Agata Bielik-Robson

This essay offers a philosophical reading of apocalyptic thought, from the moment of its inception in the Jewish Apocalypse of Baruch, through Joachim of Fiore and Hegel, to its latest avatar in Jacob Taubes. It elaborates on the fundamental ambivalence which the apocalyptic mode of thinking contains from the start: the vacillation between the desire to destroy the world and the desire to transform the world. Its goal is to show that while the historical evolution of the apocalyptic desire moves gradually from the former to the latter, the purely negative element cannot ever be fully tamed or eliminated. Even if the annihilating vision gradually metamorphoses into a concept of innerworldly dynamics—as in Joachim's paradigmatic operatio spiritus fuelling the world's historical development, or in the Hegelian concept of work as ‘delayed destruction’—the process is inherently volatile: the apocalyptic dialectic always plays with fire.

The aim of this essay is mainly critical: it intends to demonstrate that despite all the promises to give account of a “deconstructive subjectivity,” Derrida failed to do so. This charge relies on the thesis that Derrida proved unable to rethink critically the concept of narcissism which he himself saw as crucial for the future philosophical understanding of subjectivity. Yet, what Derrida calls the aporia of narcissism is, in fact, not so much the Freudian version of this concept but a deconstructive version of the old Hegelian dilemma of the beautiful soul—and, theoretically speaking, a rather “defunct” one, for it explicitly prohibits any dialectical procedure that could lead us out of this aporetic predicament.

This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).

In this article I claim there is no contradiction involved in Franz Rosenzweig’s love of life and his apology for death: what he loves and wants us to love is the finite life, life offered in its finitude which should in the end appear as enough – that is, sufficient and fit for everything we could want from life, redemption included. The beyond toward which death as the end gestures is not a promise of immortality, offering a transcendence in temporal terms infinitely prolonged. The will “to stay, to live,” of which Rosenzweig speaks in the opening paragraph of The Star of Redemption, is the drive characteristic of another finitude: desiring and investing in life, without, at the same time, wishing to prolong itself into infinity.

This essay reflects on the concept of the death of God as part and parcel of modern philosophical theology: a genre of thinking that came into existence with Hegel’s announcement of the “speculative Good Friday” as the most natural expression of die Religion der neuen Zeiten, “the religion of modern times”. In my interpretation, the death of God not only does not spell the end of the era of atheism but, on the contrary, inaugurates a new era of characteristically modern theism that steers away from theological absolutism. The new theos is no longer conceived as the eternal omnipotent Absolute but as the Derridean diminished Infinite: contracted and self-negated—even “unto death”. Such God, however, although coming to the foremost visibly in modernity, is not completely new to the monotheistic religions, which from the beginning are engaged in the heated debate concerning the status of the divine power: is it absolute and unlimited or rather self-restricted and conditioned? I will enter this debate by conducting a comparison between the two traditional models of divine self-restriction—Christian kenosis and Jewish-kabbalistic tsimtsum—and then present their modernised philosophical variants, most of all in the thought of Hegel.

This essay focuses on Eric Santner’s psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the crucial symbol of Judaism – yetziat mitzrayim, the getting out of Egypt – as “the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania.” Formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner’s later works concerned with political theology, where “Egyptomania” stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive “signifying stress” or “ex-citation,” weighing it down with the impossible demands of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to Hegel’s definition of Judaism as “the religion of the sublime,” Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary “beyond” and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger in the world. The Exodus, therefore, is to be understood not as an exit out of the world, following the call of the otherworldly God, but precisely the other way round: as an exit of the Egyptomaniac metaphysical paralysis, where “Egypt” represents an impasse of the self-negating life which cannot tolerate its finite condition and invents a sublime alibi in a false promise of immortality.

My essay positions Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) in the light of the later transformation of his thought after die Kehre, which introduces a new motif: “the withdrawal of Being.” And while the Jewish question disappears from his official discourse, the essay poses it nonetheless, despite and against Heidegger’s silence: Does the diagnosis from the Black Notebooks, which perceives the Jew as the agent of metaphysical destruction, still stand? In my analysis, the figurative Jew emerges in a role which Heidegger refuses to recognize: as a positive agent of letting-be, acting in accordance with Being’s rhythm of self-withdrawal.

Interrogating Modernity returns to Hans Blumenberg's epochal The Legitimacy of the Modern Age as a springboard to interrogate questions of modernity, secularisation, technology and political legitimacy in the fields of political theology, history of ideas, political theory, art theory, history of philosophy, theology and sociology. That is, the twelve essays in this volume return to Blumenberg's work to think once more about how and why we should value the modern. Written by a group of leading international and interdisciplinary researchers, this series of responses to the question of the modern put Blumenberg into dialogue with other twentieth, and twenty-first century theorists, such as Arendt, Bloch, Derrida, Husserl, Jonas, Latour, Voegelin, Weber and many more. The result is a repositioning of his work at the heart of contemporary attempts to make sense of who we are and how we’ve got here.

This essay is a theologico-philosophical meditation on Bruno Schulz, focusing on his “love for the marginal”: a special attention paid to tandeta, in other words all things trashy, located on the eponymous edges of the world, far away from the center. Contrary to the assumed mode of interpretation, which reads Schulz’s fascination with the “dark forces of life” in terms of the depth subversive toward the surface, I propose a different scheme: an opposition of center and edges/margins, deriving from the Kabbalistic metaphysics of Isaac Luria, which constituted the primary matrix of the Hasidic Kabbalah, known to Schulz as the member of the pre-war Drohobycz Jewry. I then juxtapose Schulz’s intuition of a life thriving on the cosmological margins with Freud’s early theory of the drives, especially his concept of perversion as a “libido on the edge.” In both writers we find a similar echo of the spatial Kabbalistic imagining of the relation between the emptied center and the rich diaspora of life, dispersing and multiplying on the fringes of the “cosmic exile.”