CROWN FAMILY CENTER FOR JEWISH AND ISRAEL STUDIES

Peter Fenves is the author of A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant (1991), “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard (1993), Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (2001), Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (2003), The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (2011), and Walter Benjamin entre los filósofos (2017).  He is the editor of Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Kant, Transformative Critique by Derrida (1993), the co-editor of “The Spirit of Poesy”: Essays on Jewish and German Literature and Philosophy in Honor of Géza von Molnár (2000) and Points of Departure: Samuel Weber between Reading and Spectrality (2016).  He edited and added an extensive introduction to Max Brod’s novel, Tycho Brahe’s Way to God (2006), in which Kafka, Werfel, and Einstein are fused into the figure of Johannes Kepler. He is the co-editor of two recent volumes:  Werner Hamacher, Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin (2019) and Walter Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (2021).  The latter edition includes a new translation of Benjamin’s famous essay as well as translations of philosophers to whom Benjamin refers, including Erich Unger and Hermann Cohen.  He is the co-editor of a volume of Benjamin’s writing on Goethe, which is scheduled to appear in 2024.  His book on Benjamin’s attempt to develop an argument for the promotion of epistemic diversity, including a kind of knowing that Benjamin associates with Judaism—“the knowing that redeems”—is expected to appear in the same year.   

Jewish Studies Courses

• German 234: Jews & Germans: An Intercultural History
• German 242: Imagining Modern Jewish Culture in Yiddish and German