Research Articles and Chapters by Jonathon Catlin
Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism, 2023
This chapter reconsiders the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory’s, and particularly Theodor W. A... more This chapter reconsiders the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory’s, and particularly Theodor W. Adorno’s, theories of antisemitism and racism in light of recent debates about global memory of the Holocaust vis-à-vis other genocides and forms of racialized and colonial violence. It reconstructs how the first-generation critical theorists came to recognize the significance and distinctiveness of modern antisemitism through their own experience of persecution as Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, but by the 1960s came to see ‘Auschwitz’ in a global and comparative framework of history, memory and
social theory. This chapter thus contests interpretations of Adorno as defending an exclusive focus on the Holocaust and antisemitism at the expense of other historical events with which he repeatedly claimed they were joined in a ‘hellish unity’ as part of the ‘permanent catastrophe’ of the same modern capitalist social order, including the Armenian genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima, war atrocities in Vietnam and ‘torture as a permanent institution’. Instead, it argues for reading Adorno as advancing what
Michael Rothberg (2009) has called ‘multidirectional memory’ of antisemitic violence and the Shoah, and for using the understanding of social pathologies arising from these traumatic histories to advance ‘differentiated solidarity’ between contemporary forms of oppression in order to move beyond national, ethnic and identity-based ‘competitive memory’ that Adorno would have rejected as provincializing the truly universal significance of the Holocaust and the ‘new categorical imperative’ he coined in its aftermath: for ‘unfree mankind … to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’ (1973: 365).
The Environmental Apocalypse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis, 2022
This chapter analyses competing rhetorical and conceptual framings of global warming as a crisis,... more This chapter analyses competing rhetorical and conceptual framings of global warming as a crisis, catastrophe, disaster, or apocalypse in contemporary climate fiction and critical theory, and intervenes by developing an expanded, dialectical notion of slow catastrophe that encompasses ‘social’ as well as ‘natural’ processes. This concept takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s conceptions of the history of modern capitalist society as ‘one single catastrophe’ or a ‘permanent catastrophe’. With theoretical updating, the framework of slow catastrophe provides a dialectical middle ground between the overly optimistic view of climate crisis as a progressive political opportunity (articulated by Nancy Fraser), and the fatalistic view of climate apocalypse as an apolitical and unending cycle of violence (articulated by Étienne Balibar). A dialectical notion of slow catastrophe holds in view the often invisible, long-term, and structural effects of global warming while also demanding responses to the acute disasters or ‘flashpoints’ to which this enduring condition gives rise. Apocalyptic representations of ongoing climate catastrophe such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future can be mobilized to support the imperative of ‘thinking against catastrophe’ advocated by earlier critical theorists, so long as they politicize apocalypse and render it contingent rather than succumb to climate fatalism.
Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions, 2022
Zygmunt Bauman's landmark 1989 book *Modernity and the Holocaust* theorised a fundamental problem... more Zygmunt Bauman's landmark 1989 book *Modernity and the Holocaust* theorised a fundamental problem in thinking about the nature of social catastrophes ‘after Auschwitz’. For Bauman, the Holocaust was not an aberration from the technical progress of modern civilisation but rather a possibility thereafter immanent within all modern societies. While Bauman developed this radical thesis to its furthest extent, his work openly drew inspiration from a number of earlier social theorists, philosophers, and historians, notably Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Raul Hilberg. Despite their different and at times conflicting intellectual approaches, these thinkers collectively constitute a strand of critical social theory I call ‘enlightened catastrophism'.
Memory Studies, 2021
This article critically interrogates historical analogies made between the Covid-19 pandemic and ... more This article critically interrogates historical analogies made between the Covid-19 pandemic and HIV/AIDS epidemic in American public discourse, highlighting the role of cultural memory and normative frameworks of 'crisis' and its temporalities in shaping collective responses. It situates the Covid-19 pandemic in a multidirectional mnemonic frame by analysing borrowings from other usable pasts, particularly the HIV/ AIDS epidemic in the United States, which in turn drew upon memory of the Holocaust. A reading of Susan Sontag's 'The Way We Live Now' affirms the value of multidirectional cultural borrowing while also revealing its limits. Notably, the ever-growing AIDS Memorial Quilt may serve as a model for memorializing victims of Covid-19. While analogies between pandemics may be comforting or mobilizing, their meaning must remain open to contestation and also preserve particularities and differences. The history of HIV/AIDS centres the question, 'crisis for whom?' and cautions against prematurely declaring the 'end' of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Book Reviews & Review Essays by Jonathon Catlin
History & Theory, 2021
Literary scholar Eva Horn's The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age inves... more Literary scholar Eva Horn's The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age investigates why modern Western culture so often imagines its own end. Through insightful readings of modern literature, film, and philosophical and sociological discourses, Horn argues that our hunger for apocalypse narratives-chief among them those about the so-called Last Man-is rooted in a deep-seated but diffuse mood of risk and crisis that has been generated by contingent and often imperceptible threats, such as impending nuclear disaster and climate change. Without concrete events to anchor it, this anxiety grows and paralyzes action. Representing these possible catastrophes through fiction provides us with cathartic, vivid, and plausible depictions of discrete events. Imagining such scenarios also serves as a practical means of preparing ourselves individually and collectively for possible threats, in turn helping to make them self-defeating prophecies. One of Horn's central claims is that fiction's capacity to imagine and capture affect, nuance, and detail offers a uniquely powerful means of thinking about the future. This essay challenges that position by arguing that fiction (though it is, as Donna J. Haraway has quipped, often the best political theory) on its own lacks the capacity for critique that connects imagined future catastrophes to their latent causes in presently catastrophic social conditions. Horn illustrates that imagined future catastrophes often illuminate the latent vulnerabilities of the societies that produced them, but her focus on apocalyptic scenarios reproduces, rather than challenges, cultural patterns that obscure more quotidian and destructive forms of "slow violence" and "slow disaster." If historians and critics are to achieve the consciousness of catastrophic threats against which Horn seeks to mobilize apocalypse fiction, such narratives must also be folded back into a critical history of the present that asks a more pointed political question: for whom is life already catastrophic?
Radical Philosophy, 2021
Using Theodor W. Adorno's 1967 lecture "Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism" and other writin... more Using Theodor W. Adorno's 1967 lecture "Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism" and other writings as a guide, this essay explores recent debates about the meaning and deployment of the term "fascism," German debates about antisemitism, and ultimately argues for the relevance of the Frankfurt School in combating the new right.
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2020
This is an extended review essay on "The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origi... more This is an extended review essay on "The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism" by Lars Rensmann (2017), the new Verso edition of "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor W. Adorno et al. (2019), and "Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus" by Theodor W. Adorno (2019). It principally reconstructs psychoanalytic conceptions of the authoritarian or potentially fascist subject that ground the Frankfurt School's empirical and theoretical studies from the 1930s to the 1950s. It assesses Rensmann's overall theory of antisemitism and criticizes it for being overly concerned with the specificity of antisemitism and Jews, which unfortunately closes off close psychological, sociological, and historical links between antisemitism and other forms of racism and othering that the Frankfurt School illuminated in their studies conducted in exile in America. It also goes further than Rensmann's book in contrasting Horkheimer and Adorno's influential theory of antisemitism as "false projection" with alternate theories of their time offered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt. The essay concludes that other cultural approaches to antisemitism like that of David Nirenberg, who is more sympathetic to Horkheimer and Adorno than Rensmann, are ultimately more compelling.
Antisemitism Studies, 2017
"In 1943, while in exile in California, the German-Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer griped in a ... more "In 1943, while in exile in California, the German-Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer griped in a letter to his colleague Friedrich Pollock that his assistant had written out “Anti-Semites,” with a hyphen, instead of “Antisemites” (closer to the German Antisemiten). He was repelled by the former term, finding it “so ugly” that he had it changed. “I know we used to write it that way ourselves,” he admitted,” but “the Antisemites are not ‘Anti-Semites’; they are rather Anti-Jews” (154). Like many today calling to put the hyphenated term “anti-Semitism” to rest, Horkheimer wished to dispense with the vestiges of nineteenth- century racial science holding out in the notion that there is some dubious entity “Semitism” that “anti-Semitism” opposes."
Conferences Organized by Jonathon Catlin
This interdisciplinary series of virtual seminars on “Adorno and Identity,” convened by Jonathon ... more This interdisciplinary series of virtual seminars on “Adorno and Identity,” convened by Jonathon Catlin (Princeton University), Eric Oberle (Arizona State University), and Fumi Okiji (University of California, Berkeley), revisits Adorno’s thought at a moment in which political, cultural, legal, and psychological notions of identity have expanded relevance and vexed public meaning. Across these sessions, scholars from diverse fields will return to Adorno’s theoretical framework in order to collectively develop more robust notions of identity, nonidentity, and negative identity, and to advance critical theory by connecting Adorno’s work to broader conversations about identity in adjacent fields, including the study of race, gender, sexuality, and technology.
This interdisciplinary symposium took place on the 80th anniversary of the November Pogroms and b... more This interdisciplinary symposium took place on the 80th anniversary of the November Pogroms and brought together leading scholars from around the world to explore intersections between legacies of racialized historical violence, trauma, and memory across African American, Jewish, and Native American traditions. The scholars invited have done pioneering scholarship on these connections from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The notion of “comparative memory” they helped develop is not principally concerned with comparison of historical events. Rather, it suggests that memory of different historical events can be mutually illuminating and reinforcing. By borrowing from and synthesizing different historical cases and cultural traditions, participants presented innovative ways to work through, narrate, creatively represent, and atone for collective crimes, and to ultimately work toward forms of reparation and justice based upon solidarity across conventional social fault lines. This comparative approach reflects the shared imperative, in the words of symposium participant Susan Neiman, “to understand how all kinds of ordinary…people commit murder, whether in Majdanek or in Mississippi,” and to reckon with continuing legacies of racial violence today.
The concluding keynote panel, "Dare We Compare Historical Atrocities? Comparative Approaches from Genocide Studies to Multidirectional Memory," featuring lectures by Carolyn J. Dean, Naomi Mandel, A. Dirk Moses, and Susan Neiman, is viewable on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/B9f3dfT6P44
This workshop took place at KU Leuven in the fall of 2019. Included is the program of presentatio... more This workshop took place at KU Leuven in the fall of 2019. Included is the program of presentations and the selection of short texts on new conceptions of catastrophe that were discussed in the closing roundtable discussion on "slow catastrophe and the Anthropocene."
Interviews by Jonathon Catlin
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2023
Andrew I. Port's latest book, *Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust* (Harvard/Be... more Andrew I. Port's latest book, *Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust* (Harvard/Belknap, 2023), examines how divided postwar Germany mobilized the memory of its National Socialist past as it confronted other genocides abroad. From the mid-1970s, as harrowing reports of mass killings in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda reached Germany, different political factions recognized aspects of their history and drew often-conflicting lessons from it: Germans had to collectively ask whether “Never Again” meant “Never Again Auschwitz,” and thus entailed support for humanitarian military interventions to prevent genocide, or “Never Again War,” proposing “total peace” as the antidote to “total war.” The question was: “Did the Nazi past oblige Germans to take action to prevent atrocities—or compel them to refrain from intervening at all?”
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2022
Press, 2021), casts Jewish thought and politics in a new light by tracing their recurrent tropes ... more Press, 2021), casts Jewish thought and politics in a new light by tracing their recurrent tropes of survival and redemption back to the representation of Jews and Judaism in a long tradition of Christian political theology. Tracking the discourse of survival in writers such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida, Stern argues that survival serves as a powerful index for the secularized traces of Christianity that define Western modernity. His book compellingly highlights the persistence of the trope of "the survivor as a universal figure for death-in-life" up to the present day (149). Contributing Editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed Stern about his book.
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2022
Three leading scholars of the historical imagination, D. Graham Burnett (History of Science, Prin... more Three leading scholars of the historical imagination, D. Graham Burnett (History of Science, Princeton University), Catherine L. Hansen (Comparative Literature, The University of Tokyo), and Justin E. H. Smith (Philosophy, University of Paris 7), recently published an unusual co-edited volume, In Search of The Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021 (Strange Attractor Press, 2021). This “very strange book” (Hal Foster) is at once history and fiction, scholarship and a poetic archive of performance art centered on cultivating practices of attention. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed Burnett about this weighty (at nearly 800 pages) experiment in historical thinking and writing, and what lessons it might offer for a discipline in an identity crisis in the age of “post-truth”—and a world seemingly plagued by a deficit of attention in the age of social media.
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2022
In this conversation I speak to Sultan Doughan, A. Dirk Moses, and Michael Rothberg about recent ... more In this conversation I speak to Sultan Doughan, A. Dirk Moses, and Michael Rothberg about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialism. Part one explores the central issues at stake in the latest debates and their relation to the German Historians' Debate of the 1980s. Part two engages the relationship of minorities to official Holocaust memory in a diversifying Germany, the role of scholarly positionality, and the relationship between scholarship and activism.
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021
Power and Time's seventeen chapters span disciplinary approaches ranging from history, to law, to... more Power and Time's seventeen chapters span disciplinary approaches ranging from history, to law, to anthropology, to the history of art, and each illustrates how political authority is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically-specific ways: The expansionist futurity of the Nazi "New Man" meets the apocalyptic presentism of the Manson Family "cult," meets the "deep time" of our Age of Plastic. In their introduction, the editors propose a new theoretical model of historical
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021
Sebastian Truskolaski's book *Adorno and the Ban on Images* investigates, across three chapters, ... more Sebastian Truskolaski's book *Adorno and the Ban on Images* investigates, across three chapters, Theodor Adorno's "imageless materialism," "inverse theology," and "aesthetic negativity," which together "reorganize Adorno's uneasily systematic 'anti-system' around the notion of imagelessness." Grounded in nuanced close readings, the book also illuminates the status of theological figures in critical theory after they have "migrat[ed] into the realm of the secular, the profane." In Adorno's thought, Truskolaski ultimately finds "a restless and incessant dismantling of established philosophical dogmas that throws into relief a mode of thinking, and-by extension-living, that escapes the violence and coercion of the present."
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021
An interview with the Harvard modern European intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon about his la... more An interview with the Harvard modern European intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon about his latest book, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization, which is based on the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures in Jewish Thought he delivered at Yale University in 2017. It explores the work of three of the most esteemed thinkers in the early canon of Frankfurt School critical theory: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. As Jürgen Habermas writes in his blurb of the book, Gordon illuminates “the deepest and darkest thought” these thinkers confronted: “How to save the truth content of religious traditions for the sake of secular modernity while denying at the same time its very foundation in religious belief.” This work of judicious intellectual history ultimately recuperates secularism as a normative ideal for our “post-secular” age.
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020
Andrew Hines's first book, "Metaphor in European Philosophy after Nietzsche: An Intellectual Hist... more Andrew Hines's first book, "Metaphor in European Philosophy after Nietzsche: An Intellectual History" (2020), traces the development of the concept of metaphor in philosophical thought from Aristotle to Jacques Derrida, arguing that the classical paradigm of metaphor as a rhetorical figure expressing similar meaning transferred across difference was “transformed to reflect the view that the linguistic operation described by Aristotle is in fact a fundamental phenomenon in thought and discourse.” Hines traces this insight in the work of thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Blumenberg, Derrida, and more recently the cognitive linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, who each defend, in their own philosophical idiom, the idea that “metaphor conditions concepts and not the other way around.” Fellow JHI Blog contributing editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed Hines about his new book.
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020
Tom Vandeputte's recent book "Critique of Journalistic Reason: Philosophy and the Time of the New... more Tom Vandeputte's recent book "Critique of Journalistic Reason: Philosophy and the Time of the Newspaper" (Fordham University Press, 2020) traces the explosion of motifs of reporters, messengers, readers, and the talk of the day in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin, arguing that modern philosophy defined itself through and against a sustained confrontation with journalism. In place of the rational progress hypothesized by teleological philosophies of history, one finds in the newspaper contingent events, confusion, unreliable accounts, disputed facts, and the announcement of the new quickly lapsing into a repetition of what has already been. Ultimately, the book demonstrates, the newspaper—in the rendering of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Benjamin—“becomes a stage where history fails to take place at all” (15). The antagonism between the philosopher and the journalist even came to reprise the ancient polemic between the philosopher and the sophist; as Nietzsche quipped, “Hegel and the newspapers—like opponents” (72). Yet the conception of philosophy that emerges from Vandeputte’s generative readings is not a negation of journalism but its radicalization: post-Hegelian philosophy, the book contends, learned to ask the “questions of the day” with particular rigor, linguistic precision, and resistance to the temptation of presentism.
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Research Articles and Chapters by Jonathon Catlin
social theory. This chapter thus contests interpretations of Adorno as defending an exclusive focus on the Holocaust and antisemitism at the expense of other historical events with which he repeatedly claimed they were joined in a ‘hellish unity’ as part of the ‘permanent catastrophe’ of the same modern capitalist social order, including the Armenian genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima, war atrocities in Vietnam and ‘torture as a permanent institution’. Instead, it argues for reading Adorno as advancing what
Michael Rothberg (2009) has called ‘multidirectional memory’ of antisemitic violence and the Shoah, and for using the understanding of social pathologies arising from these traumatic histories to advance ‘differentiated solidarity’ between contemporary forms of oppression in order to move beyond national, ethnic and identity-based ‘competitive memory’ that Adorno would have rejected as provincializing the truly universal significance of the Holocaust and the ‘new categorical imperative’ he coined in its aftermath: for ‘unfree mankind … to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’ (1973: 365).
Book Reviews & Review Essays by Jonathon Catlin
Conferences Organized by Jonathon Catlin
The concluding keynote panel, "Dare We Compare Historical Atrocities? Comparative Approaches from Genocide Studies to Multidirectional Memory," featuring lectures by Carolyn J. Dean, Naomi Mandel, A. Dirk Moses, and Susan Neiman, is viewable on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/B9f3dfT6P44
Interviews by Jonathon Catlin
social theory. This chapter thus contests interpretations of Adorno as defending an exclusive focus on the Holocaust and antisemitism at the expense of other historical events with which he repeatedly claimed they were joined in a ‘hellish unity’ as part of the ‘permanent catastrophe’ of the same modern capitalist social order, including the Armenian genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima, war atrocities in Vietnam and ‘torture as a permanent institution’. Instead, it argues for reading Adorno as advancing what
Michael Rothberg (2009) has called ‘multidirectional memory’ of antisemitic violence and the Shoah, and for using the understanding of social pathologies arising from these traumatic histories to advance ‘differentiated solidarity’ between contemporary forms of oppression in order to move beyond national, ethnic and identity-based ‘competitive memory’ that Adorno would have rejected as provincializing the truly universal significance of the Holocaust and the ‘new categorical imperative’ he coined in its aftermath: for ‘unfree mankind … to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’ (1973: 365).
The concluding keynote panel, "Dare We Compare Historical Atrocities? Comparative Approaches from Genocide Studies to Multidirectional Memory," featuring lectures by Carolyn J. Dean, Naomi Mandel, A. Dirk Moses, and Susan Neiman, is viewable on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/B9f3dfT6P44
A version of that claim has become commonplace with regard to the virus: No door handle, no friend, no lover, is innocuous. Part of the point of “Sentencing the Present,” and our “Theses” before it, has been to make the medical diagnosis social, as Adorno did in his time. To state as clearly as we could that U.S. life before “the crisis” was “wrong life” — and hence to raise our voices against any return to “normal.”
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/field-notes-on-sentencing-the-present/
A sentence is protean: It can describe, question, or cry out. A sentence is critical: In passing judgment, it names wrongs, makes decisions, and declares publicly. In a spirit of both open inquiry and political advocacy, and inspired by the response of readers to our own “Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis,” the past several weeks we have convened an ongoing conversation of critical voices reflecting on the history of the present and the possibilities of the future. To start, we asked some of today’s most pressing thinkers to offer a “thesis,” raise a question or reconsider a word. Our open invitation brought in new voices.
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/sentencing-the-present-an-archive-of-a-crisis/
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/2020/03/theses-for-theory-in-a-time-of-crisis/