Now available to an English-speaking audience, this book presents a groundbreaking theoretical analysis of memory, identity and culture. It investigates how cultures remember, arguing that human ...memory exists and is communicated in two ways, namely inter-human interaction and in external systems of notation, such as writing, which can span generations. Dr Assmann defines two theoretical concepts of cultural memory, differentiating between the long-term memory of societies, which can span up to 3,000 years, and communicative memory, which is typically restricted to 80 to 100 years. He applies this theoretical framework to case studies of four specific cultures, illustrating the function contexts and specific achievements, including the state, international law, religion and science. Ultimately, his research demonstrates that memory is not simply a means of retaining information, but rather a force that can shape cultural identity and allow cultures to respond creatively to both daily challenges and catastrophic changes.
For thousands of years, our world has been shaped by biblical monotheism. But its hallmark—a distinction between one true God and many false gods—was once a new and radical idea. Of God ...and Gods explores the revolutionary newness of biblical theology against a background of the polytheism that was once so commonplace.     Jan Assmann, one of the most distinguished scholars of ancient Egypt working today, traces the concept of a true religion back to its earliest beginnings in Egypt and describes how this new idea took shape in the context of the older polytheistic world that it rejected. He offers readers a deepened understanding of Egyptian polytheism and elaborates on his concept of the “Mosaic distinction,” which conceives an exclusive and emphatic Truth that sets religion apart from beliefs shunned as superstition, paganism, or heresy.     Without a theory of polytheism, Assmann contends, any adequate understanding of monotheism is impossible. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
En este artículo, Assmann hace eco de la crítica a las religiones “de libro” expuesta hace cuando menos 130 años atrás por Max Müller. Pero lo hace de manera por demás notable al incorporar la idea ...fundamental de la religión como lenguaje que se comunica mediante dispositivos técnicos variados (rituales, sortilegios y por supuesto la escritura alfabética que terminará constituyendo un canon, una semántica religiosa propiamente dicha) con consecuencias definitivas para los modos de religiosidad y para las formas que adquieren las culturas. Assmann define conclaridad a las religiones mundiales como religiones transnacionales sujetas a planteamientos misiológicos y, por tanto, susceptibles de incorporarse con pleno derecho a los estudios poscoloniales. Estamos también frente a un texto donde la semántica religiosa y la semántica científica tienen un feliz encuentro. Una de las principales contribuciones de Assmann a los estudios culturales es el concepto de memoria cultural, desarrollado 30 años atrás (Assmann, 1992) y que puede igualmente encontrarse en idioma inglés (Assmann, 2011).
In this article, Assmann echoes the criticism of “book” religions made at least 130 years ago by Max Muller. But he does so in an extremely remarkable way. He incorporates the fundamental idea of religion as a language that communicates with various technical devices (rituals, spells, and of course alphabetic writing that will end up constituting a canon, a religious semantics proper) with definitive consequences for the modes of religiosity and for the forms which cultures acquire. Assmann clearly defines world religions as transnational religions subject to missiological approaches and, therefore, capable of being fully incorporated into postcolonial studies. We are also facing a text where religious and scientific semantics have a fortunate encounter.
The shift from polytheism to monotheism changed the world radically. Akhenaten and Moses-a figure of history and a figure of tradition-symbolize this shift in its incipient, revolutionary stages and ...represent two civilizations that were brought into the closest connection as early as the Book of Exodus, where Egypt stands for the old world to be rejected and abandoned in order to enter the new one.
Standing at the very foundation of monotheism, and so of Western culture, Moses is a figure not of history, but of memory. As such, he is the quintessential subject for the innovative historiography ...Jan Assmann both defines and practices in this work, the study of historical memory--a study, in this case, of the ways in which factual and fictional events and characters are stored in religious beliefs and transformed in their philosophical justification, literary reinterpretation, philological restitution (or falsification), and psychoanalytic demystification.
To account for the complexities of the foundational event through which monotheism was established, Moses the Egyptian goes back to the short-lived monotheistic revolution of the Egyptian king Akhenaten (1360-1340 B.C.E. ). Assmann traces the monotheism of Moses to this source, then shows how his followers denied the Egyptians any part in the origin of their beliefs and condemned them as polytheistic idolaters. Thus began the cycle in which every "counter-religion," by establishing itself as truth, denounced all others as false. Assmann reconstructs this cycle as a pattern of historical abuse, and tracks its permutations from ancient sources, including the Bible, through Renaissance debates over the basis of religion to Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism. One of the great Egyptologists of our time, and an exceptional scholar of history and literature, Assmann is uniquely equipped for this undertaking--an exemplary case study of the vicissitudes of historical memory that is also a compelling lesson in the fluidity of cultural identity and beliefs.
In both works—in Schoenberg's even more than Freud's—the tragic aspect of the Moses figure and, in close connection with this, the ambivalent, even problematic, character of monotheism is expressed.1 ...It would be appealing to compare these two Moses works, but since this Sigmund Freud lecture is on Freud's birthday today, I want to emphasize and start with Freud's Moses book. In this essay, he interprets Moses' gaze and gesture from the scene of the dance around the golden calf, where according to the biblical account, Moses smashes the tablets of the law in anger. According to Freud, this Moses is an Egyptian, and indeed a follower of Akhenaten, that heretic king who abolished the traditional religion in Egypt and introduced the new cult the one God of Sun and Light, Aton. Akhenaten discovers the sun as the one and only origin of all life; Moses represents the covenant of God and the principle of exclusive faithfulness to this one, in full recognition of the existence of other gods (otherwise the commandment of faith would have no meaning).
Assmann uses Moses as a figure of memory to study the ways in which factual and fictional events and characters are stored in religious beliefs and transformed in their philosophical justification, ...literary reinterpretation, philological restitution (or falsification), and psychoanalytic demystification.
The paper criticizes Karl Jasper’s notion of the “axial age” with which the German philosopher dates the emergence of modern man around the middle of the first millennium BC. According to ...Egyptologist Jan Assmann such historical and mental change has indeed taken place in Antiquity, although not simultaneously, let alone unambiguously and unidirectionally as suggested by the talk of “axiality”. The use of historical and philological data to examine theoretical claims makes visible the central contribution of the text, which lies in the analysis and the further elaboration of the terminology we use in order to extend our understanding of our own and other cultures.
