Outside the Canon: Judith Butler and the Trials of Jewish Philosophy

Abstract

In her role as a philosopher and a theorist of gender, Judith Butler is perhaps the most prominent American intellectual writing today. It is thus certainly something of a boon to the discipline of Jewish Studies to see her begin to speak and think as a Jewish thinker. Jewish studies is a field that has not had much visibility in the academy outside of the Israel–Palestine conflict and it has not always been understood to offer the emancipatory promise of some other regions of area studies. Butler’s book then might seem on one level to change its stature, to give it new visibility and contemporary currency. Butler speaks in the book to the issue that most energizes interest in Judaism, but she does so by arguing that Jewish thought can itself provide the right resources for thinking critically about the relation between Jews and Judaism. That is, if we constitute its boundaries in the same way as Butler. With the exception of Emanuel Levinas, the thinkers that Butler chooses to engage in order to make this claim – Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Edward Said, and Mahmoud Darwish – hardly constitute a typical canon of modern Jewish Thought. Four are Jewish, two Palestinian, and only one worked explicitly with the Jewish canon. Thus, Butler’s book is also something a trial for the discipline itself, for both in its method and its claims it forces us to rethink what it means to bring Jewish resources to bear on contemporary political conflicts. From the very beginning then the book might seem to be at cross-purposes with itself, claiming to offer a Jewish perspective, to participate thus in the growing body of literature working at the intersection of religion and politics, and yet Butler does so by explicitly passing over the traditional canon of modern Jewish thought and formulating an alternative canon at the margins of the tradition. The effect is thus complex and paradoxical. On the one hand, it seems to suggest that the resources within Judaism for formulating a critique of Zionism are so scant that one has to invent them. While on the other hand, by insisting on reading thinkers who themselves resisted articulating their position as Jewish, she participates in a modern Jewish communitarian tradition, that of returning its stray to the fold. Like Yosef Yerushalmi unearthing the Jewish Freud or Harry Wolfson revealing Spinoza’s Jewish sources or Adam Sandler calling out Jewish celebrities, Butler too