Judaism and Modernity by Gillian Rose

Author:Gillian Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

VI

Buber’s work has been solicited to endorse the idea of ‘post-modernity’. Introduced by Lyotard as a response to scepticism about ‘the grand narratives’ inherited from foundational critique or philosophy of history,38 the post-modern alternative has also been presented by Lyotard by exploring the difference, which may be none, between Buber’s ethics and Levinas’ ethics: between the inavowable community which aspires to cognitive status in a still Kantian sense and the scandal of obligation.39 A cycle may be discerned here from philosophical scepticism to new political theology. Initially deposing scientific socialism for being utopian, and renouncing universalizing reason, post-modern scepticism rediscovers a notion of ‘community’, which denies the problem of power and its legitimation, and yet claims the middle in holy immediacy. This new aspiration – post-modern theology – draws on that tradition in modern Jewish thought which separates the lesson of love from the actualities of power, ‘dialogue’ from dialectic, time from history. Turning the logos into pathos, originary violence returns to bedevil its dreams.

In Buber, the immediacy of dialogue yields the loveful, holy middle, ‘between’ man and man, while the broken middle appears as the alienated world, law and coercion, and the sovereignty of ‘nations’. The individual bears the burden of this equivocation in its tormented phantasy. And Levinas is not as different from Buber as either he or Lyotard think: holy illeity (the unbounded) is opposed to ‘the just violences’ of the state (bounded), while the individual is traumatized by his somnolent auditions of the il y a.

Irenic thought remains implicated in the oppositions it claims to transcend. To separate community from sovereignty, dialogue from comprehension, delivers ‘the world’ to the very violence that can only call forth lamentation. The time has come to retrace such thinking from its pathos to the logos it so fears. The ‘Reply’ from Kierkegaard to Buber imagined here offers a propaedeutic for recognizing the broken middle instead of remaining submerged in original violence and in terror, from abyss to abyss, only emerging from abyssal abjection to entreat the kingdom – alas, to no avail.

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