Description
Book SynopsisIn this groundbreaking work, the author effects the first extended rhetorical-philosophical reading of the historically problematic relationship between Jews and Germans, based on an analysis of texts from the Enlightenment through Modernism by Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
Trade Review"This monumental work traces the intellectual and cultural history of the tragic failure of German-Jewish relations with extraordinary erudition, scholarship, and moral sensitivity. Librett manages to bring into a remarkable narrative and conceptual coherence the major political, philosophical, theological, and aesthetic debates of the era." -Eric Santner,University of Chicago
Table of ContentsList of illustrations; Preface: what this book is about; Introduction: from the rhetoric of dialogue to the end of Jewish-German emancipation; Part I. Enlightenment: 1. Judaism Between Power and Knowledge: the undecidability of the law in Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783); 2. The ontorhetoric of 'refined Pantheism' in Moses Mendelssohn's Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God (1785); Part II. Romanticism: 3. The birth of German Romanticism out of the 'Dialogue' Between (Protestant) Spirit and (Jewish) Letter: Friedrich Schlegel's 'On Lessing' (1797) and its 'conclusion' (1801); 4. Duplicitous engenderments of the literal spirit: Friedrich Schlegel's 'On Philosophy: To Dorothea' (1798) and Lucinde (1799); Resisting 'fulfillment': the undecidable limit between figural and literal in Dorothea Veit's Florentin: A Novel (1801); 6. Protestant negativity as 'prefiguration' of neo-catholic positivity in Friedrich Schlegel's Lessing's Thoughts and Opinions (1804); Part III. Post-Romanticism: 7. The reversal of emancipation on the left: Karl Marx's 'on the Jewish question' (1843); 8. The reversal of emancipation on the right: Richard Wagner's 'Judaism in Music' (1850); Postscript: through modernism to - 'emancipation' from Holocaust memory?; Notes; Index.
