Abstract
This chapter contributes to an analysis of philosophy’s involvement in genocide by exploring the work of Franz Baermann Steiner (1909–52), a Prague poet and Oxford anthropologist whose critique of philosophy was developed against the background of the Holocaust. The epigraph from Imre Kertész’s novel goes to the heart of Steiner’s philosophical investigation of philosophy, which emphasizes that, far from being irrational, evil is impregnated by and with reason.
What is really irrational and what truly cannot be explained is not evil, but contrarily, the good.
Imre Kertész, Kaddish for a Child Not Born
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Notes
Imre Kertész, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, trans. Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 28.
Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 22.
John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 313.
Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 11.
Michael Mack, Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti’s and Franz Baermann Steiner’s Responses to the Shoah (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001).
Franz Baermann Steiner, “Slavery,” in Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon, eds, Franz Baermann Steiner: Selected Writings, Vol. II, Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilization (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 155–9, and especially p. 158.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), pp. 396–7.
Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge), 1991.
Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 9.
Wolfgang Pross, “Anmerkungen zu Seite 389,” in Wolfgang Pross, ed., Johann Gottfried Herder: Band III/2. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit Kommentar (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), p. 594.
Immanuel Kant, “Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herders Ideen,” in Wilhelm Weischedel, ed., Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1964), pp. 781–806, and especially p. 805.
See Mary Douglas, ed., Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 113.
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 146.
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© 2005 Michael Mack
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Mack, M. (2005). The Rational Constitution of Evil: Reflections on Franz Baermann Steiner’s Critique of Philosophy. In: Roth, J.K. (eds) Genocide and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-3548-9
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