The Twilight of Reason: Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and Levinas Tested by the Catastrophe

231 Pages·2012·1.43 MB·English

by  Orietta Ombrosi

THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
EMUNOT:
JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND KABBALAH
Dov Schwartz (Bar-Ilan University), Series Editor
EDITORIAL BOARD
Ada Rapoport-Albert (University College, London)
Gad Freudenthal (C.N.R.S, Paris)
Gideon Freudenthal (Tel Aviv University)
Moshe Idel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Raphael Jospe (Bar-Ilan University)
Ephraim Kanarfogel (Yeshiva University)
Menachem Kellner (Haifa University)
Daniel Lasker (Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva)
THE T WILIGHT
OF REASON
W. Benjamin, T. W. Adorno,
M. Horkheimer and E. Levinas
Tested by the Catastrophe
by Orietta OMBROSI
Translated from French by Victoria Aris
Boston 2012
With the support of the
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
and the
Fondation du Judaïsme Français
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-936235-75-9
Book design by Ivan Grave
Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012
28 Montfern Avenue
Brighton, MA 02135, USA
[email protected]
www.academicstudiespress.com
To Hurbinek

Table of Contents
Preface by Catherine Chalier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Prelude
THE NOSTALGIA OF ODYSSEUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Regression: subjugated in order to subjugate . . . . . . . 14
The circle of the Same . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Why Odysseus? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Chapter I
FACING BEHEMOTH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
I. The Jews, a problem in Horkheimer’s analysis of anti-Semitism . . . 33
II. Anti-Semitism: a product of civilization, according to Horkheimer
and Adorno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
III. Hitlerism: paganism according to Levinas . . . . . . . . . . 47
Chapter II
ON THE THRESHOLD: WALTER BENJAMIN . . . . . . . . . . 55
I. From the before to the after: catastrophes . . . . . . . . . . . 61
1. Catastrophe and technological progress . . . . . . . . 62
2. Catastrophe and the historical continuum . . . . . . . . 66
3. Catastrophe and redemption . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
II. From the after to the before: fl ashes of remembrance . . . . . . . 81
1. Dialectic of remembrance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2. Dialectic of memory and forgetting . . . . . . . . . . 87
Interlude
A PHILOSOPHY OF TESTIMONY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Silences of the witnesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Words of the saved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
The here and the now of testimony . . . . . . . . . . 111
VII
VIII TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter III
THOUGHTS OF EXILE:
THEODOR W. ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER . . . . . . 117
I. Adorno: a “sad knowledge” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
1. Philosophical thought after Auschwitz: a truth of feeling . . 123
2. Ethics of physical suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
3. Theoretical thought in the face of pain and death . . . . 135
4. A death worse than death . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
5. Education after Auschwitz, or against coldness . . . . . 142
II. Horkheimer: between lucid despair and mute hope . . . . . . 147
1. Reason and its shadow: self-destruction . . . . . . . 150
2. Reason and nomination . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
3. A Jewish intellectual after Auschwitz . . . . . . . . . 159
Chapter IV
“THE PRESENTIMENT AND THE MEMORY OF THE NAZI HORROR”:
EMMANUEL LEVINAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
I. Philosophizing after Auschwitz: three lessons . . . . . . . . 170
II. A subjectivity of fl esh and blood . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
1. Subjectivity as sensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
2. Subjectivity as vulnerability. . . . . . . . . . . . 183
3. Subjectivity as persecution . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
III. A humanism of the “suffering servant” . . . . . . . . . . 192
1. Auschwitz as a paradigm of useless suffering . . . . . 192
2. Ethical resistance afterwards . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Indicative Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
Preface
A long lament, weak and already fading away, but still sometimes
audible to those who continue to listen and who feel the terror of
living when the thread that links them to the past is soaked in blood
and opprobrium, dereliction and hate, is once again spreading across
Europe’s soil. Its breath is made up of the indefi nable and insistent echo
of millions of words that were stammered, murmured, prayed or cried
in absolute despair during the persecution, physical abuse and murder
which, during the twentieth century, touched the abyss at the heart
of a civilization where the most noble concepts prevailed. For several
years, philosophy, theology, science and technology, literature and the
arts—so subtle and fl ourishing, and endowed with a past rich in ideas,
creations and discoveries—which were the pride and passion of this
civilization that strove so fi ercely against obscurity, were commanded
to serve inhumanity or to disappear. All the barriers erected by reason
and the mind against man’s dark and dreadful depths yielded, one by
one, to the irresistible current of a terrifying barbarity that perpetually
annihilated them. Books were burned, words became murderous slogans,
thoughts were snuffed out in minds, and, crucially, sensitivity and
emotion were perverted. Moments of compassion towards the tortured
vanished behind a dark veil.
Orietta Ombrosi’s book speaks of this terrible history, the unpre-
cedented violence and apocalypse that still cast a terrible shadow on the
present. However, it does not recount the events woven through this
history; it declares strongly, and without concession to those who feel it
is high time to turn the page as other tragedies require our attention, that
philosophy does not emerge unscathed from this disaster. This insistent
thought makes its way through the pages that follow because the author
has lent an ear to the long lament just mentioned. It seems to me that,
in doing so, she compels us to refl ect on what effect this history had on
IX
X CATHERINE CHALIER
reason, as terrible as it may be, and does so in a demanding and implacable
way that is incompatible with relativism or eagerness to close the chapter.
And yet, to refl ect on this question does not by any means allow the
suffering and perils that fi lled the twentieth century to escape from
their own time. On the contrary, to consider the injuries of that period,
to hear the lament of the European Jews murdered along with millions
of other human beings, all equally powerless and equally innocent, as
a question addressed to philosophy is—perhaps, anyway—to preserve
opportunities for reason and philosophy, and even hope.
Some of the philosophers gathered in this book sensed this disaster
and suffocating and cruel interruption of the taste for thought, for loving
and living, even before they existed within the grasp of perception and
grief. They saw what would happen, what could not be prevented from
happening. Not because they had some particular gift, but quite simply
because they had not supported logical and scholarly abstraction or even
haughty coldness against the evidence of events and the suffering of
fl esh-and-blood individuals under the pretext of faithfully exercising
a speculative reason that remains resolutely deaf to such things, or
by claiming to prefer neutrality to human faces. Emmanuel Levinas,
in the following pages, explicitly mentions this “presentiment of the
Nazi horror,” a presentiment, he says, that was then ingrained in him
like dread or a “tumor in the memory” whose unfathomable sadness
he wanted to put to use in a philosophy that rebelled at offering the
slightest security to dialectics and the ruthless alliance that necessarily
binds it up with evil. This does not mean, however, that he supported
irrationalism, which he opposed very early due to its dangers and its
complicity with what he considered to be an arrogant and sectarian
paganism inclined to celebrate the coarseness of the cult of imprisonment
in a nature with no afterlife. Walter Benjamin, who was a victim of
persecution—though he never knew the immense extent of the Shoah,
as in fear of being arrested and deported he committed suicide in Port-
Bou in 1940 during his fl ight to Spain—also felt the premonition of
an inexorable disaster. Thus in his analyses on the concept of history,
his fi nal manuscript, it seems that there is an insistent refl ection on
disaster. Written with an urgency that makes us feel the threat to the
author’s very survival, some of Benjamin’s theses can indeed be read,
quite rightly, as a terrible premonition of the imminent end of days.
This at least is the perspective of Ombrosi’s interpretation, a perspective
that is tenaciously and perceptively held: there is certainly a diffi culty