The figural Jew [[electronic resource] ] : politics and identity in postwar French thought / / Sarah Hammerschlag

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910458316403321
• Autore: Hammerschlag Sarah
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Chicago ; ; London, : University of Chicago Press, 2010
• ISBN: 0-226-31513-4; 9786612584787; 1-282-58478-2
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (310 p.)
• Collana: Religion and postmodernism
• Disciplina: 194
• Soggetti: Jewish philosophy - France - 20th century; Philosophy, French - 20th century; Jews - Identity; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-285) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.