Since I was a little child, the meaning of friendship has always been on my mind. Like many people, I was vulnerable and found that by being honest, trusting, and open to strangers I also invited people to take advantage of me. But, regardless of the negativity I experienced when I was taken advantage of, […]
In an essay on Moses Maimonides entitled “The Literary Character of The Guide to the Perplexed,” Leo Strauss suggests that we read Maimonides as we would read a good novel: we should look for textual contradictions and read into the relationship of one “chapter heading” to another. In other words, he believed that Maimonides was […]
When people ask me if one can find any characters like the schlemiel in other traditions, I immediately think of Robert Walser. Indeed, I can think of no better example of the schlemiel than in his fiction. I can also think of no better person to write such fiction since he, too, was a schlemiel, […]
While writing on Franz Kafka, the Jewish-German thinker Walter Benjamin was interested in finding common ground between Jewish and non-Jewish comic characters. We see this project in his notes and in his essay on Kafka’s work. To be sure, the essay starts with a reflection on a Russian fool named Shuvalkin; but it also includes […]
Writing of Kafka’s short stories and parables (which include all kinds of animals from mice and apes to dogs and moles), Walter Benjamin takes note of the reader’s experience as an angle for understanding them: “the reader follows these animal tales for a fair distance without even noticing that they do not deal with human […]
Does attention to detail make one a thinker? Isn’t it the attention to the whole? Robert Walser’s portrayal of the philosopher – in his prose piece “The Philosopher” – makes him into a person who is obsessed with small things. He is, as Walser says, like a child who is “groping for small things.” […]
The relationship with things and the loss of those things is something that fascinated great thinkers and writers from Walter Benjamin and Freud to Franz Kafka and Elias Canetti. What is the meaning of loss and how does it relates to the character of the person that constantly loses things as opposed to losing things […]
Philosophers, mystics, and schlemiels have something in common. They are all, in some way, detached from the world and aloof. In Plato’s Theaetetus, there is a telling tale about a Thracian servant girl who laughs at Thales, the philosopher; who, while gazing at the stars, falls down a well. Socrates Why, take the case of […]
Ruth Wisse argues that the schlemiel character is situated between hope and skepticism. Since Wisse is a scholar of Yiddish folklore and literature and not a philosophy scholar, I have taken it upon myself to look into this distinction from a philosophical perspective. To this end, one of my current research interests is in how […]
Extreme difference in size or scale is a staple of comedy, caricature, folklore, and literature. The Brothers Grimm, for instance, tell many stories about small people who comically stumble through the world and are thought not just to be small in scale but small minded. Take, for instance, “The Seven Swabians,” a story about how […]
