Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
Biographic Data
| ID | 1689461 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin Aldes |
| FAMILY NAME | Wurgaft |
| SIGNATURE | WURGAFT B A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Ways of Eating
Ways of Eating
The Twice Unearthed
In this review essay occasioned by Antoon De Baets's short book Crimes against History, I argue that the censorship of a historical work can produce narrative effects. Drawing on Hayden White's method of examining the literary tropes that shape historical narratives and determine much of their meaning, I suggest that the reception of works (including their censorship and even the murder or repression of history workers) can act like a second laye…
Seagulls! On Martin Hägglund's This Life
In this review essay, I examine Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, a book that argues on behalf of democratic socialism on the basis of an atheistic confrontation with the fact of our mortality. Hägglund's book includes readings of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Karl Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr. and is best assessed as a literary and philosophical, rather than historical, study of the relation between m…
Meat Mimesis
This article examines an emerging form of contemporary food biotechnology, laboratory-grown or “cultured” meat, that often seeks to copy conventional “in vivo” animal flesh by using in vitro techniques. The ultimate goal of cultured meat research is to devise an alternative to the environmentally damaging and ethically undesirable infrastructure that makes “cheap” industrial-scale meat possible. Formal research into cultured meat has been underwa…
Meat Planet
In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultu…
An Oblique Response
In their 1975 deck of cards, ‘Oblique Strategies,’ the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt included one card especially useful for authors of scholarly books. It reads ‘Honor Thy Error
Notes on Camps, Or, Counterfactual Führers and the Structure of the Joke
In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture , I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account…
Thinking in Public
Thinking in Public
Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. 'Thinking in Public' examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Af…
To the Planetarium—there Is Still Time
This review essay examines James McFarland's Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now‐Time of History , which stages a comparative reading of the two thinkers’ works and argues that they shared a resistance to the conventions of nineteenth‐century historicism as well as a desire to attend not to causation as a force in history but rather to the importance of each individual “present.” Benjamin's term “dialectics at a stan…
Culture and Law in Weimar Jewish Medievalism
The German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss is best known for mature works in which he proposed the existence of an esoteric tradition in political philosophy, attacked the liberal tradition of political thought, and defended a classical approach to natural right against its modern counterparts. This essay demonstrates that in his youth, beginning during a scholarly apprenticeship at the Berlin Akademie für die Wissenschaft de…
The Uses of Walter
Many authors, both scholarly and otherwise, have asked what might have happened had Walter Benjamin survived his 1940 attempt to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. This essay examines several implicitly or explicitly "counterfactual" thought experiments regarding Benjamin's "survival," including Hannah Arendt's influential "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940," and asks why our attachment to Benjamin's story has prompted so much counterfactual inquiry. It also …
Meat Planet
In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultu…
The Uses of Walter
Many authors, both scholarly and otherwise, have asked what might have happened had Walter Benjamin survived his 1940 attempt to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. This essay examines several implicitly or explicitly "counterfactual" thought experiments regarding Benjamin's "survival," including Hannah Arendt's influential "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940," and asks why our attachment to Benjamin's story has prompted so much counterfactual inquiry. It also …
Meat Mimesis
This article examines an emerging form of contemporary food biotechnology, laboratory-grown or “cultured” meat, that often seeks to copy conventional “in vivo” animal flesh by using in vitro techniques. The ultimate goal of cultured meat research is to devise an alternative to the environmentally damaging and ethically undesirable infrastructure that makes “cheap” industrial-scale meat possible. Formal research into cultured meat has been underwa…
The Uses of Walter
Many authors, both scholarly and otherwise, have asked what might have happened had Walter Benjamin survived his 1940 attempt to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. This essay examines several implicitly or explicitly "counterfactual" thought experiments regarding Benjamin's "survival," including Hannah Arendt's influential "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940," and asks why our attachment to Benjamin's story has prompted so much counterfactual inquiry. It also …
To the Planetarium—there Is Still Time
This review essay examines James McFarland's Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now‐Time of History , which stages a comparative reading of the two thinkers’ works and argues that they shared a resistance to the conventions of nineteenth‐century historicism as well as a desire to attend not to causation as a force in history but rather to the importance of each individual “present.” Benjamin's term “dialectics at a stan…
Culture and Law in Weimar Jewish Medievalism
The German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss is best known for mature works in which he proposed the existence of an esoteric tradition in political philosophy, attacked the liberal tradition of political thought, and defended a classical approach to natural right against its modern counterparts. This essay demonstrates that in his youth, beginning during a scholarly apprenticeship at the Berlin Akademie für die Wissenschaft de…
Thinking in Public
Thinking in Public
Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. 'Thinking in Public' examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Af…
An Oblique Response
In their 1975 deck of cards, ‘Oblique Strategies,’ the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt included one card especially useful for authors of scholarly books. It reads ‘Honor Thy Error
Notes on Camps, Or, Counterfactual Führers and the Structure of the Joke
In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture , I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account…
Meat Planet
In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultu…
Meat Mimesis
This article examines an emerging form of contemporary food biotechnology, laboratory-grown or “cultured” meat, that often seeks to copy conventional “in vivo” animal flesh by using in vitro techniques. The ultimate goal of cultured meat research is to devise an alternative to the environmentally damaging and ethically undesirable infrastructure that makes “cheap” industrial-scale meat possible. Formal research into cultured meat has been underwa…
Seagulls! On Martin Hägglund's This Life
In this review essay, I examine Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, a book that argues on behalf of democratic socialism on the basis of an atheistic confrontation with the fact of our mortality. Hägglund's book includes readings of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Karl Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr. and is best assessed as a literary and philosophical, rather than historical, study of the relation between m…
The Twice Unearthed
In this review essay occasioned by Antoon De Baets's short book Crimes against History, I argue that the censorship of a historical work can produce narrative effects. Drawing on Hayden White's method of examining the literary tropes that shape historical narratives and determine much of their meaning, I suggest that the reception of works (including their censorship and even the murder or repression of history workers) can act like a second laye…
Ways of Eating
Ways of Eating
Philosophy (8 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Art (5 works) · History (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Politics (3 works) · Psychology (3 works)