The most useful interventions into the history of concepts are the ones that call attention to words and categories that we have been using without thinking. Such projects are capable of reorienting scholarly conversation, sometimes for decades, by making problems out of concepts that have previously gone undiscussed or unnoticed. The more fundamental the concept, the more integrated into multiple discourses across multiple fields, the more powerful the intervention. It becomes impossible to use certain terms—“rights,” say, or “secularization”—without engaging the critical literature that has made those terms into problems.

This is what Adam Stern has done for “survival,” a term that has increasingly come to mark anyone who has endured extreme adversity or trauma. As its subtitle indicates, Survival is not a history but a genealogy, which makes “survival” into a central problem and asks where any possible history of it might begin. Following Jacques Derrida and Gil Anidjar, Stern employs the framework of globalatinization to trace the itinerary of survival, from supervivere to survie and Überleben. Beginning by observing “the specific political and theological-political anxieties surrounding the survival of the Jews” (11), Stern's counterintuitive hypothesis is that the centrality of Jewish survival to the discourse of survival is the index, not of its Jewish, but rather of its Christian significance. He tests this hypothesis through a series of readings of modern German-Jewish thinkers: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud. Over the course of the book, Stern shows that “Jewish survival is already Christian survival and that the survival of the Jews is an ambivalent, paradoxical, anxious, and constantly shifting Christian question” (31).

The choice of these four thinkers, and the intense focus on particular texts for each one, are not intended to provide a thorough survey or overview but rather to highlight significant sites of the articulation of survival and to demonstrate how they are already globalatinized, notwithstanding their appearance in works of what is sometimes called Jewish thought. The thinkers range across political, philosophical, literary, theological, and psychological discourses. What “survives” in each case is not always the same—it can be individuals, texts, the whole Jewish people, etc.—but Stern shows how, despite this apparent variety, the political-theological poetics of survival remains consistently inscribed within the globalatin history of concerns about Christ's body. His incarnation, passion, and resurrection, and especially the vexed problematics of his continued presence in the Eucharist and the Church (the passage of the corpus mysticum from the Host to the Church is especially significant here), can be found in such unexpected places as Arendt's discussion of stateless refugees and Benjamin's comments on translation.

Review of Politics readers will be interested in Stern's analysis of survival's capacity “to transform abjection into power”; the problem is that this “also makes it a cunning dissimulating mechanism for the transformation of power into abjection” (8). As a figure of sovereignty, survival is shot through with paradoxes in ways that track the figure of Christ, who is both sovereign and victim, living and dead, individual and collective, natural and mystical, and so on. Imagery of ghosts and references to the Derridean literature thereon recur frequently throughout Stern's analyses, whether of Arendt's spectral Jews and Africans or Freud's ruminations on Hamlet and his own dreams. Stern is strongest when he shows how categories like modernity and secularization function to disguise the continued operation of Christianity in its particularity. For example, he exposes the “strangely asymmetric application of the secularization hypothesis” in Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, according to which Jews secularize as the result of an internal process of transformation, while Christianity simply disappears, attacked and replaced by secular modernity: “When Jews become secular, they become Jews of a different kind. When Christians become secular, they cease to be Christian altogether” (25). Similar insights animate his readings of progressive temporalities embedded in Benjamin and Freud, and Stern deftly traverses the huge literature on these figures.

ROP readers may be less familiar with the other figure Stern treats, Franz Rosenzweig, who is mainly read by Weimar intellectual historians in Jewish studies and religious studies. Despite his status as the only “theologian” in this group and presumably therefore the most “Jewish” of the four, I would expect Stern's argument for the Christian logic of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption to cause less controversy than his similar claim about Benjamin's “Task of the Translator.” It helps that for Rosenzweig, more than the others, the Christological themes can be explicitly treated at length, and Stern needs fewer close readings of textual hints. Nonetheless, in all four cases, Stern persuasively carries forward Anidjar's mission to read Christianity as “a singular ‘structure of possible actions, the enactment of essential divisions, and their distribution across a hierarchical differential of power’” (12).

In the contemporary United States, one sometimes hears the claim that “Islam is not a religion” (see Asma T. Uddin, When Islam Is Not a Religion [Pegasus Books, 2019]), but rather a political ideology. Legal arguments for Muslim rights and freedoms must correspondingly be framed in terms of religion. This comports with the reigning paradigm in religious studies, that Christianity creates the category of “religion” to apply to itself and to force other traditions to interpret themselves according to Christian categories. Judaism, too, was frequently accused in Enlightenment Europe of being a political ideology rather than a religion, and of constituting a state within a state. Stern inverts this claim: now it is Christianity that is not, or not merely, a “religion.” Over and over throughout Survival, Christianity (or at least, Latin Christianity) is rather a figure of politics, sovereignty, and empire. It is a drive to conquer, unify, subordinate, and eliminate.

Given this, it would have been interesting for Stern to broaden his project beyond his counterintuitive “Jewish” archive and to examine texts of Christian opposition to modernity and secularization. Would such texts, in light of this analysis, appear to fail to understand themselves and Christianity as well? By the same token, another path not taken is mentioned early in the book, when Stern raises and attempts to preempt an interesting possible criticism of his project, namely, that perhaps it “simply contributes further to the foreclosure of an independent and authentically Jewish perspective on survival.” His response is that “it is not always easy to separate the Jewish from the Christian or to make a clean break with the sometimes-hidden asymmetries of the Christian point of view” (31). Survival makes that case powerfully.

Survival concludes with a brief epilogue that poignantly brings together the modern Israeli Hebrew term for survival, hisardut, with an Arabic idea from the Palestinian lexicon of resistance, sumud. He could also have ended where he began, however, and returned to the contemporary United States, perhaps exploring the expanded semantic field towards which he gestures in the introduction, where “survivor” comes to designate everyone from military veterans to people who have experienced sexual assault to winners of reality-television competitions. This is not the project of a genealogy, but a reader having reached the end of the book cannot but wonder what Stern thinks about these other spheres in light of his other analyses. (I personally would have loved his take on how the entrance of “survival” into the sphere of romantic love, classically in Gloria Gaynor's “I Will Survive” [1978] and more recently in Destiny's Child's “Survivor” [2001] relates to the semantic field as a whole.) Stern most likely intends to invite others to pursue such projects; among the many merits of Survival is that it is likely to inspire just that.