The Infrahuman explores a little-known aspect in major works of Jewish literature from the period... more 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 antisemitic 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.
Di kliatshe, a novella published in 1873 by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, has been credited as one o... more Di kliatshe, a novella published in 1873 by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, has been credited as one of the first literary works to register the failure of the Haskalah to achieve Jewish integration into Russian society. However, analysis of the literary and historical contexts in which this work emerged shows how Di kliatshe also engaged in a subtle literary dialogue with non-Jewish authors in order to promote a radical ethical position on the question of human and animal suffering. The awareness of a dimension of suffering in which Jews and animals are equivalent provides an alternative account to the conventional debate on the Jewish Question. Instead of a formal affirmation of universal human rights, in Abramovitsh's work the relation to questions of Jewish identity remains informal and marked by attentiveness to the dehumanized aspects of Jewish existence.
The essay explores the epiphanic qualities of trauma in Jean Améry’s account of torture. For Amér... more The essay explores the epiphanic qualities of trauma in Jean Améry’s account of torture. For Améry, torture emerges as a site of revelation in which a fundamental gap is exposed between the two poles of human existence: the figural capacity to represent and raw, unmediated experience. Employing this critical distinction, Améry challenged Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil” in a phenomenological analysis drawn from his own experience. The essay argues that although Améry manages to offer a phenomenological account of torture, it is not because of a successful conceptual distinction between the “real” and the “abstract,” but rather, and involuntarily, because of the reenactment of a traumatic repetition in his text. This essay exposes the conceptual deficiencies that underlie Améry’s phenomenological account of trauma, but at the same time it also argues that the “contamination” of Améry’s thought by trauma does not render his key conceptual distinctions invalid or self-defeating. Rather, his analysis ultimately sheds light on elusive aspects of the psychological motivations of Nazi perpetrators, aspects that remain outside the purview of the factual-historical account. By identifying torture as the “essence” of National Socialism, Améry lays emphasis on the calculated, illicit exercise of sovereign power in the hierarchical chain of Nazi officials.
The Infrahuman explores a little-known aspect in major works of Jewish literature from the period... more 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 antisemitic 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.
Di kliatshe, a novella published in 1873 by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, has been credited as one o... more Di kliatshe, a novella published in 1873 by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, has been credited as one of the first literary works to register the failure of the Haskalah to achieve Jewish integration into Russian society. However, analysis of the literary and historical contexts in which this work emerged shows how Di kliatshe also engaged in a subtle literary dialogue with non-Jewish authors in order to promote a radical ethical position on the question of human and animal suffering. The awareness of a dimension of suffering in which Jews and animals are equivalent provides an alternative account to the conventional debate on the Jewish Question. Instead of a formal affirmation of universal human rights, in Abramovitsh's work the relation to questions of Jewish identity remains informal and marked by attentiveness to the dehumanized aspects of Jewish existence.
The essay explores the epiphanic qualities of trauma in Jean Améry’s account of torture. For Amér... more The essay explores the epiphanic qualities of trauma in Jean Améry’s account of torture. For Améry, torture emerges as a site of revelation in which a fundamental gap is exposed between the two poles of human existence: the figural capacity to represent and raw, unmediated experience. Employing this critical distinction, Améry challenged Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil” in a phenomenological analysis drawn from his own experience. The essay argues that although Améry manages to offer a phenomenological account of torture, it is not because of a successful conceptual distinction between the “real” and the “abstract,” but rather, and involuntarily, because of the reenactment of a traumatic repetition in his text. This essay exposes the conceptual deficiencies that underlie Améry’s phenomenological account of trauma, but at the same time it also argues that the “contamination” of Améry’s thought by trauma does not render his key conceptual distinctions invalid or self-defeating. Rather, his analysis ultimately sheds light on elusive aspects of the psychological motivations of Nazi perpetrators, aspects that remain outside the purview of the factual-historical account. By identifying torture as the “essence” of National Socialism, Améry lays emphasis on the calculated, illicit exercise of sovereign power in the hierarchical chain of Nazi officials.
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Books by Noam Pines
Papers by Noam Pines