemed thinkers in the early canon of Frankfurt School critical theory: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. As Jürgen Habermas writes in his blurb of the book, Gordon illuminates “the deepest and darkest thought” these thinkers confronted: “How to save the truth content of religious traditions for the sake of secular modernity while denying at the same time its very foundation in religious belief.” This work of judicious intellectual history ultimately recuperates secularism as a normative ideal for our “post-secular” age.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020

Andrew Hines's first book, "Metaphor in European Philosophy after Nietzsche: An Intellectual Hist... more Andrew Hines's first book, "Metaphor in European Philosophy after Nietzsche: An Intellectual History" (2020), traces the development of the concept of metaphor in philosophical thought from Aristotle to Jacques Derrida, arguing that the classical paradigm of metaphor as a rhetorical figure expressing similar meaning transferred across difference was “transformed to reflect the view that the linguistic operation described by Aristotle is in fact a fundamental phenomenon in thought and discourse.” Hines traces this insight in the work of thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Blumenberg, Derrida, and more recently the cognitive linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, who each defend, in their own philosophical idiom, the idea that “metaphor conditions concepts and not the other way around.” Fellow JHI Blog contributing editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed Hines about his new book.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020

Tom Vandeputte's recent book "Critique of Journalistic Reason: Philosophy and the Time of the New... more Tom Vandeputte's recent book "Critique of Journalistic Reason: Philosophy and the Time of the Newspaper" (Fordham University Press, 2020) traces the explosion of motifs of reporters, messengers, readers, and the talk of the day in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin, arguing that modern philosophy defined itself through and against a sustained confrontation with journalism. In place of the rational progress hypothesized by teleological philosophies of history, one finds in the newspaper contingent events, confusion, unreliable accounts, disputed facts, and the announcement of the new quickly lapsing into a repetition of what has already been. Ultimately, the book demonstrates, the newspaper—in the rendering of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Benjamin—“becomes a stage where history fails to take place at all” (15). The antagonism between the philosopher and the journalist even came to reprise the ancient polemic between the philosopher and the sophist; as Nietzsche quipped, “Hegel and the newspapers—like opponents” (72). Yet the conception of philosophy that emerges from Vandeputte’s generative readings is not a negation of journalism but its radicalization: post-Hegelian philosophy, the book contends, learned to ask the “questions of the day” with particular rigor, linguistic precision, and resistance to the temptation of presentism.

Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism, 2023

The Environmental Apocalypse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis, 2022

Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions, 2022

Memory Studies, 2021

History & Theory, 2021

Radical Philosophy, 2021

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2020

Antisemitism Studies, 2017

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2023

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2022

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020

The German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) has fallen into the... more The German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) has fallen into the spotlight as of late. The new essay collection, History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader was published in June 2020 by the Signale imprint for German thought at Cornell University Press. The volume is edited and translated by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. Contributing editors Andrew Hines and Jonathon Catlin interviewed the editors about this new edition of Blumenberg’s writings.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020

Humberto Beck is Professor at the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México in Mex... more Humberto Beck is Professor at the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City and author of The Moment of Rupture: Historical Consciousness in Interwar German Thought (2019), which was published in the series Intellectual History of the Modern Age by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Focusing on the writings of three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—Beck argues that “between 1914 and 1940, in response to the experiences of abrupt discontinuity and social and political rupture, a new form of historical time consciousness was born in Germany, which articulated itself around the notion of instantaneity.” These thinkers, he writes, drew upon personal and collective experiences of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution to produce “a constellation of concepts and figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of a distinct instantaneist ‘regime of historicity’—a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.” The book’s introduction is freely available online from the publisher. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed Beck about the book.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020

Interview with intellectual historian Edward Baring about his new book, "Converts to the Real: Ca... more Interview with intellectual historian Edward Baring about his new book, "Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy" (Harvard, 2019), discussing the meaning of the term "continental philosophy," the benefits of transnational history, why contextualist intellectual history needs to be coupled with de-contextualist readings, the history of phenomenology and KU Leuven, and whether the turn to religion has run out of steam.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020

Interview with the Belgian scholar Willem Styfhals about his new book, "No Spiritual Investment i... more Interview with the Belgian scholar Willem Styfhals about his new book, "No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy" (Cornell 2019), focusing on how the religious ideas of Hans Blumenberg, Jacob Taubes, and Gershom Scholem can help us understand apocalyptic framings of modernity and climate change today.

My MA thesis investigates the concept of catastrophe (die Katastrophe) and its relation to barbar... more My MA thesis investigates the concept of catastrophe (die Katastrophe) and its relation to barbarism in the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. By tracing the development of the concept of catastrophe in Adorno’s work and systematically reconstructing the philosophy of history it implies, this thesis proposes a contextualized reading of Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” which emphasizes historical continuity as opposed to the emphasis on rupture present in most existing literature on Adorno. This thesis presents two primary forms of catastrophe in Adorno’s work: first, an experiential account arising from Adorno’s description, in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, of his own intellectual exile and the way the experience of World War II and the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, which Adorno himself escaped, caused a conceptual disruption or rupture in the course of Western thought. The second form of catastrophe is prescriptive, and expresses how Adorno used the catastrophe of thought presented in his earlier work to enact new “after Auschwitz” prohibitions and commandments to the effect of “Never again Auschwitz.” Undergirding the approach of the thesis is Adorno’s new philosophy of history, which I argue centers on the concept of catastrophe, a term which simultaneously implies the continuity of the “permanent catastrophe” of the status quo and the possibility of utter disruption. This amounts, I argue, to a theory of the contingency and historicity of thought itself. In this schema, Auschwitz, comes to represent the catastrophe latent in Adorno’s philosophy of history, and it is invoked throughout Adorno’s work in order to describe both impending objective historical trends and the possibility of breaking away from them. While many existing readings of Adorno’s response to the Shoah allege Adorno’s nihilism, prohibition on art, and pessimism, this reading opposes such characterizations. Rather, because the figure of Auschwitz, for Adorno, represents the deepest form of negativity, it actually points toward hope for utopia, for how existing suffering could be mitigated and how reality could be otherwise than it contingently is. Further, Auschwitz implies an imperative for how the world must be changed so that it is not repeated. Hence moments of catastrophe are not only destructive, but also allow us insight into this contingency, and hence can function as key points around which to reevaluate the conceptual frameworks that constitute our world. By highlighting Adorno’s positive formulations for more subjective and humane culture and thought after Auschwitz, this thesis ultimately provides new directions for forms of art, philosophy, ethics, and politics that can counteract barbarism in society.

This paper considers the concepts of " antisemitism " and " Judaism " in Dialectic of Enlightenme... more This paper considers the concepts of " antisemitism " and " Judaism " in Dialectic of Enlightenment, a foundational text of the so-called Frankfurt School of Critical Theory written in the U.S. from 1938 to 1944 by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two German theorists of Jewish origin, during their exile from Nazi Germany. At the heart of Dialectic is the question of how to critique the Enlightenment tradition's legacy of domination without abandoning its commitment to reason. Departing from Dialectic's surprising admission of the " truth " of antisemitism (" in the sense that fascism has made it true "), I show that by the 1940s the so-called Jewish Question had become, more than just a test case, the locus around which Adorno and Horkheimer could develop their method of critical theory. Connecting Dialectic with the work of their colleague Walter Benjamin, from whom they had begun to borrow theological, and specifically messianic, concepts, I argue that " Judaism " developed in their thought as a counter-concept through which to formulate a critical method that resisted naïve faith both in its accuracy of analysis and its independence from the toxic socio-political conditions under which it was created. Identifying the figure of Judaism with the possibility of critical thought allowed Horkheimer and Adorno to hold on to a concept of hope beyond the immanent horizon (Adorno's " What is must be changeable if it is not to be all ") while simultaneously rejecting the Enlightenment tradition's allegedly uncritical faith in reason. Situating Dialectic with reference to the authors' scholarly trajectories and related work by their contemporaries, I present an account of the 1940s as a pivotal moment in the development of critical theory and early attempts to make sense of the Holocaust.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2023

On April 23, 2023, one of the pioneers of German conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck (1923–200... more On April 23, 2023, one of the pioneers of German conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), would have turned one hundred years old. Born in Görlitz, in Eastern Germany, Koselleck became one of the leading German historians of his generation and a founder of historical studies at the University of Bielefeld, where he taught for most of his career and trained a generation of conceptual historians who continue to carry on his legacy at universities around the world.

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2022

This essay examines new criticism on disaster films through the lens of the field of critical dis... more This essay examines new criticism on disaster films through the lens of the field of critical disaster studies and highlights the question, "Whose suffering is considered normal, and whose is a disaster?"

EuropeNow, 2022

My work aims to redeem the concept of catastrophe for contemporary social criticism by focusing o... more My work aims to redeem the concept of catastrophe for contemporary social criticism by focusing on one of its seemingly paradoxical forms: the notion of “permanent catastrophe”—a contradiction in terms if one hews to the conventional understanding of catastrophe as a sudden and unexpected rupture or overturning, but also its essential dialectical counter-concept. Contrary to the hegemonic Begriffsgeschichten, this term is not simply an exaggerated, inflationary usage, but rather a rigorous philosophical conception of history: it runs from Adorno’s claim, first developed around 1932, that “the recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes” (2005, 49), to Benjamin’s reflection some years later that “…things [being] ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe” (1999, 473), to Sebald’s oblique and peripatetic accounts of “our history, which is but a long account of calamities” (1998, 295), to Cornel West’s insistence that “There’s never been a ‘Negro Problem’ in America; it’s been a catastrophe visited on Black people” (2016).

The Spectator, 2021

How should we remember the Holocaust? In the next decade or so, many of the last living Holocaust... more How should we remember the Holocaust? In the next decade or so, many of the last living Holocaust survivors will pass away. It will then fall to us later generations to confront what Hannah Arendt called ‘the abyss that opened up before us’ by telling their stories. In doing so, we aim to guard against the spectre of Holocaust denial. But when we vow to ‘never forget’ the terrible crimes of Nazism, what exactly is it that we seek to remember?

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020

Last month saw the passing of Ruth Klüger, one of the most influential memoirists of the Holocaus... more Last month saw the passing of Ruth Klüger, one of the most influential memoirists of the Holocaust, at age 88. Klüger stands out among survivors for her outspoken critical stance toward Holocaust remembrance culture. Gabriele Annan spoke for many when she called Klüger “merciless” and “outspoken to the point of aggressiveness." This piece revisits some of Klüger's personal and scholarly writings grappling with her story of survival and her broader criticisms of Holocaust memory, arguing that the cutting style and substance of Klüger’s writings bar the redemption of the Jewish catastrophe she felt was impertinently expected of her as a survivor.

Literaturwissenschaft in Berlin, 2020

In its new permanent exhibition, the Jewish Museum Berlin visualizes the complex history of Jewis... more In its new permanent exhibition, the Jewish Museum Berlin visualizes the complex history of Jewish life in Germany, thereby challenging many traditional clichés and simplistic narratives.

Public Seminar, 2020

The most consistent feedback we have received is that “Sentencing the Present” has taken on a lif... more The most consistent feedback we have received is that “Sentencing the Present” has taken on a life of its own. We have asked each other: Just what kind of life is that? “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” Theodor Adorno wrote. Translated literally: “There is no right life in the wrong one.” This is perhaps the best-known line from his own reflection on crisis in the 1940s, written, like many of our paragraphs, from a situation of displacement: Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. In which he also stated: “There is nothing innocuous left.”

A version of that claim has become commonplace with regard to the virus: No door handle, no friend, no lover, is innocuous. Part of the point of “Sentencing the Present,” and our “Theses” before it, has been to make the medical diagnosis social, as Adorno did in his time. To state as clearly as we could that U.S. life before “the crisis” was “wrong life” — and hence to raise our voices against any return to “normal.”

Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/field-notes-on-sentencing-the-present/

Public Seminar, 2020

This is the final compilation of contributions to the “Sentencing the Present” series, co-curated... more This is the final compilation of contributions to the “Sentencing the Present” series, co-curated by Benjamin Davis and Jonathon Catlin, and published with Public Seminar in five parts from May-June, 2020.

A sentence is protean: It can describe, question, or cry out. A sentence is critical: In passing judgment, it names wrongs, makes decisions, and declares publicly. In a spirit of both open inquiry and political advocacy, and inspired by the response of readers to our own “Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis,” the past several weeks we have convened an ongoing conversation of critical voices reflecting on the history of the present and the possibilities of the future. To start, we asked some of today’s most pressing thinkers to offer a “thesis,” raise a question or reconsider a word. Our open invitation brought in new voices.

Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/sentencing-the-present-an-archive-of-a-crisis/

Literaturwissenschaft in Berlin, 2020

This piece is an extended review essay on the exhibition "Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century... more This piece is an extended review essay on the exhibition "Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century," which opened on May 11, 2020 at Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM). The irony was not lost on me that opening the exhibition in the midst of a pandemic entailed something of an Arendtian social experiment. The review explores Arendt's role as a public intellectual, in five parts: Her clash with feminism, her writings on colonialism and imperialism, her engagements with postwar Germany, the famous Eichmann affair, and her many close friendships. Arendt once said a defining feature of every “venture into the public realm” is that we throw ourselves into a network of social relations and can never know for certain what will come of it. Arendt’s life can be seen as a succession of such ventures. Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century succeeds by debunking the myth of the solitary philosophical talking head and setting Arendt back in the world and in conversation. It helps us see that Arendt remains so endlessly relevant—and disputed—not simply because of her brilliance, or the way she resisted orthodoxies and labels, but also because she sometimes had the courage to change her mind.

Co-authored with Nuala Caomhánach: From May 8–9, 2020, thirty leading historians of medicine pres... more Co-authored with Nuala Caomhánach: From May 8–9, 2020, thirty leading historians of medicine presented in the virtual webinar “Pandemic, Creating a Usable Past: Epidemic History, COVID-19, and the Future of Health,” sponsored by the American Association for the History of Medicine and Princeton University’s Department of History. Keith Wailoo, a historian of medicine and Chair of Princeton’s Department of History, opened the event by noting that while there has been much talk of the unprecedented nature of Covid-19 in popular media, for many historians this epidemic seems remarkably familiar. Participants presented on diverse aspects of pandemics past and present, including differential health outcomes for particular groups, literary depictions of disease, the history of social distancing, the invention of public health, different concepts of political and medical “success,” and asking how to locate the moments of when and for whom a pandemic is declared over.

Tocqueville21, 2019

These days, there is good reason to fear the pejorative “ivory tower.” It has now been shown that... more These days, there is good reason to fear the pejorative “ivory tower.” It has now been shown that many of America’s more than 4,000 colleges and universities perpetuate inequality more than they advance class mobility. This means that the story many institutions have been telling us about increasing access and the American dream is at best a fiction and at worst an ideological cover for deeply unequal outcomes.

The philosopher and dissident Ágnes Heller’s century was one that believed too long in the redemp... more The philosopher and dissident Ágnes Heller’s century was one that believed too long in the redemptive power of violence. Her moving remembrance of the victims of her era serves as a fitting memorial to her own life as well.

From June 6–9, 2019, over thirty eminent scholars of German and Jewish history and culture gather... more From June 6–9, 2019, over thirty eminent scholars of German and Jewish history and culture gathered in Berlin at the conference “Mosse’s Europe: New Perspectives in the Study of German Judaism, Fascism, and Sexuality” to critically reassess and carry on the legacy of the pathbreaking German-Jewish historian George L. Mosse (1918–1999) on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. Presentations concerned both Mosse himself, including reminiscences from the many students he trained during his long career, and also new research inspired by his more than two dozen books. Of particular importance is new work about women, queer history, and the study of sexual violence that complements Mosse’s earlier work on masculinity and male sexuality.

Dagmar Herzog's "Unlearning Eugenics" (2018) tells the surprising story of how two progressive an... more Dagmar Herzog's "Unlearning Eugenics" (2018) tells the surprising story of how two progressive and traditionally allied causes, women’s reproductive rights and disability rights, have become pitted against one another. Since the 1990s, anti-abortion activists across Europe (and now in the U.S. as well) have successfully promoted “restrictions on sexual and reproductive self-determination as justice for the physically and cognitively disabled.” Taboos about Nazi eugenics have become a key weapon in the arsenal of the religious right’s campaign to restrict abortion access by conflating abortion on the grounds of fetal anomaly with Nazi eugenics and mass murders of the disabled. Herzog provides a convincing genealogy of this this false association (after all, the Nazis restricted and penalized abortions), with each turn of her narrative unraveling this dubious connection stitch by stitch. In the process, she illustrates the “contrapuntal relationship between different moments in time” and profound “ricochets and repercussions” of the Nazi past in contemporary Europe.

Donald Trump is a catastrophist-in-chief. This essay analyzes the winning rhetorical logic of Tru... more Donald Trump is a catastrophist-in-chief. This essay analyzes the winning rhetorical logic of Trump's catastrophic political rhetoric. I critique liberal hysteria comparing Trump to Hitler and Putin and instead aim to rearticulate Leftist forms of catastrophism to combat Trump's. For the Left has a long tradition of catastrophizing, too, from agitating for better social and economic conditions, to calling out forms of oppression, exploitation, and less visible "slow violence," to generating mass movements in response to economic crisis, imperialist atrocities from Vietnam to Guantanamo, and police killings of unarmed black men. Drawing upon recent work by Judith Butler and Cornel West, I argue that critique in the Trump era should strategically present the status quo as a slow or structural catastrophe as a starting point from which to develop progressive alternatives.

Toward the end of his life Koselleck moved away from his earlier project of conceptual history an... more Toward the end of his life Koselleck moved away from his earlier project of conceptual history and directed his intellectual energies to issues of memory and iconography. One of the most interesting fruits born of the recent wave of interest in Koselleck is the three-part exhibition “Reinhart Koselleck und das Bild” (Reinhart Koselleck and the Image), which was displayed in Bielefeld, Germany, in spring and summer 2018. Selections of Koselleck’s over ten thousand photographs were displayed in three different locations around Bielefeld, each of which highlighted a different dimension of his work on iconography. Curators Brandt and Hochkirchen argue convincingly that the late Koselleck—and to some degree his earlier project of conceptual history as well—was deeply attuned to visual as well as linguistic semantics. They thus position Koselleck at the forefront of the “iconic turn” to aesthetics, political iconography, and metaphorology. Their curatorial work reveals that conceptual history’s traditionally logocentric tools of etymology, philology, hermeneutics, and historical semantics only achieve their true interpretive power when combined with the study of closely related icons, symbols, and images.

This article surveys Theory Revolt's compelling case for historians to take theory seriously in t... more This article surveys Theory Revolt's compelling case for historians to take theory seriously in their work, including Joan Scott's reflections on why the feminist turn to theory in the 1980s she helped lead apparently failed to influence the discipline as a whole. It also includes Ann Stoler's recent critiques of capital-T Theory: As she has remarked, "I don’t think we need the word theory any more,” she said, claiming what is meant by the word theory itself “isn’t even problematized half the time.” “Theory with a capital T,” Stoler said, has become “a black box.” “We are doing a disfavor to our graduate students by constantly talking about theory and history, theory and practice. It paralyzes them.”

Theory Revolt—a collective of historians including Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Scott, and Gary Wilder—h... more Theory Revolt—a collective of historians including Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Scott, and Gary Wilder—has initiated a session of analysis with history’s collective unconscious; it presents a timely occasion for critical reflection not only about the discipline’s current practices and institutions, but also its most fundamental aims and commitments. I argue that if “critical history is a history of the present,” as Theory Revolt claims, then critical history must include reflection by historians upon the conditions, power, and psychic investments that undergird their own historical research.

The cunning of political realism in the mid-twentieth century was to wed Machiavelli's practical ... more The cunning of political realism in the mid-twentieth century was to wed Machiavelli's practical wisdom to the needs of Cold Warrior ideology. The hybrid that resulted is by definition a “conservative realism” insofar as it “stifles the capacity to elaborate any political project beyond the maintenance of order.” Realism is an exact reaction to utopian aims of the Atlantic revolutions and the rise of mass democracy. It was its era’s most influential representative of the Counter-Enlightenment.