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Introduction Notes Introduction 1 . Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy , trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 15. 2 . For recent, post-1945 research on the Weimar syndrome, see Dirk Moses, “The Weimar Syndrome in the Federal Republic of Germany: Carl Schmitt and the Forty-Fiver Generation of Intellectuals,” in Holer Zaborowski and Stephan Loos, eds., Leben, Tod und Entscheidung: Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2003), pp. 187–207. For the Weimar complex, see Sebastian Ullrich, Der Weimar-Komplex: Das Scheitern der ersten deutschen Demokratie und die poli- tische Kultur der frühen Bundesrepublik 1945–1959 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009). 3 . Esposito, Bios , pp. 16–17. 4 . Ibid., p. 19. 5 . Ibid., p. 21. 6 . Lebensphilosophie is usually understood as both life philosophy and vitalism. As Peter Hanns Reill demonstrated, the two concepts were put together during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, the first from the context of the German romantic nature philosophy, the second from the French vitalistic biology. A few historians and thinkers tried—in vain—to differentiate the two, but the identification has lasted to our own day. Lebensphilosophie , as will be shown below, is also taken to mean or signify life force, living experience, or wholeness. For com- prehensive discussions of the terminology, see Gudrun Kühne-Bertram, Aus dem Leben- zum Leben: Entstehung, Wesen und Bedeutung populär Lebensphilosophien in der Geistesgeschichte des 10. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Lang Verlag, 1987). See also more specific discussions in Hans Freyer, Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Kiel: Kommissionsverlag Lipsius and Tischer, 1951), p. 19; Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method , trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 66; Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 292–293; Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 220. 7 . Donna V. Jones’s book presents an ever-growing tendency to perceive the modern idea of life as a product of the previous century’s discourse of 211 212 Notes to Pages 3–5 life and its political developments. Jones’s topics of discussion are broad: from Bergson’s life philosophy to postcolonial theory and its actual realization in three different continents. In theoretical terms, her argu- ments range from a very general discussion on the background of the philosophy of life at the end of the nineteenth century to a contempo- rary discussion of Foucault, Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Elizabeth Grosz, and, in particular, Gilles Deleuze and postcolonial theo- rists such as Echille Mbembe. See Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 17. 8 . Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), p. xiii. 9 . Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der phi- losophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag, 1920). Rickert implied in this book his deep disagreement with Georg Simmel, his own protégé and the father of modern sociology, who had died two years earlier. It is worth noting that Rickert defended and helped Simmel to receive an academic position in Strasbourg, one Simmel failed to attain in Germany before, due to his Jewish origin. See David Frisby, Georg Simmel (London: Routledge, 2002). 10 . Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism,” in Selected Writings , vol. 2, part 1: 1927–1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 321. 11 . Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1935–1936 , ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1978), p. 195 (entry dated October 27, 1935). See also Gerd- Klaus Kaltenbrunner, Der schwierige Konservatismus: Definitionen, Theorien, Porträts (Herford and Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1975), p. 247, and Alfred Rosenberg, Gestalt und Leben (Halle and Saale: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1938), p. 18. 12 . Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason , trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 403. 13 . Ibid., p. 523. 14 . Ibid. 15 . Ibid., p. 524. 16 . Ibid., p. 525. 17 . Interestingly enough, Lukács himself was drawn to such circles and ideas during his earlier career. For more about the topic, see Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and his Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). 18 . George Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1980), p. 199. 19 . Mosse traces a course that leads from the reception of romantic ideas by Lebensphilosophers like Klages to race theories: “H. F. K. Günther, later to become a chief racial expert of the Third Reich, . [and] Klages believed that the course of a victorious Christianity was plotted from ‘a center’ inimical to the Aryans.” Ibid., pp. 206, 208. 20 . For an excellent analysis of “the total politicization of life” in Agamben’s biopolitics, see Andrew Norris, “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,” Diacritics 30:4 (2000): 38–58. 21 . George Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich, trans. Salvator Attanasio and others (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966), p. xx. Notes to Pages 5–8 213 22 . Mosse, Masses and Man , p. 205. 23 . Ibid. 24 . George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1998), p. 15. 25 . The allusion to Bergson is not coincidental. As Klages’s literary remains (Nachlass ) show, Klages read Bergson’s books carefully and annotated them with many comments. See Klages’s private library at the Deutsche Literaturarchiv am Marbach (henceforth, DLA), Nachlass Ludwig Klages, Bibliothek. For a more general history of the German Bergsonism dur- ing the 1910s, see the comprehensive but sole work in this field: Rudolf W. Meyer, “Bergson in Deutschland. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Zeitauffassung,” in Studien zum Zeitproblem in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts , ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Munich: Karl Albert Verlag, 1982), pp. 10–64. 26 . “Auch es war Teil der vulgären Lebensphilosophie.” Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimar Republik (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1994), p. 48. 27 . Ibid., pp. 48–49. 28 . Ibid., p. 53. 29 . Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 30 . Ibid., p. 52. 31 . Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 80. 32 . Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 325. 33 . Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany , p. 80. Aschheim admits that another branch of interpretation counted Klages’s Lebensphilosophie in the emancipatory-anarchistic legacy of Nietzsche, rather than the authoritar- ian, but at the end of the day it is the right-wing, counter-Enlightenment version that won. 34 . Karl Albert, Lebensphilosophie, Von den Anfängen bei Nietzsche bis zu ihrer Kritik bei Lukacs (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Albert Verlag, 1995), p. 135. 35 . Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, March 15, 1930, in Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, eds., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin , trans. Manfred R. and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 366–367. For the full German edition, see Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe , vol. 4: 1931–1934, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), p. 537. A note about translation: I tried to keep the English translation where I could. In some cases, whether because the letters were not mentioned in the English translation, because they were shortened, or because I disagreed with the translation, I translated the text myself. In those latter cases I mention only the German title. 36 . Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, June 1, 1932, in Scholem and Adorno, The Correspondence , p. 394. See also Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe , vol. 4, p. 100. 37 . Werner Fuld, “Walter Benjamin Beiehung zu Ludwig Klages,” in Akzente, Zeitschrift für Lieteratur 28:3 (June 1981): 274. 214 Notes to Pages 9–11 38 . John Joseph McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 176. 39 . Ibid., p. 178. 40 . Ibid. 41 . Ibid., p. 179. 42 . Irving Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros: The Way to the Planetarium,” in Benjamin-Studien 1:1 (May 2002): 74. 43 . Ibid., p. 79. 44 . Ansgar Hillach, “Aesthetics of Politics: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theories of German Fascism,’” New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979): 104–105. 45 . Michael Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Benjamin’s Baudelarie Book,” in Boundary 2 30:1 (2003): 89–104. 46 . Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34:2 (Winter 2008): 364. 47 . Ibid. 48 . Joseph Mali, Mythistory: the Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), p. 272. 49 . Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content , trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford:
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