Cara S. Greene is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. She’s a recipient of the 2022–2023 Bilinski fellowship and the UNM Dean’s dissertation fellowship, and she’s a member of the APA Graduate Student Council. Cara is living in Los Angeles and writing her dissertation on modern sacrifice in the thought of Hegel and the Frankfurt School.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on my dissertation, which concerns the theme of “modern sacrifice” in the work of Hegel and the Frankfurt School. Most commonly, these thinkers utilize the concept of sacrifice to indicate a moment in the development of subjectivity, “self-sacrifice” as it relates to the constitution of the modern ego, much like the Freudian idea of sublimation. Unlike sacrifice “proper” however, which involves a sacrificial agent and a victim, this form of self-contained sacrifice only involves one entity, a subject, and the destructive dimension of this sacrifice is metaphorical: the requisite destruction is immaterial. When I started analyzing these traditions’ respective critiques of modern reason—an intellectual paradigm Hegel calls “the Understanding” and members of the Frankfurt School call “instrumental reason”—it became apparent that both understand modern reason as a process of dividing up or “abstracting” reality into two distinct and opposed components—the infinite and the finite, the particular and the universal, the subject and the object, etc.—and establishing the dominance of one term over the other. They describe this rational movement of isolation and domination using the language of violence and murder: Hegel characterizes nineteenth-century natural science’s quest to categorize the manifold of sensuous reality as “depriv[ing it] of life… being flayed and then seeing its skin wrapped around a lifeless knowledge,” and Adorno and Horkheimer describe the modern pursuit of controlling nature to establish a less brutal means of existence as “mimesis[…]of death.” Though these thinkers don’t develop systematic theories of modern sacrifice as a bloody expression and outcome of Enlightenment thought, a latent theory of modern sacrifice, as a concrete rather than abstract phenomenon, is nonetheless legible on the surface of their oeuvres.
This summer, I’m writing my second chapter, which concerns Adorno and Horkheimer’s treatment of Homer’s Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Hegel’s treatment of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew in the Phenomenology of Spirit. While my third chapter deals with the sacrifice of individuals in service of the preservation of the modern state during the French Revolution and World War II, my second chapter concerns a phenomenon I call “discursive cunning,” a modern linguistic comportment that exploits conceptual or perspectival ambiguity, which effectively establishes the requisite indifference to nature and others that enables the rationalization of violence and murder.
What do you like to do outside work?
I have the privilege of living in a place with great food, perfect weather, and a year-round growing season, so my partner and I have a Sunday morning ritual that involves grabbing tacos for breakfast, perusing the local farmer’s market, and going on a long hike.
What is your favorite holiday and why?
My favorite holiday is the Jewish holiday of Passover, which is celebrated over a meal called a seder. During the seder, participants retell the story of the liberation of the Jews from enslavement using symbolic foods to represent different aspects of the Exodus story. I find that collectively retelling the Passover story every year forces seder participants to recognize that the freedoms we enjoy in the present are enabled by the struggles of past generations—a recognition that also forces us to think about our obligation to fight forms of oppression and enslavement that exist today. The Passover seder also features the “Hillel sandwich,” comprised of bitter horseradish (maror) and a sweet mixture of fruit and nuts (charoset) between two pieces of flatbread (matzah), a combination that sounds disgusting but is surprisingly delicious.
Who do you think is the most overrated / underrated philosopher?
I think Spinoza is both the most overrated and underrated philosopher (an opinion that fits nicely with his metaphysics).
What books are currently on your ‘to read’ list?
I just started Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies Vol. I and I hope to read Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason sometime in the next few months. These books help illuminate the connection between fascism and the hatred of women, as well as fascism and irrationalism, romanticism, and anti-intellectualism—all of which seem to be growing in popularity today. Though these texts concern the intellectual and social conditions of twentieth-century German Nazism and its precursors—and as such, can’t fully account for the contemporary forces that have led to the resurgence of fascism in the twenty-first century—they nonetheless show that politics isn’t fundamentally separate from cultural and philosophical movements. These aren’t exactly beach reads, so I also have a book about the history of women’s fitness, titled Let’s Get Physical, as well as my friend Jess’s new young adult novel about sleepaway camp, The Counselors, on my nightstand.
What is your least favorite type of fruit and why?
The unassertive melons, honeydew and cantaloupe, because they’re mostly used as filler to bulk up an otherwise exciting fruit salad. A fruit salad should never consist of more than 40% honeydew and cantaloupe. If these consistently disappointing melons were given a chance to shine outside of the fruit salad context, perhaps my answer would change.
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Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
