The Infrahuman

Noam Pines

Description

The Infrahuman explores a little-known aspect in major works of Jewish literature from the period preceding World War II, in which Jewish writers in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish employed figures of animals in pejorative depictions of Jews and Jewish identity. Such depictions are disturbing because they sometimes rival common anti-Semitic stereotypes, and have often been explained away as symptoms of Jewish self-hatred. In this book, Noam Pines shows how animality emerged in Jewish literature not as a biological or conceptual category, but as a theological figure of exclusion from a state of humanity and Christianity alike. By framing the human-animal question in theological terms rather than in racial-biological terms, writers such as Heinrich Heine, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Hayim Nachman Bialik, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Franz Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, and Paul Celan subjected the pejorative designations of Jewish identity to literary elaboration and to philosophical negotiation.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Between Figure and Creature

1. Life in The Valley: The Jewish Dog in Heinrich Heine’s “Prinzessin Sabbat”

2. A Radical Advocacy: Suffering Jews and Animals in S. Y. Abramovitsh’s Di Kliatshe

3. Into the Bowels of the Earth: Prophecy and Animality in the Poetry of Hayim Nachman Bialik
and Uri Zvi Greenberg

4. At Home in a Distorted Life: The Dog as a Constellation in the Work of Franz Kafka

5. After the Holocaust: Responses to the Infrahuman in the Works of S. Y. Agnon and Paul Celan

Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 11 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438470689
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Praise for The Infrahuman
“In this scrupulous and subtle book, Noam Pines shines new light on how animality, a well-worn theological figure of exclusion, can be seen afresh as a leitmotif of the intimate dialogue Jewish writers conducted with European literary traditions. With an exceptionally sure touch, Pines tracks this motif from Zionist literature through the postwar responses to Kafka’s legacy. The Infrahuman is a profound and highly commendable achievement.”
— Vivian Liska, author of When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature and German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy
“ The Infrahuman starts readers on an important journey from a place where we construct identities out of the cultural material that we would invent if that material had not already been provided: dichotomies (animal/human, Christian/Jew), other forms, images, things. Pines’s powerful readings of Heine, Abramovitsh, Bialik, Greenberg, Kafka, Agnon, and Celan may not teach us how to remember other alternatives, but they do call us to be attentive to the identificatory incapacities that have helped us forget how to live.”
— David Metzger, coeditor of Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference
THE INFRAHUMAN
SUNY SERIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Ezra Cappell, editor
Dan Shiffman, College Bound: The Pursuit of Education in Jewish American Literature, 1896–1944
Eric J. Sundquist, Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader
THE INFRAHUMAN

Animality in Modern Jewish Literature
NOAM PINES
Cover art: Vincent van Gogh, Old Nag , 1883
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pines, Noam, 1976- author.
Title: The infrahuman : animality in modern Jewish literature / Noam Pines.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: Suny series in contemporary Jewish literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040576 | ISBN 9781438470672 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438470689 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Jewish literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Jewish literature--20th century—History and criticism. | Animals in literature.
Classification: LCC PN842 .P56 2018 | DDC 809/.88924—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040576
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Yaffa,
with love and gratitude
יוֹם לְיוֹם יִשָּׂא שֶׁמֶשׁ בּוֹעֶרֶת
,וְלַיְלָה אַחַר לַיְלָה יִשְׁפֹּךְ כּוֹכָבִים
:עַל שִׂפְתֵי בוֹדְדִים שִׁירָה נֶעֱצֶרֶת
.בְּשֶׁבַע דְּרָכִים נִתְפַּלֵּג וּבְאֶחָד אָנוּ שָׁבִים
—Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, “A Few Say”
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Between Figure and Creature
1 Life in The Valley: The Jewish Dog in Heinrich Heine’s “Prinzessin Sabbat”
2 A Radical Advocacy: Suffering Jews and Animals in S. Y. Abramovitsh’s Di Kliatshe
3 Into the Bowels of the Earth: Prophecy and Animality in the Poetry of Hayim Nachman Bialik and Uri Zvi Greenberg
4 At Home in a Distorted Life: The Dog as a Constellation in the Work of Franz Kafka
5 After the Holocaust: Responses to the Infrahuman in the Works of S. Y. Agnon and Paul Celan
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE THANKS to the many friends and colleagues who have offered guidance and valuable advice during the long process in which this book came to take shape. I would like to thank Michael Gluzman, who has set me on this road and has put me back on track from time to time when I needed it most. I am especially grateful for the unfailing friendship and generosity of Roland Greene, Sepp Gumbrecht, and Steve Zipperstein, with whom I came to envision this project. More recently, I have benefitted from the sharp intellectual exchange with Sergey Dolgopolski, which has greatly helped me in formulating the theoretical framework for this book.
I am indebted to Rafael Chaiken of SUNY Press, who, through his attentiveness and editorial skills, has greatly facilitated the publication of this book, as well as to the two anonymous readers whose valuable comments have greatly improved the initial manuscript.
Over the years, I have been inspired by many people who have contributed, in one way or another, to the making of this book: Michal Arbell, Henry Berlin, Karl Heinz Bohrer, Noah Burbank, Richard A. Cohen, Amir Eshel, Yair Etziony, Marisa Galvez, Anne Golomb Hoffman, Hannan Hever, Kathryn Hume, Shaun Irlam, Chana Kronfeld, Nitzan Lebovic, Vivian Liska, Alan Mintz (z”l), Dan Miron, Fernanda Negrete, Paul North, Max Pensky, Avi Pines, James Redfield, Gabriella Safran, Galili Shahar, Vered Shemtov, Ewa and Krzysztof Ziarek, and Sivan Zeimer.
I am also grateful to the graduate students who attended my course on Kafka, Benjamin, and Celan, and have offered challenging input and stimulating intellectual exchange: Josh Dawson, George Life, Dipanjan Maitra, Jake Nabasny, Eric Vanlieshout, and Hsiao Chieh Yi.
Finally, I am ever grateful to my wife Sarah, for her continued support, intellectual exchange, and infinite patience; and to Alma, my daughter, with whom I have found my lost time.
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Life in the Valley: Figures of Dehumanization in Heinrich Heine’s ‘Prinzessin Sabbat,’ ” Prooftexts 33, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 25–47. This article is used by the permission of Indiana University Press.
Chapter 2, “A Radical Advocacy: Suffering Jews and Animals in S. Y. Abramovitsh’s Di Kliatshe ,” appeared in Jewish Social Studies , 23.2 (Winter 2018): 24-47. This article is used by the permission of Indiana University Press.
INTRODUCTION
Between Figure and Creature
RECENT YEARS HAVE SEEN a remarkable proliferation of critical literature dealing with animals as objects of philosophical and ethical inquiry. Under the heading of “Animal Studies,” this diverse critical literature challenged some of the unquestioned premises of the humanistic legacy that has dominated Western thought, such as the human–animal boundary, anthropocentrism, cruelty to animals, the limits of the human, and animal feelings and consciousness. Works in Animal Studies have built on a critical approach to Martin Heidegger’s discussion of animals in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , and were influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal” as well as by the late writings of Jacques Derrida in which his engagement with animality has served to question the metaphysical concept of the subject. In this context, the preoccupation with animals and animality has functioned as a critique of dominant philosophical notions and prevalent social practices that implicitly assume the centrality of humans in the world and ascribe to human beings an inherent primacy over other species. This book takes up such a preoccupation with animality not in order to offer yet another critical account of humanism and anthropocentrism, but in order to revise the terms in which the distinction between human and animal has been formulated in modern Western thought. Instead of staging a polemical philosophical dichotomy between discriminatory anthropocentric practices and a more attentive posthumanist approach, I will show how animality itself emerges as a persistent and unresolvable problem in modernity, and how this problem came to be closely associated with prevailing notions regarding Jewish identity.
As a point of departure for my inquiry I would like to take up the fundamental distinction between the presentation of Jews in literary, philosophical, and theological texts—where they play a determined role in the construction of specific arguments and positions, or assume a certain symbolic meaning—as opposed to the lived experience to which these representations refer, and which is by no means identical with them. This essential gap between figure and lived experience is proposed by Andrew Benjamin, for whom the figure is “the constitution of an identity in which the construction has a specific function that is predominantly external to the concerns of the identity itself.” 1 In the case of Jewish identity, the construction of the figure of the Jew by non-Jews, which is external to Judaism, continued at the same time to influence the ways in which Jewish identity came to be internally shaped, envisioned, and affirmed, especially in modernity.
The texts to be examined in this book present various attempts by Jewish writers to negotiate the distance between figure and experience in relation to Jewish identity by means of an intermediary—a provisional figural construction that I call the infrahuman—in which this distance comes to the fore yet remains suspended and unresolved. As a literary or poetic construction, the infrahuman is above all distinguished by its universality, that is, by its capacity to integrate into contexts that are both internal and external to Judaism. And to the extent that it is universal, the infrahuman is inevitably associated with figural constructions of animality. To be sure, at stake here is not animality conceived as an ontological or conceptual category, but rather as a theological figure of exclusion from a state of humanity and Christianity alike.
Such a figural conflation of Judaism and animality is by no means new; its sources can be traced to the inception of Christianity,