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Lecture in English:
Formulating the hypothesis that their somewhat fanciful reinvention of Yiddish is both a necessary development of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and the latest stage of a long history of non-Jewish appropriations and theorizations of Yiddish, the talk will touch upon the possible uses and abuses of their “Yiddish” for contemporary literary scholarship.
The lecture is part of the 3-weeks program "Yiddish in Berlin".
Raphael Koenig is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris. His research focuses on French, German, and Yiddish avant-garde literature and visual culture. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
Yiddish and Critical Theory
Speaker: Raphael Koenig.
With the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s essay on Kafka in 1975, Yiddish made its grand entrance on the stage of continental philosophy. In the pivotal third chapter of the book, they claimed that Kafka’s relationship to Yiddish would not only hold the key to a renewed interpretation of his entire work, but also allowed them to coin a new concept, “minor literature”. This notion had a major impact on literary studies, especially in the United States.
While acknowledging the numerous gaps and inaccuracies of Deleuze and Guattari’s description of Yiddish (most notably criticized by Chana Kronfeld), Koenig’s talk will attempt to historicize this debate by asking how Yiddish became an object of critical inquiry in the first place. Why did Deleuze and Guattari pick Yiddish, and how does it operate as a concept in the context of their broader philosophical oeuvre? Formulating the hypothesis that their somewhat fanciful reinvention of Yiddish is both a necessary development of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and the latest stage of a long history of non-Jewish appropriations and theorizations of Yiddish, the talk will touch upon the possible uses and abuses of their “Yiddish” for contemporary literary scholarship.
The lecture is part of the 3-weeks program "Yiddish in Berlin".
Raphael Koenig is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris. His research focuses on French, German, and Yiddish avant-garde literature and visual culture. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
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Event
Lecture: Yiddish and Critical Theory (27/08, 19:00)
27/08/2017 - 19:00 to 20:00
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