Gillian Rose [sketches]

In these following chapters I will cross-examine perspectives drawing on the following sources: Essays by Gillian Rose included in "Judaism & Modernity", different writings by selected people from "Ethics after the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques and Responses", lastly I will examine as well different writings by Eveline Goodman-Thau. Thereafter I might be able to turn to Levinas for re-interpretations of the problem, but I will refrain to do so in order to retrieve the threads left in Kafka through the eyes of Arendt and Rosenzweig, of particular interest I shall add as well an index from the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem on Kafka and other citations from Rosenzweig. I believe that these writing should undoubtedly lead me to Adorno, despite myself, whenever we will face the world alienation of Kafka of which Arendt's "The Human Condition" is only the throughway. Nonetheless sufficient amount of time and space will be spent on Rose, of whom I had no knowledge prior to my interaction with the writings of Barbara Galli.

"The Question of Language has returned" - thus starts the book of Goodman-Thau, and this is a question that doesn't trouble the stranger or the impaired, but rather those speakers of the German tongue (but not exclusively) that first became aware of the estranged world of speech, and set on an enterprise to create but only a philosophy of language but a science of linguistics itself. Our failure to "translate", that is to make any speech rendered comprehensible by anyone in the community of speakers contains meta-linguistic questions; those of identity and memory.

"I have not arrived at Judaism as the sublime Other of modernity - whether as the moment of divine excess from Kant's third Critique, as the living but worldless community from Rosenzweig, as the devastating ethical commandment from Levinas, as a trace and writing from deconstruction. Nor I have discovered Judaism waiting at the end of the end of philosophy, Judaism redivivus out of the ashes of the Holocaust: as the Jewish return into history for Fackenheim, as the issue of modernity for Bauman, and as the terrible essence of the West for Lacoue-Labarthe.

No. I write out of the discovery that both recent philosophy, in its turn to what I name new ethics, and modern Jewish philosophy, in its ethical self-representations, are equally uncomfortable with any specific reflection on modern law and the state, which they assimilate to the untempered domination of Western metaphysics.... Philosophy and Judaism want to proclaim a New Testament which will dispose of the broken promises of modernity"

"If I knew who or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish."

"Jerusalem against Athens has become the emblem for revelation against reason, for the hearing of the commandments against the search for first principles, for the love of the neighbour against explanation of the world, and for the prophet against the philosopher. When the common concern of Athens and Jerusalem for the establishment of justice, whether immanent or trascendent, is taken into consideration, these contrasts of form and method lose their definitive status. Yet, suddenly, in the wake of the perceived demise of Marxism, Athens, for a long time already arid and crumbling, has become an uncannily deserted city, haunted by departed spirits. Her former inhabitants, abandoning her justice as well as her reason, have set off on a pilgrimage to an imaginary Jerusalem, in search of difference or otherness, love or community, and hoping to escape the imperium of reason, truth or freedom.

This exodus, originally prepared by Nietzsche and Heidegger, had ben led over the suceeding decaded by thinkers across the spectrum of philosophy. From Buber and Rosenzweig to Weil, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Levinas, and Derrida, all are Jews with a deeply problematic relation to Judaism and to philosophy".

"The Future of Auschwitz"

"To Plato, doing wrong could only occur if one lacked knowledge of what was right - one could not intend wrong; to Aristotle, it was possible to intend and act rightly but unwittingly to incur wrong - a dilemma, but not one of malicious foresight. To modernity this dilemma of contingency acquires a systemtic twist: for, it is possible to mean well, to be caring and kind, loving one's neighbour as oneself, yet to be complicit in the corruption and violence of social institutions. Furthermore, this predicament may not correspond to, and maybe not be represented by, any availale politics or knowledge."

"Franz Rosenzweig - From Hegel to Yom Kippur"

"Walter Benjamin - Out of the sources of Modern Judaism"

"Architecture to Philosophy - the Post-Modern Complicity"

"Architecture after Auschwitz"