Kathleen Biddick
Temple University, History, Faculty Member
- History, Political Theory, Historiography, Critical Theory, Political Theology, Queer Theory and Queer Studies, Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and 20 moreQueer Theory, Trauma Studies, Historical Theology, Sovereignty, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jewish - Christian Relations, History of Crusades, Materiality (Anthropology), History Of Psychoanalysis, Zombies, Martyrdom, Weimar Republic, Eucharistic Theology, French colonialism, Critical Reading (Education), Ernst Kantorowicz, Medieval Political Theology, Education, Philosophy, and Anthropologyedit
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Centered on the opening scene of reading staged by Giorgio Agamben in his study of reading machines, The Open: Man and Animal, this article considers how Agamben's own messianic reading of an illuminated page from a medieval Ashkenazi... more
Centered on the opening scene of reading staged by Giorgio Agamben in his study of reading machines, The Open: Man and Animal, this article considers how Agamben's own messianic reading of an illuminated page from a medieval Ashkenazi Hebrew Bible (Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS B 30-32) erases the engangled histories of medieval Ashkenazi Jews and their Christian sovereigns. What happens, I ask, if we read the distinctive animal-headed Jews peopling medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts of Bibles and Haggadot, not in a messianic mode, but in the temporal mode of biopolitical bare life? What is the temporal structure of precarious life? Further, I ask how does this Ashkenazi figural tradition of animal-headed Jews point to forms of resistance to the biopolitics of medieval Christendom/ How is the messianic theory, today, unconsciously entangled in modes of temporality of precarious life then?
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How does Freud's reading of Tasso's epic, Gersulamme Liberata, as an ' exemplification of trauma, have to do with the visit of Mehmet II (the Ottoman sultan whose forces conquered Constantinople) and contemporary psychoanalytic critique... more
How does Freud's reading of Tasso's epic, Gersulamme Liberata, as an ' exemplification of trauma, have to do with the visit of Mehmet II (the Ottoman sultan whose forces conquered Constantinople) and contemporary psychoanalytic critique of the medievalism of trauma.?
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this essay explores how blood becomes a juridical substance in the anti-miscegenation laws promulgated for the English in Ireland in the late medieval period. It uses this juridical moment to confound Foucault's erstwhile supersession of... more
this essay explores how blood becomes a juridical substance in the anti-miscegenation laws promulgated for the English in Ireland in the late medieval period. It uses this juridical moment to confound Foucault's erstwhile supersession of sex over blood.
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A close reading of In An Antique Land, by Amitav Ghosh, considers the figure of the eunuch in the work of Foucault and the work of global medieval slavery. The paper ask:s how do postcolonial ethnographies based on field work and archive... more
A close reading of In An Antique Land, by Amitav Ghosh, considers the figure of the eunuch in the work of Foucault and the work of global medieval slavery. The paper ask:s how do postcolonial ethnographies based on field work and archive fabricate authority? And it argues that such fabrications of authority reinscribe a temporal supersession (that was then, this is now) that repeats temporal traumas rather than exploring how historicism and periodization might yield to the untimely.
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This essay correlates the changes in material forms of medieval manorial surveys with the reorganization of property holding and the re-construction of human status alligned property
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"find my essay pp. 37-46 ( 70-79 of .pdf)
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how does etching and its reproduction in print culture produce a new aesthetics of disappearance of late medieval Jewish communities in the humanistic heartlands of print culture in Regensburg and Tubingen?
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How does the addition of an alphabetic index in early print versions of Ptolemy's Cosmographia change the epistemological investigation of his cosmographic space in comparison to medieval manuscript versions without an alphabatized index?