Winged Words: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Life of Quotation

Benjamin E. Sax is the Jewish Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, Jewish Studies in Baltimore. He is an experienced professor, university administrator, scholar, award-winning teacher, public speaker, and practitioner and facilitator of interreligious dialogue. Before arriving at the ICJS, Sax was director of the Malcolm and Diane Rosenberg Program in Judaic Studies and the founding faculty principal at the West Ambler Johnston Residential College at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Sax holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (BA, Social Thought and Political Economy), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (MA, Religious Studies), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., History of Judaism). He has published on topics relating to Jewish philosophy, German-Jewish history and culture, Jewish-Christian relations, and interreligious dialogue.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1 The Life of Quotation1 The Life of Quotation2 Phenomenology?3 Psychology or Archive Fetish?4 Just More Derrida?2 Myth, Language, and the Origins of Tradition1 Innerlichkeit and New-Old Beginnings2 Martin Buber and Innerlichkeit3 Innerlichkeit and the Hebrew Bible4 Buber’s Hebrew Humanism5 Walter Benjamin’s Challenge to Buber6 Benjamin and Nietzsche7 Benjamin and Goethe8 The Challenge of Lebensphilosophie9 Franz Rosenzweig’s New Thinking10 Between Bildung and Anti-Bildung11 Rosenzweig and Nietzsche12 Conclusion3 Quotation as Heterodoxy: Walter Benjamin’s Karl Kraus1 Benjamin’s Essay “Karl Kraus”2 The Ur-Kraus: Benjamin’s Early Move to Language and Origin3 Jewish Negation as Jewish Quotation: a Prolegomenon to Jewish Secular Identity4 The Life of Quotation in Benjamin’s Kraus4 Quotation as Pedagogy: Franz Rosenzweig’s Goethe1 The Jewish Goethekenner2 Using Goethe’s Poetics Hermeneutically: Quotation in the Introduction of the Star3 From a Post-Goethekenner to a Premodern4 Das Geflügelte Wort (the Winged Word): Rosenzweig’s Life of Quotation5 Quotation, Experience, and the Secularizing of Life1 Experience, Language, and Life2 Quotation, Experience, and Hermeneutics3 The Arcades Project: Quotation, Montage, and the Medium of Reflection4 Jewish Thought, Quotation, and the Secularizing of Life6 Quotation and the Liturgical Life1 Jewish Books, Jewish Worlds, Jewish Words2 Biblical Words, Living Words, Winged Words3 Biblical Words, Dialogue, Commentary4 From the Star to Liturgy to Life: a Forgotten Interlocutor5 Rosenzweig’s Experience with Ismar Elbogen6 The Influence of Elbogen’s Der jüdische Gottesdienst on Rosenzweig’s Star7 From Scholarship on Liturgy to Philosophy and the Future of Judaism8 Liturgy as Polemic and Propaedeutic: Petition and Temptation9 Rosenzweig’s Application of a Jewish Liturgical Hermeneutic10 Into LifeConclusion: The Life of Quotation and the (Re)Invention of TraditionPrimary SourcesBibliographyIndex