Two-day workshop devoted to the theological interpretation of critical theory, with a special emphasis on Jewish thought.
All welcome!
Gershom Scholem once described Walter Benjamin as a theologian who wandered into the sphere of the profane and took all the hazards incipient in this bold maneuver. For Scholem, however, even these hazards were of theological nature: they belonged to the antinomian heritage of Jewish messianism, most of all the Sabbatean and Frankist movements which walked ‘a thin line between nihilism and religion’ in order to overthrow the rigid doctrine of the Law in the name of a ‘blessed life.’
Walter Benjamin remarked that he felt a close affinity with Jacob Frank, but Benjamin was lucky to have a friend like Gershom Scholem, who immediately reacted to his religious, however non-normative, Judaic sensibility. Max Horkheimer, less fortunate, had to do it himself: many years later, in a famous interview for German radio, he declared that the early Frankfurt School was really all about a ‘Judaism undercover.’ This ‘Marrano’ characteristic, which at the same time betrays and covers its traces, applies all the more to Theodor Adorno who was the most reluctant of the three to confess his religious indebtedness, yet all his works, at least from Minima Moralia on, have the distinctive pathos of the Hebraic prophet who preaches to the strayed hosts in the midst of the wilderness. In his later essay, “Reason and Revelation,” Adorno only confirms the importance of Scholem’s diagnosis about theology which needs to jump into the abyss of profanation: “Nothing will last of the traditional theological contents; they must take on themselves a risk of contaminating itself with the secular and the profane.”
The workshop will explore various points of contacts and connections between critical theory and Jewish thought with particular attention to the projects of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Leo Löwenthal, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm.
Thursday 30 May from 11am-6pm and Friday 31 May from 10am-4pm. Detailed programme released soon.