Jews and the Ends of Theory

Martin Land

ISBN 10: 082328199X / ISBN 13: 9780823281992

Published by Fordham University Press Dez 2018, 2018

About this Item

This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -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 336 pp. Englisch.

Seller Inventory # 9780823281992

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Jews and the Ends of Theory
• Publisher: Fordham University Press Dez 2018
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082328199X
• ISBN 13: 9780823281992
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 226W x 150H x 25D millimeters 226 millimeters width by 150 millimeters height by 25 millimeters depth
• Weight: 454 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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

About the Authors

Shai Ginsburg is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies at Duke University.

Martin Land is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Hadassah College and the Open University of Israel.

Jonathan Boyarin is Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University.

Svetlana Boyom of blessed memory was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. An essayist, photographer, novelist, and playwright as well as the author of myriad scholarly articles, Dr. Boym was best known to a general readership for The Future of Nostalgia, her widely praised book of 2001 (Basic Books). In that work, which ranges meditatively over philosophy, history, art, literature, and the experience of displaced persons, she explored the web of memory and mythologizing that underpins the human longing for vanished worlds. In her 2010 Another Freedom (the University of Chicago Press), she similarly explores the notion of “freedom.” Her preoccupation with these subjects was rooted partly in her own history as a Jewish émigré from the former Soviet Union.

Sergey Dolgopolski is an associate professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of Jewish Thought and is the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). He holds a joint PhD in Jewish studies from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, and a Doctor of Philosophical Sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences. His general area of interest is in philosophy and literature. He is the author of What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (Fordham University Press, 2009), The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2012), and Other Others: The Political after the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2018).