Corey Robin

Tag: Moishe Postone

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 […]

Adam Tooze on Auschwitz and Capitalism

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In a bravura of a post, the historian Adam Tooze dismantles a lot of the cliches—so common to a certain style of Marxism associated with Moishe Postone, and to a deep strain of Heideggerianism—about the Holocaust being the telos, the logical triumph and end game, of industrial capitalism and/or industrial modernity. Tooze also addresses a common misconception regarding the genocide of the Jews: that somehow the obsessive transport of Jews to their death entailed such a massive diversion of material resources and personnel, that it ultimately hurt the German war effort, that even on the Nazis’ own terms and plans for imperial conquest, it was irrational to kill all the Jews. Tooze shows that such a view is an evasion […]