Orientalism and the figure of the Jew
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Orientalism and the figure of the Jew
Fordham University Press, 2015
- : pbk
Available at / 1 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Orientalism as Typology, or How to Disavow the Modern Abyss 1 Part I. Historicist Orientalism: Transcendental Historiography from Johann Gottfried Herder to Arthur Schopenhauer 1. Ordering Chaos: The Orient in J. G. Herder's Teleological Historicism 2. Figuralizing the Oriental, Literalizing the Jew: From Letter to Spirit in Friedrich Schlegel's On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians 3. Goethe's Orientalizing Moment (I): "Notes and Treatises for the Better Understanding of the West-East Divan" 4. Goethe's Orientalizing Moment (II): The Poetry of the West-East Divan Excursus: Jussuph and the Question of Anti-Semitism in Goethe 5. Thresholds of History: India and the Limits of Europe in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History Excursus: The History of Panic-Angst und Notgeschrei 6. Taking Up Groundlessness, Fulfilling Fulfillment: Schopenhauer's Orientalist Metaphysics between Indians and Jews Part II. How Not to Appropriate Orientalist Typology: Some Modernist Responses to Historicism 7. Dialectical Development or Partial Construction? Martin Buber and Franz Kafka Excursus on a Brief Excursus-Concerning Babel 8. The Dreamwork of History: Orientalism and Originary Disfiguration in Freud's Moses and Monotheism Excursus: Edward Said and the Identity of the Different, or Freud in Palestine Conclusion: For an Abstract Historiography of the Nonexistent Present Notes Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
