Orientalism and the figure of the Jew

Resource Information

The work Orientalism and the figure of the Jew represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Orientalism and the figure of the Jew

Statement of responsibility

Jeffrey S. Librett

Creator

• Librett, Jeffrey S

Subject

• Germany -- Intellectual life
• Jews -- Public opinion
• Jews in literature
• Orientalism
• East and West
• Orientalism in literature
• Philosophy, German
• Public opinion -- Germany
• Orientalism -- Germany -- History

Language

eng

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<U+0127> �twentieth centuries, Librett argues that Orientalism and anti-Judaism are inextricably entangled. 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. 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.--

Assigning source

Provided by Publisher

Biography type

contains biographical information

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

303.482430509034

Illustrations

• illustrations
• portraits

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction