‘+1’: Scholem and the Paradoxes of the Infinite.

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Ng, Julia. 2014. ‘+1’: Scholem and the Paradoxes of the Infinite. Rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio, 8(2), pp. 196-210. ISSN 2036-6728 [Article]

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Official URL: http://www.rifl.unical.it/index.php/rifl/article/v...

Abstract or Description

This article draws on several crucial and unpublished manuscripts from the Scholem Archive in exploration of Gershom Scholem's youthful statements on mathematics and its relation to extra-mathematical facts and, more broadly, to a concept of history that would prove to be consequential for Walter Benjamin's own thinking on "messianism" and a "futuristic politics." In context of critiquing the German Youth Movement's subsumption of active life to the nationalistic conditions of the "earth" during the First World War, Scholem turns to mathematics for a genuine and self-consistent theory of action. In the concept of actual infinity (in Cantor and Bolzano) he finds an explanation of how mathematics relates to "the physical" without reducing the former to an "image" of the latter, and without relying on the concept of geometric intuition. This explanation, insofar as it relies on the notion of actual infinity, provides Scholem with a conception of mathematics (and the history of mathematics) that reconciles freedom and necessity—remarks on which he outlines in his diaries and communicates to Benjamin in early March 1916.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.4396/20141224

Additional Information:

special issue on Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Language, ed. Tamara Tagliacozzo

Keywords:

history, Zionism, infinity, set theory, intuition, tautology

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Centre for Cultural Studies (1998-2017)
English and Comparative Literature

Dates: