In German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife, Vivian Liska innovatively focuses on the changing form, fate and function of messianism, law, exile, election, remembrance, and the transmission of tradition itself in three different temporal and intellectual frameworks: German-Jewish modernism, postmodernism, and the current period. Highlighting these elements of the Jewish tradition in the works of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan, Liska reflects on dialogues and conversations between them and on the reception of their work. She shows how this Jewish dimension of their writings is transformed, but remains significant in the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida and how it is appropriated, dismissed or denied by some of the most acclaimed thinkers at the turn of the twenty-first century such as Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou.

About the Author

Vivian Liska is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She is also Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is author of When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (IUP).

Liska's academic bio is available here: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/vivian-liska/

Reviews

Although the authors who form the main focus of the book have been thoroughly studied and discussed on many occasions over the past fifty years or so, Liska brings into her analysis a fresh perspective that highlights the elusive Jewish quality at work in the texts under discussion.

* Partial Answers *

Liska's book conducts an insightful investigation into the history of ideas, and she is able to compare and contrast the wide range of thinkers under examination in clear, sophisticated, and nuanced ways.

* Religious Studies Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253024855
Author Vivian Liska
Format Paperback
Page Count 218
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 327g