Transfinite Life

Oskar Goldberg was an important and controversial figure in Weimar Germany. He challenged the rising racial conception of the state and claimed that the Jewish people were on a metaphysical mission to defeat race-based statism. He attracted the attention of his contemporaries-Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Thomas Mann, and Carl Schmitt, among others-with the argument that ancient Israel's sacrificial rituals held the key to overcoming the tyranny of technology in the modern world. Bruce Rosenstock offers a sympathetic but critical philosophical portrait of Goldberg and puts him into conversation with Jewish and political figures that circulated in his cultural environment. Rosenstock reveals Goldberg as a deeply imaginative and broad-minded thinker who drew on biology, mathematics, Kabbalah, and his interests in ghost photography to account for the origin of the earth. Caricatured as a Jewish proto-fascist in his day, Goldberg's views of the tyranny of technology, biopolitics, and the "new vitalism" remain relevant to this day.

Auteur

Bruce Rosenstock is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond. He is also the creator and manager of the Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews multimedia digital library, sephardifolklit.illinois.edu.

Contenu

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction

1. Hans Driesch and the Revival of Naturphilosophie
2. Georg Cantor and the Mathematics of God
3. Goldberg's Ontology and Unger's Politics and Metaphysics
4. The Reality of the Hebrews and YHWH's Battle for the Earth
5. Gershom Scholem, Oskar Goldberg, and the Meaning of Jewish History
   Conclusion: Ghosts and the Vitalist Imagination
   Appendix I: Thomas Mann's Critique of The Reality of the Hebrews
   Appendix II: Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte and Oskar Goldberg's Kabbalah Interpretation
   Bibliography
   Index