Apodictic Irony and the Production of Well-Structured Uncertainty: Tosafot Gornish and the Talmud as the Political after Kant

This chapter addresses an early modern instantiation of the effacement of the interpersonal political in the Talmud by conceptions of universal (inter)subjectivity and logical-apodictic reasoning. This process first tacitly erases the interpersonal political in the late ancient Talmud by reducing it to dialectical irony. In a second step, the erasure advances from irony, a Platonic concept, to logical-apodictic reading of it in the Aristotelian tradition. Only when viewed through a post-Kantian lens could it become clear that this was not merely a Platonic interpretation of the late ancient Talmud in early modernity, followed by an Aristotelian interpretation, but rather a complex and multistep process of the effacement of the interpersonal at the advent of intersubjective. The chapter arrives to that result through a case-study of staging and analyzing of a fourteenth century logical commentary on the thirteenth century rhetorical interpretation of a discussion in a late ancient text in the Talmud.

Humans, Jews, and the Other Others

The “Introduction” formulates the question of the political, and in particular of the emergence and erasure of the political from the horizon of currently predominant political thought in political theology and political ontology. The “Introduction” further attunes the readers to the dynamic key of “effacement” as both emergence and erasure, thereby defining the main register in which the book is proceeding -- as distinct from the keys of chronological periodisation, linear history, paradigm shifts, or other stabilizing approaches. The “Introduction” further draws a distinction between politics and the political, and advances the question of the political in relation to the Talmud as both a text and a discipline of thinking able to shed a new, contrasting, light on the paradox driven modern political notions of a singularizing and even singling out notion of a “Jew,” and a universalizing notion of the “human being.” The “Introduction” concludes by gesturing towards a much closer connection between the question of the political in the Talmud, the notions of the Jews and of the human beings in modernity, and the question of earth and territory as a part of political equation these concepts spell out.

Mis-Taking in Halakhah and Aggadah (Jewish Responses to Kant II)

The chapter accounts for how the rabbinic political was constructed and thereby productively lost in Jewish secularizing modernist thought and literature of Franz Kafka, Chaim Bialik, and Walter Benjamin. Modernist notions of logical implication, literary expression, and language are at the center of analysis in this chapter, as it articulates a crisis in the relationships between law and literature in how these thinkers navigate both the human condition and both the Jewish and general law as its part. The chapter further shows how a departure from neo-Kantianism in these thinkers lead to a reconsideration of the role of mistake and failure in human condition, and how their understanding of both mistaking and failing both purports to capture and misses the Talmudic understanding of mistake in terms of self-refutation. The result is a new vision of the otherwise purely logical notion of implication, a vision in which the very being implicit rather than explicit remains fundamental for human condition, and that no explication of the implicit can ever either replace or tame the power of the implicit in human condition.

The Question of the Political: Back to Where You Once Belonged?

The chapter analyses how the question of the political in two currently predominant and competing schools of political thought, political theology, exemplified by Carl Schmitt, and political ontology, exemplified by Jacques Rancière. The notion of the other others comes front and centre in this analysis. In political ontology, the concept of the political is predicated on an ability of a politician, a lawyer, or an artist to employ the philosophical, and in modern terms, “ontological” distinction between what is the case in each case and what seems to be the case in each case. In political theology, it is no longer “being” as opposed to “seeming”, but rather an ability to represent as radically distinct from any particular content conveyed. The chapter further traces foundations of both political theology and political ontology in Kant’s transcendentalism -- in particular in the necessity by which transcendentalism denies “positive law,” which Christianity traditionally ascribed to the Jews. The balance of the chapter shows how, however mutually exclusive, both political theology and political ontology remain intersubjective in their scope and thereby both efface and help notice what, in the following chapters will emerge on the pages of the Talmud as interpersonal rather than intersubjective dimension of the political.

Jews, in Theory

The chapter analyses the modern political notion of the “Jews,” and the role of that notion in both political ontology and political theology versions of the political. The key notion of the effacement of the political in political theology and political ontology develops further in the argument in the chapter. The political becomes “effaced” that is both dynamically articulated and lost in political ontology and political theology. The chapter introduces the role of a Talmudic notion of refuting as opposed to both Greek (Aristotelian) and Latin (Quintilian) notions of refutation; and spells out how that notion of refuting emerges, by the paradoxical logic of effacement, in the analysis of the political in the Talmud. The argument advances in conversation with Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, and Pavel Florensky.

The Earth for the Other Others

This chapter explores an implication of the question of effacement of the other others, which this book advanced, for and in thinking the Earth. Mobilizing the question of the other others to think the Earth anew is no more but also no less than an articulation of yet another, perhaps the most important part of the question: How, or is it possible, to think the Earth in the first place? Advancing this problem moves the argument in the chapters beyond the hitherto predominant paradigms of linear otherness, in which the other and the question of belonging to a territory have been inextricably connected one to another. Is that connection between other and territory necessary, and what does that connection preclude from the view? To formulate and advance these questions the chapter engages with Gilles Deleuze’s notion of territorialization, and in particular with his questioning of the relationships between territorialization and existence, as well as between earth and being. The argument shows both necessity and insufficiency of Deleuze’s analysis of territorialization in relation to otherness in order to ask about of those others who remain in an intrinsically necessary relationship to the earth without ever finalizing their relation with a particular territory. In that way, the chapter provides a view of the political before it locks into either political ontology or political theology -- now extending the question of the effacement of the political beyond its exemplification as the political in the Talmud.

Conceptions of the Human (Interpersonality II): The Limits of Regret

The chapter expands the notion of Talmudic refuting to translate it into a certain structure of personhood in an interpersonal relationship. It stages a conception of personhood, which neither “subjectivist” nor “relativist” notions of the humanity of humans can either fully grasp or fully efface. At issue is a possibility for a conception of humanity in general and of a human being that reaches beyond notions of “a human” as bestowing nonbeing on things, and in particular measuring their being. To advance this argument, the chapter engages with, and limits the applicability of, Alexey Losev’s Eastern Orthodox political aesthetics as a purported foundation of, or even a possible replacement for, political theology. The argument in the chapter arrives at the insufficiency of Losev’s political aesthetics to grasp Talmudic interpersonality grounded in self-refuting, or broader yet, in refuting as its foundation. That helps showing how Losev’s Eastern Orthodox political alternative for modern notions of either universal “human being” or of a modern notion of a “Jew” -- as not only its counterpart but also its root -- prove insufficient to grasp the interpersonal political the Talmud’s pages show emerging and disappearing.

Talmudic Self-Refutation (Interpersonality I)

The chapter works through the emerging and disappearing notion of the political in the Talmud, with the notion and practice of refuting, and the underlying notion of interpersonality rather than intersubjectivity at the center. The analysis in the chapter advances through a case study of a particular notion of refuting in the Talmud, the notion of self-refuting or proving that an argument of one’s conversant is refuting itself. The chapter argues how neither political theology of Schmitt nor political ontology of Rancière suffice to account for interpersonal political relationships in self-refuting. In that venue, the notion of interpersonality emerges as essential for articulating the Talmudic political. That notion emerges by contrast with the intersubjectivity as the foundation of thinking the political in the modern political theory, implying as it does a fundamental loneliness of the subject, both of an individual subject and of a nation as a subject, as well.

Formally Human (Jewish Responses to Kant I)

The chapter shows how among tradition-oriented scholars of the 20th and early 21st century, the interpersonal in the Talmud became effaced in the notion of a universal subject of reason, ultimately conceived of as pure thought and denying any intrinsic necessity of the intersubjective, let alone the interpersonal. At the center of the discussion is post-Kantian formal transcendental definition of what it means to be human as opposed to any phenomenal description of humanity in external phenomenal terms of a physical, biological, or other objectifying terms. The chapter follows the Jewish thinkers who, in response to Kant’s critique of Jewish law as positive law, argue that Rabbinic law – the Talmud and its interpretation – entail a transcendental rather than positive notion of the law, and a transcendental rather than empirical notion of universal humanity in each human being. The chapter further shows, how for the sake of that argument, modern Jewish thinkers reinvent Jewish law. The chapter displays how that process entails both construction and denial of the Talmud as an allegedly empty form of merely rhetorical arguments to be translated into, and according to the principles of a universal humanity, build, as it is for these Jewish thinkers after Kant, on the principles of intersubjective transcendentalism, and on the resulting understanding of the political in their work.