This panel considers what role both central and extra-canonical Jewish thinkers have in humanistic and aesthetic thinking. The first paper focuses on the central theme of the human face in the work of Georg Simmel and Hermann Cohen, along with its social, ethical, and historical traces. The second paper places Yosef Yerushalmi and Jacques Derrida together in a Freudian conversation to investigate the relationship between history and memory in modern historiography. The third paper stages another set of conversations, between Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy and Anna Margolin’s poetry, considering how silence for both grounds communal and intersubjective relationships. For Rosenzweig, Sabbath is a practice of communal gathering and the manifestation of eternal time; the fourth paper reads Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as offering a phenomenology of Sabbath rest. Together, these papers investigate the temporal forms of individuality, labor, and collectivity, and their concrete implications.
The human “face” is a theme often associated with Emmanuel Levinas, though it enjoys a much longer pedigree. As this paper demonstrates, the face surfaces within the context of a debate among German intellectuals over the historical emergence of the concepts of ‘universal humanity’ and the ‘human individual’. These concepts represented both the promise and crisis of modernity: creating conditions for a more unified humanity while manifesting social fragmentation. Within the context of this debate, the human face gained particular salience in aesthetic theory, notably among neo-Kantian and Jewish philosophers, standing as both a sign of human individuality and an object capable of yielding synthetic meaning pointing to the promise of a more universal humanity. This paper begins by outlining the context of this debate and its emerging aesthetic, and concludes by highlighting two of its key proponents and innovators: Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Hermann Cohen (1842-1918).
In “Monologue with Freud,” the final chapter of his 1991 book, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, Yosef Yerushalmi writes a letter to Sigmund Freud that he addresses, but does not sign. A few years later in his famous work, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida obsesses over Yerushalmi’s letter to Freud, but he makes no mention of Yerushalmi’s missing signature. This is surprising given Derrida’s extensive scholarship on the signature as exemplary of the limits of historical writing to fully capture the historical event. In this paper, Derrida is read with and against Yerushalmi’s missing signature in order to suggest that Yerulshami’s mode of doing historical writing—a history written but not signed—may provide a way to break out of the binary opposition between history and memory for which modern historiography advocates. The paper offers “signature” as a key term for the study of religion and memory.
This paper approaches questions of rest, labor, and care in Judaism by reading the motif of silence in Franz Rosenzweig and Anna Margolin. Silence, for both writers, functions as a figure for relation mediated by work and its cessation, whether in the liturgical rhythm of the Jewish calendar central to Rosenzweig’s thought or the aesthetic labor that Margolin’s poetry both thematizes and calls for. Yet while Rosenzweig’s Sabbatical silence engenders the theological realization of a community grounded in blood, silence in Margolin marks the limits of mutuality, the violence of relational fracture, and becomes in the end an imperative to refuse the gendered, reproductive relations on which Rosenzweig’s community is founded. This comparative reading, then, aspires to probe at once the affinities and distinctions of Jewish philosophy and Jewish literature in modernity, as well as to consider, through silence, the labor of relation, its limits, and its discontents.
In recent years, Bonnie Honig has published two essays, which have uncovered the "Jewish unconscious" of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (HC). In this paper, I will extend Honig's line of thinking. In particular, I will focus on Arendt's comments in HC about "the blessing of life" in the "Old Testament" (107). For Arendt, this blessing is evident in the lives of the "patriarchs," partiuclarly in the "brief spell of relief and joy which follows accomplishment and attends achievement." Though Arendt never mentions the rest of the Sabbath in these Jewishly inflected comments, following Honig, I take them to reflect something of a "Jewish unconscious." More importantly, for the purposes of this paper, I will read Arendt as offering a compelling phenomenology of Sabbath rest in the "Labor" section of HC. At the same time, I will use this phenomenology to critique Arendt's overly rigid distinction between labor and work.