The papers in this panel examine literary-political questions of circulation and reproduction, considering how formative figures, narratives, and philosophical commitments are repurposed across shifting cultural and ideological landscapes. The first paper explores the literary afterlives of Anne Frank’s diary in Philip Roth’s “The Ghost Writer,” analyzing how her words are appropriated and mediated to (mis)represent twentieth-century Jewish American life. The second paper turns to representations of antisemitism in the postwar period, drawing from archival findings to reconstruct the transnational networks behind “The Plot against the Church” and examining the epistemic anxieties that shaped both its production and the efforts to expose it. The third paper reads Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin's 1961 outer-space orbit to reconsider the phenomenological-political encounter between Martin Heidegger and Levinas, drawing from their divergent reflections on place, technology, and ethics to interrogate the persistence of fascist thinking.
Anne Frank’s diary, from its original conception to its modern multifaceted existence as an object of Jewish memory and transmission, has long been a site of writing, harmonizing and interpreting, all with various objectives and by various editors (including herself). Philip Roth, too, has participated in the tradition of transmitting and reimagining Anne Frank in the “Femme Fatale” section of his 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer; Roth quotes Frank’s own words—as published in the 1952 English translation of her diary—rendering these words, unattributed, in italics. This paper explores the literary effects of this resurrection and the limits and implications of using Frank as a mechanism of exploring contemporary Jewish American life. Like reinventions that came before (and after) Roth’s, Frank, through constant borrowings, becomes a malleable symbol belonging to Jewish society and representative of the tragic Jewish past, the ever-slipping-away Jewish present, and the uncertainty of a Jewish future.
This paper analyses the efforts made by Jewish agencies, early scholars of antisemitism and State intelligence services to identify the author(s) behind the "Plot against the Church", first distributed at VaticanII, before becoming a long-standing bestseller for opponents to the aggiornamento on the Church teaching on the Jews. Archival findings outline an uncanny obsidional alliance between three groups, all embodying a specific form of antisemitism but with no prior contacts with the other two: Mexican antimodernist Catholics, Italian neofascists and Egyptian diplomacy.
Building upon Stoler's "epistemic anxieties", the paper addresses not only the antisemitic networks behind The Plot, but also the representations of antisemitism conveyed in the hypotheses made by the investigators aiming to identify its authors. While The Plot was often seen as a derivation of the Protocols, we argue on the contrary that it embodies a complete shift of dynamics and power balance in transnational antisemitism after WWII.
What can we learn about the reproduction of fascism (and fascist desires) by re-staging the well-known antagonisms between the phenomenology and politics of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas? In this paper I read Levinas's "Heidegger, Gagarin and Us" — which chronicles the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin's successful outer-space orbit in 1961 and takes the occasion to refute Heidegger's ontological attachment to "Place" — along with the latter essays of Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" and "The Question Concerning Technology." Heidegger's essays have a provincialist, rooted, anti-technological and at times polytheistic ethos that Levinas expresses a strong aversion to. Levinas's aversion to "the Place" and human "rootedness" follows from his belief that Heidegger's attachment to place has fascist potentials. I ask however, if Levinas's thought fails to overcome what he most fears in his philosophical predecessor through his attachment to the idea of Jewish ethical exemplarity in the newly founded State of Israel?
| Evan Goldstein | egoldstein93@gmail.com | View |