LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Overall, the book’s topics largely converge with Scholem’s various scholarly and historical-political interests. However, while Scholem generally accepted the premises and the arguments of the first historical-philosophical chapters on the dialectics of progress and regression and on the relation between myth and enlightenment, he was infuriated by the analysis of modern anti-Semitism in the book’s final chapter. He left Adorno’s queries about his response to the book unanswered, but he did study the text thoroughly, as the notes that he wrote in his own copy of the book and on the back of one of Adorno’s letters attest.

      In the sixth thesis of the “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” Adorno and Horkheimer contend that³⁸

      Only the liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize the idea which has been unrealized until now: that the Jew is a human being. This would be a step away from the anti-Semitic society, which drives both Jews and others into sickness, and toward the human one.³⁹

“Awful in his Marxist mendacity,” Scholem commented. “So in Zion the Jew cannot be a human being?” Adorno and Horkheimer’s insistence on the essential separation between thinking and power as the foundation of emancipation and the abolition of violence appears opposed to Scholem’s understanding of Zionism as a recoupling of thought and power. Instead of liberating thought from its entanglement with power, thereby redeeming Jews from their continual subjection to those in power, as Adorno and Horkheimer demand, Scholem views Zionism as itself a reclamation of power, placing it in the hands of a Jewish political sovereignty. Scholem never expresses his critique explicitly in his letters to Adorno (and one may presume that it never became a subject of personal conversations either). Nonetheless, the matter continues to haunt their exchanges in a subterranean fashion. At the same time, Scholem was pleased to detect what he considered to be his own influence on Adorno’s writings. When, in the chapter on anti-Semitism, Adorno and Horkheimer explain that “Reconciliation is Judaism’s highest concept, and expectation its whole meaning,”⁴⁰ Scholem notes on the page margin: “Das hat er von mir” – “this he got from me.”

      To be sure, it is uncertain whether Adorno and Horkheimer – particularly Horkheimer, with whom Scholem shared a deep mutual antipathy – gained this knowledge from Scholem. However, Scholem’s influence cannot be overlooked in Adorno’s later writings. While it is debatable whether ideas such as in the aphorism from Minima Moralia cited above do indeed allude to Kabbalistic texts, Adorno’s late magnum opus of 1966, Negative Dialectics, unquestionably draws on Scholem’s scholarship to explicate some of the main tenets of Adorno’s central question on the possibility of philosophy after the Holocaust. At the beginning of the book’s final part, under the title “Meditations on Metaphysics” and its opening section “After Auschwitz,” Adorno writes:

      One of the mystical impulses secularized in dialectics was the doctrine that the intramundane and historic is relevant to what traditional metaphysics distinguished as transcendence – or at least, less gnostically and radically put, that it is relevant to the position taken by human consciousness on the questions which the canon of philosophy assigned to metaphysics.⁴¹

Scholem, who had also thoroughly read and extensively annotated Negative Dialectics, noted in the margin next to these lines: “Kabbalah.” Indeed, it was a central characteristic of mystical theories, including – but not limited to – Jewish Kabbalistic theories (Christian mysticism, and even the Christian reception of Kabbalah may be counted in this view),⁴² to emphasize that actions and events that take place on earth, committed by human beings, effect and shape transcendence – that is, they have an impact on the divine. The intersection and interaction between worldly and transcendent entities play central roles in Kabbalah. Adorno introduces this mystical idea into his own re-evaluation of metaphysics: the catastrophe of the Holocaust makes it evidently clear, for Adorno, that worldly events shape the structure of metaphysics, of any realm beyond the here and now, and of any possible understanding of this realm. Understanding this context and the allusion to mystical impulses that connect the worldly with the transcendent sheds special light on Adorno’s unique concept of metaphysics. Against Scholem’s anti-Marxist view, such an intersection between concrete-material and abstract-metaphysical (or theological) elements conspicuously corresponds to Marx’s historical dialectics, on which Adorno elaborates here. Adorno’s concept of metaphysics, in its substantive difference from the long tradition of metaphysical thought in the Western canon, does not exclude the temporal, historical, material elements – the “intramundane” – from metaphysics. Metaphysics, for Adorno, is the study not of immediate and absolute essences and categories but, rather, of contingencies, eventualities, and possibilities.

      Furthermore, in Adorno’s emphasis on the mediated character of metaphysics – that is, on the fact that no metaphysics can ever claim to be immediate, unrelated to given, contingent historical and material matters – he draws again from theories of Jewish mysticism. “It has been observed,” he argues, “that mysticism … establishes social traditions and comes from tradition, across the lines of demarcation drawn by religions that regard each other as heretical. Cabbala, the name of the body of Jewish mysticism, means tradition. In its farthest ventures, metaphysical immediacy did not deny how much of it is not immediate.”⁴³ In his own copy of the book, Scholem noted in the margin next to these lines “Scholem.” Indeed, it was Scholem who explained – in his first letter to Adorno, in response to the latter’s own remark on the Zohar – that the literal meaning of Kabbalah is tradition, emphasizing its historically mediated character over any understanding of primordial immediacy. Kabbalah, similar to Adorno’s philosophy, seeks not to understand any absolute proto-historical or meta-historical essence or experience but, rather, to draw an idea of transcendence – of material and utopian possibilities – from given historical experience, handed down over times and generations. Against this backdrop, Adorno’s social philosophy and metaphysics, as a theory of political redemption and emancipation, may indeed appear to follow in the footsteps of the mystical heretics whom Scholem explored in his scholarship.

In addition – and not unrelated – to their scholarly interests, the experience of the Holocaust and the analysis of its meaning played a significant role in Adorno’s and Scholem’s thought and writings, though with divergent emphases and implications. For Adorno, the Holocaust marked the line of demarcation, after which it becomes impossible to continue adhering to any theory of meaning that does not take into metaphysical, philosophical consideration the historical events of the destruction. For Scholem, however, the Holocaust does not mark any line of demarcation at all: he viewed it as the radical but imminent result of a long process of Jewish assimilation, self-oblivion, and loss of agency. It is nevertheless remarkable that, despite – or perhaps because of – the radical impact of these events on the life of both authors (Scholem’s brother Werner, a communist politician in the Weimar Republic, was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938 and executed by the Nazis in 1940), their letters do not include an assessment or an interpretation of the meaning of the Holocaust, personally, historically, or ideologically. This, too, remains a decisive underlying facet of their exchange. In the post-war years, one of the central questions in their published writings, as much as in their private correspondence, concerns their relation to Germany and the possibility of a German-Jewish dialogue. Here, the biographical differences could not be more conspicuous. On behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Scholem traveled to Europe in the post-war years to examine the situation of Jewish books and manuscripts that were either looted by the Nazis or left behind by their persecuted, and in most cases exterminated, owners. His first journey took place in 1946, as part of a two-man delegation alongside Avraham Yaari of the National Library in Jerusalem. Their expedition included cities that were centers of Jewish life and culture before the war, which were subsequently covered in debris and destruction. Beginning their journey in London and Paris, Scholem and Yaari traveled to Zurich, Prague, Frankfurt, Offenbach, Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin. Scholem was devasted by the situation he faced in Europe. For one thing, he felt that it was impossible for him to accomplish the task he was assigned. He was deeply disappointed by the failure to find many of the manuscripts he was seeking and by the disarray of the depots housing the books whose original owners could not be identified. He was also dismayed by the unwillingness of

Скачать книгу