Dr Marcel Stoetzler will spend three months this autumn in Frankfurt eating the local delicacy of boiled potatoes with ‘green sauce’ (and an optional fried egg), networking and writing an article or two.
The Horkheimer Fellowship is advertised with a specific topic each year. This year’s topic is antisemitism.Â
Dr Stoetzler said: ‘I read Horkheimer and Adorno’s book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, one of the classics of twentieth-century social theory that contains amongst other things a rather complex theory of antisemitism, first time as a teenager and repeatedly since, allowing these two authors to shape my thinking on many if not most things. So hardly anything could make me feel more honoured than the Horkheimer Fellowship. Since my PhD some twenty years ago, a large part of my academic work has been on Critical Theory’s analysis of antisemitism, and its importance for the general critique of society. I just published an edited volume on this topic last year, which might have something to do with my being given the fellowship. Still, I’d wish the topic was a lot less timely and relevant than it now is with antisemitism rising in many quarters, left, right and centre, and Jews serving as projection screens for people externalising their anxieties, discontents and conflicts caused by an increasingly brutal and miserable society whose inner workings and dynamics seem increasingly opaque and out of control.’Â
Dr Stoetzler will work on a project discussing the relation between the concepts of racism and antisemitism.