Landauer Now

Samuel Hayim Brody

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Chapter 9 Landauer Now

In: Skepsis and Antipolitics: The Alternative of Gustav Landauer

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Samuel Hayim Brody

Samuel Hayim Brody
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 202–221

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004534575_010

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Abstract

Gustav Landauer had a complex relationship to temporality. This essay presents three distinct temporalities within his thought. First, he adheres to a kind of compressed temporality or eternal presentism, arguing that “right now” is the only true moment and that we are contemporaries with every human being to have existed since the beginning of recorded history. Second, he sometimes offers a recognition of the Western temporality of “modernity” in which the past 500 years hold a special status that is unique in time due to the emergence of capitalism. Third and finally, he holds an idiosyncratic conception of history as moving between “topia,” a settled arrangement of customs and institutions that endures for a long period of time, and “utopia,” the disruption of that settlement thanks to problems and flaws long latent within it. Landauer’s ability to shift perspective between these alternative temporalities, it is argued, prefigures twenty-first-century forms of anarchism that draw on postcolonial and decolonial critiques. In their “modernism,” many forms of Marxism and anarchism perpetuate Eurocentric and ultimately Christian models of temporality in which Europe comes to dominate as time progresses. Landauer’s plural temporalities challenge this hierarchical approach to time.

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Skepsis and Antipolitics: The Alternative of Gustav Landauer

Series: Maimonides Library for Philosophy and Religion, Volume: 2

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004534575

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 28 Nov 2022

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Front Matter

Part 1 Linguistic Scepticism in Landauer’s Literary and Political Anarchism

Part 2 Mysticism, Romanticism, and History in Landauer’s ‘Anti-Political’ Stance

Part 3 Elective Affinities: Landauer and His Contemporaries

Part 4 Landauer between the Defense and Renewal of Judaism

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Chapter 9 Landauer Now

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Skepsis and Antipolitics: The Alternative of Gustav Landauer

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