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Book Cover
E-book
Author Rosenstock, Bruce (Bruce Benjamin), author.

Title Transfinite life : Oskar Goldberg and the vitalist imagination / Bruce Rosenstock
Published Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2017]

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Description 1 online resource
Series New Jewish philosophy and thought
Contents Hans Driesch and the revival of naturphilosophie -- Georg Cantor and the mathematics of God -- Goldberg's ontology and Unger's politics and metaphysics -- The reality of the Hebrews and Yhwh's battle for the earth -- Gershom Scholem, Oskar Goldberg, and the meaning of Jewish history -- Ghosts and the vitalist imagination -- Thomas Mann's critique of the reality of the Hebrews -- Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte and Oskar Goldberg's Kabbalah interpretation
Summary 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher
Subject Goldberg, Oskar, 1885-1952.
SUBJECT Goldberg, Oskar, 1885-1952 fast
Subject PHILOSOPHY -- Eastern.
PHILOSOPHY -- Religious.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2017042593
ISBN 9780253030160
0253030161