Asif Rahamim won the Lakritz Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year and a is visiting research fellow at the center in the years 2021-2023. This year he is a visiting research postdoctoral fellow at the center.

Asif is interested in the convoluted relationship between literature and philosophy, and particularly in the different ways in which this relationship is being translated into action – political, educational, ethical, etc. After working on this intersection from different angles and perspectives in the past few years, this year Asif wishes to examine it through a particularly complex and challenging case-study: that of Theodor W. Adorno, who was one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and a prominent player in the field of 20th century Western philosophy.

The project is focused on Adorno’s post-WWII political thought of non-intervention, and specifically on the pivotal role his readings in different works of literature play in its formation and its development.

Looking into the philosopher's readings of Kafka, Celan, and Beckett, Asif argues that for Adorno, aesthetic theory is not only inherently connected to ethics, but also – and perhaps even more – to politics: reading and discussing works of literature enables him to find a way out of the worn-out, conventional political discourse, and opens for him the possibility to re-think and to re-conceptualize the political after the Shoah, and to reorient political education in Germany and outside it.