Our Place in al-Andalus

Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters

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by Gil Anidjar

Stanford University Press

Due/Published April 2002, 368 pages, paper

ISBN 0804741212

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of "ends" that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts.

The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre.

At stake are issues Ð texts and contexts Ð that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost.

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present

"This is an original and extraordinarily refined work on a question that lies somewhere in the space between history and philosophy. What and where is that quite extraordinary construct we call al-Andalus? The author handles with equal ease the range of sources, both modern and medieval. His extremely elegant organization of the material reflects, at a very advanced level, a sense of style commensurate with the sophistication of his thinking."-- Maria Rosa Menocal, Yale University

Review

Medieval Spain (al-Andalus) was home to an intriguing mix of Jewish and Arab culture until Catholicism's reassertion of power in 1492. Anidjar's creative new study examines Jewish and Arab writings from the twelfth and thirteen centuries and offers an entirely new way of looking at the period. The author focuses on three main texts from the culture – Maimonides's Guide to the Perplexed, the Zohar, and Ibn al Astarkuwi's maqama (rhymed prose narratives) – and contends that they share very little context beyond their location. Anidjar's illuminating readings reveal that "...these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a preexisting cultural situation or in a recognizable literary tradition, and of containing it in a particular genre." By dislocating the literature from its contexts, Anidjar also finds occasion to re-examine scholars' claims regarding the "end" of Arab/Jewish culture in Spain and suggests that these conventional historical narratives have confined our understanding of historical periods and past communities. Drawing on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Avital Ronell, and Giorgio Agamben, Anidjar presents an understanding of al-Andalus as an event of language, but one that problematizes language and translation.