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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.
Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew proposes a new way of
understanding modern Orientalism. Tracing a path of modern
Orientalist thought in German across crucial writings from the late
eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries, Librett argues that
Orientalism and anti-Judaism are inextricably entangled.
Librett suggests, further, that the Western assertion of "material
" power, in terms of which Orientalism is often read, is
overdetermined by a "spiritual" weakness: an anxiety about the
absence of absolute foundations and values that coincides with
Western modernity itself. The modern West, he shows, posits an
Oriental origin as a fetish to fill the absent place of lacking
foundations. This fetish is appropriated as Western through a
quasi-secularized application of Christian typology. Further, the
Western appropriation of the "good" Orient always leaves behind the
remainder of the "bad," inassimilable Orient.
The book traces variations on this theme through historicist and
idealist texts of the nineteenth century and then shows how high
modernists like Buber, Kafka, Mann, and Freud place this
historicist narrative in question. The book concludes with the
outlines of a cultural historiography that would distance itself
from the metaphysics of historicism, confronting instead its
underlying anxieties.
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Portrait (Paperback)
Jean-Luc Nancy; Translated by Sarah Clift, Simon Sparks; Introduction by Jeffrey S. Librett
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R630
Discovery Miles 6 300
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to
grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. To Nancy, the portrait is
suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance,
representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It
can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by
means of which its subject advances and withdraws. The book
consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close
conversation, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations
articulated by the portrait. Heavily illustrated, it includes a
newly written preface bringing the two essays together and a
substantial Introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which places Nancy's
work within the range of thinking of aesthetics and the subject,
from religion, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis. Though undergirded
by a powerful grasp of the philosophical and psychoanalytic
tradition that has rendered our sense of the subject so
problematic, Nancy's book is at heart a delightful, unpretentious
reading of three dozen portraits, from ancient drinking mugs to
recent experimental or parodic pieces in which the artistic
representation of a sitter is made from their blood, germ cultures,
or DNA. The contemporary world of ubiquitous photos, Nancy argues,
in no way makes the portrait a thing of the past. On the contrary,
the forms of appearing that mark the portrait continue to challenge
how we see the bodies and representations that dominate our world.
Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew proposes a new way of
understanding modern Orientalism. Tracing a path of modern
Orientalist thought in German across crucial writings from the late
eighteenth to the mid–twentieth centuries, Librett argues that
Orientalism and anti-Judaism are inextricably entangled. Librett
suggests, further, that the Western assertion of “material”
power, in terms of which Orientalism is often read, is
overdetermined by a “spiritual” weakness: an anxiety about the
absence of absolute foundations and values that coincides with
Western modernity itself. The modern West, he shows, posits an
Oriental origin as a fetish to fill the absent place of lacking
foundations. This fetish is appropriated as Western through a
quasi-secularized application of Christian typology. Further, the
Western appropriation of the “good” Orient always leaves behind
the remainder of the “bad,” inassimilable Orient. The book
traces variations on this theme through historicist and idealist
texts of the nineteenth century and then shows how high modernists
like Buber, Kafka, Mann, and Freud place this historicist narrative
in question. The book concludes with the outlines of a cultural
historiography that would distance itself from the metaphysics of
historicism, confronting instead its underlying anxieties.
|
Portrait (Hardcover)
Jean-Luc Nancy; Translated by Sarah Clift, Simon Sparks; Introduction by Jeffrey S. Librett
|
R2,190
R1,945
Discovery Miles 19 450
Save R245 (11%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to
grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. To Nancy, the portrait is
suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance,
representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It
can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by
means of which its subject advances and withdraws. The book
consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close
conversation, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations
articulated by the portrait. Heavily illustrated, it includes a
newly written preface bringing the two essays together and a
substantial Introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which places Nancy's
work within the range of thinking of aesthetics and the subject,
from religion, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis. Though undergirded
by a powerful grasp of the philosophical and psychoanalytic
tradition that has rendered our sense of the subject so
problematic, Nancy's book is at heart a delightful, unpretentious
reading of three dozen portraits, from ancient drinking mugs to
recent experimental or parodic pieces in which the artistic
representation of a sitter is made from their blood, germ cultures,
or DNA. The contemporary world of ubiquitous photos, Nancy argues,
in no way makes the portrait a thing of the past. On the contrary,
the forms of appearing that mark the portrait continue to challenge
how we see the bodies and representations that dominate our world.
|
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