Notes on B. Galli & Rosenzweig

Plundering through the commentary on the cultural writings of Rosenzweig, I am startled to find more information that one would have desires; firstly the comparison between Rosenzweig hermeneutics and Gadamer seems to me of very little value to the issue, simultaneously I read the book of Allen Scult "Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An ontological encounter" which deals mainly with the early lectures on Aristotle and that often turns back to Gadamer for information and inspirtation.

Yet Barbara's writing "constructs" and "trusts" once again a bridge of impossibilities, that which connects the Anglo-Saxon thought with the German, and those of us who are entangled in the German even when writing in the English language seem out of touch with these realities. Her use of Steiner brings me to the fore of a rather Biblical question of hermeneutics. And Bible is precisely what one of the many channels of the New Thinking is concerned with. Let me turn for a second to the biblicist Aviva Gottlieb-Zornberg and Steiner, in order to return with a fresh light (paradoxically somebody explained to me last night how much there's to do with light in the idea of "Erloesung" in German) to Barbara and Rosenzweig.

Dr. Gottlieb-Zornberg speaks a few words on her methodology in one of the opening chapters of her book ("The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis) discussing Rashi:

"It seems to me that Rashi usually writes in such a multivalent way, transforming the reader's comprehension of the biblical text, even in his most -apparently- fantastic citations from the midrash. His commentary works as a dreamtext, suggesting many alternative -but not exclusive- facets of reality. In both the cases I have discussed, the feedback loop radiates a field of energy that includes both the reader, with his/her life situation, and the text. For to understand Isaac, Sarah and Rebecca through a Freudian reading of Rashi is, of course, to reunderstand ourselves.

This field, or circle of understanding, yields endless illumination. If at first the text seems familiar, while life is strange, needy of privileged guidance, at a later stage of reading the situation may be reversed: life acquires a new familiarity, a new intelligibility, in the light of Rashi's deployment of midrashic sources, while the original text suddenly seems alien, uncanny , needy of reinterpretation.

This dialectic of strangeness and familiarity is the gift of art; in t his sense, I would regard Rashi and his midrashic precursors as poets. George Steiner alerts us to this paradoxical effect of art: on the one hand "all representations, even the most abstract, infer a rendezvous with intelligibility or, at least, with a strangeness attenuated"; or on the other, "much of poetry, music and the arts aims to.... make strangeness in certain respects stranger". It is the tension between these two readings that underlies my readings of Genesis [Firstly she used hermeneutic dialectics, the quotation is from "Real Presences" of G. Steiner].

This cycle of desire, which is generated, paradoxically, by the experience of "not to have":

the priest desires. The philosopher desires
And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
It is desire at the end of winter, when
It observes the effortless weather turning blue
.....
It knows that what it has is what not
And throws it away like a thing of another time
As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.
-Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"


Now my familiarity with this reference is what helps to enter from the backside in a transparent and heavy gown the world of Galli, who herself plunders violently into Rosenzweig's intimacy by her attenuated but steel-like use of Steiner. She speaks about "translation" and it seems to me her direction to regard "translating" is not unlike that of Itamar Gruenwald (biblicist) when he defines "Midrash" as a of cognition, just as is philosophy, science and literature. In her opinion Rosenzweig's quest for "interaction" from within the possibilities of language itself, is shared by Steiner (who was born the year Rosenzweig died) as a rare voice in the intellectual world. She speaks through Steiner of a "breakdown between the correspondence of word and world".

"It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes of the very few genuine revolutions of the spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself" (Real Presences, G. Steiner)

Galli speaks about the commonality in both Rosenzweig and Steiner in that poets and music are the medium to the unprovable metaphysical. This idea is also close to Hannah Arendt from the well-known passage from the Denktagbuch, "Nur von den Dichtern erwarten wir Wahrheit (nicht von den Philosophen, von denen wir Gedachtes erwarten" and obviously doesn't distance itself very much from the distancing God of Kafka, like in that story he writes upon returning from the Yom Kippur services, in which a son received a sentence from his father to drown in water and performs it allegedly. The text used during the liturgy reads: "On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted". The precise choice of water seems to be an struggle against ontological freedom, idea that came to me after I read a part of Aviva's book, point at which one could say that Rosenzweig wasn't the only one who felt that Kafka wrote in the style of the same person who composed the Bible. But I won't be the one to expound upon this point, I think the idea of "the mighty waters" (from Aviva Zornberh) and "Aufstand der Wasser" (from Eveline Goodman-Thau) have more than sufficiently clarified the issue at stake.

In regard to music I'm not at all knowledgeable on Kafka but I can simply infere from what we know about him, in the case of Arendt the quest for music toward truth reminds of that story mentioned in her biography when she discussed views on illness with her students shortly before her death and she spoke about Nietzsche soothing beneath his sister playing the piano.

Galli claims that the relation among God, man, world (tantamout to Heidegger's "Divinities, Mortals, Earth, Heavens in "Building, Dwelling, Thinking", the triada is called "elements" by Rosenzweig and "freedoms" by Steiner, I believe Dr. Gottlieb-Zornberg is more comfortable with the latter because it adds a certain deliverance from hierarchies) is a requisite through time, "in order to arrive at truths", I'm in complete agreement with this idea, which calls for "encounters" that I believe aren't possible unless one's recovered the language that lost itself among "the crowds and groups" (Canetti) with the sounds of trains and artillery in between the two World Wars. Perhaps I might agree by detour with Steiner, on what truely defines modernity. I heard once T. Meyer speak about Simmel and say that the typically modern concept of "crisis" is what has given us modernity, in negative dialectics understood as that which is opposed to a philosophy of culture or a philosophy of human culture (this later phrasing is as old as Cassirer). But from within "thinking spaces" is perhaps this encounter not possible? One is forced to look into Buber and Rosenstock, the first I don't like and the second unfortunately I haven't "encountered" enough, but it's clear somehow from Rosenzweig attempts as a philosophy of speech in the Star.

In my opinion Galli sees Rosenzweig quest for translation as a transformation of the world, and for Steiner I believe it is a "becoming essentially", this of course reminds me too of Harvey Cox and the definition of humanity in terms of urbanization. Rosenzweig believes that all speech is a translation of reality. How is one then meant to translate when the reality has almost blurred away behind thick walls of time behind which our pasts and traditions hide? In answering this question I think one has to follow Galli's path toward Finkielkraut, Rose and Steiner; needless to mention despite of how removed they are from our traditions, at least for those of us with roots in Idealism and Existentialism.

I think I'll stop here for today, anyway I think that as long as I'm not intending to present a paper I could type these notes out in series with numbers, and I'm going to try to work on this only while I'm at the library because there's so much reading I owe to make, but nevertheless tonight I hope to write something about D., whom I've been missing for about a week. At least now I have the reference to W. Stevens. Perhaps tomorrow after the storming that awaits at CY I shall devote some more time to the cultural writings of R., it's truely amazing. The last week I've realized that most of those German-Jewish thinkers come in one only group, they can be inspected as though one were dissecting frogs, with the same prism but they all run in altogether different directions. They must be read in groups and never spoken about alone.