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 412 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 Z suren Caesurae written by Chiara Caradonna and published by Wallstein Verlag. This book was released on 2024-06-26 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ein Sammelband zu Celans einzigem Israel-Besuch 1969 mit Beiträgen zu der Frage, wie diese »Wende« und »Zäsur« für sein Leben und Werk zu verstehen sind. Im Oktober 1969 besuchte Paul Celan Israel zum ersten und einzigen Mal und nannte diesen Besuch danach »eine Wende, eine Zäsur« in seinem Leben. Wie ist diese Zäsur zu verstehen, und was ist ihre Bedeutung für Celans Spätwerk? NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen und etablierte ForscherInnen im Bereich der internationalen Celan-Forschung gehen diesen Fragen nach und eröffnen neue Zugänge zu Celans Israel-Besuch sowie zu den Gedichten, die Celan nach der Rückkehr in Paris schrieb und die sich explizit auf diese Reise beziehen. Über den Israel-Besuch hinaus ist die zweite Hälfte des Buches dem noch wenig erforschten Spätwerk Celans gewidmet. Auseinandersetzungen mit philosophischen Themen, die für Celans Spätwerk von Bedeutung sind, begleiten textnahe Interpretationen von einzelnen Gedichten und Übersetzungen aus den letzten Jahren von Celans Schaffen. Mit einer Vielfalt an internationalen Stimmen und Perspektiven tritt das Buch dem Mythos der Unzugänglichkeit von Celans Spätwerk entschlossen entgegen und lädt die Leser dazu ein, sich ihm in der ganzen Fülle seiner Anregungen und Facetten neu zu nähern. Mit Beiträgen von Bertrand Badiou, Yarden Ben-Zur, Agata Bielik-Robson, Thomas C. Connolly, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Christine Ivanovic, Michael Levine, Adam Lipszyc, Camilla Miglio, Pawel Piszczatowski, Asif Rahamim, Alexandra Richter, Thomas Schestag, Galili Shahar, Bernd Witte, Shira Wolosky, Sandro Zanetti sowie mit Kunstwerken von Shy Abady.

Download or read book Jewish Studies as Counterlife written by Adam Zachary Newton and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn’t fully happened—at least not yet. Newton asks what we mean when we say “Jewish Studies”—and when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but as a project. Jewish Studies offers a unique perspective from which to view the horizon of the academic humanities because, although it arrived belatedly, it has spanned a range of disciplinary locations and configurations, from an “origin story” in nineteenth-century historicism and philology, to the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, to the ethnicity-driven pluralism of the postwar decades, to more recent configurations within an interdisciplinary cultural studies. The conflicted allegiances with respect to traditions, disciplines, divisions, stakes, and stakeholders represent the structural and historical situation of the field, as it comes into contact with the humanities more broadly. At once a literary and philosophical thinker, Newton deploys a tableau of texts in concert with an ensemble of vivid, elastic tropes not only to theorize Jewish Studies but also to reimagine it as an agent of that potency Jacques Derrida calls “leverage”—a force multiplier for the field’s multiple possibilities. In refiguring a Jewish Studies to come, the book intervenes in a broader discourse about the challenge of professing disciplinary knowledges while promoting transit across their boundaries. Jewish Studies as Counterlife further amplifies Newton’s career-long articulation of the dialogic as the staging ground of ethical encounter.

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 A New Philosophy of Modernity and Sovereignty written by Przemyslaw Tacik and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackling important philosophical questions on modernity – what it is, where it begins and when it ends – Przemyslaw Tacik challenges the idea that modernity marks a particular epoch, and historicises its conception to offer a radical critique of it. His deconstruction-informed critique collects and assesses reflections on modernity from major philosophers including Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Arendt, Agamben, and Žižek. This analysis progresses a new understanding of modernity intrinsically connected to the growth of sovereignty as an organising principle of contemporary life. He argues that it is the idea of 'modernity', as a taken-for-granted era, which is positioned as the essential condition for making linear history possible, when it should instead be history, in and of itself, which dictates the existence of a particular period. Using Hegel's notion of 'spirit' to trace the importance of sovereignty to the conception of the modern epoch within German idealism, Tacik traces Hegel's influence on Heidegger through reference to the 'star' in his late philosophy which represents the hope of overcoming the metaphysical poverty of modernity. This line of thought reveals the necessity of a paradigm shift in our understanding of modernity that speaks to contemporary continental philosophy, theories of modernity, political theory, and critical re-assessments of Marxism.

Download or read book Tsimtsum and Modernity written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).

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 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 Critiques of Theology written by Yotam Hotam and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It seems hard to imagine a concept more significant to modern thought than critique. Critique involved distancing oneself from religious explanations and theological argumentation and came to represent the essence of secular consciousness's potential to deliver modernity's promise of human progress through rational inquiry and scientific development. Critiques of Theology debunks this common understanding. Based on a novel reading of previously less-discussed writings by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt, the book shows how the practice of critique emerged out of religious traditions and can, in many ways, be traced back to them. This study points to a persistent misreading of critique and demonstrates that it does not come from outside of religion to build a new world of ideas; on the contrary, it redeploys those already present within its theological constellations.

Download or read book Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust written by Ingrid L Anderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many, the Holocaust made thinking about ethics in traditional ways impossible. It called into question the predominance of speculative ontology in Western thought, and left many arguing that Western political, cultural and philosophical inattention to universal ethics were both a cause and an effect of European civilization's collapse in the twentieth century. Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein respond to this problem by insisting that ethics must be Western thought's first concern. Unlike previous thinkers, they locate humanity's source of universal ethical obligation in the temporal world of experience, where human suffering, rather than metaphysics, provides the ground for ethical engagement. All three thinkers contend that Judaism’s key lesson is that our fellow human is our responsibility, and use Judaism to develop a contemporary ethics that could operate with or without God. Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust explores selected works of Levinas, Wiesel, and Rubenstein for practical applications of their ethics, analyzing the role of suffering and examining the use each thinker makes of Jewish sources and the advantages and disadvantages of this use. Finally, it suggests how the work of Jewish thinkers living in the wake of the Holocaust can be of unique value to those interested in the problem of ethics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presenting a thorough investigation of the work of Levinas, Wiesel and Rubinstein, this book is of key interest to students and scholars of Jewish studies, as well as Jewish ethics and philosophy.

Download or read book Migrants in the Profane written by Peter E. Gordon and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written exploration of religion’s role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theory Migrants in the Profane takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin’s image of a celebrated mechanical chess-playing Turk and its hidden religious animus: “Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating in the realm of the secular, the profane.” In this masterful book, Peter Gordon reflects on Adorno’s statement and asks an urgent question: Can religion offer any normative resources for modern political life, or does the appeal to religious concepts stand in conflict with the idea of modern politics as a domain free from religion’s influence? In answering this question, he explores the work of three of the Frankfurt School’s most esteemed thinkers: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. His illuminating analysis offers a highly original account of the intertwined histories of religion and secular modernity.

Download or read book Ab l Barak t al Baghd d s Scientific Philosophy written by Moshe M. Pavlov and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abū’l-Barakāt is often considered one of the most comprehensive philosophers of the Arabic-Jewish milieu in the medieval age. His extensive and unique philosophical theories, especially his theories in the particular sciences, were seen as a major challenge for the traditional conceptions of the Aristotelian school of thought during and after this period. ‘Abū’l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī’s Scientific Philosophy’ explores the core material of Abū’l-Barakāt’s scientific studies, found in his magnum opus the Kitāb al-Mu‘tabar. The book then locates these scientific theories within Abū’l-Barakāt’s philosophy more widely. Whilst providing a comprehensive critique of ancient philosophy, including the work of Aristotle, certain affinities between Abū’l-Barakāt’s work and that of more modern scientific conceptions are also examined. Containing vast amounts of previously untranslated text, ‘Abū’l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī’s Scientific Philosophy’ sheds new light on the philosopher’s scientific theories, particularly with regards to his logical conceptions. For this reason, the book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Jewish and Islamic Philosophy, whilst the scientific material will appeal to those studying the history of science.

Download or read book A History of Czechs and Jews written by Martin Wein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was Israel founded by Czechoslovakia? A History of Czechs and Jews examines this question and the resulting findings are complex. Czechoslovakia did provide critical, secret military sponsorship to Israel around 1948, but this alliance was short-lived and terminated with the Prague Trial of 1952. Israel’s "Czech guns" were German as much as Czech, and the Soviet Union strongly encouraged Czechoslovakia’s help for Israel. Most importantly however, the Czechoslovak-Israeli military cooperation was only part of a much larger picture. Since the mid-1800s, Czechs and Jews have been systematically comparing themselves to each other in literature, music, politics, diplomacy, media, and historiography. A shared perception of similar fates of two small nations trapped between East and West, in constant existential danger, helped forge a Czech-Jewish "national friendship" amid periods of estrangement. Yet, this Czech-Jewish national friendship, an idea that can be traced from Masaryk and Kafka via Weizman and Ben Gurion to Havel and Netanyahu, was more myth than reality. Relations were often mixed and highly dependent on larger historical developments affecting Central Europe and the Middle East. As the Czech Republic emerges as Israel’s main EU ally, this book provides a timely analysis of this old-new alliance and is essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in History and Jewish Studies.

Download or read book The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza s Philosophy written by Yuval Jobani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza is commonly perceived as the great metaphysician of coherence. The Euclidean manner in which he presented his philosophy in the Ethics has led readers to assume they are facing a strict and consistent philosophical system that necessarily follows from itself. As opposed to the prevailing understanding of Spinoza and his work, The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza's Philosophy explores an array of profound and pervasive contradictions in Spinoza’s system and argues they are deliberate and constitutive of his philosophical thinking and the notion of God at its heart. Relying on a meticulous and careful reading of the Theological-Political Treatise and the Ethics, this book reconstructs Spinoza's philosophy of contradictions as a key to the ascending three degrees of knowledge leading to the Amor intellectualis Dei. Offering an exciting and clearly-argued interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy, this book will interest students and scholars of modern philosophy and philosophy of religion, as well as Jewish studies. Yuval Jobani is Assistant Professor at the Department of Hebrew Culture Studies and the School of Education at Tel-Aviv University.

Download or read book Judaism in Contemporary Thought written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central aim of this collection is to trace the presence of Jewish tradition in contemporary philosophy. This presence is, on the one hand, undeniable, manifesting itself in manifold allusions and influences – on the other hand, difficult to define, rarely referring to openly revealed Judaic sources. Following the recent tradition of Lévinas and Derrida, this book tentatively refers to this mode of presence in terms of "traces of Judaism" and the contributors grapple with the following questions: What are these traces and how can we track them down? Is there such a thing as "Jewish difference" that truly makes a difference in philosophy? And if so, how can we define it? The additional working hypothesis, accepted by some and challenged by other contributors, is that Jewish thought draws, explicitly or implicitly, on three main concepts of Jewish theology, creation, revelation and redemption. If this is the case, then the specificity of the Jewish contribution to modern philosophy and the theoretical humanities should be found in – sometimes open, sometimes hidden – fidelity to these three categories. Offering a new understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology, this book is an important contribution to the fields of Theology, Philosophy and Jewish Studies.

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 229 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 Skepsis and Antipolitics The Alternative of Gustav Landauer written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-12-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One century after Gustav Landauer’s death, in a time marked by a deep doubt concerning modern politics, the volume proposes a fascinating overview of the articulation between skepsis and antipolitics in his multifaceted unconventional anarchism.