Jeffrey Sacks
Biographic Data
| ID | 5803172 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey Sacks |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Sacks |
| SIGNATURE | SACKS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Riverside |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Country of Words
Among the acts of the Israeli genocidal assault against the Palestinian people have been the sustained attacks upon archives, libraries, universities, schools, and museums in Gaza. These Israeli attacks upon Palestinian collective pedagogical and epistemic existence—what has been called “scholasticide”—is not new (United Nations Press Release, April 18, 2024). The present reiterates the past, from Israel’s theft of Palestinian books in 1948 and t…
Loving Sentient Flesh
I want to share that I love and admire this book, that I love it and that I have not been able to cease doing so, and that this never-ceasing, this excess in love over the thinking of being “as such” is what will have been at stake in my love of R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black. It is a book that extends from readings of Plato and Aristotle to W. E. B. Du Bois, al-Jāhiẓ, Ibn Khaldūn, Nabile Farès, and more, and …
The Philological Thesis
This essay addresses the principal form and practice for linguistic domination, philology, to draw out a sense in which philology discombobulates the stabilizing terms it privileges and sends out at the world. This essay traces several moments in a history of the disorganization of linguistic and social form—in the poetic writing of Paul Celan and the Arabic-language translations of Celan offered by the Iraqi poet Khālid al-Ma‘ālī; in Walter Benj…
The Resistance to Boycott
This article traces the relations between the 2017 vote of the Modern Language Association (MLA) against supporting the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and the practices of reading and literary interpretation upon which the MLA is founded. It argues that the MLA's affirmation of the exteriority of literature and literature studies to boycott advances a Bildungs-centric conception of language, literature, and self-understanding, which the…
Poetic Theology
The article offers a reading of the letters of Paul in relation to their interpretation by a number of figures – Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou. It traces the persistence of an economy of terms in Paul, in relation to the part and the whole, death and life, spirit and the flesh, and others, to argue that this economy morphs and transforms itself in the modern world, imparting and imposing a sociality of living and d…
Philologesis in Adūnīs, al-Maʿarrī, al-Fārābī
This paper offers a reading of texts—of Adūnīs, al-Maʿarrī, and al-Fārābī—and argues that for each, however differently, language declines the Bildungs -centric terms and reading practices into which it has been conscripted in literary and colonial modernity. The article opens with Adūnīs and considers the reflection on the singular and the plural given in his poem Mufrad bi-ṣīghat al-jamʿ , framing the reflection on language and interpretation o…
Against Simplicity
Against Simplicity:The Languages of Pain in Talal Asad and Etel Adnan Jeffrey Sacks Some of us are familiar with these private disasters which accumulate and become daily bread and daily experience. —Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country It's not that critique isn't useful, indeed it is and doing detailed criticism is generally more useful—but for tactical purposes rather than in some absolute sense. —Talal Asad, "The Trouble o…
The Philological Present
Iterations of Loss
In a series of exquisite close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, Jeffrey Sacks considers the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Addressing the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn, Sacks demonst…
Palestine and Sovereign Violence
Sacks’s essay offers a reading of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism to argue that it offers a critique of sovereign violence. Taking as a point of departure the hermeneutic and interpretive violence occasioned in Israel’s “Operation Pillars of Defense” in November 2012, and the statement offered by Israeli Minister Eli Yishai that “the goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years,…
Untranslatability, or Mourning Translation (Darwish with Schmitt and Agamben)
Untranslatability, or Mourning Translation (Darwish with Schmitt and Agamben) Jeffrey Sacks for Fady Nahnu al-duyuf `ala al-farasha —Mahmoud Darwish, Jidariyya One must translate. But what is the provenance of this imperative? Does this imperative not respond to a call for translation, if also translatability? One must translate, because language is already more than one, and because there is already translation, between and within, and this impe…
Latinity
Latinity Jeffrey Sacks (bio) Sunt enim quaedam uerba certarum linguarum, quae in usum alterius lin-guae per interpretationem transire non possint. —St. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana In a debate that took place during the tenth Christian century between Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus, the translator of Aristotle's Poetics into Arabic, and Abu Sa'id al-Sirafi, a scholar of jurisprudence, theology, and philology, the latter compels the former to form…
Palestine and Sovereign Violence
Sacks’s essay offers a reading of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism to argue that it offers a critique of sovereign violence. Taking as a point of departure the hermeneutic and interpretive violence occasioned in Israel’s “Operation Pillars of Defense” in November 2012, and the statement offered by Israeli Minister Eli Yishai that “the goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years,…
Latinity
Latinity Jeffrey Sacks (bio) Sunt enim quaedam uerba certarum linguarum, quae in usum alterius lin-guae per interpretationem transire non possint. —St. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana In a debate that took place during the tenth Christian century between Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus, the translator of Aristotle's Poetics into Arabic, and Abu Sa'id al-Sirafi, a scholar of jurisprudence, theology, and philology, the latter compels the former to form…
Latinity
Latinity Jeffrey Sacks (bio) Sunt enim quaedam uerba certarum linguarum, quae in usum alterius lin-guae per interpretationem transire non possint. —St. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana In a debate that took place during the tenth Christian century between Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus, the translator of Aristotle's Poetics into Arabic, and Abu Sa'id al-Sirafi, a scholar of jurisprudence, theology, and philology, the latter compels the former to form…
Untranslatability, or Mourning Translation (Darwish with Schmitt and Agamben)
Untranslatability, or Mourning Translation (Darwish with Schmitt and Agamben) Jeffrey Sacks for Fady Nahnu al-duyuf `ala al-farasha —Mahmoud Darwish, Jidariyya One must translate. But what is the provenance of this imperative? Does this imperative not respond to a call for translation, if also translatability? One must translate, because language is already more than one, and because there is already translation, between and within, and this impe…
Palestine and Sovereign Violence
Sacks’s essay offers a reading of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism to argue that it offers a critique of sovereign violence. Taking as a point of departure the hermeneutic and interpretive violence occasioned in Israel’s “Operation Pillars of Defense” in November 2012, and the statement offered by Israeli Minister Eli Yishai that “the goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years,…
Iterations of Loss
In a series of exquisite close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, Jeffrey Sacks considers the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Addressing the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn, Sacks demonst…
The Philological Present
Poetic Theology
The article offers a reading of the letters of Paul in relation to their interpretation by a number of figures – Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou. It traces the persistence of an economy of terms in Paul, in relation to the part and the whole, death and life, spirit and the flesh, and others, to argue that this economy morphs and transforms itself in the modern world, imparting and imposing a sociality of living and d…
Philologesis in Adūnīs, al-Maʿarrī, al-Fārābī
This paper offers a reading of texts—of Adūnīs, al-Maʿarrī, and al-Fārābī—and argues that for each, however differently, language declines the Bildungs -centric terms and reading practices into which it has been conscripted in literary and colonial modernity. The article opens with Adūnīs and considers the reflection on the singular and the plural given in his poem Mufrad bi-ṣīghat al-jamʿ , framing the reflection on language and interpretation o…
Against Simplicity
Against Simplicity:The Languages of Pain in Talal Asad and Etel Adnan Jeffrey Sacks Some of us are familiar with these private disasters which accumulate and become daily bread and daily experience. —Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country It's not that critique isn't useful, indeed it is and doing detailed criticism is generally more useful—but for tactical purposes rather than in some absolute sense. —Talal Asad, "The Trouble o…
The Resistance to Boycott
This article traces the relations between the 2017 vote of the Modern Language Association (MLA) against supporting the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and the practices of reading and literary interpretation upon which the MLA is founded. It argues that the MLA's affirmation of the exteriority of literature and literature studies to boycott advances a Bildungs-centric conception of language, literature, and self-understanding, which the…
The Philological Thesis
This essay addresses the principal form and practice for linguistic domination, philology, to draw out a sense in which philology discombobulates the stabilizing terms it privileges and sends out at the world. This essay traces several moments in a history of the disorganization of linguistic and social form—in the poetic writing of Paul Celan and the Arabic-language translations of Celan offered by the Iraqi poet Khālid al-Ma‘ālī; in Walter Benj…
Loving Sentient Flesh
I want to share that I love and admire this book, that I love it and that I have not been able to cease doing so, and that this never-ceasing, this excess in love over the thinking of being “as such” is what will have been at stake in my love of R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black. It is a book that extends from readings of Plato and Aristotle to W. E. B. Du Bois, al-Jāhiẓ, Ibn Khaldūn, Nabile Farès, and more, and …
Country of Words
Among the acts of the Israeli genocidal assault against the Palestinian people have been the sustained attacks upon archives, libraries, universities, schools, and museums in Gaza. These Israeli attacks upon Palestinian collective pedagogical and epistemic existence—what has been called “scholasticide”—is not new (United Nations Press Release, April 18, 2024). The present reiterates the past, from Israel’s theft of Palestinian books in 1948 and t…
Philosophy (9 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Reading (process (6 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · History (4 works)