43. The Frankfurt School

43. The Frankfurt School

Cultural Sabbateanism

Steven M. Wasserstrom explains that Scholem, a regular speaker at the Eranos conferences, was the scholar responsible for communicating the Frankist notion of “defeating evil from within” to the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School’s main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Freud, Max Weber and Georg Lukacs, focusing on the study and criticism of culture developed from the thought of Freud. The Frankfurt School’s most well-known proponents included Max Horkheimer (1895 – 1973), Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980), media theorist Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979), Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) and Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929). When asked during an interview for German radio about the briefest possible definition of the purpose of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, without hesitating, answered that it was a “Judaism under-cover.”[1]

The influence of Hasidism in the Frankfurt School was also felt in the thought of Erich Fromm, who was also deeply immersed in Judaism and later indicated how he was influenced by the messianic themes in Jewish thought. Central to Fromm’s worldview was his interpretation of the Talmud and Hasidism. He began studying Talmud as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid. While working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm studied the Tanya by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad.[2]

According to Wasserstrom, Adorno was another example of “cultural Sabbateanism,” when he stated: “Only that which inexorably denies tradition may once again retrieve it.”[3] Martin Jay, in his history of the Frankfurt School, concedes that the Kabbalah would have had some influence as well, as noted by Habermas.[4] Jurgen Habermas cites the example of the Minima Moralia of Adorno who, despite his apparent secularism, explains that all truth must be measured with reference to the Redemption—meaning the fulfillment of Zionist prophecy and the advent of the Messiah:

Philosophy, in the only way it is to be responsive in the face of despair, would be the attempt to treat all things as they would be displayed from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but what shines on the world from the redemption; everything else is exhausted in reconstruction and remains a piece of technique. Perspectives would have to be produced in which the world is similarly displaced, estranged, reveals its tears and blemishes the way they once lay bare as needy and distorted in the messianic light.[5]

Scholem, by tracing the origins of Jewish mysticism from its beginnings in Merkabah Mysticism all the way forward to its final culmination in the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi, rehabilitated perceptions of the Kabbalah as not a negative example of irrationality or heresy but as supposedly vital to the development of Judaism as a religious and national tradition.[6] According to Scholem’s “dialectical” theory of history, Judaism passed through three stages. The first is a primitive or “naïve” stage that lasted to the destruction of the Second Temple. The second is Talmudic, while the final is a mystical stage which recaptures the lost essence of the first naïve stage, but reinvigorated through a highly abstract and even esoteric set of categories. In order to neutralize Sabbateanism, Hasidism had emerged as a Hegelian synthesis.

As Wasserstrom noted, Scholem’s classic essay about Sabbatean antinomianism, “Redemption through Sin,” published in 1937, “remains one of the most influential essays written not only in Jewish Studies but in the history of religions more generally.”[7] According to Scholem:

Evil must be fought with evil. We are thus gradually led to a position which as the history religion shows, occurs with a kind of tragic necessity in every great crisis of the religious mind. I am referring to the fatal yet at the same time deeply fascinating doctrine of the holiness of sin.[8]

The appearance of the mystical messiah, explained Scholem, caused an “inner sense of freedom” which was experienced by thousands of Jews. He explains, “powerful constructive impulses… [at work] beneath the surface of lawlessness, antinomianism and catastrophic negation… Jewish historians until now have not had the inner freedom to attempt the task.”[9] In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem speaks of the “deeply fascinating doctrine of the holiness of sin,” and in On The Kabbalah and its Symbolism he confesses that “[o]ne cannot but help be fascinated by the unbelievable freedom… from which their own world seemed to construct itself.”[10] Scholem told his friend Walter Benjamin of his attraction to “the positive and noble force of destruction,” and declared that “destruction is a form of redemption.”[11]

Scholem first saw Benjamin in 1913 at a meeting above the Cafe Tiergarten in Berlin, held jointly by Young Judea, the Zionist youth organization to which he belonged, and the Youth Forum, a discussion group composed of members of the Youth Movement founded by Gustav Wyneken, who also inspired by Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair.[12] Benjamin held a leading role in the Wyneken-edited radical youth journal Der Anfang (“The Beginning”), which brought him into personal contact with intellectual figures such as Martin Buber and Ludwig Klages, founder of the Cosmic Circle. According to Benjamin, in Der Anfang he found “…an elitist, aristocratic and fiercely intellectualist wing of the German youth movement… Wyneken’s ideal (was) of an elite and highly ethical Männerbund devoted to the ideals of Kant, Hegel, Goethe and Nietzsche.”[13]

Scholem recalled that he was introduced by Benjamin to Erich Gutkind, founder of the Forte Kreis. Gutkind had already developed a reputation in New Age circles based on the popularity of his first major work, under the pseudonym Volker, Siderische Geburt: Seraphische Wanderung vom Tode der Welt zur Taufe der Tat (“Sidereal birth: Seraphic wanderings from the death of the world to the baptism of the act,” 1910), the first in a series of attempts to reconcile communist utopia, inspired by Jakob Böhme and the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria.[14] Although largely rejected as a philosopher in Germany, Gutkind’s book was praised by Ernst Barlach in a letter to Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.[15]

Benjamin socialized with a group of Jewish intellectuals he referred to as the Zauberjuden (“sorcerer Jews”).[16] The friends of the Cosmic Circle’s Karl Wolfskehl included Walter Benjamin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber.[17] Benjamin once took a class on the Ancient Mayans from Rilke.[18] In 1924, in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a member of the George-Kreis, published Benjamin’s Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (“Goethe’s Elective Affinities”), about Goethe’s third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). Benjamin later wrote of George-Kreis founder Stefan George, “It was not too much for me to wait for hours on a bench reading in the castle park in Heidelberg in expectation of the moment when he was supposed to walk by.”[19] Benjamin eulogized the Cosmic Circle, and corresponded with Klages and employed their ideas in his celebrated Arcades Project, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the nineteenth century.[20]

Benjamin was intent on writing even more about Klages, but Adorno and Horkheimer convinced him against it. However, in the very letter he wrote to Benjamin on December 5, 1934, Adorno admitted that Klages’ “doctrine of ‘phantoms’ in the section ‘The Actuality of Images’ from his ‘Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele’ lies closest of all, relatively speaking, to our own concerns.” Nevertheless, Adorno even tried to keep the letters Benjamin and Klages wrote to each other out of Benjamin’s collected works.[21]

The George-Kreis’ ideas have been identified as preparing the ground for the rise of Nazism by Marxist scholars such as Bruno Frei or writers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Thomas Mann. However, in 1934 Adorno wrote an essay on Stefan George’s Days and Deeds, which he attached a lot of importance to, but which has been lost. In 1939–40, Adorno wrote a lengthy essay on the George-Hofmannsthal correspondence. In the 1940s, Adorno followed the example of Schönberg, Weber, and Berg and set a cycle of George poems to music. In 1957, he would write the essay “Lyric Poetry and Society,” which concludes with a panegyric to George; and in 1967 he wrote and delivered a radio piece called simply “George.”[22] Both Adorno and Benjamin praise George for foreseeing in his poem “Templars” a Weltnacht (“universal night”) for “doomed” capitalism.[23]

Scholem also befriended Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss (1899 – 1973) and corresponded with him throughout his life.[24] Benjamin to became socially acquainted with Strauss, and he remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life.[25] As a youth, Strauss was “converted” to political Zionism as a follower of Zeev Jabotinsky. He was also friends with Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, who were both strong admirers of Strauss. He would also attend courses at the University of Freiburg taught by Martin Heidegger. Because of the Nazis’ rise to power, he chose not to return to his native country and ended up in the United States, where he spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the Rockefeller-funded University of Chicago.

Despite his Nazi affiliations, Schmitt was also associated closely with well-known Jewish philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss.[26] Schmitt and Benjamin were both obsessed by the “state of exception.”[27] According to Wasserstrom, Schmitt was another example of “cultural Sabbateanism,” expressed through the “imperative to defeat evil from within.” [28] Schmitt’s speculations strongly influenced those of Ernst Jünger, who, according to Steven M. Wasserstrom, elaborated what he calls a “cabala of enmity,” based on Kabbalistic traditions he associated with the myth of Leviathan myth, in an “anti-Jewish politico-theosophical program.” Jewish enmity, explains Wasserstrom, was as central for Jünger as it was for Schmitt. And according to Jünger, who adopted Schmitt’s concept: “The great goal of the political will is Leviathan.”[29]

Schmitt’s highly positive reference for Leo Strauss was instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that allowed him to leave Germany, when he ended up teaching at the University of Chicago, at the invitation of its then-President, Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899 – 1973).[30] Strauss’ critique and clarifications of The Concept of the Political (1932) led Schmitt to make significant emendations in its second edition. Writing to Schmitt during 1932, Strauss summarized Schmitt’s political theology as follows: “[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against—against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men… the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state.”[31]

Transgression

French philosopher George Bataille (1897 – 1962)—who would exercise a formative influence on the post-modernist movement—along with Man Ray, André Breton, Jean Paulhan and several other personalities of the avant-garde, participated in the sessions of Naglowska.[32] With his friend and collaborator Pierre Klossowski (1905 – 2001), Bataille founded the College of Sociology, a loosely-knit group of French intellectuals, named after the informal discussion series that they held in Paris between 1937 and 1939, when it was disrupted by the war. Klossowski’s mother, Elisabeth Dorothée Spiro Klossowska, who had an affair with Rainer Maria Rilke, was descended from Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to East Prussia.[33] Pierre’s brother, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908 – 2001), known as Balthus, was a modern artist known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls. The group met for two years and lectured on many topics, including the structure of the army, the Marquis de Sade, English monarchy, literature, sexuality, Hitler, and Hegel. Participants also included Hans Mayer, Jean Paulhan, Jean Wahl, Michel Leiris, Alexandre Kojève and André Masson. The College published Klossowski’s “The Marquis de Sade and the Revolution” in 1939. In 1937, Walter Benjamin met George Bataille, who was linked through friendship with several participants of the Eranos conferences. Bataille was also affiliated with the Surrealists, and heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche and Guénon.[34]

From 1925 to 1940, Jean Paulhan (1884 – 1968) was editor of Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), which was closely associated with the intellectual group who met at the Pontigny Abbey—one of the four daughter houses of Cîteaux Abbey, along with Morimond, La Ferté and Clairvaux—founded in 1114 by Hugh of Mâcon, who later joined his friend St. Bernard at the Council of Troyes in 1128 to officially approve and endorse the Templars on behalf of the Church. In 1909, the abbey was purchased by the philosopher Paul Desjardins, the synarchist founder of l’Union pour l’Action Morale, which split in 1889 to form the Action Française. At Pontigny, Desjardins held meetings there every year, known as Décades de Pontigny (“Decades of Pontigny”), from 1910 to 1914 and then from 1922 to the start of the World War II in 1939. The intellectual elite of Europe who participated in included Paul Valéry, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Nikolai Berdyaev, Raymond Aron, H.G. Wells, Denis de Rougemont and Martin Buber.[35]

The NRF became the leading literary journal, occupying a unique role in French culture. The review was founded in 1909 by a group of intellectuals including André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Jean Schlumberger. In 1911, Gaston Gallimard (1881 – 1975) became editor, which led to the founding of the publishing house, Éditions Gallimard. The first published works by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 –1980), one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, were in the pages of the NRF.

As summarized by Wasserstrom, “In short, Scholem’s antinomian necessity ‘to defeat evil from within’ enjoyed a certain elective affinity not only with the College of Sociology, Eranos, and the history of religions, but with a scattered elite of postreligious intellection.”[36] Jeffrey Mehlman links the transgressive and antinomian elements in Bataille’s thought to Sabbateanism through Benjamin’s friendship with Scholem.[37] Bataille’s writing has been categorized as “literature of transgression.” He was a coprophiliac, a necrophiliac and committed, by his own confession, an incestuous sexual act, in a state of “arousal to the limit,” upon his mother’s corpse after her death.[38] Bataille wrote that human beings, as a species, should move towards “an ever more shameless awareness of the erotic bond that links them to death, to cadavers, and to horrible physical pain.”[39]

Fascinated by human sacrifice, Bataille founded a secret society, Acéphale, the symbol of which was a headless man. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration, though none of them would agree to be the executioner.[40] In “The Sacred Conspiracy,” the call to arms which Bataille published in the first issue of Acéphale, he exhorted his followers “to abandon the world of the civilized and its light,” and to turn to “ecstasy” and the “dance that forces one to dance with fanaticism.”[41]

Members of Acéphale were also invited to meditation on texts of Nietzsche, Freud and Marquis de Sade, after whom the words “sadism” and “sadist” were derived, and whose is best known for the execrable The 120 Days of Sodom. Starting in the 1930s, Klossowski, Bataille, Paulhan, French philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Blanchot celebrated the Marquis de Sade as a model of perfect freedom. According to Wasserstrom, at the same time Klossowski was extolling de Sade as a liberator contributing to the spirit that led to the French Revolution, Scholem described Jacob Frank in much the same terms in “Redemption through Sin.”[42] Klossowski knew Walter Benjamin, who favorably reviewed his article, “Evil and the Negation of the Other in the Philosophy of D.A.F. de Sade,” in the Frankfurt School’s journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforshung. [43]

Sartre established a long-term romantic relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, best known as the author of the feminist classic, The Second Sex. In 1943, she worked for Radio Vichy, founded by pro-Nazi journalists. In that same year, Beauvoir was suspended for life from teaching for “behavior leading to the corruption of a minor,” when she was accused of seducing her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine in 1939. It is well known that she and Sartre developed a “contract,” which they called the “trio,” in which Beauvoir would seduce her students and then pass them on to Sartre, who enjoyed taking girls’ virginities. According to a review of Carole Seymour-Jones’s book, Simone de Beauvoir? Meet Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Telegraph, “de Beauvoir’s affairs with her students were not lesbian but paedophiliac in origin: she was ‘grooming’ them for Sartre, a form of ‘child abuse’.”[44]

Paulhan admired the Marquis de Sade’s work and told his lover, French author Anne Desclos, that a woman could not write like Sade. To challenge him, Desclos wrote for him the Story of O, under the pen name Pauline Réage. Story of O is a tale of sado-masochism, involving a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded, chained, and whipped, while her anus is widened by increasingly large plugs, and her labium is pierced and her buttocks are branded. In 1955, Story of O won the French literature prize Prix des Deux Magots, a major French literary prize, but the French authorities brought obscenity charges against the publisher.

Bollingen Series

Klossowski was to enjoy a strong relationship with the work of Henry Corbin and Mircea Eliade, key figures and longtime associates of Scholem’s at the Eranos conferences. Despite his anti-Semitism, Gershom Scholem, as reported by Mircea Eliade, stated that Jung’s friend Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, was among the very few Nazis against whom he had no objection.[45] According to Gershom Scholem:

When we, Adolf Portmann, Erich Neumann, Henry Corbin, Ernst Benz, Mircea Eliade, Karl Kerényi and many others—scholars of religion, psychologists, philosophers, physicists and biologists—were trying to play our part in Eranos, the figure of Olga Fröbe was crucial—she whom we always referred to among ourselves as “the Great Mother.” Olga Fröbe was an unforgettable figure for anyone who came here regularly or for any length of time. I have never been a great Jungian… but I have to say that Olga Fröbe was the living image of what in Jungian psychology is called the Anima and the Animus.[46]

Swiss writer and cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont once evoked the Eranos ideal with the slogan, “Heretics of the World Unite!”[47] De Rougemont, who wrote the classic work Love in the Western World, was another leader of the College of Sociology. Participants over the years have included the scholar of Hinduism, Heinrich Zimmer, Karl Kerényi the scholar of Greek mythology, Mircea Eliade, Gilles Quispel the scholar of Gnosticism, Gershom Scholem, and Henry Corbin a scholar of Islamic mysticism.[48] Over the years, interests at Eranos included, Yoga and Meditation in East and West, Ancient Sun Cults and the Symbolism of Light in the Gnosis and in Early Christianity, Man and Peace, Creation and Organization and The Truth of Dreams.

In 1938, Froebe-Kapteyn had applied for financial support to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, but was turned down. Her fortunes changed when she met Mary and Paul Mellon 1907 – February 1, 1999), of the influential Mellon family, thanks to her friendship with Jung.[49] Paul was the son of Andrew Mellon (1855 – 1937), who through the bank established by his father, Thomas Mellon, the patriarch of the family, had developed some of the leading American industries, including Gulf Oil, Standard Steel Car Company, and the Aluminum Company of America. Prior to becoming Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, a supporter of Hitler, controlled interests such as Alcoa, and formed several cartel arrangements with I.G. Farben.[50] At Yale, Paul was also the first man to be tapped by both Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key, but turned down Bonesmen for Keys. As the co-heir to one of America’s greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank, was one of the four richest men in the United States, the others were Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew’s brother Richard.[51]

Paul Mellon served with the OSS in Europe during World War II, working in Berne with Allen Dulles, who worked closely with Jung. US military intelligence apparently found that claims of Jung’s Nazi sympathies were unsubstantiated, and cleared him for employment in the OSS, where he was known as “Agent 488” by Dulles. Jung had a devoted student in Mary Bancroft, who became Dulles’ mistress. Dulles later remarked: “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.”[52] Nearing the end of the war, Dulles exchanged letters with Jung on the best use of psychological techniques for turning the German “collective mind” from Nazism towards democracy.[53]

Mary Mellon had begun reading Jung’s work in 1934 and she and her husband were deeply impressed on hearing Jung speak to the Analytical Psychology Club in New York in 1937. In New York, the Mellons underwent a Jungian analysis with Ann Moyer and her husband, Erlo van Waveren, the “business manager” of Alice Bailey. The Mellons travelled to Zurich in 1938, attending Jung’s later famous seminars on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra at the Psychology Club. One of the participants, the psychologist Cary Baynes, was a friend of Froebe-Kapteyn. After the seminar, Baynes and the van Waverens suggested to the Mellons that they visit to Ascona to meet Froebe-Kapteyn. Even before they left Ascona, the Mellons had committed themselves to funding the publication of the proceedings of the forthcoming conference at Eranos on the “The Great Mother.”[54]

Froebe-Kapteyn had fallen under the suspicion of the FBI since 1941. It had also been noticed that all her travel expenses had been paid by Paul Mellon and that she had given his residence as her address during the visit. Due to outbreak of the war, and aggravated by the FBI’s suspicions about Froebe-Kapteyn, the Mellons were forced to break off all contact with everyone apart from those living in the United States or England. As a result, in the early summer of 1942, the Bollingen Foundation was completely dissolved. Despite the dissolution of the foundation, Mary Mellon did not want to give up her publishing activities. Finally, in May 1943, the Mellons set up a budget for a publishing project called the Bollingen Series.[55] In early 1943, Froebe-Kapteyn once again came under accusations of pro-Nazism. On Jung’s advice, she turned to Dulles, who investigated the case and found no evidence, thus putting an end to the suspicions once and for all. Dulles’ mistress Mary Bancroft is also said to have spoken out in Olga’s favor.[56]

It was also the custom that each speaker at Eranos donated the text of his lecture in exchange for lodging and hospitality, which resulted in the collection of over seven hundred articles published in over seventy Eranos Yearbooks. Parallel with the development of the conferences was the creation of an Eranos-Archiv für Symbolforschung (“Eranos Archive for Symbol Research”), to hold the numerous reproductions of images derived from Eastern and Western iconographic traditions, including alchemy, folklore, mythology, and contemporary “archetypal” representations. The Eranos Archive supported studies, such as Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (1944), Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible—The Origins and Structure of Alchemy (1956), and Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954) and The Great Mother—An Analysis of the Archetype (1955). The material is preserved at the Warburg Institute in London as the Eranos Collection of Jungian Archetypes. The Eranos Archive also represented the basis for the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) in New York.[57]

[1] Agata Bielik-Robson. Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (Routledge, 2014), p. 5

[2] Erich Fromm. Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx & Freud (London: Sphere Books, 1980), p. 11.

[3] Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 54.

[4] Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 107.

[5] Jurgen Habermas. “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers” (Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity).

[6] Steven B. Smith. “Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss: Notes toward a German-Jewish Dialogue.” Modern Judaism, Vol 13, No. 3 (Oxford University Press, Oct., 1993).

[7] Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 37.

[8] Gershom Scholem. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; cited in Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 37.

[9] Ibid., p. 41.

[10] Ibid., p. 42.

[11] David Ohana. Modernism and Zionism (New York: Palsgrave Macmillan, 2012) p. 73.

[12] Gershom Scholem. “My Friend Walter Benjamin.” Commentary (December 1981). Retrieved from https://www.commentary.org/articles/gershom-scholem/my-friend-walter-benjamin/

[13] Anson Rabinbach. “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Block and Modern German Jewish Messianism.” In New German Critique, No.34 (1985).

[14] Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 230.

[15] Ernst Barlach. Die Briefe I. 1888–1924 (Friedrich Dross, München: R. Piper & Co. 1968), p. 411.

[16] Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 229.

[17] “Das Affenherz ist so etwas Vielgestaltiges.” Albert Schweitzers Briefwechsel mit Karl Wolfskehl. In Sinn und Form, 64:4 (2012), p. 516–531.

[18] Gershom Scholem. Walter Benjamin: the story of a friendship (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 33

[19] Norton. Secret Germany, p. 475.

[20] “Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics.” The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. Retrieved from https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/walter-benjamin-meets-the-cosmics

[21] Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 228.

[22] Paul Fleming. “The Secret Adorno.” Qui Parle, 15: 1 (2004), p. 99.

[23] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[24] Kenneth Hart Green. “Leo Strauss as a Modern Jewish Thinker” in: Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 55.

[25] Kenneth Hart Green. Jewish philosophy and the crisis of modernity (SUNY, 1997), p. 55.

[26] Bryan S. Turner. “Sovereignty and Emergency Political Theology, Islam and American Conservatism.” Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 19(4): 103–119.

[27] Wollin. “Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics.”

[28] Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 54.

[29] Jünger, Eumeswil, 378; cited in Steven M. Wasserstrom. “The Great Goal of the Political Will Is Leviathan,” in Huss, B. (Eds.). Kabbalah and Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 330.

[30] Edward Shils. “Robert Maynard Hutchins.” The American Scholar, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Spring 1990), p. 223.

[31] Heinrich Meier. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: the hidden dialogue (University of Chicago Press 1995), p. 125.

[32] Donald Traxler. The Light of Sex: Initiation, Magic and Sacrament (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011), pp. 1–2.

[33] Sabine Rewald. Balthus (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1984), p. 19.

[34] Georges Bataille. “Nietzsche and Fascists.” Acéphale (January 1937); Pierre Prévost. Georges Bataille et René Guénon (Jean Michel Place, Paris).

[35] Emmanuelle Hériard Dubreuil. The personalism of Denis de Rougemont: Spirituality and politics in 1930s Europe (St John’s College, 2005), p. 40.

[36] Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 55.

[37] Jeffrey Mehlman, “Parisian Messianism: Catholicism, Decadence and the Transgressions of George Bataille.” History and Memory l3.2 (Fall/ Winter 2001): 113-33.

[38] Jillian Becker. “The French Pandemonium, Part Two.” The Darkness of This World (November 23, 2014).

[39] Ibid.

[40] Georges Bataille. “Introduction.” In Stoekl, Allan. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (University of Minnesota Press, 1985). pp. xx–xxi.

[41] Bataille. “The Sacred Conspiracy.” Visions of Excess, p. 179; cited in Michael Weingrad. “The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research.” New German Critique, No. 84 (Autumn, 2001), p. 134.

[42] Steven M. Wasserstrom. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton University Press, 1999) p. 219.

[43] Michael Weingrad. “The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research.” New German Critique, No. 84 (Autumn, 2001), p. 152.

[44] Tim Martin. “Simone de Beauvoir? Meet Jean-Paul Sartre.” The Telegraph (April 12, 2008). Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3672534/Simone-de-Beauvoir-Meet-Jean-Paul-Sartre.html

[45] Hakl. Eranos, p. 82.

[46] Ibid., p. 12.

[47] Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 50.

[48] Ibid. p. 51.

[49] Hakl. Eranos, p. 109.

[50] Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of America (Joshua Tree, Calif: Progressive Press, 2008), pp. 43, 80.

[51] Judith Ann Schiff. “The Man Who Helped Build Yale.” Yale Alumni Magazine (March/April 2007). Retrieved from http://archive.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2007_03/old_yale.html

[52] Mark Vernon. “Carl Jung, part 2: A troubled relationship with Freud – and the Nazis.” The Guardian, (6 June 2011).

[53] Peter Grose. Allen Dulles, Spymaster : the Life & Times of the First Civilian Director of the CIA (Indiana University, 2006), p. 254.

[54] Hakl. Eranos, p. 110.

[55] Ibid., p. 131.

[56] Ibid., p. 131.

[57] “Iconographic collection.” Eranos Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.eranosfoundation.org/page.php?page=19&pagename=iconographic%20collectio