Report to the Mellon Foundation on the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on

“The Ethics of the Neighbor”

UCLA 2003-2004

Kenneth Reinhard, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA
Principle Investigator

The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “The Ethics of the Neighbor” was conducted at UCLA during the academic year 2003-2004, and administered by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. This intensive research seminar met weekly during the fall and winter, and less frequently in the spring, when it culminated in a two day conference in May. The core group that formed the seminar was made up of graduate students and faculty from UCLA and other nearby universities, our external Mellon Fellow, Professor Dana Hollander of Macmaster University in Canada, and our two in-house graduate fellows, Molly Hiro of the Department of English, and Joseph Jenkins of the Department of Comparative Literature. The fall and winter quarters of the seminar were held in conjunction with two graduate seminars taught by Professor Kenneth Reinhard: in the fall, English 259, “Neighbors of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, Islam” and in the winter, Comp Lit 291, “Modernity and the Neighbor: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis.”

Our guest speakers and their topics this quarter were Aryeh Cohen(Professor of Talmud, University of Judaism) speaking on “The Neighbor in Torah and Talmud”; John Milbank (Professor of Religion, University of Virginia)on “The Neighbor in the New Testament”; Amy Hollywood(Professor of Religion, University of Chicago) on “Love of Neighbor in Christian Mysticism”; John Bowen (Professor of Anthropology at Washington University, St. Louis) on “The Neighbor in Islam: the Case of Indonesia”; Aron Zysow (Professor of Law, Harvard) on “The Neighbor in Islamic Law”; Galit Hasan-Rokem (Professor of Folklore, Hebrew University) on “The Neighbor in Midrash and Jewish Folklore”; and Alain Badiou (Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Superieure, Paris) on “The Neighbor and the Open.” For this concluding three day sequence with Professor Badiou, we were joined by Professor Eric Santner (Chair, Department of German, University of Chicago), who lead a session of the seminar and participated in the other discussions. We arranged to have these final sessions of the fall videotaped for pedagogical and archival purposes, and they were screened this past summer as part of the UC Humanities Research Institute Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory on “Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Event.”

The second quarter of the seminar investigated the role of the ethics of the neighbor in the philosophical and ideological transformations that produced modernity. Despite the fact that modernity often represents itself as “enlightened,” as the annulment of particular religious beliefs in the name of universal reason, an account of neighbor love derived from the interaction of the three major monotheisms plays a key role in the conceptual, social, and ethical constitution of modernity. This quarter the seminar traced the paths through which the ethics of the neighbor passed from religious discourse into modern secular culture and thought, only, towards the end of the twentieth century, and, as if from some only obscurely sensed necessity, to return to these scriptural origins in order to replumb their dark and often troubling depths. Thinkers whose texts were central here included Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Arendt, Lacan, Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Derrida. This quarter, the following visiting scholars made presentations to the seminar: David Clark (Professor of English, McMaster University) spoke on Kant’s ethical writings; Etienne Balibar(Professor of Philosophy, Université Paris-X Nanterre) spoke on Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Hent de Vries (Professor of Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University) spoke on the figure of the neighbor in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical works; Oona Eisenstadt (Professor of Religion, Pomona) spoke on the neighbor in Levinas’ religious writings; Robert Gibbs (Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto) spoke on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love; Dana Hollander (Professor of Religion, McMaster University) spoke on the Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen and his theory of neighbor-love; and Martin Kavka (Professor of Religion at Florida State University) spoke on Franz Rosenzweig’s ethics of the neighbor. The quarter ended with a three day session featuring Slavoj Žižek(University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), Eric Santner (University of Chicago), and Joan Copjec (SUNY Buffalo) “The Neighbor in Modernity: Freud, Lacan, and Levinas.”

Since the seminar had met on a weekly basis Fall and Winter Quarters, Spring Quarter involved fewer meetings. Professor Alain Badiou (École Normale Superieure) returned for three days of seminars entitled “On Love and the Neighbor,” two of which were conducted at UCLA and the third at UC Irvine (to overlap with the UC Humanities Research Institute’s residential research group on “The Ethics of the Neighbor”). Finally, the seminar culminated in a conference aimed at an academic audience, although with certain elements geared towards the general public. The first session of the conference, “The Figure of the Neighbor in Classical Jewish Texts and the History of Israel” featured talks by Menachem Lorberbaum (Tel Aviv University), “Jewish Collectivity and Gentile Otherness”; Suzanne Last Stone (Cardozo Law School), “The Neighbor, the Stranger, and Humanity’s Shared Image of God in the Jewish Legal Tradition”; David Myers (UCLA), “Politics and Piety in Kiryas Joel”; and Nomi Stolzenberg (USC Law School) “What’s Keeping the Other Out of Kiryas Joel? A Legal Perspective on a Liberal Problem.” The second session, entitled “The Neighbor in Jewish Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Texts,” featured talks by Kenneth Reinhard (UCLA), “The Ethics of the Neighbor in Jewish Thought: Universalism, Particularism, Exceptionalism”; Adam Zachary Newton(University of Texas, Austin), “‘At a Near Distance’: Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz by way of Levinas”; Michael Zank (Boston University), “The Ethics of Rebuke”; Dana Hollander (McMaster University), “Hermann Cohen on ‘the Neighbor’: Between Ethics, Politics, and Religion”; and Paul Mendes-Flohr (University of Chicago), “Love, accusative and dative. Reflections on Leviticus 19:18.” The conference also featured a special lunchtime lecture by Daniel Boyarin (UC Berkeley), entitled “Judaism and Christianity as Neighbors” and an evening roundtable on “The Concept of the Neighbor in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” with Rabbi Harold Schulweis (Temple Valley Beth Shalom), Jack Miles (The Getty Center), and Professor Mehnaz Afridi (Loyola Marymount University).

The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “The Ethics of the Neighbor” at UCLA was, from all accounts, highly successful. It managed to bring together a broad segment of the UCLA community, faculty and students from surrounding institutions, and scholars from around the country and the world for a common intellectual project, indeed for the conceptualization of a new interdisciplinary object of study. Numerous products and spin-off projects have been the result. A book co-written by three of the seminar’s participants, Kenneth Reinhard, Slavoj Zizek, and Eric Santner, entitled Neighbors, a Love Story, arose from the seminar’s discussions and is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press (Fall, 2005). A research group at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, based in Irvine, is continuing to examine the concept of the neighbor from three distinct perspectives. Among the projects anticipated by this group, which includes members of the UCLA Mellon Sawyer group, are a website that will serve as the nexus for research on the concept of the neighbor and discussion of its implications for a variety of contemporary concerns. The Mellon Foundation will be acknowledged in all publications that emerge from the seminar. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for sponsoring the seminar. It has been a stimulating and productive experience, and it promises to have a long afterlife in the publications and other projects that it will be its legacy. Moreover, it has created a paradigm for UCLA of fruitful interdisciplinary collaborative work in the humanities, one which we hope to be able to sustain in subsequent projects.

Kenneth Reinhard
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
UCLA