Agata Bielik-Robson

My essay will take as its point of departure the paragraph from Gershom Scholem’s “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in which he depicts the modern religious experience as the one of the "void of God" or as "pious atheism". I will first argue that the "void of God" cannot be reduced to atheistic non-belief in the presence of God. Then, I will demonstrate the further development of the Scholemian notion of the ‘pious atheism’ in Derrida, especially in his Lurianic treatment of Angelus Silesius, whose modern mysticism emerges in Derrida’s reading as the ‘almost-atheism’. The interesting feature of this development is that, while for Scholem, the ‘void of God’ is a predominantly negative experience, for Derrida, it becomes an affirmative model of modern – not just Jewish, but more generally, Abrahamic – religiosity which, on the one hand, touches upon atheistic non-belief in the divine presence here and now, yet, on the other, still insists on commemorating the ‘withdrawn God’ through his ‘traces.’ What, therefore, for Scholem, constitutes the ultimate cry of despair, best embodied in Kafka’s work – for Derrida, reveals the more positive face of the modern predicament in which God has absented himself in order to make room for the creaturely reality. And while Scholem envisages redemption as the full restoration of the divine presence – Derrida redefines redemption as the ‘pious’ work of deconstruction to be undertaken in the ‘almost-atheistic’ condition of irreversible separation between God and the world.

ExcerptThis essay analyzes the following constellation of concepts from a theologico-philosophical perspective: “state of exception,” “bare life,” and “the remnant.” Recently employed in the work of Giorgio Agamben, none of these concepts is his own coinage. Agamben borrowed “state of exception” from Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, “bare life” from Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” and “the remnant” from biblical sources, which include Isaiah and the letters of Saint Paul. Nevertheless, the reappearance of these concepts within Agamben's constellation provides each with an altered meaning, which emerges only through interplay with the others. In the prologue to his work on German…

This essay is an attempt to analyze an important decision Brzozowski took at the end of his life, i.e. his late turn towards Catholicism, which, despite his own objections, we should nonetheless call a religious conversion. The main reason why Brzozowski resisted the traditional rhetoric of conversion lies in his often repeated conviction that faith cannot invalidate life, because “what is not biographical, does not exist at all.” Brzozowski, therefore, rejects conversion understood as a radical and abrupt revolution of the soul, which annuls everything that happened before, and turns to a model of religiosity (“Catholicism, undoubtedly”) which preserves his entire biographical past. In this manner, Brzozowski seeks his own formula of faith, more adequate to the “situation” of the modern man who lives in and through History. I argue that the model of “conversion without conversion” Brzozowski chose as representative of modern man is typically, though avant la lettre , post-secular: closer to the Jewish sources of past-oriented tschuva than to the mystical timelessness of traditionally Christian metanoia . The idea that redemption consists not in a liberation of a pure spirit but in a patient working-through of the universal history of creation is an implicit credo of the whole modern age, first fully articulated by Brzozowski and only later in the writings of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin. Brzozowski emerges as a relatively early precursor of the future post-secular option whose advocates, like the author of The Diary , will not allow themselves to “lose a single moment,” either of their lives or the world’s history

This essay focuses on political implications of Derrida’s messianicité as a form of Marrano messianism: a universal vision of community “out of joints” which, despite its disjointedness and inner separation, nonetheless addresses itself as “we”. By referring to the generalized “Marrano experience” – the fate of those Sephardic Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity and, in consequence, became neither Jewish nor Christian – Derrida takes the Marrano as his paradigmatic political figure of a “rogue” who escapes every identity politics. In Derrida’s project of “living together”, the Marrano stands for the non-participatory remnant of otherness which is not just the other of this or that particular tradition, but becomes a bearer of a new universalism, based not on the abstract notion of human nature but on the non-identity, a distance-from-identity or what Yirmijahu Yovel calls the “non-integral identity.”

The aim of this essay is to give a general and accessible overview of the so called “post-secular” turn in the contemporary humanities. The main idea behind it is that it constitutes an answer to the crisis of the secular grand narratives of modernity: the Hegelian narrative of the immanent progress of the Spirit, as well as the enlightenmental narrative of universal emancipation. The post-secularist thinkers come in three variations which this essay names as Enlightenmental, Traditional, and Revolutionary. The first camp wishes to reconceptualize the place of religion in the seemingly secularized modern paradigm and see if revelation can cooperate with enlightenment, that is, if it can support the modern emancipatory values in the dangerous moment of their “crisis of legitimation.” The second one emphasizes the need to recover the institutional aspect of Christian theology which must be reinstated once again as the “queen of the sciences,” or as the true “invisible hand” operating behind social theories. And the third party, which simultaneously opposes both, enlightenment and tradition, revolves mostly around the “revolutionary figure” of Saint Paul and constitutes a radically leftist answer to the crisis of Marxism with its scientific insight into the objective laws of history.

The first [age] is in the servitude of slavery, the second in the servitude of sons, the third in freedom. The first in fear, the second in faith, the third in love. The first is the status of bondsmen, the second of freemen, the third of friends.What a violent, all-consuming, impetuous love! It thinks only of itself, lacks interest in anything else, despises all, is satisfied with itself! It confuses stations, disregards manners, knows no bounds. Proprieties, reason, decency, prudence, judgment are defeated and reduced to slavery.It may seem strange for someone who delivered the keynote at a conference of the Utopian Studies Society to critique utopia. Yet this is precisely what I am going to do: I will criticize...

The main theme of this essay is f i n i t e l i f e, which is the bedrock of modern biopolitics. In the series of lectures devoted to the ‘birth of biopolitics,’ Michel Foucault defines it as a new system of ‘governing the living’ based on the natural cycle of birth and death, and the law of genesis kai phtora, ‘becoming and perishing.’ Foucault’s answer to modern biopolitics is to accept its basic premise – that life is finite, and, consequently, reduced to the natural law of birth and death – and then slightly correct the naive liberal trust in the ‘naturalness’ of human existence by appropriating and internalizing the true essence of the biopolitical paradigm: the disciplining practices. This essay contests Foucault’s minimalist Neostoic program of the ‘care of the self’ by demonstrating that we can still hope for a n o t h e r f i n i t u d e that refrains from any renaturalization of human existence.

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.

In my essay, I analyze Schelling’s and Rosenzweig’s commitment to the narrative philosophy as a unique method of telling a philosophical story. I want to understand what such “philosophical story” means and how it differs from the conceptual approach, here represented by Hegel. I also want to see how it connects with Schelling’s another project continued by Rosenzweig, of doing “positive philosophy”: in what way does positivity imply narrativity? Is this a necessary implication? And, last but not least, I want to explore the theological dimension of the narrative project. I perceive Schelling’s, and then Rosenzweig’s goal as an attempt to oppose Hegel’s double manoeuvre of sublation – of temporal contingency and religion – by returning to the narrative which recovers the actuality of both elements and sees the necessary connection between them. The living experience of history is strictly linked to the religious stories telling the life of the “living God,” who is emphatically not the “God of the system.” Theosophy and its narrative way of creating a suspense and then inscribing it into a metaphysical drama which plays itself out on the arena of history reveals the deep connection between living historical temporality and religious imagery.

Preview: Almost twenty-five years have passed after the publication of Jacques Derrida’s 1996 seminal essay, “Faith and Knowledge: Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone,” one of the most important, but also most enigmatic post-secular texts of late modernity. Six articles in this issue are devoted directly to Derrida’s essay. The other two can also be read along them as dealing with broadly conceived post-secular issues. They all can be brought under the traditional heading of “faith and knowledge” – simultaneously in recognition of Derrida’s title and in opening a wider perspective on fides et ratio today (a few decades after the famous 1994 Capri seminar on religion). Derrida participated in the seminar with his 2000 essay (Glauben und Wissen), on the same subject, along with the equally famous intervention of Jürgen Habermas. The main theme of Derrida’s take on the confrontation between fides and ratio is the analysis of the relation between modern philosophy/knowledge and modern religion/faith: a complex co-dependence which challenges Hegel’s conviction that philosophy had managed to sublate religion completely and allowed for the survival of its most valuable contents in a new rational form. Pace Martin Hägglund’s thesis, (according to which Derrida’s philosophy should be classified as “radical atheism” in the Hegelian vein), the essays in this volume present Derrida’s thinking on religion as far more ambivalent, leaning toward not so much atheism as radical iconoclasm which does not annul the idea of divinity, but rather hides it away from sight.

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).

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.”

Esej ten kreśli nową strategię uniwersalizacji historii, która wyłania się z analizy żydowskiejpraktyki filozofowania w erze nowożytnej. Nazywam ją „strategią marańską”, budując analogięmiędzy sytuacją conversos, którzy zostali zmuszeni do przyjęcia chrześcijaństwa, przechowującprzy tym judaizm „utajony”, a filozoficzną interwencją nowoczesnych myślicieli żydowskich,którzy wkroczyli w idiom zachodniej filozofii, jednocześnie nasycając go motywami wywiedzionymiz ich „partykularnego” kontekstu: nie po to jednak, by podważyć perspektywęuniwersalistyczną, lecz po to, by ją przekształcić. Dla Waltera Benjamina i Jacques’a Derridywłaściwy uniwersalizm okazuje się równoznaczny z „zadaniem tłumacza”: projektem sklejaniarozbitej całości od środka, horyzontalnie, przez wysiłek wielojęzyczności, czyli bez przyjmowaniawyniosłej pozycji ogólnego metajęzyka, który mógłby uzurpować pozycję hegemona.

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.

The subject of this essay is the modern theology of work. Contrary to neoplatonism that condemned matter as unworthy of spiritual investment, theology of work states that matter is an ontological material that deserves further processing. Therefore, if modernity is to be understood as the beginning of the materialistic philosophy of immanence, early modern theological transformations have deeply contributed to this. Namely, the appreciation of matter as a realistically existing material to work through, the not yet ready and not fully shaped element of creation justifying the creatio continua in the human version, has certainly inaugurated a turn towards temporality, far less random than Max Weber thought. In Weber’s classic approach, Puritan theology played the role of a catalyst for modernity, creating the concept of “intra-world asceticism”. It stood for work conceived as Beruf which, in line with the Lutheran concept, means “profession and vocation”. However, the author points to another – no more ascetic – theological genealogy of the modern idea of work, whose sources lie in the vision of the delayed apocalypse or, in other words, creative destruction. This extraordinary theology of work has its roots in the nominalism of Duns Scotus, the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, then transformed into the Christian Kabbalah, Goethe’s Faust and particularly in Hegel’s dialectical concept of work performed by the destructive and yet suppressed negativity.