Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[A] remarkable study...If one reads only the epigraph and the epilogue, one would already be witnessing nimbleand generative theorizing at work. Luckily, these framing plot points are fleshed out with a rich substance...The book requests the reader’s patience, curiosity, and recollection of the pleasure entailed in watching careful, masterful exegesis unfold sentence by sentence and, literally, word by word." * Journal of Religion *
"Adam Stern's remarkable book offers a set of lucidly argued readings of twentieth-century German-Jewish thinkers through the prism of 'survival.' Joining biopolitics to theology, he constructs a revelatory critical genealogy of survival by tracing the importance of a Christian-inflected discussion of survival in Jewish thought, and outlines its political forms. Casting a critical eye on competing claims to sovereignty, Stern shows how all sacralizing discourses about survival-including Israeli military mobilizations-paper over the fragility of the mortal body. His is an original, highly innovative work that is deeply informed and rigorously argued." * Carolyn J. Dean, Yale University *
"Adam Stern's innovative and astute study of the concept of survival is both expansively far-reaching and acutely focused. One might mistakenly think that the work is another survey of a certain line of twentieth-century German-Jewish thought. In fact, it is a work on the Christian logic that pervades these thinkers. Stern's analysis ranges masterfully from Pseudo-Dionysius to Shakespeare, to tell its own story about the surreptitious power of Christianity. Stern decenters the concept of survival, which has become so frequently synonymous with post-Holocaust Judaism, and reveals how the image of resurrection is in fact its driving force." * Sarah Hammerschlag, University of Chicago *
