Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism

191 Pages·2014·2.671 MB·English

by  Aaron W. Hughes

Rethinking Jewish Philosophy

Rethinking
Jewish
Philosophy
Beyond Particularism
and Universalism
z
AARON W. HUGHES
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– author.
Rethinking Jewish philosophy : beyond particularism and universalism / Aaron W. Hughes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–935681–2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jewish philosophy. 2. Judaism
and philosophy. 3. Derrida, Jacques—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
B154.H84 2014
181’.06—dc23 2013028087
9780199356812
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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e.r.w.

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: Occupation 1
1. Impossibilities 14
2. Irreconcilability 28
3. Kaddish 49
4. Authoritarianism 66
5. Rosenzweig’s Patient 85
6. Beyond 108
Notes 127
Bibliography 153
Index 167

Preface
Every preface is in reverse [Toute preface est à l’envers]. It
presents itself the right way round, as is required, but in its
construction, it proceeds in reverse; it is developed (“pro-
cessed”), as one says of photography and its negatives,
from its end or supposed purpose: a certain conception of
its architectural “project.”1
like many others in my field, I have spent most of my life reading
Jewish philosophers as shining exemplars of the universalizing tenden-
cies within Judaism. Juxtaposed against the forces of obscurantism, so
the master narrative of Jewish philosophy goes, these individuals articu-
lated a Judaism that was as rational and inclusive as it was open to the
cosmopolitan trends of the civilizations in which Jews historically found
themselves. This narrative has performed a great deal of intellectual work
as Jewish thinkers in the modern period have used it—and indeed con-
tinue to use it—in order to show that Judaism, as a religion not unlike
others, can be integrated within and respond to the demands of the
modern nation-state.2
Jewish philosophy, in other words, has been used to normalize Ju-
daism, to demonstrate the tradition at its most rational. Jewish philoso-
phy—in its many guises and forms—has been perceived to have taken
the particular elements of Judaism and subsequently translated and con-
structed them into universal terms in ways that show potential filiations
between a Judaism deemed authentic and an external standard imag-
ined as universally binding. Yet the potential counterpoints between the
particular and the universal risk masking the instability of both. Each
requires the other for its determinacy, just as each is simultaneously un-
dermined by the indeterminacy of its opposite. This alterity, the subject