Negative Theology, Power, and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Abstract

Ludwig Wittgenstein tells us in On Certainty: “It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.”1 I want to begin this paper with a mini-genealogy of Maimonides's negative theology—which declares that we can only endlessly say what God is not, but not what He is—that traces it to a specific and recurring Talmudic source. I will then go on to argue that Machiavelli, who is one of the great theorists of power in the Western intellectual tradition, structures his argument about power in a…