Is Deconstruction A Jewish Science? Reflections On “Jewish Philosophy” in Light of Jacques Derrida’s Judéïtés

Abstract

In 1920, Franz Rosenzweig published a pamphlet entitled Of Bildung There Is No End (Bildung und kein Ende), in which he sought-during time in which he was involved in founding Lehrhaus in Frankfurt-to take stock of meaning and aims of Bildung (education, formation) for his time. For Rosenzweig, to undertake such a task required asking question, What is Jew? or What is human being?, and doing so in a way that sidestepped parochial assumptions that undergirded organized life-those assumptions, for instance, that centered on Judaism as a political or cultural enterprise understandable only with reference to mainstream culture, whether it posed as an alternative or a supplement to that culture, or whether it proposed a way into that cultureRosenzweig names as examples both Zionists and assimilationists. For Rosenzweig's purposes, Jewish human does not mean a delimitation [Abgrenzung] against other kinds of humanity [andere Menschlichkeiten]. While Germanness [Deutschtum] necessarily delimits itself against other Volkstiimer [nations, peoples], such that a German cannot be at same time a Frenchman or an Englishman and the Germanness of human being excludes his simultaneous Frenchness or Englishness, Jew is a human being strictly insofar as he is a Jew, and a Jew insofar as he is a human being.1 Thus, while it could be a legitimate question-and had indeed been pursued, in a Hegelian vein, as a legitimate question-what connections are between Germanness and humanity or universal human history, a pursuit of kind that might lead to philosophico-historical speculations about German contribution to career of absolute spirit, for Judaism such a question would be nonsensical. No connections can be revealed or established between Judaism and humanity; two are co-extensive, Rosenzweig writes. We have here, in compact form, and with an emphasis on its consequences for what in contemporary parlance is known as identity, a version of Rosenzweig's classic retrieval and reappropriation of concept of election, understood not as a particularism but in its universal significance.2 Now, Rosenzweig himself will go on to specify against what instead, is indeed delimited-namely Christian and pagan human being, in accordance with his dualistic schema, in Star of Redemption, of Christian and paths that emerge from a pagan, mythic pre-history. But I would like, for my present purposes, to leave this aside in order to build on Rosenzweig's notion of Jewishness as a difference without delimitation, as a different kind of difference. The contemporary scholar of German-Jewish thought Willi Goetschel has made significant strides towards figuring out what consequences of this idea might be for category of Jewish Whether one can legitimately speak of a Jewish is of course a long-standing question. Traditional answers have ranged from pointing to medieval context as birthplace of, and privileged locus for, philosophy; to defining philosophy in terms of philosophies of Judaism, i.e., as consisting of philosophical analyses of traditions and phenomena; to philosophical inquiry, from a point of view, into classic religio-philosophical themes, such as relationship of faith and reason; to wider range of expressions of reflection, secular and religious, Paul Mendes-Flohr has recently suggested, that could be taken as one of specifically modern contributions to project of philosophizing.3 In his 1994 article on notion of Jewish Philosophy4 Goetschel calls attention to fact that this question always has a normative dimension, both for Judaism and for philosophy. Goetschel takes as his conceptual starting point question of emancipation as it gets posed in Lessing's Nathan Wise. …