The figural Jew : politics and identity in postwar French thought / Sarah Hammerschlag.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hammerschlag, Sarah.

Series:

Religion and postmodernism.

Religion and postmodernism

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Blanchot, Maurice.

Derrida, Jacques.

Lévinas, Emmanuel.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980.

Sartre, Jean-Paul.

Jewish philosophy--France--20th century.

Jewish philosophy.

Philosophy, French--20th century.

Philosophy, French.

Jews--Identity.

Jews.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (310 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms, and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity. Sarah Hammerschlag explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jew's rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, Hammerschlag ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms. Both an intellectual history and a philosophical argument, The Figural Jew will set the agenda for all further consideration of Jewish identity, modern Jewish thought, and continental philosophy.

Contents:

Introduction

Roots, rootlessness, and fin de siècle France

Stranger and self: Sartre's Jew

Anti-Semite and Jew

Dialectical history, unhappy consciousness, and the Messiah

The ethics of uprootedness: Emmanuel Levinas's postwar project

Literary unrest: Maurice Blanchot's rewriting of Levinas

"The Last of the Jews": Jacques Derrida and the case of the figure

The cut

The exemplar

Conclusion.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-285) and index.

ISBN:

9786612584787

9780226315133

0226315134

9781282584785

1282584782

OCLC:

635292239