Transfinite Life

<p>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.</p>