In this Book
- Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew
- Book
- 2014
- Published by: Fordham University Press
summary
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._x000B_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. _x000B_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. _x000B_
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. i-vi
- Illustrations
- pp. ix-x
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xiii-xviii
- Part I: Historicist Orientalism:Transcendental Historiography from Johann Gottfried Herder to Arthur Schopenhauer
- Part II: How Not to Appropriate Orientalist Typology: Some Modernist Responses to Historicism
Additional Information
ISBN
9780823262953
Related ISBN(s)
9780823262915
MARC Record
OCLC
899261511
Pages
376
Launched on MUSE
2015-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No