Ethan Kleinberg

Ethan Kleinberg works on the acrobatics of modern thought. He is Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University, Editor-in-Chief of History and Theory and was Director of Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities. Kleinberg's research interests include European intellectual history with special interest in France and Germany, critical theory, educational structures, and the philosophy of history. Together with Joan Wallach Scott and Gary Wilder he is a member of the Wild On Collective who co-authored the "Theses on Theory and History" and started the #TheoryRevolt movement. He is the author of Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (SUP); Haunting History: for a deconstructive approach to the past (SUP); Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-61 (CUP) which was awarded the 2006 Morris D. Forkosch prize for the best book in intellectual history by the Journal of the History of Ideas and co-editor of the volume Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century (CUP). He is completing a book length project titled The Surge: a new compass of history for the end-time of truth.

Biography

Kleinberg did his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley where he further developed his interest in philosophy and history. He took philosophy courses on Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault with Hubert Dreyfus and wrote his BA thesis on Soren Kierkegaard under the direction of Martin Jay. He graduated from Berkeley as an interdisciplinary humanities major.

Kleinberg entered the PhD program in the Department of History at UCLA where he worked with Robert Wohl, Samuel Weber, Saul Friedländer, and David N. Myers. At UCLA he developed his interest in theory and philosophy of history. Kleinberg trained as a European intellectual historian with a focus on continental philosophy arriving soon after the conference on the Holocaust at UCLA that led to the volume edited by Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation. Kleinberg was part of a cohort interested in the form and theory of history as much as the pursuit of historical case studies. In particular, they were engaged with the work of Hayden V. White.

At UCLA, Kleinberg worked closely with Professors in the History Department but also in French, German, and Comparative Literature. His interest in the work of Heidegger led him to Samuel Weber who was teaching in the Comparative Literature department at UCLA and Jacques Derrida who was teaching at UC Irvine. Kleinberg’s work and interest moved between intellectual history and theory of history as he focused on the work of Hegel, Benjamin, de Beauvoir, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Foucault, Irigaray, and Kojève as both templates for theory of history and actors in intellectual history.

In 1994-95 Kleinberg received a UCLA Critical Theory in Paris Program Fellowship and also a Monkarsh Award for French Studies which allowed him to spend the academic year in Paris, France taking courses, doing archival work, and meeting with scholars. Michael Roth (who is currently President of Wesleyan University), connected Kleinberg with Alexandre Kojève’s partner Nina Ivanov which provided access to Kojève’s personal papers which were housed in her apartment at the time. In 1995, Kleinberg was awarded a Research Fellowship from the U.C. Berkeley Center for German and European Studies. In 1996, he awarded a UC Humanities Research Institute Scholars in Residence Fellowship to participate in a faculty working group organized by Tyler Stovall, George van den Abbeele, and Emily Apter on the theme “French Civilization and It’s Discontents.” This led to one of his first publications, “Kojève and Fanon: the fact of blackness and the desire for recognition.” In 1997 Kleinberg was awarded a UCLA Department of History Dissertation Writing Stipend. The following year he received a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award which enabled him to return to Paris, France and complete his dissertation on the reception of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in France.

In 2000, Kleinberg took a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of French History at Iowa State University but left the following year when he was offered a joint appointment at Wesleyan University in the College of Letters (a three-year interdisciplinary major program for the study of literature, history, and philosophy) and the History Department. In 2001, he began work at Wesleyan University as Assistant Professor of History and Letters. Fully appointed in two departments, Kleinberg wrote about value and benefits of both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches in the essay “Interdisciplinary Studies at the Crossroads,” Liberal Education, Winter 2008, Vol. 94, No. 1. In 2003, he was awarded the Carol A. Baker ’81 Memorial Prize for “the development and recognition of the accomplishments of junior faculty awarded by the Dean of the Social Sciences on a yearly basis to encourage and recognize excellence in teaching and research.”

Kleinberg received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2007 and became Director of the College of Letters. In 2006 his book Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 was awarded the Morris D. Forkosch prize for the best book in intellectual history by the Journal of the History of Ideas. In 2011 he was promoted to Professor of History and Letters and that same year was Directeur d’études invité at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. In 2012 became the Director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and Editor-in-Chief of History and Theory. In 2018 Kleinberg was Professeur Invité at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne and later that year named the Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University. He was selected as the 2020 Reinhart Koselleck Guest Professor at the Center for Theories of History, Bielefeld University where he taught graduate courses and gave the annual Koselleck Lecture.

Bibliography

• Generation Existential: Heiddegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 (Cornell University Press, 2005)

In Generation Existential, Ethan Kleinberg offers a history of the initial reception of Heidegger's philosophy in France by those who first encountered it. Kleinberg explains the appeal of Heidegger's philosophy to French thinkers, as well as the ways they incorporated and expanded on it in their own work through the interwar, Second World War, and early postwar periods. In so doing, Kleinberg offers insights into intellectual figures whose influence on modern French philosophy has been enormous, including some whose thought remains under-explored outside France. Among Kleinberg's "generation existential" are Jean Beaufret, the only member of the group whom one could characterize as "a Heideggerian"; Maurice Blanchot; Alexandre Kojéve; Emmanuel Levinas; and Jean-Paul Sartre. In showing how each of these figures engaged with Heidegger, Kleinberg helps us to understand how the philosophy of this right-wing thinker had such a profound influence on intellectuals of the left. Furthermore, Kleinberg maintains that our view of Heidegger's influence on contemporary thought is contingent on our comprehension of the ways in which his philosophy was initially understood, translated, and incorporated into the French philosophical canon by this earlier generation.

• Haunting History: for a deconstructive approach to the past (Stanford University Press, 2017)

Haunting History is Kleinberg’s polemic against conventional historical scholarship in which he advocates for a deconstructive approach to the practice and writing of history. To do so, Kleinberg explores the legacy and impact of deconstruction on American historical work; the fetishization of lived experience, materialism, and the "real;" new trends in philosophy of history; and the persistence of ontological realism as the dominant mode of thought for conventional historians. Kleinberg argues for a hauntological understanding of the past and throughout the book he relies on the figure of the ghost because of the ways it represents the liminal in-between of absent presences and present absences. For Kleinberg, what is troubling and powerful about the ghost is not that it is present (which it is) but the ways that its presence disturbs all the spatio-temporal categories by which we have come to make sense of the world around us. The ghost troubles both time and space and thus one cannot make sense of it. On Kleinberg’s account, the porous and disturbing nature of the past that haunts us provokes one to question the historical ground on which we stand and the borders by which we divide past, present, and future.

• Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Stanford University Press, 2021)

In Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn, Kleinberg deploys the deconstructive approach articulated in Haunting History in the service of an intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and his “Talmudic Lectures” presented in Paris between 1959 and 1989. It is the first modern work of history to use a deconstructive double column format. In the book Kleinberg utilizes the distinction between “God on Our Side” and “God on God’s Side” that Levinas takes from the 18th century rabbi and Talmudist Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin to provide two discrete and at times conflicting approaches to Levinas’s Talmudic readings. Each chapter of the book is written using a two-column format, a double séance, wherein one narrative is historically situated and argued from “our side” while the other narrative uses Levinas’s Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from God on “God’s side.” The first presents a traditional intellectual history of Levinas’s Talmudic lectures that provides a contextual reading of the sources and causes for his turn to Talmud as well as a critical assessment of how his interpretative strategies are at times in conflict with his stated ethical commitment to the Other. The second simultaneously offers a counter that allows for Levinas’s transcendent claims about the past, history, and the ethical opening to the Other to stand in opposition to those of the first. Each session is meant to be in dialogue and conflict with the other such that the claims made in each session on the Talmudic lectures are often in direct conflict with the historical explanations offered as intellectual history. The one is historically situated and argued from “our side” while the other approaches the issue as timeless, derived from “God on God’s own side,” even if the lessons to be learned can and should be applied to specific moments in time. This means that it is also the case that Levinas’s Talmudic readings, presented in the book, should be seen as applicable to our moment today.

• Presence: Philosophy, History and Cultural Theory for the 21st Century co-edited with Ranjan Ghosh (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Publications

• Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought, October 2021, Cultural Memory in the Present series, Stanford University Press.
• Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past, August 2017, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series, Stanford University Press.
• Historia Espectral: por un enfoque deconstructivo del pasado, December 2021, Coleción Historiografía Postmoderna, Palinodia Press.
• Historicidade Espectral: teoria da história em tempos digitais, February 2021, Editora Milfontes.
• Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961, 2005 Cornell University Press. Paperback edition, 2007. Chinese translation with author’s foreword (Beijing: New Star Press/Xin Xing, July 2008).
• Presence: Philosophy, History and Cultural Theory for the 21st Century, a volume co-edited with Ranjan Ghosh, November 2013, Cornell University Press.
• “The Time of Ghosts and the Ghosts of Time,” in Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: a cross-cultural approach eds. Bennett Gilbert, Natan Elgabsi (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
• “One Dimensional Man as One Dimensional History” Journal of Philosophy of History 15 (2021) 340-360
• “Ethan Kleinberg” interview in Mauricio Megliolo, Los Historiadores y sus Libros (Madrid: Guillermo Escolar Editor, 2021)
• “Post-Modern Theory with Historical Intent: a deconstructive approach to the past” in Philosophy of History: Twenty-First Century Perspectives ed. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
• “Los fantasmas de la historia: una aproximación decontructiva al pasado,” trans. Anaclet Pons, Historia Y MEMORIA, (Num especial 2020), 51-80. «Los fantasmas de la historia: una aproximación deconstructiva al pasado»
• 《海登·怀特史的情节建构》(“Emplotting the History of Hayden White”) translated into Chinese by Zhang Zuocheng, 世界历史评论 (The World History Review), NO.3, 2020, pp. 47-60. Issn:2096-6733.
• “Levinas as a Reader of Jewish Texts: The Talmudic Commentaries” in The Oxford Handbook for Emmanuel Levinas, editor Michael L. Morgan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, May 2019).
• “Post-Structuralism: from Deconstruction to the Genealogy of Power” co-authored with Julian Bourg, in The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, eds. Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, October 2019).
• “Are Historians Ontological Realists? An Exchange (on Kleinberg’s Haunting History)”, Herman Paul and Ethan Kleinberg, Rethinking History (2018), 22:4, 546-557, DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2018.1530820
• “Le spectre du passé. Pour une approche déconstructiviste de l’histoire”, trans. Christophe Bouton, L’expérience du passé: histoire, philosophie, politique, eds. Christophe Bouton, Barbara Stiegler (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2018).
• “Hayden White: in memoriam” The Historian, Volume 80, Issue 4, Winter 2018 pp. 691-704,

Hayden White: In Memoriam.

• “Ethan Kleinberg: Theory of History as Hauntology”/ “Teoria da História como Fantalogia,” an interview by André da Silva Ramos in English and Portuguese versions, História da Historiogafia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography 2018. Ethan Kleinberg: Theory of History as Hauntology
• “Ethan Kleinberg: Teoría de la Historia como Fantología” Spanish version of interview by André da Silva Ramos, Historiografías, 16 (Julio-Diciembre, 2018), pp. 108-126.
• “Where is Benjamin?” Politics, Religion, and Ideology (Taylor and Francis), 30 May 2017 (online), 25 July 2017 (print).
• Just the Facts: the Fantasy of a Historical Science, History of the Present: a journal of critical inquiry (University of Illinois Press), Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 2016).
• History and Theory in a Global Frame, introduction to History and Theory Theme Issue on “Historical Theory in a Global Frame,” co-authored with Vijay Pinch, Volume 54, No. 4, December 2015.
• Not Yet Marrano: Levinas, Derrida and the ‘ontology’ of Being-Jewish, in Traces of God: Derrida and Religion, Edward Baring and Peter Gordon eds., October 2014, Fordham University Press.
• To Atone and to Forgive: Jaspers, Jankélévitch/Derrida and the possibility of forgiveness in Jankélévitch and Forgiveness, Alan Udoff ed., February 2013, Lexington Press, Rowman and Littlefield.
• Academic Journals in the Digital Era: An Editor’s Reflections, Perspectives on History, 50:9/ December 2012.
• The Trojan Horse of Tradition, introduction to History and Theory Theme Issue on “Tradition and History”, Volume 51, No. 4, December 2012.
• Back to Where We’ve Never Been: Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida on Tradition and History, History and Theory, Volume 51, No. 4, December 2012.
• The New Metaphysics of Time, introduction to History and Theory Virtual Issue, August 2012.
• In/finite Time: tracing transcendence to Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic lectures, International Journal of Philosophical Studies special issue on Emmanuel Levinas, Volume 20, Number 3 (2012).
• Of Jews and Humanism in France, Modern Intellectual History volume 9, Number 2, (August 2012).
• The Letter on Humanism: Reading Heidegger in France, in Situating Existentialism, Robert Bernasconi and Jonathan Judaken eds. (June 2012, Columbia University Press).
• A Perfect Past? Tony Judt and the Historian’s Burden of Responsibility, French Historical Studies, Volume 35, Number 1 (Winter 2012).
• To Atone and to Forgive: Jaspers, Jankélévitch/Derrida and the possibility of forgiveness in Jankélévitch and Forgiveness, Alan Udoff ed. (forthcoming from Lexington Press, Rowman and Littlefield).
• Freud and Levinas: Talmud and Psychoanalysis Before the Letter, Freud’s Jewish World, Arnold Richards ed., (New York: Macfarland Press, January 2010).
• Presence In Absentia in Storia della Storiografia 55 (2009).
• Review of François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2008-09-07
• Review essay of Allan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (Stanford University Press, 2006), Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56, 3, Fall 2008.
• Interdisciplinary Studies at the Crossroads, Liberal Education, 94, no. 1, Winter 2008.
• Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision, History and Theory, 46, no. 4, December 2007.
• New Gods Swelling the Future Ocean, History and Theory, 46, no. 3, October 2007.
• The Myth of Emmanuel Levinas in After the Deluge: New Perspectives in French Intellectual and Cultural History, Julian Bourg, ed., Lexington Press, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
• Kojève and Fanon: The Fact of Blackness and the Desire for Recognition in French Civilization and Its Discontents, Tyler Stovall and George Van Den Abbeele, ed., Lexington Press, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

External links

• History and Theory: Expanding the Intellectual Network
• Wesleyan History Department
• History and Theory editorial page
• Video of lecture on Freud and Levinas at Center for Jewish History
• Kleinberg's article Interdisciplinary Studies at a Crossroads Archived 2011-09-28 at the Wayback Machine
• Kleinberg’s review of Francois Cusset's French Theory Archived 2009-02-20 at the Wayback Machine
• "Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision" in History and Theory

See also

• Wesleyan biography
• H-net biography
• Columbia biography