The rhetoric of cultural dialogue : Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and beyond
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The rhetoric of cultural dialogue : Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and beyond
（Cultural memory in the present）
Stanford University Press, c2000
- pbk.
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p.[371]-384) and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
ISBN 9780804736220
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface: what this book is about
- Introduction: from the rhetoric of dialogue to the end of Jewish-German emancipation
- Part I. Enlightenment: 1. Judaism Between Power and Knowledge: the undecidability of the law in Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783)
- 2. The ontorhetoric of 'refined Pantheism' in Moses Mendelssohn's Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God (1785)
- Part II. Romanticism: 3. The birth of German Romanticism out of the 'Dialogue' Between (Protestant) Spirit and (Jewish) Letter: Friedrich Schlegel's 'On Lessing' (1797) and its 'conclusion' (1801)
- 4. Duplicitous engenderments of the literal spirit: Friedrich Schlegel's 'On Philosophy: To Dorothea' (1798) and Lucinde (1799)
- Resisting 'fulfillment': the undecidable limit between figural and literal in Dorothea Veit's Florentin: A Novel (1801)
- 6. Protestant negativity as 'prefiguration' of neo-catholic positivity in Friedrich Schlegel's Lessing's Thoughts and Opinions (1804)
- Part III. Post-Romanticism: 7. The reversal of emancipation on the left: Karl Marx's 'on the Jewish question' (1843)
- 8. The reversal of emancipation on the right: Richard Wagner's 'Judaism in Music' (1850)
- Postscript: through modernism to - 'emancipation' from Holocaust memory?
- Notes
- Index.
- Volume
-
pbk. ISBN 9780804739313
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface: what this book is about
- Introduction: from the rhetoric of dialogue to the end of Jewish-German emancipation
- Part I. Enlightenment: 1. Judaism Between Power and Knowledge: the undecidability of the law in Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783)
- 2. The ontorhetoric of 'refined Pantheism' in Moses Mendelssohn's Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God (1785)
- Part II. Romanticism: 3. The birth of German Romanticism out of the 'Dialogue' Between (Protestant) Spirit and (Jewish) Letter: Friedrich Schlegel's 'On Lessing' (1797) and its 'conclusion' (1801)
- 4. Duplicitous engenderments of the literal spirit: Friedrich Schlegel's 'On Philosophy: To Dorothea' (1798) and Lucinde (1799)
- Resisting 'fulfillment': the undecidable limit between figural and literal in Dorothea Veit's Florentin: A Novel (1801)
- 6. Protestant negativity as 'prefiguration' of neo-catholic positivity in Friedrich Schlegel's Lessing's Thoughts and Opinions (1804)
- Part III. Post-Romanticism: 7. The reversal of emancipation on the left: Karl Marx's 'on the Jewish question' (1843)
- 8. The reversal of emancipation on the right: Richard Wagner's 'Judaism in Music' (1850)
- Postscript: through modernism to - 'emancipation' from Holocaust memory?
- Notes
- Index.
by "Nielsen BookData"
