Infrahuman

Noam Pines is Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

"A work of stunning originality. Noam Pines revisits texts across the expanse of European and modern Jewish culture, excavating a preoccupation with Jewish animality that is no less illuminating than it is unsettling." — Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History"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

• 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 Bialikand 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