On Judith Butler's Parting Ways as Jewish Philosophy

Abstract

In this brief essay, I want to make one claim about the nature of the argument of Parting Ways and then raise one question about the limits of that argument. Parting Ways presents itself as an attempt to articulate Jewishness in terms of a relation to alterity, which both grounds and interrupts Jewish identity. As Butler writes in her introduction, “Is this a Jewish notion?Yes andno.”This claimabout the nature of Jewish identity is what authorizes her detachment from Zionism at the same time that it authorizes her attachment to a diasporic notion of Jewishness or Judaism. Yet although the book announces itself as an intervention into the reflexive equation of Judaism or Jewishness with Zionism, it is perhaps surprising that Zionism goes unmentioned for large chunks of the book, particularly in the second through the fourth chapters, which treat Levinas and Benjamin (although the ends of the latter two of these chapters do address contemporary political matters). After the first chapter, which endorses a challenge to identity politics common to the work of Edward Said and parts (but not all) of the Levinasian corpus, and in effect amplifies Said’s call to Jews to remember the exilic ground of their identity (represented in the person of the Egyptian JewMoses), Butler offers three chapters in which she argues that (a) Levinas’s thought, especially his argument about substitution as acknowledging “the other inme,” demonstrates that there is no archē ofmeaning found in the self and the self alone, (b) this antiprinciplism is echoed in Benjamin’s claim in “Critique ofViolence” that there is something sacred in life that transcendsnaturalist accounts, and thus is also “allied with the anarchistic” (85), and (c) Benjamin’s account of the messianic also serves to interrupt and question the apparent clarity of any and all conceptual thinking. These claims serve, somehow, to set up themasterful detachment of Judaism and Zionism that occurs in the fifth chapter. But why does the articulation of this political position require pages of grappling with two Jewish philosophers, one (Levinas) whom Prof. Butler explicitly reads in a heterodox manner (“I would prefer to think with Levinas against Levinas,” she writes), and another (Benjamin) whose work she suggests is more suggestive and elliptical than one might imagine would be ideal for a book that seeks to justify an account of Jewishness as anti-identitarian?What are these pages doing here? I want to