• Nihilism as world politics : Benjamin's theology of entropy
    In Brendan P. Moran & Paula Schwebel (eds.), Walter Benjamin and political theology, Bloomsbury Academic. 2024.
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    Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg (edited book)
    Palgrave Macmillan. 2020.
    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 i…Read more
  • Apocalypse
    In Tilottama Rajan & Daniel Whistler (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 361-381. 2023.
    G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida are true masters of a carefully mediated messianic political theology, and what they share is a utilization of the apocalypse, that is, the conviction that without the apocalyptic genre there would be no concept of history at all. To put it another way, their messianic political theology tarries with a common negative: the apocalyptic nearness of God or the danger of coming too close to the naked divine power.
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    Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology (edited book)
    with Daniel H. Weiss
    De Gruyter. 2020.
    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,…Read more
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    The Edges of the World: Diasporic Metaphysics of Bruno Schulz
    Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 6 (1): 49-64. 2022.
    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 f…Read more
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    Bielik Robson: żyj i pozwól żyć
    Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. 2012.
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    The first book devoted to Derrida's Marranism - his paradoxical 'non-Jewish Jewishness' - connecting it to the Derridean themes of exile, survival, betrayal and autobiography.
  • Jacob Taubes, the Jewish Hegelian
    In Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink & Hartmut von Sass (eds.), Depeche mode: Jacob Taubes between politics, philosophy, and religion, Brill. 2022.
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    Will There Rather Be Nothing Than Something?
    Civitas. Studia Z Filozofii Polityki 29 105-125. 2022.
    The purpose of this essay is to put Ernst Bloch’s philosophy to a test suggested by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. According to Blumenberg, modernity constitutes the second, successful, attempt at overcoming Gnosticism, after the first attempt, undertaken by Christianity, had failed. However – Blumenberg argues – it was not modern philosophy, but only science which had managed to escape Gnosticism’s ontological trap of viewing the world as an illusion bordering on nothing.
  • Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (edited book)
    with Adam Lipszyc
    Routledge. 2014.
    The central aim of this collection is to trace the presence of Jewish tradition in contemporary philosophy. This presence is, on the one hand, undeniable, manifesting itself in manifold allusions and influences – on the other hand, difficult to define, rarely referring to openly revealed Judaic sources. Following the recent tradition of Lévinas and Derrida, this book tentatively refers to this mode of presence in terms of "traces of Judaism" and the contributors grapple with the following questi…Read more
  • This book aims to interpret 'Jewish Philosophy' in terms of the Marrano phenomenon: as a conscious clinamen of philosophical forms used in order to convey a 'secret message' which cannot find an open articulation. The Marrano phenomenon is employed here, in the domain of modern philosophical thought, where an analogous tendency can be seen: the clash of an open idiom and a secret meaning, which transforms both the medium and the message. Focussing on key figures of late modern, twentieth century…Read more
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    Faith and Knowledge, Reconsidered: Modern Religion and the “Time of Life”
    Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5 (3): 1-6. 2021.
    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 knowle…Read more
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    Machina ex Deo: Game Theology in Kabbalah and Derrida
    Internationales Jahrbuch Für Medienphilosophie 7 (1): 63-84. 2021.
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    Derrida’s Umbrapolitics: Marrano “Living Together”
    Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 4 (4): 63-82. 2021.
    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 o…Read more
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    Teologia pracy: asceza, kenoza, apokalipsa
    Civitas 26 13-45. 2020.
    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 …Read more
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    The Void of God, or The Paradox of the Pious Atheism: From Scholem to Derrida
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (2): 109-132. 2020.
    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, wh…Read more
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    The Human Difference: Beyond Nomotropism
    Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 1 (1): 18-28. 2017.
    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 – …Read more
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    The Post-Secular Turn: Enlightenment, Tradition, Revolution
    Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 3 (3): 57-82. 2019.
    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 Re…Read more
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    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: ni…Read more
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    ‘The Story Continues …’ Schelling and Rosenzweig on narrative philosophy
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80 (1-2): 127-142. 2019.
    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 no…Read more
  • W tych smutnych okolicznościach przyrody…
    Władza Sądzenia 3 (1). 2014.
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    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…Read more