The structure of afterthought

Abstract

The structure of afterthought – which I take from the French phrase ‘l'esprit de l'escalier’ – has an unhealthy domination over our thought, our scholarship and politics. Rather than facing up to the present and writing to the future, there is a powerful tendency to retain our gaze backwards, to be shackled in the past way of thinking. I suggest the counter-structure of imagination as one way to think about the nature of scholarship.

Keywords:

• social theory
• Jewish Question
• racism
• epistemology
• politics
• utopia

Notes

1. Israel (2011).

2. Diderot (1875–1877).

3. Rousseau (1889).

4. In contemporary usage, the word is roughly synonymous with ‘paradox’ or ‘irony’, having drifted to semantic dissonance from its original mooring in temporary displacement.

5. Hegel (1979).

6. ‘Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie/Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.’ Goethe (1808).

7. Khong (1992).

8. See Lie (2004).

9. Arendt (1951).

10. Peter Novick, for example, documents the belated recognition and awareness of the Holocaust in the United States (1999).

11. See Lie (2004).

12. See still Benny Morris's pioneering work (2004). Cf. Ilan Pappe (2006).

13. See the compelling portrait of polite anti-Semitism in Chapter 85 of Albert Cohen (1986). Novels, at their most pensive and reflexive, constitute a genre par excellence of afterthought.

14. Carroll (2007).

15. Neglected in the sense that the English-language edition translated and edited by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, widely available in paperback published in the United States and in Britain, is out of print in both countries as of 2012. The German paperback edition by Vittorio Klostermann is available, pretty much as it was originally published in 1929. The original three-chapter edition (comprising Chapters 2–4 in the Wirth-Shils edition) clearly captures Mannheim's intellectual intervention in the tense political climate of the late 1920s. The Wirth-Shils version, with its sober and scientistic discussion of the sociology of knowledge in the first chapter, blunted the sharp political and critical edge of Mannheim's original.

16. And in turn elaborated by Stanley Cavell (2000).

17. Mills (1951).

18. Although a Columbia University faculty member, Mills remained an Associate Professor, who was unable to teach Ph.D. students, at the time of his death