Beyond the Beyond

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Notes

¹ Confucius, Confucian Analects, the Great Learning & the Doctrine of the Mean, trans. James Legge. [1861]. American Theological Library Association (ATLA) Historical Monographs Collection: Series 1. Web [10/04/2012].

² It is, I think, pedantic to complain that ‘post’ ought to mean ‘after,’ rather than the temporal condition of ‘after the beginning’ or, as is sometimes the case here, ‘the beginning of the end.’ Although, like ‘beyond’ constructions, ‘post-’ prefixes always risk hyperbole, this double temporality is quite common. Yildiz cites Marianne Hirsch's concept of ‘postmemory,’ in which the prefix ‘“reflects an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture”’ (p.4). Wendy Brown, meanwhile, has recently described a ‘post-Westphalian condition’ in which ‘“post” signifies a formation that is temporally after but not over’ (Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone, 2010), p.21; emphasis in original).

³ Yildiz explains that Fremdwörter are not simply ‘foreign words’ – the type of word that, in English, would usually be marked by estranging italics. Nor are they simply German words of foreign origin – e.g. Fenster [window], long ago adapted from Latin (p.68). They are common German words that nevertheless retain a visible trace of their foreign origin. Yildiz gives the example of Handy [mobile phone], which derives from English but is in fact peculiar to German speech.

⁴ On this topic, see e.g. Joshua L. Miller, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

⁵ Some of this history is covered implicitly in the Adorno chapter. Still, with its appropriately tight focus on German-Jewish relations, the chapter does not really open out onto the broader linguistic and political history of the mid-century.