Always historicize?

Arendt’s love affair with Heidegger and its aftermath, and Adorno’s love of the high life, than we learn about their philosophies and the ways in which these might emerge out of experience of and reflection on Nazi domination. (Sherratt has written elsewhere on Adorno’s philosophy, in a study titled Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, 2002.) The opponents […]

Social Madness

Social Madness Ronald Aronson In The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope I have analyzed the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’ as an act of societal madness . We ordinarily use this term ‘madness’ quite freely in conversation, but then abandon it upon moving into serious discourse and study – perhaps in trying […]

Levinas’s political judgement: The Esprit articles 1934–1983

Levinas’s political judgement The Esprit articles 1934–1983 Howard caygill Lebanon, Levinas revealed a capacity for political judgement that at first glance seems remote from the prevailing picture of Levinasian ethics. While refusing the synthesis of realpolitik and mysticism that to some extent characterized the Likud era in Israeli politics, Levinas was nevertheless forthright in making […]

Holocaust Day

News Holocaust day The inauguration of a Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK on 27 January 2001 was a belated recognition of the central trauma of the twentieth century, and of the suffering of the (relatively few) Jewish refugees and survivors who came to Britain before and after the war, members of a generation now […]

W.G. Sebald and the modern art of memory

W.G. Sebald and the modern art of memory Stewart martin been repressed within cultural consciousness, but with what has been repressed by the dominant scenes and institutions of memory, with what the memory of the repressed itself represses. This is controversial but also timely, as the recent commemorations of the bombing of Dresden indicate. It […]