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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination

Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination

Hardcover

Series: New Jewish Philosophy and Thought

PhilosophyGeneral Eastern Religions

ISBN10: 0253029708
ISBN13: 9780253029706
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: Nov 20 2017
Pages: 308
Weight: 1.37
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

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