Corey Robin

Tag: Edgar Allan Poe

White Negroes and the Jewish Question, from Carl Schmitt to Norman Mailer, by way of Bruno Bauer

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Yesterday, I was reading Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx, when I stumbled across a reference that sent me tumbling down an afternoon’s worth, or warren, of rabbit holes. In no particular order… 1. In February 1945, as Germany slowly dawned to its likely defeat in the Second World War, two of its representative intellectuals, Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, launched the strangest, even by their standards, musing of the mind. Jünger kicked it off. Responding to a condolence card from Schmitt, Jünger stoically itemizes his losses over the last two years: his father, his son (killed during the war), and his hometown. With an unruffled melancholy, he registers the death and destruction that has occurred and is […]

When Universities Really Do Destroy the Past, We Don’t Care

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Fifteen years ago, NYU announced a plan to expand its law school by tearing down Edgar Allan Poe’s home on West Third Street, where Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado,” revised “The Raven,” and acquired his own literary magazine. The announcement provoked some resistance; 70 scholars signed a letter in protest. They lost. Four years later, a nine-story, 170,000 square-foot Furman Hall was formerly opened. The Poe House was completely gone; a version of its facade was reconstructed a half-block away. According to a historical preservationist: Walking by, you would never know this was supposed to be the actual remnant of a 19th-century house. It looks tacked on. It’s a facade, literally and figuratively. Like the capitalist society they serve, universities erase the past […]