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From: "rapaport" <[log in to unmask]>
Angelika Rauch
The Hieroglyph of Tradition. (Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant).
Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated
University Presses, 2000. ISBN 0-8386-3846-5
A hieroglyph is a cluster of half-understood symbols, usually couched in
images. But what is a hieroglyph in language, in verbal images, particularly
as the hieroglyph resists abstraction, always retaining a sense of materiality?
This book answers that it is tradition, not understood as any kind of content
but as an underlying affect in (literary) language. And this felt affect in reading
print--as opposed to consuming electronic images resulting in an atrophied
imagination--forces us to think about what we feel, and maybe also why. The
hieroglyph is embodied tradition--its best example is the Jewish Cabbalah--
which, to this author, symbolizes the reading process as it is filtered through
the reader's biography and the cultural past. But because this personal as
well as historical past cannot be completely recovered, and is always
different in the recovery, the hieroglyph as the carrier of the past, and hence
reading, is always accompanied by a sense of melancholy, as a reminder of
a loss. On the other hand as an aesthetic experience, reading produces
epiphanic moments in which we seem to almost grasp affectively what is was
like before the loss--or would be like without it. On the whole, this book
examines all the major intersections of literature, philosophy, and
psychoanalysis, but it emphatically examines allegory as productive for
translating language into thought, a mental process that not only cultivates
tradition but educates and expands imagination.
Contents:
Part I. History or Tradition?
1. Tradition: Search for the Lost Object
2. The Representation of History
3. Repetition and Experience
Part II. Faculties of the Unconscious in Kant
4. Desire and the Body in Kant
5. The Maternal Ground of Aesthetic Experience
6. The Unconscious Hermeneutics of "Wit"
7. Intuition versus Representation
8. The "Genius" of Tradition
Part III. The Hermeneutics of Tradition
9. Tradition: A Matter of BILDUNG in Novalis
10. The Hieroglyphic Nature of Tradition
11. Building the Memory of Signs
Part IV. Redemption of the Past in Allegory
12. Woman as the Allegory of Modernity
13. Benjamin's Hieroglyphs
14. The Melancholia of Ideas
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