Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) - Hardcover

Biemann, Asher D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804760411 ISBN 13: 9780804760416

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Inventing New Beginnings is the first book-length study to examine the conceptual underpinnings of the "Jewish Renaissance," or "return" to Judaism, that captured much of German-speaking Jewry between 1890 and 1938. The book addresses two very fundamental, yet hitherto strangely understated, questions: What did the term "renaissance" actually mean to the intellectuals and ideologues of the "Jewish Renaissance," and how did this understanding relate to wider currents in European intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? It also addresses the larger question of how we can contemplate "renaissance" as a mode of thought that is conditioned by the consciousness and experience of modernity and that extends to our present time.

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Asher D. Biemann is Assistant Professor for Modern Jewish Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Virginia. He is the editor of The Martin Buber Reader (2002) and the author of a critical edition of Martin Buber's Sprachphilosophische Schriften (2003).

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Inventing New Beginnings

On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern JudaismBy Asher D. Biemann

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6041-6

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................ixPreamble........................................................................................................1Part One (Recto) Thinking in Renaissance or A Grammar of Beginnings1. Beginnings: Thresholds of Continuity.........................................................................232. Beginning Anew: The Palingenesis of Memory...................................................................633. Turning: Transformations into the Open.......................................................................106Part Two (Verso) Writing in Resurrection or The Semantics of Restoration1. The Imperishability of Being: Writing Jewish History in Resurrection.........................................1652. The Retrieval of Ambivalence: Jewish Renaissance and the (Re-)Turn(-ing) to/of Tradition.....................2223. The Unfinishedness of Return: Renaissance and the Reaestheticization of Judaism..............................274Abbreviations...................................................................................................307Notes...........................................................................................................309Index...........................................................................................................415

Chapter One

Beginnings

Thresholds of Continuity

To begin-to ignore or suspend the undefined density of the past-is the wonder of the present. -Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other

Mitten hinein versetzt zu werden, ist am besten. -Ernst Bloch, Tbinger Einleitung in die Philosophie

I

Where to Begin

"Where to Begin?" Roland Barthes' well- known essay of 1970 plants this question into the mind of an imaginary student who, though not unaware of the "divergencies of approach," feels uncertain how to approach and where to enter the jumble of a "text's plural." Unable to find "the" beginning, the student finally despairs, for there simply is no beginning at the beginning but only an arbitrary thread to grasp, a first thread, which then unravels to reveal a system of simultaneous codes, meanings, and themes. What makes this unraveling possible is that texts are not run-proof, that we can pull an end and arrive in the middle of its plenitude. But for Barthes, the "I" approaching the text "is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)." When the imaginary student pulls a thread, no more than the middle unravels: He is cast "in medias res," Barthes writes, thrown into the midst of things, into a beginningless flux. He is verwebt (interwoven) in history; verstrickt (entangled) in stories. He is in the midst, but he is unable to begin at the beginning.

To be sure, being in the midst of a difficult flux, without beginnings and without shelter, as John Caputo described "radical hermeneutics" in the 1980s, has become a familiar motif in our time. When measured by our day-to-day experience, however, the beginningless, authorless text seems to resist intuition. Our conscious lives rarely are in flux but, instead, saturated with beginnings, beginnings that we begin, and beginnings, which-as it appears to us-begin on their own, like the "beginning" of a new day. Beginnings, as we are likely to experience, exist well apart from any "one" beginning at the beginning. They are, as Catherine Keller aptly wrote, "going on." Even Barthes' imaginary student might experience, while entangled in the middle, a beginning in some sense. Like Dante's traveler, he begins in medias res, somewhere in the middle of a path-but he still makes a beginning.

Ambiguities

The nature of beginnings is no trivial matter and the term itself is ambiguous. A verbal derivative, beginning, always indicates an action or, to paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, the action of entering upon action. At the same time, the word beginning functions as a mode of existence, an "entering upon existence," as the dictionary defines it, or as Aristotle put it in the Metaphysics: "the first out of which something exists or comes into being or is recognized." This ambiguity of action and existence has rendered the beginning a quasi-creative principle in itself, a dynamis and product of the nous poietiks. Conversely, this ambiguity already foreshadows a duality of longing that we attach to beginnings: The nostalgic longing for origins and first beginnings in the past, and the forward-looking desire for beginnings that we can begin to shatter the sameness of the before.

Rudolf Carnap, in his now-classic essay "The Elimination of Metaphysics," points to this very ambiguity and longing to demonstrate how, in metaphysics, the gerundial "beginning" became the beginning, how an empirical (though interpretive) description of actions or events was transformed into the "principium" or arch. Metaphysical systems, Carnap argued, rely largely upon the hypostatization of similar derivatives to create words deprived of their day-to-day meaning without, however, being given another meaning of their own. Nothing in our experience can correspond to the beginning as an active first principle, much less to the beginning as a primordial "first." The metaphysical arch, the self- generating origin of all things, the hypostatized act of beginnings, for Carnap, is a philosophically meaningless term.

But it is surrounded by an aura. A particularly inconspicuous term of what Adorno called the "jargon of authenticity," the beginning belongs to both our everyday use of language and to a "higher" plane of being. "Words of jargon," Adorno writes, "sound as if they said something higher than what they mean." The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto compared this "something higher" to a musica di vocaboli resonating in all metaphysical terms to conceal their meaningless contents. But the beginning, unlike other metaphysical terms, impresses primarily through its ordinariness and by the habitual grammar that surrounds it. The music of beginnings is as solemn as it is mundane and often inaudible. The jargon of beginning, to most of us, does not appear to be jargon at all. To the contrary, beginnings seem to firmly belong to our daily, pedestrian vocabulary and, indeed, to the categories of thought by which we order the world around us.

A Desire for Beginnings

Reason, as Kant remarked in his first Critique, has a desire (Bedrfnis) for beginnings. It is this desire that brings reason also to its first antinomy: the world as begun and un- begun. But it is the same desire that grants reason-practical reason-its freedom: The freedom for which every beginning of an action becomes a "first beginning." In Kant's third antinomy, therefore, it is the ability to begin that removes reason from the causality of the phenomenal world, setting it free from the laws of nature that only know "subaltern beginnings," beginnings by comparison, but no "first beginning." To be sure, the antinomies of pure reason must remain antinomies, but the desire for first beginnings, which...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804760411
• ISBN 13: 9780804760416
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 428
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar