Edith Wyschogrod Research Articles

Acts of Irreconcilable Mourning: Post-Holocaust Witness and Testimony

This essay revisits the question of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm in light of the now-urgent question of transmission – the shift in mourning and memory between first-generation survivors and later generations. Offering a different but complementary analysis to those in trauma or memory studies, I argue that post-Shoah witness and testimony are acts of ‘irreconcilable mourning’. This sense of mourning departs from post-Freudian approaches that focus on closure. Instead, irreconcilable mourning is a non-totalising approach to loss that resists ‘redemption’ and instead necessitates an ongoing, creative, and critical response to loss. In the course of this argument, I examine first-generation accounts such as Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's to highlight the necessity and contingency of transmission by interrogating concepts such as the ‘unsayable’ and the remnant. I then focus on Art Spiegelman's second-generation Maus: A Survivor's Tale, bringing cross-generational questions of witness and testimony as acts of irreconcilable mourning into the fold of Marianne Hirsch's ‘postmemory’ and Edith Wyschogrod's heterological history-telling.

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Can Jews Be Radical Theologians?

AbstractIn its first half, this essay recapitulates the history of the relationship between Christian radical theology (sometimes called “God-is-dead theology”) and Judaism from the 1960s onward, in order to hypothesize that this relationship has not yet become a productive dialogue, since Jewish philosophical theology has understood itself to be fundamentally opposed to the Hegelian elements on which Christian radical theology depends. If God is immanent in history, as God was for Hegel, wouldn't a Jewish radical theology be obscene after the Holocaust? Taking up a productive line of inquiry in the work of the author's teacher, the late Edith Wyschogrod, the second half of the essay claims that a non-obscene Jewish radical theology is possible once it centers around law as a site of kenosis, in which the authority of God as lawgiver becomes subordinate to the development of the freedom of the members of the community. Classical rabbinic texts about the so-called “Yavneh reforms” are analyzed in support of this claim.

On the Trace of Emmanuel Levinas

In her remarkable book Emmanuel Levinas: Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, Edith Wyschogrod clearly stressed contribution of Levinas to philosophy, defining it as a in relationships between ethics and metaphysics. She writes, The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is no less than an attempt to accomplish a radical reversal of traditional procedures by grounding metaphysics in ethics rather than in constructing an ethic upon pre-established metaphysical ' Wyschogrod's purpose, as she stated it herself, was mainly to evaluate feasibility of Levinas's effort to reconstruct metaphysics on ethical foundations. As we know, these ethical foundations can be summed up as altruism, a altruism as Wyschogrod said so well, that is grounded on transcendence of human face.2 Wyschogrod, through impressive and rigorous analyses, successively encounters problem of phenomenological method, break with Husserl, self, temporality, language, and Judaism in order to reach some enlightening conclusions that do not avoid problems and objections that could be raised about an ethical foundation of metaphysics. I will come back to some of these important objections later, but before examining these objections, I would like to begin by outlining my own approach to Levinas's philosophy. We can situate enterprise of Levinas in relation to larger movement that preceded him: namely, rebellion of singular and individual against claims of universal. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Bergson all have their place in movement. Each of these thinkers, in his own way, presents a recrimination against powers, both philosophical and practical, that are exercised by a despotic universality, a universality that institutionalizes itself in form of conceptual language, social devices, and laws of State. In a sense, whole of philosophy, especially since Aristotle, is put on trial by these thinkers. Aristotle wanted to make universal only path of science, and he insisted on common measure as means of social exchange and of law. In larger scheme, humans would live under reign of theoretical and practical universale that govern sociality, especially in form of concepts conveyed by language, and more generally in form of abstract - and alienating - laws, which reduce all things to anonymity and impersonality, erasing their singularity and leveling their differences into same neutralizing homogeneity. For some of these thinkers, Nietzsche for example, it is clearly specter of equality, democratic nightmare of a unified and uniform world where everyone is worthy of everyone, which disturbs. Nietzsche opposes to risk of the herd morality creation by individual of his own values and affirmation of individual perspective beyond all common measure and beyond all transcendent or established values. For others, like Henri Bergson, it is primarily limitations of science and philosophy when submitted to straitjacket of language, to common measure of pre-established concepts, which is targeted. For Bergson, general notions stored in language through process of socialization of truth do not permit one to grasp what is incomparable or incommensurable in individual intuition? It is necessary to free oneself from words, to go beyond constraints of language, in order to grasp things by an immediate intuition. For Bergson, intuition is this sympathy by which one carries oneself in interior of an object in order to coincide with what it has as unique and, by consequence, inexpressible.4 It is direct intuition, without any point of view or symbols, that enables us to reach absolute, and it is here, according to Bergson, path which must be chosen by philosopher. However, approach leaves untouched question of communicating to others direct intuition as experienced. …

Photographic Index, the “Spiritual in Art” After the Ethics of “Downcast Eyes”

Seeking a place somewhere Between Swooners and Cynics, Edith Wyschogrod asks if gasp of the swooner before the beauty of the artwork can be recovered in an age of suspicion? Or does the challenge of the cynic call the swooner's vision of art to order by recalling the world 'outside,' that of the iniquities and atrocities of the present age?1 Probing the relation between ethics, aesthetics, and theology, Wyschogrod's trenchant analysis in this and in other essays mostly from the late 1990s and early 2000s collected in Crossover Queries (2006) trade upon the tensions between presence, absence, transcendence, and corporeality.2 Written after her three most consequential books (Spirit in Ashes [1990], Saints and Postmodernism [1990], and Ethics of Remembering [1998]), these essays indicate what might have been future directions in this important theorist's lifework. What proves remarkable about these essays is the consistent stance by which an author remains sensitive to aesthetic sensation, but can do so always only under ethical erasure. Cracks left open to sensation, especially visual experience, are always closed back down, transformed into non-predicative forms of imperative, ethical discourse. The phenomenon of swooning, or what I will instead be calling enthusiasm, the name of another eighteenth century trope, would seem to be hopelessly mired as an act of bad ethical faith, which is precisely not the point in Wyschogrod's late turn to aesthetics. In my own attempt in this essay to make sense of the query posed by Wyschogrod (Is enthusiasm still a condition of possible aesthetic experience?), it is important first to identify two strands in her work that from the start will have slanted her own answer towards the negative (No, enthusiasm is not really possible at all at this juncture in contemporary culture). One strand is composed by the legacy in twentieth century French philosophy of an irredeemably anti-ocular habit of thought, the one identified by Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes. The other strand of her reflections on the relation between ethics and aesthetics is the critique of images, or rather the idea of the critique of images, in Hebrew monotheism and Jewish aniconism. These are the two cross-hatched, theoretical fields rising out from the ruins of the collapsed Cartesian picture-world of clear ideas and objects subsisting in geometrically ordered space.3 For all its philosophical force, the combination of continental and Hebrew tendencies could only have worked to force back the aesthetic, ethical, and theological possibilities of visual experience, the suspicion of which extends all the way to sensibility tout court.4 An alternative and affirmative approach to Wyschogrod's question about aesthetic enthusiasm and postmodernism would be to bracket the twentieth century preoccupation with Cartesian rationalism as well as philosophical claims regarding the Hebrew Bible and aniconic Judaism. Yes, enthusiasm is possible at this juncture of contemporary culture. The line of thought pursued in this essay is to gauge theorists deeply invested in visual experience writing about photography and photographic images in order to consider critically the combination of enthusiasm and cynicism at the interface between postmodern aesthetics and ethics. Wyschogrod's turn to aesthetics in Crosssover Queries underscores that the theoretical apparatus undergirding her reflections has grown so complicated and cumbersome that it actually works against itself, even at the level of affect. Reading along with Jay, one wonders about the dread haunting the phenomenological and postphenomenological tradition. Wyschogrod's attribution of fear to Jewish monotheism in the face of the visual image would seem to be symptomatic of her own philosophical anxieties. I have argued elsewhere that the privileging of word over image and the notion of biblical aniconism are German theoretical cliches with roots in Lessing and Kant (you will not find them in the writings of Moses Mendelssohn), which have been almost completely undone in the last decade or so of Jewish textual and cultural studies. …

Founding Faces

In Edith Wyschogrod's 1998 book, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and Nameless Others, we hear a small set of questions iterated around a theme, all pointing toward ongoing concerns for anyone who seeks to move insights of Continental philosophy into actual practice of social sciences, and out of small corners of theory still practiced in corners of some humanities departments. Her announced problem area is history, or rather how a present practice of remembering, as embodied by a should represent human past. So, for example, in her treatment of Derrida and grapheme that becomes spectacle, she names still current situation in mass culture, then asks some partly rhetorical questions: Today phenomena involving vast numbers of persons not only occur, but when they do they immediately become ocular, events to be captured in still and moving images. How is heterological to language of her time so that she may be understood, graphematically, as it were, from within cataclysm that cannot itself be pictured? How is she to counter culture's to anything whatsoever, thus even to picture cataclysm? How is she to use images to past without affect through image?1 I am going to pull out several themes from these few sentences, trying as carefully as possible to understand what would be relevant for a historian who wanted to be attentive to these questions. Someone who wanted to use approach to write, for example, about one of things normal historians write about, albeit in a different way. First, we note dual use of, and repeated insistence on, present historical moment, both in today - when we of a time where mass events occur, yet are immediately part of simulacra, part of available resources for systems of absolute representation - and need to in the language of her time, when one wants to of these events using representations and images that are available to everyone. Second, we note that structural part of demand to speak language of her time, if we pair that demand with refusal to submit to specular culture's claim to monopolizing forms of all possible representation, in its ability to simulate anything whatsoever, thus even to picture cataclysm, suggests that one may fail each of these tasks. It is a without material necessity - or yet more, a demand that one not allow necessity to determine how one must speak. Freedom, after all, is at stake in not having been duped by age. That also seems structural, that one will always have, in same event, that which refuses representation and representation itself, further complicates problem area. Third, we suspect that Wyschogrod's last question is loaded, or is merely rhetorical - we are perhaps meant to see, in other words, that demand to speak, through images that demonstrate past actualities is also answered when one avoids manipulating affect through image. The description of what has happened, historically, must somehow be otherwise than informative, yet cannot be a phenomenological description - at least not simply so, given that structures are chancy, and may be as rare to observe as a saint on Wall Street. One should worry that any such decision will become surreptitiously normative, and that idea of renunciation it preaches is, well, preachy. IfI may say so, my point is to be as reflexive as possible, without becoming simply paralyzed - I want to ask with Wyschogrod why a historian would want to be attentive to such questions, or rather, why one would want to be such a historian, given that it demands this peculiar sort of attenti veness, not to detail alone, but to incommensurable events (cataclysms) that do not convey information, but are found in those places where we are attentive to details. …

Saintly Lives in a World of Violence

More than twenty-five years after it was published, Edith Wyschogrod's Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death remains an important theoretical work that combines theoretical orientation and philosophia practica and still speaks today as a different voice in political philosophy. Writing about human existence, Wyschogrod argued: Contemporary existence is characterized by episodes of man-made mass death which, taken together, constitute a death event of unprecedented character and scope whose impact on the formation of self requires a new interpretation of selfhood.1 This claim encapsulates a philosophical orientation within a totalized world that affronted the self and embarked on a journey to obliterate the self. Wyschogrod's argument comes at the end of her analysis of the ideology and philosophy of violence that in the twentieth century turned to a raging attack on the self and made it possible for some to use technology to dehumanize other people and establish a death world. Spirit and Ashes forever debunked the notion that one could look at some events and claim that what we are witnessing was merely the unfolding of history. In this essay, I explore Wyschogrod's philosophical analysis and argue that in an increasingly violent world we need to turn to the image of a saint or saintly lives for possibilities of responding to violence on a grand and small scale. I do not claim that we can expect a messiah, but we can organize social existence in a way that prioritizes concern for others who face violence on a daily basis. In Spirit in Ashes, Wyschogrod provided a compelling account of the death world to call attention to an ethical imperative (she would not say so) that invites reflection on human and social existence. The texts of Hegel and Heidegger demonstrated that death was not only a reality, but also an awakening event, which brought one to consciousness. Death does not only bring forth a certain kind of consciousness, but the event of human-made mass death calling for more than a concernful mourning. According to Wyschogrod, technologically assisted mass death invites reflection and a different kind of mourning; one that may involve heads of states leading nations in mourning, but certainly calls for a different kind of engagement when we see death as a political project. When death becomes a political project, public mourning may not accompany such deaths, because those who carried out the political project of death would not allow such rituals to take place. Such rituals might indeed dignify those who have been eliminated. Wyschogrod was correct to argue that mass death calls for a different kind of thinking that employs poetic language to remember those who have been eliminated and then to mourn them in an appropriate manner. In other words, mourning and grieving are not limited to public acts and the use of cultural and religious symbols, but have to include the practice of lamentation that is grounded in the refusal to forget the depersonalized death through death events like the gas chambers, burned locked school and church houses, or the mass graves designed to create anonymity. If we have learned anything from the latter part of the twentieth century, it is the fact that, as Wyschogrod reminds us, death is not anonymous, and it is certainly not the singular project of Being and Time, where we are urged to stand on our own when we face death, and cannot escape it or hasten it. From the point of view of Dasein, one faces the death event on his or her own, but this is not the case when death comes because someone has created the conditions of the possibility of not only one death, but of the death of millions of people. Resoluteness in the face of such mass death requires a different understanding of the death event; one that begins with the resolution to remember each and every one who has perished at the hands of others. Wyschogrod does not deny the individual dimensions of death, because many people do die individually, but she calls attention to activities that intentionally target and dehumanize others who then must be turned to ashes (if I can do a word play with Wyschogrod's title). …

Wyschogrod’s Hand

In his lecture Hand (Geschlecht II), Jacques Derrida announces his topic as follows: are going to speak then of Heidegger. We are also going to speak of monstrosity. We are going to speak of word Geschlecht.1 slippage from Heidegger to monstrosity to Geschlect - Geschlect once again, a second time, moreover - is not merely provocative but downright stagy. will not reopen today question of Heidegger's 'politics,' Derrida asserts subsequently. everything I will try to do now will maintain an indirect relation to another, perhaps less visible, dimension of same drama. Today, I will begin then by speaking of . . . monstrosity. This will be another detour through question of man (Mensch or homo) and of 'we' that gives its content to a Geschlecht''2 Indeed, this question of man, of humankind or human race, will here animate and focus Derrida's close reading of two Heideggerian texts, namely, first lecture in Was heisst Denken? and lecture on poet Trakl in Unterwegs zur Sprache. It is in former that hand makes its appearance,3 marked as distinctly and exclusively human - marked, that is, by its capacity to point and, precisely in so doing, to designate enigmatic content of a Geschlecht. Derrida prepares us for this appearance of hand by dramatizing it in advance, calling to mind an archive of photographs of German philosopher that once came into his own hands. The play and theater of hands in album would deserve an entire seminar, he enthuses. Were I not to renounce this project, I would stress deliberately craftsmanlike staging of hand play, of monstration and demonstration that is exhibited there, whether it be a matter of handling of pen, of wielding of cane, which points rather than supports, or of water bucket near fountain.4 However reluctantly, Derrida has, then, renounced engagement with Heidegger's politics and also with his photographs, so as not to have to renounce his current project. Yet each of these apophatic gestures is itself crucial to framing ofthat project, it would seem. Heidegger's politics and Heidegger's photographed hand haunt Derrida's readings - latter the only thing that overflows on cover of album, as we are told. If, as Derrida argues, doubly monstrous figure of Heideggerian hand is icon of a humanity that refuses animality absolutely, what is cost of this refusal? Heidegger's own hand in politics hovers just outside frame of Derrida's query. Derrida's lecture, delivered in 1985 and first published in 1987, was picked up swiftly by Edith Wyschogrod. Her 1990 Saints and Postmodernism devotes several pages to its engagement, in a section of a chapter entitled Thinking, Animality, and Saintly Hand.5 Here I want to trace path of Wyschogrod's reading of Derrida and, through him, of Heidegger, with regard to hand. It will be precisely in slippages of her reading that we shall most easily detect Wyschogrod's own hand at work. That hand gives us both saints and animals where we might not have expected to find them - in a Levinasian ethics.6 It gives us an innovative theory of imitation and excess that bypasses nomianism while also challenging constraints of narrativity. Wyschogrod's saintly hand finally gives us more than a hand; it gives us embrace of arms, of a womb, indeed of a whole body laboring in pain on behalf of so many other bodies-in-pain. These gifts are lavish. But certain questions will press. Has Wyschogrod inadvertently closed distance of alterity, by appealing not to a common humanity but to a snared animality that may (or may not) add up to much same thing? Or does her thinking of sanctity and animality together finally allow us to engage question of Geschlecht, of man, of monstrosity, differently? Near end of this essay, I shall try to circle back to these issues through a brief reading of a fourthcentury Christian work, Jerome's Life of Paul. …

When the Scaffolding Falls Away

Recently, I discovered a personal note that I had received from Edith Wyschogrod dated November 17, 1998. It was in a manila envelope attached to a copy of the manuscript for a keynote address that she presented at a conference that I organized and directed in El Paso commemorating the founding of the Modern State of Israel in the context of reflecting on the Holocaust. title of her talk was The Shoah and the Historian's Passion for the Dead Others.1 talk was enriched by themes drawn from her recently published book, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others. I recall the note as a personal gesture that reminded me of a face to face conversation that I had with Edith during the course of the conference. encounter occurred on the morning after she gave her talk. As the organizer, and obsessed with my responsibilities for the dozens of guests and speakers, I had arrived early in the morning in order to make sure everything was just right and that the breakfast bar would be welcoming and adequate. In fact, the tables were covered with a bounty of fruits and breakfast foods, juices and drinks. And perched on a chair by the side of one of the tables that were groaning with breakfast goodies was Edith, alone, tasting this, that, and the other from one of the tables. I greeted her and sat down next to her, thanking her for accepting my invitation to speak and for being involved in the program and in all of the activities. I recall, with special interest, her offhanded remark: You created quite an event here. A bit embarrassed (this was thirteen years ago and I was still only a Lecturer), I thanked her again for sacrificing her time to be with us and for the gift of her talk, commenting that I could tell how much her had been influenced by Levinas. To which she replied, Is it that obvious? I would like to propose that a scaffolding can take many forms, one of which is the most obvious, namely, that sort of temporary structure that we erect to support people and materials in order to create something more enduring and lasting such as a building, an institution, a book, or a narrative recollection, or even a lived life. It can also be a platform on which plays are performed or criminals executed. In these senses, scaffoldings provide us with support for both the play of life and the drama of death. One of the lessons that I learned from my brief encounters with Edith, by reading and teaching her works, is that it is in gift and sacrifice - through the act of reaching out to others - that the scaffolding falls away and the play of life between myself and an other is enacted. But I am referring now not to just any impersonal other, but to a dead other, and to recollect the gifts given by Edith Wyschogrod. Paraphrasing her own words, to 'give face' through word and image [to the other] is absent and who cannot speak for [her] self ... is to enter into the terrain of ethics. And yet again, from her 1998 talk, the logical form of the name suggests that its primary function is to confer an identity, to restore the links in achain of living memory. For the historian, the name becomes an ethical placeholder, a way in which she or he makes a person or group come to life. In naming, the historian engages in a signifying-bestowing act through which different contexts or worlds are traversed and brought together through the permanence of the name. (History, Religion and Meaning, 32) Drawing on Lyotard' s claim that The historian is under obligation to the dead designated by the name to prevent the significations of the name from hostile preemption (ibid.), Wyschogrod accentuates the custodial and caretaking responsibilities that we have for the past. responsibility extends even further to demand that the historian account for why an event should be singled out as momentous, because assessing the temporal dimension - beyond a simplistic and dispassionate description or explanation of events - supplies the framework for the ethical dimension of the historian's work (34). …

Should Levinasians also be Hegelians? On Wyschogrod’s Levinasianism

There are few things more intellectually rewarding than writing on the work of Edith Wyschogrod. Her work was so wide-ranging - covering figures in the continental and the analytic traditions, Jewish and Christian philosophical theology, Asian philosophy, and various manifestations of high culture (dance, opera, etc.) - that spending a day reading or re-reading her books and essays cannot but inspire new avenues for thinking and new argumentative strategies. (It was in the undergraduate classroom that she displayed that anything could generate her intellectual energies, whether Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard or Roland Emmerich's 1996 film Independence Day.) Nevertheless, for me, there are few things that are more intellectually frightening. There was always, in conversations with Dr. Wyschogrod, whether in her seminar room or in her home or over email, so much more than I could absorb. This led to a curious conjunction of both hunger and fear; I wanted to be a sponge and read everything, yet suspected that I would never synthesize it adequately. Midway through the first seminar I had with her, in the fall of 1996, my fear led me to ask her for an incomplete. Her response was to ask me, in her extremely kind manner, Why? Are you planning on being ill? So ended the conversation. In these ways, Dr. Wyschogrod was and remains a transcendent figure for me. I never felt mat I existed on the same temporal plane with her. Arguments she made in seminar would only make sense to me months later. Comments she made to me in phone calls would become clear to me years later. There are some emails that I am still turning over in my head. I was always lagging behind her, and now that she can no longer edify us with her presence, I am falling even further behind. As a means of trying to catch up, and as a way of acknowledging her power, in this essay I will unsay things that I believed about her in the past. One of the standard ways that religious elites have dealt with that which transcends is to undo the concepts they have developed about it. Mystical has been described by Michael Sells as a language of unsaying, and the work of Elliot R. Wolfson has made this locution more precise by showing that in mystical texts, the unsaying of concepts that is the hallmark of apophatic still nonetheless says, and has its own unique library of images. A of unsaying is still a language, for if nothing is spoken, nothing is unspoken.1 In this essay, what I will unsay is what I at one time believed to be the case about her relationship with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, namely, that it was one of fidelity. Desiring to be faithful to a teacher, I fear that I am also betraying her. The impetus in Wyschogrod's work, in my view, is that a scholar should never be bound by one intellectual form, or by one philosophical hero. One should read in the interest of setting the stage for later undoings of an interpretation, and her love of open-ended narratives was grounded in the infinite future of re-readings that those narratives established. One of the many things that Wyschogrod taught in her work was that to read in this manner is to imitate the way of the saint. In this regard, the exemplary case is a brief discussion in her 1990 book Saints and Postmodernism of the transvestite saint Marina/Marinus, who died in the early sixth century CE.2 The rough outlines of her story are as follows. Marina's father Eugenius enters a monastery after his wife dies. After a period of years, his longing to be near Marina again will not end, and he brings her into the monastery; she is necessarily disguised as the boy Marinus. As he nears death, Eugenius orders Marina never to reveal to anyone that she is a woman. Soon after his death, a local villager's daughter accuses Marinus of impregnating her (Marinus was in the habit of stopping at her home while fetching wood for the monastery). Marinus refuses to deny the charge; his abbot expels Marinus; Marinus lives as a beggar outside the monastery gate for five years, the last two of which are spent taking care of the son that it was believed Marinus had fathered. …

Apophasis and the Trace of Transcendence

Fame is the tint that Scholars leave Upon their Setting Names - The Iris not of Occident That disappears as comes - Emily Dickinson Undoubtedly, it will take some time before the full measure of the contributions of Edith Wyschogrod the disciplines of philosophy and religious studies are appreciated. Needless say, there have already been some major works of scholarship that have critically engaged various aspects of her multifaceted and interdisciplinary thought. In particular, her status as one of the premier interpreters of Levinas - she was the first publish a full-length monograph on him in English1 - has been duly noted. Additionally, there have been essays that have called attention her interventions in the fields of phenomenology, postmodernism, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and historiography. What has been less scrutinized is her status as a creative Jewish thinker. This essay attempts fill that lacuna by charting some of the ways in which she offers a deconstructive Jewish philosophy that I will call, borrowing her own taxonomy, an immanent a/theology.2 Fissure, Non-Self Identity, and the Aporia of Incommensurable Faiths I commence my reflections by recalling Wyschogrod's comment on the fact that in the essay How Avoid Speaking: Denials, which was first delivered in June 1986 as the opening lecture of the colloquium on Absence and Negativity organized by the Hebrew University and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem,3 Derrida (by his own admission) intentionally avoided discussing the apophatic element in the Jewish and Islamic traditions, thereby being compelled to speak of it without speaking of it.4 Glossing this part of the lecture, Derrida himself added in a note, Despite this silence, or in fact because of it, one will perhaps permit me interpret this lecture as the most 'autobiographical' speech I have ever risked __ But if one day I had tell my story, nothing in this narrative would start speak of the thing itself if I did not come up against this fact; for lack of capacity, competence, or self-authorization, I have never yet been able speak of what my birth . . . should have made closest me: the Jew, the Arab.5 This is, of course, a deeply ironic passage: precisely by not discussing the tradition of apophasis in either Judaism or Islam, Derrida performatively enacted the very topic of his lecture, for with respect what cannot be spoken, not speak is the pertinent gesture.6 Wyschogrod is thus completely justified in her own exegetical surmise: Yet it is precisely with regard the missing traditions that one might apply Derrida's term 'the logic of the supplement,' the hidden presuppositions that drive his analyses, his account of apophasis and denegation.7 I submit that the sentiment expressed by these words can be applied the role of Judaism in Wyschogrod, even though the situation is not completely analogous, inasmuch as she does often attend Jewish figures and themes more overtly. My point is, rather, that what drives her post-phenomenological and post-structural analyses is her philosophical grappling with her Jewishness. This is not parochialize her thought; on the contrary, it seems me that she saw the particular as the only possible way implement the universal without reducing the other the identity of the same. To some degree, Wyschogrod's perspective is congruous with Levinas's notion of a universalist singularity,8 that is, a universalism grounded in the preservation of the singular, the oneself that is prior the distinction between the particular and the universal.9 The paradox of Israel is the promotion of an exceptional message that is nevertheless addressed all, the peculiarity beyond universality . . . made manifest well before the distinction between the particular and the universal makes its appearance in the speculation of logicians. …

Eros, Ethics, Explosion

Emmanuel eloquent on both ethics and eros, though if we had not read him before, we might well be surprised to find the former passionate and unlimited, the latter viewed with no small measure of suspicion and restraint. We might be surprised, too, to see just how firmly the two relational realms are held distinct. In this at his most vigorously anti-Platonic: whereas for the Platonists the most ethical response a deepening of the erotic appreciation of beauty and the beautiful, for ethics must be strictly de-eroticized. contrast striking, even if some strands of Platonism do share Levinas's ethical suspicion of the carnal. From the Levinasian perspective, eros has multiple ethical problems. It is, to begin with, too sensual; it can get stuck in the immanence of the body as object and fail in ethical transcendence toward an absolute and imperative subjectivity. declares, You turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe them. best way of encountering the Other not even to notice the color of his eyes! When one observes the color of the eyes one not in social relationship with the Other.1 Not in a social relationship, one has no chance of engaging the other ethically. Indeed, Rudolf Bernet adds in his gloss on Levinas's remarks, Apprehending the form of the Other's body instead of responding to the infinite demand his 'face' expresses would be both a theoretical and ethical fallacy.2 Eros intensifies the very attention to the flesh that ethics must get beyond, regarding the face not as the site of inexhaustible responsibility provoked by vulnerability, but as a source - perhaps equally inexhaustible - of pleasure, a site for desire in all of its greed and specificity.3 Transcendence encountered through the face seems to imply a sort of theological incarnation, but Robert Gibbs emphasizes that it important to that the divine not made incarnate, even or especially in the face of the other.4 Rather, the other manifests God's transcendence as the space where the difference opens up.5 That unwavering insistence on difference the source of a deeper ethical problem for eros, one that goes beyond its strictly carnal versions. Erotic engagement can blur boundaries; it perhaps the sort of experience in which we are most likely to say that we lose ourselves, and in this we also lose the sharp distinction between other and self so essential to Levinasian ethics. It true that eros in the flesh cannot fuse bodies altogether, but, as Plato long ago had Aristophanes point out, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't like to.6 For Edith Wyschogrod, too, remaining in the immanence of flesh can be a problem, although she's much more direct about also granting the body no small ethical importance - it may well be ethically central. But for her as for the deeper issue with eros ecstasy, and especially the risk of ecstatic fusion. As she emphasizes, The proximity of eros not the proximity of ethics. What - and what, we gather, she fears as well - is the transfer of the intensities of eros to transcendence because the braking power of another's flesh absent and sheer intensity unleashed. No matter how close bodies may be, one distinguishable from the other, but with the transcendent, boundaries disappear. As avers, with Buber in mind, the mystic speaks to himself in the second person, as if he has entered into God.7 This not to claim that never acknowledges eros at all. As Wyschogrod points out, Levinas speaks movingly of the eros of flesh, the pleasures of the caress, which involves one with the other, the near one, but not the Other of ethics.8 Eros all very well in its place, but that place not an ethical one. There eros, and there transcendence, but for they do not work together. Eros disrupts the ethical, but precisely by overcoming the disruption that a boundary creates. …

Beyond the Self, Beyond Ontology: Levinas' Reading of Shestov's Reading of Kierkegaard

In 1937, Emmanuel Levinas published a review of Lev Shestov's Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle in the journal Revue des Études Juives. This essay includes a translation of his review as well as an introductory essay that contextualizes it. In her Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (1972), Edith Wyschogrod contended that Levinas' short review contains what "might well be taken as the program of his own future work." Both seek a way out of ontology, but Shestov seeks his escape through a violent wrenching out of the tradition of Western ontology. Levinas would later dub this attempt "the wound that bleeds throughout Shestov's work." Unlike Shestov, Levinas does not seek a lost primordial freedom that existed before being and has been lost ever since. Because Levinas' ethics takes its rise in the relation to the other person, he does not suffer from Shestov's continual wound that cannot be escaped.

Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion – Edited by Eric Boynton and Martin Kavka

Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion – Edited by Eric Boynton and Martin Kavka

Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others – By Edith Wyschogrod

Reviews in Religion & TheologyVolume 15, Issue 4 p. 593-596 Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others – By Edith Wyschogrod Chris Boesel, Chris Boesel Drew Theological SchoolSearch for more papers by this author Chris Boesel, Chris Boesel Drew Theological SchoolSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 August 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9418.2008.00402_17.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume15, Issue4September 2008Pages 593-596 RelatedInformation

Encounters with Levinas by Thomas Trezise (review)

1120 Reviews whereas the materialists of Documents insist on art-as-process. Adamowicz addresses Aragon's fractured narrative of collage (1923-75), exposing the ideological reading that led him to condemn Ernst's collages as frivolous, and to vaunt John Heartfield's satirical photomontages fortheir collectivist political freight.Adamowicz's critique of the erasure of collage in Aragon's slavish socio-realist writings of 1935-60 opens the way for a corrective engagement with Ernst's mesmerically poetic assault on establishment values. The study concludes with a consideration of the post-war struggle to reaffirmSurrealism under pressure from abstract experimentalism. As Breton's voice falters, a new generation deploys esoteric discourse to chart the processes of lyrical abstraction in painting: in this respect the metaphoric texts of the 1950s reprise the rhetorical strategies of the 1930s. This admirably paced study, combining close read? ing and lucid synthesis, offersan incisive examination of textual figurations that lose sight?product ively,provocatively?ofthe art works that were their catalyst. University of Wales Swansea Susan Harrow Encounters with Levinas. Ed. by Thomas Trezise. (Yale French Studies, 104) Lon? don: Yale University Press. 2004. 146 pp. ?15. ISBN 0-300-10216-x. In the useful but tantalizingly short 'Editor's Preface' to this collection of essays Thomas Trezise ascribes Levinas's now uncontested status and influence to the fact that the ethical relation to the other raises more questions than it answers. Trezise goes on to outline some of these questions (p. 2). Does Levinas's philosophical dis? course essentialize the very other whose singularity he wishes to champion? Might not discourses other than philosophy be more appropriate to the preservation of alterity ? How can the purely dyadic encounter of self and other be reconciled with issues such as justice and politics? And might not Levinas's perceived originality derive at least in part from the work of other thinkers, or from long-standing religious, philosophical, or cultural traditions? Rather than offering direct or comprehensive responses to these pertinent questions, the following essays are conceived as a series of encounters which explore some of the intellectual contexts and philosophical resonance of Levinas's work. Interesting and accomplished essays analyse Levinas's defence of subjectivity and trace its Cartesian roots (Leora Batnitzky), unravel the importance of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky in his work (Samuel Moyn and Alain Toumayan respectively), and discuss his equivocations on the image and figuration (Philippe Crignon). If there is no startling new reading of Levinas in these essays, they nevertheless offernumerous fresh insights into aspects of his writing which have been misunderstood or neglected. Of the remaining essays, Paul Ricoeur's discussion of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence is already published in French, though it was certainly worthwhile to make his typically courteous but probing engagement available to anglophone scholars; and Edith Wyschogrod breaks new ground by confronting Levinas's thought with recent developments in genetic theory. Most ofthe contributors are happy to correct or criticize Levinas on occasion, but easily the most overt and challenging attack comes in Luce Irigaray's essay, 'What Other are We Talking About?', which builds upon and clarifies her chapter on Levinas mAn Ethics of Sexual Difference. She vigorously distances herself from Levinas's work, accusing him of understanding subjectivity in exclusively masculine terms and thereby silently appropriating the feminine other despite his desire to avoid fusion or pos? session. Irigaray's reading may be limited by the fact that it is based here primarily on the lectures from the 1940s published as Time and the Other, rather than taking account of Levinas's later self-revisions in, for example, Otherwise than Being or Be? yond Essence. Even so, her lively, provocative engagement is at least as much in the MLRy 100.4, 2005 1121 spirit of Levinasian encounter as the more respectful excavations of Levinas's thought and contexts, and it is to be regretted that Levinas was unwilling to respond in kind during his lifetime. In summary, this is a varied collection of essays, all of which make valuable contributions to the now massive body of secondary material on Levinas. Royal Holloway, University of London Colin Davis Andrei Makine: la rencontrede I'Est et...

The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Levinas Zahi Zalloua Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. xxx + 293 pp. There are no other editors better equipped to edit this book on Levinas in the well-known Cambridge Companion series. Simon Critchely and Robert Bernasconi have been some of the most attentive readers of Levinas, at once appreciative and rigorously critical of his work. Critchley gives a very accessible introduction to Levinas, focusing on some of the philosopher's key terms and loaded expressions (totality, infinity, "ethics as first philosophy," etc.). Critchley also calls attention to what he appropriately calls the "deconstructive turn" (18) in Levinas, a turn provoked in large part by Derrida's influential critique of Levinas's Totality and Infinity in "Violence and Metaphysics," in which he reproaches the latter for still using the language of ontology all the while claiming to be operating outside of it. As Critchley reminds us, the Levinas of Otherwise than Being becomes far more alert to the ways in which the ethical can take place with philosophical discourse: how the said (the refying of the ethical saying) can be perpetually un-said and re-said. Hilary Putnam discusses Levinas's relationship to Judaism, exploring, for instance, how the figure of the Jew (the Other par excellence) occupies an exemplary status in Levinas's ethics, how "in essence, all human beings are Jews" (34). Catherine Chalier's article also addresses the question of religion in Levinas, but from the perspective of his perplexing, and often ignored, Talmudic readings. She makes a compelling case for the importance of these readings to an understanding of Levinas, of a Levinas, to be sure, irreducible to the title of either (Greek) philosopher or Talmudic scholar. Berhard Waldenfels tackles the ambiguous and fleeting meaning of the face (visage) in Levinas. Rudolf Bernet revisits Levinas's powerful critique and appropriation of Husserl's phenomenological project. John Llewelyn and Edith Wyschogrod discuss Levinas's understanding of language; Llewelyn situates Levinas within his intellectual milieu, a milieu dominated by structuralism and a Heideggerian understanding of language, while Wyschogrod explores how Levinas's use of language frustrates any reduction to propositional statements, and its ultimate significance for his account of alterity. Related to the question of language and representation is Levinas's ambivalent [End Page 357] attitude towards the concepts of art and poetry—the subject of Gerald Bruns article. Paul Davies and Richard Bernstein examine the problematic of theodicy in Levinas—the former tying theodicy to sincerity, the latter to evil (Kant is in the background of both pieces). Stella Sanford, by far the most polemical author of the collection, is determined to discredit Levinas as an important philosopher for feminism. While feminist criticism of Levinas is nothing new (Irigaray, Chanter), Sanford is unfortunately not interested in engaging Levinas in a dialogue with feminism. Rather, she tirelessly insists that Levinas's complex notion of the "feminine" is inadequate for the aims of feminism, failing to free itself from the Western economy of the Same. Robert Bernasconi, for his part, takes up the difficult task of explaining Levinas's idea of "substitution," speculating on the kind of question(s) that might be seen as informing or motivating the latter's enigmatic thinking. In this eloquently written essay, Bernasconi moves back and forth from a reading of Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being in order to better locate the ethical moment, to better attest to the meaning of "substitution." While the earlier Levinas squarely situates the ethical encounter in the actual or concrete encounter with the Other, the latter Levinas, according to Bernasconi, avoids the potential (mis)reading that could arise from such account: that prior to the ethical situation the self was already full constituted. But by developing his idea of substitution—along with the infinite irresponsibility that entails—Levinas, still on Bernasconi's reading, argues that one's possibility of "substitution for others" (247) is a way to account for primordial openness to alterity that precedes, so to speak, the empirical encounter with the Other, shedding some light on the problem of deduction (the vexed and contested move from the transcendental to...

Edith Wyschogrod. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Name-less Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xxi, 280 pp.

“What is it that must precede the conveying of history? Must there not be the declaration of a double passion, an eros for the past and an ardor for the others in whose name there is a felt urgency to speak?” asks Edith Wyschogrod. She continues: “to be a historian . . . is to accept the destiny of the spurned lover—to write, photograph, film, televise, archive, and simulate the past not merely as its memory bank but as binding oneself by a promise to the dead to tell the truth about the past” (p. xi). By positing the responsibility of the historian peremptorily as a “promise,” thus implying a binding obligation to others, Wyschogrod tilts her discussion of the writing of history away from the cognitive realm and toward “postmodern” ethics. Her intricate reflections are marked by an overwhelming consciousness of the uniqueness of our age, in which the historian must breast the cumulative moral impact of the experiences of organized “scientific” murder and genocide and the staggering and disconcerting manipulation of information made possible by hyperreality; as well as the radical philosophical questioning of the communicative possibilities of language and skepticism about the nature of historical truth.

Asceticism ed. by Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis

282BOOK REVIEWS is not acknowledged; furthermore, it is mysteriously identified as "a document ... in the legal texts of France" and erroneously assigned to the first haU ofthe ninth century rather than to the second haUofthe eighth century (p. 58). The question whether or not Athanasius wrote the Life ofSt. Antony has long been laid to rest; it is therefore quite inappropriate to question Athanasius' authorship (p. 64). Geography receives only rninimum attention; there are only two maps, one showing the spread of Christianity Ui the tlurd century (p. 40), and the other showing the distribution of reUgions in Europe in 1570 (p. 203)· Chronology, too, is given insufficient attention; the Chronology at the end of the book (pp. 286-293) is only a partial compensation for this weakness. The numerous illustrations—they are not numbered—, many in color, have been selected with care and are of high quality. Unfortunately, readers wUl be disturbed even in theU enjoyment of these beautiful illustrations by the captions , which often partake of the same weaknesses as the text. In general, then, this book is a disappointment. Chadwick has underestimated the intelUgence and educational level of those who might be interested in his subject.Those who may be looking for a book simUar in purpose and scope but more substantial and more pleasing in style should turn to The OxfordIllustrated History of Christianity, edited by John McManners (Oxford University Press, 1990), to which, incidentaUy Chadwick has contributed a very fine chapter. Hans A. Pohlsander State University ofNew York at Albany Asceticism. Edited by Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. Pp. xxiii, 638. $125.00.) This monumental collection of essays adds new weight to the evidence for a surprisingly vigorous and growing interest in reUgious asceticism. Our age in western culture, and particularly Ui North America, has seemed quite tone-deaf to the ascetic.Yet these essays suggest not only a new and serious inteUectuaI curiosity about ascetic phenomena in other times and places, but even the emergence of individuals and smaU groups in diverse corners of our own society whose quest for focus and renewal oflife is leading them to explore various traditions of disciplined practice. This is not to say that, as scholars or lay people, we know quite what to think about asceticism. The participants in the international conference that produced these papers, held at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in April, 1993, did not attempt to agree on a definition of the term.The papers also reveal considerable diversity not only in the specific subject matter described but in method and approach and even in fundamental attitude toward ascetic practice. KaUistos Ware, in the opening address, cites two Russian Orthodox BOOK REVIEWS283 thinkers who celebrate respectively asceticism's power to Uberate the human person and to produce "a beautiful personaUty" By contrast, Bruce Malina, adopting a determinedly "modern" and "scientific" viewpoint, sees only "setfshrinkage .'The reactions ofreaders may osculate between these poles ofhorror at the ascetic and fascination with it.Yet the obvious depth of knowledge and the extraordinary ability of the contributors to convey their knowledge wiU lead most readers to new appreciation for the power of the ascetic impulse as well as to vastly increased understanding of the variety of its expressions. The plan of the book generaUy foUows that of the conference. After a foreword byJohn Hick, an introduction by the editors, and two "General Challenges and Reconsiderations" by KaUistos Ware and Edith Wyschogrod, twenty-four short essays are presented in groups of three, each threesome followed by a response . Elizabeth A. Clark then attempts the daunting task of responding to aU of these in six pages. The papers are sorted under four headings: Origins and Meanings of Asceticism, Hermeneutics ofAsceticism, Aesthetics of Asceticism, and PoUtics ofAsceticism. Most of them could as easUy have been put into one or sometimes two of the other categories, but that fact merely Ulustrates the interesting cross-currents that are at work. Even so, there are six additional contributions that were apparently not deemed quite to fit any of these topics. These appear as "Ascética Miscellanea" in an appendix, which also records the closing...