Papers by Agata Bielik-Robson
chapter in Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci, eds, The European Reception of John D. Caputo’s Thought: Radicalizing Theology (New York: Lexington Books, 2023), 113-30, 2023
The purpose of my essay is to juxtapose John D. Caputo’s reflections on the ‘weakness of God’ wit... more The purpose of my essay is to juxtapose John D. Caputo’s reflections on the ‘weakness of God’ with a seemingly very similar attempt of Jacques Derrida to venture beyond the paradigm of power and create a new notion of ‘the unconditional without sovereignty,’ which, in Derrida’s writings usually associates with the name of Khora or, as he calls it in Foi et savoir, the ‘infinite wound.’ The metaphor of the wound could indeed suggest that Khora is a ‘weak’ form of the divine, as in Caputo’s interpretation – yet, the danger inherent to Caputo’s concept of the ‘weakness of God’ is that it offers nothing more than the inversion of the paradigm of sovereignty and, precisely because of that, still remains within this very paradigm. I thus try to prove that the simple reversal, even if partly fuelled by the Derridean deconstructive critique of divine potestas, doesn’t yet do the trick. I argue that, in order to approach the non-sovereign origin of letting-be (Seinlassen), one cannot rely on the idea of the depletion of power, but must search for a completely new set of categories, which would evade the context of power altogether.
article in Philosophies 2024, nr 9, vol. 134., 2024
This essay reflects on the concept of the death of God as part and parcel of modern philosophical... more This essay reflects on the concept of the death of God as part and parcel of modern philosophical theology: a genre of thinking that came into existence with Hegel’s announcement of the “speculative Good Friday” as the most natural expression of die Religion der neuen Zeiten, “the religion of modern times”. In my interpretation, the death of God not only does not spell the end of the era of atheism but, on the contrary, inaugurates a new era of characteristically modern theism that steers away from theological absolutism. The new theos is no longer conceived as the eternal omnipotent Absolute but as the Derridean diminished Infinite: contracted and self-negated—even “onto death”. Such God, however, although coming to the foremost visibly in modernity, is not completely new to the monotheistic religions, which from the beginning are engaged in the heated debate concerning the status of the divine power: is it absolute and unlimited or rather self-restricted and conditioned? I will enter this debate by conducting a comparison between the two traditional models of divine self-restriction—Christian kenosis and Jewish-kabbalistic tsimtsum—and then present their modernised philosophical variants, most of all in the thought of Hegel.
article in teksty drugie 2023, nr 1, s. 21–32, 2023
The Eternal Contemporaneity of Trauma, or, On the Pathologies of Polish Memory Let us start with ... more The Eternal Contemporaneity of Trauma, or, On the Pathologies of Polish Memory Let us start with the wrong kind of remembering that considerably impedes any openness to the future. This is the subject of Friedrich Nietzsche's notable treatise "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," which can be read in two ways: either as a direct attack on the "parasite of memory," which lodges itself in the human mind and sucks the vital energy out of it, or-in a more dialectical manner-as a subtle guide that illuminates the difference between pathological and nurturing memory.2 I will follow the second reading-even if it goes against Nietzsche's intentions-as alongside the "antiquarian" memory, which overburdens the psyche with commitments to past things whose traces memory tries to preserve, there is also a kind of active remembering that is governed by a sense of responsibility for the future. When Nietzsche defines humans as beings that are capable of making promises, he does it on the grounds of their ability to properly remember those commitments-all the more so as a substantial number of those are of the negative kind: "Never again!" Therefore, only well-structured memory permits us to escape the circle of fruitless repetition and to break the bonds of harmful projects. Contrary to what Karl Marx has claimed, not every tragedy reappears as farce; it most often returns simply as another tragedy. The idea that good memory can bring deliverance from the vicious circle of compulsive repetition shows up in Sigmund Freud's essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."3 In both these works-of Nietzsche and Freud-a certain paradox comes to the fore, as good, appropriate remembering turns out to be, in part, forgetting. Here the Nietzschean aktive Vergessenheit is above all the ability to gain some distance to the things that were, by framing them as proper past, that is, as something that no longer exists. Proper memory would therefore draw upon the dialectical power of forgetting, which distances past things from the field of the living present, preventing the specters of past events from casting a shadow on the time experienced here and now. While Nietzsche calls the ever-present past a "destructive force," Freud talks in this context of the repetition compulsion, which he also places on the side of the death instinct. The past that cannot become the future and reappears incessantly
article in Pólemos 2024; 18(2): 293–315, 2024
The apocalyptic genre was from the beginning in the centre of the theologico-political discourse ... more The apocalyptic genre was from the beginning in the centre of the theologico-political discourse which, according to Jacob Taubes, always has to choose one of the two fundamental options: either in favour of the apocalypse ("from above," as in early Schmitt, or "from below," as in Taubes himself), or against it in the katechonic defense against the apocalyptic chaos and destruction (late Schmitt). In Taubes's account, apocalypse is simultaneously revelatory and destructive. By assuming the standpoint of the Last Judgment, it passes an ultimate verdict without appeal over the worldas indeed in Taubes's most famous statement: "I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is. I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it come down." It is precisely this form of position assuming the uncompromising perspective of the Last Judgment, which will occupy me in my essay. I want to approach critically the most recent phenomenon of what we may call an absolute judg-mentailityor, in Nietzschean terms, a "mentality of judgment"which takes apocalyptic form of a violent negation, exposing the whole "world as it is" to the scorching light of the verdict and leaving no space that would be free from adjudication.
chapter In Zäsuren / Caesurae: Paul Celans Spätwerk / Paul Celan's Later Work, eds. Chiara Caradonna and Vivian Liska, Wallstein Verlag 2024., 2024
4 I add this translation of Patrick Mensah, following closely the French version of Hölderlin's p... more 4 I add this translation of Patrick Mensah, following closely the French version of Hölderlin's poem, because it is essential for Derrida's analysis of Scholem's speech; especially important here is the word »husky« which does not appear in Hamburger's version: Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 83.
Chapter 9 in Unfinished God: The Speculative Philosophical Theology of Ray L. Hart, edited by Alina N. Feld and Sean J. McGrath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024)., 2024
In this essay, I focus on Ray L. Hart’s innovative idea that Godhead is structured like a languag... more In this essay, I focus on Ray L. Hart’s innovative idea that Godhead is structured like a language. This hypothesis emerges in his magisterial book, God Being Nothing: Toward a Theogony, but is already present in nuce in his earlier work, Unfinished Man and the Imagination. Hart, however, does not define it that way: the allusion to Lacan who claimed that the unconscious is structured like a language is on my part intended for polemical reasons. For Lacan, any articulation (parler) of the linguistic substance of the unconscious (langage) is a betrayal and distortion of the latter: a parlêtre that creates a false symbolic order of being as merely an illusory reality. For Hart, on the other hand, the easy Gnostic condemnation of ens creatum as a distortion, falsity or nothing when compared to the hidden Real, defines the essence of nihilism as dangerously characteristic ‘of much modern and postmodern thought’ (GBN, 6). In order to avoid nihilism, Hart constitutes his Godhead as a ‘nothing that is’ (GBN, 9), but does not ex-ist until it becomes something. It does not represent an evasive Real which negates reality of all actualized being, by reducing it to a mere epiphenomenon: instead, the real is real only and insofar as ‘becomingly real-ized’ (GBN, 31). Unlike in Lacan the parlêtre is a real being constantly emerging out of the apeiron of the Godhead in the act of creatio continua: ‘indeterminate Godhead is rendered determinate God the Creator, calling forth from nothing the determinate human creature who, as image of God, preserves a residuum of indeterminacy over which she is to preside’ (GBN, 223-24). Both moments – of nothing and being – must thus be maintained and related to one another in a non-antagonistic manner: this is the poetic task of the human creature as simultaneously imago Dei and ad imaginem Verbi, reflecting both the Ungrund of Godhead and the power of the Word represented by God the determinate.
article in Stasis nr 15 (1/2023), 2023
The purpose of this essay is to analyze the theodicy of violence in its two different forms: the ... more The purpose of this essay is to analyze the theodicy of violence in its two different forms: the antinomian and the hypernomian. The theodicy of violence deliberately blurs the lines between the messianic idiom of Walter Benjamin's Toward the Critique of Violence (2021), with its stark contrast between mythic and divine violence, and the Lacanian idiom of various subjective positions toward the symbolic order. While the antinomian line turns out to be close to the discursive strategies of the Hysteric, the hypernomian line resembles those of the Pervert. My goal is to present them in purely descriptive and value-free terms. I will thus begin with the close reading of the Critique of Violence, which is, in fact, an apology of a certain form of political violence, and then juxtapose it with another praise of violence, originating in Slavoj Žižek's deliberately "perverse" reading of both Paul and Benjamin. The difference between them will be revealed by the Benjaminian phrase: for the sake of the living. I will try to prove that while violence for the antinomian/hysterical line can be justified only with regard to life conceived as survival, for the hypernomian/perverse line violence becomes a goal in itself.
chapter 8 in "Walter Benjamin and Political Theology," eds. Paula Schwebel and Brendan Moran (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2024) , 2024
In my essay, I try to prove that, in Benjamin’ writings, there is a consistent project of a polit... more In my essay, I try to prove that, in Benjamin’ writings, there is a consistent project of a political theology and it takes the form of ‘nihilism as world politics.’ This idea originates in Benjamin’s “Theological-Political Fragment,” written in response to Ernst Bloch’s 1918 edition of Geist der Utopie. It is partly a praise and partly as a disguised polemic with Bloch who first gets openly credited for having proved the impossibility of a utopian theocracy (a compliment not at all obvious in regard to Bloch), and then tacitly trashed for his investment in the messianic ‘principle of hope,’ staking on the gradual raising of the world to the spiritual level. In my analysis of the “Fragment” – which, as I will argue, had a lasting influence on Benjamin’s political thinking – I want to point to the theological elaboration of the concept of the transience (die Vergänglichkeit) which can be called Benjamin’s own version of the ‘metaphysics of entropy’ and the corresponding notion of a hope in reverse. Bloch approaches his ‘principle of hope’ – soon to become a title of his opus magnum – in a traditional manner of Jewish messianism, filtered through his appropriation of Hegel and Marx, according to which the world has an objective tendency to press towards the redemptive telos when spirit and matter will have found perfect reconciliation. Benjamin, on the other hand, sees the ‘messianic intensity’ of thinkers like Bloch as a source of misfortune and unhappiness. Thus, paraphrasing Kafka, if there is a hope, it is not for ‘us,’ if we imagine ourselves as the messianic agents pressing for the redemptive goal of history. It is rather a hope in reverse, realising itself not in the Blochian progress of the world towards the ‘humanisation of matter,’ but in the reverse downward movement of the ‘eternal Fall,’ in which matter resists and counteracts the messianic agency of the spirit.
article in Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 32 (2024) 35–59, 2024
My essay positions Heidegger's Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) in the light of the later transfo... more My essay positions Heidegger's Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) in the light of the later transformation of his thought after die Kehre, which introduces a new motif: "the withdrawal of Being." And while the Jewish question disappears from his official discourse, the essay poses it nonetheless, despite and against Heidegger's silence: Does the diagnosis from the Black Notebooks, which perceives the Jew as the agent of metaphysical destruction, still stand? In my analysis, the figurative Jew emerges in a role which Heidegger refuses to recognize: as a positive agent of letting-be, acting in accordance with Being's rhythm of self-withdrawal.
article, 2024
In my essay, I want to focus on what, for me, constitutes Eric Santner’s greatest achievement: th... more In my essay, I want to focus on what, for me, constitutes Eric Santner’s greatest achievement: the brilliant psychoanalytic reinterpretation
of the crucial symbol of Judaism – yetziat mitzrayim, the “getting out of Egypt” – as “the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania.” Although formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner’s later works concerned with political theology, where “Egyptomania” stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive “signifying stress” or “ex-citation” (On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life 31), weighing it
down with the impossible demands of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to
Hegel’s famous definition of Judaism as “the religion of the sublime” (Philosophy of History 196), Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary “beyond” and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger
in the world.
article, 2024
In my essay, I offer an interpretation of Giorgio Agamben's political thought as a case of philos... more In my essay, I offer an interpretation of Giorgio Agamben's political thought as a case of philosophical perversion. According to Lacan, perverse practice is based on a structural non-personal enjoyment, in which a pervert assumes the role of an executioner, meticulously executing his task. My analysis will focus on Agamben's perverse use of the messianic discourse, the aim of which is to explode it from within: while applying all elements of the messianic idiom, Agamben assumes a mission the goal of which is to deactivate all mission and revoke all vocations. As he states in reference to Bartleby the Scrivener as the possible figure of the Messiah, to fulfill the Torah, i.e. the religious law, is to "destroy it from top to bottom." I will thus claim that Agamben's strategy of deactivation-a vocation to end all vocation-can be interpreted as a deliberate methodical use of perversion, that is, a position which simultaneously obeys and destroys the law. Although critical of Agamben's method, I will not use the Lacanian frame of perversion in a valuecharged manner. I want to present it as one of the late-modern philosophical modes of thinking, which became so widely seductive precisely of its powerful perverse component.
Angelaki, 2002
dence, or, more precisely, its potential importance for the philosophy of subjectivity. As a conc... more dence, or, more precisely, its potential importance for the philosophy of subjectivity. As a concept, “dependence” does not even figure in the philosophical vocabulary; it is merely hinted at by a category that comes from a different language and a thoroughly different logic: the category of determination or conditioning (in its mother tongue, the language of German Idealism: die Bedingtheit).1 Here, I want to juxtapose these two differing conceptual logics – the logic of dependence and the logic of determination or conditioning – and, eventually, to demonstrate that the former, although absent from the official philosophical language, is, in fact, much more useful in solving crucial problems posed by the contemporary philosophy of subjectivity: most notably, the problem of subjective freedom.
Chapter in "Rethinking Ernst Bloch," eds. henk de Ber and Cat Moir, Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023, 2023
The purpose of this chapter is to put Ernst Bloch’s philosophy to a test suggested by Hans Blumen... more The purpose of this chapter is to put Ernst Bloch’s philosophy to a test suggested by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. According to Blumenberg, modernity constitutes the second – and one successful – attempt at overcoming Gnosticism, after the first attempt, undertaken by Christianity, had failed. However – Blumenberg argues – it was not modern philosophy but science that had managed to escape Gnosticism’s ontological trap of viewing the world as an illusion bordering on nothing. Modern metaphysics proved unable to liberate itself from the powerful pull of the Gnostic rejection of being, in spite of all philosophical efforts to affirm the existence of material reality. Even when claiming to be materialist, it had at its core remained suspicious of matter as an imperfect and privative mode of being. My aim in what follows is to locate Bloch within this late modern constellation of attempts to overcome Gnosticism, reading his "Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left" as an attempt to counteract his early Marcionite tendencies, manifest above all in "The Spirit of Utopia."
Versus nr 2/2023 ISSN 2782-3660, eISSN 2782-3679, 2023
Александр Погребняк. Неприсваиваемое: пейзаж 57 Агата Билик-Робсон. Reditus к преднамеренной незр... more Александр Погребняк. Неприсваиваемое: пейзаж 57 Агата Билик-Робсон. Reditus к преднамеренной незрелости: регрессии Джорджо Агамбена Георгий Лайус. Событие упразднения и упразднение события Дарья Фарафонова. «Ум, окунающий перо в чернила мысли»: к вопросу о переводе на русский язык термина potenza и о его значении в онтологии Джорджо Агамбена 151 Олег Горяинов. «Музыка бытия»: примечание к одной метафоре из последнего тома Homo Sacer Джорджо Агамбена БЕНЬЯМИН. DAS PASSAGEN-WERK IN PRO GRESS Вальтер Беньямин. Конволют F: Железная конструкция 201
Modern Jewish Thought on Crisis, eds. Gilad Sharvit and Gilad Shenhav (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023), 2023
In this essay, I sketch a portrait of Gershom Scholem as a Young Marrano, deeply interested in th... more In this essay, I sketch a portrait of Gershom Scholem as a Young Marrano, deeply interested in the theology of the coversos as a still living formula of Jewish revelation, which he, in the famous letter to Benjamin from 1935, described as Geltung ohne Bedeutung: a ‘validity without content.’ I attempt to show that the Marrano crisis of tradition constitutes a thema regium of Scholem’s whole intellectual career, from his earliest diaries (Lamentations of Youth), through his own theological declarations (Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah), up to his latest essays and interviews (Jews and Judaism in Crisis). In my interpretation, Scholem the Marrano hides behind a mask of the Jewish historian, but the secret kernel of his doctrine is not historical: his continuous insistence on the ongoing vitality of the ‘hidden truth’ of the tradition (Wahrheit) as opposed to the overt articulation of the traditional religious form of life (Tradierbarkeit) reveals a strong theological agenda that governs the works of Scholem the Historian from within. In result of Scholem’s not purely historical approach to the Marrano theology, the Marrano crisis of tradition – seemingly an affair of the past – comes to the fore as a still actual phenomenon and raises the issue of the ‘hidden faith’ as the sole ‘authentic’ form of Judaic religiosity, which not only does not betray Jewish tradition, but paradoxically touches its very core.
Wielogłos, 2019
The Stormy Life of Am Ha'arets, or How Jacob Won the Virgin. Jacob Frank's Words of the Lord as a... more The Stormy Life of Am Ha'arets, or How Jacob Won the Virgin. Jacob Frank's Words of the Lord as a Picaresque Novel The aim of this essay is to present Jacob Frank's Words of the Lord as the first (and perhaps the last) Polish picaresque novel which abounds in semi-fantastical, kabbalahinspired stories, depicting a stormy life of a protagonist who calls himself an "am ha'arets" (a man of the land or a village idiot in Hebrew) and brags of his infinite and supranatural vitality that helps him to overcome all adversities. The essay considers a hypothesis formulated by Yirmiyahu Yovel, according to which the picaro novel emerged in 16th century Spain, in the milieu of the Marranos or conversos, i.e. the Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity, but usually retained some elements of their Judaic faith undercover. This hypothesis seems to fit perfectly well to Jacob Frank's gadki (stories) as he himself can be regarded as the paradigmatic Marrano: a willing convert to Catholicism, whose aim was to "messianize" the Christian religion from within. The essay ends with a comparison of Frank's messianic ambitions to Jacques Derrida whose messianicite operates on a similar Marrano basis.
introduction to the book: Derrida’s Marrano Passover Exile, Survival, Betrayal, and the Metaphysics of Non-Identity, London/ New York/ Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, series: Comparative Jewish Literatures, ed. Kitty Millet. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-9261-0 PB: 978-1-5013-9265-8, 2023
In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Toledo confession,’ where he portrayed himself... more In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Toledo confession,’ where he portrayed himself as a ‘sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture,’ I take Derrida’s marranismo the way he himself intended: as his truly ‘serious play’ and a literary experiment of auto-fiction. I am looking at all possible aspects of Derrida’s Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of a non-identitarian evasion, which permeats all his oeuvre: just as Marranos cannot be characterised as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida’s ‘universal Marranism’ an invitation to think philosophically, politically and – last but not least – metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging. There already exist works which approach Derrida’s Jewishness, but no one has yet concentrated solely on Derrida’s deliberate choice of marranismo, which not only penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking on ‘messianicity shorn of everything,’ but also throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination, and “Differance.” By following Derrida’s paradoxical non/identification and putting in in the centre of my reading of Derrida’s vast ouevre, I offer a completely new interpretation of many of his works, only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In all these new readings, I intend to demonstrate that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a trope of openness, governing all his anti-identitarian thought from differance to Khora.
chapter in the book, The Environmental Apocalypse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis, ed. Jakub Kowalewski, London: Routledge, 2022, 2022
In the recent debates on ecology, Adorno’s name resurfaces very rarely, despite the fact that his... more In the recent debates on ecology, Adorno’s name resurfaces very rarely, despite the fact that his late thought is concerned almoast uniquely with the idea of reconciliation with nature. In my essay, I will attempt to reconstruct Adorno’s variation on the Hegelian theme of Versöhnung as very different from the idea of return to nature, and because of that as a unique – perhaps even the most convincing – solution to the problem of antagonism between mankind and natural life. In contrast to the post-humanist position, here associated with Martin Heidegger’s famous ‘turn,’ I will call Adorno’s unfinished project a neohumanism and explain it along the famous quote from Lévinas, according to which “a little humanity distances us from nature, a great deal of humanity brings us back.” In my essay, the gesture of wiping away the tears of Esau – the biblical emblem of natural life – which Zohar describes as the necessary precondition of redemption, will emerge as the best metaphor (perhaps even an inspiration) of Adorno’s philosophical strategy: his reconcilement with nature does not aim at the atonement/ at-one-ment, which would annul the anthropological difference, but at the ethical act of giving justice to nature understood as the Lévinasian other.
article, 2023
This article attempts to discuss the philosophical contexts and meaning of the new humanities in ... more This article attempts to discuss the philosophical contexts and meaning of the new humanities in the context of the philosophy of subjectivity. At the foundation of the new humanities, as it is argued, is not enlightenment, but Heidegger's thought, with his excoriating critique of modern subjectivity and its Machenschaft. The article points to the foundational hubris that the new humanities oppose, and to the attempt to reinstall the subject within fixed boundaries. The new humanities, and posthumanism in particular, might backlash with violence against civilisation, comparable to that they endeavour to renounce. In order to manoeuvre through these convoluted figures of subjectivity, the article supports its theses with insightful readings of Hölderlin and Adorno.
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Papers by Agata Bielik-Robson
of the crucial symbol of Judaism – yetziat mitzrayim, the “getting out of Egypt” – as “the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania.” Although formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner’s later works concerned with political theology, where “Egyptomania” stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive “signifying stress” or “ex-citation” (On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life 31), weighing it
down with the impossible demands of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to
Hegel’s famous definition of Judaism as “the religion of the sublime” (Philosophy of History 196), Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary “beyond” and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger
in the world.
of the crucial symbol of Judaism – yetziat mitzrayim, the “getting out of Egypt” – as “the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania.” Although formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner’s later works concerned with political theology, where “Egyptomania” stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive “signifying stress” or “ex-citation” (On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life 31), weighing it
down with the impossible demands of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to
Hegel’s famous definition of Judaism as “the religion of the sublime” (Philosophy of History 196), Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary “beyond” and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger
in the world.
Interrogating Modernity returns to Hans Blumenberg's epochal The Legitimacy of the Modern Age as a springboard to interrogate questions of modernity, secularisation, technology and political legitimacy in the fields of political theology, history of ideas, political theory, art theory, history of philosophy, theology and sociology. That is, the twelve essays in this volume return to Blumenberg's work to think once more about how and why we should value the modern. Written by a group of leading international and interdisciplinary researchers, this series of responses to the question of the modern put Blumenberg into dialogue with other twentieth, and twenty-first century theorists, such as Arendt, Bloch, Derrida, Husserl, Jonas, Latour, Voegelin, Weber and many more. The result is a repositioning of his work at the heart of contemporary attempts to make sense of who we are and how we’ve got here.
Contents
Editors' Preface: Blumenberg's Modernity, Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel Whistler
Part One: Overcoming Gnosticism
1. I Hurt, Therefore I Am: Descartes with Blumenberg (and Job), Agata Bielik-Robson
2. Legitimacy of Nihilism: Blumenberg’s Post-Gnosticism, Elad Lapidot
3. Blumenberg, Latour and the Apocalypse, Willem Styfhals
Part Two: Political Theologies of Modernity
4. The Sovereign Position of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (after Blumenberg), Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin
5. Interrogating John Locke and the Propriety of Appropriation with Blumenberg and Voegelin, Lissa McCullough
6. Political Legitimacy and Founding Myths, Zeynep Talay Turner
Part Three: Competing Visions of Modernity
7. Trial and Crisis: Blumenberg and Husserl on the Genesis and Meaning of Modern Science, Robert Buch
8. Infinite Progress and the Burdens of Biography, Charles Turner
9. The Ideal of Optics and the Opacity of Life: Blumenberg on Modernity and Myth, Oriane Petteni
Part Four: Modernity and Method
10. World-Modelling and Cartesian Method: Blumenberg’s Hyperopia, Adi Efal-Lautenschläger
11. Umbesetzung – Reoccupation in Blumenbergian Modernity, Sonja Feger
12. Modernising Blumenberg, Daniel Whistler
Another Finitude turns to Judaism for the theological framework of the new elaboration of finitude. Taking inspiration from the Jewish idea of torat hayim, the principle of finite life, which found the best expression in the biblical sentence, ‘love strong as death’, the book develops the concept of love as an alternative marker of finitude, redefined in an affirmative way. By tracing the avatars of love in the group of 20th-century thinkers, or ‘messianic vitalists’ – Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Arendt, Derrida, and (deeply revised) Freud – this book ultimately demonstrates how love, in all its forms, represents the ‘infinite-in-the-finite’.
Perhaps, religion was never about God? Perhaps, it was always about the finite life which resolved to believe in itself – despite and against death, entropy, and dispersion?
“Much of modern Jewish philosophy is dismissed as a simple assimilation by Jews to Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment vocabularies and norms. In Another Finitude, Agata Bielik-Robson redescribes part of the Jewish philosophical canon in terms of its protest of Christian and post-Christian philosophies that insist that earthly existence is impoverished, and that we are in debt to God for even that mere life. Jewish philosophy becomes, on Bielik-Robson's impressive reading, a therapy that produces happiness in life because it does not aspire to any eternal beyond. Another Finitude shows why the humanities, and the universities, need to foreground the voices and arguments of the thinkers whom she treats.” Martin Kavka, Professor of Religion, Florida State University, USA
“After God, Nature. Four hundred years of intellectual history have unfolded along this trajectory, with the great theological promise of immortality slowly giving way to the finitude of existence understood according to a naturalistic conception of 'life'. But to live according to nature is perhaps even less advisable than to live under an eternal God, for nature becomes biopolitics, life becomes resource, individuation dissolves into the organic. Is there an alternative to God or Nature? This book presents one. Drawing on a series of Jewish thinkers who imagine "another finitude" that does not reduce to natural life, Bielik-Robson shows how the prevailing course of intellectual history can be steered toward the redemptive resources of love without lulling into eternity. Diagnostically acute, erudite, creative and rigorous, this is a contemporary guide to the perplexed that forges a third way beyond God and Nature.” Michael Fagenblat, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies, The Open University, Israel
wszelkich kulturowych badań nad religią, których nie da się przecież zamknąć w wąskich ramach tradycyjnie rozumianej teologii, nawet jeśli zamierzonym celem konferencji i dokumentującej ją książki miała być dyskusja nad społecznym i naukowym umocowaniem dyskursu teologicznego w obliczu typowych dziś dla zachodniego świata ciągłych redefinicji religijności. Re–ligare, powtórne postawienie pytania o więzy i więzi, również te wykraczające poza to, co immanentne i świeckie, inspiruje tu do przyjęcia szeroko komparatystycznej perspektywy, także w sensie diachronicznym. Stąd wśród zebranych artykułów, choć przeważają studia nad bliższą i dalszą współczesnością, nie zabrakło analiz poświęconych historycznie pojmowanym wspólnotom religijnym: wczesnochrześcijańskim, gnostyckim, nowożytnym czy dziewiętnastowiecznym. Z kolei wśród artykułów badających religijno–społeczne aspekty nowoczesności ważne wydaje się zarówno zróżnicowanie tematyczno–przedmiotowe
(na przykład eksploracja ukrytych teologicznych przesłanek pisarstwa
filozoficznego, literackich sposobów de– i rekonstrukcji wątków religijnych, najnowszych ustaleń socjologii religii, powiązań teologii z rozwijającymi się obecnie żywiołowo studiami nad relacjami ludzko–zwierzęcymi, roli refleksji teologicznej w rozważaniu wybranych fenomenów życia zbiorowego w rodzaju sportu czy nowych mediów), jak i dystrybucja badanych dziedzin w sensie geograficznym (wspólnota mała, lokalna i regionalna, wspólnota narodowa, relacje międzykulturowe i międzyreligijne, specyfika religijno–społeczna diaspory). Wielotorowość tej narracji, która w powierzchownej lekturze może stwarzać wrażenie trudnego do przeniknięcia rozproszenia, wydała nam się jednak o tyle cenna, że istotnie dokumentowała różnorodność i bogactwo myśli ogarniającej wiarę i religię w ich odniesieniu wspólnotowym, zwłaszcza w zderzeniu z nowymi prądami myślowymi we współczesnej humanistyce. Nie zdecydowaliśmy
się więc w żaden sposób wielości tej ograniczać.
W przypadku tak pomyślanej, interdyscyplinarnej całości każda
próba jej podziału i klasyfikacji musi się jawić jako prowizoryczna czy
wręcz kompromisowa — i taką też postać przybrać musiała kompozycja
niniejszej książki. W jej części pierwszej zgromadziliśmy rozprawy zakreślające ideowe kontury podejmowanej refleksji nad religią i wspólnotą. Wprawdzie odwołują się one do literatury, ale zdecydowanie bliżej im do refleksji o charakterze teologiczno–filozoficznym. Z kolei analizującym społeczne funkcjonowanie religii i innych form duchowości
tekstom pochodzącym z części drugiej patronować wydaje się podejście
socjologiczne. W końcu, artykuły zgromadzone w częściach trzeciej
i czwartej przynależą, jak należałoby przyjąć, do dziedziny literaturoznawstwa — wszystkie one poświęcone są wprost tekstom literackim, czy będą to klasyczne już dzieła modernistyczne (część trzecia), czy teksty autorów współczesnych i żyjących w czasach nam nieodległych (część czwarta). Wychodząc od tego, co literackie, podejmują one cenny namysł nad różnorodnymi związkami tego, co teologiczne, i tego, co społeczne, stale oscylując tym samym wokół wierzchołków interesującej nas, wyeksponowanej w podtytule książki niniejszej, triady.
The Marrano metaphor, alluding to the forced conversion of Sephardic Jews to Christianity, is employed here, in the domain of modern philosophical thought, where an analogous tendency can be seen: the clash of an open idiom and a secret meaning, which transforms both the medium and the message. Focusing on key figures of late modern, twentieth century Jewish thought; Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Jacob Taubes, Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida, this book demonstrates how their respective manners of conceptualization swerve from the philosophical mainstream along the Marrano ‘secret curve’.
Analysing their unique contribution to the ‘unfinished project of modernity’, including issues of the future of the Enlightenment, modern nihilism and post- secular negotiation with religious heritage, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in Jewish Studies and philosophy.
In the first full-length book on Harold Bloom, Agata Bielik-Robson explores the many facets of Bloom’s critical writings and career. In his work, she argues, Bloom draws on a variety of disparate traditions—Judaism, Gnosis, Romanticism, American Pragmatism, but also, especially recently, Victorian Aestheticism – that comprise a dialectical, difficult whole in a constant quarrel with itself. Yet, this is precisely the image of “life-in-antithesis,” which constitutes Bloom’s highest speculative achievement. The Saving Lie brings all these “Blooms” together and, despite their own tendencies towards dissociation, let them speak in one, almost harmonious, voice that will clearly utter the principles of a new speculative position – Bloom’s antithetical vitalism. In the book’s first section, The Antithetical Quester, Bielik-Robson presents Bloom’s theoretical development, focusing mostly on his romantic period, which prepares him for the confrontation with deconstruction; in the second chapter of this part, she also tries to explain the reasons why this theoretically ambitious agon went seriously wrong and dissolved into a series of misunderstandings in the reception of Bloom’s High Argument. In the book’s second section, Agon with the Deadly Angels, Bielik-Robson engages in close encounters between Bloom and his two main deconstructive adversaries, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, and shows the fundamental differences in their respective approaches to the vital issues of life and death that play crucial roles in Bloom’s speculative “counter-narrative.” Finally, in Wrestling Harold, Bielik-Robson offers her own reading of the six ratios of the poetic agon where she demonstrates how life, gathering all its most cunning defenses and dispersed “arrows of desire,” once again becomes a powerful argument – a “presence not to be put by” any contemporary theory.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Einführung
In memoriam Karl Dedecius (1921–2016)
Adam Zagajewski: Karl Dedecius
Essays
Klaus Bachmann: Politische Debatten in Polen nach 1989
Lech M. Nijakowski: Die polnische Erinnerungspolitik
Tomasz Stefanek: Die Botschaft der Freiheit über alles Trennende hinweg. Über die polnische Erinnerungspolitik
Andrzej Leder: Wer hat uns diese Revolution genommen?
Reinhold Vetter: Im Schützengraben. Zur politischen Kultur in Polen
Agata Bielik-Robson: „Polnisches Weimar“ oder die polnische Liberalismusallergie
Marcin Król / Grzegorz Sroczyński: Wir waren dumm. Gespräch
Gerhard Gnauck: Konservatismus als revolutionäres Potential. Ein paar unfrisierte Gedanken aus Anlass der Kaczyński-Ära
Gerhard Gnauck: Citizen Kaczyński
Michał Sutowski: Die Suche nach dem Heiligen Gral. Über die Probleme linker Parteien in Polen
Sławomir Sierakowski / Grzegorz Sroczyński Wo sind bloß die Typen in Pullovern geblieben? Gespräch
Piotr Buras: Die neue europäische Frage in Polen
Zbigniew Nosowski: Warum die polnische Politik nicht ohne die Kirche sein kann
Reportage
Dagmara Dzierzan: Dobra zmiana – die Stimme des Volkes
Literatur
Andrzej Horubała: Die Befleckten
Janusz Głowacki: Ich bin da oder wie ich ein Drehbuch über Lech Wałęsa für Andrzej Wajda schrieb