The article discusses the transformation of the concept of History as it can be traced in the writings of Günther Anders. Anders is primarily known as a critique of modern technology specifically of ...the atomic bomb, which made him a mentor for the first anti-nuclear movement in West-Germany in the late 1950s. His historical thinking was therefore mainly perceived in its post-historic and apocalyptic dimensions. A closer look at his earlier writings reveals not only that his questioning of the modern concept of History began long before the “ontological cesura” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The article discusses two unpublished philosophical manuscripts as well as passages from his Californian diaries, both dating from 1940/41 and focussing the concept of progress. To follow his thoughts from two different angles – historical philosophical inquiry (however fragmented) and the literary form of his diary – gives us insight in his specific methodology of writing coined “Gelegenheitsphilosophie”. This specific form between “journalism and metaphysics” enables Anders to review abstract philosophical concepts on the basis of everyday observation. In the crucial year 1941 Anders reviews progress-thought from the perspective of a Hollywood film studio, raising questions of tradition, authenticity and technological progress in cultural production.
THE SHAME OF THE SURVIVOR Parussa, Sergio
Journal of modern Jewish studies,
20/3/1/, Volume:
7, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In the third chapter of
The Drowned and the Saved
, Primo Levi describes the shame of the survivor-the nameless pain felt before the silence and the void of Auschwitz-as an echo of the atavistic ...anguish inscribed in every one of the
tohu-bohu
, the empty and deserted universe. In this feeling there may lie the first signs of a reaction against blind matter: a form of consciousness of the existence of evil and an anticipation of hope for a better future. In this article, the author explores how, by means of a meditation on Auschwitz, by a reference to the Bible and to some fundamental concepts of Jewish ethics, Levi delineates an ethical horizon on which a text, a collective memory and a relationship with God, or with the silence of God, stand as fragile but visible signposts in an ethically uncertain future.
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