The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and BeyondIn 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. |
Contents
From the Rhetoric of Dialogue to the | 1 |
The Ontorhetoric of Refined Pantheism in Moses | 75 |
The Birth of German Romanticism out of | 103 |
The Undecidable Limit | 176 |
Protestant Negativity as Prefiguration of Neo | 201 |
Through Modernism to Emancipation | 259 |
Notes | 287 |
371 | |
385 | |
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The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn ... Jeffrey S. Librett No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract affirmation allegory anti-Semitism appears argues attempt become Catholic Catholicism Chapter characterizes Christian church critique cultural denegation dialogue discourse Dorothea emancipation empiricism Enlightenment essay essence ethical faith feminine Fichte figural interpretation Florentin fragment fragmentary Freud Friedrich Schlegel fulfillment Geist gender gender theory German hermeneutics Holocaust human identity insofar Jacobi Jerusalem Jewish Jewish emancipation Jewish-Christian Jewish-German Jews Judaeo-Christian Judaism Judaizing Julius Julius's language Lessing Lessing's letter and spirit Lucinde Lutheran Marx Marx's masculine material means medieval merely Moses Mendelssohn Nathan nature Neo-Catholic neopaganism notion novel ontorhetorical opposition pagan pantheism passage philosophy polemic political political emancipation position possible post-Romantic precisely prefiguration Protestant Protestantism pure question radical rational reading realization relation religion religious rhetoric Richard Wagner Romantic Romanticism secular sense Spinoza spirit and letter structure synthesis theism theological theopolitical thought tion tradition truth turn undecidability understanding unity Veit Veit's Wagner writing