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VIBS
Volume 274
Robert Ginsberg
Founding Editor
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Executive Editor
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a volume in
Philosophy and Religion
PAR
Kenneth A. Bryson, Editor
JEWISH THOUGHT, UTOPIA,
AND REVOLUTION
Edited by
Elena Namli
Jayne Svenungsson
Alana M. Vincent
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3833-2
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1078-2
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
Printed in the Netherlands
Philosophy and Religion
(PAR)
Kenneth A. Bryson
Editor
Jim Kanaris, Editor. Polyphonic Thinking and the Divine. 2013. VIBS 257
Rem B. Edwards. What Caused the Big Bang? 2001. VIBS 115
EIGHT Berlin Debates: The Jews and the Russian Revolution 111
OLEG BUDNITSKII
TWELVE Left (in) Time: Hegel, Benjamin, and Derrida Facing the
Status Quo 173
BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON
INDEX 205
INTRODUCTION
Elena Namli, Jayne Svenungsson, and Alana M. Vincent
Where we think makes a difference to how we can think. Knowing that I was
going to be thinking in Vilna, the city where my father was born—or so his
driving license says—and close to Suvalki, where the family lived before
moving to Warsaw sometime in the early 1920s, created its own disturbances
in my thinking and my writing. I was making a return journey, but could in no
sense return. What was appropriate to think in Vilna and what inherited
relationship did I have to this city—the Jerusalem of the North that held a
particular light throughout my childhood? It was a city that I loved from a
distance, though I also knew that terrible things had happened there, and that a
vibrant center of Jewish learning had been destroyed.
I grew up dreaming of Vilna and knowing that my father, who died
when I was just five, had not really survived Hitler’s war against the Jews. He
had been the only member of his family who was outside Poland when the
war began—everyone else died in Warsaw, in the Warsaw ghetto or in
Treblinka. My father could not live knowing this, but somehow I had to live
with this knowledge and somehow keep it hidden away as I was to become
“English” and so secure a possible future for the family. I was to know that
my father was a Litvak—but did this make me a Litvak? And how did his
particular brand of Jewish orthodoxy tacitly shape my own experience and
history? Did I have to escape and take a different journey in order to be able
to feel safe? What were the inheritances and excitements that I carried, even if
I could not easily share them? I grew up with Buber and his Hassidic Tales
and with readings from the Baal Shem Tov—these sayings resonated, even if
they existed in some tension with schooling that taught us histories of Kings
and Queens of England that we had to learn by heart. But there were
subterranean echoes that carried traces of thinking Jewish that I somehow
absorbed—through Freud, but also later as a philosophy student at Oxford in
the middle 1960s through Wittgenstein, as well as through teachers such as
Isaiah Berlin, who was open to traditions of Russian thought in addition to the
Counter-Enlightenment and German Romanticism.
10 VICTOR JELENIEWSKI SEIDLER
became “my uncles and aunts.” They had names I was to discover and learn to
mourn.
2. Embodying Philosophy
progress. European modernity alone could take its “civilization” for granted as
it shaped, through Descartes and Kant, the superior terms of a culture that was
set against an uncivilized nature.
Though Hegel challenged the terms of a Cartesian mind that treated
consciousness as universal, and so as ahistorical, in showing the historical
nature of consciousness he remained within the secularized Christian terms
that shaped disembodied conceptions of knowledge. A Platonic/Christian
tradition insisted on the need to transcend physicality, as Gods were now
removed from the feminine and earthly realm that they had occupied in
Minoan thinking, instead taking residence in the heavens in classical Greek
culture. We were to look to the heavens and transcend the earthly realm that
came to be disdained in contrast to the spiritual realm.
A Christianity that was to disavow its Jewish sources, as I argue in
Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture (Seidler, 2007), was to be refigured
within Platonic Greek traditions which defined “the human” in radical
opposition to “the animal,” so that it is only as Kant frames it, through
transcending our animal natures—our emotions, feelings, and desires, which
Kant gathers as “inclinations”—that we can acknowledge the dualistic
framing of “human nature” whereby, as I argued in Kant, Respect and
Injustice: The Limits Of Liberal Moral Theory (Seidler, 1986), it is “reason”
alone that defines what it means to be “human” so that to become human we
have to control our “animal” natures.
This is not to speak against reason but to show, as Wittgenstein explores,
the care we need in the ways we think reason and the ways we are led astray
in our thinking when we contrast reason with nature, minds against bodies,
spirit against flesh. For example, Wittgenstein shows, among other things, the
danger of assuming that all sentences in the indicative mode can be regarded
as descriptions:
I hear the word ‘I am afraid’. I ask: ‘In what connection did you say
this? Was it a sigh from the bottom of your heart, was it a confession,
was it a self-observation […] ?’ (Wittgenstein, 1996, p. 47).
3. Embodying Redemption
is only through their relationship with men in heterosexual marriage that they
can hope to secure a reliable inner relationship with reason. In relation to the
colonized, who are supposedly trapped in their relationships with nature, it is
only through an external relationship with their European colonial masters
that they can hope to make a transition from tradition to modernity, from
colonial dependence towards independence.
So it is that feminisms and ecology, in different ways, challenge the idea
of progress as involving the control and domination of nature. In their
reclaiming of bodies and sexualities as part of what it means to be human,
these traditions echoed Freud, who was also revolutionary in his challenge to
the repression of sexuality and the silent sufferings that it produced that had
been treated as “subjective” and “personal” and so excluded from the
discourses of oppression and injustice that were legitimated within the public
realm of politics alone. In their different ways, ecology’s reclaiming of the
earthly and feminisms’ reclaiming of bodies and the everyday shaped an
embodied utopianism that was “thinking Jewish” in the ways that it allowed
for the sacred in the transformation of everyday relationships. The spiritual no
longer needed to involve an escape from the earthly into a transcendent realm
of the spiritual, but could involve the revolutionary sacralization of the
everyday within equal relationships that recognized others as equally created
in the image of God. This was a vision that also informed the secular politics
of the Bund who rejected the centralization of the Bolshevik party and sought
a more libertarian expression of Yiddish culture through the transformation of
everyday relationships.
This could resonate with what Georg Lukacs identified as an “anti-
capitalist romantic” dimension in his writings, even after he joined the
Communist Party. As Löwy (1992) argues, like many intellectuals of German
cultural origins both Jewish and non-Jewish, Lukacs “probably discovered the
spiritual universe of mystical Jewish religiosity through Buber’s books on
Hasidism” (Löwy, 1992, p. 145). In 1911, Lukacs wrote to Buber saying that
it has been “a great experience” for him to read particularly The Legend of the
Baal-Shem which he said was “unforgettable” (ibid.). They later met when
Lukacs visited Buber in Heppenheim, the village Buber lived in.
Lukacs was attracted to the messianic aspiration of Hasidism, which he
discussed in his piece entitled “Jewish Mysticism”—the only paper he wrote
on a Jewish theme and which he translated or got re-published (Lukacs,
1911). Though he does not seem to engage with the transformation of
everyday life, he does in a later essay on Dostoevsky refer to the idea that the
Shabbat was “the source of the world to come” or the reflection of
redemption, and quoted a passage to this effect from The Legend of the Baal-
Schem. It was the idea that heaven could be lived on earth so that the heavenly
could be made earthly as much as the earthly be spiritualized. For on Shabbat,
people could experience the heavenly for themselves as a kind of spark that
was alive in their lives. Of course there are different traditions, and while
Tikkun Olam—“Repairing the World” 17
Vilna was associated with a rationalist Judaism that was critical of the
spontaneous heart-feeling that was to be celebrated through dance and song as
a way of getting closer to God within Hasidism, it was the anti-rationalist and
the “romantic” aspects of Judaism that drew Lukacs.
This was opposed to the rationalist image of the Jewish religion that was
conveyed by the Haskalah, the liberal Jewish Enlightenment and German
sociologists such as Max Weber and Werner Sombart. For Lukacs, as Löwy
notes, it was “messianism, which bore from within a true
‘ethical democracy’” (ibid., p. 147). But Löwy is also right to insist that
Lukacs was “one of the least touched by the Jewish problematic,” and that his
“relationship to Jewish messianism remained largely ‘subterranean’ […] His
reflections and his utopian/revolutionary aspirations always remained within a
universal-humanist and world-wide framework” (ibid., p. 150). Under the
influence of the Russian Revolution, in his article “Bolshevism as a Moral
Problem,” it was the proletariat that was presented as the “bearer of social
redemption for mankind” and the “Messiah-class of world history” (ibid., p.
149).
In contrast, it had been a vision of a Yiddish inspired “ethical
democracy” that informed the libertarian socialism of the Bund even if they
thought of themselves as anti-religious and secular. Possibly it is the
transformation of the everyday that helps to redefine “the political” in ways
that feminisms and ecological movements were also to do late in the twentieth
century. It was in their different reclaimings of an embodied ethics and,
possibly with Levinas, a shared sense of the priority of the ethical in relation
to the epistemological, that they show the resonance of Jerusalem and its
necessity as a balance and critical engagement to Athens that has largely been
able to define Western culture, with some very destructive inheritances.
4. Thinking Jewish
Wittgenstein contrasted his friend Drury’s “Greek” religious ideas with his
own thoughts, which were, he said, “one hundred per cent Hebraic.” Drury
had admired Origen’s vision of a final restitution of all things, a restoration to
their former glory, but to Wittgenstein it was right to consider this a heresy
because “It would make nonsense of everything else. If what we do now is to
make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away
with.” It was important for Wittgenstein to recognize that what we do now in
our relationships, both with ourselves and with others, makes a difference. In
this way, he was also questioning Ernst Bloch’s sensitivity to the restorative
aspects of messianism—the eschatological return of all things to their original
perfection mentioned in his Geist der Utopie. We can only appreciate the
seriousness of life if we can recognize that what we do, not just what we
think, makes a significant difference. It is the realization that you also find in
18 VICTOR JELENIEWSKI SEIDLER
Exodus, that it is deeds that matter and that what we think emerges out of
what we do, that marks his thinking as Hebraic. But this is to question a
utopianism that is locked into the significance of images against which people
evaluate themselves and their experience, and to suggest an embodied
utopianism as an attention to the everyday details of life and relationships.
Relationships will end, and people will be hurt, but this is something
they have to accept and live through, as out of the hurt something else might
emerge that might leave them with a different sense of what matters in life.
But there is a tendency to escape from “negative emotions,” such as hurt or
pain, as if we can be distracted, as if there is nothing that can be learnt as we
live through these experiences. Often it helps if we have friends we can share
these hurts with, since they are made real through being shared with others.
As we are listened to, so we can also share more of what is hurting for us and
trace the different stages we are living through. This is to embody the times
we are living through, rather than to seek ways of escaping as we recognize
there is no way of “fast forwarding” what we are living through, even if it
feels unbearably painful and we feel like a yoyo, shifting between different
emotions that can seem equally difficult to tolerate.
A few days before his death, Wittgenstein was visited in Cambridge by
Drury, and remarked to him: “Isn’t it curious that, although I know I have not
long to live, I never find myself thinking about a ‘future life’. All my interest
is still on this life and the writing I am still able to do” (Monk, 1990, p. 580).
Wittgenstein was concerned, as Monk frames it, with “a state of ethical
seriousness and integrity that would survive the scrutiny of even that most
stern of judges, his own conscience” (ibid., p. 580). This meant an attention to
how he should be living his everyday life, and for a while he considered
becoming a doctor because that would allow him to help people; he even
considered moving to find work in the Soviet Union.
George Thompson, a Greek scholar who knew Wittgenstein well in the
1930s, said in relation to his attitude towards Marxism: “He was opposed to it
in theory, but supported it in practice.” During the political upheavals of the
1930s, Wittgenstein’s sympathies were with the working class and the
unemployed and that his allegiance, as Monk says, “broadly speaking, was
with the Left” (ibid., p. 343). Thompson spoke of Wittgenstein’s “growing
political awareness” during those years and testified that “He was alive to the
evils of unemployment and fascism and the growing dangers of war” (ibid., p.
343). It seemed as if he wanted to settle in Russia as a manual worker, or
possibly to take up medicine, but to abandon philosophy. We could say that he
wanted a different experience and was also partly influenced by Tolstoy in his
desire to experience manual labor on a collective farm. As Monk argues, he
was attracted by Keynes’s portrait in his Short View of Russia which, “while
depreciating Marxism as an economic theory, applauded its practice in Russia
as a new religion, in which there were no supernatural beliefs but, rather,
deeply held religious attitudes” (ibid., p. 348).
Tikkun Olam—“Repairing the World” 19
and reality as we work to make a more just and equal world. This is the work
we do together as part of tikkun olam—the repairing of the world that is also a
healing of ourselves as we learn to live with greater truth and justice within an
unjust and oppressive world.
Two
JEWISH HOPE
VERSUS REVOLUTIONARY HOPE
Catherine Chalier
The person who hopes starts going toward a horizon that they can now neither
perceive nor predict. Yet this horizon already touches them, and prevents
them from remaining where they are. Their hope might be founded on
imagination, on a bet, on reason, or on a promise, but it does not rely on any
precise positive knowledge that one could transmit to someone else since hope
always exceeds what we know. To hope means not to agree to the idea that
fate or necessity are the true and ultimate explanation of what is and also to
negate the notion that amor fati is the noblest wisdom. It also means to
perceive how we may get out of tragedy and despair while at the same time
recognizing their terrible force and danger in our own lives. The one who
hopes is not a naïve person, at least not always! Indeed, in spite of a nihilism
that is so often prevalent nowadays, and which describes it as a pathetic or a
laughable attitude, hope does not disappear from most human lives. On the
contrary, it always seems ready to come back in our lives on the pretense of
the humblest signs of encouragement. Hope may concern the history of a
precise person, of a group of people, or (as we shall see) of humanity as such.
In any case, hope urges one who is vigilant enough to discern new
possibilities that otherwise remain hidden in a particular situation, as well as
in the human condition as such, and to work for the realization of these
possibilities. Yet, as Henri Bergson rightly pointed out, it might be the other
way round: it is because one works for their realization that these possibilities
reveal themselves as such and give us hope.
Although some philosophers (for instance the Stoics or Spinoza) think
that hope is but a dream or an imaginary consolation for the person who
suffers without being wise enough to agree to their fate, hope remains a great
force in most lives. When human beings fight for justice or for curing terrible
illnesses, they hope they will succeed and their hope is also for times to come,
which means they are able to transcend their own finitude. It even seems that
without hope no one could live.
From a biblical point of view, hope is first justified by God’s promise to
Abraham that he will become a great people and that in him all the peoples of
the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12:2–3). We will see later on that the
prophets have emphasized the idea that human history is not governed by fate,
but depends on our agreeing to God’s promise about a happier future for the
24 CATHERINE CHALIER
Jewish people and for the families of the earth. This biblical hope also leads
us to think about death as something other than an ultimate defeat. It is even
said in the Talmud that one main question will be asked to us when we will
arrive in the world to come (HaOlam haba): “Did you keep hope alive in
yourself during your life?”
In this chapter I want to explain in greater detail the meaning of hope in
the Bible, and especially in the prophetic texts (Nevi’im) since their vision of a
happier future (which has also been described as messianism) has been a
reference for many secular thinkers. I will turn to Ernst Bloch as one of these
secular thinkers and explain why he thought Marxism could be understood as
a messianic hope without any reference to a special Messiah or to the biblical
promise. Then I will turn to Emmanuel Levinas (who was much interested in
Bloch’s work) and explain why hope requires from us not only an engagement
in favor of a better future, but also a radical change in the way we understand
our finitude. I will conclude by turning to some more traditional Jewish
understandings of hope and I will vindicate the following position: if we
forget the promise (as is the case in a secular attitude), we also forget an
important—and probably the most important—dimension of hope.
1. Biblical Hope
In the Bible hope (tiqva) is certainly the golden thread that prevents people
from believing that brutality and wars, suffering and despair are the true
reality. Whenever something unhappy and tragic happens the Bible is always
looking for a new perspective: after Abel’s murder by his brother Cain comes
the birth of Seth (Genesis 4:25) whose own son, Enoch, is characterized by
hope according to Philo; Philo (1965, §138, p. 103) uses the word elpis—
which is translated by the word “hope”—and he quotes the Greek translation
of the Bible (the Septuagint) according to which Enoch “hoped to call upon
God’s name” (Genesis 4, 26). The terrible jealousy of Joseph’s brothers gives
way to a reconciliation; God puts an end to the bondage of the Hebrew people
in Egypt and they are set free.
How is it that hope is so strong in the Bible? It is founded neither on a
bet or a calculation of one’s own good luck, nor on a reasonable or imaginary
better future, but only on God’s promise. A promise is a gift which is also an
engagement for the future. Israel’s faith (emunah) testifies to this promise—
which does not mean that this future will occur without facing hard and even
terrible times. Hope also needs courage and moral resistance to one’s own
despair.
The promise is linked to the future and not to an escape from time (as in
Plato for instance), but is it necessarily accomplished by history, as some
philosophers (such as Kant and Hegel) would have it? We know that Kant, for
instance, was waiting for God’s or nature’s “plan” to be realized in history in
spite of, and thanks to, the wars that prevail both in Kant’s time and still in
Jewish Hope Versus Revolutionary Hope 25
our own. One day, peace and justice would be overcome (Kant, 1985, p. 202).
Although this description of the ultimate times might be compared to some of
the prophets’ images of the future that God has promised to Israel (see Isaiah
65:25; 66:14 for instance), such a philosophical rationalization does not
recognize what biblical hope really is. It is not reducible to the secular hope
which both the Age of Enlightenment and later on the revolutionary
movements have approved of, arguing that a just and peaceful society will
emerge from the terrible struggles that occur in history.
What is the difference between biblical hope and this revolutionary
hope? In the first case—in the first case only—the promise enlightens the
future, it helps us rely on the “may be” that is hidden in the events that occur,
even when they are terrible (see Lamentations 3:29), but only provided that
we don’t forget the Covenant with God which gives this hope its true
signification. In order for future times to be peaceful and just, we must also
obey this Covenant. That is to say: we must agree to transform ourselves,
otherwise this good future will never occur. When Jeremiah says: “O Lord,
the hope of Israel (mikvé Israel), all that forsake Thee shall be ashamed” (17,
13), he is well aware that such a desertion is not only a private affair without
consequences for other people, but in fact concerns the history of the whole
people.
The great prophets, who have given biblical hope its most important
features in the midst of the terrible events that were happening in their time,
never separated this hope from the promise and from the necessary
transformation of each one among the people. The prophets’ strength did not
come from their own cleverness or imagination, but from the promise. This
hope was not only linked to the future but also to the past. Let me explain this
crucial point.
Contrary to common understanding, what we hope for is not an object
(be it peace, justice, good health) exterior to our hope. If such were the case, it
would mean that hope is but compensation, a reward or a salary that one may
expect to receive one day. According to Levinas, who is here faithful to this
biblical tradition concerning hope, “the expectation of fortunate events is not
of itself hope,” because if this was the case, then it would mean that what
remains irreparable in the past would be forgotten. “This compensating time is
not enough for hope. For it is not enough that tears be wiped away or death
avenged; no tear is to be lost, no death without a resurrection […] The true
object of hope is the Messiah, or salvation” (Levinas, 1978, p. 93). Now,
in the conception of time which fits our life in the world and which we
shall […] call the time of economy (ibid., 89–90).
Opposite to such an ordinary view point about hope, “all the acuteness of
hope in the midst of despair comes from the exigency that the very instant of
despair be redeemed […] hope hopes for the present itself” (ibid., 94). It also
means that even the most fortunate end of history, even the happiness of
humanity as a whole, does not justify the suffering of the individual.
We see here that Levinas criticizes a teleological interpretation of history
that justifies the suffering of the individual as means for a better future.
According to him, such an interpretation—be it a religious one or a secular
one—always misses the point of hope, and is also impossible in the face of
terrible sufferings that we must never consider as means for something else.
No theodicy, not even a secular one, is possible after the terrible events that
happened in the twentieth century.
In the text that I have quoted, Levinas refers to the Messiah and he links
his name to “the caress of a consoler which softly comes in our pain” and
whose concern is “the very instant of physical pain, which is then no longer
condemned to itself, is transported ‘elsewhere’ by the movement of the caress,
and is freed from the vice-grip of ‘oneself’, finds ‘fresh air’, a dimension and
a future. Or rather, it announces more than a simple future, a future where the
present will have the benefit of a recall” (ibid., 93). According to the Talmud
(Sanhedrin 98b) one of the Messiah’s names is indeed “the Consoler”
(Menaḥem) and Levinas views it as the vocation of human subjectivity as
such. The Messiah is not a special man that will come some day and set
history free from all sufferings; rather, he stands for our human vocation as
such.
From a Jewish viewpoint, in order to keep God’s promise alive in one’s
own psyche, one has to remember that although the temporality par
excellence of hope is the future, it is of vital importance to remain in touch
with the “beginning.” The memory of the “beginning,” of God’s first words
when He created the world—a creation that happens now—and when He gave
us His Torah—which also happens now—gives us strength to persevere in our
desire for justice and peace in spite of all the tragedies that contradict it. This
is what vindicates hope and, the Rabbi of Ger argues, this is also the
testimony of Israel (Alter, 1999/2000, p. 231). Hope is only meaningful in a
world that remains unaccomplished, a world which is still “to be made”
(la’asot) (Genesis 2:2); a world in which God’s promise that He will be He
who He will be (Exodus 3, 14) still remains waiting for its fulfillment.
Contrary to Christian insistence that this fulfillment has been accomplished in
the death and resurrection of Christ, Jews protest that God’s Kingdom is
incompatible with all the injustices, the starvations and the unremitting wars
that prevail. Yet if the Messiah who would have delivered us from this terrible
burden has not come, it is because we don’t behave as though we were
Jewish Hope Versus Revolutionary Hope 27
ourselves the Messiah; the continued absence of the Messiah is evidence that
our hope is not strong enough. The messianic times are not separable from the
certainty that the root of the Messiah’s soul is hidden in each person’s psyche
(Ha-Kohen, 1994, p. 55).
What, then, can be said about revolutionary hope?
2. Revolutionary Hope
us ground for hope especially when it describes how the Hebrews escaped
from their bondage in Egypt. Hope is also founded on God’s answer to Moses
when He tells him that His name is “I shall be who I shall be” (Exodus 3:14).
Bloch says the Bible is most interesting because it gives us hope in the future
by teaching us that history is not yet accomplished. Human beings don’t have
to wait for a new Moses, they have to fight for the success of justice, freedom,
peace, and happiness which are real possibilities although they still remain
hidden. When Isaiah reminds the people of the fast which God has chosen,
that is to say, to “loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to
let the oppressed go free, and […to] break every yoke […] to deal one’s bread
to the hungry and to bring the poor that are cast out to one’s house” (58:6–7),
Bloch could understand this prophecy as describing some of the main features
of the “Homeland” (Heimat) he was expecting in due time.
On the one hand, Bloch is interested in the dreams of human beings
since it means they do not accept defeat. He writes in praise of utopia and
imagination, which show that human subjective life is greater than what is.
The category of possibility is thus one main category of the subjective life
according to him. On the other hand, he takes for granted that the world itself
is not “compact,” not yet at the end of its own possibilities, and he describes it
as a “process.” Bloch is a Marxist who does not believe that “progress” is a
necessary device. He is optimistic, but not in a simple ideological way. He
says that this historical process relies on certain conditions that have to mature
before human beings can play their part. His optimism is that of an activist
who wants to liberate the oppressed elements within a society, but knows that
everything is not possible at once. He writes in favor of a new covenant: no
more a covenant between God and human beings, but a covenant between
human beings’ dreams and the dispositions toward constructive change that
are already inscribed within the depth of reality. One has to act according to
the possibilities of the historical process, which means one has to be on the
“Front” (Bloch’s word).
The philosopher speaks of a materialist hope: past times still contain a
future that has not yet been realized. This future is not a return to the past, but
rather something completely new, although one may compare it to the biblical
eschatological times predicted by the prophets and which Bloch interprets in a
completely secular way. He quotes Isaiah announcing “new heavens” and a
“new earth” that will be created by God (65:17) and he praises the category of
“Novum.” This Novum is prior to the Ultimum, which will be its triumph
(Bloch, 1976, p. 245).
Bloch argues that Judaism (along with other religions) is ambivalent,
since on the one hand it hopes for a better future but on the other hand it
remains an authoritarian alibi that makes us submit to alienation and suffering.
Or, in Marx’s words, “religion both testifies to real misery and protests
against it.” According to Bloch, hope is a principle of reality: it relies on its
secret possibilities (both subjective and objective) but does not need any
Jewish Hope Versus Revolutionary Hope 29
If the better future one is fighting for remains “without hope for the self,” this
is not a failure according to Levinas (1967, p. 102). The future in which I will
not be and which my work anticipates signifies the passage into the time of
the other and the resurrection of the irreplaceable instant. The philosopher
recalls that in 1941—“a hole in history, a year when all the visible gods had
abandoned us, where God was truly dead or had gone back to his
irrevelation”—Léon Blum, who was in prison at that time, finished a book for
the generations to come, for a time in which he would no longer be. Levinas
(1972, p. 44) underlines the dimension of hope and nobility inherent in this
project: “a man in prison continues to believe in an unrevealed future and
invites us to work in the present for the most distant things of which the
present is an irrefutable denial.”
Yet, in order that hope may continue to promise us a world, even where
confusion and misery predominate, it is not enough to fight for justice and
peace. One must let this justice and this peace illuminate one’s own psyche
now, even in the dark times. The messianic hope is indeed a hope for this
world, but it will never become concrete unless we start fighting against our
own hatred, or simply our own desire to persevere in our own being without
the other interfering in our so-called tranquility or happiness. Yet we must not
be content with a revolutionary hope if this hope only means fighting against
another class, another people and so on, without questioning our own desire to
become powerful as soon as possible. Indeed we know that when “the highest
hope” and “the highest power” coincide, intolerance and violence also become
greater and greater. “Extreme violence coincides with extreme hope when this
hope claims to totalize signification, be it a political or a religious
signification,” Paul Ricoeur rightly argues (1995, pp. 233–234). One has to be
patient, and one has to do away with one’s desire for power in the present.
“I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds
of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please” (Song of
Songs 2:7). According to the Midrash, this text means that one must not be
impatient and try to invoke the Messiah before He has decided to come (Song
Rab., 2:7, pp. 113–116). The commandment to be patient is necessary
because, in spite of their crucial importance, history and politics do not detain
the ultimate meaning of the collective redemption. One must not try to make
the Messiah come within our history and our politics while pretending they
are more understandable and more endurable when we do so.
After the so tragic events of the twentieth century that testify to the end
of theodicy, Levinas writes that politics and history now demand “even more
from the resources of the I in each one of us” (1998, p. 100). The Messiah is
hidden within our own psyche, and we have to awaken his spirit while acting,
Jewish Hope Versus Revolutionary Hope 31
redeemer of the world, or at least of the part entrusted to them and which they
alone can save. From that viewpoint the much-awaited Messiah does not play
the role of a national savior but rather—in a more urgent fashion—that of a
redeemer of individual souls, of a spiritual guide toward the light of the
Infinite within oneself and outside oneself.
Both Levinas and the Hassidim (Levinas was not one of them) teach us
that even when history is full of hatred—and it is always the case—it remains
possible to find the way back to a “point” hidden within ourselves that is not
contaminated by evil. Human hope depends on this certitude. From that
viewpoint, the best achievement we may celebrate cannot do away with our
intimate and always unfinished struggle against the dark forces that inhabit us
and that so often urge us to celebrate death instead of life. Shall we be able to
lead these forces back to this “point” (Berezovsky, p. 76)? This is a necessary
fight. Indeed, how could the world become “a home for God” (as the
Hassidim say) or a “home for humanity” (as Levinas on the one hand, and the
revolutionaries on the other, say) as long as our psyche refuses to be one?
How could this world become a world of justice, peace, and freedom if we
despise this fight? Revolutionary hope and Jewish hope are both oriented
towards this prize.
Three
Mattias Martinson
If anything in Hegel, and in those who turned him right way up, has
become part of my very flesh and blood, it is an asceticism with regard
to any unmediated expression of the positive. […] For utopia is the
concrete, and not itself some universal theory or finished
recommendation for praxis.
Theodor W. Adorno begins his major philosophical work from 1966, Negative
Dialectics, in a somewhat surprising manner: “Philosophy, which once
seemed obsolete, keeps itself alive, since the moment of its realization was
missed. The summary judgement that it has only interpreted the world, that it
is in itself crippled by resignation in the face of reality, becomes a defeatism
of reason after the transformation of the world failed” (Adorno, 1973, p. 3,
translation modified).
In this chapter, I have two distinct ambitions related to this single
quotation. The first is to interpret the statement and put it in the general
context of Adorno’s thought on philosophy, theory, and praxis, with special
reference to its Marxist and Jewish traits. Although I will argue that Adorno’s
statement must be understood in terms of Marxism, my interpretation will not
point forward to a positive notion of revolution, either theoretically or in any
practical way. On the contrary, I will point to Adorno’s revised understanding
of philosophy, which challenges both political activism and traditional
philosophical conceptualization by theorizing from a perspective of
redemption, not integration or subjugation. This trait, in its turn, is intelligible
in the context of Jewish messianism, although Adorno’s Marxist thought is
not as obvious in its messianic dimensions as, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s
or Ernst Bloch’s.
The second ambition, therefore, is to enquire more explicitly about the
messianic roots of Adorno’s curious version of utopian philosophy, to discuss
the messianic theme in a somewhat broader context of Adorno’s thought, and
34 MATTIAS MARTINSON
2. Against Idealism
For Adorno, idealism—even in its most subtle form, which for Adorno is
Hegel’s dialectics—reconciled the subject and the object on the premise of a
subjectivity that had been “ontologized” and detached from concreteness and
true individuality (Adorno, 1973, p. 121). In idealism more generally, this
aspect is captured by the notion “transcendental subject”. Thus, the resulting
philosophical totality, the system produced through this fundamental
subjective operation, was not only ignorant of the concrete individual (the
ontic subject), but of objects and the object in general.
Even though negation is the driving force of Hegel’s system, the
primordial subjectivity on which it is built is similar to a machine or spectral
agent that produces reality according to its own internal structure. Put
differently, the logic according to which the absolute was to be produced does
not change through an encounter with reality; it creates reality subjectively.
“Once radically separated from the object, subject reduces the object to itself;
subject swallows object, forgetting how much it is object itself” (Adorno,
1998, p. 246). In relation to Hegel, this means that the negative moment of the
logic is illusory: “The thesis that the negation of a negation is something
positive can only be upheld by one who presupposes positivity—as all-
conceptuality—from the beginning” (Adorno, 1973, p. 160).
Contrary to this, Adorno insists that the object has to be given
precedence in thought. The object should be seen as something real that one
has to confront by means of concepts and, yet, something that always eludes
36 MATTIAS MARTINSON
In a certain sense, although idealism would be the last to admit it, the
transcendental subject is more real, that is, it far more determines the
real conduct of people and society than do those psychological
individuals from whom the transcendental subject was abstracted and
who have little to say in the world. Those, for their part, have turned into
appendages of the social machinery and, in the end, into ideology. The
living individual person, such as he is constrained to act and for which
he was even internally moulded, is as homo oeconomicus incarnate
closer to the transcendental subject than the living individual he must
immediately take himself to be. To this extent idealist theory was
realistic […].
The trace of that which is left out—the non-identical—does not lead to a new
and more inclusive concept, but to the critical insight that the social form of
human thought and praxis makes true conceptualization impossible.
Given the last quote, one can perhaps say that Adorno suggests a
materialistic twist of idealist dialectics (in a Marxist manner) in order to
approach subjectivity as something objective, social, and particular. The basic
dilemma with idealism is not its logic, but the general exclusion of concrete
reality from the grasp of this logic, in a way that is ultimately oppressive.
Hence, the integration that is accomplished by idealist logic is real, but its
result must not be legitimatized through this fundamental connection to the
real. From the perspective of Adorno’s materialism, the real itself, as it has
become, is an illegitimate totality, and a dialectical grasp of this reality must
Adorno, Revolution, and Negative Utopia 37
reflect this totality as illegitimate through an attempt to take the side of the
particular objects which suffer within this totality. Instead of being grounded
in an ontologized or transcendental subjectivity, Adorno’s dialectics works
from the viewpoint of a utopian possibility that things could be completely
different. But this possibility is not expressed in a positive way. Instead he
states: “Regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology
of the wrong state of things” (Adorno, 1973, p. 11). Ontologized in this
negative way, dialectics becomes the presupposition for a philosophy in which
the negative moment of thinking is motivated by the totality of things, not
vice versa (as in Hegel).
Adorno expresses this neatly by turning Hegel’s dictum “the true is the
whole” on its head: “The whole is the untrue” (Hegel, 1977, p. 11; Adorno,
1974, p. 50, translation modified). In line with this, the positive result of
philosophy has always to be linked to the negative insight that the generalized
perspective—that is, the concept—“is fused with untruth, with the oppressive
principle” (Adorno, 1973, p. 48). Philosophy must therefore proceed in a
restless manner, as “the prism in which its [the concrete’s] colour is caught”
(Adorno, 1973, p. 57). As a prism it is not in charge of the concrete and the
suppressed object but it spreads the light of “the negativity of the universal” in
a way that “welds cognition to the particular as that which is to be saved”
(Adorno, 1973, p. 48).
historical practice and can thus be newly reflected upon in theory, instead of
thought bowing irrationally to the primacy of practice. Practice itself was an
eminently theoretical concept” (Adorno, 1973, p. 144).
This leads us back to the initial statement about philosophy with which
this essay began: It lives on because its historical moment of realization was
missed. Philosophy’s continued “actuality” (Aktualität)—an allusion to the
title of an early lecture of Adorno from 1931 (Adorno, 2000)—is an indication
of the ultimate incapability of reason to climb out of its predicament; it
continues to be a systematic conceptual embrace of a totality in which the
particular and concrete is downplayed and ill-represented, not to say
extinguished. To reinstate the actuality of philosophy against this negative
background is therefore to call for a changed politico-philosophical vision.
In the last aphorism of Minima Moralia, under the headline Finale, Adorno
states: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of
despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present
themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (Adorno, 1974, p. 247).
A question that follows naturally after my presentation of Adorno’s
basically Marxist insistence on the continued role of philosophy—after the
moment of its realization has been missed—is whether this verdict from
Minima Moralia can shed some more light on Adorno’s concrete
understanding of a possible political potential of “post-Marxian” philosophy.
It has become clear that revolution is out of the question, since the history of
society has moved in a direction that makes it virtually impossible—not to say
inconceivable—to realize a philosophical notion of freedom and liberty by
mere political action. But is there anything else of radical political interest in
Adorno’s rather gloomy vision? He has been severely criticized for his way of
acting in relation to the student revolts in 1968 and 1969 (in 1969 he called
the police when he feared student occupation of the Institute of Social
Research in Frankfurt). Was this a sign of the bankruptcy of his thought in
general, or is there a logic to be found behind the surface of this seemingly
reactionary act? How does Adorno’s Eurocentric, non-revolutionary tenor
match today’s experiences of revolution in contexts such as Egypt and
Tunisia?
My own suggestion is broadly in line with what John Holloway,
Fernando Matamoros, and Sergio Tischler have argued: namely that Adorno’s
political significance lies in the way he detached dialectics from its synthetic
mode (initiated by Hegel and followed by many after him) (Holloway et al.,
2009, p. 6). They argue that notwithstanding its critique of Hegel, Marxism in
general was caught up by this synthetic mode, and this is one reason for the
totalitarian history of Marxism. Adorno’s alternative, non-synthetic way of
being thoroughly dialectical is therefore possible to compare with an anti-
40 MATTIAS MARTINSON
According to Holloway et al., what Adorno can bring into the picture is a
correction of certain crucial aspects of the anti-dialectical tenor in recent
political thought. He makes possible a critical view that is unwaveringly
rooted in the contradictions of this world and skeptical to views that relates
the utopian moment directly to the present state of things. The utopian
moment in Adorno is thereby not lost, but his utopianism is of the negative
kind I delineated above. To repeat, this means that the utopian moment does
not lie in a positive vision that is extracted from the present order; it consists
of the refusal to accept that the broken world in front of us can become a
legitimate paradigm in any sense. As I have already hinted, this kind of
utopianism harbors a revolutionary moment, but I will now also claim that this
revolutionary moment is of a messianic rather than of an activist kind. The
next step, therefore, will be to look a bit closer on this messianic aspect in
Adorno’s thought.
Critical theory is the name that Max Horkheimer (one of Adorno’s
closest colleagues) gave to a theoretical perspective that is anchored in the
antagonistic differentiation and division of labor that goes on in a highly
Adorno, Revolution, and Negative Utopia 41
advanced and integrated social totality. Critical theory is not a power that
operates outside this society, but rather a political philosophy that works
dialectically as an immanent force “permeated with the potential of what
could be different” (Adorno, 1998, p. 16). As argued by Adorno in Minima
Moralia, this means that its hope for a different society is weak and related to
the construction of a frangible standpoint from which the flaws of the present
order are clearly revealed. This standpoint is not a stepping-stone from that
which is. It is only a new and revealing perspective. Adorno continues:
This aphorism was written towards the end of the forties, in the immediate
shadow of Auschwitz. This might explain why Adorno continues by saying
that this interpretation of the task of thought is, in some sense, trivial. He
argues that the whole social and cultural situation “calls” for this kind of
radical philosophical enlightenment. And yet, he holds it to be an utterly
impossible task for thought, since the very standpoint he asks for presupposes
exactly the kind of transcendence that his notion of “non-synthetic” dialectics
originally forbids.
Hence, no matter if the step is almost invisible or as small as “a hair’s
breadth,” to climb up to a privileged position beyond this world is a denial of
thought’s obvious entanglement with the very problem it attempts to solve. In
Adorno’s words: “The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for
the sake of the unconditional, the more consciously, and so calamitously, it is
delivered up to the world” (Adorno, 1974, p. 247). From the viewpoint of
dialectics and materialism, therefore, the only responsible philosophical way
to reach for truth is finally judged to be an impossible one. In a later text this
theme is developed in terms of self-critique: “Dialectic is not a third
standpoint but rather the attempt, by means of an immanent critique, to
develop philosophical standpoints beyond themselves and beyond the
despotism of a thinking based on standpoints” (Adorno, 1998, p. 12).
Against this developed notion of standpoints, the idea put forward in
Minima Moralia of a “standpoint of redemption” cannot be a historical
standpoint, or a standpoint within the framework of this world. It is, rather, an
impossible possibility of something utterly different that breaks into this
world and changes it—redeems it—through radical recreation. This quite
obvious messianic dimension is never developed or incorporated
wholeheartedly by Adorno’s critical theory (i.e., his idea of philosophy), but I
would like to argue that it is the messianic dimension of his thought that
42 MATTIAS MARTINSON
It is obvious and well established that Adorno developed this specific notion
of dialectics in close relation to Walter Benjamin’s thought. Benjamin’s early
thought has been described as a Jewish theology of language that took its
point of departure in an eccentric interpretation of the Fall and the human
transgression from paradise to an alienated existence. In an essay from 1916,
Benjamin argues that language (as we know it) was born in the moment when
the human word was put in the place of the god-inspired name (Benjamin,
1997, p. 119). The passage in Genesis where God gives man the task of
naming the creatures (Gen. 2:19–20) is interpreted as the original and true
model of language. Through God’s command, man gives proper names to all
the creatures and this represents a pure language; “a communion of man with
the creative word of God” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 116). This represents a perfect
relation between nature, man, and God. Nature does not speak for itself, but
through the act of naming, its muteness is nevertheless understood as a “bliss”
because the name secures the integrity of the particular (Benjamin, 1997, p.
121).
Compared to the proper name, Benjamin insists that the human word is
an arbitrary sign that makes language into a mere instrument for
communication. After the Fall the relation both to God and to nature was
drastically changed. With the Fall, nature begins its “other muteness” through
the curse of God, and this muteness has ultimately to do with the function of
the human word, which is now inadequate and neglectful with respect to
creation. For Benjamin, this constitutes the “deep sadness of nature”
(Benjamin, 1997, p. 121). While the proper name has an immanent magic,
constituting “the paradisiac language of man” that “must have been one of
perfect knowledge” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 119), he relates the fallen, post-
lapsarian language to an “external magic” of the word, where something
outside the word is inadequately captured. The mute nature is without any
Adorno, Revolution, and Negative Utopia 43
hope of being given a true voice through the word, which leads to a
“mythical” human understanding of nature as something static, lifeless and
open to manipulation, scientific calculation and exploitation.
Through the Fall from paradisiac language, the situation became one of
“prattle,” inadequate signification and multiplicity. “The enslavement of
language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in a folly as its
inevitable consequence. In this turning away from things, which was
enslavement, the plan for the tower of Babel came into being, and linguistic
confusion with it” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 121).
The tower of Babel represents the ultimate consequence of the
appearance of the law, which according to Benjamin has its mythical origin in
the question of good and evil. Paradise did not include a tree that brought
about information about good and evil; rather, the tree was an “emblem of
judgement over the questioner” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 121). Thus, in the young
Walter Benjamin’s view, the emergence of language as signification and
forgetfulness of the things themselves is simultaneous with the emergence of
subjectivity that sets itself apart from the creation it belongs to. “To erect
oneself as a subject is already to fall,” as Irving Wohlfarth has put it
(Wohlfarth, 1989, p. 161).
This means, furthermore, that both history and linguistic meaning are
constituted by the Fall—before the Fall, everything was complete. And, even
more importantly, according to Wohlfarth’s reading of Benjamin, “the Fall is
already, in some sense, the infernal machine of modernity; and modernity the
free fall of history” (Wohlfarth, 1989, p. 161). The historic attempt of the
subject to labor with his language in order to reach fulfillment is in vain.
History cannot be a reasonable process that amends its earlier flaws and
fissures. It is an accelerating catastrophe.
This perspective was exemplified decades later when Benjamin utters his
famous comment to Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which is featured on
the cover of this volume. I quote the entire comment:
This comment is a late one (1940), which makes it clear that the young
Benjamin’s theological motifs continued to nurture a severe critique of history
and modernity, long after Benjamin had denounced some of his most explicit
mystical impulses and adopted a more explicit materialist and Marxist
terminology (cf. Pensky, 1993, pp. 233–239).
Paradise is neither awaited nor put forward as a possibility in itself. The
angel is not in charge of anything. The mode is not nostalgic, at least not in a
believing way. Paradise is faint; it is becoming more and more distant and
inaccessible. Thus, the possibility is not one of restoration, but of the creative
construction of a critical dialectical image in which the modern is identified
with the catastrophic archaic origin of history. The absoluteness of negativity
that this image reflects forces thought to take a new stand. The messianic
moment is the sudden light that emerges from the constellation between the
angel and its impotence despite its position above history. It is a light that, for
Benjamin, is tied to a new view of nature, things, history and subjectivity in
the framework of the impotence of human language.
The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only
in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such
absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism
brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be
positively pictured; this is the substance [Gehalt] of its negativity
(Adorno, 1973, p. 207).
last thing science reaches. Or, to put it differently: myth is the nature that we
meet in science.
But this way of expressing things is not the same as saying that unreason
is good. It is, rather, to follow the Benjaminian insight about the inadequacy
of the word compared to the name, or the failure of our human languages to
be what language is. Nor does the negation of language or rationality mean
that hope lies in the final affirmation of hopelessness. Hope rather resides in
the very possibility of the negation of the idea that the essence of hope is in
the reach of thought. As long as something different is conceivable, the whole
is not completely closed. But this hope is not to be confused with a clear
vision. This is expressed by one of Adorno’s most poetic lines from Negative
Dialektik: “Nur wenn, was ist, sich ändern läßt, ist das, was ist, nicht alles”
(Adorno, 1966, p. 391; this line is defectively translated as: “What is must be
changeable if it is not to be all.” Adorno, 1973, p. 398).
In the situation where the spiritual (subjectivity) is alienated from its
natural origin, and nature is perverted through this very alienation, one must
look for answers in unexpected places. The most spiritual might become the
most natural, and nature might reveal itself as the flip-side of spirituality.
Adorno addresses this in a letter to Benjamin from 1934, in which he tries to
explain how his own present work on the philosophy of music connects with
Benjamin’s theoretical perspective:
Perhaps, this material will seem rather remote to you at first. But I
believe I am also one with you in the conviction that the more remote
matters are not the least significant ones, and the work […] is therefore
much more closely connected with your own interest than the title alone
would suggest. I will simply express the following thought to you for
now: the question concerning the muteness of works of art has led me in
the most remarkable fashion right into our central question, that of the
coincidence of the modern with the archaic. And indeed from the other
end of the spectrum: from the archaic itself. For I have come to realize
that just as the modern is the most ancient, so too is the archaic itself a
function of the new (Adorno & Benjamin, 1999, p. 38).
Michael Löwy
Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber shared a Romantic utopian vision that
inspired their literary, religious, and political writings, and made them into the
twentieth century’s main prophets of community. Let me begin by explaining
what I understand by “prophet,” “Romantic,” and “Utopia.” By “prophet,” I
do not mean a magician that pretends to foresee the future, but, in the truly
biblical meaning one who warns the people of the impending catastrophe and
calls for action before it is too late. “Utopian” should not be understood as, in
the words of The Concise Oxford Dictionary “an ardent but impractical
reformer,” but rather as the partisan of a just and humane social order that
does not—yet—exist anywhere (the original meaning of the Greek word u-
topos).
And by Romanticism I mean not only the German literary school from
the beginning of the nineteenth century, but also a powerful movement of
protest against modern bourgeois/industrial civilization in the name of past
social, cultural or religious values, which runs through modern culture from
Rousseau until our days. The Romantic protest is aimed against the cold,
utilitarian, calculating spirit of the modern (capitalist) age—what Max Weber
called Rechnenhaftigkeit—against the mechanisation and reification of the
soul, and above all against what Weber called die entzauberung der Welt
(disenchantment of the world). To a large extent, Romanticism is a nostalgic
and often desperate attempt to re-enchant the world, through poetry, myth,
religion, mysticism, utopia. A powerful current in Central European culture at
the beginning of the twentieth century, it usually took a conservative and
restorative character—the main exception to this being the Romanticism of
Jewish intellectuals, where we find often socialist, utopian or revolutionary
tendencies.
Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber met for the first time in 1899 at the Neue
Gemeinschaft (New Community), a sort of “neo-romantic” literary circle
created that year by the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart, two well known
50 MICHAEL LÖWY
literary critics, which attracted writers and artists such as Erich Mühsam, Else
Lasker Schüller, and Fritz Mauthner (Buber, 1929, p. vii). Curiously
enough—but at the same time, in a manner quite typical both for the
Romantic quest for religious spirituality, and for the assimilation of German-
speaking Jewish intellectuals—their first area of common interest was
Christian mysticism: Landauer was preparing an edition of Meister Eckhart’s
writings, while Martin Buber gave a conference on Jacob Böme. For both of
them mysticism appeared as a fascinating alternative to the empty rationalism,
materialism, and positivism of bourgeois culture. Buber intended to edit, with
the German publisher Diederichs, a collection of essays on European
Mysticism, divided into three sections: German, Slav and Jewish. If the
project was accepted, he would invite Landauer to write a piece on Eckhart
(Buber, 1972, p. 186).
But they had also another, even more important common passion:
Gemeinschaft. According to Hans Kohn, Martin Buber’s biographer, the
meeting with Landauer was “a landmark in Buber’s life. From this day until
Landauer’s death intimate friendship united these two men. Buber’s views on
human communitarian life were decisively influenced by Landauer” (Kohn,
1930, p. 29). Indeed, on social and political issues, Buber was to become, to a
significant extent, a disciple, or follower of his older friend—a debt which he
always acknowledged. As Paul Mendes-Flohr aptly summarized, “without
Landauer it is difficult to appreciate the ideational nuance and passion of
Buber’s conception of politics. [...] Landauer was his alter ego on social and
political matters” (1985, p. 71).
This does not mean that Buber was not a profoundly original social
philosopher. If one compares their key conferences at the Neue Gemeinshaft
in 1900, one can grasp both their common aspirations and some crucial
differences in their thought. In June 1900, Gustav Landauer gave his talk
“Through Isolation to Community,” an important statement of his new
communitarian theory:
The community we long for and need we will find only if we isolate
ourselves as individuals; then we will at last find, in the innermost core of
our hidden being, the most ancient and the most universal community:
the human species [Menschengeschlecht] and the world. Whoever has
discovered this joyous community in himself is enriched and blessed for
all time and is finally removed from the common accidental communities
of our age. Among those old communities which have to be rejected in
order to create the Menschengemeinschaft [human community], there is
of course the State, this “authoritarian communal community” [autoritäre
Gemeinheitsgemeinschaft] (1901, p. 50).
Thus will humanity, which came out from a beautiful but rough
primitive community, after going through the growing slavery of
Gesellschaft (society), arrive at a new community, which will not be any
more grounded, as the first one, on blood affinities
(Blutverwandtschaft), but on elective affinities (Wahverwandtschaft).
Only in it can the old eternal dream be accomplished and the instinctive
life-unity of the primitive human being (Urmenschen), which has been
for so long fragmented and divided, return in a higher level and a new
form (1976, p. 56).
the center of social philosophy. Well before Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia
(1918) and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929), Gustav Landauer
had, already in 1907, raised utopia to a universal human principle, whose
active expression was revolution (1974, pp. 17–18). Landauer’s apology of
utopia was to influence not only Buber, Bloch and Mannheim, but also—
among others—Gershom Scholem, Manes Sperber, Walter Benjamin and the
youth movement Hashomer Hatzaïr. It is difficult to estimate the impact this
book had on his publisher: he certainly shared Landauer’s idea of revolution
as regeneration and his belief that the utopian change will come from “the
unknown, the deeply buried and the sudden.”
Buber also was deeply interested in Landauer’s attempt to reformulate
socialist theory in his document “People and Land: Thirty Socialist Theses”
(1907): if socialism is ever to emerge, it must be built outside the State,
through decentralized communities, making up the “new organism of the
people.” Buber willingly joined the Berlin chapter—named “Gemeinschaft”—
of the Sozialistischer Bund, the libertarian/socialist association created by
Landauer in 1908 on the basis of his “Theses.” In its first pamphlet, “What
wants the Socialist Bund?” the new organisation, which attracted a significant
following (some thousand members), called for an “active general strike,”
through which the working people no longer would work for the capitalists
but for their own needs (see Landauer, 1924, pp. 3–20, 91–95). In the
foreword to this posthumous collection of Landauer’s socialist essays, Martin
Buber celebrates in these “Theses” the “presuppositions of a true socialism”
and pays homage to the visionary character of the Socialist Bund (Buber,
1924, p. iii).
Buber and Landauer also had in common a radical criticism—having
both German Romantic and Jewish messianic inspiration—of the evolutionist
philosophy of progress common to both liberals and Second International
Marxists. They published in 1911, practically at the same time, books where
this new conception of history appears in almost identical terms: it is
impossible to find out who was influenced by the other.
Rejecting the conformist ideology of progressive “improvement”
(Verbesserung), Buber wrote, in his Three Speeches on Judaism: “By
‘renewal’, I do not in any way mean something gradual, a sum total of minor
changes. I mean something sudden and immense (Ungeheures), by no means
a continuation or an improvement, but a reversal and a metamorphosis”
(1920d, pp. 60–61). Rather than hope for ordinary progress (Fortschritt), one
should “desire the impossible (das Unmögliche)” (ibid.). Buber found the
paradigm for such a complete renewal in the Jewish messianic tradition: “The
last part of Isaiah has God say: ‘I create new heavens and a new earth’ (Isaiah
65:17) [...] This was not a metaphor but a direct experience” (ibid.). Landauer
wrote Buber a warm letter on May 1911, referring to his “inner joy” when
reading the book, and emphasizing that he felt that they were “friends going
together in the same path” (Buber, 1972, p. 294).
The Romantic Socialism of Landauer and Buber 53
2. Romantic Judaism
from every nation (Goethe for Germany, etc) he writes: “The Jews too, have
their unity and their Isaiah, Jesus and Spinoza"—a very characteristic choice,
in which two of the highest representatives of Judaism have little in common
with the Jewish traditional religion or culture (Landauer, 1924, p. 7).
What caused Landauer to turn towards Judaism was not—as in the case
of Theodor Herzl or Bernard Lazare—anti-Semitism or the Dreyfus Affair. It
was his discovery, through the writings of Martin Buber, of a new conception
of Jewish spirituality, a romantic Jewish religiosity.
Landauer showed much interest and sympathy for Buber’s first Hassidic
book, Stories of Rabbi Nachman (1906). He was particularly attracted by the
story called “The Master of Prayer,” which has a strong anti-bourgeois critical
edge: once upon a time there was a “Land of Wealth” where gold, money, and
wealth were the only recognized values, and where the rich were adored as
gods and received human sacrifices; compassion and solidarity were
considered as shameful nonsense. They are finally saved from their folly by
the “Master of Prayer” (Buber, 1927, pp. 77–103). After reading this chapter
to his friend the Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunius (the pen name of
Leopold Wertheimer) and his wife, he reported their reaction in a letter to
Buber: “Deep joy, strong emotion and astonishment was the effect. It is
indeed a marvelous text.” The letter from Landauer was lost, but the comment
is proudly quoted by Buber in a letter to his wife from December 1906
(Buber, 1972, p. 252).
But the real watershed for Landauer was Buber’s The Legend of the
Baal-Schem (1908): it worked on him as a sort of profane illumination (to use
Benjamin’s image). He was not the only one impressed by it: the book had a
tremendous impact on many Jewish—and non-Jewish—intellectuals in
Central Europe because it presented, for the first time, a new image of
Judaism, radically different from both assimilated liberalism and rabbinic
orthodoxy. Among those who were fascinated by it one can find figures as
different as Rainer Maria Rilke, Walther Rathenau, Georg Lukacs, Ernst
Bloch, and Franz Kafka (Mendes-Flohr, 1991, p. 100). For Landauer, as for
several other Jewish intellectuals of German culture, only a Romantic,
mystical and poetical Judaism, such as the one created by Buber from the old
Hassidic legends, could be attractive. It appeared as a direct challenge to the
view of Judaism as a rationalist, non-mystical, anti-magical, and legalistic
religion, presented—in different ways—by German sociology (in the works of
scholars such as Max Weber and Werner Sombart).
In October 1908, shortly after the publication of the book, Landauer
hailed in a letter to a friend “the marvellous stories and legends, from the
tradition of eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish mystical writings of the Baal-
Schem and Rabbi Nachman” (1929, I, p. 218). He also wrote a review of the
book—which was published only in 1910—bringing to the fore its
Romantic/messianic aspects: “The extraordinary thing about these Jewish
legends is [...] that not only must the God who is sought after free people from
The Romantic Socialism of Landauer and Buber 55
the limitations and illusions of the life of the senses, but he must first and
foremost be the Messiah who will lift the poor, tormented Jews from their
suffering and oppression.” The Hassidic tales were the collective work of a
people (Volk)—which does not mean something “popular” or trivial, but
rather, according to Landauer, “living growth: the future within the present,
the spirit within history, the whole within the individual [...] The liberating
and unifiying God within the imprisoned and lacerated Human Being
(Menschen); the heavenly within the earthly” (Landauer, 1910, p. 149).
In this review there is also to be found a sort of confession: Landauer
tells us about the change in his own attitude towards Judaism as a result of
reading Buber’s opus:
soul, is the path taken by mankind towards the future, and the tradition of our
martyred and nostalgic heart is nothing other than the revolution and
regeneration of mankind” (Landauer, 1921, p. 135).
However, he emphasized, much more than Buber, the revolutionary
social and political dimension of Judaism. For instance, in his Appeal for
Socialism (1911) he interpreted Moses’ institution of Jubileum in the
following terms:
This does not mean that Buber disagreed with this sort of argument: he quotes
this same passage at the conclusion of his chapter on Landauer in Paths in
Utopia (1947). But Landauer did not share Buber’s faith in the “God of
Abraham and Isaac.” A note which I found in the Landauer Archives takes up
this theme from another angle: in other religions, the gods help the nation and
protect its heroes, while in Judaism, “God is eternally opposed to servility; he
is therefore the subversive (Aufrührer), the arouser (Aufrüttler), the one-who-
warns (Mahner).” The Jewish religion is evidence of “the people’s holy
dissatisfaction with itself” (Landauer, n. d., MS 432/23). Paul Mendes-Flohr
(1991, p. 108) is right in emphasizing the role of aesthetics in Landauer’s
conception of Judaism, but the social and political dimension are not less
important.
As far as the issue of Zionism is concerned: Landauer was not hostile to
the movement, but had ambivalent feelings. On one side, he rejected what he
considered to be the “cold” and “doctrinaire” concept of a “Hebraic Judaism”
aiming to suppress the German-Jewish, the Russian-Jewish, and the Yiddish
culture (Landauer, 1921, p. 127). But in another article of the same year
(1913) he praises “the movement that, generally under the name of Zionism,
goes through Judaism,” because it has the aim to give “a pure and creative
form” to the specific essence of the Jewish nation (ibid., p. 133). What he
particularly resented was what he called, in an angry letter to the Zionist
educator Siegfried Lehmann, “the falsifying ‘either/or’ choice which a Zionist
calls upon me to make between being a German and a Jew, a European and an
Oriental” (see Mendes-Flohr, 1991, p. 131).
In any case, his true commitment was not, as Buber’s, to Zionism, but to
a sort of messianic diaspora socialism. He believed that the Jewish people had
a specific messianic/revolutionary rôle in modern history: their mission (Amt),
58 MICHAEL LÖWY
vocation (Beruf) or task (Dienst) was to help transform society and create a
new humanity.
Why the Jew? He answers in an astonishing passage from his “heretical”
article from 1913:
A voice, like a wild cry resonating throughout the world and like a sigh
in our heart of hearts, tells us irrefutably that the redemption of the Jew
can take place only at the same time as that of humanity; and that it is
one and the same to await the Messiah while in exile and dispersed, and
to be the Messiah of the nations (Landauer, 1921, p. 125).
remain a nation, and at the same time, to transcend that nation and all nations,
and to perceive the future unity of mankind as being made up of a variety of
true nations.”
These differences never led to a clash between the two thinkers: their
friendship and their spiritual Wahlverwandtschaft (affinity) was strong enough
to overcome this and other divergences. But things became different with the
beginning of World War I: here, for the first time, a real conflict emerged.
While Buber, like many other Jewish-German intellectuals, seemed to
follow—admittedly, with ambivalent feelings—the general trend of German
patriotism, Landauer was, from the beginning, a staunch opponent to the war.
In June 1914, just before the war, Landauer and Buber had taken part in
an international cultural meeting in Potsdam, the “Fortes Circle.” When the
war began, several of its members—such as the writers Erich Gutkind and
Florens Christian Rang—sided with the German Reich, and hailed the war as
a fight for German spiritual values against French and English
commercialism. The extent to which Buber shared this viewpoint is unclear.
In any case Landauer expressed, in a letter to Gutkind, his utter rejection of
such views, which he considered to be a sort of perverse aestheticism.
Apparently this critique included Buber, who wrote his friend on 18 October
1914 complaining against what he considered to be an unfair judgement:
“Gutkind reports, that you reproach me—as well as himself—for an
aestheticist attitude; is it possible that you really did misunderstand and
mistake me so much? I cannot believe it” (Buber, 1972, p. 381). Apparently
there was a personal explanation between them, and the quarrel was
neutralised—but the tension remained.
Landauer’s attitude was summarized in a letter from November 1914 to
his friend Fritz Mauthner, who also had taken a German nationalist position:
“I do not have the slightest feeling of association with the policies and actions
of the German Reich” (1929, II, p. 10). In his Journal Der Sozialist, closely
watched by the authorities, he tried to fight German chauvinism by publishing
cosmopolitan and anti-war texts by Herder, Fichte and Romain Rolland. He
also supported the initiatives of the democratic pacifist organisation Bund
Neues Vaterland created in 1915 by some intellectuals (Friedrich Wilhelm
Foerster, Albert Einstein) who favoured an immediate compromise peace. At
the same time, he was deeply wounded by the pro-war position taken by
friends he had trusted, such as Fritz Mauthner or Richard Dehmel (Lunn,
1973, pp. 243–246).
Martin Buber’s views were much less clear-sighted. In the editorial
(Losung) he wrote for the first issue of his Journal Der Jude, in 1916, he took
a highly ambiguous stand: while emphasizing that Judaism as such remained
outside of the war, he praised individual Jewish commitment to the warring
60 MICHAEL LÖWY
hosts as “the discovery of Gemeinschaft” and “the first step to the inner
liberation” (Buber, 1920a, pp. 7–15)! In another essay from the same year,
“The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism,” he celebrated Germany as the only
nation in Europe with spiritual affinity to the Eastern cultures, and therefore
best suited for the historical mission of bringing together Occident and Orient
in a fruitful reciprocity. He also emphasized that, among all European nations,
the German one has had the strongest exchange of influence with Judaism
(Buber, 1916, p. 46). These passages disappeared from the revised edition of
the essay in 1919.
That was too much for Landauer. In a highly emotional letter to Buber,
dated 12 May 1916, he reacted to his friend’s arguments with anger and bitter
disappointment. He found again in these documents “Buber-the-warrior”
(Kriegsbuber) which he had almost forgotten—probably a reference to their
first exchange in 1914. For him, both texts were “very painful, offensive, and
almost inconceivable,” and represented the worst sort of “aestheticism and
formalism” (once again the reproach from 1914). This applied particularly to
the editorial “Die Losung”: what is the meaning of “community” when there
is war and murder? Referring now to the conference on the Spirit of Orient, he
told his friend that he met several young people who used to admire him as a
leader but now, after hearing this talk, saw him as a traitor. Landauer’s own
judgement was somewhat milder: Buber was not really guilty of treason, but
confusion (Trübung). In any case, Landauer considered Buber’s presentation
of Germany as the redemptive nation for the Orient—without mentioning its
policy of colonial conquest during the last decades—as war politics and semi-
official rhetoric (Offiziosentum). And finally, at the end of his letter, he
predicted—quite accurately—that Buber would soon regret these writings,
and no more cooperate with the German war against the other European
nations, as he now did in such a deep confusion (Verwirrung) and
entanglement (Verstrickung) (Buber, 1972, pp. 433–438). For obvious reason
this letter was not included in the selection of Landauer’s correspondence
published in 1929 by Buber.
How did Buber react to this harsh indictment—which was, at the same
time, the testimony of a wounded friendship? The editor of his
correspondence, Grete Schraeder, writes in a footnote after Landauer’s letter:
“Buber’s answer is missing; probably the friends had an oral exchange” (Ibid.,
p. 438). In fact, we know the answer, thanks to a letter discovered in the
Landauer Archive by Eugene Lunn: denying that he had defended the German
war policies, Buber claimed that Landauer had read his article “with the eyes
of fanaticism” and had imposed a political meaning that was foreign to it.
Landauer, in turn, concluded the exchange by saying that Buber, whether he
wanted or not, had played into the hands of the imperialists, although he saw
his friend’s position as an unfortunate effect of the agony of the war. Buber’s
answer is quoted in a letter Landauer wrote on June 2, 1916 (Lunn, 1973, pp.
246–247).
The Romantic Socialism of Landauer and Buber 61
In his last will Landauer had made Buber the executor of his estate. The
surviving friend accomplished this mission with exemplary dedication,
publishing Landauer’s correspondence (1929) and two volumes collecting his
articles and essays: Der Werdende Mensch (1919) and Beginnen (1924). But
above all Buber remained all his life faithful to the Romantic, libertarian, anti-
authoritarian, federalist and communitarian socialism of Gustav Landauer, in
all his social-philosophical writings, from The Sacred way (Der heilige Weg)
of 1919, dedicated to his friend’s memory, to his last essays. At a conference
in 1939 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Landauer’s death, he
insisted, referring to the statist-bureaucratic degeneration of Stalinist Soviet
Russia (“a Leviathan that presents himself as Messiah”), that history had
confirmed his ideas: “Landauer had pointed, again and again, with perfect
clarity and consistency, that such an accumulation of power and violence
cannot become socialism” (Buber, 1939).
But it is above all in Paths in Utopia (first published in Hebrew in
1947)—his most important excursion in socialist theory—that Buber pays
homage to Landauer as a thinker. He shared Landauer’s Romantic conception
of the socialist utopia as a revival, a regeneration, a renewal, outside of the
State and its institutions, of ancient communitarian traditions, which remained
present in the collective memory. And, of course, he agreed with his friend’s
conception of socialism as “religion,” in the etymological sense of the word
(religare means to link, to bind), as the free common life of human beings
linked by a common spirit. The definition he proposes for Landauer’s social
philosophy applies perfectly to his own: “Revolutionary conservatism was
exactly what Landauer had in mind; a revolutionary choice of those elements
of social being which deserve to be preserved and are viable in the building of
a new structure.” And, above all, he did share Landauer’s belief in the need to
begin building socialism here and now, by creating an “organic” social life,
through a de-centralised network of local socialist villages or communities
(Buber, 1967, pp. 83, 88).
There are however significant differences between Buber’s utopian
socialism and Landauer’s anarchism: a) the author of Paths to Utopia had a
critical but not negative assessment of Marx’s socialism, and acknowledged
the federalist and democratic content of his writings on the Paris Commune of
1871; b) he did not call for the complete abolition of the State, but only of the
“surplus-State” (Mehrstaat), i.e. that amount of state power that has been
made unnecessary by the people’s capacity of voluntary common life in
justice and order.
Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber were un-armed prophets, to use
Machiavelli’s well-known proposition. They were also Romantic socialists
and communitarian utopists. Was their utopian socialist dream a reasonable
one?
Let me answer with a remark by George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable
man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to
64 MICHAEL LÖWY
When Löwith published Meaning in History, he had been exiled for over a
decade. Raised in a Jewish-Protestant middle-class milieu, Löwith belonged to
A Secular Utopia 67
They did not presume to make sense of the world or to discover its
ultimate meaning. They were impressed by the visible order and beauty
of the cosmos, and the cosmic law of growth and decay was also the
pattern for their understanding of history. According to the Greek view
of life and the world, everything moves in recurrences, like the eternal
recurrence of sunrise and sunset, of summer and winter, of generation
and corruption. This view was satisfactory to them because it is a
rational and natural understanding of the universe, combining a
recognition of temporal changes with regularity, constancy, and
immutability. The immutable, as visible in the fixed order of the
heavenly bodies, had a higher interest and value to them than any
progressive and radical change (Löwith, 1949, p. 4).
68 JAYNE SVENUNGSSON
The modern age began, not indeed as the epoch of the death of God, but
as the epoch of the hidden God, the deus absconditus—and a hidden
God is pragmatically as good as dead. The nominalist theology induces a
human relation to the world whose implicit content could have been
formulated in the postulate that man had to behave as though God were
dead. This induces a restless taking stock of the world, which can be
designated as the motive power of the age of science (Blumenberg,
1983, p. 346).
A Secular Utopia 73
What Blumenberg here suggests is that the modern view of nature, history and
humanity came into being as a reaction against the theological absolutism of
the late Middle Ages: when William of Ockham argued that there was no
rationale accessible to human mind as to why God actualized one possible
world rather than another, he in fact cleared the ground for the scientific
pragmatism of Galileo, Bacon, and all the subsequent theorists who sought to
overcome the deficiencies of nature by transforming it through human
activity.
Blumenberg’s argument for a radical break between the medieval
worldview and the modern age sheds further light on his misgivings about
Löwith’s secularization thesis. Rather than continuing medieval theology by
secular means, modern thought is brought into being through a critical
confrontation with the distinguishing motifs of the dominating theological
worldview. This is also true for the Leitmotiv in Löwith’s genealogy—the
notion of a future redemption. When Löwith argues for a substantial
connection between Judeo-Christian eschatology and modern belief in
progress, he overlooks a crucial difference: whereas the former aims at a
transcendent consummation whose main actor is God, the latter refers to an
immanent process of development whose main actor is humanity. From these
two visions two entirely different attitudes to life follow: in the first case a
passive anticipation of divine interference, in the second an awareness that
history is only as successful as human beings attempt to make it. Blumenberg
never made any secret that his own preferences lay in the latter attitude.
How does one think the revolution? What does it imply for a philosopher to
conceptualize the revolution? Can we at all “think the revolution” after so
many failed, and failing, revolutions? Perhaps it is possible that this question
is not limited in scope to the work of political philosophers branded or
branding themselves leftist (or conservative), already inscribed in a struggle of
words and concepts. Perhaps, we could be helped by taking up a more
unexpected voice into the philosophical debate.
The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, discussed in this
volume already by Catherine Chalier, is certainly a revolutionary thinker in
the sense that he has revolutionized the way we consider ethics, but he would
not be someone we typically consider as a thinker of the revolution. Indeed he
is not always considered a political thinker. The secondary literature applauds
or dismisses him for his thinking of “the Other,” the ethical dimension of
interhuman relationships. Those who applaud him often do so because he has
made it possible to imagine new ways of thinking the ethical. The ones who
dismiss him often do so because they see him as part of a trend to ignore the
political in favor of exclusive focus on the ethical. This is understandable: one
of Levinas’s articles even bears the title “Politics after!” (Levinas, 1982, pp.
221–228).
There are however, political dimensions to Levinas’s thought—and how
could there not be? Indeed, in locating political thought “after” the ethical,
Levinas is, in fact, framing his political thought, and his own writings make
this clear. Even when he emphasizes the uniqueness of the ethical relation, he
also shows how the political is present in all ethical relations. “The epiphany
of the face,” says Levinas, “attests the presence of the third, the whole of
humanity, in the eyes that look at me” (Levinas, 1990b, p. 235; Levinas,
2004a, p. 213, translation slightly altered). Through the concept of “the third”
(le tiers) Levinas can emphasize the inescapable connection between the
singular, situational and ethical (the other), and the universal, abstract and
political (the third). The political is responsibility thought not only in relation
to one, but for many people and for many situations. Commentators as Robert
Bernasconi (1999), Simon Critchley (2007), Miguel Abensour (2002), and
Jean-Francois Rey (1997) have all, in different ways, shown how Levinas can
help to provide new perspectives on the political. But these comments, helpful
80 CARL CEDERBERG
and insightful as they are, are most often metapolitical rather than political. Is
it possible to chisel out a more concrete political stance from Levinas’s work?
Here, we will ask how Levinas poses the problem of the revolution. However,
this is still a question about Levinas’s philosophy, not a question about how
Levinas personally or privately acted or chose not to act in concrete political
issues.
Can we think the revolution with the help of Levinas? What would this
mean? Levinas certainly did not treat revolution as a central concept of his
philosophy, even in a time where the notion of a world revolution was more
present in political and philosophical discourse. But he did not totally avoid
the topic, and at times opened his thought to a revolutionary vision. In fact, he
dedicated a lecture to the notion of revolution at the Colloque des juifs
internationelles de langue française in 1969: “Judaism and revolution”
(Levinas, 1977, pp. 11–53; Levinas, 1990a, pp. 94–119). What I will
investigate in this article is in what direction Levinas’s thought seeks for a
revolution. What is the revolution according to Emmanuel Levinas?
In order to prepare the ground for an answer to this question, I will start
out by addressing a predominant misconception of Levinas’s philosophy.
Lately, thinkers such as Alain Badiou have associated Levinas with the
contemporary tendency to use ethical formulae in support of a reactionary
political agenda. As I will show, this interpretation was partly inspired by the
image projected from Jacques Derrida’s earlier critical engagement with
Levinas. I will demonstrate how Badiou’s criticism is unjustified, and that
Levinas in fact had already responded to Derrida’s critique. My next step will,
therefore, be to show that Levinas’s philosophy is pervaded by a systematic
revolutionary trope, which he denotes with concepts such as “youth” and
“critique.” He leans on these concepts when articulating in his support for the
‘68 movement, as well as for the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.
Thereafter, I will analyze the one text that Levinas has dedicated solely to the
concept of revolution (“Judaism and revolution,” cited above). Here, in his
reading of a Mishnah text on the limitation of working hours, Levinas argues
for an understanding of the content of the revolution through his ethical
philosophy of the human. Levinas shows that Judaism is not a tradition to be
overcome by revolutionary politics, but that it, through the aid of interpreters
such as himself, can be seen as providing inspiration for revolutionary
thought. Finally, through critical engagement with Levinas’s attempt of
creating an ethical-ontological category of the café, I uncover some
problematics which remain in Levinas's thinking with respect to the
possibility of thinking the revolutionary community.
1. Ethics and Violence
Nietzsche’s main claim is that there can be no justice in itself that stands
outside of violence, since life itself is violent. Thus, it is dangerous to perceive
of a society that is entirely peaceful and just, because this will merely serve to
disguise stronger violence, a violence threatening human life as such.
Nietzsche’s thoughts are echoed by later thinkers. For example, in
“Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida reasons along similar lines. This is his
early and major text on Levinas, where he assails Levinas with difficult
questions. One of the most poignant of these, a question which condenses and
82 CARL CEDERBERG
summarizes the real challenges Derrida puts before the Levinasian project is
the following: in Levinas’s aim to free ethics from the unholy alliance
between ontology and politics, is there not a risk that he might serve to install
a certain pious hierarchy of ethics over politics, of the singular over the
conceptual, which in turn, is in fact nothing but the reign of one concept over
others? For the ethical must still operate within discourse, and therefore
within the political, the conceptual, and the ontological. Between the lines:
does not the (anti-totalitarian) privilege of the ethical over the political lead to
a new totalitarian conception of the political? In Derrida’s view, which echoes
Nietzsche, there is no transcendence from violence, i.e. no privileged ethical
discourse, and if one creates the illusion of such a discourse, one does not
only remain in the fetters of violence, but one forms a new sort of violence
(“the worst violence” (Derrida, 1967, p. 136n; Derrida, 1978, p. 400n), the
violence that would try to extinguish all other violence. “The ethical” can
become a kind of police force, “hostile to life,” in Nietzsche's words, if we
establish a hierarchy of the ethical over the political.
This has been followed up by recent thinkers—such as Slavoj Žižek
(2006), Jacques Rancière (2004), and Alain Badiou (2001)—challenging
Levinas’s preoccupation with the ethical-singular, which in their eyes is an
escape from philosophy’s necessary engagement with the political. Badiou in
particular associates Levinas’s “ethics of difference” to a certain turn towards
ethics in contemporary political discourse, and therefore to a fuzzy “politics of
values.” This discourse is often operated by politicians in hiding different
sorts of conservative or other geopolitical agendas—such as waging war in the
Middle East, and being able to send soldiers to these wars, because they are
labeled just, and because they are allegedly fought for the “rights of others.”
For Badiou and similar critics, saying that ethics precedes politics would
mean opening the doors to a certain form of ethico-political rhetoric (for we
are never outside politics, but only establish hierarchies within politics). Since
these allegations are made in very sweeping and indirect ways, it is also
difficult to free Levinas from them. I will in the following argue that Levinas
is unjustly associated with this kind of discourse. Badiou is right to criticize
the contemporary employment of ethical tropes in politics, and
“Levinasianism” might well provide some fuel for this “intellectual
counterrevolution” (Badiou, 2001, p. li). However, Levinas was well aware of
this problem; the dialogue with Derrida, as well as the events of 1968, helped
him bring this understanding to the forefront of his philosophy.
2. A Levinasian Politics
In the following, I will show how Levinas escapes the criticism exemplified
above by Derrida and Badiou. If we content ourselves with what Catherine
Chalier writes in this volume, I fear that this criticism would be hard to refute.
Here, Chalier warns against revolutionary hope as a violent hope, and
Thinking Revolution With and Beyond Levinas 83
juxtaposes it with her readings of Jewish hope and of Levinas, which is a turn
towards an “inner ‘point’ uncontaminated by evil.” Such a turn would
certainly be a turn away from a revolutionary thought of the political, towards
a focus on the immediate and ethical. And this is, in a sense, fine. Levinas was
not revolutionary in the immediate political sense, and perhaps neither is
philosophy in general, inasmuch as it must have the time to reflect upon, and
not already be an instrument for, political action. Of course, philosophical
thought can inspire revolutions. Or it can turn thought away from burning
political issues; such is the accusation against Levinas. As Louis Althusser
(one of Badiou’s philosophical heroes) wrote, “Simply put, the recourse to
ethics so deeply inscribed in every humanist ideology may play the part of an
imaginary treatment of real problems” (Althusser, 2005, p. 258). Althusser
was, of course, not referring to Levinas but to the advance of a “Marxist
humanism” in the 1960s. But Althusser is highly relevant, since his fear of a
turn from the material scientific language towards a pathetic language of
ethics inspires much of the contemporary criticism targeted at Levinas, most
notably Badiou’s.
Interestingly, Levinas has dedicated a short text to Althusser, the
existence of which Levinas’s critics seem conveniently to ignore. In this short
essay entitled “Ideology and Idealism” from 1972 (Levinas, 1982b, p. 17–33),
Levinas defends Althusser against Claude Bruaire’s rationalist criticism.
Althusser had introduced a notion of “suspect reason,” which from Bruaire’s
rationalist position appears as a weakness, a philosophical surrender. For him,
Althusser’s “critique of ideology” seems to hold reason to be suspect merely
because it has not provided the right proofs. Bruaire argues that philosophy as
suspicion of ideology is a self-contradiction. On its own terms, philosophy can
be nothing but ideology. Levinas, however, takes a step beyond the debate and
provides a justification for Marxism outside of the terminologies of Bruaire
and Althusser.
He argues along the following lines: in order for reason to truly be
reason, it must be able to lead humanity towards that which is good. And in
that case, it must be sensitive to injustice and must respond to the social
injustices of the world. Yet, many of these injustices are inflicted or allowed
by scientifically rational systems. Therefore, there needs to be a reformed
understanding of scientific rationality. A Marxist critique of rationalism is
justified by the injustice suffered by the proletariat. But the reason operating
in this justification can never be made totally independent of the process of
justification. Levinas warns against the totalitarian risks of this
conceptualizing world-view. Therefore, reason per se must be made suspect.
Levinas does not therefore argue for irrationalism, but that the abstractness of
reason ought to be judged from the standpoint of people’s actual needs. Here
we find a surprising Levinasian justification for Marxism as a science, with a
key suggestion of how Marxism can avoid falling into the traps of brutal
dogmatism and bureaucratic inhumanity.
84 CARL CEDERBERG
critique has a better understanding of the human than the humanists. When
Levinas calls the movement “youth,” he denotes a certain relationship to
temporality, trying to capture the piercing movement of critique rather than an
established set of values. Of course, this does not mean a farewell to values.
But if we see the good as that which is to be preserved, uncontaminated from
evil, it seems that one will easily find oneself in the other mode of
temporality, that of the humanists aiming to preserve that which for the critics
is already ideology and hypocrisy. This is not necessarily wrong. If one was to
opt for radicalism over conservatism by default, the choice of political outlook
on life would be based on a preference of temporal modes (the future over the
past, and the movement over the stance) rather than of views of the world.
This would be, as we shall see later, too “formal” an understanding of the
revolution.
Of course every formulation of critique will wither away into jargon and
clichés. Youth ages, and so did the revolutionary 68’s. But this does not do
away with the value of critique, of youth. The concept of youth has provided
us with a vantage point from which to view Derrida’s Nietzschean critique of
Levinas. The very claim that an economy of violence exists, enveloping all
human interaction, is not a neutral statement but a critique. This critique can
only be understandable as such from the viewpoint of the responsibility for
others. If there were no such conception of responsibility, violence could not
be understood as such; there would be nothing to be violated. Thus,
responsibility is the condition which makes critique possible, by disclosing the
economy of violence. Yet, any act of responsibility can be put to a new
critique—the perspective of critique is not stable. Responsibility is not an
inner point of goodness to which one can return. This is why I am slightly
worried about what Catherine Chalier writes earlier in this volume. According
to Chalier, Levinas teaches that it “remains possible to find the way back to a
‘point’ hidden within ourselves that is not contaminated by evil.” In my
reading of Levinas, this is not how he conceptualizes the ethical. He explicitly
warns against the idea that the one-for-the-other would be an inner safe harbor
(Levinas, 1990c, p. 214; Levinas, 2004b, p. 136); it can only be seen as the
movement of ethically informed critique and self-critique.
However even if there must be this movement, its measure cannot lie
within itself as movement. Youth implies novelty, but novelty is not always
best. In his presentation “The youth of Israel” (Levinas, 1977, pp. 54–81;
Levinas, 1990a, pp. 120–135) on Colloque des juifs internationelles de langue
française, Levinas somewhat sarcastically mourned the death of a true
revolutionary spirit in the uniformism of popular culture: “Long hair worn as
a uniform—now there is a the big scandal of long hair” (Levinas, 1977, p. 61;
Levinas, 1990a, p. 124). Revolutionary spirit cannot be for its own sake—this
does not exhaust the meaning of youth (Levinas, 1977, p. 71; Levinas, 1990a,
p. 130). This point is made somewhat differently in another Talmudic lecture
in the same volume, “Damages due to fire” (Levinas, 1977, pp. 149–180;
86 CARL CEDERBERG
Levinas, 1990a, pp. 178–197). Funnily, the theme of hair and age reappears.
From the Gemara he quotes the story of a middle-aged man with two wives,
one old and one young, struggling over his identity. The young wife tears of
all his white hair, the old wife tears out all his black hair, leaving him bald
(Levinas, 1977, p. 176; Levinas, 1990a, p. 195). The parable speaks of the
futility in the struggle between conservatism and modernism, between
“maturity as conservatism and youth as a search for novelty at any price.” The
point lies again, not in whether one is conservative or modern, but in the
ethical content of the political. The measure of critique is responsibility. The
same may be said with regard to his understanding of revolution.
A scan through Levinas’s published work with the help of Christian Ciocan’s
and Georges Hansel’s Concordance (Ciocan & Hansel, 2006, pp. 711–712)
shows that “revolution” is not a central notion in his work. Most often when
he uses the word “revolution” it is in order to describe a revolution of thought,
such as: German idealism (Levinas, 1979, p. 25); the phenomenological
reduction (Levinas, 2001, p. 222, Levinas, 1991, p. 92); Buberian (Levinas,
1987, p. 29) or Bergsonian (Levinas, 1987, p. 118) thought; or when he sees
his own work as an interpretation of Kant’s Copernican revolution (Levinas,
1995, p. 72, p. 216).
This can be seen as an irrelevant metaphor, and can perhaps sometimes
be justly dismissed as a façon de parler, but the expressions become more
interesting if we add that in “La philosophie et l’Éveil,” he speaks of
philosophies, in the transcendence of stable Weltanschauungen, as
“permanent revolutions,” finding this transcendence, of course, in the ethical
relation to the other, itself a “permanent revolution” (Levinas, 1991, pp. 97–
98). For Levinas, philosophical critique is in itself a revolution: it must strive
towards erupting the totality of a system—and as we saw in the discussion of
youth, critique is not merely a matter of cool theoretical speculation.
In the French context in which Levinas works, “Revolution” does not
only imply a future world revolution. The concept refers also to the French
Revolution, which Levinas always mentions in positive terms, linking it to the
emancipation of European Jews which began with that event (Levinas, 1998,
p. 159). Since the French revolution, he says, the struggle for human rights
has had the style of a revolutionary struggle. Human rights are surprisingly
often connected to the idea of revolution, and said to have a revolutionary
content (Levinas, 2006, p. 151; Levinas, 1987, p. 162; Levinas, 1991, p. 216).
Is this a traditionalist viewpoint, in assimilating a revolutionary spirit to the
more liberal western complacency of human rights, or is it revolutionary, in
that it sees the truth of human rights to lie beyond liberalist jargon in a
revolutionary spirit? As I have already argued, this dichotomy between radical
and traditional does not capture Levinas’s political thought. When discussing
Thinking Revolution With and Beyond Levinas 87
The place where Levinas directly opens his own thought towards revolution is
in his Talmudic lectures. Here he often relates Judaism to the notion of
revolution, sometimes equating the hope for revolution with the hope for
justice (Levinas, 1977, p. 97). The socialist dream of justice for all is inspired
by Judaism, yet he warns of the crimes committed “in the name of freedom, of
revolution, and even of love” (Levinas, 1982, p. 23). Judaism does thus not
have an unambiguous relation to revolution. It has, as Levinas writes, inspired
both the patience of the oppressed and the impatience of the revolutionaries
(Levinas, 1987, p. 179).
Levinas has devoted one entire Talmudic lecture to the topic of
“Judaisme et révolution” (Levinas, 1977, pp. 11–53; Levinas, 1990a, pp. 94–
119), which we will here interpret at some length. He begins with a text from
the Mishnah:
He who hires workers and tells them to begin early and finish late cannot
force them to do it if beginning early and finishing late does not conform
to the custom of the place. Where the custom of the place is that they be
fed, he is obligated to feed them: where it is that they be served dessert,
he must serve them dessert. Everything goes according to the custom of
the place. (Levinas, 1977, p. 15; Levinas, 1990a, p. 94).
This quotation from the Mishnah, does this not today sound as a support of
subalterns in their struggle against neoliberalism’s blindness to “customs of
the place”? However, Levinas does not focus so much on the notion of
88 CARL CEDERBERG
custom, remarking only that the usage of this term does not indicate a
“conservative and counter-revolutionary traditionalism” (Levinas, 1977, p. 22;
Levinas, 1990a, p. 101). On the contrary, Levinas reads from this passage a
“sublime materialism,” or even a “materialist humanism” (Levinas, 1977, p.
16; Levinas, 1990a, p. 97). What the text shows is that the human basic needs
of sleep and food are not negotiable, not subject to sale and purchase. “Food is
not the fuel necessary for the human machine” (Levinas, 1977, p. 16; Levinas,
1990a, p. 97). What is negotiable and limited is, rather, the freedom of the
employer. Levinas shows that human rights are not only the classically liberal
rights of liberty and property, but are also social rights, for example the rights
of the workers. While the freedom of capital expects that everything is
negotiable, Levinas in his reading of the Mishnah clearly shows that the rights
of the workers are human, non-negotiable rights. And Levinas observes, in a
somewhat condensed argument, that the rights are here as always discussed as
the rights of the other. But even if he does not elaborate this point here, this
makes perfect sense: rights are here discussed not from the viewpoint of the
worker claiming his rights, but from that of the employer obliged to observe
the rights of the worker. And what also becomes clear from this Mishnah
passage is that rights do not appear by way of an imagined social contract,
mutually beneficial to both parties. The freedom of capital must be limited
from the viewpoint of my original obligation to the other. As Levinas writes:
“in the forest of wolves, no law could be introduced” (Levinas, 1977, p. 21;
Levinas, 1990a, p. 100).
But: It would seem that I am digressing from the topic, the idea of
revolution. And so is Levinas, in the text that I am interpreting. In what way is
this then a text on revolution? The text was, as I have mentioned, first
produced as a lecture at the yearly Colloque des intellectuelles juifs de langue
française. That year, 1969, the topic of the colloquium was “Youth and
revolution.” Levinas holds, probably with a polemical edge against others
presenting that same year, that revolution shall not be defined purely formally
as a violent overturning of society. Rather, “revolution takes place where one
frees man; that is, revolution takes place where one tears man away from
economic determinism” (Levinas, 1977, p. 24; Levinas, 1990a, p. 102). It
concerns a vision of a political realization of the ethical relation to other
human beings. This text, therefore, sheds a light on that which we know as
“the political” in Levinas’s thought. As I have repeated, for Levinas, the
political stands for the necessary abstraction and dilution of the ethical. Since
I am responsible before everyone, Law, Justice, and the State are all needed in
order to distribute my responsibility and calculate how it is best met in
political actions and institutions. Knowing this, we can now understand that
revolution must be seen as the fulfillment of those ideals. Somewhat later, he
defines it very succinctly as “the realization of the order where Man is
defended” (Levinas, 1977, p. 35; Levinas, 1990a, p. 108). As was mentioned
already, Levinas’s whole oeuvre is aimed towards this, what he sees as the
Thinking Revolution With and Beyond Levinas 89
The café holds open house, at street level. It is a place of casual social
intercourse, without mutual responsibility. One goes in without needing
to. One sits down without being tired. One drinks without being thirsty.
All because one does not want to stay in one’s room. You know that all
the evils in the world occur as a result of our incapacity to stay alone in
our room [Levinas is referring to Pascal]. The café is not a place. It is a
non-place for a non-society[…] It is because one goes to the café for
distraction that one can stand all the horrors and injustices of a world
without soul (Levinas, 1977, pp. 41–42; Levinas, 1990a, pp. 111–112).
I am not waging war on the corner cafés—and I do not want to have all
the café keepers of Paris rise against me. But the café is only the
realization of a form of life. It proceeds from an ontological category
that Rabbi Eleazar ben Rabbi Simeon perceived in the simple inn of his
time, a category essential to Western being, perhaps to Eastern being,
but rejected by Jewish being (Levinas, 1977, p. 42; Levinas, 1990a, p.
112).
The café is no place for revolutionaries it seems. Are the revolutionaries in the
cafés inauthentic? Of course, Levinas is making the café into an ontological
Thinking Revolution With and Beyond Levinas 91
prolonging my own interests that really bring the ethical to the fore. The
loving, sharing situation is not a symbiosis. Even when I am in love, I am still
a distinct individual with appetites and desires produced from my own unique
perspective. The reminder that the other—the other that I love, as well as
those others that are outside the loving relationship—must concern me in spite
of these appetites and desires is the point from which a critique of human
relations must operate. But, as he also says in Totality and Infinity, enjoyment
is already better than mere existence, or ataraxia (Levinas, 1990b 154;
Levinas, 2004a, p. 145). And only one who can enjoy life can give from the
pleasures of life to the other. The reason for this is that
the transcendence of the face is not enacted outside of the world […]
The “vision” of the face as face is a certain mode of sojourning in a
home, or—to speak in a less singular fashion—a certain form of
economic life. No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted
outside of economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and
closed home (Levinas, 1990b, p. 187; Levinas, 2004a, p. 172).
“The home” for Levinas is a term for our capacity to prolong, maximize, and
protect our enjoyment of life. The idea of a home that must be kept
harmoniously intact in ordered to be opened to the stranger rests on a
patriarchal view of society, which we can trace throughout the tradition of
philosophy, or at least from Aristotle to Levinas. However, the concept of the
home is defined on the basis of the economy of enjoyment, rather than vice
versa. This lets us question Levinas's notion of the home, retaining his idea,
however of an economy of enjoyment as a prerequisite to the ethical. My
positive claim is, then, that the economy of enjoyment must not be isolated to
the home. Levinas, of course chooses to favor the home over the café out of a
fear of distraction. Distraction means non-responsibility: the café stands for a
communication where I cannot be sure that I will act responsibly towards the
other, and Levinas therefore disqualifies it as the environment for responsible
action. But can there ever be such a safe zone of responsible life? In fact, it
was Levinas who said that all communication with others is a “dangerous life,
a fine risk to run” (Levinas, 1990c, pp. 190–191; Levinas, 2004b, p. 120).
This is true for my contacts in the café as well as those in the home (say, with
Mrs. Levinas). He says that Judaism rejects the café. This may be true of some
interpretations of Judaism, but is this true of Judaism per se? Would it not be
more in keeping with Levinas’s interpretation of Judaism as already
secularized to welcome this forum for enjoyment and debate in the public
sphere, in spite of the risks that it holds?
Today, the café is hardly this forum. The café in this form is a dated
phenomenon; it brings to mind in particular a certain European culture,
ranging from the turn of the seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth
century. With new media, new modes and forums for public enjoyment and
Thinking Revolution With and Beyond Levinas 93
interaction have appeared and replaced and transformed the old forums for
public communication. The community of the café should not be idealized. To
be sure, the community of the café was predominately a European male
middle class privilege. Who picked, transported, and ground the beans, who
built the coffee machine, who served the coffee and who swept the floors of
the café? Who took care of the children while the debate was flowing in the
café? Clearly the communication taking place in the café, no matter how
“responsible” and politically avant-garde, was made possible due to various
unjust structures of society. This is true also of the café’s modern
counterparts, such as the so-called social media; the structures upholding the
communication in these forums can be unjust in new ways, and offer new
modes of distraction from political responsibility, and they must also be
questioned and criticized. But all critiques of injustice need these public
forums, in order to be developed and spread. Thus, any such critique will be a
critique of the culture in which the criticism itself is produced: it is a self-
critical process, where conservatism can offer as much danger of distraction
as “modernity.” Levinas’s name for this incessant movement of critique was
“youth.” This movement has revolution as its goal. Levinas's thought is
precisely not counter-revolutionary (as Badiou claims), but strives for
revolution as the “realization of the order where Man is defended.”
Seven
If the animal laborans needs the help of homo faber to ease his labor
and remove his pain, and if mortals need his help to erect a home on
earth, acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his
highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and
historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them
the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not
survive at all (ibid., p. 173).
Topos and Utopia 97
My purpose in this chapter is to take seriously the place of activity beyond the
political in the task of worldmaking that is necessitated by the revolutionary
philosophies discussed elsewhere in this volume, and to examine how, in two
concrete cases, the work of homo faber attempted to transform a utopian
vision into a concrete topos. I will first, and at greater length, discuss the case
of the early Bezalel School as an example of such a process of negotiation,
highlighting the manner in which it both was driven by and supported the
political project of the early Zionist movement, arguing that the rise of
European nationalism and the concomitant emphasis on national spirit and
folk culture expressed through the arts, coinciding as it did with debates over
the integration of Jews into European society, led to an emphasis on Jewish
material production as a locus of identity negotiation.
I will then, by way of a counterpoint, turn briefly to the work of Marc
Chagall, who presided over the Vitebsk People’s Art School in the years
immediately following the Russian Revolution. Chagall is a considerably
more complex political actor than was the founder of Bezalel, Boris Schatz;
while at various points in his career he appeared to be aligned with the Bund,
with Zionism, and points in between, if there is a consistency to his politics it
is that he aligned with whatever party or movement appeared, to him, to offer
him a platform from which to promote his vision of the future of art. In this
regard, Chagall’s work also functions as a locus of identity negotiation, but
the identity in question belongs to the work itself, rather than the culture
which produced it. Nevertheless, it is the work of Chagall, rather than Bezalel,
which has become emblematic of “Jewish art,” and this chapter will conclude
by discussing the way in which Chagall mobilized both Revolutionary politics
and the actual topos of the town of Vitebsk in order to fuel the production of
symbolic utopias.
they used Hegelian categories and principles to prove Kant wrong when
he declared Judaism lacking in true religion, ethical significance, and
universal concern. When they finished their work, Judaism became
fundamentally aniconic, pre-eminently spiritual, coterminous with
ethics, and quintessentially universal (ibid., p. 16).
Margaret Olin has noted that the discipline of Art History also developed
during the nineteenth century, largely in Germany and, at least in part, as an
overtly nationalist undertaking, especially in the context of the 1871
unification of the various German states into a single country (2000, pp. 7–8).
Olin traces three main narratives about Jewish art which developed over the
course of the century: of “Jews as exotic purveyors of fantasy” (which Olin
attributes to nineteenth century interpretations of biblical descriptions of the
Temple and its furnishings, although Bland traces the trope of exotic and
excessive Jewish visuality back to the medieval period), of Jews simply
lacking a national art of their own (but being capable, and perhaps even
interested in, imitating the art of other nations), and of Jews as actively hostile
to images (ibid., p. 17). It is this last trope which she connects directly to the
Second Commandment, as well as to Hegel and his intellectual heirs. The
perpetuation of these tropes through the emerging academic discipline of Art
History, as well as through Hegelian nationalism kept the ideas derived from
the Second Commandment alive even among Jews who considered
themselves thoroughly secular and assimilated. It is this combination of
Hegel’s theory of national spirit expressed through art with the last two tropes
which had attained prominence by the time Boris Schatz sought permission
from Theodor Herzl to found the Bezalel School in Palestine, in order to
promote Jewish nationhood through the creation (ex nihilo) of a distinctive
Jewish national art.
100 ALANA M. VINCENT
We shall not leave our old home before the new one is prepared for us.
Those only will depart who are sure thereby to improve their position;
those who are now desperate will go first, after them the poor; next the
prosperous, and, last of all, the wealthy. Those who go in advance will
raise themselves to a higher grade, equal to those whose representatives
will shortly follow. Thus the exodus will be at the same time an ascent
of the class (Herzl, 1988, p. 82).
Unlike Herzl, who grew up in a highly assimilated family, Boris Schatz came
from a traditional Eastern European Jewish community; his father was a
teacher at the local ḥeder. He was born in Vorna, Lithuania, in 1867 and was
educated at a yeshiva in Vilnius, before leaving to attend art school, first in
Vilnius, then in Warsaw, and finally in Paris, where he was a student of Mark
Antokolski (Bertz, 2003, pp. 248–249). Inka Bertz notes that
Antokolski, famous in Russia for his depiction of Ivan the Terrible and
other patriotic gestures, still belonged to the generation of the
Peredvishniki, the “Wanderers.” In their concept, art had to be national
art, expressing “the spirit of the people”, and at the same time being
comprehensible to “the people”, since its task was to educate “the
people” (ibid., p. 249).
Topos and Utopia 101
In order to develop his talents the Jewish artist must leave his Jewish
environment and study in foreign countries, be influenced by a foreign
spirit and work on foreign subjects. Thus, gradually, without noticing it,
he removes himself from the Jewish people (qtd. in Manor, 2005, p. 15).
Schatz designed the Bezalel program with the aim of helping diaspora Jews to
recover from this assimilation, or to avoid it all together, by immersing
themselves in what he considered a pure Jewish (“Hebrew”) culture, just as he
had immersed himself in Bulgarian national culture during his time there.
Dalia Manor, the leading expert on the Bezalel School, describes at some
length the steps that Schatz took to secure a proper environment in which to
enculturate his students, from instruction in the Hebrew language, to the
acquisition of a wide collection of local flora and fauna as well as
102 ALANA M. VINCENT
archaeological artifacts and local crafts for students to study (Manor, 2005,
pp. 25–28). The result of this program was a visual vocabulary
drawn from several sources: the past (Jewish symbols, the works of
Jewish artists, archaeology, and the depiction of the Holy Places); the
present (Zionist symbols and figures); and the environment of Eretz
Israel (flora and fauna, ethnic prototypes, the pioneer life, and scenic and
historical sites). An additional preoccupation was the revival of ancient
elements such as the Hebrew letter and biblical topics (Cohen, 1994, p.
145).
What emerged in the early twentieth century from the workshops of the
Bezalel School was an art deliberately grounded in motifs from the craft
traditions of the Levant region, rather than from the folk traditions of
European Jewish communities, which were thought to be too derivative of
non-Jewish cultures. That the folk traditions of European nations were
increasingly considered to be central to the expression of national spirit
rendered Jewish folk culture from the same areas suspicious, as Jewish
craftswork very often bore a strong regional resemblance to non-Jewish works
(for a lengthy discussion of Jewish visual borrowing in the medieval period,
see Kogman-Appel, 2001). However, a recourse to non-European craft motifs
did not grant the artists of Bezalel the political or cultural legitimacy which
they sought within Europe. Rather than contesting their exclusion, as Jews,
from participating in any European nationalist undertaking, this strategy
served to confirm the basis of such an exclusion, which is not to suggest that
Jews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were not very often
ardent patriots of the country in which they resided—the historical record is
clear that a large majority of Jews were deeply dedicated to their country—but
rather that Herzl’s analysis of anti-Semitism as embedded in European society
was proven sadly correct; insofar as the logic of nationalism depends upon the
creation of a group of outsiders against which the nation might define itself,
Jews have tended to play the symbolic role of outsider far more often than
they have been privileged insiders.
In acquiescing to the exclusion of Jews from European space, Bezalel
surrendered any claim Jewish art might have made for significance as a
Western tradition, relegating it instead to the Orient (a move which Zachary
Braiterman (2012) has recently, and appropriately, termed “auto-Orientalism”
(see also Braiterman, 2013)). Moreover, while within Europe the craft revival
could be seen as a re-injection of national spirit into the bland and soulless
work of academic art, non-Western craft was still treated as a lesser form of
production, a fact of which Schatz himself was well aware (see Winter, 1975,
p. 36). Manor reports that he published his very first paper on the issue of
Jewish national art in 1888 (nearly twenty years before he began the Bezalel
Topos and Utopia 103
project) and, following his opening statements about the nature of art and
beauty,
Schatz then suggests that the talent for painting and sculpture which was
recently recognised among Jews was wasted on decorative religious
objects. Although the makers excelled in their craft it was not highly
appreciated and they were only titled ‘craftsman’ (Manor, 2005, p. 10).
While the two forms of production and their practitioners existed side-by-side,
the mutual enrichment that Cohen hints at here, and that I agree was Schatz’s
aim, never really emerged; instead, the products of the early Bezalel School
were received as almost entirely commercial in nature, as craft of high
technical proficiency but limited aesthetic value: “‘fancy articles for luxurious
tourists’ whose aesthetic value ‘is not of this time’” and which never quite
104 ALANA M. VINCENT
The Yemenite Jews have always produced fine silver and gold filigree,
but some of the younger men have received training at the new Bezalel
school of applied arts and are now turning out fine table silverware of
simple and good design, for which there is always a limited number of
buyers. Their jewellery has been modernized also, and is more
acceptable to the European section of the public than the over-ornate and
weak ornaments of the Yemenite tradition. On the whole it can be said
that silver-work and jewellery are of fine craftsmanship with designs
tending to follow the simple forms of modern European design (1944,
pp. 267–268).
Likewise, William Schack, in 1966, wrote that “Aside from western art, in
which, as has been noted, the historic gaps are large and hard to fill (we shall
see whether the Israel Museum will be able to snare Old Masters permanently
as it did for an opening loan exhibition), the Israeli museums have a good
sampling of eastern art in some limited areas” (1966, p. 382). The local and
particular continue to be measured against their relation to the (European)
universal, the former valuable only insofar as they proved access to, or serve
to in some way illuminate, the latter; the “many notable objects” in Bezalel’s
“large collection of Near Eastern, and especially Persian, art ranging over a
thousand years” (which had, by the time Shack wrote, been incorporated into
the newly-opened Israel Museum) held little value in comparison to the Old
Masters which it lacked (ibid.). This is a sharp departure from the motivation
behind the original Bezalel collection, which originated in 1906, when Boris
Schatz began to gather objects, including “samples of Jewish ritual objects,
works by Jewish artists, and local archaeological items” in order for Bezalel
students to study and base designs on them; the school also hosted a museum
of natural history, featuring flora and fauna from the region, developed for a
similar purpose: “The singularity of Bezalel [...] lies in its motivation: the
attempt to create a total environment, a ‘Hebrew’ environment influencing
everyone and everything in it” (Cohen, 1994, p. 140).
The failure of the original Bezalel School was, in part, and in spite of
the eventual success of the new incarnation of the project which opened in
1935, a failure of this vision: it was, from the beginning, precisely not a total
Topos and Utopia 105
artistic freedom. These two ideas are not necessarily mutually exclusive, of
course—as Chagall’s tenure as the Commissar of Arts demonstrates, for at
least some time his vision was sufficiently in harmony with the post-October
government for each to perceive the other as a source of support.
The eventual division and collapse of relationship between Chagall and
the Revolutionary government can be understood best as follows: for Chagall,
Art was Revolution; for the Revolutionaries, the Revolution itself was the
highest form of art. Hints of this division could be seen even as early as 7
November 1918, in Chagall’s speech “Art on the Anniversary of October,” in
which he both aligns art with Revolution and at the same time insists on its
autonomy:
Art lived and will continue to live by its own laws. But in its depths, it
undergoes the same stages experienced by all humanity, advancing
toward the most revolutionary achievements. And if it is true that only
now, when humanity has taken the road of the ultimate Revolution, can
we speak of Humanity with a capital H, even more so, can Art be written
with a capital A only if it is revolutionary in its essence (Chagall, 1918,
pp. 28–29).
The pogroms of the Civil War period that resulted in the deaths of at least tens
of thousands of Jews were one of the most debated topics in the Ukrainian
Jewish press in the early decades of the twentieth century; the Democratic and
Socialist press also paid a considerable amount of attention to this subject. In
the 1920’s, journalists and historians who worked for the “pogrom
commission”—the Central Aid Committee for pogrom victims in Kiev—
issued a series of research publications based on documents that had been
collected in an archive of Eastern European Jewry in Berlin, which was
established in 1921, at the instigation of Ilya Cherikover. The foundational
collections of this archive were formed from materials which had been
gathered by the “Editorial Panel”—a subsidiary of the Central Aid
Committee—that began operating in May 1919; the work of this “pogrom
commission” was reinvigorated in Berlin. Thus, Nochum Shtif’s book
Pogroms in Ukraine: The Period of the Volunteer Army was written in Kiev in
March 1920, published in Russian in 1922 and appeared in Yiddish in 1923.
That year also saw the publication of Cherikover’s first volume of The History
of the Pogrom Movement in Ukraine 1917–1921, with a foreword written by
Semyon Dubnov (Budnitskii, 2005, pp. 276–280; Roskies, 1984, pp. 138–
140).
In his book, among other things, Shtif aimed to show the “organic,
interworking connections between the pogroms, as part of military routine, the
military and the socio-political programme of the Volunteer Army.” The
author considered the program of the White Army to have “contained features
of restoration and return to the pre-revolutionary Russia.” Pogroms were “a
reaction against the emancipation of the Jews, itself a result of the hateful
revolution; it was the anti-revolutionaries’ first step in an attempt at re-
enslaving the Jewish population” (Shtif, 1922, pp. VII–VIII ). However,
Shtif’s opinions regarding the links between the pogroms and the Volunteer
Army programme were somewhat mistaken. To be more precise, he was
wrong about the connection between the pogroms and the official ideology of
the White Movement leaders. The Declaration of the Volunteer Army was
written by a leader of the Russian liberals, Pavel Miliukov, who, officially,
always promoted equal rights for the Jews. In practice, however, Anton
Denikin’s troops became infamous for bloody pogroms and mass looting, to
112 OLEG BUDNITSKII
which the commanding officers turned a blind eye (Budnitskii, 2005, pp. 158–
344). It is not surprising then, that for Eastern European Jews, the White
Movement became synonymous with pogroms.
Taking into consideration the degree to which pogroms were part of the
White Army strategy, it is easy to understand how much of a shock it was for
the Jewish community of Berlin, not to mention the Jewish émigré community
as a whole, to see a group of Jewish public figures and journalists calling for a
war on Bolshevism and suggesting that Jews should accept responsibility for
taking part in the revolution. This group, who called themselves The National
Union of Russian Jews, blamed their fellow Jews for not lending enough
support to the efforts of the White Army in its struggle against the Bolsheviks.
Among the Union members were Iosif Bikerman, Daniil Pasmanik, Veniamin
Mandel’, Grigorii Landau, as well as less well-known figures, such as Isaak
Levin and Linskii (Naum Dolinskii).
In the beginning of 1923, Bikerman, Mandel’, and Landau presented a
series of lectures in Berlin concerning the revolution and the role of the Jews
in it. This campaign was started by Bikerman; in his paper, Russia and the
Russian Jews, presented on 17 January 1923, he attempted to defend his
fellow Jews, who had been accused of destroying a “blossoming Tsarist
Russia” (Rul’, 1923a, p. 5; Rassvet, 1923, p. 17). According to him, “Russia’s
downfall began during the preparations for the February revolution, in which
Jews played no part.” However, Russian Jews were not altogether forthright in
According to Bikerman, the biggest enemy to both Russia and her Jews were
the Bolsheviks. However, he also attacked those Jews who “sought to impede
Russia’s regeneration” (ibid.). This group consisted of Zionists, who not only
distracted Jews from participating in modernizing Russia, but also encouraged
them to collaborate with the Bolsheviks; “autonomists,” whose intentions
were to orchestrate a secession of one large state into many smaller ones, so
that Jewish autonomy could be easier to gain; and the entire Jewish
community who were fearful that the downfall of the Bolsheviks would be
followed by White Army pogroms. Bikerman entered into a direct dispute
with Shtif: he put the pogroms in the context of the Civil War and argued that
the anti-Jewish pogroms were part of the all-Russian demise. “A strong
Russian statehood is essential for the Jews,” concluded Bikerman (ibid.).
Berlin Debates 113
According to Landau, “the present accusations [made against the Jews] are
taken out of all proportion. Now, in the midst of ruin, suffering, and the
destruction of the state and possibly even culture, it is essential that one holds
himself to account and finds the truth” (ibid.). The truth was that “the Jewish
semi-intelligentsia became receptive to ideas of unrest and thus committed a
treachery against both Russia and their own people” (ibid.). The three
movements—Socialism, nationalistic separatism, and revolutionary
tendencies, widely spread among the Jewry—had a devastating effect on it.
Landau concluded: “There are no contradictions between Russia’s interests
and those of her Jewish population. The Jews are interested in revival of the
Great Russia. […] Most of them wish this and strive towards it. Russia’s
revival is only possible through a triumph of morality and sobriety; through
freedom from self-deception; through a conscious appreciation of collective
interests” (ibid.).
The series of lectures delivered by the Kayshchiesya (repentant)
concluded on 21 March 1923 with a paper by Veniamin Mandel’ who stated:
The widely circulated view that ‘Jews destroyed Russia’ has very little
to do with the truth. Even if it was possible to equate Jews with the
Bolsheviks, it would still have been inappropriate to hold them
responsible for Russia’s demise, as the Bolsheviks themselves proved to
be only a consequence of said demise. What truly obliterated Russia was
the February revolution, which was orchestrated by the Russian elite and
the state and public bodies, which Jews were not part of. The revolution
was realized by sailors, the St. Petersburg proletariat and the St.
Petersburg garrison. None of these groups claimed any Jewish members
either. However, the Jews did engage in the development of the
revolution, as well the Bolsheviks’ torturous devastation of Russia. The
Jewry cannot deny its responsibility for its participation in blatant
barbarism committed by the Bolsheviks. If a Jewish nationalist
114 OLEG BUDNITSKII
same floor. It seems that this was only possible in the Berlin of the early
1920s.
Let us explore the most characteristic statements of those present at the
debates, including the main speakers. This discussion is reconstructed on the
basis of anonymous reports from Russian émigré newspapers published in
Berlin. One of the principal questions discussed was that of “accountability”
with regards to pogroms. Also discussed were the views on Zionism and
Bolshevism, potential avenues for Russia’s reconstruction, her new structure,
and the role of the Jews in this new, hypothetical country.
The well-known economist Boris Brutskus, who had been forced to flee
Russia on the infamous “philosophers’ ship” in 1922, explained that the
Russian Revolution “was rooted deeply in the depths of the Russian psyche.
An elemental force in the form of Russian folk-Bolshevism burst through to
the fore. The Russian people have made their own history” (Rul’, 1923b, p.
5). One cannot separate the Jews from ordinary Russians when the question of
accountability arises. The close relationship many Jews had with Bolshevism
was determined by the condition in which they lived in pre-revolutionary
Russia. Brutskus both argued against and agreed with the Kayshchiesya: “It is
difficult at this moment in time to come up with a recipe for deliverance, but
one can only salute those Jews who express desire to support Russian
statehood” (Dni, 1923b, p. 7).
The Zionist activist and historian of pogroms Iosef Schechtman
proclaimed: “Zionism is the only solution for a nation inhabiting foreign
states. The Jewry does not have any other allies. The White Movement is only
an attempt to restore the Tsarist regime, which is inevitably linked with
pogroms” (Rul’, 1923g, p. 5). Schechtman noted that Tsarist rule and
oppression of the White Guardsmen had become so tiresome for so many, that
it was impossible not to become a revolutionary: “The February Revolution
should be highly praised because it resulted in dispensing the Pale of
Settlement, Numerus Clausus, and other restrictions” (Dni, 1923d, p. 5). Yet
another Zionist, Israel Trivus, said that “the Kayshchiesya harm not only the
Jewish people, but Russia too; their activities do not shed light on the Jewish
question but instead complicate it. They uphold the popular belief that Jews
are responsible for Russia’s collapse. The image of the revolutionary Jew is a
myth, because Jews are traditionally very conservative. It is not the Jews who
should repent, but those who carried out anti-Semitic policies” (Rul’, 1923f, p.
5). Trivus and Mandel’ did not disagree about the conservatism of the Jewish
people. However, Mandel’ thought that, even though the revolution displayed
typically Russian characteristics, the Russian Jewry contributed to it in
particular, and therefore ought to take responsibility for their participation.
“Zionism does not offer the Jews anything substantial,” Mandel’ said, “it
acted as a catalyst for Jewish emancipation from the Russian state for some
Jews, while the Russian Jewry [at large] had merged with Russia and her
116 OLEG BUDNITSKII
culture” (Rul’, 1923g, p. 5). Mandel’ believed that Jews should aim to
reinstate the “Great Russia” in which the Jewry would flourish.
Landau echoed Mandel’s statement: “It would be untrue to say that Jews
do not have allies. It is necessary to be more active in Russian political life.”
The Zionist tendency to avoid Russian politics puts Jews on a “road to
nowhere” (ibid.). Landau particularly directed his accusations at the Jews for
not doing enough to support the Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon, who was
imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1922: “These protests are even more
necessary, because the Jews themselves would often turn to the public opinion
all over the world when persecuted for their faith” (ibid.).
Bikerman attacked not only the Jews associated with Communism, but
also the Zionists. They “got carried away with the prospect of creating their
own nation state, dragging the Jewish masses along with them, distracting the
community from tackling the question of how to face Russia’s new fate” (Dni,
1923c, p. 5). Speaking at the debates, Bikerman reiterated that although
“pogroms were unfortunate events, they were unavoidable and even natural
under the circumstances.” In another presentation, Bikerman talked about the
idealism of the Whites, and stated that applying the word “pogroms” to their
actions would be a “misuse of the word” (Dni, 1923b, 11 March, p. 7). It was
these comments by Bikerman, as well as those made by Landau (although
formulated less harshly), which initiated a vehement reaction. The editor and
publisher of the Russian Economist magazine, Anatoly Gutman, stated that
pogroms cannot be justified by the Civil War: “The commanding officers
never attempted to curtail the carnage as the White Army enacted genocide.”
However, he conceded that at the “present moment” one should concentrate
on overthrowing Bolshevism, rather than on the critique of the White
Movement: “Russian Jews must be Russian patriots and therefore enemies of
Bolshevism” (Rul’, 1923b, p. 5).
A Jewish sympathiser of General Kornilov, one Shifrin, “painted a
picture of Jewish persecution by the Whites” (ibid.). Shifrin must have
belonged to a handful of Jews serving in Volunteers’ Army when it had
indeed been voluntary (i.e. before the secret decision to reject Jewish
applicants).
Naum Gergel’, a member of the “pogrom commission,” who was later to
publish an article analyzing pogroms’ statistics after many years of research
(see Gergel’, 1928, pp. 106–113), and whose data on the victims’ numbers,
sex, and age remain the most authoritative to this day, gave the most
boisterous presentation. Taking part in the debates following Landau’s lecture,
Gergel’ stated that one should discuss Landau’s position, rather than the
question of Jewish culpability: “Let [Landau] explain where he stands with
regards to the White Movement and the pogroms committed by Denikin’s
troops. Bolshevism is a negative phenomenon. However, one does not wish to
return to the times of the Beilis Case either” (Dni, 1923b, 11 March, p. 7). The
severity of Gergel’s speech was probably toned down for newspaper
Berlin Debates 117
publication. The reporter noted that Gergel’ had spoken abrasively and a
portion of the audience left the auditorium in protest.
A biographer of Emperor Nicholas II, Sergei Oldenburg, spoke in
defense of the White Army, calling it “the nucleus of future Russia” (Rul’,
1923b, 10 February, p. 5). Another monarchist, Maslennikov, a member of the
3rd and 4th State Dumas and later a member of the Supreme Monarchist
Council abroad, came out in support of the Kayshchiesya: “Bolshevism is the
product of an illness festering in the Russian soul, and the Jews—Trotsky,
Radek, Litvinov et al.—are responsible for upholding its stability. Without
their actions, the Russian revolution would have limited itself to a cruel but
impotent and short-lived riot.” Concluding his statement, Maslennikov said
that it was “necessary for everybody to work towards rebuilding the Great
Russia” (Dni, 1923e, p. 5). “Everybody,” by implication, suggests that
Maslennikov believed that the Jews should also contribute to this endeavor.
This view was not widely shared by other right-wing politicians.
A certain Kuznetsov, a Moscow industrialist, considered the Jewish role
in reinvigorating Russia, making a call to write off “all old accounts”: “Jewish
merchants and industrialists are essential for Russia of the future. The only
way that this Russia could be created is through application of collective will
and energy.” (Rul’, 1923h, p. 5)
It is curious to note that some of the Kayshchiesya shared monarchists’
opinions. They obviously saw in the monarchy (naturally, an “enlightened”
one) a guarantor of order and stability. Thus, Mandel’ sung a veritable “paean
to the future monarchy, free from the Black Hundreds” (Rul’, 1923d, p. 5).
Meanwhile, one Minskaia confidently reflected that in the recent years, 9 out
of 10 Jews leaned to the right and began to feel a “melancholy longing for the
Tsar” (Rul’, 1923g, p. 5). Daniil Pasmanik, yet another “Jewish monarchist”,
took part in the Berlin debates by correspondence, as it were—from Paris,
where he was living at the time. In the beginning of January 1923, Pasmanik
published a book in Paris titled Russian Revolution and Jewry (Bolshevism
and Judaism). He argued that Judaism and Bolshevism had nothing in
common, and that blaming the Jews for playing a decisive role in the Russian
Revolution is nonsensical, at least if you consider the statistics. However, he
also wrote:
It is not enough to say that the Jewish people are not responsible for
certain actions which were carried out by members of its community.
We are responsible for Trotsky until we distance ourselves from him,
just as the Russian people are responsible for Lenin, Chicherin, and all
the traitor generals, until they distance themselves from them. [...] We,
the Jews, do not have a right to keep our heads in the sand (Pasmanik,
1923b, pp. 11–12).
118 OLEG BUDNITSKII
Pasmanik suggested that the Russian émigré community and even the anti-
Soviet opposition in the USSR, when in a state of emergency, should follow
Italy’s example by consolidating around a single political figure, as the
Italians had done with Mussolini. “As an evolutionist, I am not ecstatic about
the emergence of Fascism, but I see it as a historical necessity,” wrote
Pasmanik (1923a, p. 30). Of course, one has to bear in mind, that in the
beginning of 1923, Fascism had not yet acquired the same notorious
reputation as it would in later years. Still, using Fascist Italy as a model for
solving the “Russian Question” shows that the author lacked not only political
intuition but also taste.
Holding an entirely contrary opinion was a certain Kaplan, who claimed
that the Soviet state was the only power which is capable of bringing about
order while boosting Russia’s prestige: “soon, Parisian hegemony will be
transferred to Moscow” (Rul’, 1923f, p. 9). One Epfel’baum, who called
himself a sympathiser of the Third International but was not a member of any
political party, said that both Zionists and the Kayshchiesya were united in
“bowing to the Whites, so that they can show how distant they are from
Bolshevism […] The monarchists Landau and Bikerman must decide whose
side they are on: Nicholas’s or Cyril’s.” Epfel’baum stated ironically that the
future [Russian] monarchist newspaper to be published in Berlin will be
funded by the Jews (Rul’, 1923g, p. 5).
In the words of the journalist Ilya Trotsky (no relation to Leon Trotsky),
the Kayshchiesya disassociated themselves from the Jewish public. “It is
unclear whether the balance of power in a future Russia will shift to Miliukov
or Kerensky,” said the journalist, “but it is certain that neither Markov nor
Maslennikov will succeed in gaining any authority and, in fact, it is even more
humiliating to be led by them. Only in 1917 were the Jews freed from their
legally inferior position. By not accepting this, the Kayshchiesya are
condemning themselves to absolute isolation” (Dni, 1923d, p. 5). Trotsky was
entirely correct. The group of “repentant” or “responsible” Jews (as they were
Berlin Debates 119
mockingly called in émigré circles [Gul’, 2001, p. 150]) was rejected by the
largely indignant wider Jewish public. This was reflected in the Jewish press,
irrespective of political affiliations. Shloyme (Solomon) Gepshtein, the editor
of the Zionist Rassvet, responded to Bikerman’s lecture by comparing him to
an incompetent solicitor:
one should listen to what he has to say, and then hire another solicitor.
He cannot be trusted with the ‘Jewish case.’ The man in the street would
formulate the reason in layman’s tongue: ‘my lawyer must be first and
foremost my lawyer.’ In my opinion, we, Zionists, have worked out a
formula which has won us international support from the Jewish masses
in all countries. This formula is based on the paramount importance of
Jewish national interests, honour and dignity in any delusionary or
challenging circumstances (Gepshtein, 1923, p. 5).
Around the time of the first Russian revolution of 1905 and the pogroms
that followed, the late Medem, one of the leaders of Bund, said: “Jewish
blood spilled during the pogroms greased the gears of the Russian
revolution.” Now comes Bikerman, the Jewish apostle of the Russian
counter-revolution, demanding that the Jewish people should not blame
the ‘Whites’ for spilling Jewish blood, but instead consider it as a
consequence of the Civil War. He encourages the Jews to satisfy
themselves with this explanation, extend their hands out to those who
have spilled Jewish blood and be happy that this blood greased the gears
of the Russian political backlash (Schechtman, 1923, pp. 3–4).
Kulisher cited Edmund Burke’s words about not being able to fathom a single
accusatory speech against an entire people. Closing his statement, Kulisher
said that
The discussion almost dried out when this polemic resurfaced on the pages of
Berlin periodicals after the publication of Russia and the Jews in early 1924,
which featured not only essays by Bikerman, Landau and Mandel’, but also
texts by Daniil Pasmanik, Isaak Levin and Linskii (Dolinskii). Most of the
authors of this compilation expanded the ideas which had previously been
touched upon in their lectures, or, like in the case of Pasmanik, in his previous
publications. The principal concepts of this volume can be summarized as
follows: first of all, for the Jews, Bolshevism is an absolute evil which should
be fought against. Second, many Jews are conservative by their nature and are
generally found to be interested in stability—a point which can be proved by
historical evidence. To claim that they strive for ruin and revolution is at best
a mistake and at worst, a slander. Finally, due to certain historical
circumstances—for example, the anti-Semitic policies of the Tsarist
government—quite a few Jews actively took part in the Russian revolution.
The Jewish people need to take responsibility for this, distance themselves
from these Bolshevik Jews, and take on an active role in attempting to restore
the Russian state.
The introduction to the volume, titled “To the Jews of All Countries!”
reads:
In this time of trouble, all Russian Jews have had to part either with their
lives or private possessions. Jewish culture and dignity have been
degraded, forced into a helpless and miserable void and pressured by
grief into a slow and quiet death. Our shrines are desecrated; our culture
has been trampled upon and turned inside out. Just like the Russian
Berlin Debates 121
people, hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews have been exiled and are
now forced to traverse the globe. For us it is our second Diaspora, a
Diaspora within a Diaspora. […] The National Union of Russian Jews is
strongly convinced: for the Jews, as well as all peoples of Russia,
Bolshevism is the prime evil and our sacred duty is to fight it with all
our strength for the sake of humanity, culture, the motherland and the
Jewish people. Our goals are to spread this conviction among Jews all
over the world—but first and foremost, among the Russian Jews, to
mobilise the Jewish public opinion in all countries for the war against
Bolshevism and to rebuild Russia (Bikerman et al., 1978, pp. 5, 7).
Every Jew, who does not fantasise that Jews can walk on water, or that
in the middle of collapsing kingdoms and dying nations we can stay
calm, because we are protected by a magic spell that turns centuries of
accusations into perpetual innocence, must remember that the February,
and not the October Revolution, was responsible for Russia’s demise
(Bikerman, 1978, p. 21).
But who were these Bolshevik Jews? Mandel’ pointed out that “the immature
and pretentious half-wits whose only intention is the proliferation of their
careers, as well as degenerate fanatics and even sadists, whom the Bolsheviks
met ‘with arms wide open’, come from both Russian and Jewish
122 OLEG BUDNITSKII
If only the Berlin grouping of the supporters of the old regime were not
blinded by the desire to turn back the wheel of history, they would not
have written indecent articles about ‘wide spread irresponsibility,
boundless verbal immorality and triumphant superficiality.’ It would
cease to play the absurd role of the healer of national wounds and would
stop distributing superlative advice regarding the war on Bolshevism.
After all, Russian Jews fight Bolshevism to the best of their ability,
without having to be reminded of it (Pozner, 1924, p. 2).
When I was reading Russia and the Jews, I strongly felt the deep, tragic
self-realisation of the Russian Jews, who love their native country, do
not like the revolution and wish to be Russian patriots. I do not agree
with many of the ideas expressed in this volume; however, I respect the
effort of the group united by the volume, which aims to establish the
dignity of Russian Jews without using the revolution in the Jewish
interests. This brings to mind how deep and maybe hopeless the tragedy
of the ‘Jewish question’ is (Berdiaev, 1924, p. 2).
However, the Whites never accepted the Kayshchiesya in their camp. The
famous philosopher Ivan Il’in, who, in the words of one of his
contemporaries, “spent the Civil War lecturing in a Red university,” engaged
in a relatively frequent correspondence with General Piotr Vrangel’ while
living abroad (Il’in was expelled from Russia in 1922). The philosopher was
sincerely devoted to the General and even signed his letters “White.” In
October 1923, Il’in sent to the General a Memorandum about the current
political situation. Il’in believed that Jews could prove useful in a potential
anti-Bolshevik coup d’etat, but
only if they were able to secure a guarantee against any further reprisal.
[...] They tested the ground for this by presenting a group of repentant
patriots (Pasmanik, Bikerman, Landau and Mandel’), who cunningly
provoked the right-wing into public debates. This group ‘defends’ the
White Army and enjoys unfounded trust from respectful public figures
(Struve). Bikerman even entered negotiations with the Supreme
Monarchist Council on behalf of the group (having the intelligence
services in mind) (Il’in, 1996, p. 227).
It may seem a little problematic to dismiss Jewish “heroes from the street” as
mere renegades and immature adolescents. Far too many of them were
involved in the revolution to make such generalizations.
The Menshevik St. Ivanovich (Semen Portugeis’s pseudonym) expressed
a more earnest view fifteen years after the Berlin debates had first taken place.
He contemplated the persecution of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and argued that
Berlin Debates 125
the percentage of those who lost their social status was much higher among
the Jewish population than among Russia’s other peoples. He wrote:
In 1912 Hermann Cohen, at that time the world’s most influential neo-Kantian
philosopher, retired from his chair in Marburg and moved to Berlin and the
Academy of Jewish Sciences. Now he had time to complete his seminal work
Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism—the last great systematic
expression of Jewish rationalism in the twentieth century. Cohen’s firm belief
in the power of reason is, of course, a feature of neo-Kantian philosophy and
originates from the passionate rationalism of Kant and the Enlightenment.
However, most neo-Kantian philosophy has been shaped within Christian
contexts, which makes Cohen’s rationalism especially interesting. As a
European Jew and one of the leading German philosophers, Cohen confronted
the growth of anti-Semitism by reclaiming what he thought was the liberating
power of universal human reason. Listening to many sad stories told by his
Jewish students from almost all over Europe, Cohen still insisted that the
emancipation of Jews cannot be separated from the liberation of the entire
humankind and that this universal liberation should be grounded in human
reason alone.
In this chapter, I will analyze Cohen’s ethical and religious rationalism
alongside his vision of liberation, and argue that, despite many historical
failures of universalistic and rationalistic projects, Jewish rationalism and
universalism has great moral and political potential and still can inform
current philosophical discourse on social revolution.
I will first present some fundamental features of Cohen’s religious
rationalism. Hermann Cohen suggested a variant of universalist ethics that
was simultaneously informed by Kantian rationalism and based upon what
Cohen argued was the most important meaning of the Jewish monotheism and
messianism. Secondly, I will analyze this rationalism in relation to a
philosophical and political controversy that appeared among Hermann
Cohen’s Russian students in post-revolutionary Nevel and Vitebsk. I will
show how Matvei Kagan was using Cohen’s ethics and religious rationalism
in order to develop a morally legitimate vision of social revolution, and
contrast Kagan’s interpretation of Cohen with Mikhail Bakhtin’s severe
criticism of Cohen’s rationalistic ethics. Lastly, I will argue that the current
political situation both invites us to reclaim the tradition of Jewish rationalism
128 ELENA NAMLI
and its universalistic ethics, and also calls for a certain modification of that
tradition.
Out of the unique God, the creator of man, originated also the stranger as
fellowman. […] “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the
stranger as for the homeborn; for I am the Eternal your God” (Lev.
24:22). This reasoning is quite instructive: it deduces the law pertaining
to the stranger from monotheism. And it is particularly instructive that
monotheism is expressed here through an appeal to “your God”. Because
Jewish Rationalism, Ethics, and Revolution 129
the Eternal is your God, you must make one law for the stranger as well
as for yourselves (Cohen, 1995, p. 124–125).
How does the radical difference between God and the human transcend the
moral difference between neighbors and strangers, thus transforming the
stranger into the fellowman? The Eternal is “your God” first of all in terms of
justice. The unique God relates to the human by means of justice and law,
which signifies that the human should relate to God by treating the other (the
stranger) with justice. Cohen’s interpretation of monotheism, which very
heavily stresses the radical difference between God and the human, implies
therefore that injustice—unequal treatment of men—violates the very ground
of Jewish religion. To treat the stranger unjustly (unlawfully) is to break the
correlation with God, whose main attribute is justice. Cohen’s correlation is
thus a normative principle that stipulates the human’s obligation to recognize
God’s uniqueness by means of respect and just treatment of the (human)
stranger. There is no other way of the authentic worshiping of one God.
There are three obvious challenges that Cohen’s interpretation of Jewish
monotheism and its ethical implications must respond to. The first is the fact
that the imperative to treat the stranger by means of one and the same law
(universal justice) is not the dominant trend in the history of Judaism. The
second is the political challenge of the preservation of Jewish culture as the
one threatened by the more powerful Christian states. The third is the
challenge of social and economic inequality. Religion of Reason deals mostly
with the first and the third challenges, while the second one is addressed in
several other works by Cohen which were originally included in three
posthumous volumes, Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften (Cohen, 1924).
As has already been mentioned, Cohen argues in favor of a special
interpretation and practice of Judaism. Its origin is first of all the rationalism
of Maimonides that stresses the centrality of moral and political universalism
and the moral and political heritage of the prophets. Religion of Reason is one
long historical and systematic argument in support of this interpretation. Even
in his other writings, Cohen defends this universalistic and rationalistic vision
of Judaism. In the article “Affinities Between the Philosophy of Kant and
Judaism,” first published in 1910, he states that “Judaism simply denies any
possible conflict between the concepts of God and of moral reason. Moral law
must and can be both: the law of God and the law of reason” (Cohen, 1993, p.
81). Maimonides, whom Cohen describes as a genius of Jewish rationalism,
contributed to its development by his use of the techniques of negative
theology in order to produce an advanced philosophical interpretation of
creation. According to Cohen, Maimonides arrived at this position through a
particular consideration of the negative attribute of privation: “The share of
reason in religion has to discover what the logical meaning of the originative
principle is for the problem of creation. And this was the meaning for the
problem of creation that Maimonides bestowed upon the negative attribute of
130 ELENA NAMLI
[…] the Jew saw his Messianic idea revitalized in and through the
German spirit. For Herder ushered in the dawn of a new humanity so
that the Messiah of the prophets, that most unique possession of the Jew,
was restored to him in the idealistic postulate of German ethics, a united
mankind. […] Now we can understand the impact Mendelssohn had
upon German Judaism, not so much as a Jew who believed in
Messianism but as a German whose thought was closely akin to German
humanism and German ethics. And now we can understand, too, why
German Judaism has exerted and continues to exert such a profound
influence on the Jews of all other countries… I believe that the Jews of
France, England, and Russia owe a debt of filial piety to Germany, for it
is the motherland of their soul to the extent that their religion constitutes
their soul (Cohen, 1993, pp. 182–183).
How are we to interpret and evaluate these lines while being aware of the
verdict the history of the twentieth century pronounced over “the German
spirit” and its relation to the Jewish tradition? There is of course a too-narrow,
idealistic understanding of German culture in Cohen; he one-sidedly points
out the tradition of German philosophical idealism in its Kantian version as
the most important cultural heritage of Europe and seeks to develop its
universalistic and religious potential. The political processes that resulted in
the popular support of Hitler and the Nazi regime are much more complex
than the shortcomings of the German philosophical idealism, but we should
still admit that Cohen’s firm support of German philosophical idealism and its
Kantian model of universalism must be questioned. When reading Cohen
today it is easy to see inconsistencies of his universalism. On the one hand,
Cohen defended humanism as the ideal of a united humankind; on the other,
he viewed one specific culture, the German, as the main representation of this
humanism. The latter can easily be used in order to legitimize exactly that
kind of suppressive particularism that Cohen meant to overcome. Later in this
essay I will come back to this inconsistency as revisited by some of Cohen’s
students. For now, I would like to stress that a universalistic vision of
emancipation ends in a destructive self-contradiction if it includes any kind of
belief in the superiority of a particular culture. As many philosophers from the
period after the Second World War have shown (Levinas and Derrida can be
mentioned here as thinkers related to both German idealism and Jewish
religious heritage), universalistic claims on behalf of a particular culture
produce violence rather than liberation. One of the most apparent risks of such
universalism is the firm conviction that those who disagree with “universally
valid” rational propositions don’t need to be listened to but might, or even
should, be persuaded to accept the “universally valid” beliefs.
Let us now turn to the third challenge to Cohen’s understanding of the
Jewish tradition, namely the issue of social inequality. Cohen is very clear
regarding this point, and claims that the unity and equality of humankind is
132 ELENA NAMLI
Cohen thus believes that genuine monotheism must recognize social suffering
as immoral and fight it morally and politically. Cohen is explicitly skeptical
towards mysticism, and denies its capacity to grasp the true meaning of God’s
oneness. According to him, there are prophets of the Bible who, by means of
moral and political indignation, reach a proper understanding of the
uniqueness of God. The two very last chapters of Religion of Reason are
dedicated to the issues of justice and peace. Cohen states that violation of
justice infuriates the prophets and causes them to “make God the advocate of
the stranger, the orphan, and the widow” (Cohen, 1995, p. 430). Cohen is very
clear about the political implication of his reading of the prophets, and claims
that the justice of Jewish monotheism “had as its consequence the relativity of
the principle of property—this bulwark of egoism, of eudaemonism, of
opportunism and everything else that is opposed to religious morality”
(Cohen, 1995, p. 430). In “The Style of the Prophets” Cohen comments on the
likeness of the Hebrew terms anavah (humility) and aniyut (poverty) as used
in the Talmud. In this context he claims that “[t]he poor man is a living
contradiction of the concept of human equality, the equality of God’s children.
[…] Human beings are not meant to be divided into free men and laborers. All
men are equal, for all have been called upon to lead a moral life” (Cohen,
1993, pp. 116–117).
It is obvious by now that Cohen views social inequality as a sin against a
unique and just God, and calls for a religiously motivated political fight
Jewish Rationalism, Ethics, and Revolution 133
Cohen claims, further, that this type of messianism was reshaped by the spirit
of German idealism and its ideal of a united humankind. As expressed in
Kant’s categorical imperative, the universal form of morality has to do with
the categorical demand to always respect humanity in every person.
Discussing similarities between Kant and Judaism, Cohen posits that
“[m]ankind is man’s final purpose and goal. And the individual, being and
end-in-himself, must therefore never become a ‘mere means’ for other men.
This idea of mankind gave rise to development of socialism” (Cohen, 1993, p.
180). I agree with Cohen’s evaluation of Kant in that Kant’s vision of
liberation links political progress to the expectations of moral improvement of
all and everyone.
As we have seen, Cohen views Jewish monotheism as a genuine form of
this kind of universalistic humanism. Every violation of the rights of the other
is a sin against the unique God who relates to human beings through the
medium of justice. To liberate the Jewish people means, therefore, to liberate
them from oppression and into the structure of justice which encompasses
both promises and demands.
Cohen’s universalism in both ethics and the philosophy of religion was
explicitly connected to rationalism. In his own words, “[w]ithout the basic
notion that all men are equally endowed with reason, there can be no all-
encompassing concept of man” (Cohen, 1993, p. 75). This rationalism is not
empirical in character—it does not state that everyone is rational. What this
rationalism means is a normative idea that everyone should be treated as a
Jewish Rationalism, Ethics, and Revolution 135
rational person or, in theological terms, that one (unique) God gives all human
beings one and the same law by which to discriminate between good and evil.
What can be said about Cohen’s religious ethics today? Has its
universalism and rationalism been totally discredited? Are not particularistic
visions of liberation that neither expect nor demand trans-contextual
agreements more reliable after all? Should we reject Cohen’s vision of Jewish
messianism as a naïve or even dangerous utopia? These questions call for a
further investigation. Therefore I suggest we now take a short journey
following some of Cohen’s students and heirs.
Among the participants of the seminar there was Matvei Kagan who had
studied philosophy in Berlin and Marburg. With his traditional Jewish
educational background, Kagan—unlike for example Boris Pasternak (who
studied in Marburg 1912 but was not interested in following Cohen to
Berlin)—appreciated the opportunity to study under Cohen in Berlin where
the great philosopher focused on the Jewish tradition. Kagan’s family has
managed to preserve 48 pages of notes on Religion of Reason, which are a
witness of Kagan’s deep involvement with Cohen’s interpretation of the
Jewish tradition. In 1918, Kagan wrote an obituary for Hermann Cohen, in
which he tried to give a short summary of his former teacher’s most important
philosophical achievements. Among other things, Kagan emphasized the
special contribution Cohen had made to the philosophical analysis of morality,
as well as his rationalistic understanding of religion (Kagan, 2004, pp. 39–44).
Kagan states that in his Kants Begründung der Ethik Cohen “gives us the
main problematic of Kant’s ethics when it is following the right direction of
the history of ethics and philosophy” (Kagan, 2004, p. 39). This “right
direction” is understood by Kagan as “[t]he idea of being as duty (dolznogo
bytiya),” as “the problem of moral being, of the moral obligation” (Kagan,
2004, p. 39). Kagan claims that Cohen’s development of Kantian philosophy
could be described as a further critique of metaphysics and an attempt to
construct ethics as a strictly critical discipline. Of crucial importance for
Kagan is Cohen’s analysis of the will (practical reason) and its unique
character when compared with theoretical reason. It becomes obvious that
Kagan reads Cohen in a revolutionary context when he compares Cohen’s
grundgesetz der Wahrheit with the Russian revolutionary philosopher
Mikhailovsky’s notion of pravda-spravedlivost (truth-justice), and states that
ethics should in the main be constructed as a social science (Kagan, 2004, p.
40). Furthermore, Kagan rightly emphasizes that Cohen’s “religion of a united
humankind” and of one God is social and based on ethics.
In the manuscripts that have either survived in Kagan’s family archive or
were published between 1918 and 1922 there is one dominant theme: history
as a human activity and moral responsibility. In an article from 1923, Kagan
argues that Judaism brings history into existence by articulating the idea that
the “historical task consists of the incompleteness of the world, the world
must be created and justified through labor” (Kagan, 2004, p. 174). Kagan
seems to believe that European culture finds itself in a special kind of crisis
that has something to do with forgetting this historical task. Kagan states that
European culture is marked by a “psychologization” of human personality that
prevents human beings from becoming agents of history, which is to say
creators of “new heaven and new earth” (Kagan, 2004, p. 181). Judaism
should counteract this crisis by remaining “the monastic culture of history”
and by reclaiming history as meaningful—a morally responsible and rational
activity directed towards the future. Kagan presents this vision of history in
Jewish Rationalism, Ethics, and Revolution 137
Was Hermann Cohen wrong when he defended his optimistic vision of Jewish
rationalism with its universalistic view of human liberation? I do believe that
finding a form of universal ethics that might survive, and even counteract,
political abuse is a very difficult task. To shape universalism in such a way
that it empowers a politics of emancipation and simultaneously resists the
temptation to view one’s own traditional rationality as generally binding is
still a valid ideal—impossible to fully realize and simultaneously vitally
important for the politics of liberation.
What is most attractive in Cohen’s philosophy of religion is its potential
to interpret religion as a restorative power, capable of bringing morality back
into politics. This is of special importance in our technocratic era of neo-
liberalism with its cynical slogan “There Is No Alternative.” I agree very
much with Catherine Chalier, who in chapter 2 of this volume highlights the
hope of the Jewish tradition as an always-morally-engaged hope. A religiously
approved political liberation should not be formed as a mere fight for
particular interests, even if such interests are totally legitimate. The
revolutionary (!) hope articulated in terms of Jewish tradition should be
striving to counteract both the political passivity of despair and the moral
cynicism of realpolitik. Therefore, I believe it is worth trying to reclaim some
of the ideas of Hermann Cohen’s religion of reason.
Cohen belongs to the tradition of ethics that points to liberation as the
main criterion of tenable social ethics. He interprets this liberation as a social
liberation of the oppressed which is, simultaneously, a liberation into genuine
relationship with God. Both liberations are marked by lawfulness and
dedication to reason. For Jewish religion to be a genuine monotheism means
to profess one unique God as the legitimate power behind a single and
universally valid moral law. Justice is the main attribute of the unique God,
and the rationalism of Cohen’s principle of correlation stipulates that religious
ethics can only approve of political action that aims at inclusive justice and
law. Such action might start in a particular experience of oppression but is
driven by the potential of a broader social solidarity.
As mentioned earlier, Cohen was not consistent when he simultaneously
argued in favor of ethical universalism, and also claimed that German culture
should be regarded as the most genuine representation of this universalistic
quest. It is not difficult to understand Cohen’s glorification of German culture
as a pragmatic strategy undertaken by a Jewish professor in Germany. It is
even possible to suggest that, while claiming rationalism and humanism to be
the essential feature of German culture, Cohen hoped to defeat the expansion
of anti-rationalistic trends in German philosophy at the beginning of the
twentieth century. But this kind of pragmatism must be rejected in the name
of Cohen’s own vision of moral law as the law of one unique God and one
universal reason. Using liberation as the main criterion makes it necessary to
142 ELENA NAMLI
REFLECTIONS OF REVOLUTIONARY
MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN YIDDISH
POETRY: THE CASE OF PROLETPEN
Alexandra Polyan
Es marshirn tsuzamen der toyt un der Death and hunger march together,
hunger,
S'shteyen in reyen di himl-kratser un Skyscrapers and dugouts are placed
erd-shtiber, next to each other,
Un in ale radios vert eyn lid And all the radios broadcast the same
gezungen— song—
Dos lidl fun glaykhkayt un menchn- The song of equality and love of
libe. fellow men.
Es fresn un zoyfn, vi gekekhlte And the rich gorge and drink hard,
rinder, like overfed cattle,
Unlike most of their American counterparts, the leftist poets stood up for
collective structures, not for the sake of national survival, but for the sake of
class struggle. The interests of class surpassed those of nation. The authors of
the “Editorial notes” in the Union Square almanac quote Lenin’s words about
the “coexistence of two nations within each contemporary nation and two
national cultures in each contemporary culture” and Stalin's famous statement
Reflections of Revolutionary Movements in American Yiddish Poetry 149
Zishe Vaynper also contributed to the subject. The most rigorous advocate of
the blacks is Ronch, who also studied the treatment of attitudes towards the
blacks in Yiddish literature and found a great similarity between the Jews and
the blacks. He wrote:
A Jewish writer, a son to a suffering and protesting people, can feel and
hear the Afro-American’s silent or actual protest even unwillingly
(Ronch, 1945, p. 224, translation from Yiddish).
And also:
Ikh greyt zikh tsu. Ikh lern zikh I get prepared. I teach myself.
aleyn, I go to any place where there are
Ikh gey ahin vu s'zaynen arbeter workers.
faranen. The ignorant Louisiana masses
Es heybm on dem klasnkamf Are beginning to understand the
farshteyn principles of class-struggle.
Di masn fintstere fun Louisiana.
Fun Fulton-turme laykht zikh likht From Fulton Jail shines the light
Fun nayntsn-yerike martirer-oygn. Of 19-year-old martyr’s eyes.
Zey lakhn in ponem fun merder- They laugh right to the judges’—the
gerikht murderers’ face
Un viln zikh nit boygn. And refuse to bow.
Zey veysn, az Angelo bald vet They know, Angelo will soon
Dokh vern der balebos Become a master
Iber erd sovetisher, In the Soviet land
Af doremdikn bloyen groz. And on the bluegrass in the South.
The eyes of the whole world are turned to China. Every day we wait
impatiently for the news that come from there. Every brain wonders,
152 ALEXANDRA POLYAN
All the young workers must rally—more closely than they have ever
done it before,—must form a united front and, as well as the older
workers, begin their vigorous struggle against imperialistic wars,
interventions into Nicaragua, Mexico and China, as Lenin has directed
us (Yugnt, 1.3, 1927, p. 6).
Tools, factories, and machines symbolized the worker’s party, and for
Proletpen represented the production of Poetry itself. Present in many of
these poems is a rhythm borrowed from the factory. This is particularly
true in the case of Kalman Hayzler’s machine poems. Repeated phrases
such as ‘at the machine, at the machine’ and ‘she grows wild, she grows
wild’, suggests a poetry that comes from the repeated sounds of factory
labor (Glaser and Weintraub, 2005, p. 97).
Az mayn partey gehert mayn yede And every act of mine belongs to my
tat. party.
Proletpen is totally pro-Soviet. As Dovid Katz (2005, p. 20) has shown, this
empathy grew stronger after the famous Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s
visit to America. Depicting injustices embedded in American life, inequality,
and the wicked structures of American society, the leftist poets emphasize the
difference between the USA and the USSR, where they believe there to be no
persecution on the basis of race, and political power belongs to the working
class. The Soviet Union becomes an embodiment of the ideal society: a
Utopia. It is an enormous country with fertile fields and gardens, where
people are healthy, happy, and full of joy, in contrast to diseased American
society:
Aza land faran. Aza land faran. There is such a land, there is such a
land.
A land fun felder zang balodene, A land of fields with loaded ears,
Vu s'zingt di freyd aroys fun fule Where joy sings from everywhere,
zashikes,
Un seder harbstike in shefe bodn And the autumn gardens are full and
zikh. abundant.
Aza land faran. Aza land faran There is such a land, there is such a
land
Fun vinters frostike tif-shneike, Of frosty snowy winters,
Un rufn ruft men es dos land dos And this wonderful land is called
zeltene,
Sovetn-land—dos land fun arbeter. The Soviet land—the land of the
workers.
(B. Ts. Burshtok, from “Aza land faran,” in Yugnt, 1, 1926, p. 10).
The concept of “art for the sake of art” is, therefore, also criticized. The
leftists consider meeting the needs of the working class and helping its
struggle to be their main goal.
This attitude was also shared by the ideologists of the leftist Yiddish
Theatre in New York called Artef (from Arbeter teater-farband, or “Workers’
theatrical alliance,” which included Moyshe Olgin, David Pinski, David
Abrams, Melech and Kalman Marmur, Shachno Epstein, Moyshe Nadir, and
others). They understood this “fresh sound” also to be in congruity with the
spirit of the age. The Soviet literature and theater were blessed with this
sound, whereas the theaters in America—either English or Yiddish—lacked it.
Nathaniel Buchwald, dissatisfied with the situation on stage, wrote: “Life
pulled in one direction, to world upheavals, to Revolution, to Soviet Russia, to
collective consciousness and collective action, [while] the theatre still busied
itself with bygone idylls, Hassidic legends, all kinds of tall tales, or with the
routine of bourgeois life, family drama and romantic complication” (Nahshon,
1998, p. 22). Their other reason to stick to the Soviet literature, an entirely
aesthetic one, is apparent from the first reason: Soviet theater was considered
a source of creativity and avant-garde invention essential for handling the
Reflections of Revolutionary Movements in American Yiddish Poetry 155
Nor ibern bet funem yidishn shnayder But over the Jewish tailor’s bed
In a roytn papirenem reml In a red paper frame
Geshturemt a fester hot Lenin, The rigorous Lenin stormed
Geturemt a vant hot fun Kreml. And the Kremlin wall towered.
Lenin is the only one who can lead the army of the hungry and free them from
their chains:
156 ALEXANDRA POLYAN
The Christ-like depiction of Lenin could have been inspired by his Soviet cult:
Lenin has been compared to the Sacred Helmsman; his openness, directness,
and love for the commoner were emphasized (Weisskopf, 2001, pp. 344–345,
357–359).
The new religion also has its martyrs: for example, a communist from
Texas who dies in jail and an executed German communist called Engel,
whose grave becomes an object of worship (Nahshon, 1998, pp. 45, 115–116).
Such an attitude towards the revolutionaries fits excellently with the paradigm
of the struggle between the forces of good and evil—or the Soviet Union and
tsarist Russia—adopted by the Jewish leftists. As Lederhendler puts it: “an
entire generation of Jews in the ranks of the American radical left invested the
mystique of the Russian revolution with its particular fervor, identified with
its myths and venerated its heroes as political saints and martyrs” (2008, p.
253). The oddest expression of such balance is Yosl Cutler's ironical
theomachic romanticism. In his cycle “Munter-klang” (1934), there is a poem
called “Simkhe be-reb Krizis”—Simkha, the son of Crisis. The protagonist, a
poor worker, being unable both to buy enough food for his family and to
afford a seat in a synagogue for the Yonkiper service, speculates:
One more example is Arn Rapoport’s poem “Un es dreyt di rod,” or “And a
wheel spins,” which provides an alternative version of mayse-breyshis (the
creation story). The whole world is reduced to industry, which has been
created by the evil will of a Pre-Historic Man (Urmench). He invented a
wheel, “and saw that it was good,” then he created a machine “in Our image,
according to Our likeness.” In the end, the whole of humanity is subsumed in
the process of mechanization: “he who had seen the tohu va-vohu before the
act of creation as well as he who saw the form, who filled the heart of the
Earth and who cast a hammer—have been making a machine ever since”
(Rapoport, 1935, pp. 74–75).
The concept of a new era, which began with the emergence of the new
ideology, is also religious. As Mikhail Krutikov notes, “The revolution of
1905 had a tremendous impact on the consciousness of Russian Jewry. For the
first time in history, large numbers of Jews became active participants in
Russian politics. ‘I do not know how others number the years. But I count
them from 1905,’ wrote the Yiddish poet David Einhorn years later”
(Krutikov, 2001a, p. 74; see also Trachtenberg, 2008, for more concerning the
impact of the Russian revolutions on Yiddish thought). The “new linear
revolutionary chronology” is opposed to the traditional calendar based on
natural and religious cycles (Krutikov, 2001a, pp. 88, 115–116). The
Proletpen authors share this new chronological concept. They describe the
present as a moment of birth—for example, Arn Kurz writes about “di velt
vos halt in vern,” “the world that is becoming a world at the moment” (Kurz,
1927, p. 43).
The Proletpen poets proclaim October to be the crucial point in the
history of the world. By this, they do not mean simply the month of the
Russian Revolution. More often, two Octobers are mentioned: the historical
one, belonging to the past, and a metaphorical, forthcoming one. Pomerants
calls for a hastening of “the coming of the common American-Soviet October,
of the World October” (1930, p. 217). Yuri Suhl uses the metaphor of a
physical calendar:
Un az der tog ba undz vet kumen in And, whenever the day comes—
detsember, whether in December,
In yanuar, in yuli, tsi in may— Or in January, or in July, or in May—
Zayn vet dos der tog der lang- It will be the long-awaited day,
dervarter, It will be October anyway.
Zayn vet dos oktober say vi say.
The Proletpen poets emphasize that they are future-oriented and the future—
in history as well as literature—belongs to them. This idea is related to the
messianic perception of revolutionary events. For some writers, as Krutikov
puts it, the Revolution “was the beginning of the Messianic age that would
eventually lead to the redemption of all mankind in the form of liberation
from any oppression, including anti-Semitism” (Krutikov, 2001a, p. 75).
The leftists describe revolution in terms borrowed from the Lurianic
Qabbalah: “it emitted the energy of the working masses and spread it all over
the world” (Union Square, 1930, p. 209). In Nokhem Vaysman’s poem
“Funken fun doyres,” the Revolution is compared to sparks dispersed by the
past generations, which are being gathered at present and will form a
purifying flame (1930, p. 129). The metaphor of sparks to be turned to flame
was frequently used by the Russian Bolsheviks, alongside the idea of
succeeding the previous generations in their struggle. Lenin writes in his
declaration about the newspaper Iskra (“Spark”): the historic task of the
Proletariat is “to finish the stubborn struggle of quite a number of perished
generations with our victory over the hateful regime” (Lenin, 1967, p. 360).
Ironically, such a perception is one of the signs of Leyvik's influence on
the Proletpen. Leyvik, one of the most prominent authors among “Di yunge,”
also associated the Messiah’s arrival with revolutionary struggle (Shalit, 1945,
pp. 17–20, 31–47; Niger, 1920, p. 19). In addition, the “Di yunge” poets were
instrumental in rendering the image of Jesus Christ “kosher” enough for
Yiddish literature (Hoffman, 2007). So, ironically, the Proletpen poets share
this strange fusion of religious and anti-religious, of Jewish and Christian with
their literary opponents.
This combination of Jewish and Christian motives reflects a wider
phenomenon—a complex balance of the national and the international that
both Proletpen and their opponents shape in their writings. Despite
proclaiming themselves to be enemies of national culture, the leftists also
struggled against cultural assimilation and the Americanization of Jewish
workers (Pomerants, 1930, p. 215)—which is to say: they remained concerned
Reflections of Revolutionary Movements in American Yiddish Poetry 159
with national issues. They wrote in Yiddish, doing their best to expand its
expressive abilities. This was similar to the balance of the Jewish and the
universal in the aesthetic program of In zikh: they argued that “All the high
achievements of poetry—the highest—are possible in Yiddish” (Harshav,
1986, p. 780), and used Jewish themes and motifs from Jewish folklore while
attempting to be universal and to address the whole human race (Krutikov,
2001b, p. 208). It is also worth mentioning that rhythmic experiments were
most prominent in the poetry of the inzikhists and the Proletpen, out of all the
Yiddish poetry movements.
One more feature Proletpen, “Di yunge,” and the inzikhists have in
common is the idea of the emergence of the poetic movement itself. The
Proletpen authors insist on their independence from all literary heritage, both
of the past and of contemporary European, American, and Yiddish literature.
For example, in his poem “Sacco Vanzetti,” Arn Kurz calls for getting rid of
all classic Italian culture (Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo), referring to
Marinetti and his appeal to demolish museums and libraries; the protagonist of
his poem called “Miguel Cervantes” provocatively turns out to be an illiterate
Spanish peasant whose sons have joined the revolution. But, simultaneously,
the Proletpen poets embrace links to Soviet literature and to one of their
predecessors, Morris Vinchevsky, adopting a widespread cliché and calling
him grandfather (Union Square, 1930, pp. 3–4). The same idea of
“discontinuity of Yiddish literary development” and “symbolic patricide”
regarding the tradition of Yiddish literature is also typical for In zikh and for
“Di yunge” (Krutikov, 2001b. p. 206; Wisse, 1988, p. 58). The inzikhists also
share the leftists’ approach of giving credit to their immediate predecessors,
while rejecting the classics of Yiddish literature—but in the case of the
Inzikhists, this accepted teacher is claimed to be the whole world culture.
Perhaps it is this peculiar combination, both accepting and rejecting the
literary legacy, being both Jewish and universal, religious and anti-religious,
which unites such different trends and can define the American Yiddish
poetry of the interwar period.
Eleven
The first half of the twentieth century, in Hannah Arendt’s view, suffered
from the coming to fruition of nihilism, as traditions that had been disrupted
by the growth of the sciences and the adherence to conventional morality
came to be shallow and easily abandoned: “in passing from hand to hand,”
Arendt (2006a, p. 201) writes, cultural values “were worn down like old
coins. They lost the faculty which is originally peculiar to all cultural things,
the faculty of arresting our attention and moving us.” So, she concludes, with
a startling analogy, morality had been reduced to a set of seemingly arbitrary
customs, “which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble
than it would take to exchange the table manners of a whole people” (Arendt,
2003, p. 43).
Arendt draws upon diverse traditions precisely to deal with the
disruption of traditions—that is, she approaches them in order to find
practices which can stabilize human life, when the stability of received
traditions has been disturbed. Instead of the moral conventions transmitted by
religious and philosophical traditions, she wants to retrieve elements from
these traditions which can mitigate the risks of cruelty inherent in an uncritical
submission to political authority once conventions have become empty. Thus,
the unpredictability and irreversibility of human action, she says, can be
mitigated by promise and forgiveness—the former is a crucial part of classical
political practices, but formulated most strongly as a promise of hope in
Christianity, whereas the “role of forgiveness in human affairs” was, she
claims, discovered by “Jesus of Nazareth” (Arendt, 1998, p. 238).
Furthermore, she locates the discovery of conscience in the inner dialogues of
Socrates, but as a “side effect. And it remains a marginal affair for society at
large except in emergencies” (Arendt, 2003, p. 188). It is in exceptional
situations, where conventional morality no longer seems to be able to guide
162 JON WITTROCK
us, or has collapsed, that we most need these stabilizing elements, inherent in,
but often obscured by, traditions.
Arendt’s drawing upon Christianity as well as classical Greek and
Roman elements in addressing the problems of the contemporary world,
however, raises the question whether she was indeed in any sense a “Jewish
thinker” and what, if anything, this entails for her political thought and its
contemporary relevance. In the following, I will argue that Arendt’s thought
can be characterized as a hybrid drawing upon diverse elements—Jewish,
German, Christian, Classical—an observation that can be extended to an
understanding of her advocacy of political spaces, which can be seen, in a
certain sense, as both utopian and messianic. Thereafter, Arendt’s writings on
revolution will be used to further illuminate her thought on political space,
and on the many anti-political forces preventing political spaces from arising.
Finally, I will advance a critique of certain blind spots in her view of the
political, and suggest some paths forward.
Jewish, Arendt does so by recourse to Greek words, as if that were the most
natural thing in the world to do. In pointing out her own simply given
Jewishness, Arendt simultaneously manifests an enthusiastically acquired
Greekness. She was born Jewish, but she made herself Greek, by her own
choices, expressed in her works. So when Arendt (ibid., p. 466) concludes this
line of argument by stating that the gratitude for what is simply given is
“prepolitical, but in exceptional circumstances—such as the circumstances of
Jewish politics—it is bound to have also political consequences,” it would
hardly be unexpected if those political consequences, to her, would be tied up
not only with the givenness of being Jewish, but also with an acquired
condition of Greekness. And this is indeed the case.
In The Human Condition, Arendt appears to be telling the following
story: the ancient Athenian pólis featured a desirable political space, which
manifested physically in the sites and institutions of democracy. True, this
space excluded slaves and women—the “chief merit” of the pólis, according
to Xenophon, Arendt (1970, p. 50) notes, “was that it permitted the ‘citizens
to act as bodyguards to one another against slaves and criminals so that none
of the citizens may die a violent death’”—but for those who were included it
provided a platform for excelling, for appearing as unique human beings
amongst others, and at the same time, made it possible to meet others in their
uniqueness.
This tension, in the human condition of plurality, gave rise to narratives
of tragedy and excellence, constituting a shared web of meaning predating,
but also pervading, political life in the pólis. Arendt speaks admiringly of the
heroic ethos of Homer, and of the possibilities that the political space of the
pólis, transforming the aristocratic deeds of archaic Greece, offered for men to
distinguish themselves, and to gain an immortality of reputation: “The polis
[…] gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the
scene of their daring will not remain without witness” (Arendt, 1998, p. 197).
The politics of the pólis, then, did not simply replace the kind of violent and
heroic deeds lauded by epic poetry. Rather, it constituted their continuation by
other means. The other great classical model of a political space was provided
by the Roman Res Publica, which appeared to guarantee collective survival
even in the face of individual mortality, and which Arendt also holds in high
regard.
Unfortunately, a series of historical developments came to shatter not
only these models, but also the tendency of such political spaces to emerge at
all. Late classical and early Christian philosophy came to downplay the
importance of this shared political space of speech and interaction in favor of
otherworldly concerns, and the withdrawn ways of life that appeared
alongside them. Furthermore, work, which entailed the crafting of those
lasting objects which provide this fragile space of appearance with its physical
durability in a shared, human world, came to be increasingly replaced by
164 JON WITTROCK
while such spaces of appearance have indeed arisen, on occasion, during the
millennia following the fall of the Roman Republic, they have been the
exception, provoked by the exceptional: for example, the American
revolution, in which the founding fathers acted politically, claiming to do so
out of duty, but finding happiness therein (cf. Arendt, 2006b, pp. 117–123).
Or the resistance against occupation by Nazi Germany, a moral or political
duty but also strangely joyful—commenting on French poet and resistance
fighter René Char, Arendt (ibid., p. 272) writes of his “frankly apprehensive
anticipation of liberation; for he knew that as far as they were concerned there
would be not only the welcome liberation from German occupation but
liberation from the ‘burden’ of public business as well.”
This really is a tragic narrative, then, but there is also the possibility of
remembrance, of returning to the past in pursuit of those fragments of it that
may be retrieved into the present, and there, transformed in relation to a novel
context, into a treasure (cf. Arendt’s poetically rendered characterization of
Walter Benjamin in Benjamin, 1969, pp. 50–51). Thus, there is a promise of
redemption in the resurrection of political space, and Arendt’s works
articulate that promise. In other words, she can be read as an unrelenting
prophet formulating the promise of the possible return of true and lasting
political spaces.
But here we naturally ask: why? Why ought we to consider the return of
political spaces as a great promise? Is it because of the benefits they bestow
upon us, outside of them, in their effects after the fact? Do they, for example,
counter the threats of totalitarian politics? No, that does not seem to be the
case. While a multiplicity of political spaces, of centers of power, is indeed a
model distinct from totalitarian centralization—as well as from representative
democracy—this does not mean that, causally, they prevent these latter
tendencies from arising. On the contrary, political spaces, whether in the guise
of workers’ councils or local democratic structures, have proved painfully
fragile and have fallen beneath the onslaught of the development both towards
totalitarian centralization, as well as towards the bureaucratization of liberal
democracy.
When Arendt ends On Revolution by quoting from Sophocles’ Oedipus
at Colonus, “Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far
the second-best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible
whence it came,” this could be considered a damning indictment on the folly
of all things political, of worldly action—but for Arendt, of course, the very
opposite holds true: “it was the polis, the space of men’s free deeds and living
words, which could endow life with splendour” (2006b, p. 273). It is precisely
because of the ultimate futility of all strivings, of the impermanence of all
things, of the many disappointments in leaving behind the hopes of youth,
because nothing lasts and not the least because of the horrific terrors of this
world, that the political space is needed. It provides redemption, not to
anything outside of it, but in itself.
166 JON WITTROCK
Arendt’s slim 1969 essay On Violence, firmly rooted in its historical context,
comprises a compact presentation of several of her core concerns. First and
foremost, she seeks to divorce, conceptually, power from violence: while the
two, empirically, may intermingle in various ways, for Arendt, violence often
arises when power is lost, or to destroy power. Thus, her notion of power, as
“the human ability not just to act but to act in concert,” corresponds to an
Aristotelian understanding of the political (Arendt, 1970, p. 44. Cf. e.g.
Aristotle, 1996, pp. 13). Furthermore, for Arendt, power must arise from
coordinating action freely, not from coercion; this entails that one either meets
one’s equals in a political space—her ideal—or, when hierarchical
Nihilism and the Resurrection of Political Space 167
organization is needed, that such networks are driven by free consent, rather
than coercion. Hence, “Power is never the property of an individual; it
belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps
together,” and “[w]hen we say of somebody that he is ‘in power’ we actually
refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their
name” (Arendt, 1970, p. 44). Coordination, in so far as it is hierarchical and
does not rely on sheer coercion, on violence or the threat of violence,
functions by recourse to authority: “Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition
by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed”
(ibid., p. 45). And authority, in turn, derives in the familial sphere from the
simple fact of parenthood (and in patriarchal contexts, the father is elevated
above all others), and in politics from legitimacy: “Power springs up
whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy
from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may
follow” (ibid., p. 52).
In other words, the origins of the polity are crucial. It is hardly
surprising, then, to find Arendt stating, in her posthumously published
notebooks, “The problem of politics: the problem of grounding” (Arendt,
2002, p. 36; author’s translation of “Problem der Politik: Problem der
Gründung”). Revolutionary transformations could constitute what Arendt
(1970, p. 7) calls events, “occurrences that interrupt routine processes and
routine procedures.” But for them, or any other event, to carry the promise she
hails, they must entail the opening up of genuinely political spaces, arising
“out of acting and speaking together” (Arendt, 1998, p. 198)—a meaningful
revolution, from Arendt’s perspective, is a revolution which establishes
lasting political spaces.
At this point, however, we need to ask what is or who are holding back
such free action, thus restraining the political? Several factors are mentioned
by Arendt throughout her works, such as: I) the belief in a transcendent
horizon, which can include religious-eschatological hopes, or an ideological
belief in progressivism (Arendt [1970, p. 25], at least, distinguishes between
the two); II) the need to, not necessarily work, but labor, to produce rapidly
for consumption, or if not strictly speaking a need, a compulsion to be
integrated in the unrelenting processes of production and consumption, or to
be stigmatized and punished by society, or, of course, in many countries, the
very real risk of life-threatening poverty; III) violence, exerted by those who
wish to dispel power (i.e. concerted action), but also IV) the bureaucratic
machines of modern and contemporary politics, in which “politics has become
a profession and a career,” and “the ‘élite’ therefore is being chosen according
to standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical”
(Arendt, 2006b, pp. 269–270). Crucially, however, (V), this
professionalization of politics within the confines of party-apparatuses also
parallels the extension of bureaucratic machinery into ever larger spheres of
life, entailing “the rule by nobody,” which is not necessarily “no-rule; it may
168 JON WITTROCK
indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its cruelest and
most tyrannical versions” (Arendt, 1998, p. 40). This “rule by nobody” is
cruel, since there is no longer anything singular with which to communicate
grievances, and nothing highly visible, at which to direct anger: “Politically
speaking, the point is that loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute
violence for power” (Arendt, 1970, p. 54).
So those are anti-political tendencies which need to be addressed,
whether there is a revolutionary transformation or not. Unfortunately, Arendt
tells us too little about the social preconditions for maintaining a lasting
political space: what about social cohesion? Arendt came to distinguish
between the political and the social spheres, respectively, each working with
their own core principles. In the former sphere, equality is, or ought to be, the
ideal, but it is also “clearly restricted to the political realm. Only there are we
all equals” (Arendt, 2003, p. 204). The social sphere, however, operates
according to a different logic: “What equality is to the body politic—its
innermost principle,” Arendt says, in one of those typical Arendtian
formulations which are simultaneously off-putting and oddly endearing,
“discrimination is to society” (ibid., p. 205). But that is surely one-sided: a
less confrontational thinker might have chosen to start with association
instead. Anyway, association and discrimination characterize the social
sphere, but they ought not to give way to “mob rule,” people ought to be “law-
abiding” (ibid., p. 202). So while there is power—free, coordinated action—in
the social sphere, it ought not to be allowed to crystallize into violence. By
contrast, political power does operate by recourse to legal sanctions, and
legitimately so.
To her great credit, Arendt often refused to play the usual social games
of association and discrimination and she was not afraid to be controversial
and defend notions which ran counter to popular opinions. It might be
interesting to recall the headline of one review of Eichmann in Jerusalem in a
Jewish journal at the time: “Self-hating Jewess writes pro-Eichmann book”
(Cf. Elon, 2006, p. xx). But Arendt’s own willingness to be controversial and
open to debates on sensitive issues does not imply that social cohesion is
unimportant, or that her hopes for political spaces can dispense with these
factors.
“Local self-government and mixed Jewish-Arab municipal and rural
councils, on a small scale and as numerous as possible,” Arendt (2007, p. 401)
wrote, in 1948, “are the only realistic political measures that can eventually
lead to the political emancipation of Palestine. It is still not too late.”
Significantly, Arendt claims, here, that those would be the only realistic, not
the only desirable, measures. However, she consistently offered virtually the
same response to any political problems and conflicts on which she
commented—and in the end, this is only comprehensible if we focus on her
hopes for political spaces: as spaces of meaning and joy, as desirable
regardless of context. When addressing the specific problems of the formation
Nihilism and the Resurrection of Political Space 169
shared cultural world, the practices of which are needed to stabilize the
potential dangers of the unpredictability and irreversibility of that very action
which she lauded. And this only deepens the tension between universality and
particularity. On the one hand, there is a universality of advocacy in Arendt,
in her consistent calls for stable political spaces, as opposed to authoritarian
rule, bureaucratic technocracy, and representative democracy. On the other,
there is the fact that any such political space will have to be stabilized by
recourse to the practices of its cultural context. And here, as we have seen,
Arendt again draws heavily upon what is commonly perceived as a Western
heritage, frequently stressing classical and Christian sources. This, however,
far from excludes the possibility of drawing upon corresponding practices of
promise and forgiveness in other contexts. But many questions remain
concerning how to ensure the cultural cohesion that a shared political space
would seem to presuppose. Is it really realistic to rely on the eventual
integrative function of political interaction per se? Unfortunately, there is
scarce real world support for such high hopes.
Finally, at the most fundamental level, there is yet another tension in
Arendt’s thought between universality and particularity, concerning sources of
existential meaning. In taking a decisive stand in favor of political spaces,
Arendt can be dismissive towards alternative sources of existential meaning.
Whether political spaces can really be stabilized and secured against the
threats of nihilism and violence without recourse to widely shared historical
narratives, with their attendant rituals and symbols, locating a source of
meaning beyond them, either in hopes for other-worldly salvation, or for some
this-worldly redemption, or vision of a collective historical fate, remains
unclear, to say the least. And this, in turn, raises several crucial questions
concerning the symbolic reproduction of identities in relation to conflicts in
the social sphere. In the end, one is almost forced to conclude, whether
willingly or not, that her call for political spaces simply becomes a competing
narrative in itself, in relation to other religious and ideological narratives, in
the sense of offering a source of existential meaning as well as being attached
to the consistent claim of constituting the best and perhaps necessary way of
addressing almost any problem.
Arendt’s ideal strikes me as both attractive and fascinating, but it is so in
much the same way as, say, the image of people floating above Earth in
gigantic space stations, which occupied public imagination during much of the
time that Arendt was making her arguments for political space—it seems
utopian not only in the sense of proposing a not yet realized ideal for human
existence, but also in the sense that it seems disconnected from the more
grubby realities of human existence and interaction. Had it been possible to
reach a marginalization of conflicts of interests with the aid of technological
wonders and material abundance, and had people been slightly more cerebral
and altruistic, Arendt’s ideal might already have succeeded and become the
model for political rule in some global federation of councils. As it is,
Nihilism and the Resurrection of Political Space 171
however, there remain stark conflicts of interest, and these are still mitigated
through the precarious balancing of influence and the continuous symbolic
reproduction of identities.
Any political space has to be situated in, and stabilized with recourse to,
inherited norms, which, while open to reinterpretation, must first be retrieved
from somewhere and passed on to someone. This suggests that political
spaces will take on distinct forms depending on, and relying upon, the shared
cultural contexts in which they are embedded. And any calls for political
spaces in the Arendtian understanding need to be more sensitive to conflicts
of material interests, the issues of association and discrimination, as well as
the symbolic reproduction of collective identities. Arendt’s thought does not
so much incorporate a hidden reliance on some particular cultural context,
which she attempts to force on others by claiming it is in some sense
universal. She is very clear that her ideal is rare and fragile and derived from
very specific historical examples. Rather, the problem is her unwillingness to
deal in depth with the relevance of the symbolic reproduction of identities,
and the way in which, more generally, the material and symbolic conflicts of
the social sphere inevitably impact on the interaction of political space, which
may even prevent it from taking on the form of a meeting of unique equals in
the first place. Perhaps this is ultimately what so provoked many of her
fiercest critics—neither a lack of love of the Jewish people, nor self-hatred,
but a certain blindness on her behalf. Being Jewish is not simply something
naturally given, but a set of understandings and self-understandings which are
continuously symbolically reproduced, contested, and reinterpreted—both
physei and nomō.
Twelve
Björn Thorsteinsson
Is the world doomed? Is humankind heading towards extinction? Can
catastrophe—environmental, economic, political, and, eventually, at once
universal and personal—be avoided? Should we even try to avoid it? Indeed,
should we even spend time worrying about it? Will things perhaps take care of
themselves or, in other words, will something—a god, nature, science,
technology, even politics—save us?
Why ask such questions? Why should we even let them, in their almost
unbearable and brutish banality, color the pages of our academic products?
And who are we anyway (to deal with them)? In the name of what, and in the
hope of achieving what?
In the following, an attempt will be made to produce what we might call
a piece of philosophical theatre that addresses these questions through an
intermingling of, mostly, three voices from the past two centuries or so.
To begin with, we will attend to the way in which the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida crossed paths with the German system-thinker
G.W.F. Hegel, demonstrating that the former’s relation to the latter is not as
simplistic as some might think. This will be brought out through a discussion
of Glas, a book written by Derrida forty years ago and dealing explicitly with
the Hegelian legacy. As it turns out, this textual analysis will lead us to an
examination of Walter Benjamin’s writings on history and dialectics, through
which we hope to locate, within the body of Hegel’s work as inherited by
Derrida, a certain materialist and messianic conception of temporality,
historicity, and subjectivity. Thus, in the end, we will try to show how the
three thinkers we engaged with can present us with a way of thinking about
historicity and temporality that does not exclude the irruption of the other or
the avoidance of catastrophe. All, of course, in the name of the hope that, after
all, redemption is still possible in face of the ongoing temptation of
resignation, apathy, and conformism—as well as, who knows, revolution.
Let us stipulate, at the outset, that there exists a prevalent “common opinion”
about the relation between Derrida and Hegel. Derrida, the inventor of
deconstruction, the thinker of différance and of archi-writing—of writing as
174 BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON
the “foundation without foundation” of reality, which also means that there is
no fixed ground, there are no stable units, only “traces,” each of which is only
“the trace of a trace” (Derrida, 1982, p. 26)—forever stands opposed to the
absolute, all-encompassing, self-sufficient, and self-identical system of
thought proposed by G.W.F. Hegel. According to this view, then, the entire
force of Derrida’s thinking seeks to demonstrate that the totalitarian
aspirations of the system are doomed to failure. Why and how is that? The
shorthand answer would be the following: because of the remains. Something
always remains, something that the system has not yet accumulated and
incorporated into its all-devouring and insatiable body—something which
resists the system, something other which, in its very singularity, always
springs forth or returns. And the shortcoming of the system, its failure, would
be, quite simply, that it neglects—omits, passes over, misses—the structural
nature of the remains. But, of course, the system does not stop there, nor does
the charge against it: faced by the remains or by the resistance, the system will
always react (in spite of itself, betraying its totalitarian ambition) in such a
way as to strive to exclude them or repress them. This repressive and
exclusive moment is by definition unthinkable by the system, but through this
move, it quickly assumes the figure of an inhumane, intolerant, and heartless
machine—reacting, precisely, to anything or anyone new, unforeseeable and
exceptional in a profoundly unjust way—manufacturing, instead, relentlessly,
an ongoing apology, at once repetitive and inventive, of the reigning state of
affairs.
Now, if these remarks are true, or, more specifically, and retreating to
our context here, if they truly apply to Derrida’s reading of Hegel, then
Derrida would join, without reserve, the society of latter-day philosophers
who see Hegel as essentially a reactive thinker, one that ends up advocating a
closed reading of history, a properly sterile notion of progress, and a
disempowering conception of the subject. As examples of such thinkers, one
could of course cite Theodor W. Adorno (cf. Mattias Martinson’s contribution
to the present volume), Gilles Deleuze (whose relation to Hegel may still be
more complex than is often assumed) and, more recently, Alain Badiou, who
has expressed doubts about the idea, which he attributes to Hegel (as well as
to Martin Heidegger), that “there is a History of being and thought,” against
which Badiou affirms that “rather there are histories of truth, of the
multiplicity of truths” (Badiou, 2005, p. 136). But the advocates of the closed
reading may also be found among those who relate to Hegel’s legacy in an
apparently positive way, to the point of conceiving of themselves as his
disciples. A prime example here would, of course, be Francis Fukuyama’s
influential and controversial “end of history” reading of Hegel. It should not
be forgotten that when advancing his hypothesis, Fukuyama very openly
proclaimed himself to be a faithful disciple of Hegel—as well as of Karl
Marx, even if his main mentor and inspiration should, perhaps, be proclaimed
to be Alexandre Kojève (Fukuyama, 1992, pp. xii, xvi–xviii, xxi).
Left (in) Time 175
The point I wish to raise here is, quite simply, that the issue of the
reading of Hegel, the question “How should we read Hegel?” is very much
alive today. This question cannot be neglected by us, the a/historical beings
that we have become, caught as we are between the seemingly irrational and
erratic, and unending, course of history and the relentlessly self-serving
discourse of the end of history—between revolts, protests, and popular
movements on the one hand and economic rationality, the “no alternatives”-
doctrine and imperial brutality on the other hand. As many writers, such as
Michel Foucault (1981, p. 74), have pointed out, Hegel is with us, whether we
like it or not—for is he not, to deploy a somewhat risky metaphor, the mother
of all thinkers of historicity as well as of a possible end to history? The
question of the relation of any human being, or beings, to the past, present,
and future, the question of the development of history—objective or
subjective, deterministic or open—can hardly be posed without some
reference to Hegel, however unconscious or unavowed. What is more, owing
to the cunning conception of the nuts and bolts of his system, his specter will
haunt us all the more if we neglect the task—the admittedly scholarly and
intellectual task (“thou art a scholar, Horatio, speak to it!”)—of addressing it.
It is my contention that Derrida did not fail to attend to Hegel’s ghost, or
Geist. This claim, when properly read, entails that Derrida’s interpretation of
Hegel turns out not to be as schematic and simplistic as implied by the
“common opinion” described above. This is not to say, however, that
Derrida’s encounter with Hegel is characterized by unproblematic acceptance.
Let us put it this way: there is at least one Hegel from whom Derrida wishes
to distance himself, with whom he begs to differ. And perhaps this Hegel is
(more or less) the one that has, for one reason or another, been mobilized and
given the status of “common opinion”. But there are other Hegels, other
manifestations of his spirit—or of his nature, or of his Idea—which Derrida
wants to engage with.
In this context, then, I see Derrida as having contributed to, or prepared
the way for, what Slavoj Žižek calls “a kind of ‘return to Hegel’,” a revival
which claims, quite emphatically, that “[t]he current image of Hegel as an
‘idealist-monist’ is totally misleading: what we find in Hegel is the strongest
affirmation yet of difference and contingency” (Žižek, 1989, p. 7). For Žižek,
thus, Hegel should not be reduced to a proponent of the end of history, or,
which comes down to the same thing, as an apologist for the status quo. I will
attempt to show that Derrida would agree with such a reading of Hegel—
inspired, possibly, by a strand of thinking, represented by Walter Benjamin,
that entertains a close and essential relation to Jewish messianism.
One way to argue for the complexity of Derrida’s relation to Hegel is simply
to point to a very concrete thing: Glas, Derrida’s bi-columnar 1974 book
176 BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON
In other words, there is (always) something left in Hegel, something that we—
the “we” of which Derrida speaks here, thus calling us forth, interpellating
us—should attend to and bring out. There is a “remainder of writing” in Hegel
which forever disrupts the circular closure of his Encyclopedia, of the self-
identical and immutable systematic construct that seems so concrete and
lifeless. Hegel, Derrida tells us, is alive—but this life apparently is not in any
way to be seen as absolutely divorced from death. After all, did he not die in
1831? Still, his writings live on: his philosophy, his oeuvre which, we should
remember, was in a strong sense what he lived for. And, what is more,
according to Derrida this work should not be seen as merely “dead letters”
stored in a few volumes—for, after all, as Derrida puts it, Hegel was not only
“the last philosopher of the book” but also “the first thinker of writing”
(Derrida, 1976, p. 26).
In this spirit, then, the immense reading machine that is Derrida’s Glas
sets out to do justice to the complexities of Hegel’s thinking. One of the key
operations performed by the book consists in reconstructing and
deconstructing the porous membrane separating the last two stages of the
development contained in the Phenomenology of Spirit: the stages of absolute
religion (or revealed religion) on the one hand, and absolute knowing (which
Derrida unfailingly abbreviates as “Sa” for the French savoir absolu,
inevitably connoting the Freudian “Id,” ça in French) on the other hand. Let
us note that the passage from absolute religion to absolute knowing has to be
Left (in) Time 177
Absolute religion is not yet what it is already: Sa. Absolute religion (the
essence of Christianity, religion of essence) is already what it is not yet:
the Sa that itself is already no more what it is yet, absolute religion.
The already-there of the not-yet, the already-no-more of the yet
cannot agree [s’entendre] [sic] (Derrida, 1986, p. 218; for comparison to
the original, see Derrida, 1974, p. 244).
The shortcoming of absolute religion lies in the fact that it remains on the
level of Vorstellung, of anticipatory representation (to use Derrida’s
explicatory rendering of the German word; Derrida, 1986, p. 219). As Derrida
puts it, in absolute religion “[t]he unity of the object and the subject does not
yet accomplish itself presently, actually, the reconciliation between the subject
and the object, the inside and the outside, is left waiting. It represents itself,
but the represented reconciliation is not the actual reconciliation” (ibid., pp.
219–20).
In other words, and to repeat, the mode of representation of absolute
religion, this Vorstellung or picture-thinking (as A.V. Miller’s translation of
Hegel’s Phenomenology has it) of the absolute, is not the whole story—for the
very surpassing of religion by absolute knowing means, according to Hegel,
that the content of religion, “the highest content,” finally comes to full self-
consciousness within philosophy—which means, of course, that the mode of
“mere” representational thinking is left behind to make room for genuinely
conceptual thinking—thinking as such, which seizes the content and frees it of
any kind of material support, thus overcoming the last cleavage separating the
content from itself. Then, the final reconciliation of the spirit with itself takes
place—the circle of absolute knowing is closed.
Be that as it may, then, but still we have to ask—we, readers and
inheritors of Hegel: what is the time of this latter representation—of the
representation of the final reconciliation presented to us by the last chapter of
the Phenomenology of Spirit? Has the final reconciliation really taken place,
once and for all? Do Hegel’s works, each on their own and all of them as a
whole, constitute and bring about the fulfillment of the becoming of the spirit?
In that case, could there still be time, could there still be spirit—and if so, in
178 BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON
what sense? How does one live, how are we, supposedly living and spiritual
beings, supposed to live inside the circle of absolute knowing? Is there really
life within that circle? If so, is that intelligent life? Spiritual life? Has the
already-there become absolutely predominant, has it come to reign supreme—
is there nothing (left) that is not-yet? In what sense is history finished, and in
what sense not?
Hegel has a response to this question, which, it must be added, can
justifiably be seen as the question of the system. Obviously, then, Hegel has to
have the answer to this question—if he didn’t, his system could hardly be seen
as complete, it would come down to a question with no answer. The answer,
as it (will) turn(s) out, lies at once on the surface and in the depths of the
system—but a very good formulation of it can be found in the aforementioned
last chapter of the Phenomenology, the one on absolute knowledge (das
absolute Wissen). But before we turn to that chapter, let us take a brief look at
the other end of the Phenomenology, namely the introduction to the book.
There we find another renowned passage in which Hegel describes our (or
cognition’s) mistaken efforts to capture the Absolute and bring it to us, against
which Hegel affirms the necessity of recognizing the fact that the Absolute we
are seeking, our Absolute, the only Absolute we will ever get, is already “with
us, in and for itself, all along, and of its own volition” (Hegel, 1977, p. 47). To
this poignant remark Hegel adds, a little further on, that, owing to the fact that
we thus start off, in our search for the Absolute, by presupposing “that the
Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and
separated from it, and yet is something real,” we thus exclude cognition from
the truth while acting as if cognition was on the side of truth, and thereby our
search for truth, which “calls itself fear of error,” merits, rather, to be called
“fear of the truth” (ibid.). Thus we find ourselves poised between error and
truth, confusing the two, looking for truth all around, on the other side, instead
of turning our gaze towards ourselves and our nearest surroundings, this side.
This, however, does not entail that we have already become one with the
Absolute—even if it is on our side, it is still removed from us, there still is a
gap. Accordingly, and moving now to the chapter on absolute knowing, we
find ourselves in the open space (and in the open time) that takes the form of
the hiatus between spirit (and/or consciousness) and the concept. “Time is the
Concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as
empty intuition [Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist und als leere
Anschauung sich dem Bewußtsein vorstellt],” writes Hegel, drawing the
following conclusion: “for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and
it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Concept, i.e. [as
long as it] has not annulled Time [deswegen erscheint der Geist notwendig in
der Zeit, und er erscheint so lange in der Zeit, als er nicht seinen reinen
Begriff erfaßt, das heißt, nicht die Zeit tilgt]” (Hegel, 1977, p. 487; Hegel,
1988, pp. 524; emphases in original). Everything here hinges on the “as long
as”—as long as the concept has not yet “caught up with itself”, as long it has
Left (in) Time 179
not yet (completely) returned to itself, the advent of the end, of the end of
history—of the spirit—remains to come, even here, at the end of the
Phenomenology. Therefore, as long as this is so, spirit is still (left) in time:
“Time […] appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet
complete within itself” (Hegel, 1977, p. 487). We are not yet at the end of
history—the annulation has not yet been achieved, the circle has not been
closed.
Or—and here we go again—has it? Is Hegel’s philosophy not (supposed
to be) the “grasping of Spirit’s pure Concept”? Does the realization that time
is the Dasein of the concept not already annul time? Let us read further. The
above-named incompleteness of spirit, and the injunction that follows,
consists of “the necessity to enrich the share which self-consciousness has in
consciousness” (ibid., p. 487). Does the realization that we spoke of, the
realization that we have just arrived at, towards the end of the
Phenomenology, not fall within the category of such an enrichment? Is this
realization not a matter of self-consciousness coming to increased
consciousness—that is to say, in this particular and unique case: complete
consciousness?
Still—and the very fact that the question returns, and remains, seems,
when properly conceived and thought through, ample proof that there is no
end to history, not yet—spirit must still be in time and, hence, there must be
time remaining. But why? Where does this injunction, this “must” come
from? The response goes as follows: even if spirit must necessarily seek its
own fulfillment, which is also its own suppression, and even if the realization
that this is so amounts, in a sense, to the achievement of the suppression, it is
also the case, still, that “Spirit is necessarily […] immanent differentiation
[Unterscheiden in sich]” (Hegel, 1977, p. 488; Hegel, 1988, p. 525). The last
sigh of the dialectics of spirit thus turns out also to be, eternally, its breath of
life. For, to turn now to another beginning, namely to the Preface to the
Phenomenology, Hegel insists that “[i]n my view, which can be justified only
by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and
expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (Hegel,
1977, pp. 9–10). How should this notion of the Subject be understood, then?
Let us read: “[…] the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or,
what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of
positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This
Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity” (ibid., p. 10).
Let us leave it there and step back and gather our senses. What these
incursions into Hegel’s Phenomenology demonstrate is that there can be no
question of assuming that Hegel’s own idea of his system is devoid of “living
Substance,” or, in other words, of subject as radical negativity. “In my view,”
as Hegel modestly puts it, this is what the full development of the system
should make the reader realize. There is no substance without subject—(at
least) as long as there is spirit, as long as we (someone, anyone) are left in
180 BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON
time. The complete and final grasping of the pure concept of spirit has not
happened—yet; because spirit is still negativity, it is (still) appearing in time,
or in other words, there is still time. Indeed, spirit is appearing here and now,
in us, before us, in our very act of asking the question, the question of the
system itself. And this asking is always also a kind of resistance—to the very
idea that history could be finished, here and now. Of course it isn’t! Just open
your eyes and look around! This indignant realization of the “not-yet” is
absolute knowing. And this entails also, as Derrida meticulously brings out in
his analysis of these issues in Glas, that the limit between absolute religion
and absolute knowing has not been crossed, and left behind, once and for all.
Thus, absolute knowing circumscribes the very dialectic of substance and
subject, of the end and the ever new beginning. The schism, the gap is still
there, but in a different mode, for it has been posited, i.e. represented, or, in
other words, laid bare for us to behold:
The reconciliation has produced itself, and yet it has not yet taken place,
is not present, only represented or present as remaining in front of,
ahead of, to come, present as not-yet-there and not as presence of the
present. […] Consciousness represents to itself the unity, but it is not
there. In this does it have, it must be added, the structure of a
consciousness, and the phenomenology of spirit, the science of the
experience of consciousness, finds its necessary limit in this
representation (Derrida, 1986, p. 220).
This, then, would be as far as we can go with the system. A lesson waits to be
learned, one that can for instance be formulated thus: “[…] if philosophy—
Sa—was considered to be the myth of absolute reappropriation, of self-
presence absolutely absolved and recentered, then the absolute of revealed
religion would have a critical effect on Sa. It would be necessary to keep to
the (opposite) bank, that of religion […], in order to resist the lure of Sa”
(ibid., p. 221). Revealed religion thus assumes the guise of the very resistance
to totalization. Hidden in these formulations, there is an injunction that
Derrida does not fail to spell out. In French: “Il faut se donner le temps. Le
reste du temps” (Derrida, 1974, p. 252). Or, in the English translation: “It is
necessary to give oneself time. Time’s remain(s)” (Derrida, 1986, p. 226). We
have to give ourselves time, presuppose that there is time, that there will be
time—the time that remains, the remains of time. Such is the injunction
ceaselessly directed towards absolute knowing by what has not yet seized
itself fully in its concept and thus represents the necessity and presence of
time—absolute religion.
Left (in) Time 181
3. Benjamin—Being a Dialectician
Avid readers of Walter Benjamin will have discerned familiar themes in what
has been said here—not least in the conclusion of our analysis of the relation
between absolute religion and absolute knowing in Hegel which carries more
than a distant echo of Benjamin’s famous metaphor involving the puppet of
historical materialism and the dwarf of theology at the opening of his Theses
on the Philosophy of History. Furthermore, in The Arcades Project (Das
Passagen-Werk), Benjamin develops his much-discussed concept of
“dialectical image,” defining it as “an image that emerges suddenly, in a
flash.” To this he then immediately adds the following clarification: “What
has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up in the now of its
recognizability” (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 473). In other words, the dialectical
image concerns the relation of “what has been” to the “now.” However, what
defines it as dialectical image is the fact that what has been appears, to the
observer, in a flash. The effect of the dialectical image is a rupturing of the
smooth and continuous progression of time. Essentially, such images possess
a unique capability to open up time, paving the way for a genuinely subjective
intervention into the smooth and unproblematic running of the machine of
history:
For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a
particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility
[Lesbarkeit] only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding “to
legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their
interior. Every present day [Jede Gegenwart] is determined by the
images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular
recognizability [Erkennbarkeit]. In it, truth is charged to the bursting
point with time (Benjamin, 1999a, pp. 462–463; Benjamin, 1991, pp.
577–578).
(Benjamin, 1999b, p. 246). This stance ultimately boils down to the standpoint
that we, in our present situation, have no obligations towards the past or
towards the claims staked upon us by the no longer living. For us, past
generations are gone, but they are no more lost than anything else; they are
safely preserved in the grand museum of history, and therefore we do not need
to pay any attention to them as anything other than curious artifacts. Implicit
here is a naïve and uncritical (and doubtless familiar) idea of progress (ibid.,
p. 252)—an idea that inevitably serves as “a tool of the ruling classes” (ibid.,
p. 247).
Against this subservient and disempowering attitude, Benjamin advances
another conception of time, an essentially messianic conception that he wants
to relate to historical materialism in order for the latter to become what it truly
should be. We can regard materialism in this context as referring to a certain
sympathy with the victims, with the slain and the fallen in the process of
history. If there is ever to be a genuine redemption of humankind as such, and
not only the ultimate and categorical triumph of the victors (the strong, the
mighty, the wealthy), the downtrodden need to be rehabilitated. This can only
happen through the “dialectical” leap into the unknown, the “leap in the open
air of history” that Marx termed revolution (ibid., p. 253). The revolution is
bound to take place “in an arena where the ruling classes give the commands”
(ibid., p. 253), simply because there is no other arena—which means, among
other things, that the notion of history that prevails, in this arena, is the
conformist-historicist one. Revolution entails, precisely, that “the
revolutionary classes” (ibid., p. 253), or “the struggling, oppressed class”
(ibid., p. 251), make “the continuum of history explode” (ibid., p. 253).
To mark the opposition between the historicist and the historical
materialist even more clearly, let us reproduce Benjamin’s Thesis XVI in its
entirety:
The reason why the historical materialist “remains in control of his powers” is
precisely that he resists the temptation to depict history as a homogeneous
continuum of internally indiscernible events which follow each other in
smooth procession. Against this harmless and diluted conception, he is
conscious of the fact that he is facing a certain danger: “every image of the
Left (in) Time 183
past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens
to disappear irretrievably” (ibid., p. 247). Against this threat, the historical
materialist strives to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger” (ibid., p. 247). This entails an awareness of the way in which a
particular “historical subject” can appear in the form of a “monad,” in which
“thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions” (ibid., p.
254). In this moment of history condensed into a monad, the historical
materialist “recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put
differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (ibid.,
p. 254). And it is precisely in virtue of this notion of specific “condensed”
moments—which Benjamin also calls “chips [Splitter] of Messianic time”
(ibid., p. 255; for comparison to the original, see Benjamin, 1974, p. 704)—
that the historical materialist severs himself from the impotent conformism of
the historicist.
Now let us return to Hegel and ask: how should we relate him to this
conceptual scheme? In order to address this question, we need go no further
than to Benjamin himself. In one of his “first sketches” for The Arcades
Project, he writes:
To unravel these somewhat cryptic remarks a little, let us note that Benjamin
claims that time, by which he clearly means the temporality of the now
(Jetztzeit), really is contained in Hegelian dialectics—making it possible, by
the same token, for the dialectical image to arise within the Hegelian scheme
of things. However, Benjamin reproaches the Hegelian conception for
reducing time to a “time of thinking” which Benjamin further qualifies as
“properly historical” (implying historicism) or even “psychological.” This
implies, for Benjamin, that the Hegelian conception of time does not allow for
the dialectical image to fully realize itself—in the sense of becoming effective
(wirklich); or, in other words, what Benjamin calls “the time differential”—by
which he seems to mean some sort of a tangent touching the unfolding path of
time, allowing for it to “tangent off” in a radically new direction—is quite
simply unknown to Hegel, or, at the very least, inoperative within the
Hegelian system.
In light of the above, I want to suggest that Hegel would not be
insensitive to dialectical images in general—or to the “time differential” or the
“historical index” in particular. Rather, responding to the Hegelian injunction
184 BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON
Being a dialectician means having the wind of history in one’s sails. The
sails are the concepts. It is not enough, however, to have sails at one’s
disposal. What is decisive is knowing the art of setting them (Benjamin,
1999a, p. 473).
This setting of the sails only becomes possible after the advent of absolute
knowing—given that this last term is “nothing but a name for the
acknowledgment of a certain radical loss” (Žižek, 1989, p. 7)—a loss which
comes down to the realization that substance is still incomplete and that the
subject is still called for. But it also entails a sense of what Hegel called
“positing the presuppositions,” defined by Žižek as a “retroactive conversion
of contingency into necessity, in this conferring of a form of necessity on the
contingent circumstances” (Žižek, 2008, p. 131). Perceiving the dialectical
image in its moment of legibility, attending to the splinters of messianic time
when they arrive—and, while we wait, setting the sails, in the name of the
nameless oppressed, for a justice to come: preconditions of subjectivity, of
breaking out of the circle, of reinventing reality—of revolution.
Left (in) Time 185
4. Reading—Citations
To finish, let us read the beginning of Glas—its left column, the one that is
dedicated to Hegel—which starts in mid-sentence:
what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?
For us, here, now: from now on that is what one will not have been
able to think without him.
For us, here, now: these words are citations, already, always, we will
have learned that from him.
These strange sentences invite a number of questions. Why are these common
words, “for us, here, now,” citations? Citations from where? Or, to repeat
Derrida’s own question: “Who, him?” My hypothesis is that the answer is not
only the obvious one: “Hegel”—but a slightly more complex formula, which,
nevertheless, is Hegelian in its very structure: we should think of this figure,
who has taught us something about citations and about the “for us, here,
now,” not only as Hegel, but also as Benjamin. For, in this context, we should
recall the point made by Benjamin that citations can be piercing, and that they
can arrive at their moment of readability any time—thus becoming what he
terms citations à l’ordre du jour (Benjamin, 1999b, p. 246). For us, here, now,
readers of Hegel and/or Benjamin and/or Derrida, any moment, indeed, is, or
should be seen as, “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter”
(ibid., p. 255).
Thus we remain poised—between the already-there and the not-yet.
Positioning ourselves, here and now, in this in-between, we become capable
of appreciating the import of the dialectical images that appear, sometimes,
for those who remain sensitive to them. Derrida has a name for this between:
différance. We are in différance—and, as such beings, we are subject to the
call of justice; a justice to come which is not transcendent but seizes us here
and now, when we least expect it, in a more or less unexpected and
unforeseeable figure—summoning us, precisely, to act as subjects within the
social substance.
As Catherine Malabou (2005) has pointed out, Hegel, towards the very
end of his life, left us some sort of a testament, contained in his introduction to
the second edition of the Logic, completed on November 7, 1831, seven days
before his death. A testament to those left behind: instructions, but also an
injunction:
Now I have been giving some indications to the effect that in Benjamin and
Derrida, Hegel may have found two such “good” readers—characterized by
the “plasticity” that is needed to genuinely receive and understand the “plastic
discourse” that, surprisingly, Hegel makes his own work, at the eve of his life,
out to be. Maybe Benjamin and Derrida provide us here with a good example
to follow. A lot—if not everything—hinges upon it. For, as Benjamin (1999a,
p. 473) puts it, “the catastrophe is the status quo.” Or, more explicitly:
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Elena Namli is Professor of Ethics and Research Director at the Centre for
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understandings of the concept of human rights.
correlation (between God and man), faith (religious), 24–27, 29, 56–58, 68,
128–129, 132, 133, 141 69, 71, 76, 116, 133, 155
creation, 26, 31, 42, 43, 46, 74, 76, 99, Fall, the, 42–44, 45
129, 137, 147, 157 feminism, 3, 10, 11, 16, 17, 20,
re-, 34, 41 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 56
Critchley, Simon ,79, 176 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 59
Christian(ity), 1, 4, 6, 10, 13–15, 20, 26, First World War, see World War I
50, 55, 66–69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 98, Foucault, Michel, 40, 175
99, 105, 123, 127, 128, 129, 132, Fukuyama, Francis, 174
137, 140, 149, 158, 161–162, Futurism, 106, 108
163, 170, 177, see also Judeo-
Christian Great War, see World War I
Galilei, Galileo, 72, 73
Deconstruction, 173, 176 Galut, see exile
Deleuze, Gilles, 40, 174 Gaon, Saadia, 128, 130
democracy, 17, 65, 140, 163, 165, 170 Genet, Jean, 176
Denikin, Anton, 111, 116, 122 Gogarten, Friedrich, 69
Derrida, Jacques, 6–7, 77, 78, 80–82, 84, Goldmann, Nahum, 61
85, 131, 173–177, 180, 185–186 Gramsci, Antonio, 11
Descartes, René, 14
dialectic(s)(al), 3–4, 5, 7, 35, 36–42, 44, Hardt, Michael, 40, 47, 48
46, 56, 69, 78, 143, 173, 179, halakah see law
180, 182–184 Hasidism, 9, 32, 54–56, 154
Dialectic of Enlightenment Haskalah, 17
(Horkheimer and Adorno), 44 Heb(ew)(raic) (mode of thought), 17–18,
Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 33, 37, 19, 20, 57, 67, 69, 76
44, 95 (language), 61, 63, 101, 102, 132
dialectical image, 44, 181, 183–184, (people, culture), 24, 28, 56, 101,
185 104–105,
difference, 173, 185 Hebrew Bible 3
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 16 Heidegger, Martin, 69, 70–71, 75, 174
Duma (State Duma), 117 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6–7,
13–14, 24, 33, 34–40, 71, 98–99,
ecology, 16 173–179, 181, 183–186
Eisner, Kurt, 61–62, 135 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 59, 131
embodiment, 3, 10, 12, 13–14, 15–17, Herzl, Theodor, 54, 95, 99, 100, 102
18, 47, 153 history, 1, 3, 6, 7, 17, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30–
Enlightenment, 11, 17, 25, 41, 44, 65, 67, 32, 34, 38, 43–44, 47, 52, 53, 55,
70–71, 75, 127 57, 58, 63, 67–68, 71–73, 75–78,
Counter-, 9 105, 115, 123, 131, 135, 136–
Jewish, see haskalah 140, 142, 154, 157, 158, 164,
eschatology, 11, 71, 73 173–175, 178, 180–184
ethics, 5–6, 17, 29, 80–84, 99, 127, 128, Angel of (Klee), 43–44
131, 132, 134–143, end of, 174–175, 179–180
exile, 31, 58, 66, 67, 95, 121 of
American Yiddish poetry, 6, 147
Index 207
law, 11, 43, 51, 67, 72, 74, 76, 81, 88, 91, materialism, 2, 7, 28, 29, 34, 35, 36, 38,
98–99, 107, 108, 128–130, 133, 41, 44, 46, 50, 68–69, 88, 140,
135, 141–143, 168, 169 173
left (political), 6, 12, 18, 19, 70, 89, 130 historical materialism, 140, 181, 182–
leftist(s), 20, 61, 79, 89, 106, 145, 147, 183
148, 149, 151, 153–156, 158, Matamoros, Fernando, 39
159 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 153
Lenin, Vladimir, 95, 117, 126, 148, 152, Mendelssohn, Moses, 99, 131
155–156, 158 Messiah, 17, 20, 24–27, 30–32, 42, 55,
Leninism, 140 58, 63, 131, 158, 185
Levinas, Emmanuel, 2, 3, 5, 15, 17, 24– Messiani(c)(sm), 1–5, 7, 11, 16–17, 19,
26, 29–32, 77, 79–93, 131, 137, 24, 27, 30–31, 33, 39–42, 44,
139, 140 46–48, 52–53, 54, 56, 57–58,
“Ideology and Idealism”, 83, 87, 90 65–66, 68, 76–78, 127, 130–131,
liberation, 3, 20, 60, 131, 133–134, 135, 133–135, 137, 158, 162, 164,
141–143, 158, 165 173, 175, 182–184
from occupation, 165 midrash, 30
Jewish, 3 Milosz, Czeslav, 29
of Russia, 61 modernity, modern age, 35, 43–45, 49,
political, 34, 95, 133–134, 140 51, 53, 56–58, 65–68, 70–76, 81,
universal, 6, 127, 143 86, 90, 93, 98, 104, 112, 155,
liberal, liberalism 20, 52, 53, 54, 65, 78, 164, 167, 169, 186
81, 86, 88, 111, 141 monarchist(s), 114, 117–118, 124
libertarian(ism), 10, 12, 16, 17, 19–20, monotheism, 5, 127–129, 132–134, 141–
52, 62–63 143
Litvak(s), 2, 9 Mursi, Muhammad, 47–48
Löwith, Karl, 1, 65–71, 73–78 mystic(ism)(s), 16, 44, 49, 50, 54, 56,
Meaning in History, 65–70, 74, 75 132, 133, see also kabbalah
Lukacs, Georg, 16–17, 54
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 105 natality, 96, 164
National Socialism, 81
Maimonides, Moses, 128, 129–130 nationalis(m)(t), 59, 97–99, 101–102,
Malevich, Kazimir, 106, 108, 109, 135 113, 130, 142
Mandel, Veniamin, 112–117, 120, 121– Jewish nationalism, 99, 100, 105, 113,
122, 124 119, see also Zionism
Mann, Thomas, 33 national spirit, 97, 99, 101–102, 105
Mannheim, Karl 52, 53 negativity, 37, 44, 179–180
Manor, Dalia, 101–104 Negri, Antonio, 40, 47–48
Marx, Karl, 3, 10, 13, 15, 28, 31, 34, 38, neo-Kantian philosophy, 6, 127–128,
46, 63, 68–70, 75, 76, 174, 182 135, 137
The Communist Manifesto, 69 neoliberalism, 19, 87
Marxis(m)(t)(ts), 2, 4, 11, 12, 18, 24, 28, Nevel, 6, 127, 135, 137, 139–140
33–34, 36, 44, 46, 47, 52, 61, 69, Nevi’im, see prophetic literature
76, 80, 83, 87, 89, 95–96 New Bezalel School, 104
post-, 37–40, 47 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 67
nihilism, 23, 161, 169, 170
Index 209
240. John Ryder and Radim Šíp, Editors, Identity and Social
Transformation, Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Five. A
volume in Central European Value Studies
245. Harry Lesser, Editor, Justice for Older People, A volume in Values in
Bioethics
252. Leonidas Donskis, Editor, Yet Another Europe after 1984: Rethinking
Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe. A volume in Philosophy,
Literature, and Politics
255. Raja Halwani, Carol V. A. Quinn, and Andy Wible, Editors, Queer
Philosophy: Presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy,
1998-2008. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical
Societies
257. Jim Kanaris, Editor, Polyphonic Thinking and the Divine. A volume in
Philosophy and Religion
261. Mechthild E. Nagel and Anthony J. Nocella II, Editors, The End of
Prisons: Reflections from the Decarceration Movement. A volume in Social
Philosophy
268. Greg Moses and Gail Presbey, Editors, Peace Philosophy and Public
Life: Commitments, Crises, and Concepts for Engaged Thinking. A volume in
Philosophy of Peace
270. Patricia Hanna, Editor, Reality and Culture: Essays on the Philosophy
of Bernard Harrison. A volume in Interpretation and Translation
271. Piotr Nowak, The Ancients and Shakespeare on Time: Some Remarks
on the War of Generations. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and
Politics
272. Brian G. Henning and David Kovacs, Editors, Being in America: Sixty
Years of the Metaphysical Society. A volume in Histories and Addresses of
Philosophical Societies