Jews and the Ends of Theory

Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, Jonathan Boyarin, Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, Jonathan Boyarin

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780823281992, 9780823282005
• eBook ISBN: 9780823282029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish History

Theory, as it's happened across the humanities, has often been coded as "Jewish." This collection of essays seeks to move past explanations for this understanding that rely on the self-evident (the historical centrality of Jews to the rise of Critical Theory with the Frankfurt School) or stereotypical (psychoanalysis as the "Jewish Science") in order to show how certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theory.In the range of violence and agency that attend the appellation "Jew, " depending on how, where, and by whom it's uttered, we can see that Jewishness is a rhetorical as much as a sociological fact, and that its rhetorical and sociological aspects, while linked, are not identical. Attention to this disjuncture helps to elucidate the questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that modern theory has grappled with. These questions in turn implicate geopolitical issues such as the relation of a people to a state and the violence done in the name of simplistic identitarian ideologies.Clarifying a situation where "the Jew" is not readily or unproblematically legible, the editors propose what they call "spectral reading, " a way to understand Jewishness as a fluid and rhetorical presence. While not divorced from sociological facts, this spectral reading works in concert with contemporary theory to mediate pessimistic and utopian impulses, experiences, and realities. Contributors: Svetlana Boym, Andrew Bush, Sergey Dolgopolski, Jay Geller, Sarah Hammerschlag, Hannan Hever, Martin Land, Martin Jay, James I. Porter, Yehouda Shenhav, Elliot R. Wolfson

Table of contents

• Cover
• JEWS AND THE ENDS OF THEORY
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction: Jews, Theory, and Ends
• 1. Leo Lowenthal and the Jewish Renaissance
• 2. The Palestinian Nakba and the Arab-Jewish Melancholy: An Essay on Sovereignty and Translation
• 3. The Ends of Ladino
• 4. The Last Jewish Intellectual: Derrida and His Literary Betrayal of Levinas
• 5. Jews, in Theory
• 6. The Jewish Animot: Of Jews as Animals
• 7. The Off-Modern Turn: Modernist Humanism and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Shklovsky and Mandelshtam
• 8. Old Testament Realism in the Writings of Erich Auerbach
• 9. Buber versus Scholem and the Figure of the Hasidic Jew: A Literary Debate between Two Political Theologies
• 10. Against the “Attack on Linking”: Rearticulating the “Jewish Intellectual” for Today
• 11. Recovering Futurity: Theorizing the End and the End of Theory
• List of Contributors
• Index