German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife - Vivian Liska

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 Žižek, and Alain Badiou.

Click here to read the retrospective response of Prof. Vivian Liska to the book event on the occasion of the publication of her book "German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy" (11 June 2017, Hebrew University of Jerusalem).