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The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue - Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Paperback)
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The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue - Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Paperback)
Series: Cultural Memory in the Present
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In this groundbreaking work, the author effects the first extended
rhetorical-philosophical reading of the historically problematic
relationship between Jews and Germans, based on an analysis of
texts from the Enlightenment through Modernism by Moses
Mendelssohn, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Karl Marx, Richard
Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. The theoretical
underpinning of the work lies in the author's rereading, in terms
of contemporary rhetorical theory, of the medieval tradition known
as "figural representation," which defines the Jewish-Christian
relation as that between the dead, prefigural letter and the
living, fulfilled spirit.
After arguing that the German Enlightenment ultimately plays out
the historical phantasm of a necessary "Judaization" of Protestant
rationality, the author shows that German Early Romanticism
consists fundamentally in the attempt to solve the aporias raised
by this impossible confrontation between Protestant spirit and
Jewish letter. In readings of Dorothea Schlegel--Mendelssohn's
daughter--and her husband Friedrich Schlegel, the author provides a
new interpretation of the Neo-Catholic turn of later German
Romanticism. Further, he situates the proleptic end and reversal of
the project of Jewish emancipation in the two extreme versions of
late-nineteenth-century anti-Judaism, those of Marx and Wagner,
here viewed as binary concretizations of a specifically
post-Romantic paganized Protestantism.
Finally, the author argues that twentieth-century Modernism as
represented by Nietzsche and Freud renews, if in a multiply ironic
displacement, the secret "Judaizing" tendencies of the
Enlightenment. Fascism and Communism both denigrate this Modernism,
which affirms the letter of language as quasi-synonymous with the
force of temporality--or anticipatory repetition--that disrupts all
claims to the full presence of spirit. The book ends with a note on
recent debates about Holocaust memory.
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