Inventing New Beginnings by Biemann Asher D.;

Author:Biemann, Asher D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Two

The Retrieval of Ambivalence

Jewish Renaissance and the (Re-)Turn(-ing) to/of Tradition

Ich gehöre den ewigen Wandel-Welten.

—Alfred Mombert, Sfaira der Alte

In Wahrheit ist Tradition stets ein Moment der Freiheit und der

Geschichte selber.

—Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode

I

Repetition

In our previous chapter, we suggested that the modern Jewish turn to thinking in history remained rooted in the conceptual tradition of restoration and rebirth, if also demystified, and that the possibility of a “Jewish Renaissance” seemed therefore already contained in the concept of a “Jewish history.” Modern Jewish “resurrectionism” thus emerged as a variant of historicism; a historicism of a particular kind that served as moral apperception of time. Affirming rather than negating the historical, the story of resurrection presented itself not as an act of transcendental acquiescence but as task. This task we shall now call “renaissance.” Its historical principle is the conscious continuity of distance-memory, the making and presupposing of ruptures, of thresholds and liminal histories that allow and demand for the axiom of one-timeness to be dissolved into an image of contemporal unfinishedness: In the synchronization of threshold, every time is present without being complete. At their turning, renaissances take stock of other times, responding to their otherness and putting in question the returning self, whose continuity and place in history is ruptured and in need of repair. “History is worked over by the ruptures of history, in which a judgment is borne upon it,” Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity. “When man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history.”1 The rerooting of renaissance is conditioned by the uprooting from history, which continuously acts as a recovery and corrective of roots. Return and turning are correlative modalities of beginning-anew, and beginning anew is the correlative concept of repentance. In this fundamental dialectic lies the capability of renaissance to formulate the possibility of an ethics of its own. Approaching the “Jewish Renaissance,” we must be attentive to the fragments of an ethics dispersed within its romanticizing jargon of homecoming and pristine past: We must be attentive to the fragments of turning.

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