Suchergebnisse

Using the work of a range of key thinkers, including Marx, Agamben, Nietzsche, Sartre, Adorno and Horkheimer, Arendt and Lyotard, this book examines the connections between legal rights as an expression of modern political emancipation and the emergence and development of the social phenomenon of antisemitism. Addressing, amongst others the topic of the Holocaust and its impact upon critical forms of thought and public life, this volume discusses the relationship between law and antisemitism

Jean-Francois Lyotard's commentary (1980s & 1990s) on anti-Semitism & the Holocaust is analyzed in the context of social theorizing on these issues. Anti-Semitism has gone through three distinct phases: during the struggle for Jewish political emancipation (full political rights), during & immediately after the Holocaust (an event inscribed in the project of emancipation), & in the postmodern period, where hope in the praxis of emancipation has been abandoned. As a postmodern, Lyotard lost faith in the praxis of emancipation. However, his thinking is problematic in its failure to establish critical distance between its object & the nature of the theory. He mirrors (in reverse) the anti-Semitic worldview in his resistance to forms of emancipation dependent on concepts of equality, his belief that there is some aspect of Jewishness that thwarts attempts at emancipation, & his insistence that the "Jewish Question" is a marker of modernity. M. Pflum