Download or read book Derrida s Marrano Passover written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida's 'Toledo confession' – where he portrayed himself as 'sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture' – Agata Bielik-Robson shows Derrida's marranismo to be a literary experiment of auto-fiction. She looks at all possible aspects of Derrida's Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of non-identitarian evasion that permeates all his works: just as Marranos cannot be characterized as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida's 'universal Marranism' an invitation to think philosophically, politically and – last but not least – metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging. By concentrating on Derrida's deliberate choice of marranismo, Bielik-Robson shows that it penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking, constantly drawing on the literary works of Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Cixous and Valéry, and throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination and 'Différance'. She also offers a completely new interpretation of many of Derrida's works only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In these new readings, this book demonstrates that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a literary trope of openness, offering up a new genre of philosophical story-telling which centers around Derrida's Marrano 'auto-fable'.
Download or read book The Marrano Phenomenon written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2019-05-09 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What we call here the ‘Marrano phenomenon’ is still a relatively unexplored fact of modern Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution, but nevertheless exerts significant influence on modern humanities. Our aim, however, is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), i.e., the mostly Spanish and Portguese Jews of the 15th and 16th centuries, who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism ‘undercover’: such an approach already exists and has been developed within the field of historical research. We rather want to apply the ‘Marrano metaphor’ to explore the fruitful area of mixture and crossover which allowed modern thinkers, writers, and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication—without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness, which they subsequently developed as a ‘hidden tradition’. What is of special interest to us is the modern development of the non-normative forms of religious thinking located on the borderline between Christianity and Judaism, from Spinoza to Derrida.
Download or read book The Marrano Specter written by Erin Graff Zivin and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Marrano Specter pursues the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism. On the one hand, Derrida’s work has engendered a robust conversation among philosophers and critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates in excellent translation, and where many of the terms and problems he addresses take on a distinctive meaning: nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; institutionality. Perhaps more remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal: across his writings, Derrida grapples with the theme of marranismo, the phenomenon of Sephardic crypto-Judaism. Derrida’s marranismo is a means of taking apart traditional accounts of identity; a way for Derrida to reflect on the status of the secret; a philosophical nexus where language, nationalism, and truth-telling meet and clash in productive ways; and a way of elaborating a critique of modern biopolitics. It is much more than a simple marker of his work’s Hispanic identity, but it is also, and irreducibly, that. The essays collected in The Marrano Specter cut across the grain of traditional Hispanism, but also of the humanistic disciplines broadly conceived. Their vantage point—the theoretical, philosophically inflected critique of disciplinary practices—poses uncomfortable, often unfamiliar questions for both hispanophone studies and the broader theoretical humanities.
Download or read book The Marrano Way written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-05-09 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis," according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity," which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.
Download or read book The Jewish Derrida written by Gideon Ofrat and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until now, no critical work has touched on the Jewish dimension in Jacques Derrida's philosophical oeuvre. Ofrat notes that early Derridean works contained few, if any, references to Jewish writers, concepts, or issues. At first glance, Judaism itself, along with all other structures found in traditional Western metaphysics, would appear to have no place in Derrida's thought, but Ofrat argues that "Derrida cannot be thoroughly understood without elucidating the Jewish current running through his philosophy, right down to the scar of his circumcision." A French-Algerian Jew, Derrida broke free of the Jewish consciousness and culture of his childhood—but taught that leaving something is a precondition for recognizing its significance. Ofrat suggests that Derrida's philosophy grew from these early influences and the fragments of his Jewish identity, and he offers a comprehensive reading of Derridean writings and strong grounding in Jewish tradition. By approaching Derrida's philosophical, poetic, and artistic themes through a Jewish lens, Ofrat gives a sophisticated, subtle, entirely fresh reading of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Marrano as Metaphor written by Elaine Marks and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Europeans in the Middle Ages spoke of "marranos," they were making a derogatory reference to "crypto-Jews"--those who publicly converted to and performed as Christians, but who remained secretly faithful to Judaic law. Today, asserts Elaine Marks in Marrano as Metaphor, the concept can be used to describe all Jews living in a dominant Christian or Muslim culture, whatever may be their conscious relationship to Judaism. A sweeping examination of the Jewish presence in French literature from the sixteenth century to the present, Marrano as Metaphor explores the many shapes and forms in which jews are perceived, spoken, and written about. Employing a wide spectrum of analytical methods from history, literary theory and psychoanalysis, renowned French scholar Elaine Marks opens new doors in the study of literature. Marrano as Metaphor investigates questions of difference and assimilation, of respect and derogation, in a wide range of French literature--from Alain Robbe-Grillet's discussion in his memoirs of his parents' antisemitism to the story of Esther through Jean Racine and Marcel Proust; from efforts to address Jewish issues in the writings of Marguerite Duras and Jean-Paul Sartre to the secular, "assimilated" Jewish tradition of Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous. Marks looks closely at strains of antisemitism running through French literature, analyzing such antecedents as the nihilism of the 1880s and its meditation on death and absence.
Download or read book Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to interpret ‘Jewish Philosophy’ in terms of the Marrano phenomenon: as a conscious clinamen of philosophical forms used in order to convey a ‘secret message’ which cannot find an open articulation. The Marrano phenomenon is employed here, in the domain of modern philosophical thought, where an analogous tendency can be seen: the clash of an open idiom and a secret meaning, which transforms both the medium and the message. Focussing on key figures of late modern, twentieth century Jewish thought; Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Jacob Taubes, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, this book demonstrates how their respective manners of conceptualization swerve from the philosophical mainstream along the Marrano ‘secret curve.’ Analysing their unique contribution to the ‘unfinished project of modernity,’ including issues of the future of the Enlightenment, modern nihilism and post-secular negotiation with religious heritage, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in Jewish Studies and Philosophy.
Download or read book Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint written by Hélène Cixous and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A kaleidoscopic portrait of Derrida's life and works through the prism of his Jewish heritage, by a leading feminist thinker and close personal friend. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being (or not being) Jewish.
Download or read book Deconstruction in a Nutshell written by Jacques Derrida and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up with unusual clarity and great eloquence such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida’s most influential readers, John D. Caputo, elaborates upon Derrida’s comments and supplies material for further discussion. This edition also includes a substantial new Introduction by Caputo that discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida’s death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, Deconstruction in a Nutshell will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida’s work.
Download or read book Interrogating Modernity written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogating Modernity returns to Hans Blumenberg's epochal The Legitimacy of the Modern Age as a springboard to interrogate questions of modernity, secularisation, technology and political legitimacy in the fields of political theology, history of ideas, political theory, art theory, history of philosophy, theology and sociology. That is, the twelve essays in this volume return to Blumenberg's work to think once more about how and why we should value the modern. Written by a group of leading international and interdisciplinary researchers, this series of responses to the question of the modern put Blumenberg into dialogue with other twentieth, and twenty-first century theorists, such as Arendt, Bloch, Derrida, Husserl, Jonas, Latour, Voegelin, Weber and many more. The result is a repositioning of his work at the heart of contemporary attempts to make sense of who we are and how we’ve got here.
Download or read book Deconstruction in a Nutshell written by Jacques Derrida and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Provided Annotation "Caputo succeed in providing scholars with one of the most comprehensive & valuable interpretation of deconstruction."--Library Journal "In a nutshell, this is a wonderfully helpful & stimulating book...It is a congent, witty & always accessible discussion of Derrida's work of the past ten of twenty years...This is one of the best guides available of his recent work...Highly recommended."--Choice.
Download or read book The Other Within written by Yirmiyahu Yovel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-25 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "He describes the Marranos as "the Other within" - people who both did and did not belong. Rejected by most Jews as renegades and by most veteran Christians as Jews with impure blood, Marranos had no definite, integral identity, Yovel argues. The "Judaizers" - Marranos who wished to remain secretly Jewish - were not actually Jews, and those Marranos who wished to assimilate were not truly integrated as Hispano-Catholics. Rather, mixing Jewish and Christian symbols and life patterns, Marranos were typically distinguished by a split identity. They also discovered the subjective mind, engaged in social and religious dissent, and demonstrated early signs of secularity and this-worldliness. In these ways, Yovel says, the Marranos anticipated and possibly helped create many central features of modern Western and Jewish experience.
Download or read book A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking written by Aubrey L. Glazer and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking is a search for authenticity that combines critical thinking with a yearning for heartfelt poetics. A physiognomy of thinking addresses the figure of a life lived where theory and praxis are unified. This study explores how the critical essays on music of German-Jewish thinker, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) necessarily accompany the downfall of metaphysics. By scrutinizing a critical juncture in modern intellectual history, marked in 1931 by Adorno's founding of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, neglected applications of Critical Theory to Jewish Thought become possible. This study proffers a constructive justification of a critical standpoint, reconstructively shown how such ideals are seen under the genealogical proviso of re/cognizing their original meaning. Re/cognition of A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking redresses neglected applications of Negative Dialectics, the poetics of God, the metaphysics of musical thinking, reification in Zionism, the transpoetics of Physics and Metaphysics, as well as correlating Aesthetic Theory to Jewish Law (halakhah).
Download or read book Miracle and Machine written by Michael Naas and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miracle and Machine is a sort of "reader's guide" to Jacques Derrida's 1994-95 essay "faith and knowledge," his most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the media. It provides essential background for understanding Derrida's essay, commentary on its unique style and its central figures (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger), and assessment of its principal philosophical claims about the fundamental duplicity of religion and the ineluctably autoimmune relationship among religion, science, and the media. Along the way it offers in-depth analysis of Derrida's treatment of everything from the nature of religious revelation, faith, prayer, sacrifice, testimony, messianicity, fundamentalism, and secularism to the way religion is today being transformed by globalization, technoscience, and worldwide telecommunications networks. But Miracle and Machine is much more than a commentary on a single Derrida text. Through references to scores of other works by Derrida, both early and late, it also provides a unique introduction to Derrida's work in general. It demonstrates that one of the very best ways to understand the terms, themes, claims, strategies, and motivations of Derridean deconstruction from the early 1960s through 2004 is to read critically and patiently, in its spirit and in its letter, an exemplary text such as "Faith and Knowledge." Finally, Miracle and Machine attempts to put Derrida's ideas about religion to the test by reading alongside "Faith and Knowledge" an already classic work of American fiction that is more or less contemporaneous with it, Don DeLillo's 1997 Underworld, a novel that explores the same relationship between faith and knowledge, religion and science, religious revelation and the World Wide Web, messianicity, and weapons of mass destruction--in a word, in two words, miracles and machines.
Download or read book Tradition and Equality in Jewish Marriage written by Melanie Malka Landau and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often when people have become alienated from their religious backgrounds, they access their traditions through lifecycle events such as marriage. At times, modern values such as gender equality may be at odds with some of the traditions; many of which have always been in a state of flux in relationship to changing social, economic and political realities. Traditional Jewish marriage is based on the man acquiring the woman, which has symbolic and actual ramifications. Grounded in the traditional texts yet accessible, this book shows how the marriage is an acquisition and contextualises the gender hierarchy of marriage within the rabbinic exclusion of women from Torah study, the highest cultural practice and women's exemption from positive commandments. Melanie Landau offers two alternative models of partnership that partially or fully bypass the non-reciprocity of traditional Jewish marriage and that have their basis in the ancient rabbinic texts.
Download or read book Messiahs and Resurrection in The Gabriel Revelation written by Israel Knohl and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It features the first discussion of the recently discovered text 'The Gabriel Revelation' - an apocalyptic text written on stone at the turn of the Common Era. This tablet provides revolutionary paths to the understanding of the historical Jesus and the birth of Christianity. It explores the formation of the conception of "catastrophic messianism" in the Gabriel Revelation. According to this conception, the death of a messianic leader and his resurrection by the angel Gabriel after three days is an essential part of the redemptive process. This conception is a new key which enables us for the first time to understand the messianic vision of the historical Jesus. This important and fascinating book will thus shed new and revolutionary light on our basic view of Christianity.
Download or read book Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo Saxon Verse written by Samantha Zacher and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible played a crucial role in shaping Anglo-Saxon national and cultural identity. However, access to Biblical texts was necessarily limited to very few individuals in Medieval England. In this book, Samantha Zacher explores how the very earliest English Biblical poetry creatively adapted, commented on and spread Biblical narratives and traditions to the wider population. Systematically surveying the manuscripts of surviving poems, the book shows how these vernacular poets commemorated the Hebrews as God's 'chosen people' and claimed the inheritance of that status for Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on contemporary translation theory, the book undertakes close readings of the poems Exodus, Daniel and Judith in order to examine their methods of adaptation for their particular theologico-political circumstances and the way they portray and problematize Judaeo-Christian religious identities.
