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This paper examines Gustav Landauer’s mystical anarchism, focusing on the concept of overcoming death as a core element of his thought. It explores Landauer’s rejection of death as both a linguistic superstition and a limited worldview, emphasizing the collective whole over individualism. The essay suggests that Landauer’s representation of revolution moving from space to time includes his account of mystical anarchy, which fosters a deep connection with the past and a sense of unity with the world and humanity. This shift in perspective promotes a more fulfilling and meaningful existence within a larger, authentic community that is an antidote to the constraints of death.

Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) was a German-Jewish anarchist and radical thinker who was brutally murdered in the Munich Soviet Republic. Paul Mendes-Flohr has contributed enormously to the rediscovery of this long-neglected figure, who nonetheless played a crucial role in the intellectual debates of his time. Mendes-Flohr emphasizes the impact that Landauer’s death had on Martin Buber’s conception of politics at a time when Jewish revolutionaries were attempting to combine messianism and activism. In this essay, as a complement to Mendes-Flohr’s insightful work, I will attempt to show how Landauer’s legacy can be traced in two other German-Jewish thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin, albeit with important differences. In particular, I want to illustrate how Landauer’s idea of an anarchic diaspora, as well as his idea of revolution as interruption, both based on a unique conception of time, can be seen as two powerful theologico-political devices that he used in order to dismantle a too narrow and too technical idea of politics. I will, therefore, examine how the anarchic diaspora finds its echo in Rosenzweig’s thought, and how the idea of interruption and inversion can be found in Benjamin’s conception of revolution.

This essay examines Gustav Landauers original conception of Judaism, his redemptive conception of community, his theory of revolution, and the influence of his writings on the voluntary organizing of settlements in the pre-state community of Mandatory Palestine-all of which are relevant in accounting for the impact of Landauers work upon German Jewry in the 1920's, as well as upon the Yishuv, the emerging body of Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in Palestine in the decade 1920-30. How his thought was received by his contemporaries has not been analyzed from a scholarly perspective. Though he became aware of his Jewish identity only gradually, Judaism played a central role in his political thought. dauer the term \"diaspora\" as an implicitly anarchistic category. To see one-self as living in a diaspora means that one is perceived as not investing full legitimacy and credence in the actual state that one inhabits. In terms of his view of diaspora, Landauer transformed into a virtue what others saw as a flaw in Jewish exile existence. For him, diaspora Judaism potentially constituted a vanguard movement for overcoming the state.

Gustav Landauers work evoked enthusiastic interest among early Jewish settlers of Mandatory Palestine who probed it for guidelines on how to build a new, just society in conjunction with setting up kibbutzim. The Jewish Yishuv (Jewish settlements in Mandatory Palestine) would have been the type of society that Landauer envisioned, one not needing to be held together by a state. He had the opportunity to be decisively involved in the attempt to carry out a revolutionary transformation of Bavarian society in its revolution of 1918-19. When this revolutionary experiment was crushed, Landauer was murdered on May 2, 1919, by counter-revolutionary Freikorps soldiers, who had been requested of the national government in Berlin by the Bavarian government that had fled to the city of Bamberg, Bavaria. This essay looks at various blueprints that Landauer devised to channel these revolutionary events into a productive direction in accord with his vision. It seeks to track down his efforts in some detail to get a sense why, after his death, Landauer became such an inspiration for some of the early settlers in what later became the State of Israel and other revolutionaries.

Recently, indigenous struggles against ongoing colonial violence have become prominent in the context of growing environmental destruction and the ascendancy of the far right in the United States and parts of South America. This article suggests that European radical theory is not always equipped to provide normative frameworks of allyship with such struggles. Exploring the ‘messianic tone’ (Bradley and Fletcher, 2010, p. 3) in European radical theory, and in particular the works of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, the article argues that the analytical tendency to render the subject entirely dissolute acts against indigenous demands for justice built around the latter’s sovereignty. In an effort to excavate a ‘European’ tradition that might enable relations of allyship between those in relatively privileged positions and indigenous peoples, the article foregrounds the life and thought of Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), a German, Jewish, anarchist revolutionary who lost his life during the 1919 German revolution. Landauer’s anarchism was suffused with his reading of his Jewishness, and as such, although he prefigures Derrida and Agamben in many ways, he ultimately refused to completely reject the sovereignty of the subject, providing a means by which to engage European political theory with indigenous struggles in the world today.

For Gustav Landauer, literary critic and anarchist, scholar of mysticism and participant of the Bavarian revolution, culture and politics occupied the same spiritual space. While identifying with ethical socialism, his Jewish sensibility increasingly gained over the years, not only, but in great measure due to Buber's influence. This volume brings together leading scholars to assess Landauer's ramified literary and political activities, his life as a Jew and anarchist, paying particular attention to his impact on Martin Buber.

The concept of utopia is from the moment of its inception umbilically tied to modern conceptions of progress that have legitimized settler colonialism, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the violent subordination of women and racial and sexual “others,” ecocide, and a “grow or die” form of civilization that is now threatening the very existence of all life on the planet. Drawing on the critical socialist insights of Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin, and the “non-Euclidean” utopianism of Ursula K. Le Guin, this article challenges the common association between utopia and culturally dominant ideas of progress and outlines a temporally and spatially grounded alternative approach to the study of utopias suitable to a post-anthropocentric world. The aims of the analysis are at once scholarly and practical: scholarly, inasmuch as it develops conceptual tools conducive to fresh interpretations of utopian texts and practices; and practical, insofar as it vitalizes utopian thought and action by illuminating hitherto obscure aspects of utopianism’s transformative potential.

[...]I do want to point out that all of them say that he was born into an observant Jewish home except the Encyclopedia Britannica, which reports that the home was one of an assimilated Jewish family. Presenting a summary of his memoir is more in line with Buber's personal approach and the topic of Buber and Psychology. [...]Fragments is an attempt by Buber to present what might be termed the events and our insights that best portrayed his life and thoughts. The relationship of my father to nature was connected with his relationship to the social world. \"The language of instruction was Polish, but the atmosphere was that, now appearing almost unhistorical to us, which prevailed or seemed to prevail among the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian empire: mutual tolerance without mutual understanding.

This essay uses both published and archival material to reconstruct the ideological and social contexts of Martin Buber’s 1909 address “Judaism and the Jews”. It suggests that Buber’s address became immensely influential because it equated mysticism and politics into one metaphor. Secondly, it shows that Buber imported this idea from debates and discussions that took place almost a decade earlier in Berlin, among the bohemian circle known as the Neue Gemeinschaft (new community). Finally, the author hopes to show that the social context can be as crucial to understanding an idea as the ideological context. The question about the functions and potentials of the “community” so central to Buber and the Neue Gemeinschaft must be examined, this essay contends, not only conceptually but also as a lived reality. In order to get a glimpse of “the new community”, this essay reproduces archival material that testifies not only to what people thought but also what they did, who they were, and how they interacted.

In his intellectual biography of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, A Life of Faith and Dissent written in 2019, Paul Mendes-Flohr offers us an intimate view of Buber’s life and thought without neglecting the story of the women in his life and their contributions to shaping his thought. In this short reflection essay, I wish to present a crosscutting perspective on the important biography written by Paul Mendes-Flohr, by highlighting Buber’s relation to women, feminism, and femininity, a perspective that emerges in almost every chapter of the biography. This angle, I hope, will illuminate not only the personal–psychological dimension of Buber’s inner life but also the deep currents of his intellectual life and thought.