Midrash & Modernity

Women in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt, Agnes Heller, Eveline Goodman-Thau

In memory of the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt
100 Years 1906-2006

100 years might have seem rather insignificant to the Greek historians and the Jewish saints, no less to St. Augustine, Kant or Hegel who counted in the hundreds and the thousands before the advent of pocket-size machines that could perform advanced operations on the tens and hundreds of ciphers. For us those interesting artifacts seem to have a lot less relevance when it comes to speaking about our history; thereby we cannot speak of the world as we knew it, because we did not and rather say that such and such was the world as they knew it - speaking of Moses or Duns Scotus, of Hildegard Von Bingen or Spinoza.

To us some hundred years represent the advent of our world, one so terribly original and authentic that has no referential point to anything else, a world that in its comfortable double-seating stands alone and strayed from all possible worlds before and after, not because it is actually a palace of wonders but because altogether with the most remarkable achievements of mankind also contains the most unremarkably broken promises. We do not dare to call ourselves modern, because so did the Greeks in times of Pericles and the Encyclopedists. We go by the alias of "Sons of the Modern Age", just like some others before us went by "Sons of Israel" or "Daughters of Benedict". No matter who you are, it is important to have a father, isn't it? Even if his birth-control methods bewilder the most innocent eye and irresponsibly gives birth -and takes pride in the pangs of birth, to the murderer and the saint, to loving husband and respectable citizen who does not oppose dictatorship and terror or to animal-rights activists who do not hold a grudge before depraved governments and bureaucratic injustice. A father cannot be denied, not even if he has no second name of noble origin and as a first name he bears the generic one of "Modernity".

No doubt he is an open-minded father, who granted us deliverance from church and monarch alike, set us free. So free that even God is himself free of all liability. That, of course when one does not take notice of the old crowd of unbelievers and heretics replaced by the theologians claiming that God is dead. This free world was the one Hannah Arendt described with the old Chinese adage, "Interesting times are always a curse". The advent of the technological imagination shares a throne with genocide, the cure for malaria with the widespread of AIDS and equal-opportunity education with global hunger; no world more interesting than this, it is a fact. Once released from dead old God we bear all the responsibility upon our shoulders; like that Polish rabbi who scorned his son for mocking the heretic of the village who smoked on the Day of the Atonement and rode on the Shabbat. "Those who deliver themselves from God are the real heroes of the world, because they are themselves alone responsible for all suffering and joy". The prophet Jeremiah warns us that if we do not receive freedom by listening to the word of God, then we will receive it, yes, by sword, by famine, by hunger, by devastation, in the hands of the Kingdoms of the earth. Perhaps that was the freedom we received as a free gift from nowhere in the last hundred years that have fastened their pace more than any billion of years but have witnessed more changes and revolutions and horrors than any other century.

Another prophecy by Isaiah says that the Lord will release the captives and the heart-broken and will set them free with a "total opening of the eyes" and Hesiod foresaw that "in the end of times children will be born with their eyes wide-open". This openness can be at times so bright as to cause one blindness -none of the Israelites could bear the presence of the "light" amidst their midst, not being sure at all whether it is a curse or a blessing. The mystery of blindness permeates the earliest memories of humankind: The rabbi who put his eyes out of the sockets to avoid the temptation of Satan in the guise of a woman, in the Biblical story of Lot the men of Sodom gathered before the gates of the house pursuing the angels and "they struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door"; the miracle of Jesus healing the blindness of an old man or the cycle of Oedipus in the Greek tragedy. In the Greek world Eros -God of Love, was the first-born Light that is responsible for the coming into being and ordering of all things in the cosmos and is often shown blind or blindfolded; he was also called ελευτεριος (eleutherios), "the liberator". The poetess Sappho often described him as "bittersweet" and "cruel".

Now Eros shakes my soul,
A wind on the mountain falling on the oaks (Sappho)

The Book of Deuteronomy reads "The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindess and confusion of mind". It is this madness in fact what best characterizes our world,
an Exodus from the philosopher's explanations of the world and truth to the truths and revelations of the prophet; the philosopher can no longer explain the world if he is not a prophet of some sort. A world in which we no longer make attempts at being civilized or enlightened, the major concern of this sombre age is "learning anew to be human". The last hundred years experienced the atomic explosion, the concentration camp, the technological imagination, totalitarian regimes swearing an oath to wipe out the earth at their will, environmental pollution, the liberalization of the sexes, and many other "constructions" in the social dynamics that claim an ancient past but are simply reactions at the root of modern man's discontent, the discontent with modernity which is in itself the most important creative driving force of modern man. Athens became arid and desolated and a sudden emigration forced the prophets into a state of permanent alert and no slumber, "for the guard of Israel will never sleep nor slumber", only taking into account Israel acquired a new father. The prophets awoke from their millenarian sleep and summoned the academics and the politicians and the citizens emulating Socratic discussions and summoning interlocutors! But most of their interlocutors soaked in the blood of the concentration camps and the revolutions, they fell into the oblivion triggered by the opportunist who can only find grace in another of his kind. It only took a hundred years for humans to do what God in a second did in the Midrash: "To create worlds and destroy them". But a hundred human years to a second of God? Perhaps this is actually the meaning of emancipation in the fuller sense; an ability to destroy.

All of us were born long after this happened, without enough time for a wink of the eye and a reminder of that world that was destroyed by the imagination of modern man, by modernity - the human condition of wanting to repair the frailty of the world by escaping the earth, by overcoming the human, the condition and the world. Perhaps believing we could be cured from the human condition in a past world or in a future world, but in the meantime not having any other one to live in. All this has been pondered in academic halls and newspapers and taxi cabs and supermarket lines, all this has been discussed and memorials erected and countries liberated, children adopted and opportunities given. Not all the promises of modernity have failed, perhaps only our expectations did. But our blindness remains.

That is where three Jewish women, contemporaries of one another have left us a message in the language of the prophets but with the words of the philosophers, those we can grasp in our limited imagination. These women were by no means philosophers voluntarily, in our generation one does not become a philosopher because he thinks he is servicing humankind with it. They do not want to proclaim a New Testament of Bible and philosophy to mend the modern world we received also by no means voluntarily. They do not write out of certainty or sureness of the self, it is completely unnecessary; they write out of moments of anger and despair that have no names -for in the Creation everything had a name, every creature was named by man. They are not rebelling against reason or trying to halt the crumbling structures of Athens. These women lived through persecutions and terror, regimes and smell the breath of death from close-by, it did by no means turn them into saintly martyrs or exemplary novelties from a paleontological collection at the museum of Western antiquity; but it gave them an obligation.

An obligation to understand, a task as instrumental as life itself, to understand not in order to provide the answers necessary to mend the world's frailty, but rather to understand that this frailty is what makes the world what it resembles now and that one must learn to live with the discontent, because if there is anybody at all who will write the next chapter of history that will follow modernity, it is certainly us. They have not come to cure us from our blindness, but to remind us it was once possible to speak and see. Not claiming a return to that world of the past, but to realize that the possibilities of humankind supersede and overcome ultimately the technological. They're teachers of the invisible, that which to us has become so detached and impossible; the utilitarian claim that only the tangible must be of any importance by which the technological imagination has replaced humanity with terror and humane behaviors by bureaucracy and despotism. One a political philosopher, the other a social philosopher and the third a religious philosopher.

The epicenter of their concerns is not simply philosophy or that new branch in the library's catalog called "Biblical thought", but unearthing the long-forgotten faculty of thinking which the inability to move among invisible space typical of the modern world, turned into ideology and philosophy. It is clear to most people to do that in order to act one must have an ideology or a philosophy, but what about thinking? Did we forget that the consequence of thinking are action and politics? Not the consequences of ideology and philosophy? That the world is something that must be loved instead of survived?

This is where their real worth is, their love's work is philosophy. The care of the irresponsible father was replaced by the guilt of the caring mother, one sin replaced by an epiphany. Philosophy more than anything else, even more than a desire and despair is an act of love; this notion being as old as both Plato and God. To love is always a dialectical damage, it might be merciful or it might be merciless. Yet this dialectical possibility is available only to the beloved, the newborn and the world. Not to the philosopher, who sees the fruits of his labor in the invisible structures built upon a world already old, they do not want to market any new commodities for ideas have existed for as long as humankind has. Philosophy is not a profession or an academic degree, it is what you realize you have when you journey along this Exodus: The realization of what you lack after you thought, then comes the desire; so said the poet Wallace Stevens: "The priest desires... the philosopher desires and not to have is the beginning of desire".

The work of love is the thinker's solitude -not his loneliness, in which the free beloved -the world, sees the light that blinds and the loving philosopher is bound to his condition. But as long as the thinker isn't lonely, as long as he can discuss and experience he can overcome even his own philosophy and throw himself into life even if that means death in earthly terms. The choice of philosophy is irreversible, and the struggle against the prophet runs along this thread. The philosopher is trying to unearthen the real world but the prophet is warning him that he won't be able to live in it. But the philosopher insists and he finds himself chained to the abyss, because the reafirmation of his individual freedom requires a source of truth, which to the philosopher is already impossible and in his interpretation of meaning he has died himself to life, but in that sense he's become deaf to the prophet therefore bound to see everything by himself without an audience, and in fact he's the real survivor.

To tell the work of Love is a metaphysics of the experience, in which the philosopher uncalls himself for his quest and in doing so experiences the negation that feeds him life. Midrash is the work of the lover and philosophy is the result of the beloved's care, of the beloved's ignorance and poignant questioning. The philosopher doesn't want to philosophize, but he's left with no other option. Because the beloved is not always present to construct together worlds anew to protect both from the mighty waters. The beloved is a free citizen and the philosopher is the slave. Philosophy is the prayer of Kafka, Benjamin and Arendt - attentiveness. The philosopher isn't satisfied with it, he wants to capture the photograph of our earthly life and redeem it before us. Freedom lives in a prayerless world, that the philosopher rejects. He wants lively discussions and dialogues, because he knows God created the world by acts of speech and not by translations, but he is unable to speak. In a sense he is only granted to love alone, and in doing so all philosophy is already antidemocratic and elitist. On account of that the philosopher wants to think, but he cannot do so alone therefore he calls upon himself the three freedoms; he envies the prophets. He needs the beloved to write the Midrash of Love, but the beloved doesn't need him because he's himself already free, therefore thoughtless, irresponsible and evil. The lover loves his evil because it reminds him of good, there's a presence but no real essence. The philosopher loves art because in Greek it is acting and creating, but he is unable to do so for as long as he is loving in philosophy, he must radically think instead. But it is this illusion of love what creates the narrative, the philosopher and the philosophy. This is the work of love, to unearthen language, as to be able to love not the beloved alone but in general. The beloved is jealous and chains himself to protect his love from the waters, he cheats Eve and turns all knowledge again into falsehood and deceive, by answering questions no one asked. The lover runs after the beloved in motionless silence, the beloved answers in impossibilities.

World and philosopher have chosen themselves for philosophy, the former criminally and the latter consequentially. Their love's work is writing the Midrash of Love which becomes impossible in translation, speech is necessary, but their love's work is in itself the Midrash of Love. Not only the political philosopher loved the world, also the social philosopher and the theologian love the world. Their words keep echoeing to us in the mouth of the poetess Zelda:

"Your flitting eyes-
Smal birds sipping nectar.

When you wept,
The King did not hear.

When you fell,
The world didn't revert
To void-and-chaos.

Mephiboshet, you dreamt
Of a more innocent friendship.

You abhorred the wisdom
Of the ancient serpent,

O son of Jonathan." (1977).

George Steiner

"Any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence".

"One of the radical spirits in current thought has defined the task of this sombre age as "learning anew to be human."

"All serious art, music and literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life". Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world. Aesthetic means embody concentrated, selective interactions between the constraints of the observed and the boundless possibilities of the imagined. Such formed intensity of sight and of speculative ordering is, always, a critique. It says that things might be (have been, shall be) otherwise.

But literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain."

"A real presence is a critique in action". "Criticism makes the past text a present presence".

Morning

The mornings come often accompanied by bloated epiphanies, by a vacuum in the air that is followed by a particularly white smell. Mornings are always great disappointment for the moderns, what separates the divine and the profane, the deeds of criminals, sin and life, in the mornings we must hide in urbanity wearing faces of decay, weary from themselves.

It comes in the form of an antithesis that for the philosopher means only despair, with acts of speech that create hindered by an empty odor of freedom, by a negation. We awaken to the artifacts of the world and experience the democratic effect of that technological imagination meant to constitute the liberties of democracy, whereas the philosopher has experienced this is a world by all means antidemocratic in which the thinker's sermon only resembles the negation of reality, the innermost necessity and rather desperate crave to distance oneself from the world of visible phenomena. A man searches for the cross, he wants to escape the powerful nature of reality, he wants to escape life because then answers might be given to him. His flight is no longer possible, he is faced with Kant's dead nature.

Last night I imagined again our Midrash, in which he sat idly by the dim light of candles at the table with his wife and sang Biblical verses to his children; he was still young and strong with the knowing smile of silence. It was Shabbat and the modest dishes would come in the disguise of earthly palaces, of timely palaces. He would cover his head to give his God due respect; the small young family sings in the dim light "... and he shall summon freedom...."; the fresh smell of tears, of deceive and of a philosopher's love hangs in the air and hovers on the soup plates but it cannot be noticed, because death has a particular likeness to it, and whoever hearkens to the God of Israel knows well his sentence has been written, written in the New Year and sealed in the Atonement Day.

That smell reminds one of contempt, the contempt of bodiliness... of intimacy, the closeness of a flight that surrounds one like pain circumvents the flesh and turns it ripe for love. The philosopher has allegedly deserted all hope, he only lives on the house of memory and language; in a world fed with all possible deceives.

In the other end of the city as friends remind each other of Shabbat and sing the bride's songs just like she does with husband and son.... The philosopher remains aloof with the physicality of his dread, of his body, he aches. And he reminds himself that Easter is not like Shabbat, he dreams about the Passion of the Lord, not because he hopes for anything but because he knows, he remembers.

He remembers the accounts of wisdom and their protagonist Jesus, and do not we all yearn for him and for Socrates? Even in Jerusalem, we remember them well. The philosopher can only think of that protestation that turned him into a useless figure, into a liturgical paradox, into a prayer that finds often the deaf ears of the modern world, into a prayer that has chosen itself to remain aloof from the heavenly gates, into a prayer that translates itself into the loneliest of all possible worlds. The philosophers yearns for Easter again. Lover and beloved are both survivors, like Anje... mute survivors.

τα εργα

When I started thinking about the Midrash of Love a question attacked me: How is it possible to write a Midrash without a previous conversation, and because the conversation is all about translating I thought my enterprise was apparently much bigger than anything I saw before, I presumed that this Midrash should be written in a time line, therefore additions would be made all along the way. It is interesting I decided to start my Midrash with "he shall summon freedom" because once the freedom has been summoned and we've been granted entire responsibility for the world imminent chaos ensued.

I could only think about this while I made love to him, justly deciding that negatively speaking I created him out of a Midrashic character. The prophet tells us revealing things about this freedom, pointing out the words of God in that as much as the freedom would have been granted to us gratuitiously had we listened, now the conditions have changed. The freedom will be bequeathed to us by the sword and the plague. We will be thrown into the abyss. And only he shall summon freedom.

I said previously philosophy is an act of love, and philosophizing is the work of love. The modern thinker has an unsatiable need to love, therefore he allegedly endeavours to acquire a language to construct, to found and therefore to have the possibility to love. Freedom is only a foundation for the abyss, for blindness. In seeking meaning and therefore being entirely modern the philosopher is denying this freedom by writing a different narrative, a narrative of both thing and world. This denial of freedom is the quest for a foundation, and once this foundation is construed the philosopher will be able to love. He does not want to be free, because this causes him vertigo and blindness, he wants to love without a negation, he wants to love with the beloved clearly drawn before his eyes. But in wanting to see the philosopher is also sinning before God and is therefore condemned to the obscurity of twilight, and perhaps only the beloved can see because he's been set free. Philosophy wants to deny the foundation by eloquently speaking about it and seeking refuge in the vicious power of language, but as soon as he achieves it he realized he's found the Kafkian Archimedean point, to be found only in order to use it against himself.

The good as ultimate commodity resembles the liberal theory, it is boring. Therefore the philosopher can only affirm his essence by means of art, by reflecting about art without being an artist. His reflections conduce him to think that he must withdrawn in order to become Greek-godly even when this is scorned by the prophet. The philosopher then turns to seek evil, in which he finds the art he is seeking, the art of life. In the callous smile of evil the philosopher achieves the view of the prophet... that of postponing the present by the narrative of the future, but because it is modernity this future is simply a narrative and therefore a mode of cognition like Midrash, art, philosophy and science. Evil means for the philosopher life whereas good means only truth, and in his search for meaning he is a lot more content with the view of redeemed life than with that of a redeeming truth which has ceased to interest him.

In trying to achieve life out of the sources of philosophy, the philosopher turns into a philosopher of death, because mortality is the only source of philosophy and this lacking in vitality is the only motivation for creativity. Had the philosopher hearkened to the prophet he would be safely grounded in his idlesome conformism, and a social conformist can never make a philosopher. Life is the only motivation behind this philosophy, even when turning towards death could be the only way to achieve this life. The philosopher thinks his death over and over, whereas the prophet has only gospels. The good news do not satisfy the philosophical mind, and to my demise my Midrash of Love can be written only by the Greeks, because Jerusalem has lost the power to charm the stupefied humanity and in order to build her anew one must journey along the Greeks in order to find the throughway to philosophy so that the exit to revelation can be located anew. The philosopher can never learn to act in Athens, he can only learn about the value of the good in an Archimedean way, only in order to reject it and use this negation against himself.

The work of love is the thinker's solitude, in which the free beloved sees the light and the loving philosopher is bound to his condition. But as long as the thinker isn't lonely, as long as he can discuss and experience he can overcome even his own philosophy and throw himself into life even if that means death in earthly terms. The choice of philosophy is irreversible, and the struggle against the prophet runs along this thread. The philosopher is trying to unearthen the real world but the prophet is warning him that he won't be able to live in it. But the philosopher insists and he finds himself chained to the abyss, because the reafirmation of his individual freedom requires a source of truth, which to the philosopher is already impossible and in his interpretation of meaning he has died himself to life, but in that sense he's become deaf to the prophet therefore bound to see everything by himself without an audience, and in fact he's the real survivor.

To tell the Midrash of Love is a metaphysics of the experience, in which the philosopher uncalls himself for his quest and in doing so experiences the negation that feeds him life. Midrash is the work of the lover and philosophy is the result of the beloved's care, of the beloved's ignorance and poignant questioning. The philosopher doesn't want to philosophize, but he's left with no other option. Because the beloved is not always present to construct together worlds anew to protect both from the mighty waters. The beloved is a free citizen and the philosopher is the slave. Philosophy is the prayer of Kafka, Benjamin and Arendt - attentiveness. The philosopher isn't satisfied with it, he wants to capture the photograph of our earthly life and redeem it before us. Freedom lives in a prayerless world, that the philosopher rejects. He wants lively discussions and dialogues, because he knows God created the world by acts of speech and not by translations, but he is unable to speak. In a sense he is only granted to love alone, and in doing so all philosophy is already antidemocratic and elitist. On account of that the philosopher wants to think, but he cannot do so alone therefore he calls upon himself the three freedoms; he envies the prophets. He needs the beloved to write the Midrash of Love, but the beloved doesn't need him because he's himself already free, therefore thoughtless, irresponsible and evil. The lover loves his evil because it reminds him of good, there's a presence but no real essence. The philosopher loves art because in Greek it is acting and creating, but he is unable to do so for as long as he is loving in philosophy, he must radically think instead. But it is this illusion of love what creates the narrative, the philosopher and the philosophy. This is the work of love, to unearthen language, as to be able to love not the beloved alone but in general. The beloved is jealous and chains himself to protect his love from the waters, he cheats Eve and turns all knowledge again into falsehood and deceive, by answering questions no one asked. The lover runs after the beloved in motionless silence, the beloved answers in impossibilities.

Both have chosen themselves for philosophy, the former criminally and the latter consequentially. Their love's work is writing the Midrash of Love which becomes impossible in translation, speech is necessary, but their love's work is in itself the Midrash of Love.

Freedoms

The freedoms of the world is how I've allegedly decided to name Rosenzweig's "elements", with a double narrative in mind... in one hand I take the narrative of history from the Bible, it's memory and in the other hand the narrative of technology from Heidegger, it's hope. The doubly-binded source of humanity against the backdrop of the doubly-binded nature of modernity. Let's see how this hermeneutic compartmentalization into freedoms fits into our definition of modernity.

The modern world is different from the pre-modern in that it is founded not in traditions but in freedom, whereas freedom itself cannot be a foundation for anything, at least not for anything secure. Hegel and Heidegger provide us with a model based on language - the foundation in itself when achieved is only replaced by the abyss; the German is a lot clearer by phrasing "Grund" [foundation] as the forerunner of "Abgrund" [abyss] which literally means "out of the foundation" or "from the foundation". If the elements are taken out of Rosenzweig's mathematical model of "elements" and translated into freedoms, in order to deliver them from hierarchies in the narrative then God, man and world as freedoms on their own right are empty foundations, in that their isolation cause them to be become merely an abyss for themselves, a vertiginous abyss in which by searching each other those freedoms negate freedom itself and modernity, their denial of freedom comes in the form of quest for meaning opposed to quest for truth. It is a question of representations and not of identities. This hasn't solved my problem.

The problem lies in that the paradox of freedom contains in itself the paradox of truth, namely in the disguise of the possibilities already alienated when we define modernity as an impossibility. The impossibility to mend the frailty of the world turns both positively and negatively represented in thought thus: Positively the impossibility opens an accessible throughway to modes of interpretation, a desperate need for an exit. Negatively it is a struggle between Bergson and Hegel, one by claiming that the possibility of negation does not exist in nature and the other that negation is actually the structure of thinking that gives us modernity. Rightly Arendt said that modern men have a gap with their world. The possibility that both Bergson and Hegel can argue is already a symptom and a consequence of the modern imagination. What we're facing here is that my question of freedoms isn't a question, but a paradox that produces questions, by the sheer force of necessity historically speaking and by the sheer force of utilitarianism technologically speaking. This would have been by no means possible without Kierkegaard and the imperative necessity of choices, the choice of yourself as a philosopher, the choice of yourself as an individual which has become modernly possible. The quest for individuality is part of that Protestantion that foreran Modernity. But the protestation it in itself paradoxical in the sense that it is not limited, it can protest itself and the negation of itself, therefore it has in itself the ability of creation altogether with the ability of destruction. The individual can no longer behold traditions because he is no longer part of the community, he is by himself. This condition is what gives me the opportunity to make radical choices whether neutral or good or bad, the deliberate independence of choice already keeps him from being able to conversate, speech is no longer a possibility. It is all translation.

Choices

I've been thinking about the choice of philosophy, not of being chosen as a philosopher by the public faces but rather of choosing yourself as a philosopher; this was inspired by reading the interviews with Agnes Heller, that great thinker. Once you choose yourself as a philosopher it seems you've radically made one of the most terrible and fateful choices in your life, because this is one you are not allowed to regret. The modern version of the story might date back to Kant when he said he always returned to philosophy like one returns to a concubine after a quarrel. In a more general sense this spirit might be as old as the Greek world, as old as the first philosophers who burdened by the oligarchy and the different "official" religions sought to defy their pre-rational explanations of the world, in fact enacting the first and most important intellectual revolution of Western history.

No matter how longingly we turn towards Jerusalem, in choosing ourselves for philosophy we remain faithful to the spirit of the Classics; this desire to seek world explanations out of nothingness because of the simple craving to do so is an entirely Greek enterprise. Julius Guttman explained us how the Jewish people did not start to philosophize out of a desire to do so, they simply joined forced with the intellectual traditions of the time and their echoes can be hard to this very day, but philosophizing wasn't a natural alternative for the Jew like it was for the Greek. Absurd enough is that this paradox is not far from the paradox of freedom, one that not only has no solution but does not seek to find one.

Modernity endows us with a different motivation for philosophy - perhaps you can call it Angst, existential despair. Once all the traditions have been destructed and deconstructed to make space for freedom this has become the only foundation on which everything rests, but in itself freedom is not a foundation for anything, is not a goal. The paradoxicality of freedom has been in our minds since Kant, who first discovered the lethal powers of this force. The philosopher of modernity does not seek rational explanations for the world, since the truths inherent to it lie already shattered before our eyes; he seeks a language in which he can communicate and overcome his alienation, the philosopher seeks a language that will permit him to love directly, "language as the house of being" (Heidegger). The modern philosopher yearns for Socrates and Jesus, he yearns for communicability and from within his alienation any form of communicability is translation in itself. The idea was perhaps not new to Rosenzweig and Benjamin but they actualized the tension before us. For the Jewish philosopher there's obviously no natural home in the philosophical language, because it is not home for the Greek philosopher himself.

In Modernity as both philosophy and Judaism attempt to mend the world Athens and Jerusalem both share a sense of estrangement, they share an impossibility. To the same degree that Modernity allows the possibility of Judaism and philosophy to communicate, it also enhances the danger of the alienation from one another. Agnes always says that the modern imagination posseses a double-bind, in which lie its greatest potential and its danger. The fact that traditions no longer exist and that thinking is subject to the pull of the abyss that freedom leaves when turned into a foundation leaves Judaism and philosophy in an equally difficult position.

Were it not for Plato I think perhaps I should found distaste in philosophy since the very beginning. I did start choosing myself for philosophy as the product of an education, but rather of facing Heidegger both as a Jew and a reader of the Classical antiquity. It was Heidegger who convinced me of philosophy and with his hand I opened the gate of Athens, through which I entered as a visitor from Jerusalem - unknowingly. In my glorious return to the Jerusalem of the prophets I entered it as a Greek nihilist, as an stupefier of the human, trading the ethical for the sake of the beautiful as the supreme good. During my adolescence I read extensively Holderlin more than anybody else and wrote childish poems in which I embraced myself as the son of Endymion. In an unknowing way I was myself a critic of the historical imagination disattaching myself from it, in order to create a world of things, a technological one. In interpreting Holderlin I returned to Heidegger, criticizing the Romantics and naturally aiding Modernity along my threads.

In growing up I chose myself for philosophy, and only this year I came to comprehend my doubly-binded tragedy; I chose myself for "in-betweens", which could be translated into a logic of entirely human terms, but biblically speaking I made a choice for both solitude and loneliness both of which this era enabled in the modern mind. It is a choice of love, the work of love.

Agnes Heller - Logics of Modernity

The modern world is based on freedom, but freedom cannot become a foundation. It must necessarily stand on freedom, because it is the product of destruction and deconstruction of all foundations, accordingly modernity in itself has no foundations.

In both Hegel and Heidegger the 'Grund' is not a foundation, for it only opens the 'Abgrund', that is the abyss. Freedom cannot found, therefore the modern world must reinvent itself constantly. The constructed models of the modern world are abstract in the Hegelian sense therefore the narrative that realizes them does not ring true for more than a few decades.

The two constituents of modernity which together constitute the essence of modernity are the dynamics of modernity and the modern social arrangements. The dynamic created the social arrangement - this dynamic consists of the constant and ongoing querying and testing of general concepts; the true, the good, the just.

Modernity, according to Hegel is the only world that is not destroyed, but maintained and revitalized by negation. For this reason it constitutes the end of history. Going against Hegel, Heller argues that in the 20th century modernity can break through the limits of the modern social arrangement and negate modernity itself. The dynamics of modernity can run as nihilism and even end up as fundamentalism.

The paradox of freedom cannot be solved.

The two binds of the modern imagination: the technological and the historical.

The age of technological revolutions is also the age of hermeneutics.

The three logics of modernity:
-Logic of Technology
-Logic of the Functional Allocation of Social Positions
-Logic of Political Power

Logic of Technology: technological imagination is future-oriented, it includes faith in progress.

Logic of Functionality: "There's a gap between the life of modern man and his world" (H. Arendt). In order to have a world one needs to become dettached from the technological imagination, not to abandon it but to create a distance from it.

Arendt would have said that animals have life but no world. In the modern 'animal-kingdom' (Hegel), however, men have become specialized just like animals, but very much against their essence, their spiritual nature. When human beings have lives but no world, they are not living up to their spiritual potential.

Culture is the most accesible contemporary institution of the modern imagination.

Logic of Political Power: Historical imagination appears here as both tradition and ideology.

Modern life, anymore than life in general is not a problem to be solved. Many representative conflicts of modern man do not revolve around the allocation of resources. They emerge from the general malaises of modernity, from the loss of meaning in life, of a secure life path, of faith, of spirituality. The dominating role of the technological imagination itself resucitates the historical imagination.

Men in search for meaning turn to the historical imagination, they restore ancient customs, they discover ancient enemies, recollect ancient wounds which seemed to have sealed.

If one were to approach the limits (of modernity) closely in politics chaos would ensue... for fear of the total destruction of tradition one either establishes limits (in constituting liberties) or turns to fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a reaction to the paradoxicality of freedom and of truth.

The modern world needs ideologies, yet it also needs critiques of ideologies because ideologies can bring about a closure, in which a world of the historical imagination becomes isolated from the others and also from other logics of modernity. The abscence of ideology would mean that actors, in particular political ones, are left to be enframed by the technological imagination alone.

The double bind of modernity is also a double pull. There is a constant tension between the two imaginary institutions of modernity, the future-oriented and the past-oriented, the problem-solving oriented and the interpretation-oriented, the thing-oriented and the world-oriented, the infinite and the finite. It is in this tension - by means of this tension - that the paradox of freedom is maintained as a living paradox.

Among all the political forms that the moderns have invented totalitarianism exemplified the most extreme form of the double bind. The paradox of freedom disappears, together with freedom itself, in the attempt to unite both forms of the imagination, to totalize them. These attempts failed, at least in Europe. But the totalisation of the imagination is still being attempted.

The double bind is both the greatest danger and the saving power of modernity.

To blame the technological imagination alone for the totalitarian extermination machinery follows from one-sided view of Heidegger's concept of enframing. For something other than the technological imagination must set the task of eliminating a group of people. The problem becomes technological as a result of the translation of an ideological system, an ideologically constructed world of the historical imagination. It is perhaps true that the technological imagination on its own can also become lethal for modernity. The historical imagination on tis own, however, can scarcely threaten modernity.

The double bind is one of the major manifestations of the modern paradox of freedom, the paradox of truth included. The danger of totalitarianism looms large whenever the two binds are united and pointed in one direction. Liberalism and democracy if joined together can perhaps offer spaces in which they can coexist in tension. This is not a goal, but a practice to be kept alive.

From:
Agnes Heller
"The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern Imagination"
Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study
2000

Definitions of Modernity

Richard Hooker:

Modernity - the sense that the present is discontinuous with the past - is an illusion and this illusion creates modernity itself. What has changed is social memory; we have disconnected most of our practices and ideas from our collective memory of their origins and meanings.

Frederick M. Dolan:
(Hannah Arendt & the Political Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth)

Modernity, its secularism notwithstanding, just is the attempt to trascend the human world, from the conviction, presumably that there is no other way to remedy its frailty.

George Steiner:
(Real Presences)
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.

Hannah Arendt:
(The Human Condition)
Modernity is the struggle of men to escape the earth, the quintessence of the human condition.

A Genealogy of Betrayal

Once again as I wrote previously it took me the whole day to start writing, because I fear losing the oblique angle of the photograph during the entanglements and then simple astray into comtemplative thoughts. That's not what I'm looking for, I'm rather searching attentiveness - the ultimate form of prayer; not just the way in which Hannah and Franz prayed, but even Moses himself - his turning asides. The secret consists in maintaining different oblique angles of the same photograph, angles that are based on multi-sourced memory and not in hope, therefore it is much more of a re-understanding than it is hoping, the story must be told as a striving - using the narrative to postpone the present with the future, not to foresee the future in the present.

The future of the narrative I envisage isn't that of an Aristotelian kind, it isn't logical; by that I mean that the future doesn't necessarily exclude the possibilities of the present and the past as in a true-and-false syllogism, it co-exists with them sharing a thread of time, instead of sharing a space. In a sense I'm returning to Kafka through Benjamin and Adorno, because the magnificence of the tale lies on that particularly human detail-recounting that is the only story-telling that gifts you with a universal perspective, by that I mean the perspective of the dettachment from the human condition - this is possible only by looking at our earthliness either from outside the earth or from the "angle" of a redeemed life.

Because I''ve been dwelling on the question of translation and language, I'll follow Rosenzweig in that all language is a translation, in fact speech itself is a translation of a strangling, of that strangling between a word and a world that can't bear one another. Because of that I can't write the story myself, because it's too unreal to be described by the imagination, it can only be pictured by a narrative of the present. At the same time that it can't be narrated by a first person or by a third person but in a dialogical form, the story must be dialogically hermeneutic for it is the mending of a rationale that can't be provided, therefore it must be replaced with Agadah.

The story can't be told by the characters themselves, therefore the narrator needs to engage the voices of other people, of those who did have a language and interweave them withal so that the voices of the story can be heard only from the autobiographical details that can't be provided. They have been obscured by the demise of speech, they are hindered by shame and outrage, pain even. This is a way similar to that in which Arendt wrote the biography of Rahel Varnhagen, it was an account of Rahel's mind and world, therefore the identification must be so intense as to trascend time and space yet remaining chained to both, the only way in which language will have the vivifying power of mystery, in that twofold source; otherwise its function will be diminished to such an extent that it will be no longer necessary.

The resounding voices of my account are drawn from St. Augustine, Hannah Arendt, Gillian Rose and Milan Kundera; yet they only constitute the mute voices beneath the silence of the Scripture. This is meant to take advantage of a resource that the Jewish Sages have used throughout the times in a unique blend of originality and despair: To confront God against himself, rewriting God and reunderstanding themselves on the way. The voices of my account must be biblical. Must be voices headed towards death, but they shall not be dead themselves whereas the writing itself isn't about death, but about love. Here I return to Rosenzweig to say that only death is as powerful as love and viceversa, in this sense the awareness of death or the actual facing of it, the realizable fear is what makes the love mesmerizing in its truth, truth only to the extent that it becomes a narrative and a personal impossibility. One has to recognize the two sources of humanity, the mortality at the root of poetry and the arts together with the natality inherent in action and that is only negatively represented, by despairingly looking at the photograph without being able to move within, except by means of speech. A speech that is silent and in itself unable to move in invisible spaces.

My thesis with the writing should be that Modernity is that Midrash of Love that can't be told, a Midrash that resembles the face of God in that it is a distancing that brings nearness, it is a distancing that provokes sensuous and bodily unconcealment; this unconcealmente has only two forms, the from of truth and the form of love. The eternal return to the oldest philosophical question of Athens, but that nowadays can be pondered only in Jerusalem, only by the prophets and not the poets, but a poetization of the world. A poetization that is meant to make the world a little unreal as to make it a place fit to be dwelled at. That's why this poetization needs the Scripture's travelling, firstly in order to gain the sharp depth of movement, and secondly in order to become humanized. Contemplation against attentiveness.

The story isn't an account, but an actualization of life, in the same way Rosenzweig thought Kafka's concepts being thoughts in the same way the Bible was. The photograph must have several angles in colour and two angles in black and white, two angles of tears through laughter, two angles of pain and joy, of fearful struggle uphill and liberation. It must pickpocket the characters through their very bones and nude them before the Scripture, so that they can be vanquished and ransacked and raped by mute speech in order to remake themselves. It is a story about an irony that doesn't cause laughter, about a betrayed world. A world that is imaginatively being recreated in reality as it is being written in truth, but truth can only be concealed, so that the story will contradict itself in that it should never be spoken of. It's a "Rede" about silences. It's a story in which both body and soul must write, or not write at all. It isn't a story about hope, it's only about memory.

The tale can't mend the character's world, only make it liveable. It can't provide explanations or answers, it can only justify the conspicuousness and the loss at words when it comes to moral judgement, it's a tale about groundlessness. It's a tale about Shabbat, about mornings, about a dying writer who loves, about a loving husband who dies without either living or dying. It's a story about the body.

These will be companions: St. Augustine's "Confessions", H. Arendt's "Love & Augustine", M. Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", Kafka's "The Castle", E. Goodman-Thau's "Miriam", G. Rose's "Love's Work", L. Shestov's "Athens & Jerusalem" and the Bible with Rashi, the Midrash and songs of Shabbat. It's a triple dreamweaving-text to contain and constrain by chains the dreamweaving itself with possible realities and photographs.

(sketches) דרור יקרא

דרור יקרא לבן עם בת
וינצרכם כמו בבת
נעים שמכם ולא ישבת
שבו ונוחו ביום שבת

He shall summon freedom
For the son and the daughter
He shall guard over you
As the beloved one
Pleasant are your names
They shall never cease
For in the seventh day
They shall dwell and rest
(free translation is mine)

Last night when I was in the middle, I lost my post on the Midrash of Love because of some power failure, and then unlike other times I thought perhaps I'll write now entirely something else, but without deleting the previous stekch. I want to speak obviously about the philosophers, the connection between Rose and Arendt and Rosenzweig in the thread of St. Augustine I believe is the pivotal focus of my idea, which is the writing of a Midrash that can't be told, that of the philosopher's Love in Modernity. Because the writing itself is a "Love's Work" it isn't meant to be a theoretical essay, and I believe it will be ready by the end of next week or even a couple of days from now. The translation into English of the "piyut" is mine, and it is in itself the text in which I want to base my writing on, for this reason I will necessarily rely on a great deal of Jewish literature to be interwoven with Athens and from within the wombs of their belligerance to write my Midrash about... about that. I start to see Aviva's idea of the dreamtext and I believe I hinted at it previously when I spoke about dreamweaving, possible realities and photographs. The choice of the "piyut" wasn't a deliberate one, after I listened to it last night from a song of an Indie-New Era band from Britain that sings Hebrew music in a very original way I asked my friend about that song, and the people in our company informed me that it is one of the songs for Shabbat day.

I found the piyut in my after-meals blessing book, and thought it would be much more personal to start writing about the Midrash of Love from a piyut rather than from St. Augustine, in particular because this piyut doesn't have a Midrash. Other explanations will come later; I'm quite certain of what I want to write in the end but I'm a lot more certain about my willingness to journey there.

Biblical sources for דרור:

דרור is a biblical word almost unique in its kind, coming an unused root (very ancient) meaning to move rapidly, [Greek]; freedom, deliverance, spontaneous outflow, clarity, libery, pure. The root is undoubtedly דרר. I can think of several Greek words with a similar root (as used by Plato) that denote movement, which usually means "through the air". According to Rashi (this interpretation is rather allegoric) the word is derived from דור "to dwell", this immediately reminds me of Heidegger and Lessing (from the essay "Dwelling, Building, Thinking"): a person may then reside wherever he pleases. According to Ibn Ezra it is the name of the swallow which sings while free, but, when captive, refuses to eat until it dies. Nachmanides connects it with דור "generation", as in Ecclesiastes. It is mentioned as a "swallow" in Psalms and Proverbs; there's some responsa literature of rather modern times on whether it is a bird fit to eat. Rashi doesn't seem to provide more information that the Bible commentary does, which relies often on him.

TORAH

Leviticus 25:10
וקדשתם את שנת החמשים שנה וקראתם דרור בארץ לכל-ישביה יובל הוא תהיה לכם ושבתם איש אל-אחוזתו ואיש אל-משפחתו תשבו.

"You shall sanctify the fiftieth year, and proclaim freedom through the land to all the dwellers thereof, it shall be as a shofar's blast for you; thereby shall return every man to his estates and a man unto his family you shall return"

Midrash - ילקוט שמעני
וקראתם דרור אין דרור אלא חירות. אמר ר' יהודה מה לשון דרור כמדייר בי דיירא כאידרא ומסחר בכל מדינה.

Exodus 30:23
ואתה קח-לך בשמים ראש מר-דרור חמש מאות וקנמן-בשם מחציתו חמשים ומתאים וקנה-בשם חמישים במתאים

"Take thou unto thee the choicest spices, of pure [flowing] myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet cinammon half as much, even two hundred and fifty, and of sweet calamus two hundred and fifty"

Midrash - ילקוט שמעוני
ואתה קח לך בשמים ראש, מנין למרדכי בתורה שנאמר ואתה קח לך בשמים ראש מר דרור ומתרגמינן מרי דיכי.

[] Tanhuma gives very little information on this section of the Bible, I have the impression Rashi's reading comes mainly from Midrash Rabba on Leviticus but the text makes a very difficult reading. I'll try to inspect it again some other time.

http://www.tsel.org/torah/midrashraba/behar.html

PROPHETS

Isaiah 61:1
רוח אדני עלי
יען משח יהוה אתי
לבשר ענוים
שלחני לחבש לנשברי-לב
לקרא לשבוים דרור

ולאסורים פקח-קוח

"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me
Because God hath anointed me
To gladden the humble;
He hath sent me to bind up the
broken hearted,
To proclaim liberty to the
captives,
And to those bound
A complete opening of the eyes"

Jeremiah 34:8
הדבר אשר-היה אל-ירמיהו מאת יהוה אחרי כרת המלך צדקיהו ברית את-כל-העם אשר בירושלים לקרא להם דרור.

The word that came unto Jeremiah from God, after the king Zedekiah had covenanted with all the people that were in Jerusalem, to proclaim liberty unto them.

Jeremiah 34:15
ותשבו אתם היום ותעשו את הישר בעיני לקרא דרור איש לרעהו ותכרתו ברית לפני בבית אשר-נקרא שמי עליו

And you had by now returned and had done what is righteous in my eyes, in proclaiming liberty every man to his neighbour; and you had covenanted before me in the house whereon my name is proclaimed

Jeremiah 34:17
לכן כה-אמר יהוה אתם לא שמעתם אלי לקרא דרור איש לאחיו ואיש לרעהו הנני קרא לכם דרור נאם-יהוה אל-החרב אל-הדבר ואל-הרעב ונתתי אתכם לזועה לכל ממלכות הארץ

Therefore thus said God: You have not hearkened unto me, proclaiming liberty, every man to his brother, and every man to his neighbour; behold, I proclaim for you a liberty, said God, unto the sword, unto the pestilence, unto the famine; and I will give you away to the terror of the kingdoms of the earth

Midrash - ילקוט שמעוני
מקץ שבע שנים תשלחו איש את אחיו העברי אשר ימכר לך ועבדך שש שנים, שנו רבותינו משגלה שבט ראובן וגד וחצי שבט מנשה בטלו יובלות שנאמר וקראתם דרור בארץ לכל יושביה בזמן שכל יושביה עליה ולא בזמן שגלו מקצתם.

Writing Love's Midrash: Augustine, Arendt, Kundera, Rose

What was so impressive about Hannah Arendt as a person?

Her immense vitality and curiosity. She used to say you had to think with body and soul or better not at all. She was distinguished by this complete engagement of her person for that which she thought and that which she did. -Joachim Fest.

... At times one has to ponder for long enough if he really wants to write, because writing contrasted to living contains the desire of not having, the striving of not-being-as-yet; one usually doesn't write out of pleasure but rather of sheer necessity. Some might exercise a very dumbfounded criticism of this enterprise, but for some of us gaining a voice anew outside the entanglements of our lively encounters with others is a compelling task, that most likely is never achieved. That's how one never talk about Love with the Bible, because it's all written in such a way that it becomes written anew in every motion of one's body, and therefore one turns aside and finds the Midrash not merely for inspiration, but more in order to find that thick concrete of words that are bodily in the conversation between God and man, men.

Some other times you hear a story from a friend, particularly one that has to do with love and because you know it is certainly not a dream - it lacks a certain amount of realism, you discover yourself hearing a Midrash, Love's Midrash. In the quest of Modernity this particular tale has a two-fold meaning, one in which the Beloved (what is being told) escapes the writing as a Phoebus while the Beloved experiences the loss and desires, his words desire him with the contempt of impossibility. Modernity is a Midrash about love, in which the Beloved can't hear and the Lover can't write.... It's a recurrent human story in which the divorce between words and worlds can only be mended by the mystic, not by that who can explain the world with its intricacies but by the one that can add some meaning to the moment being experienced as though it were unique in its kind and irreparably solemn. Man experiences the solitude of God in mute pangs of despair, yet when he jumps into the Ocean he's unable to swim finding himself anew chained to both his heavenly home and his earthly soil; he's only free to desire.

And because the Rabbis can't be trusted in the age of doubt, since stories no longer mend the world... one turns to the philosopher and discovers himself by means of wisdom his life thought, but his mind never did. He discovers that thinking is in itself loving, but it isn't love at work. He laughs, because that's what God would do in his place. The laughter of embarrassment, of the ageing man who can no longer laugh about death, he can only laugh with her. She experiences anger too, because of mistrust... how could you, philosopher, distrust your older sister? And you who read Pirkei D'Rabbi Nathan and prayed for a winged-world, you can't trust her, it's not about doing philosophy anymore. It's all about speaking, about wilderness; dont you remember that Midrash on the Song of Songs? It's a book about two lovers, about creatureliness, yet lovers that can't speak. The desert itself is your language, your uniqueness. We can't trust death as philosophers because it no longer holds true to hope, from our unearthly homes the world seems less dense, less sore. "It is memory and not expectation (for instance the expectation of death in Heidegger) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence" (H. Arendt, "Love & Augustine").

But the effect is inevitable, mortality is the only driving force to poetize a world; that's why the divine haute-societe of the Pantheon resembled Auschwitz much more than Auschwitz resembled itself; the Gods also remind me of Thereza's mother, for whom life was nothing but a sequence of farts and sweat... That brilliant woman, who didn't think like Eve, who didn't know the serpent and never loved Mephiboshet. She might as well have been a Greek goddess, not unlike those pre-enlightened beautiful men in the shores of Tel Aviv, who always remind me of death, not of any death but that of Stalin's son, who died out of the mere inability to clean his own shit in the most literal sense of the word; he experienced a metaphysical death; not unlike that of the lawyer in my story, who jumped from that tall building in New York, I felt very sorry for having assassinated my best friend in literature, but once I discovered Virginia Wolff would have done the same about herself and then comit suicide, I started to think it wouldn't be fair to myself or to the world, therefore I decide to replace my errings with a sin; being a good Christian instilled on me the conviction to take upon my brother's sin.

The Philosophical Madonna: Cohn-Bendit on Arendt

December 3, 2005. DIE WELT.

The philosophical Madonna

Daniel Cohn-Bendit recalls his relationship with Hannah Arendt and reflects on her and his generation

Die Welt: What did Hannah Arendt mean to you, when you were still a real, radical leftist 68er?

Daniel Cohn-Bendit: That's complicated, because she was a friend of my parents. I knew her and was aware of her theses as a child. After emigrating in 1934, she belonged to a group of intellectuals in Paris along with my parents, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt's husband Heinrich Blücher. My father and Blücher were interned together at the beginning of the war, and that resulted in a deep friendship. But you make a point in your question: Hannah Arendt was not the most influential thinker for me at that time.

Fred Stein

When did you meet Hannah Arendt?

When she held a laudatio for Karl Jaspers in 1958, when he received the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. My father had just died and she visited my mother. The second time I saw her was at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. I was there with my school class – and she happened to be there too.

When did you begin to get interested in Hannah Arendt's work?

In the 1970s, as the discussions about totalitarianism became more and more pressing. I was a leftist anti-communist and when I came to Germany in 1968, I was perplexed by the reluctance to compare communism with national socialism, which was rooted in German history.

Did your referring to Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" lead to conflicts with your colleagues?

There was conflict from the outset, because when I was expelled from France in 1968, I was absolutely certain that, despite my revolutionary convictions, I would prefer to live in West Germany than in the GDR. I saw in France and the GDR bourgeois societies – that's what we called them back then – that needed reform but not totalitarian systems.

What does Hannah Arendt's still controversial book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" mean to you?

That the demonisation of the Nazis doesn't help us in the long run. The most insane thing, that has to be understood is that the Nazis were "normal people"! Eichmann was a nobody who was only to achieve the status and commit the annihilation he did in a totalitarian, totally racist system.

But some of the claims that Hannah Arendt makes in "Eichmann in Jerusalem" don't hold up historically. Take for example her complete condemnation of the Jewish councils...

Nonetheless, the question that she asks with the Jewish council remains relevant: when does one accept developments and at what point does one put up resistance? It's possible that Hannah Arendt was not fair on the Jewish councils. But her basic question is still legitimate: Was it right to collaborate in the first place? Because it wasn't just the Jews who didn't want to see the annihilation that was facing them. When the western democracies signed a treaty with Hitler in Munich in 1938, they didn't see the annihilation potential that was being developed in Germany. It's basically this question that is still being asked in Israel. The injustice that Israel is doing to Palestine is related to the feeling that one doesn't want to ever end up in the same situation again. That's a problem that, in my opinion, has not been dealt with adequately – but it's a real problem.

Hannah Arendt's position on Zionism was complicated in an interesting way; she vacillated between agreement and rejection. Do you see your own position reflected in that?

Hannah Arendt realised that Jews wanted to have a place somewhere where they could live in peace as Jews. That's a kind of primary Zionism that I can understand for the generation of people who lived through the Holocaust. I was born later. And I am A-Zionist. That means I am neither pro nor anti Zionist. I can understand Jews wanting to live in Israel – but I want to remain a Jew of the diaspora. Hannah Arendt sensed in 1947 and 48 that the violent-military assertion of the state of Israel would lead to a permanent state of conflict. At the same time, the Six Day War represented a reality: there was only one state of Israel and despite all criticism, she stood in solidarity with the people of Israel. She did not want to do away with Israelis.

On another subject: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Can you explain that for us?

No! But that's the nice thing about life: love and sex cannot be explained rationally, philosophically. I always say: Hannah Arendt is the philosophical Madonna. Put it this way - Madonna is the woman who said: I'll take the man that I want. Whether that's Christ - who she takes down from the cross in her famous music video – or her sports teacher, or whoever else. And Hannah Arendt is a political philosopher who can think radically, who takes on her teacher Heidegger with her radical thinking, who falls totally in love with this man – and the love was enduring. It was buried deep in her head and in her body. Some relationships are not to be explained; one has to accept that.

Back to politics...

We've been talking about politics the whole time. It's crazy to assert that Hannah Arendt should only have politically correct relationships. By the way, she also had a politically correct love. The interesting thing about her life is these two men. The other one was her husband, the former radical leftist who remained leftist later. Heinrich Blücher influenced Hannah Arendt a great deal in her book "The Human Condition". She always had a leftist understanding of the social. She thought in liberal terms about democratic institutions but she was very left in the social realm. She said America was politically democratic, and socially totalitarian. That's true! If you go into an American suburb, you see communism realised. Communist levelling is fully achieved. One identical row house after the next, for kilometres.

Since we're talking about America... how do you think Hannah Arendt would respond today to Islamicism?

She would say that Islamic fundamentalism is a form of totalitarianism. And that we need to have the power to fight this totalitarianism while at the same time considering Islam as a religion as equal to others. But she would also say that all religions have totalitarian moments in them. That our democracies developed in the emancipation from religion. And that's what Islam has to address: the emancipation of Muslims from their religion, through which a changed Islam and a Muslim atheism would emerge.

Joachim Fest on Hannah Arendt

This is an interview published by the Goethe-Institut with the late historian Joachim Fest (who passed away Sept. 11 2006) on Hannah Arendt. Quite revealing.

Thinking with Body and Soul


How and where did you become acquainted with Hannah Arendt?

The acquaintance came about through our publisher. He sent Hannah Arendt a copy of my first book The Face of the Third Reich (Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches, 1963). She liked it and expressed herself positively about it in letters, for example to Karl Jaspers. Our publisher then arranged for a meeting: Arendt came to Germany in 1964 to present her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. During a podium discussion, she then simply called to me to join the circle because an historian was needed to clarify some question. That was her inimitable unconventional manner. The next day she invited me to join her on a trip to Baden-Baden for an interview. There we got to know one another better, went often for walks together. She spoke a lot about herself and about people she had once thought highly of and then later despised.

She spoke, then, of Martin Heidegger?

Yes, of course. But not, I think, out of her deepest feelings. She said many things disparaging of Heidegger. And yet I think she loved him to the end. She said of him that he was mendacious, sly, unreliable and disloyal, a quite crooked character. But in 1964 as we boarded the train from Baden-Baden to Frankfurt, she said she would so much like to head in the opposite direction, to Freiburg. To Heidegger, that is. To the end she was deeply divided about him. She never got over it.

Over the years your acquaintance with her became closer?

Quite cordial, quite relaxed. She visited me often when she was in Germany, and I her when I was in New York or Chicago. I ate very often at her place. I recall she once fried some scrambled eggs and said: "Anyone can do this much house-keeping!". She couldn't understand the whole feminist movement that was then making so much about these things. She was a human being in the most real, truest and fullest sense that this concept can have. That always impressed me immensely.

What was so impressive about Hannah Arendt as a person?

Her immense vitality and curiosity. She used to say you had to think with body and soul or better not at all. She was distinguished by this complete engagement of her person for that which she thought and that which she did.

You followed of course her work and discussed it with her.

Yes, naturally. I've always thought The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book which after all gained her world-fame, was a little over-rated. I read Eichmann in Jerusalem and of course Vita Activa. But her best writing are the portraits. They evince such a rich humanity, are so full of loving attention, that they are deeply moving.

From your personal acquaintance with Hannah Arendt and your knowledge of her work, how would you judge her public influence?

Back then her influence was very great, no doubt about it. Today, unfortunately, she has been forgotten. In general, it has been the fate of the generation of promising thinkers who began their careers at the time of Hitler to be treated unjustly. Only those are always highlighted who co-operated with the Nazis. People with not so strong a character have an enormous popularity. That holds for quite a few, not least Heidegger. But people like Dolf Sternberger, Friedrich Meinecke or Hannah Arendt – these members of the generation have been eclipsed by those who worked with the Nazis. Sometimes I think, cynically enough, that actually the others chose the right side. It has brought them at any rate a posthumous fame which they would not have otherwise had, and which they do not really deserve.

That sounds somewhat embittered.

No, not embittered; realistic. It can't be denied that Heidegger has received enormous publicity. Not, for instance, because of Being and Time or Off the Beaten Track, but because of his joining the Nazi Party in 1933. As a thinker, he has received little publicity; that doesn't interest people. And then ask about Hannah Arendt at the universities. Absolute silence. I've done the test several times. Or Gerhard Ritter, who even in Freiburg has been nearly completely forgotten. And he was imprisoned after Stauffenberg's assassination attempt against Hitler and only narrowly escaped execution. If he had only really failed in his principles, then the Germans would have taken him into their hearts.

You mean that the public bestows its love rather on the shady and dubious characters?

No, one recognises oneself again, sees the similarities. Opportunists with each other. That's the reason. There is something reassuring for the average normal opportunist in seeing that others, that "great minds", can be just as small-minded and weak as himself. Why aren't the works of Dolf Sternberger read any longer? Why is Hannah Arendt hardly read any more?

Should Hannah Arendt still be read? Does her work still make a contribution to the understanding of totalitarianism?

Certainly. Totalitarianism was then one of the great subjects and still is today in modified form. Hannah Arendt was the first to discuss the comparability of communism and Nazism. As far as I can see, her book on totalitarianism is still today the best in the field, with a broad survey taking into account other dictatorial movements in the world. The generation of 1968 have attempted to discredit it. But, you know, they are all spoiled and lazy. They would never have even picked up a book of six hundred pages. I've spoken to so many of these people who make judgements about things that don't even understand. Scholarship, however, is a severe discipline, demanding many renunciations.

Was Hannah Arendt prepared to make the renunciations required by scholarship?

Quite prepared. She thought with body and soul. It's such a shame that there is still no good biography of Hannah Arendt. If I were twenty years younger, I'd do it. Now I can't. But someone really ought to do it; hers was such a great life. I was once asked in a television interview to name the greatest person whom I had met in my life. And although I've known people like Konrad Adenauer, Herbert Wehner, Willy Brandt and so forth, I answered without hesitation: Hannah Arendt.


The German historian, journalist and author Joachim Fest was born in Berlin on December 8, 1926 and died on September 11, 2006. He was editor-in-chief of North German Broadcasting (NDR) from 1963 to 1968, and co-editor of the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1973 to 1993. In the latter capacity, he published Ernst Nolte's article Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will (i.e., History that will not pass away), whose appearance started what became known as the "historians' dispute" (Historikerstreit). Fest became known mainly through his biography of Hitler. In 2003 he was awarded the Einhard Prize for biographical literature. In 2004 he received the Eugen Bolz Prize for his journalism dealing with the German resistance against the Nazi regime.

Dream

Last night I dreamt the dream of my death, but it was an appaling opaque photograph in movement in its bursting joy and trembings of flourishing happiness raining from cemented ceilings, it was a dream unlike any other.... not unlike Rahel's. In the dream although it nevertheless was interwoven with a re-interpretation of another past dream there was a yellowing light hovering on the sights from all the possible oblique angles and the photograph didn't remain static in black and white, it seemed to be moving all the time as though being watched from a stellar moon, quite far outside in the universe and free from the quintessential chains of the human condition yet bounded by the dread of nearness.

It was the disease that killed Jim in his New York apartment and that seemed to vanquish those readers of Virginia Wolff, it was the hourly being of Goethe in which he has given her only enough time to live as to mourn in the disguise of a witness. As he jumps out of the window he fails knowingly to find the waters and drowns in the asphalt as though one of many representations has failed at the time, he lived only in the imagination and therefore is himself become real, turning Augustine into the shade of an angle, unable to grasp the spirit of motion in which all truths are weaved as though a tapestry covering the skies even above God's prayer shawl extending all over the slies of heaven, man's chain-home in the companion of a lover, of a solitary lover that is unable to count the hours, he's mourning eternity and regretting not having been Greek. He is himself stupefied.

As I discovered the cause of my death I wasn't still there, but preferred to stand still in that room without weeping, without yearning for Rome, it was a dream so powerful that it was seemly being experienced in the third person, in the perspective of Descartes, devoid of any human touch and almost unable to link the feeling to the expression. I had choosen to open my phylacteries bag and pray, not the way we were taught to pray but in a more Kafkian fashion; I had learnt to pray by means of attentiveness. It wasn't a dream about death, it was a dream about love and about freedom. It wasn't a dream that can be described in philosophical terms and broken down to sequences of phenomenae, dissecting each and every second of it would have shattered it to pieces. It wasn't a dream about fear, bur rather about sureness of the self. It was an island that destructed all possible forms of prayer, that ransacked the imagination and remained aloof in a petrifying form of movement, so candid and yellow that it was impossible to follow through, a million different pathways showed me open doors with words stained in invisible skin and weary from travelling, from being passages themselves.

"I've told the tale. The Midrash isn't beautiful, is difficult" [G. Rose]. It was a watery phrase that compelled one to a very Stoic form of contemplation, some form of belligerant skepticism that wasn't laughing about death at all nor about the comedy. It was just laughing at the tangible world because it had become unbearable, it had become silent. In the dream moments before the deadly sweeping of orgiastic proportion I had been talking to my father, trading modernity for innocence, for unawareness. The dream is just queing a shadow and a half before objectivity, before mind-informed obsessions, before illuminations. It awoke me to a very sunny morning, as though I were a passanger on a bus-tour of the earth. I heard all those voices screaming in the silence of blood, singing epiphanies as though the war were over, we are all returning home. In the unearthened situation I didn't experience any familiar faces, I didn't experience familiarity at all. It was such a lonely dream. It was a dream only in that it used the narrative of the present to postpone a foreseen future, in every other respect it was just a photography of earthly life. Not even dreams can speak their own words these days. They need tiny crystal houses to navigate in the waters and swiftly undie themselves into a different form of fear. A childish voice screaming outloud love, the love of the philosopher, that became possible once again only since Auschwitz. If we knew what or who we are, there would be no literature, that's why the scripture needs to re-write itself anew at any given moment, because knowledge has been transformed in deceive and falsehood, it's become translated with subtitles in bodily movements. The world can only be translated into irony and laughter, into paradoxes, into rootlessness from the origins of everything, into the immanent reality of mystery which is allegedly and cruelly more real than reason. One sin has been replaced by a murder.

Mitchel Verter, Ph.D Thesis 1996 (Notes)

Throughout his work, he attempts to overcome the possibility of doubt in order to secure control over the contingencies of his cognitive world. Descartes does so by creating a spectatorial position for a detached subject, separating it from the external world. [Where's that subject located to be more specific?]

Descartes distinguishes between two visual faculties which the mental eye employs: the power of imagination and the power of understanding. Descartes explains this distinction: “When the mind understands, it in some way turns towards itself and inspects one of the ideas which are within it; but when it imagines, it turns towards the body and looks at something in the body which conforms to an idea understood by the mind or perceived by the senses.” [Philosophical Writings]

In between the lines (notes)

I've decided not to make the Galli's posts fit into an essay for the time being, as my intuition tells me that by the time I will be able to return to "Kafka unplugged" it will be necessary to rewrite the thing from scratch. I thought erroneously she might become the start, of course that is not undermining her achievement but simply stating that once I've entered the dialogue with Rose by hand it is impossible to reduce the categories; nonetheless the piece on Kafka must be finished, next step will be the input from LM. I believe the essay can be concluded with Kafka himself but I can't arrive there at face value, it requires certain hermeneutic tools that are in process of being constructed.

I want to set to work on Rose's thought on Rosenzweig, which seem to me flirtatious in their sobriety but before I can return there I must dwell on Athens & Jerusalem for a while. It proves undoubtedly necessary because the Critique of Reason she exercise is something previously unexperienced, an unintoxicated wording. It is also in tune with Eveline's book that while great can be significantly improved upon, not in philosophy (for it contains almost none) but in discoursiveness. Perhaps I err also in this point being heavily halted from my concerns by Benjamin and Rosenzweig's ideas of translation. Moreover one should never lose from sight that Eveline has her own Grittli, namely her lectures and the writings on the Jewish stuff. People will have to look for it themselves, I can only become the footnotes she never wrote.

On other thoughts I believe those of us dealing with German scholarship often neglect the Anglo-Saxon eye with its cool sobriety; if more of us would be familiar with people like Steiner, Rose, Canneti, Harvey Cox and the modernist Americans (like Arendt did) I think it could only enhance our quest for the lost language, for a philosophy of the experience. It's important to realize these thinkers are not analytical philosophers of any kind, and many of them unwittingly have turned to the "Abendland" for inspiration. The only sources I can make use of to find these gateways are Barbara and Aviva, that must be read carefully in order not to miss important authors. This becomes particularly important for discoursiveness, at least for those like me who are attempting an "exiled writing", namely not ever writing in the German language. The English literature shows how far-sighted the idea of exile is, for the rootlessness from the world is as old as Homer and is only slightly ameliorated by the modern literature. But obviously if one could define the German-Jewish literature of modernity as anything, it would be the literature of the exiles. Kafka from all peoples returns in the German language to a model that astounds Rosenzweig, "narrating along with them, translating, interpreting, transmitting the shifting temporal templates for living life" (Galli). His writing contains the impatience of prayer. It is the style of those who thought the Bible.

The next essay by Galli is that one on music, but I feel it's a little too much for the time being. Because I have to travel through Rose and Goodman-Thau in order to return to Kafka and through him to Rosenzweig, that only in order to start with the cultural writings! Music though, is a topic I've never good writing about, perhaps because I haven't read Adorno and Bloch on those topics, together in my brutality and vulgarity when it comes to interpreting music. Nonetheless at least the thing should be read carefully. Poetizing the world is perhaps what knocks on the door of time, what compels me to this study. It's an alleged recovery in a foreign language.

Such recovery is in the spirit of Benjamin's thoughts on language. It isn't a utilitarian projection but a symbolic one, whereas reality remains asymbolic, objective and edge-cutting. It becomes a theological epiphany and it's revealing only in that it's to be found only "in between" many other things, it isn't bound to a discipline or a method of analysis. Just as when Aviva speaks of Rashi with Freud... When we try to reconstruct the images we're slowly unmaking ourselves into the dust of the many and soon thereafter from the dust of the one (creatively speaking) we remake ourselves, we scrutinize our own earthliness in order to unearthen an slightly used image of ourselves, used only enough as to contain plurality. We reunderstand ourselves.

This thematic orientation proves very useful, for it allows us even to engage Aristotle and the Classics, showing no more than an universal problem that is simply hands-on-experienced by the Bible. It is something that provides a better understanding of bodiliness and embodiment. Whenever we speak about metaphysics of the experience by sheer force we're already speaking of "making" and therefore following the Greek we're engaged in ποιεσης, we're creating and in order to do so it's necessary to build spaces for ourselves both in time and space; as soon as this creating is on-going we're not only alive in a reflexive fashion but our eyes see constantly in a shifting present that trades templates every so often with a series of freedoms, such as dreamweaving, possible realities and the photographs of the memory that feed not our imagination, but our reality in that it creates it anew from a common source we share with the rest of our fellow-men in transversally-cut ways.

[]Dreamweaving

Our dreamweaving isn't unfamiliar at all to Hesiodus and Homer, nor is it to Joseph in Egypt or to Miriam in the wilderness. We're dreaming in the same way Kafka provides for us, chained to both the earth and the heavens... with only two possible escapes, the waters and prophecy. But the prophet isn't only that of Jerusalem even though as Rose often points us in our rebellion against reason we've turned to Jerusalem to look for prophets instead of philosophers, to make up for broken promises of eternity.

The waters drown us so that we need to protect from them by building houses of safety, this protects us from freedom but also from any possible knowledge, for once the water is experienced (Oddyseus' journey, The parting of the Red Sea, The Flood) language and thought (that is philosophical) are not merely unnecessary but have lost their power to imagine in that they've become rooted in truthful representations, those that are unavailable to us and force us to poetize the world, or in the case of Kafka poetize the universe from different oblique angles of the photograph in a way that is impossible to improve upon from both earthliness and worldliness.

It's a scripture being written as events unfold, unconceptually laid out. Nakedness in the waters is transformed into a rapture, through which we unveal our sexuality and our blood ties in the open, like the sons of Noah find him drunk and naked in the tent and the Midrash speaks about a rape. The secret of Western morality: An alleged attempt to keep ourselves from the water, but in that we've divorced word and world (Steiner) as the greatest intellectual achievement of Western mankind that gifted us consequently with Modernity, we're able to override those rules with readings of our own "dramatis persona" in the world that are separated from the magic power of creation - speech.

We dissect open the dreamweaving map of the human body in the quintessential heavenly boredom of speechlessness, but in the chains of time. Our models resemble the ancients all the more, and even our safety houses of steel and concrete are closer to Athens than they're to the French Revolution even; even though Athens remains deserted and the wilderness has been turned into speech, or speech representations (Midrash). Our surgerical abilities seem to be hindered by an acquired incapability to move in the invisible, dreams cannot be dissected like nations and human bodies, even though they wear our own bodies. We need to turn to the prophets, which nowadays wear boxing sweat and hot red glue for a skin.

The prophets are those who poetize the world in order to make it a little unreal, a little difficult to believe. Modern prophets are in strait needs to act differently though, they need to unmake our world in order to make it possible, that is, unreal. Prophets no longer speak in tongues, they utter pegs that joined together make up for the world of ideas lacking in the tangible, in the extreme philosophies of the experience that have summoned the demise of pronouns. Our sexuality has changed shoes and shifted the template of desire from the world, where not having was the underlying principle, to the earth - where every desire can be satisfied, but the violence of this relationship is paramount to desire itself; we return to the world before the Flood and therefore bound our destruction, not as individuals or nations but as a world. We need to summon prophecy and revelation, not in the way known to our forefathers.

[tomorrow possible realities and photographs of the memory]

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"

Notes on B. Galli & Rosenzweig II

The term happens is important to Rosenzweig. His primary philosophical question is not "What is the essence of a thing?" but instead "What happens? What story is being told? What world story is unfolding?"-B. Galli

I think this should be contrasted to what was laid out by Heidegger in "Was ist das - die Philosophie?". The cycle of Kafka's "The Castle" is not unresembling of Rosenzweig system: The World, man, God equated to the village, K. and the Castle. Kafka even though keeps the sight of man from the outside universe, the redeemed world of Adorno, he is aware of Steiner's divorce between word and world, and this inescapable situation becomes Rosenzweig's main concern. At this point I owe to mention what I wrote in my diary a couple of months ago: It seems to me Kafka opposed the ontological freedom of Heidegger, because he found it to be extremely difficult in a world whose reality is entirely unreal instead of surreal, since it is not an attempt at a representation of any sort but the presentation itself, in a way so cruel that one needs to engage in some sort of poetization, and by means of poetization we can find the only channels available to re-unmake the world and make it anew; here I'm not speaking of deconstruction, because it isn't an experiment from within the possibilities of language and readerships, it's a multi-layered quest for relationships and events.

In these chains of relationships from within the critique one owes to return to Husserl, and more specifically to Edith Stein, not the one who wrote the philosophy of the human person based on Aristotle and Aquinas (time by which she already entered the sphere of ontological freedom) but the doctoral dissertation on "empathy" improving upon the second volume of Husserl's Logic Investigations; particularly her concept of relationships within the field of experience. Most of her philosophy is of little use for us particularly in the light of the "Spaetere Schriften" of Husserl when he tuned up with Cassirer on a philosophy of the cultural sciences, but it is worthwhile having a glimpse into Stein's "Philosophy of Psychology and the Cultural Sciences", the idea of the I in relationship to the human body might have been improved upon by Merleau-Ponty who stands already outside my field of inquiry and obviously far beyond the tradition I'm willingly diving into, that after WWII might have been taken up by nobody except Levinas and by detour (that is accidentally) by Hannah Arendt.

Unwittingly I keep return with Galli to the Critique of Auschwitz (that has somehow come to the fore of my hermeneutic questions in the disguise of a quest for a continental philosophy of language, or rather for a philosophy of language based on human culture finding a kernel out of the Western dialectic process through continental philosophy into the provenance of "thinking", an "Ausgang" that shall be parallel to an "Ingang" which lies beyond analytical and critical analysis). The post-Auschwitz world brings me closer to Hannah Arendt again, to the need not for a philosophy or for a philosophical language, but for a "common" language that will permit us once again to navigate in our traditions anew:

"Hence the possible advantage of our situation following the demise of metaphysics and philosophy would be two-fold. It would permit us to look on the past with new eyes, unburdened and unguided by any traditions, and thus to dispose of a tremendous wealth of raw experience without being bound by any prescriptions as how to deal with those treasures. Our inheritance comes to us by no will-and-testament. The advantage would be even greater had it not been accompanied almost inevitably, by a growing inability to move, on no matter what level; in the realm of the invisible; or to put it in another way, had it not been accompanied by the disrepute into which everything that isn't visible, tangible, palpable, has fallen, so that we're in danger of losing the past itself with our traditions." (R&J)

This text obviously goes in hand with a poem of W.H. Auden, to whom the essay "Moral & Thinking Considerations" was addressed:

"All words like peace and love
All sane affirmative speech
Had been soiled, profaned, debased
To a horrid mechanical screech"

Sinning in being a modernist Auden can but show us how impossible the language of man has become, so that a prior de-poetization of the world with a stoppover in reality is necessary in order to become anew. This phenomenon isn't unique to Auden, I believe Kafka was the precursor following the poets of the late 19th century France (symbolism and thereinafter), followed by others as Joyce, Elliot, Nelly Sachs, Grass and the literature of Eastern Europe along the lines of Utopian and Dystopian thought, for an example we obviously have the historical philosophy of Patocka (heavily influenced by Arendt's readings of history) and the writings of Milan Kundera that by close rub their elbows with Kafka but unearthing the world of unreality and portraying it swiftly with those petty obsessions of everyday life that inform the minds of the contemporary readers, since the contemporary speakers have been lost along the way.

Kundera is essentially important in this process: [Quotation to be found]

At this stage before turning to the philosophers I need look into Galli's essay once again:

"The difference brought along by WWII is the difference of an arguably absolutely unprecedented event: the Holocaust. No linguistic reference points seemed to exist in the resources of language for the survivors, for witnesses, for those others of us who have learned and are learning of an event involving six million Jews, in an aim of the total eradication of a people on earth, and involving as well another five million murders, of gypsies, of homosexuals, of Nazi dissenters (Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an illuminating example of the poetics of exile from a non-Jewish eye, this note is mine)."

"Thus for the post-WWII thinkers, the affirmation of language was an agonizing task burdened with a painful process of impossibilities that in their hands was made possible".

From the impossibility of language we step into revelation, which seems to be the point in which Rosenzweig and Arendt weren't simply concerned, but pained and bewildered in their readings of Kafka, for entirely different purposes. Galli expounds the prophetic power of language when attempting to build relationships, namely of bridging that gap between the word and the world.

"Neither Rosenzweig or Benjamin experienced WWII. Those who inquired into language before the second great and terrible World War that raged in Europe -too dreadful anywhere- in important ways can be claimed to be foreseers, through language, of impending further dangers in Europe. There were to occur unless contemporary philosophical errors were addressed". We'll look at some insights on language from Kafka, Rosenzweig and Benjamin through Hannah Arendt.

The wrong sentences lie in wait about my pen, twine themselves around its point, and are dragged along into the letters. I am not of the opinion that one can ever lack the power to express perfectly what one wants to write or say. Observations on the weakness of language, and comparisons between the limitations of words, and the infinity of feelings, are quite fallacious. The infinite feeling continues to be as infinite in words as it was in the heart. What is clear within is bound to become so in words as well. This is why one need never worry about language, but at sight of words one might often worry about himself. After all, who knows within himself how things really are with him? This tempestuous or floundering or morasslike inner self is what we really are, but by the secret process by which words are forced out of us, our self-knowledge is brought to light, and though it may be still veiled, yet it is there before us, wonderful or terrible to behold. -Kafka to Felizia, 1913

"Inadequacy of language, "limitation of thought", "our sensory experience", finally as a highlight the "God" formed by man in his image -this is how a theological problem is solved today! Even if we grant the soundness of these theoretical-knowledge imperfections (I frankly do not understand with which language, which thought, which experience we can compare our language, our thought, which experience in order to be permitted to confer upon them the grade of unsatisfactory). Even if we do grant that, in which other science is it permitted to put "theoretical-knowledge" lamentations in the place of honest striving after the understanding of the facts themselves. Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften

Thus there is "a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate secrets which all thought is concerned with" and this is "the true language" whose existence we assume unthinkingly as soon as we translate from one language into another. That is why Benjamin places at the center of his essay... the quotation from Mallarme in which the spoken languages in their multiplicity and diversity suffocate, as it were, by virtue of their Babel-like tumult, the "immortelle parole", which cannot even be thought, ... and thus prevent the voice of truth from being heard on earth with the force of material, tangible evidence. Whatever theoretical revisions Benjamin may subsequently have made in these theological-metaphysical convictions, his basic approach, decisive for all his literary studies, remained unchanged: not to investigate the utilitarian or communicative functions of linguistic creations, but to understand them in their crystallized and thus ultimately fragmentary utterances of a "world essence". What else does this mean that he understood language as an essentially poetic phenomenon? And this is precisely what the last sentence of the Mallarme aphorism, which he does not quote, says in unequivocal clarity: ... all this were true poetry if poetry did not exist, the poem that philosophically makes good the defect of languages, is their superior complement. -H. Arendt, footnote on her English edition of Benjamin's Illuminations

At this point we confront of a totally different perspective which unfortunately leaves the works of most of the exile thinkers allegedly incomplete, and calls for a reinterpretation of language. Perfunctorily we need to return to Gillian Rose, who in not belonging to the continental tradition and living in the world of post-Auschwitz bleeds with more information that we are able to digest. We will proceed to examine the cultural criticism of Auschwitz in light of the Athens & Jerusalem paradox, before proceeding onto the cultural writings of Rosenzweig. Thanks are due to B. Galli for her excellent introduction that engages us in the thematic discussion on language, which is by the force of necessity the first step back into the world of Kafka and Rosenzweig.