The Marrano Specter

The Marrano Specter PDF Author: Erin Graff Zivin
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823277690
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
The Marrano Specter pursues the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism. On the one hand, Derrida’s work has engendered a robust conversation among philosophers and critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates in excellent translation, and where many of the terms and problems he addresses take on a distinctive meaning: nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; institutionality. Perhaps more remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal: across his writings, Derrida grapples with the theme of marranismo, the phenomenon of Sephardic crypto-Judaism. Derrida’s marranismo is a means of taking apart traditional accounts of identity; a way for Derrida to reflect on the status of the secret; a philosophical nexus where language, nationalism, and truth-telling meet and clash in productive ways; and a way of elaborating a critique of modern biopolitics. It is much more than a simple marker of his work’s Hispanic identity, but it is also, and irreducibly, that. The essays collected in The Marrano Specter cut across the grain of traditional Hispanism, but also of the humanistic disciplines broadly conceived. Their vantage point—the theoretical, philosophically inflected critique of disciplinary practices—poses uncomfortable, often unfamiliar questions for both hispanophone studies and the broader theoretical humanities.

The Marrano Specter

The Marrano Specter PDF Author: Erin Graff Zivin
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823277690
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Marrano Specter pursues the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism. On the one hand, Derrida’s work has engendered a robust conversation among philosophers and critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates in excellent translation, and where many of the terms and problems he addresses take on a distinctive meaning: nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; institutionality. Perhaps more remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal: across his writings, Derrida grapples with the theme of marranismo, the phenomenon of Sephardic crypto-Judaism. Derrida’s marranismo is a means of taking apart traditional accounts of identity; a way for Derrida to reflect on the status of the secret; a philosophical nexus where language, nationalism, and truth-telling meet and clash in productive ways; and a way of elaborating a critique of modern biopolitics. It is much more than a simple marker of his work’s Hispanic identity, but it is also, and irreducibly, that. The essays collected in The Marrano Specter cut across the grain of traditional Hispanism, but also of the humanistic disciplines broadly conceived. Their vantage point—the theoretical, philosophically inflected critique of disciplinary practices—poses uncomfortable, often unfamiliar questions for both hispanophone studies and the broader theoretical humanities.

The Marrano Specter

The Marrano Specter PDF Author: Erin Graff Zivin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823277681
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The Marrano Spirit brings together work by major scholars who collectively pursue the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism: his reception within intellectual circles in Spain and Latin America, on the one hand, and the Hispanist or marrano inflection of Derrida's philosophical writings on the other.

The Marrano Phenomenon

The Marrano Phenomenon PDF Author: Agata Bielik-Robson
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 303897904X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
What we call here the ‘Marrano phenomenon’ is still a relatively unexplored fact of modern Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution, but nevertheless exerts significant influence on modern humanities. Our aim, however, is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), i.e., the mostly Spanish and Portguese Jews of the 15th and 16th centuries, who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism ‘undercover’: such an approach already exists and has been developed within the field of historical research. We rather want to apply the ‘Marrano metaphor’ to explore the fruitful area of mixture and crossover which allowed modern thinkers, writers, and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication—without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness, which they subsequently developed as a ‘hidden tradition’. What is of special interest to us is the modern development of the non-normative forms of religious thinking located on the borderline between Christianity and Judaism, from Spinoza to Derrida.

The Marrano Way

The Marrano Way PDF Author: Agata Bielik-Robson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110768348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis," according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity," which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.

The Converso's Return

The Converso's Return PDF Author: Dalia Kandiyoti
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503612449
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Five centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past. Dalia Kandiyoti offers nuanced interpretations of contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts about crypto-Jews in Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Spain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. These works not only imagine what might be missing from the historical archive but also suggest an alternative historical consciousness that underscores uncommon convergences of and solidarities within Sephardi, Christian, Muslim, converso, and Sabbatean histories. Steeped in diaspora, Sephardi, transamerican, Iberian, and world literature studies, The Converso's Return illuminates how the converso narrative can enrich our understanding of history, genealogy, and collective memory.

English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain

English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain PDF Author: Eric J. Griffin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202104
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The specter of Spain rarely figures in our discussions of the drama that is often regarded as the crowning achievement of the English literary Renaissance. Yet dramatists such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare are exactly contemporary with England's protracted conflict with the Spanish Empire, a traditional ally turned archetypical adversary. Were these playwrights really so mute with respect to their nation's Spanish troubles? Or have we failed—for reasons cultural and institutional—to hear the Hispanophobic crosstalk that permeated the drama no less than England's other public discourses? Imagining an early modern public sphere in which dramatists cross pens with proto-imperialists, Protestant polemicists, recusant apologists, and a Machiavellian network of propagandists that included high government officials as well as journeyman printers, Eric Griffin uncovers the rhetorical strategies through which the Hispanophobic perspectives that shaped the so-called Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty were written into English cultural memory. At the same time, he demonstrates that the English were as ready to invoke Spain in the spirit of envious emulation as to demonize the Spanish other as an ethnic agent of intolerance and oppression. Interrogating the Whiggish orientation that has continued to view the English Renaissance through a haze of Anglo-American triumphalism, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain recovers the voices of key Spanish participants and the "Hispanized" Catholic resistance, revealing how England and Spain continued to draw upon shared traditions and cultural resources, even during the moments of their most storied confrontation.

Derrida's Marrano Passover

Derrida's Marrano Passover PDF Author: Agata Bielik-Robson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501392638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida's 'Toledo confession' – where he portrayed himself as 'sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture' – Agata Bielik-Robson shows Derrida's marranismo to be a literary experiment of auto-fiction. She looks at all possible aspects of Derrida's Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of non-identitarian evasion that permeates all his works: just as Marranos cannot be characterized as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida's 'universal Marranism' an invitation to think philosophically, politically and – last but not least – metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging. By concentrating on Derrida's deliberate choice of marranismo, Bielik-Robson shows that it penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking, constantly drawing on the literary works of Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Cixous and Valéry, and throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination and 'Différance'. She also offers a completely new interpretation of many of Derrida's works only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In these new readings, this book demonstrates that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a literary trope of openness, offering up a new genre of philosophical story-telling which centers around Derrida's Marrano 'auto-fable'.

Translating the Jewish Freud

Translating the Jewish Freud PDF Author: Naomi Seidman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503639274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.

Anarchaeologies

Anarchaeologies PDF Author: Erin Graff Zivin
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823286835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? Our critical moment, Graff Zivin argues, demands anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art. Rather than applying concepts from philosophy in order to understand or elucidate cultural works, the book exposes works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art and activism to one another. Working specifically with art, film, and literature from Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges, Juán José Saer, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Albertina Carri, the Internacional Errorista), Graff Zivin allows such thinkers as Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, and Rancière to be inflected by Latin American cultural production. Through these acts of interdiscursive and interdisciplinary (or indisciplinary) exposure, such ethical and political concepts as identification and recognition, decision and event, sovereignty and will, are read as constitutively impossible, erroneous. Rather than weakening either ethics or politics, however, the anarchaeological reading these works stage and demand opens up and radicalizes the possibility of justice.

Re-envisioning Jewish Identities

Re-envisioning Jewish Identities PDF Author: Efraim Sicher
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004462252
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This innovative study combines readings of contemporary literature, art, and performance to explore the diverse and complex directions of contemporary Jewish culture in Israel and the diaspora.