Ethan Kleinberg works on the acrobatics of modern thought.[1] 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. Kleinberg's wide-ranging scholarly work spans across the fields of history, philosophy, comparative literature and religion. 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 approache 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

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 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.

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.

Publications

Hayden White: In Memoriam.

References

  1. ^ "Ethan Kleinberg". History and Theory. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
  2. ^ "History and Theory". doi:10.1111/(ISSN)1468-2303.
  3. ^ "François Cusset - French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States - Reviewed by Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame". ndpr.nd.edu. Archived from the original on 2009-02-20.

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