Kitty Millet – författare

This book provides a sophisticated investigation into the experience of being exterminated, as felt by victims of the Holocaust, and compares and contrasts this analysis with the experiences of people who have been colonized or enslaved. Using numerous victim accounts and a wide range of primary sources, the book moves away from the 'continuity thesis', with its insistence on colonial intent as the reason for victimization in relation to other historical examples of mass political violence, to look at the victim experience on its own terms. By affording each constituent case study its own distinctive aspects, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust allows for a more enriching comparison of victim experience to be made that respects each group of victims in their uniqueness. It is an important, innovative volume for all students of the Holocaust, genocide and the history of mass political violence.

This book provides a sophisticated investigation into the experience of being exterminated, as felt by victims of the Holocaust, and compares and contrasts this analysis with the experiences of people who have been colonized or enslaved. Using numerous victim accounts and a wide range of primary sources, the book moves away from the 'continuity thesis', with its insistence on colonial intent as the reason for victimization in relation to other historical examples of mass political violence, to look at the victim experience on its own terms. By affording each constituent case study its own distinctive aspects, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust allows for a more enriching comparison of victim experience to be made that respects each group of victims in their uniqueness. It is an important, innovative volume for all students of the Holocaust, genocide and the history of mass political violence.

This state of the art collection offers fresh perspectives on why intersections between literature, religion, and ethics can address the fault lines of modernity and are not necessarily the cause of modernity’s ‘faults.’ From a diverse cohort of scholars from around the world, with appointments in comparative literature and other disciplines, the essays suggest that the imagined hegemony of a Judeo-Christian Western project is neither exclusively true nor productive. However, the essays also suggest that elements of the Western religious traditions are important vectors for understanding modernity’s complicated relationship to the past.

Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures.Kabbalah and Literature shows how the Jewish mystical tradition contributes to the renewal of literature in a modern, global, and increasingly disconnected age. Kitty Millet explores Kabbalah’s conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literature’s absorption of kabbalistic material has altered its ontology, function, and the tasks it sets for itself. Reading writers from Europe and the Americas, Kitty Millet maps how the kabbalist’s desire to "recover Eden" transforms into a latent messianic drive only intuitable through text. Thus it charts a journey of sorts, a migration of Jewish mystical material embedded surreptitiously within text in order to shift ever so slightly at times the range of the literary to encompass an aesthetic vision not easily reducible to the literal, the known, the allegorical, or even the philosophical.In this way, Kabbalah and Literature proposes a novel, intuitive approach, shifting focus away from the Jewish text’s epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."

This state of the art collection offers fresh perspectives on why intersections between literature, religion, and ethics can address the fault lines of modernity and are not necessarily the cause of modernity’s ‘faults.’ From a diverse cohort of scholars from around the world, with appointments in comparative literature and other disciplines, the essays suggest that the imagined hegemony of a Judeo-Christian Western project is neither exclusively true nor productive. However, the essays also suggest that elements of the Western religious traditions are important vectors for understanding modernity’s complicated relationship to the past.

Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures.Kabbalah and Literature shows how the Jewish mystical tradition contributes to the renewal of literature in a modern, global, and increasingly disconnected age. Kitty Millet explores Kabbalah’s conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literature’s absorption of kabbalistic material has altered its ontology, function, and the tasks it sets for itself. Reading writers from Europe and the Americas, Kitty Millet maps how the kabbalist’s desire to "recover Eden" transforms into a latent messianic drive only intuitable through text. Thus it charts a journey of sorts, a migration of Jewish mystical material embedded surreptitiously within text in order to shift ever so slightly at times the range of the literary to encompass an aesthetic vision not easily reducible to the literal, the known, the allegorical, or even the philosophical.In this way, Kabbalah and Literature proposes a novel, intuitive approach, shifting focus away from the Jewish text’s epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."

In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Toledo confession’ – where he portrayed himself as ‘sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture’ – Agata Bielik-Robson shows Derrida’s marranismo to be a literary experiment of auto-fiction. She looks at all possible aspects of Derrida’s Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of non-identitarian evasion that permeates all his works: just as Marranos cannot be characterized as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida’s ‘universal Marranism’ an invitation to think philosophically, politically and – last but not least – metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging.By concentrating on Derrida’s deliberate choice of marranismo, Bielik-Robson shows that it penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking, constantly drawing on the literary works of Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Cixous and Valéry, and throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination and 'Différance'. She also offers a completely new interpretation of many of Derrida’s works only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In these new readings, this book demonstrates that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a literary trope of openness, offering up a new genre of philosophical story-telling which centers around Derrida’s Marrano ‘auto-fable’.

In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Toledo confession’ – where he portrayed himself as ‘sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture’ – Agata Bielik-Robson shows Derrida’s marranismo to be a literary experiment of auto-fiction. She looks at all possible aspects of Derrida’s Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of non-identitarian evasion that permeates all his works: just as Marranos cannot be characterized as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida’s ‘universal Marranism’ an invitation to think philosophically, politically and – last but not least – metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging.By concentrating on Derrida’s deliberate choice of marranismo, Bielik-Robson shows that it penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking, constantly drawing on the literary works of Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Cixous and Valéry, and throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination and 'Différance'. She also offers a completely new interpretation of many of Derrida’s works only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In these new readings, this book demonstrates that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a literary trope of openness, offering up a new genre of philosophical story-telling which centers around Derrida’s Marrano ‘auto-fable’.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2025How can genocide be witnessed through imaginative literature? How can the Holocaust affect readers who were not there?Reading the work of major figures such as Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Avrom Sutzkever, Ida Fink, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Czeslaw Milosz, Poesis in Extremis poses fundamental questions about how prose and poetry are written under extreme conditions, either in real time or immediately after the Holocaust. Framed by discussion of literary testimony, with Wiesel’s literary memoir Night as an entry point, this innovative study explores the blurred boundary of fact and fiction in Holocaust literature. It asks whether there is a poetics of the Holocaust and what might be the criteria for literary witnessing. Wartime writing in particular tests the limits of “poesis in extremis” when poets faced their own annihilation and wrote in the hope that their words, like a message in a bottle, would somehow reach readers. Through Poesis in Extremis, Daniel Feldman and Efraim Sicher probe the boundaries of Holocaust literature, as well as the limits of representation.