Matthew Handelman is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Michigan State University.
Handelman shows how spiritual, quirky, and inventive engagements with math could suggest its affinities with projects of emancipation and ethics of dignity. His argument troubles oppositions between the humanities and STEM fields and promises to renew how humanists regard the incursion of positivism in the digitialization of method and episteme. -- Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois-Chicago Against the familiar lament that the inappropriate application of mathematical reasoning abets social reification, de-vitalizing abstraction and instrumental rationality, Matthew Handelman rescues forgotten attempts by three leading German Jewish intellectuals, Rosenzweig, Scholem and Kracauer, to argue otherwise. In their search for a 'negative mathematics' that has critical potential, they foreshadowed ways in which the yawning gap between the humanities and STEM fields may be overcome in our digital age. -- Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley