Dissertation Fellow 2004-05
Sarah Hammerschlag
The University of Chicago
The Trope of the Jew: Twentieth-Century Revalorizations
out of the Sources of German Idealism
This project examines why 20th-century thinkers such as Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida
utilize the figure of the Jew as a trope in their writing. All these
writers are concerned to preserve the irreducible particularity
of the human being in thought and language. As a figurative representation,
the trope would seem to elide the particularity of the person. While
numerous scholars have called the troping of the Jew a troubling
essentialization, none have seriously engaged the questions of why
and to what effect the trope of the Jew has been employed.
By tracing genealogically the role of the Jew in German and French
philosophy since the Enlightenment, this dissertation exposes the
subversive function that this figure plays for 20th-century French
thinkers engaged in a critique of the totalizing character of German
Idealism. Further it explores the ethical significance of attempts
by 20th-century thinkers to divorce the trope of the Jew from an
historical people in order to utilize the figure in developing an
ideal of a post-national political subject. The dissertation will
conclude by considering the ethical implications of this employment
in light of current debates over nationalist ideologies, particularly
Zionism.
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