Conference on Rosenzweig and Derrida

Conference on Derrida and Rosenzweig

Derrida

“Under the heading of ‘declaring oneself Jewish,’ I would rather confide in you, and perhaps avow that these philosophical necessities have imposed themselves upon me through the modest experience of someone who, prior to becoming what you call a ‘French-speaking Jewish intellectual,’ was first a young Jew in French Algeria ... In a country where the number and the diversity of historical communities was as rich as in Jerusalem, West to East, this Jewish child could only dream of a peaceful, cultural, linguistic, and even national pluri-belonging through the experience of non-belonging: separations, rejections, ruptures, exclusions. If I did not forbid myself any lengthy first-person discourse, I would describe the contradictory movement which ... pushed a little boy expelled from school and who understood none of it, to rebel, for ever, against two ways of ‘living together’: at once against racist gregariousness, and therefore against anti-Semitic segregation, but also ... against the enclosing of conservation, of auto-protection, of a Jewish community which, naturally, legitimately seeking to defend itself ... in the direction that I then already felt as a kind of exclusive, even fusional, communitarism. [...]

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria in 1930. He studied philosophy at the École Normal Superieure in Paris, where he later went on to teach for many years, and he now is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, as well as Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Derrida has published nearly a hundred books in English alone, and countless essays and other scholarly contributions. Some of his most famous works include Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), Disseminations (1972), Glas (1974), The Truth in Painting (1978), The Post Card (1980), Of Spirit (1987), Given Time (1991), and The Politics of Friendship (1994). He has written extensively on his friend, the Jewish philosopher and Talmudist Emmanuel Lévinas, most recently in Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas (1997). Numerous books and essays have recently been published detailing the relationship of Derrida’s thought to Jewish texts, ideas, and interpretive methodologies, and Derrida’s work has increasingly taken up the issue directly, in books and essays on such topics as the figure of Abraham, the ritual of circumcision, the possibility of an ethics based on hospitality, the ill-starred German-Jewish relationship, and the nature of witnessing and testimony after the Holocaust.

The child felt at his core two contradictory things as to what this ‘living together’ could signify: on the one hand, that he could betray his own, his close ones, and Judaism, and that he had to avow this within himself, even before others, even before God, but also, on the other hand, that by this separation, this rupture, this passage toward a kind of universality beyond symbiotic communitarism and gregarious fusion, beyond even citizenship, in this very separation, it could be that he was more faithful to a certain Jewish vocation, at the risk of remaining the only, the last and the least of the Jews, in the most ambiguous sense of this expression with which he played without playing— elsewhere and fifty years later, presenting himself or sometimes also hiding himself like a kind of paradoxical Marrano who ran the risk of losing even the culture of his secret or the secret of his culture. For, at the core of this solitude, this child had to begin believing ... that any ‘living together’ supposes and guards, as its very condition, the possibility of this singular, secret, impregnable separation, from which, and from which only, a stranger accords himself to a stranger, in hospitality.”

Rosenzweig

“The Jewish people has already reached the goal toward which the nations are still moving ... But just because it has that unity, the Jewish people is bound to be outside the world that does not yet have it ... In order to keep unharmed the vision of the ultimate community it must deny itself the satisfaction the peoples of the world constantly enjoy in the functioning of their state. For the state is the ever changing guise under which time moves step by step toward eternity. So far as God’s people is concerned, eternity has already come -- even in the midst of time! ... Thus there is no universal history without the state. Only the state drops into the current of time those reflections of true eternity which, as epochs, form the building blocks of universal history.

Franz Rosenzweig

Therefore the true eternity of the eternal people must always be alien and vexing to the state, and to the history of the world. In the epochs of world history the state wields its sharp sword and carves hours of eternity in the bark of the growing tree of life, while the eternal people, untroubled and untouched, year after year add ring upon ring to the stem of its eternal life. ... Over and over, our existence sets before the eyes of the nations this true eternity of life, this turning of the hearts of the fathers to their children: wordless evidence which gives the lie to the worldly and all-too-worldly sham eternity of the historical moments of the nations ... Only the eternal people, which is not encompassed by world history, can -- at every moment -- bind creation as a whole to redemption while redemption is still to come.”

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is both one of the most famous and least read figures of 20th century European and North American Judaism. Besides his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption, largely written on aerograms to his mother from the trenches of WWI, Rosenzweig wrote several shorter essays and books, collaborated with Martin Buber on a monumental new translation of the Bible (as well as a radical theory of translation), and founded the Freie Juedische Lehrhaus in Frankfurt. Although he has long been revered as a great Jewish thinker, few people until recently have actually read his central work, The Star of Redemption (1921), with the attentiveness that it demanded. Increasingly, however, Rosenzweig has become the focus of intensive study in universities and seminaries, and these re-encounters have often been fruitful in unexpected and timely ways. Rosenzweig’s thought has already had a great impact on a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, the critical study of religion, psychoanalysis, education, and Jewish-Christian dialogue, and new implications and connections are constantly emerging. Rosenzweig’s thought is both traditional in its reliance on classical Jewish texts and commentaries, and radical in its application of those concepts to a reinterpretation of human experience and possibility. Like many of his intellectual friends and relatives in Germany at the turn of the century, Rosenzweig considered converting to Christianity, as the more “rational” religion and the historical fulfillment of the Jewish revelation; but instead Rosenzweig forged a new path by returning to the texts and practices of Judaism and comparing them to those of Christianity and Islam. In the particulars of Rabbinic Jewish thought, Rosenzweig found the basis of a fundamental philosophy and ethico-political practice that would extend to embrace all people in its universal vision of redemption.