(Value Inquiry Book) Elena Namli, Jayne Svenungsson, Alana M. Vincent (Eds.) - Jewish Thought, Utopia, and Revolution (2014, Brill - Rodopi) PDF

JEWISH THOUGHT, UTOPIA,
AND REVOLUTION
VIBS
Volume 274
Robert Ginsberg
Founding Editor
Leonidas Donskis
Executive Editor
Associate Editors
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Dane R. Gordon Emil Višňovský
J. Everet Green Anne Waters
Heta Aleksandra Gylling James R. Watson
Matti Häyry John R. Welch
Brian G. Henning Thomas Woods
Steven V. Hicks
a volume in
Philosophy and Religion
PAR
Kenneth A. Bryson, Editor
JEWISH THOUGHT, UTOPIA,
AND REVOLUTION
Edited by
Elena Namli
Jayne Svenungsson
Alana M. Vincent
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover Illustration:
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920 (India ink, color chalks and brown wash on
paper, 32.2 x 24.2 cm)
Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Photo ©The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner
Cover design: Studio Pollmann
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© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
Printed in the Netherlands
(PAR)
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Editor
Other Titles in PAR
David C. Bellusci. Amor Dei in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

2013. VIBS 265
Jim Kanaris, Editor. Polyphonic Thinking and the Divine. 2013. VIBS 257
William Sweet and Hendrik Hart. Responses to the Enlightenment: An

Exchange on Foundations, Faith, and Community. 2012. VIBS 241
Avi Sagi. Tradition vs Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in

Jewish Thought. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein. 2008. VIBS 197
Brendan Sweetman. The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human

Person, the Transcendent. 2008. VIBS 193
Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson. The Curve of the Sacred.

2006. VIBS 178
Deane-Peter Baker and Patrick Maxwell. Editors. Explorations in

Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. 2003. VIBS 143
Rem B. Edwards. What Caused the Big Bang? 2001. VIBS 115
Editorial Board of PAR
Rod Nicholls (webmaster) Harriet E. Barber

Deane-Peter Baker Stephen Clark
D. de Leonardo Castro Gwen Griffith-Dickson
G. Elijah Dann Jim Kanaris
Russ Dumke William Sweet
Carl Kalwaitis Pawel Kawalec
Ruby Ramji Esther McIntosh
Gregory MacLeod Ludwig Nagl
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
ELENA NAMLI, JAYNE SVENUNGSSON, AND ALANA M. VINCENT
ONE Tikkun Olam—“Repairing the World”:

Embodying Redemption and Utopia 9
VICTOR JELENIEWSKI SEIDLER
TWO Jewish Hope Versus Revolutionary Hope 23

CATHERINE CHALIER
THREE Adorno, Revolution, and Negative Utopia 33

MATTIAS MARTINSON
FOUR Utopia and Revolution: The Romantic Socialism

of Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber 49
MICHAEL LÖWY
FIVE A Secular Utopia: Remarks on the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate 65

JAYNE SVENUNGSSON
SIX Thinking Revolution With and Beyond Levinas 79

CARL CEDERBERG
SEVEN Topos and Utopia: the Place of Art in the Revolution 95

ALANA M. VINCENT
EIGHT Berlin Debates: The Jews and the Russian Revolution 111
OLEG BUDNITSKII
NINE Jewish Rationalism, Ethics, and Revolution:

Hermann Cohen in Nevel 127
ELENA NAMLI

TEN Reflections of Revolutionary Movements in
American Yiddish Poetry: the Case of Proletpen 145
ALEXANDRA POLYAN
ELEVEN Nihilism and the Resurrection of Political Space:

Hannah Arendt’s Utopia? 161
JON WITTROCK
viii JEWISH THOUGHT, UTOPIA AND REVOLUTION
TWELVE Left (in) Time: Hegel, Benjamin, and Derrida Facing the
Status Quo 173
BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON
WORKS CITED 187
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 201
INDEX 205
INTRODUCTION
Elena Namli, Jayne Svenungsson, and Alana M. Vincent
Gershom Scholem has famously described Jewish messianism as “a theory of

catastrophe,” which “stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the
transition from every historical present to the Messianic future” (Scholem,
1971, p. 7). In response to the grim realities of the present world, Jewish
thought has not tended to retreat into eschatological fantasy, but rather to
project utopian visions precisely on to the present moment (at whatever period
in history has constituted the “present”), envisioning redemptions that are
concrete, immanent, and necessarily political in nature. In difficult times and
through shifting historical contexts, the messianic hope in the Jewish tradition
has functioned as a political vision: the dream of a peaceful kingdom, of a
country to return to, or of a leader who will administer justice among the
nations. Perhaps against this background it is not so surprising that Jewish
messianism in modern times has been transposed, and lives on in secular
political movements and ideologies. The Jewish messianic political-visionary
move throws an important light on the significant presence of Jewish thinkers
and actors in the different utopian and revolutionary currents that spread over
both Western and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.
By taking a fresh look at the historical and textual roots of the notions of
utopia and revolution, this volume wishes to engage in the ongoing debate on
political theology. In recent years, a number of prominent voices––ranging
from Jürgen Habermas and Michael Walzer to Giorgio Agamben and Judith
Butler––have in various ways explored the constructive politico-philosophical
impulses inherent in traditional theological tropes, notions and values.
However, in spite of this intense renewed interest in the political and
philosophical potentials of both Jewish and Christian theology, there is still
little reflection on the relation between religious ideas and tropes on the one
hand, and political notions and ideologies on the other––the kind of meta-
reflection that was carried out in the twentieth century by figures such as Ernst
Bloch, Karl Löwith, and Hans Blumenberg. Albeit in different and partly
conflicting ways, these thinkers all posed the larger question about the nature
of the relation between Europe’s religious heritage—exemplified in Judaism
and Christianity—and modern political ideas of progress, utopia, and
revolution.
The specific contribution of this book lies in approaching this question
with particular regard to Judaism as a religious tradition. Is the relation of the
Jewish religious heritage and modern progressivist ideologies essentially one
of continuity—as Bloch and Löwith would have it—or of discontinuity—as
Blumenberg forcefully claimed? What happens when ideas from the religious
sphere are transferred to the political sphere? Are modern political notions
2 ELENA NAMLI, JAYNE SVENUNGSSON, AND ALANA M. VINCENT
“only” secularized theological notions, or do they exist in their own right?

Is—to borrow from the title of Catherine Chalier’s contribution to this
volume—Jewish hope something quite distinct from revolutionary hope?
Or—as suggested in Michael Löwy’s and Victor Seidler’s contributions—is
there an essential ideological link between Jewish messianism and certain
strands within modern revolutionary thought?
By posing these and numerous other related questions, the various
authors represented here seek to contribute to a deeper understanding of the
relationship between Jewish thought, utopia, and revolution. This general
issue is approached from several perspectives, with differences of opinion
presented in regard to both what constitutes Jewish tradition, and how to
regard utopia and revolution. Bearing in mind that all of these notions are
multifaceted––comprising aspects such as political messianism, religious
renewal, Zionism, and different forms of Marxist and Anarchist movements––
a strong emphasis throughout the various chapters is placed on the historical
and biographical backdrop against which the philosophers, writers, and artists
under discussion display their work.
This focus on the historical and material conditions for intellectual and
artistic creativity was prompted by the particular circumstances in which this
volume originated. The selected articles are based on conversations and
debates from a colloquium held in Vilnius (Vilna) in June 2012. Before the
Second World War, Vilnius was a flourishing center for Jewish culture in
Eastern Europe, the Jerusalem of the Litvaks, and our aspiration was that the
very space of the meeting, which gathered twenty scholars from different
European countries, would help to frame and contextualize the conversations.
During the days of the colloquium, we walked through the extensive area that
was once a Jewish ghetto and, watching the remains of the old Yiddish wall
inscriptions, recalled the history of Jewish Lithuania, which comprises both a
long philosophical tradition (Lithuania is both the home of the Gaon of Vilna
and the Misnagdim, as well as the country of young Emmanuel Levinas) and
the unbearable memories of the Shoah––the Holocaust. Almost all of the Jews
from the Vilnius ghetto were killed by Nazis and their Lithuanian
collaborators during 1941–1943, and our intention was to honor their memory
by recalling the persisting importance of the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe.
The colloquium focused on the theme of utopia and revolution, and
during three days we discussed papers that in different ways dealt with
philosophical and historical aspects of the issue of how Jewish traditions are
related to utopia and revolution. Some papers were directly devoted to the
revolutionary experiences of the Jews of Russia; others offered more general
accounts of the idea of revolution, or revolutionary thought. Vilnius in June
2012 became a starting point for the process that has resulted in the essays
collected in this volume. Our hope is that the selected contributions will offer
a broad look at the central issues at stake, and bring about interesting cross-
fertilizations between idealist and materialist perspectives, between
Introduction 3
philosophical and historical perspectives, and between theoretical perspectives

based in Eastern European and Western European experiences respectively.
The invited authors represent a wide range of academic disciplines (political
science, sociology, history, philosophy, Jewish studies, and theology) and
include both a number of prominent established scholars as well as promising
emerging scholars.
Although our account thus far has focused on the differences in approach
between the authors, we also recognize a recurring theme throughout the
chapters, namely that of universalism. The key figures in this volume are
Jewish thinkers and artists who dreamed of a Jewish liberation that is both
rooted in Jewish traditions and, at the same time, universally comprehensible.
In this respect, the volume contributes to the ongoing theoretical and political
efforts that put the dichotomy of particularity and universality under
suspicion. Jewish thinkers whose legacy is discussed in this volume, such as
Hermann Cohen, Emmanuel Levinas, and others, offer highly embodied
visions of liberation which simultaneously aspire to universal significance.
The first chapter, written by the British sociologist and scholar of Jewish
thought Victor Seidler, is a good example of this “embodied aspiration for
universality.” Seidler offers a philosophical reflection on his personal journey,
from an admiration of Marx’s vision of liberation––as opposed to Jewish
particularity––to a re-discovery of the political potential of Jewish traditions,
inspired by feminism. In his autobiographical essay, Seidler suggests a
clarifying interpretation of the idea that “the personal is political” and exposes
interesting substantial continuities between the Kabbalistic notion Tikkun
Olam—repairing the world—and several secular ideas of redemption and
utopia.
In contrast to Seidler’s search for antecedents for his own involvement in
social-revolutionary movements within his Jewish intellectual inheritance,
Catherine Chalier investigates the discontinuities between the notion of hope
found in traditional Jewish thought––particularly the prophetic literature of
the Hebrew Bible––and in revolutionary philosophy. Chalier suggests that
revolutionary thinkers (of which she takes Ernst Bloch as a paradigmatic
example) crucially misunderstand the prophetic tradition of Jewish
messianism as radical change in the world. This chapter draws on Chalier’s
experience as an interpreter of Levinas in order to construct a model of hope
for the future that does not rely on a violent rupture in the world, but rather an
intense inward change: in the end, she concludes that “Messianism is an
interior event, while being at the same time linked to my action within
history.”
The skepticism toward revolution as a violent rupture in the world is
echoed in Mattias Martinson’s critical elaboration of Theodor W. Adorno’s
notion of a “negative utopia.” Taking his cue from Adorno’s critique of
idealist dialectics, Martinson argues that the lasting political significance of
Adorno lies in the way that he detaches dialectics from its synthetic mode and
thus eliminates the idea of a final redemption or revolution. In Adorno’s view,

the utopian moment does not lie in a positive vision that is extracted from the
present order, but instead consists of an immanent critique revealing the
inconsistencies of all human thought and political action. In this view,
revolution becomes more of a critical task which is constantly to be fulfilled
than an ideal which can be achieved once and for all. If Chalier is hesitant
about tracing continuities between Marxist philosophies of revolution and
traditional Jewish messianism, Martinson, in this respect, takes an opposite
stand. Although it is never developed or incorporated wholeheartedly by
Adorno himself––and only to a minor degree theorized by Adorno scholars––
Martinson states that “it is the messianic dimension of his thought that makes
his dialectics of radical immanence (critical theory, non-synthetic dialectics)
possible in the first place.”
In the following chapter, Michael Löwy draws a captivating portrait of
the evolving friendship between Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber. Löwy, a
prominent voice within contemporary Marxist philosophy, shows how
Landauer and Buber shared a socialistic Romantic utopian vision of human
community. Unlike contemporary conservative German Romantics, these
“prophets of the community” hoped for a revolutionary and future-oriented
fulfillment of the ideal of communitarianism. Landauer and Buber both
believed that genuine social change can only come from a radical desire for
the impossible. Löwy offers an analysis that demonstrates similarities as well
as disagreements between Landauer and Buber. While Landauer influenced
Buber with the clarity of his political thought, Buber managed to persuade his
friend of the liberating potential of Jewish spirituality.
Jayne Svenungsson shifts the focus away from philosophical friendship
and towards the philosophical debate between Karl Löwith and Hans
Blumenberg. Contrary to Landauer and Buber––but also to a number of other
figures discussed in this volume––these two thinkers were united in their
hesitance about the purportedly constructive impact of the biblical theological
legacy on modern political thought. Significant to both philosophers, in spite
of their opposed positions in the debate, is also the tendency to blur the
boundaries between Jewish and Christian theological inheritances, and indeed
between variants within each theological system. Svenungsson is critical of
these tendencies, arguing that “both, in the end, fail to do justice to the
complexity of the relation between modern political ideology and its
theological past.” She maintains that it is only when we recognize this
complexity that we can fully engage in a critical assessment of the relation
between modern political thought and various strands of the biblical
inheritance. Finally, Svenungsson herself suggests a specifically Jewish form
of messianism as a necessary critical corrective to the failure of both Löwith’s
and Blumenberg’s systems to offer a constructive way of being in the world.
The political import of Jewish messianism is further explored by Carl
Cederberg, who engages in a constructive political reflection in relation to
Introduction 5
how Emmanuel Levinas poses the question of revolution. Cederberg takes

issue with the pervasive claim that Levinas’s alleged “turn to the ethical”
implies a turn away from the political in favor of an exclusive focus on the
relation to the neighbor. In contrast to such charges (in recent times put forth
by Alain Badiou, among others), Cederberg demonstrates how Levinas’s
thought is pervaded by revolutionary tropes, most explicitly in his Talmudic
lectures, where he often relates Judaism to the notion of revolution. In
exploring Levinas as a “thinker of the revolution,” Cederberg also explicitly
challenges Catherine Chalier’s emphasis on the discontinuity between
revolutionary hope and the notion of hope elaborated by Levinas. This is not
to say that Cederberg ignores the tensions between the messianic strand in
Levinas’s philosophy and certain revolutionary politics. But this tension, he
concludes, is rather of a constructive nature: “Levinas shows that Judaism is
not a tradition to be overcome by revolutionary politics, but [...] can be seen
as providing inspiration for revolutionary thought.”
In the following chapter, Alana Vincent shifts the focus from “thinking
the revolution” to the material actualization of revolutionary thought,
examining the way that visions of political utopias were expressed in Jewish
art movements in the early twentieth century. Vincent presents two competing
Jewish utopias: the Zionist vision of the early Bezalel School, and the
European integration of the Vitebsk School. By means of contrasting the two
visions articulated by Boris Schatz and Marc Chagall, she elaborates on the
fascinating dialectics of the political and artistic dimensions of utopia and
revolution. In order to understand this dialectics, Vincent pays special
attention to the use of space––both real and imaginary––in the work of these
two artists and these two schools.
Following on from Vincent’s chapter, Oleg Budnitskii, one of the world
leading historians of Russian Jewry, takes us to a very concrete historical
space––the Jewish-Russian Berlin in 1922–1923. Through an analysis of rich
archival materials, Budnitskii presents the inflamed political debates that took
place among a group of prominent Jewish publicists that held a series of
lectures calling upon Jews to acknowledge responsibility for their part in the
Russian Revolution. The “Berlin debates” articulated the tragic dilemma of
the Jews as being simultaneously the subjects and the victims of the Russian
Revolution. One of the most discussed issues was that of the pogroms
performed by the White Army during the Civil War, and Oleg Budnitskii
offers a pertinent historical description of how the Russian Jewry of Berlin
attempted to approach it.
The intellectual climate in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution is
also the focus of Elena Namli’s chapter. Namli takes her departure in
Hermann Cohen’s attempt to formulate a universalist ethics informed by
Kantian rationalism and simultaneously based upon what he argued was the
essential meaning of Jewish monotheism and messianism. In spite of his
strong conviction that Jewish monotheism contradicts every form of ethical
particularism, Cohen nonetheless viewed one specific culture, the German, as

the most distinguished representative of the ethical universalism he embraced.
In order to deepen the analysis of this apparent tension between the universal
and the particular, Namli, in the second part of the chapter, shifts focus to the
small Russian town of Nevel (today in Belarus), where a number of young
neo-Kantian scholars formed a seminar in the years following the Revolution.
Among the participants of the seminar were both Mikhail Bakhtin and the
(today less known) Jewish philosopher Matvei Kagan. Through their partly
diverging reception of the neo-Kantian legacy, Namli finally turns to the
question of the contemporary significance of a universalist ethics, arguing for
an “open universality,” which seeks to “combine the ideal of universal
liberation with the firm rejection of every politics built upon cultural
superiority.”
In chapter ten, Alexandra Polyan shifts focus from the immediate space
of the Russian Revolution to its reception abroad, focusing on the “left” wing
of Yiddish poetry in America. Contesting the generally accepted outline of the
history of American Yiddish poetry as a gradual draining of political content,
Polyan demonstrates that notions of revolution, class struggle, social utopia,
as well as specific connections to the Russian Revolution remained present in
the Proletpen movement well into the 1930’s. However, it would be equally a
mistake to read this body of poetry as the work of Russian Jewish emigrants
who retained the cultural and political concerns of their home country; Polyan
also points out the extent to which American social concerns––especially race
relations––were present in the work of Proletpen.
Moving away from considerations of revolution enacted within
particular concrete spaces, Jon Wittrock engages with Hannah Arendt’s idea
of political space as a utopian project in its own right. He is particularly
interested in the manner in which “Arendt draws upon diverse traditions
precisely to deal with the disruption of traditions––that is, she approaches
them in order to find practices which can stabilize human life, when the
stability of received traditions has been disturbed.” Wittrock argues that
Arendt’s thought is not, strictly speaking, Jewish, but rather a hybrid system
which draws equally upon influences from Christianity as well as classical
Greek and Roman philosophy, in an attempt to construct a system that could
endure beyond the twentieth century’s wars and disasters which otherwise
represented the overturning of all such systems.
In the final chapter, Björn Thorsteinsson brings attention to a figure who
is somewhat unexpected in this context: G.F.W. Hegel. In sharp contrast to
the other key figures discussed in this volume, Hegel saw little if any political
and moral value in the Jewish religion, but rather depicted it as an aborted
project in the ongoing march of history. Hegel’s metaphysics of the alienated
Jews is partly the subject of Jacques Derrida’s 1974 book Glas––which is the
focal point of Thorsteinsson’s chapter. Through a close reading of this
compound work, Thorsteinsson reveals the richness and complexity of
Introduction 7
Derrida’s relation to Hegel. Far from a simple rejection of Hegel as an anti-

Jewish philosopher, or as the thinker of the all-encompassing system,
Derrida’s sensitive interpretation brings out a certain materialist, even
messianic, conception of temporality, historicity and subjectivity in Hegel’s
work. Perhaps, Thorsteinsson suggests, this is not so surprising, given that an
important inspiration for Derrida’s take on temporality and subjectivity is
Walter Benjamin’s writings on history and dialectics. In the end, he
concludes, Hegel––read through the lenses of Benjamin and Derrida––can
even present us with “a way of thinking about history and temporality that
does not exclude the irruption of the other or the avoidance of catastrophe.
All, of course, in the name of the hope that, after all, redemption is still
possible in face of the ongoing temptation of resignation, apathy and
conformism––as well as, who knows, revolution.”
The editors wish to acknowledge our deep gratitude to Mark Godin and
Andrei Rogatchevski for their extensive assistance in the production of this
volume. Thanks are also due to the attendees of the original colloquium in
Vilnius, whose questions and comments contributed greatly to the shaping of
the final papers in this volume.
We appreciate the financial support given by Riksbankens
jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences)
to the initial colloquium in Vilnius. Our gratitude to the Centre for Russian
and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University for funding and organizing the
conference in Vilnius as well as for logistical and financial support during our
work with the volume. Thanks also to Åke Vibergs Stiftelse and Gunvor och
Josef Anérs stiftelse for generous support given to work on the volume.
Uppsala, December 2013

One
TIKKUN OLAM—“REPAIRING THE WORLD”:

EMBODYING REDEMPTION AND UTOPIA
Victor Jeleniewski Seidler
1. “I create new heavens and a new earth.” (Isaiah 65:17)

JOURNEYS: From Vilna to Treblinka
Where we think makes a difference to how we can think. Knowing that I was
going to be thinking in Vilna, the city where my father was born—or so his
driving license says—and close to Suvalki, where the family lived before
moving to Warsaw sometime in the early 1920s, created its own disturbances
in my thinking and my writing. I was making a return journey, but could in no
sense return. What was appropriate to think in Vilna and what inherited
relationship did I have to this city—the Jerusalem of the North that held a
particular light throughout my childhood? It was a city that I loved from a
distance, though I also knew that terrible things had happened there, and that a
vibrant center of Jewish learning had been destroyed.
I grew up dreaming of Vilna and knowing that my father, who died
when I was just five, had not really survived Hitler’s war against the Jews. He
had been the only member of his family who was outside Poland when the
war began—everyone else died in Warsaw, in the Warsaw ghetto or in
Treblinka. My father could not live knowing this, but somehow I had to live
with this knowledge and somehow keep it hidden away as I was to become
“English” and so secure a possible future for the family. I was to know that
my father was a Litvak—but did this make me a Litvak? And how did his
particular brand of Jewish orthodoxy tacitly shape my own experience and
history? Did I have to escape and take a different journey in order to be able
to feel safe? What were the inheritances and excitements that I carried, even if
I could not easily share them? I grew up with Buber and his Hassidic Tales
and with readings from the Baal Shem Tov—these sayings resonated, even if
they existed in some tension with schooling that taught us histories of Kings
and Queens of England that we had to learn by heart. But there were
subterranean echoes that carried traces of thinking Jewish that I somehow
absorbed—through Freud, but also later as a philosophy student at Oxford in
the middle 1960s through Wittgenstein, as well as through teachers such as
Isaiah Berlin, who was open to traditions of Russian thought in addition to the
Counter-Enlightenment and German Romanticism.
10 VICTOR JELENIEWSKI SEIDLER
I was born in London and subject to an unspoken contract that the

traumatic family histories would be held by my parents alone, and that my
task was to secure a future through “becoming English.” The past belonged to
them, and there was a fear that if I got to close to it myself and accepted its
histories and memories as my own, I would be too close to the fire. As yet, I
have only passed by Treblinka on the train that I took from Warsaw, though I
did make it briefly to Suvalki and even to the shtetl of Jelenow where the
Jeleniewskis had come from. I witnessed the destruction in the cemetery of
Suvalki: how only a few headstones remained, and how the remnants of stone
had been constructed into a memorial. The image of a deer—the Jelen—was
there to be seen, beautifully present as a remnant. But this was a journey that I
did not really follow up, even though it took me to teaching in Bialystock
where few seemed to remember how many Jews there were in the pre-war
population. There were gaps in time, as there were gaps in family history. I
learnt visiting the Memorial to the Murder of European Jewry in Berlin that
there were no surviving records of those who had been murdered in Treblinka,
unlike Auschwitz where there were detailed records and names. There were
only ashes and stones in a field.
As a postgraduate student, I was caught up in the politics of 1968 and its
aspirations towards a universalism that could also provide a kind of hiding. I
read Marx, and for a while accepted his vision of “the human” as involving a
transcendence of Jewish particularity. But it was the influence of feminism
that allowed for a grounding of the discourse of “everyday life,” as well as a
reclaiming of bodies as part of what it means to be human in “our bodies,
ourselves,” that resonated in me somehow with the validation of the embodied
life within Jewish tradition—echoed in Buber’s writings on Chasidism. An
encounter with feminism and sexual politics allowed for a different reading of
Jewish libertarian traditions, for it called for people to speak more openly and
honestly about their experience and so, also, for a different way of listening to
others. Jewish tradition, with the centrality of the prayer Shema, recognized
the significance of hearing and listening to the voice of God, so that it was an
aural tradition that shaped a philosophy different from the dominant
Greek/Christian tradition, which was an ocular tradition that insisted that
“seeing is believing”—and also insisted that Judaism was blind and thus
unknowing, because it refused to see the truth of the Christian revelation. The
synagogue was to be represented, as it is in the cathedral in Strasburg, as a
blind woman who has a broken stick and so cannot find her way. For
Christianity “truth” was already given in the coming of Christ, and so in the
denial of the Jewishness of Jesus.
Through engaging with the challenges of feminism, and so with the
shaping of inherited masculinities in the libertarian socialist politics of late
60s and early 1970s—as I was to explore in Rediscovering Masculinity:
Reason, Language and Sexuality (Seidler, 1989)—I developed an awareness
of how European modernities were shaped through a taken for granted
Tikkun Olam—“Repairing the World” 11
dominant masculinity. Consciousness-raising could be understood as a

philosophical practice that traced how certain ways of thinking were related to
the workings of social relationships of power. In this way, it went beyond the
familial terms of Freud’s classical psychoanalysis to acknowledge the impact
of traumatic histories and the memories they helped to shape. But it also
questioned an Enlightenment rationalism that sought to separate minds from
bodies and reason from emotions, as within a Kantian tradition it was through
a reason radically separated from nature that we were to discern the moral
law. It was through reason alone that lives were to be guided and
revolutionary transformations made.
This rationalism, in its totalistic and destructive mode, is also echoed in
Ernst Bloch’s anarcho-Bolshevik revolutionary outlook which, as Michael
Löwy recognizes, “cannot be separated from his messianic conception of
temporality, which was opposed to all gradualism of progress: Munzer and his
friends ‘did not wage the battle for better times, but for the end of all time [...]
the eruption of the Kingdom’” (Löwy, 1992, p. 143). Adorno also recognized
that “the ‘perspective of the messianic end of history and the thrust towards
transcendence’ formed the center around which everything in Geist der
Utopie was organised” (ibid., p. 142). But Bloch’s “synchretic” Judeo-
Christian religious approach brings together traditions that need to be
explored in their difference to frame an apocalyptic vision that confusingly
leads him to say of the Safed cabbalists that they waited for “the messianic
avenger, the destroyer of the existing Empire and Papacy [...] the restorer of
‘Olam-ha-Tikkun’, the true Kingdom of God” (ibid., p. 143).
Buber offers quite a different image of tikkun olam, in recognizing the
need for the active participation of men and women in the work of redemption
as they also remake their everyday lives and relationships. As Löwy
recognizes, Buber “contrasted more and more categorically, messianic
prophetism (Jewish eschatology proper) and Apocalyptics. [...T]he former
accorded the preparation of redemption to humanity, to the decision-making
power of each human being so called upon; while the latter conceived of
redemption as an immutable future, predetermined in the smallest detail,
which used human beings only as instruments” (ibid., pp. 52–53). In relation
to Marxism, this was an insight also of Gramsci who contested traditions of
orthodox Marxism that assumed that the laws of capitalism development
would inevitably lead to a revolutionary crisis.
Gramsci called for a different kind of grounding as he called people to
interrogate the different historical and cultural elements that made up a
“common-sense” that they took for granted. He calls for an archaeology of
common sense that acknowledges the fragments that shape it. Early Second-
Wave feminisms learnt from Gramsci in the experiments of consciousness-
raising that encouraged women to explore how an experience that had been
taken to be “private” and “personal” was also shaped by patriarchal
relationships of power and subordination. In a similar vein, we can learn from
Jewish feminist traditions to question the patriarchal terms of Jewish

revolutionary and utopian traditions.
There are potential links between a critique of patriarchal power and
Buber’s critique of the state. Summing up his difference with Hermann
Cohen—the champion of “state consciousness” against which Buber in 1916–
17 was crystallizing his own political-religious views—he writes: “Cohen,
whether he is aware of it or not, want the State to subjugate the Spirit, as for
me, I want the Spirit to subjugate the State” (ibid., p. 53). Appealing to
Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and Landauer, Buber condemns State tyranny, that
“homunculus which drinks blood from the veins of communities” and in his
homage to Gustav Landauer, published shortly after his assassination in April
1919, Buber wrote: “He rejected mechanical, centralist pseudo-socialism,
because he longed for communitarian, organic and federalist socialism” (ibid.,
p. 54). In some ways this remained an inspiration for the libertarian socialist
politics that we were developing as activists in East London Big Flame, where
we were inspired also by the tradition of East London Jewish anarchists,
including Rudolf Rocker. We were concerned in working with the working
class people in the area as we transformed our own class experience and
shaped new forms of industrial and community politics. We were attempting
to ground our politics in lived experience rather than to live out abstract ideals
and principles that were to be discerned through reason alone. We were
feeling our way as well as reflecting critically upon our everyday experience.
But there were other philosophical sources, and other journeys, that were
also inspiring, even though it was to take time to acknowledge how thinking
Jewish was somehow tied with embodying experience and transforming
everyday relationships as doing our part in tikkun olam—repairing the world
not according to some abstract and idealized image, but through creating more
equal and just relationships. This meant learning from our experience, often in
ways that stretched the notion of “the political” when we were also learning
how to bring up children, live collectively and deepen intimate relationships.
But it was also difficult to think Jewish on the left, especially when it
came to do with Zionism and relationships between the Israeli state and the
Palestinians. It also took time to realize how the universalism of a certain
critical Marxism could also make it difficult to engage with issues of Jewish
difference along with other ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual differences. It
took time to engage with Hess’s critique of certain strands in Marxism in
Rome and Jerusalem and the space it opened up for thinking across the
boundaries of the secular and the spiritual. There were also other ways that
these concerns were opening up. There were other journeys that I was learning
from, and also other journeys I was going to have to make connections with
the different legacies and inheritances I carried. It meant coming to terms with
the Shoah—the Holocaust—and so finding my way to Poland and engaging
with the losses that my family endured that, in time, I was going to have to
experience as my own losses, as my father’s brothers and sisters-in-law
became “my uncles and aunts.” They had names I was to discover and learn to
mourn.
2. Embodying Philosophy
In September 1948, Wittgenstein travelled to Vienna to visit his sister

Hermine who was seriously ill. We know little of what it meant for him to
return to Vienna and the destruction of the Jewish community that had taken
place during the Shoah—the Holocaust. Even though his family had been
directly affected, Wittgenstein seems to have written little about this and
instead to go on with writing philosophy in a way that did not appear to be
radically challenged. After spending a couple of weeks in Cambridge, he
returned to Ireland and to the quiet room he had occupied previously at the top
of Ross’s Hotel on Parkgate Street, close to Phoenix Park. It was known
locally as a “Protestant” hotel for it was where Protestant clergymen used to
stay when they came to Dublin to attend conferences and meetings. “When I
look at the faces of the clergy here in Dublin,” Wittgenstein remarked to his
friend Drury, “it seems to me that the Protestant ministers are less smug than
the Roman priests. I suppose it is because they know they are such a small
minority” (Monk, 1990, p. 535).
During the winter months in Dublin, Wittgenstein worked with great
intensity. “I’m anxious to make hay during the very short period when the sun
shines in my brain,” he wrote (2012, p. 434). Writing what was to become
published as Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology he was
attempting to show the multiplicity and complexity of psychological concepts
such as “fear,” “hope,” and “belief” in a way that exposes the barrenness and
confusion of “the philosopher’s search for generality.” His work is full of fine
distinctions, and in some sense could be read as a challenge to the idea that
philosophy is Greek—a sentiment Levinas expresses—as Wittgenstein seeks
to show the dangers in a Platonic/Christian tradition that sets up certain ideals
against which human beings are to judge themselves inadequate, lacking, or in
Christian terms “sinful”—as having born into sin a feeling that Wittgenstein
himself was often haunted by.
Wittgenstein is working against this dominant Christian tradition and the
ways it might imagine possibilities of revolutionary and utopian theory and
politics. It is a tradition that also shaped Hegel’s logic, and so a certain strand
within Marx’s thinking, that is convinced of the needs of transcendence,
including a transcendence of a Jewish particularity that is to be disdained
when set against a universal vision of “the human” that is already set within
the terms of a dominant Christianity. This dominant Christianity has been
given a secular form, within a dominant European modernity and the
traditions of philosophy and social theory that it has sustained to legitimate
European colonialism, which set itself to be superior in its possession of a
disembodied conception of reason that guaranteed freedom, science, and
progress. European modernity alone could take its “civilization” for granted as
it shaped, through Descartes and Kant, the superior terms of a culture that was
set against an uncivilized nature.
Though Hegel challenged the terms of a Cartesian mind that treated
consciousness as universal, and so as ahistorical, in showing the historical
nature of consciousness he remained within the secularized Christian terms
that shaped disembodied conceptions of knowledge. A Platonic/Christian
tradition insisted on the need to transcend physicality, as Gods were now
removed from the feminine and earthly realm that they had occupied in
Minoan thinking, instead taking residence in the heavens in classical Greek
culture. We were to look to the heavens and transcend the earthly realm that
came to be disdained in contrast to the spiritual realm.
A Christianity that was to disavow its Jewish sources, as I argue in
Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture (Seidler, 2007), was to be refigured
within Platonic Greek traditions which defined “the human” in radical
opposition to “the animal,” so that it is only as Kant frames it, through
transcending our animal natures—our emotions, feelings, and desires, which
Kant gathers as “inclinations”—that we can acknowledge the dualistic
framing of “human nature” whereby, as I argued in Kant, Respect and
Injustice: The Limits Of Liberal Moral Theory (Seidler, 1986), it is “reason”
alone that defines what it means to be “human” so that to become human we
have to control our “animal” natures.
This is not to speak against reason but to show, as Wittgenstein explores,
the care we need in the ways we think reason and the ways we are led astray
in our thinking when we contrast reason with nature, minds against bodies,
spirit against flesh. For example, Wittgenstein shows, among other things, the
danger of assuming that all sentences in the indicative mode can be regarded
as descriptions:
I hear the word ‘I am afraid’. I ask: ‘In what connection did you say
this? Was it a sigh from the bottom of your heart, was it a confession,
was it a self-observation […] ?’ (Wittgenstein, 1996, p. 47).
Wittgenstein had felt a need to make a confession, which included possibly

leading people astray about his Jewish ancestry, but we might also wonder
about the fear he felt for his family in Vienna and also feelings he had about
the destructions wrought on Jewish communities through the Shoah.
Wittgenstein’s concern was to stress life’s irreducible variety, something
he continually experienced walking in the Zoological Gardens, and so he was
wary of imposing a single scheme upon all this diversity. On one of their
walks in Phoenix Park, Drury mentioned Hegel and Wittgenstein responded
saying, “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which
look different are really the same, whereas my interest is in showing that
things which look the same are really different” (Rhees, 1984, p. 157). In his
later work, as Monk recognizes, an idea of central importance is “that there is

a kind of seeing that is also a kind of thinking (or at least, a kind of
understanding): the seeing of connections” (Monk, 1990, p. 537).
This is very different from the kind of ordering that Nazism did when it
thought about different races and the hierarchy of superiority and inferiority
that seemed, as Simone Weil also recognized, to have very deep routes within
Western culture, particularly as she frames it within Roman conceptions of
power and greatness—and so of Empire—that she felt Hitler was attempting
to emulate in his colonial thinking of power and extermination, familiar from
German South West Africa and also in his admiration for the British empire.
But Weil was less willing to acknowledge resonances of Roman power in the
framing of dominant Christian traditions, wanting to blame Judaism in her
acceptance of the distinction between Christian love and Jewish revenge.
But Weil was blind to the sources of Christian anti-Semitism. In learning
to transcend our animal natures we learn to disdain bodies that come to be
identified with sexuality and the “sins of the flesh.” Judaism comes to be
identified with “Carnal Israel”—as Daniel Boyarin (1995) explores—and its
connections with the flesh are taken as a sign of its defective spirituality—its
inability to transcend the earthly and its insistence that the earthly and the
spiritual need to remain in connection with each other. For a dominant
Christianity, this becomes a mark of Jewish “otherness” and inferiority,
because it is supposedly only in transcending the body (that somehow
becomes identified with Jewish particularity) that we can create an inclusive
Christian universalism. Christianity takes itself to be superior because, as
Boyarin explores in A Radical Jew: Paul and The Politics Of Identity (1994),
it is able to transcend the body and offer a universal humanism.
3. Embodying Redemption
Marx remains, in this regard at least, trapped within a tradition of

Enlightenment rationalism—as I explored in Recovering the Self: Morality
and Social Theory (1994)—when he argues for the need to transcend Jewish
tribal particularity to become human (Marx, 1958). At the same time, he does
reclaim bodies in his grasp of alienated labor within a capitalist mode of
production. But it might be that to think Jewish is to suggest a different path
towards a different vision of the universal, freedom, and justice—thinking
through differences, towards a sense of the universal that can both respect,
honor and critically engage with particular cultures and traditions.
We also learnt within the “modern philosophy” of European
modernities, framed through secularized Christianities, that it is a dominant
white masculinity that can alone take its reason for granted, and that women
and people of color who are deemed to be “closer to nature” are more likely to
be influenced by their emotions, feelings, and desires. Because of this their
humanity is taken to be defective, and in the case of women, as Kant argues, it
is only through their relationship with men in heterosexual marriage that they
can hope to secure a reliable inner relationship with reason. In relation to the
colonized, who are supposedly trapped in their relationships with nature, it is
only through an external relationship with their European colonial masters
that they can hope to make a transition from tradition to modernity, from
colonial dependence towards independence.
So it is that feminisms and ecology, in different ways, challenge the idea
of progress as involving the control and domination of nature. In their
reclaiming of bodies and sexualities as part of what it means to be human,
these traditions echoed Freud, who was also revolutionary in his challenge to
the repression of sexuality and the silent sufferings that it produced that had
been treated as “subjective” and “personal” and so excluded from the
discourses of oppression and injustice that were legitimated within the public
realm of politics alone. In their different ways, ecology’s reclaiming of the
earthly and feminisms’ reclaiming of bodies and the everyday shaped an
embodied utopianism that was “thinking Jewish” in the ways that it allowed
for the sacred in the transformation of everyday relationships. The spiritual no
longer needed to involve an escape from the earthly into a transcendent realm
of the spiritual, but could involve the revolutionary sacralization of the
everyday within equal relationships that recognized others as equally created
in the image of God. This was a vision that also informed the secular politics
of the Bund who rejected the centralization of the Bolshevik party and sought
a more libertarian expression of Yiddish culture through the transformation of
everyday relationships.
This could resonate with what Georg Lukacs identified as an “anti-
capitalist romantic” dimension in his writings, even after he joined the
Communist Party. As Löwy (1992) argues, like many intellectuals of German
cultural origins both Jewish and non-Jewish, Lukacs “probably discovered the
spiritual universe of mystical Jewish religiosity through Buber’s books on
Hasidism” (Löwy, 1992, p. 145). In 1911, Lukacs wrote to Buber saying that
it has been “a great experience” for him to read particularly The Legend of the
Baal-Shem which he said was “unforgettable” (ibid.). They later met when
Lukacs visited Buber in Heppenheim, the village Buber lived in.
Lukacs was attracted to the messianic aspiration of Hasidism, which he
discussed in his piece entitled “Jewish Mysticism”—the only paper he wrote
on a Jewish theme and which he translated or got re-published (Lukacs,
1911). Though he does not seem to engage with the transformation of
everyday life, he does in a later essay on Dostoevsky refer to the idea that the
Shabbat was “the source of the world to come” or the reflection of
redemption, and quoted a passage to this effect from The Legend of the Baal-
Schem. It was the idea that heaven could be lived on earth so that the heavenly
could be made earthly as much as the earthly be spiritualized. For on Shabbat,
people could experience the heavenly for themselves as a kind of spark that
was alive in their lives. Of course there are different traditions, and while
Vilna was associated with a rationalist Judaism that was critical of the
spontaneous heart-feeling that was to be celebrated through dance and song as
a way of getting closer to God within Hasidism, it was the anti-rationalist and
the “romantic” aspects of Judaism that drew Lukacs.
This was opposed to the rationalist image of the Jewish religion that was
conveyed by the Haskalah, the liberal Jewish Enlightenment and German
sociologists such as Max Weber and Werner Sombart. For Lukacs, as Löwy
notes, it was “messianism, which bore from within a true
‘ethical democracy’” (ibid., p. 147). But Löwy is also right to insist that
Lukacs was “one of the least touched by the Jewish problematic,” and that his
“relationship to Jewish messianism remained largely ‘subterranean’ […] His
reflections and his utopian/revolutionary aspirations always remained within a
universal-humanist and world-wide framework” (ibid., p. 150). Under the
influence of the Russian Revolution, in his article “Bolshevism as a Moral
Problem,” it was the proletariat that was presented as the “bearer of social
redemption for mankind” and the “Messiah-class of world history” (ibid., p.
149).
In contrast, it had been a vision of a Yiddish inspired “ethical
democracy” that informed the libertarian socialism of the Bund even if they
thought of themselves as anti-religious and secular. Possibly it is the
transformation of the everyday that helps to redefine “the political” in ways
that feminisms and ecological movements were also to do late in the twentieth
century. It was in their different reclaimings of an embodied ethics and,
possibly with Levinas, a shared sense of the priority of the ethical in relation
to the epistemological, that they show the resonance of Jerusalem and its
necessity as a balance and critical engagement to Athens that has largely been
able to define Western culture, with some very destructive inheritances.
4. Thinking Jewish
Wittgenstein contrasted his friend Drury’s “Greek” religious ideas with his
own thoughts, which were, he said, “one hundred per cent Hebraic.” Drury
had admired Origen’s vision of a final restitution of all things, a restoration to
their former glory, but to Wittgenstein it was right to consider this a heresy
because “It would make nonsense of everything else. If what we do now is to
make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away
with.” It was important for Wittgenstein to recognize that what we do now in
our relationships, both with ourselves and with others, makes a difference. In
this way, he was also questioning Ernst Bloch’s sensitivity to the restorative
aspects of messianism—the eschatological return of all things to their original
perfection mentioned in his Geist der Utopie. We can only appreciate the
seriousness of life if we can recognize that what we do, not just what we
think, makes a significant difference. It is the realization that you also find in
Exodus, that it is deeds that matter and that what we think emerges out of
what we do, that marks his thinking as Hebraic. But this is to question a
utopianism that is locked into the significance of images against which people
evaluate themselves and their experience, and to suggest an embodied
utopianism as an attention to the everyday details of life and relationships.
Relationships will end, and people will be hurt, but this is something
they have to accept and live through, as out of the hurt something else might
emerge that might leave them with a different sense of what matters in life.
But there is a tendency to escape from “negative emotions,” such as hurt or
pain, as if we can be distracted, as if there is nothing that can be learnt as we
live through these experiences. Often it helps if we have friends we can share
these hurts with, since they are made real through being shared with others.
As we are listened to, so we can also share more of what is hurting for us and
trace the different stages we are living through. This is to embody the times
we are living through, rather than to seek ways of escaping as we recognize
there is no way of “fast forwarding” what we are living through, even if it
feels unbearably painful and we feel like a yoyo, shifting between different
emotions that can seem equally difficult to tolerate.
A few days before his death, Wittgenstein was visited in Cambridge by
Drury, and remarked to him: “Isn’t it curious that, although I know I have not
long to live, I never find myself thinking about a ‘future life’. All my interest
is still on this life and the writing I am still able to do” (Monk, 1990, p. 580).
Wittgenstein was concerned, as Monk frames it, with “a state of ethical
seriousness and integrity that would survive the scrutiny of even that most
stern of judges, his own conscience” (ibid., p. 580). This meant an attention to
how he should be living his everyday life, and for a while he considered
becoming a doctor because that would allow him to help people; he even
considered moving to find work in the Soviet Union.
George Thompson, a Greek scholar who knew Wittgenstein well in the
1930s, said in relation to his attitude towards Marxism: “He was opposed to it
in theory, but supported it in practice.” During the political upheavals of the
1930s, Wittgenstein’s sympathies were with the working class and the
unemployed and that his allegiance, as Monk says, “broadly speaking, was
with the Left” (ibid., p. 343). Thompson spoke of Wittgenstein’s “growing
political awareness” during those years and testified that “He was alive to the
evils of unemployment and fascism and the growing dangers of war” (ibid., p.
343). It seemed as if he wanted to settle in Russia as a manual worker, or
possibly to take up medicine, but to abandon philosophy. We could say that he
wanted a different experience and was also partly influenced by Tolstoy in his
desire to experience manual labor on a collective farm. As Monk argues, he
was attracted by Keynes’s portrait in his Short View of Russia which, “while
depreciating Marxism as an economic theory, applauded its practice in Russia
as a new religion, in which there were no supernatural beliefs but, rather,
deeply held religious attitudes” (ibid., p. 348).
Wittgenstein was interested in the possibilities of people living

differently, thinking that issues that were troubling them could not be solved
through reason alone, but called for people learning to relate differently.
Possibly, the stress on reflecting and reorganizing the details of everyday life,
rather than in thinking that problems will be solved by thinking differently,
that is also a way that Wittgenstein’s thought is Hebraic. There are resonances
with Buber and his insistence that Jerusalem offers a different tradition of
libertarian socialism that the West can also learn from. In Buber’s idea of
messianism, “[t]he central Jewish Theologumenon, which remains
unformulated and undogmatic, but which forms the background and cohesion
of all doctrine and prophecy, is the belief that human action will actively
participate in the task of world redemption” (Löwy, 1992, p. 52). A central
message of Hasidism, for Buber, was that people were not condemned to
waiting and contemplation, but rather redemption was there for people to act
upon, by collecting and releasing the sparks of holy light dispersed throughout
the world.
As redemption becomes a collaborative project, so people also have to
learn from their own experience and from the experiments that they make in
changing their lives and challenging dominant neoliberal capitalist relations
which alone value market values. If justice is still to be accomplished as part
of the redemption of the world, then we have to learn to live more equal
relationships across gender, “race,” religious, and ethnic differences. Rather
than assume that the sources of distress lie in the unconscious mind so that we
have to return to causal factors, as Freud has proposed, as Wittgenstein’s
challenges to Freud enumerate, we need to make changes in the ways we live
everyday lives and relationships as we trace connections between sources of
distress to the impact of social and historical events that have left their own
marks. This is what Freud did out of Jewish sources when he names the
repression of sexuality. In this way post-analytic humanistic psychotherapy
traditions can be more open to grounding insights of a libertarian left tradition
as it recognizes tensions between values that people want to live out in their
lives and the values of a neoliberal capitalism that tends to reduce zones of
value and self-realization.
In the refusal of political leadership, the Occupy movements show the
sensitivity of a younger generation in its challenges to the global financial
crisis and its fallout to naming the responsibility of bankers and the financial
sector. It questions a universalism that would have ruling groups argue that
“we are all in this together,” and draws upon revolutionary and utopian
insights of a Jewish tradition that sought to make changes, as the Bund sought
to do in the institutions that sustain capitalist money relationships, as it seeks
for new more libertarian forms of democratic accountability. As there are
echoes between Occupy movements in 2012 and the libertarian political
movements of the 1970s that also sought to learn from the feminist idea that
“the personal is political,” so there are also resonances back to the hopes that
inspired earlier generations of Jewish libertarian radicals who were suspicious

of the intensions of state power.
But there have also been learnings that trace different histories and
connections, say between feminism and gay liberation and the earlier
socialism of Edward Carpenter and the gay counter-cultures of his time. There
is also a questioning of the universalism of leftist traditions that too often
reproduced European notions of white superiority, and that found it hard to
integrate post-colonial critiques as they did other appeals to difference. As
Wittgenstein recognized, this is part of a Greek/Christian tradition of
universalism that has shaped “modern philosophy” and social theory that
seeks refuge in abstract generalizations. He opens up a respect for differences,
but also an attention, through ordinary language, to the quality of people’s
relationships with themselves and others, and the integrity and honesty with
which they seek to manifest more equal and just relationships within a
globalized world that has become unequal as it is threatened by the advent of
global warming that reminds people to the vulnerability of the planet as well
as human lives that have suffered not only in the Shoah, but also in Cambodia,
Rwanda, Bosnia, and all the other spaces neighbors have learnt to hate and
murder neighbors.
Benjamin’s question, which historians are learning to take seriously, is:
what are our responsibilities to the dead, and how does a Jewish tradition of
memory help us to realize what we need to do in order to honor the memory
of the dead? There are resonances between Wittgenstein and Benjamin, and
possibly they are both speaking out of a Jewish/Hebraic tradition when they
challenge liberal traditions of progress which consign the past to oblivion. We
often learn that there is “no point” in dwelling on the past, but as Freud also
knew it is in mourning that we express our humanity. Rather than deny or
escape the hurt, we recognize that it takes time to live through it. But Freud’s
rationalism meant that he felt we could gradually disconnect the ties that bind
us to those who have died, and so gradually find greater freedom. He was less
attuned to ways that we might remain spiritually in connection with those who
have died—that we might have to make our own journeys. As Benjamin
notes, we can never tell when the Messiah might come, when the present
might be irrevocable transformed and something shift inside us. Sometimes
this is a process that involves integrating aspects of ourselves that we have
rejected or escaped from, possibly out of fear of engaging too directly.
As we have slowly learnt the philosophical impact of the idea that “the
personal is political,” so we have also recognized the inner journeys that we
have to take along with the outer journeys to release the sparks that are
waiting as part of a process of redemption. This might be slower and more
detailed than revolutionaries once imagined, but we have also had to learn
from the historical experiences of Soviet Russia as well as the terrible losses
of the Holocaust. It is as a surviving remnant that we remember and honor the
dead as part of a process of learning how to live with a greater sense of joy
and reality as we work to make a more just and equal world. This is the work
we do together as part of tikkun olam—the repairing of the world that is also a
healing of ourselves as we learn to live with greater truth and justice within an
unjust and oppressive world.
Two
JEWISH HOPE
VERSUS REVOLUTIONARY HOPE
Catherine Chalier
The person who hopes starts going toward a horizon that they can now neither
perceive nor predict. Yet this horizon already touches them, and prevents
them from remaining where they are. Their hope might be founded on
imagination, on a bet, on reason, or on a promise, but it does not rely on any
precise positive knowledge that one could transmit to someone else since hope
always exceeds what we know. To hope means not to agree to the idea that
fate or necessity are the true and ultimate explanation of what is and also to
negate the notion that amor fati is the noblest wisdom. It also means to
perceive how we may get out of tragedy and despair while at the same time
recognizing their terrible force and danger in our own lives. The one who
hopes is not a naïve person, at least not always! Indeed, in spite of a nihilism
that is so often prevalent nowadays, and which describes it as a pathetic or a
laughable attitude, hope does not disappear from most human lives. On the
contrary, it always seems ready to come back in our lives on the pretense of
the humblest signs of encouragement. Hope may concern the history of a
precise person, of a group of people, or (as we shall see) of humanity as such.
In any case, hope urges one who is vigilant enough to discern new
possibilities that otherwise remain hidden in a particular situation, as well as
in the human condition as such, and to work for the realization of these
possibilities. Yet, as Henri Bergson rightly pointed out, it might be the other
way round: it is because one works for their realization that these possibilities
reveal themselves as such and give us hope.
Although some philosophers (for instance the Stoics or Spinoza) think
that hope is but a dream or an imaginary consolation for the person who
suffers without being wise enough to agree to their fate, hope remains a great
force in most lives. When human beings fight for justice or for curing terrible
illnesses, they hope they will succeed and their hope is also for times to come,
which means they are able to transcend their own finitude. It even seems that
without hope no one could live.
From a biblical point of view, hope is first justified by God’s promise to
Abraham that he will become a great people and that in him all the peoples of
the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12:2–3). We will see later on that the
prophets have emphasized the idea that human history is not governed by fate,
but depends on our agreeing to God’s promise about a happier future for the
24 CATHERINE CHALIER
Jewish people and for the families of the earth. This biblical hope also leads
us to think about death as something other than an ultimate defeat. It is even
said in the Talmud that one main question will be asked to us when we will
arrive in the world to come (HaOlam haba): “Did you keep hope alive in
yourself during your life?”
In this chapter I want to explain in greater detail the meaning of hope in
the Bible, and especially in the prophetic texts (Nevi’im) since their vision of a
happier future (which has also been described as messianism) has been a
reference for many secular thinkers. I will turn to Ernst Bloch as one of these
secular thinkers and explain why he thought Marxism could be understood as
a messianic hope without any reference to a special Messiah or to the biblical
promise. Then I will turn to Emmanuel Levinas (who was much interested in
Bloch’s work) and explain why hope requires from us not only an engagement
in favor of a better future, but also a radical change in the way we understand
our finitude. I will conclude by turning to some more traditional Jewish
understandings of hope and I will vindicate the following position: if we
forget the promise (as is the case in a secular attitude), we also forget an
important—and probably the most important—dimension of hope.
1. Biblical Hope
In the Bible hope (tiqva) is certainly the golden thread that prevents people
from believing that brutality and wars, suffering and despair are the true
reality. Whenever something unhappy and tragic happens the Bible is always
looking for a new perspective: after Abel’s murder by his brother Cain comes
the birth of Seth (Genesis 4:25) whose own son, Enoch, is characterized by
hope according to Philo; Philo (1965, §138, p. 103) uses the word elpis—
which is translated by the word “hope”—and he quotes the Greek translation
of the Bible (the Septuagint) according to which Enoch “hoped to call upon
God’s name” (Genesis 4, 26). The terrible jealousy of Joseph’s brothers gives
way to a reconciliation; God puts an end to the bondage of the Hebrew people
in Egypt and they are set free.
How is it that hope is so strong in the Bible? It is founded neither on a
bet or a calculation of one’s own good luck, nor on a reasonable or imaginary
better future, but only on God’s promise. A promise is a gift which is also an
engagement for the future. Israel’s faith (emunah) testifies to this promise—
which does not mean that this future will occur without facing hard and even
terrible times. Hope also needs courage and moral resistance to one’s own
despair.
The promise is linked to the future and not to an escape from time (as in
Plato for instance), but is it necessarily accomplished by history, as some
philosophers (such as Kant and Hegel) would have it? We know that Kant, for
instance, was waiting for God’s or nature’s “plan” to be realized in history in
spite of, and thanks to, the wars that prevail both in Kant’s time and still in
Jewish Hope Versus Revolutionary Hope 25
our own. One day, peace and justice would be overcome (Kant, 1985, p. 202).
Although this description of the ultimate times might be compared to some of
the prophets’ images of the future that God has promised to Israel (see Isaiah
65:25; 66:14 for instance), such a philosophical rationalization does not
recognize what biblical hope really is. It is not reducible to the secular hope
which both the Age of Enlightenment and later on the revolutionary
movements have approved of, arguing that a just and peaceful society will
emerge from the terrible struggles that occur in history.
What is the difference between biblical hope and this revolutionary
hope? In the first case—in the first case only—the promise enlightens the
future, it helps us rely on the “may be” that is hidden in the events that occur,
even when they are terrible (see Lamentations 3:29), but only provided that
we don’t forget the Covenant with God which gives this hope its true
signification. In order for future times to be peaceful and just, we must also
obey this Covenant. That is to say: we must agree to transform ourselves,
otherwise this good future will never occur. When Jeremiah says: “O Lord,
the hope of Israel (mikvé Israel), all that forsake Thee shall be ashamed” (17,
13), he is well aware that such a desertion is not only a private affair without
consequences for other people, but in fact concerns the history of the whole
people.
The great prophets, who have given biblical hope its most important
features in the midst of the terrible events that were happening in their time,
never separated this hope from the promise and from the necessary
transformation of each one among the people. The prophets’ strength did not
come from their own cleverness or imagination, but from the promise. This
hope was not only linked to the future but also to the past. Let me explain this
crucial point.
Contrary to common understanding, what we hope for is not an object
(be it peace, justice, good health) exterior to our hope. If such were the case, it
would mean that hope is but compensation, a reward or a salary that one may
expect to receive one day. According to Levinas, who is here faithful to this
biblical tradition concerning hope, “the expectation of fortunate events is not
of itself hope,” because if this was the case, then it would mean that what
remains irreparable in the past would be forgotten. “This compensating time is
not enough for hope. For it is not enough that tears be wiped away or death
avenged; no tear is to be lost, no death without a resurrection […] The true
object of hope is the Messiah, or salvation” (Levinas, 1978, p. 93). Now,
there is hope only when hope is no longer permissible. What is

irreparable in the instant of hope is that that instant is a present. The
future can bring consolation or compensation to a subject who suffers in
the present, but the very suffering of the present remains like a cry
whose echo will resound forever in the eternity of spaces. At least it is so
in the conception of time which fits our life in the world and which we
shall […] call the time of economy (ibid., 89–90).
Opposite to such an ordinary view point about hope, “all the acuteness of
hope in the midst of despair comes from the exigency that the very instant of
despair be redeemed […] hope hopes for the present itself” (ibid., 94). It also
means that even the most fortunate end of history, even the happiness of
humanity as a whole, does not justify the suffering of the individual.
We see here that Levinas criticizes a teleological interpretation of history
that justifies the suffering of the individual as means for a better future.
According to him, such an interpretation—be it a religious one or a secular
one—always misses the point of hope, and is also impossible in the face of
terrible sufferings that we must never consider as means for something else.
No theodicy, not even a secular one, is possible after the terrible events that
happened in the twentieth century.
In the text that I have quoted, Levinas refers to the Messiah and he links
his name to “the caress of a consoler which softly comes in our pain” and
whose concern is “the very instant of physical pain, which is then no longer
condemned to itself, is transported ‘elsewhere’ by the movement of the caress,
and is freed from the vice-grip of ‘oneself’, finds ‘fresh air’, a dimension and
a future. Or rather, it announces more than a simple future, a future where the
present will have the benefit of a recall” (ibid., 93). According to the Talmud
(Sanhedrin 98b) one of the Messiah’s names is indeed “the Consoler”
(Menaḥem) and Levinas views it as the vocation of human subjectivity as
such. The Messiah is not a special man that will come some day and set
history free from all sufferings; rather, he stands for our human vocation as
such.
From a Jewish viewpoint, in order to keep God’s promise alive in one’s
own psyche, one has to remember that although the temporality par
excellence of hope is the future, it is of vital importance to remain in touch
with the “beginning.” The memory of the “beginning,” of God’s first words
when He created the world—a creation that happens now—and when He gave
us His Torah—which also happens now—gives us strength to persevere in our
desire for justice and peace in spite of all the tragedies that contradict it. This
is what vindicates hope and, the Rabbi of Ger argues, this is also the
testimony of Israel (Alter, 1999/2000, p. 231). Hope is only meaningful in a
world that remains unaccomplished, a world which is still “to be made”
(la’asot) (Genesis 2:2); a world in which God’s promise that He will be He
who He will be (Exodus 3, 14) still remains waiting for its fulfillment.
Contrary to Christian insistence that this fulfillment has been accomplished in
the death and resurrection of Christ, Jews protest that God’s Kingdom is
incompatible with all the injustices, the starvations and the unremitting wars
that prevail. Yet if the Messiah who would have delivered us from this terrible
burden has not come, it is because we don’t behave as though we were
ourselves the Messiah; the continued absence of the Messiah is evidence that
our hope is not strong enough. The messianic times are not separable from the
certainty that the root of the Messiah’s soul is hidden in each person’s psyche
(Ha-Kohen, 1994, p. 55).
What, then, can be said about revolutionary hope?
2. Revolutionary Hope
In a commentary to his translation of a poem written by Yehudah haLevi,

Franz Rosenzweig argues that “the false Messiah is as old as the true
Messiah” and “he separates every Jewish generation into those whose faith is
strong enough to give themselves up to an illusion, and those whose hope is so
strong that they do not allow themselves to be deluded.” He concludes thus:
“the former are the better, the latter the stronger. The former bleed as victims
on the altar of the eternity of the people, the latter are the priests who perform
the service at this altar. And this goes on until the day when all will be
reversed, when the belief of the believers will become truth, and the hope of
the hoping a lie” (Glatzer, 1976, p. 350). In Rosenzweig’s time the former
(those he calls the better) were Jews who had become communist, socialist or
bundist, and Zionist. They could not bear their people’s poverty, misery, and
persecution, and they decided to act within history so as to improve their
situation or even to change completely the order of the world. Rosenzweig
opposes them to the Jews who remained faithful to their traditional way of
living, studying and praying in spite of poverty, misery, and persecution.
These latter Jews are called the stronger, since they remain waiting for the
true Messiah who certainly will come one day and save the world.
Among the former were many Jews who may have received a traditional
education but decided to turn to the revolutionary ideals of their time since
they thought this education was in vain, while modern philosophical ideas
gave them the certainty that human beings could take their history in hand.
They wanted to keep the messianic hope of their ancestors alive, but to do
away with the divine promise that gave it its true meaning and strength. They
argued that this promise was but an illusion, while their hope in a just society
that could be achieved now was founded on a rational explanation of history.
At first glance, what they wanted to achieve looked very much like what the
prophets were waiting for: “Thou shalt be called, the City of righteousness”
(Isaiah 1:26); “Violence shalt no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor
destruction within thy borders” (Isaiah 60:18). Yet these revolutionaries
wanted to achieve this righteousness and this peace without listening any
more to the voice of a God who, they argued, was but an illusion.
In his famous book, The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch establishes “an
encyclopedia of hopes” (Bloch, 1976, 1, p. 27). In this encyclopedia, Jewish
text—the Bible but not the Talmud and all the other traditional texts that are
necessary to interpret it—plays a key role. Bloch explains that the Bible gives
us ground for hope especially when it describes how the Hebrews escaped
from their bondage in Egypt. Hope is also founded on God’s answer to Moses
when He tells him that His name is “I shall be who I shall be” (Exodus 3:14).
Bloch says the Bible is most interesting because it gives us hope in the future
by teaching us that history is not yet accomplished. Human beings don’t have
to wait for a new Moses, they have to fight for the success of justice, freedom,
peace, and happiness which are real possibilities although they still remain
hidden. When Isaiah reminds the people of the fast which God has chosen,
that is to say, to “loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to
let the oppressed go free, and […to] break every yoke […] to deal one’s bread
to the hungry and to bring the poor that are cast out to one’s house” (58:6–7),
Bloch could understand this prophecy as describing some of the main features
of the “Homeland” (Heimat) he was expecting in due time.
On the one hand, Bloch is interested in the dreams of human beings
since it means they do not accept defeat. He writes in praise of utopia and
imagination, which show that human subjective life is greater than what is.
The category of possibility is thus one main category of the subjective life
according to him. On the other hand, he takes for granted that the world itself
is not “compact,” not yet at the end of its own possibilities, and he describes it
as a “process.” Bloch is a Marxist who does not believe that “progress” is a
necessary device. He is optimistic, but not in a simple ideological way. He
says that this historical process relies on certain conditions that have to mature
before human beings can play their part. His optimism is that of an activist
who wants to liberate the oppressed elements within a society, but knows that
everything is not possible at once. He writes in favor of a new covenant: no
more a covenant between God and human beings, but a covenant between
human beings’ dreams and the dispositions toward constructive change that
are already inscribed within the depth of reality. One has to act according to
the possibilities of the historical process, which means one has to be on the
“Front” (Bloch’s word).
The philosopher speaks of a materialist hope: past times still contain a
future that has not yet been realized. This future is not a return to the past, but
rather something completely new, although one may compare it to the biblical
eschatological times predicted by the prophets and which Bloch interprets in a
completely secular way. He quotes Isaiah announcing “new heavens” and a
“new earth” that will be created by God (65:17) and he praises the category of
“Novum.” This Novum is prior to the Ultimum, which will be its triumph
(Bloch, 1976, p. 245).
Bloch argues that Judaism (along with other religions) is ambivalent,
since on the one hand it hopes for a better future but on the other hand it
remains an authoritarian alibi that makes us submit to alienation and suffering.
Or, in Marx’s words, “religion both testifies to real misery and protests
against it.” According to Bloch, hope is a principle of reality: it relies on its
secret possibilities (both subjective and objective) but does not need any
promise. This is a typical attitude of “the better” ones that Rosenzweig

describes in the quotation with which I opened this section.
Bloch assumes that the one who fights for a just, free, and peaceful
future is also fighting for what he calls “the good.” This “good” is a
possibility hidden in the objective process of reality and the person who is on
the revolutionary front of history is anxious to make it become concrete. The
person who understands what kind of actions are necessary now in order to
remain on the Front will not take into account the point of view of those who
do not agree with them. More than that, since such a point of view (so the
revolutionaries argue) is hostile to hope, one has to fight against it in order to
remain on the right side of history. It is of course an old story; human beings
have always tried to clear themselves of whatever violence they have been
using while pretending acting for a better future (Bloch, 1976, 3, pp. 557–
560). It is also typical of Western thought’s explicit or implicit theodicy: pains
are subordinated to a finality—be it religious or materialistic— “glimpsed by
faith or belief in progress.” That, Levinas says, is “the grand idea necessary to
the inner peace of souls in our distressed world” (1998, p. 96).
It is also the grand idea necessary for committing terrible acts without
feeling any remorse of conscience. This is made clear by Czeslaw Milosz’s
attempt to argue that, in the fight for the better future praised by Bloch
(communism), there is no room for pity, for moral consciousness. In fact,
whenever “science” or “rational objectivity” is a substitute for conscience one
feels entitled to commit terrible acts in the name of the future (Milosz, 1953,
p. 133). One wants to do away with one’s own doubts, and one refuses to
testify now to the ideals one is fighting for.
Sometimes, revolutionary ideals are really present in the community of
those who fight. “One had been in a community where hope was more normal
than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship
and not, as in most countries, for humbug,” George Orwell writes in Homage
to Catalonia (2000, p. 88). When such is the case, the future the comrades are
fighting for really seems worth working hard, and even losing one’s own life,
for. But when betrayal between the comrades occurs—as was the case in
Catalonia—or hatred prevails over concern for the people, how may one still
trust in this just and happy future? This is precisely what happened to Orwell,
who suddenly found himself guilty of “Trotskyism” and imprisoned by his
former comrades (ibid., p. 173).
Is it possible to hope for the fulfillment of a just and peaceful society if
we do away with our conscience and take science or a so-called rational
process of history as a substitute for it? In the twentieth century, so many
terrible tragedies occurred in the name of “the good” that it is no longer
possible to link hope and theodicy. “Suffering and evil inflicted deliberately,
but in a manner no reason set limits to, in the exasperation of a reason become
political and detached from all ethics” Levinas says, concluding that the most
revolutionary fact of this century is this end of theodicy (1998, p. 83).
What, then, becomes of hope?
3. Back to Jewish Hope
If the better future one is fighting for remains “without hope for the self,” this
is not a failure according to Levinas (1967, p. 102). The future in which I will
not be and which my work anticipates signifies the passage into the time of
the other and the resurrection of the irreplaceable instant. The philosopher
recalls that in 1941—“a hole in history, a year when all the visible gods had
abandoned us, where God was truly dead or had gone back to his
irrevelation”—Léon Blum, who was in prison at that time, finished a book for
the generations to come, for a time in which he would no longer be. Levinas
(1972, p. 44) underlines the dimension of hope and nobility inherent in this
project: “a man in prison continues to believe in an unrevealed future and
invites us to work in the present for the most distant things of which the
present is an irrefutable denial.”
Yet, in order that hope may continue to promise us a world, even where
confusion and misery predominate, it is not enough to fight for justice and
peace. One must let this justice and this peace illuminate one’s own psyche
now, even in the dark times. The messianic hope is indeed a hope for this
world, but it will never become concrete unless we start fighting against our
own hatred, or simply our own desire to persevere in our own being without
the other interfering in our so-called tranquility or happiness. Yet we must not
be content with a revolutionary hope if this hope only means fighting against
another class, another people and so on, without questioning our own desire to
become powerful as soon as possible. Indeed we know that when “the highest
hope” and “the highest power” coincide, intolerance and violence also become
greater and greater. “Extreme violence coincides with extreme hope when this
hope claims to totalize signification, be it a political or a religious
signification,” Paul Ricoeur rightly argues (1995, pp. 233–234). One has to be
patient, and one has to do away with one’s desire for power in the present.
“I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds
of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please” (Song of
Songs 2:7). According to the Midrash, this text means that one must not be
impatient and try to invoke the Messiah before He has decided to come (Song
Rab., 2:7, pp. 113–116). The commandment to be patient is necessary
because, in spite of their crucial importance, history and politics do not detain
the ultimate meaning of the collective redemption. One must not try to make
the Messiah come within our history and our politics while pretending they
are more understandable and more endurable when we do so.
After the so tragic events of the twentieth century that testify to the end
of theodicy, Levinas writes that politics and history now demand “even more
from the resources of the I in each one of us” (1998, p. 100). The Messiah is
hidden within our own psyche, and we have to awaken his spirit while acting,
and not be content by pretending that we will do that afterwards. We have to

truly suffer from the other’s suffering and to be responsible for it before
pretending to act—or while acting—for justice and freedom. Politics and
struggle for freedom and justice remain necessary—Levinas is not apolitical
as some critics argue, and he was also most interested in both Marx and
Bloch—but when this struggle misses the former point—a responsibility of
one for another before one can expect any reciprocity—this fight always
becomes insufficient and even dangerous.
Suffering is not by itself redemptive and it is certainly not sufficient to
save humanity. Yet according to Levinas—as I have already mentioned—we
must recall that one of the names of the Messiah is Menaḥem, the Consoler.
Why is that? Levinas, faithful to Rabbi Nachman, who, in the Talmud
Tractate Sanhedrin (98b), identifies the Messiah with the “I” (le Messie c’est
moi), argues that the Messiah is the just person who suffers because he or she
has heard the call coming from the suffering of the other and has taken upon
themself the immense burden which emanates from it. “The fact of not
evading the burden imposed by the suffering of the others defines ipseity
itself. All persons are the Messiah” (Levinas, 1991, p. 89). Messianism is an
interior event, while being at the same time linked to my action within history.
Messianism “is not the certainty of the coming of a man who stops History. It
is my power to bear the suffering of all. It is the moment when I recognize this
power and my universal responsibility” (ibid., pp. 120 and 90, emphasis
added).
The messianic rupture is here identified with the advent of the human I
in worldly violence. This is the unique power we must be looking for, but this
is also a paradoxical power since it requires that I learn to question my desire
to persevere in my own being only. On the other hand, it is not a free decision.
It comes from the other who awakens in me this messianic vocation or, better
said, this election. The “I” is sensitive to what occurs in history, it feels within
itself “the absurdities that history realizes,” and it does not surrender to them.
This does not signify that this “I” has to give up action in history or political
engagement and the hope for a better future, but it is an invitation to meditate
on the present instant and on the possibilities of salvation harbored within it.
In the extremely painful conditions of the Jewish communities in
eighteenth century Central Europe, Hasidism also stressed the idea of a
redemption that could arrive any time. Thus when a person attempts to elevate
themself toward the source of all life and to take with them the rest of the
creation (and mostly the wicked) they work for redemption in the present
world. The meditation on the biblical verse, “Assuredly, the Eternal is present
in this place and I am unaware of it” (Genesis 28:16), drives Rabbi Ephraïm
of Sedylkov to identify exile with the sleep of the soul cramped in its interests
which only reinforces the pretentious and blind narrowness of the I. It leads
him to think of redemption as the awakening of that soul. Guided by the light
of the Torah, each person has the possibility and the obligation to be the
redeemer of the world, or at least of the part entrusted to them and which they
alone can save. From that viewpoint the much-awaited Messiah does not play
the role of a national savior but rather—in a more urgent fashion—that of a
redeemer of individual souls, of a spiritual guide toward the light of the
Infinite within oneself and outside oneself.
Both Levinas and the Hassidim (Levinas was not one of them) teach us
that even when history is full of hatred—and it is always the case—it remains
possible to find the way back to a “point” hidden within ourselves that is not
contaminated by evil. Human hope depends on this certitude. From that
viewpoint, the best achievement we may celebrate cannot do away with our
intimate and always unfinished struggle against the dark forces that inhabit us
and that so often urge us to celebrate death instead of life. Shall we be able to
lead these forces back to this “point” (Berezovsky, p. 76)? This is a necessary
fight. Indeed, how could the world become “a home for God” (as the
Hassidim say) or a “home for humanity” (as Levinas on the one hand, and the
revolutionaries on the other, say) as long as our psyche refuses to be one?
How could this world become a world of justice, peace, and freedom if we
despise this fight? Revolutionary hope and Jewish hope are both oriented
towards this prize.
Three
ADORNO, REVOLUTION, AND NEGATIVE

UTOPIA
Mattias Martinson
If anything in Hegel, and in those who turned him right way up, has
become part of my very flesh and blood, it is an asceticism with regard
to any unmediated expression of the positive. […] For utopia is the
concrete, and not itself some universal theory or finished
recommendation for praxis.
Theodor W. Adorno to Thomas Mann,

December 1, 1952
(Adorno & Mann, 2006, pp. 97–98)
Theodor W. Adorno begins his major philosophical work from 1966, Negative
Dialectics, in a somewhat surprising manner: “Philosophy, which once
seemed obsolete, keeps itself alive, since the moment of its realization was
missed. The summary judgement that it has only interpreted the world, that it
is in itself crippled by resignation in the face of reality, becomes a defeatism
of reason after the transformation of the world failed” (Adorno, 1973, p. 3,
translation modified).
In this chapter, I have two distinct ambitions related to this single
quotation. The first is to interpret the statement and put it in the general
context of Adorno’s thought on philosophy, theory, and praxis, with special
reference to its Marxist and Jewish traits. Although I will argue that Adorno’s
statement must be understood in terms of Marxism, my interpretation will not
point forward to a positive notion of revolution, either theoretically or in any
practical way. On the contrary, I will point to Adorno’s revised understanding
of philosophy, which challenges both political activism and traditional
philosophical conceptualization by theorizing from a perspective of
redemption, not integration or subjugation. This trait, in its turn, is intelligible
in the context of Jewish messianism, although Adorno’s Marxist thought is
not as obvious in its messianic dimensions as, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s
or Ernst Bloch’s.
The second ambition, therefore, is to enquire more explicitly about the
messianic roots of Adorno’s curious version of utopian philosophy, to discuss
the messianic theme in a somewhat broader context of Adorno’s thought, and
34 MATTIAS MARTINSON
especially to address Adorno’s deep involvement with Benjamin’s thought. I

construct this second discussion in a framework that might add to the debate
about the political relevance or irrelevance of Adorno’s thought (cf. Hammer,
2005; Holloway et al., 2009).
1. Marxism against Marxism
Given Adorno’s own intellectual investments in German idealism and Marxist

theory, there are at least five important and distinct politico-philosophical
aspects hidden in the statement quoted above, which I now repeat:
“Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, keeps itself alive, since the
moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it has
only interpreted the world, that it is in itself crippled by resignation in the face
of reality, becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world
failed.”
First, according to the introductory sentence, the statement comprises a
kind of ultimate acceptance of the well-known Marxist critique of (idealist)
philosophy, understood as ideology. Adorno affirms this conception by
choosing it as a starting point. As ideological idealism, philosophy is
tragically incapable of materially actualizing the human freedom it constantly
prates about in spiritual terms. Consequently, it cannot become a force of true
political liberation or reconciliation between the individual and the oppressive
social totality in which the individual has become derivative, mute and unfree.
Second, therefore, one can claim that Adorno with his statement
implicitly stresses the fundamental relevance of Karl Marx’s attempt to turn
“Hegel on his head” in order to purge Hegel’s philosophy from ideology and
adapt it to a real struggle for liberation and reconciliation between the
particular and the universal.
Third, however, Adorno’s statement is also an unmistakable denial of
the success of this Marxist fruition of idealist philosophy. Marxism’s
summary judgement about philosophy’s lack of practical force is now in itself
viewed as defeatism of reason, because its own strivings toward
transformation of reality failed to realize freedom.
Fourth, and in view of the previous aspects, the statement contains a
related, yet different, idea of a missed opportunity, that is, an idea of a
decisive moment in history up to which it perhaps would have been possible
to transform philosophy to a level of materialistic insight that could have led
to a lasting re-creation of the relations between the individual and society.
That moment has passed, however. And this leaves us with nothing but (the
threatening idealism of) philosophy.
Fifth, therefore—as a mere consequence of the other aspects taken
together—the statement can be summarized as a resolute Marxist rejection of
the deeply Marxist idea that theory and philosophy should be reasonably
Adorno, Revolution, and Negative Utopia 35
connected with unambiguous and positive political hopes and expectations

(that is, a true reconciliation between the individual and the social totality).
To put it differently, what we find in Adorno’s opening sentences on the
state of philosophy is a dense elimination of the possibility of successful
revolution—that is, an elimination of the possibility of a successful program
for a radically liberating rearrangement of societal conditions based on a
purely rational and theoretical understanding of the present. This elimination
is founded on the historical judgment that the liberating promise of philosophy
has become impossible to purge from its spiritual abstraction without
simultaneously recreating a new moment of ideology and abstraction,
which—according to Adorno’s materialist dialectics—stems directly from the
highly abstract and unreconciled nature of late modern society itself
(compared to earlier forms of society).
Thus, rather than promising a new form of realization of its ideas, radical
philosophy has to turn inward, to contemplate its own failed opportunity and
thus its own brokenness. “After having broken its promise that it is one with
reality or that it stands at the brink of realization, philosophy is obliged to
ruthlessly criticise itself” (Adorno 1973, p. 3, translation modified).
2. Against Idealism
For Adorno, idealism—even in its most subtle form, which for Adorno is
Hegel’s dialectics—reconciled the subject and the object on the premise of a
subjectivity that had been “ontologized” and detached from concreteness and
true individuality (Adorno, 1973, p. 121). In idealism more generally, this
aspect is captured by the notion “transcendental subject”. Thus, the resulting
philosophical totality, the system produced through this fundamental
subjective operation, was not only ignorant of the concrete individual (the
ontic subject), but of objects and the object in general.
Even though negation is the driving force of Hegel’s system, the
primordial subjectivity on which it is built is similar to a machine or spectral
agent that produces reality according to its own internal structure. Put
differently, the logic according to which the absolute was to be produced does
not change through an encounter with reality; it creates reality subjectively.
“Once radically separated from the object, subject reduces the object to itself;
subject swallows object, forgetting how much it is object itself” (Adorno,
1998, p. 246). In relation to Hegel, this means that the negative moment of the
logic is illusory: “The thesis that the negation of a negation is something
positive can only be upheld by one who presupposes positivity—as all-
conceptuality—from the beginning” (Adorno, 1973, p. 160).
Contrary to this, Adorno insists that the object has to be given
precedence in thought. The object should be seen as something real that one
has to confront by means of concepts and, yet, something that always eludes
such conceptualization. On this ground he concludes: “all concepts, even the

philosophical ones, refer to nonconceptualities” (Adorno, 1973, p. 11).
At a first glance, this statement looks rather simplistic, as a kind of
critical realism against crude idealism. But Adorno’s perspective is much
more complex, since he basically accepts the Hegelian (idealist) gesture of
production through negation. The preponderance of the object that he
advocates against Hegel is, therefore, not to be understood as an
epistemological standpoint (cf. Adorno, 1991, pp. 18–19). It rather is a theory
of what is left out in the identifying process of negation. Thus, Adorno can
negatively assign some truth even to the idealistic reduction of the object:
In a certain sense, although idealism would be the last to admit it, the
transcendental subject is more real, that is, it far more determines the
real conduct of people and society than do those psychological
individuals from whom the transcendental subject was abstracted and
who have little to say in the world. Those, for their part, have turned into
appendages of the social machinery and, in the end, into ideology. The
living individual person, such as he is constrained to act and for which
he was even internally moulded, is as homo oeconomicus incarnate
closer to the transcendental subject than the living individual he must
immediately take himself to be. To this extent idealist theory was
realistic […].
When the standard structure of society is the exchange form, its

rationality constitutes people: what they are for themselves, what they
think they are, is secondary. They are deformed from the beginning by
the mechanism that was philosophically embellished and turned into the
transcendental. The allegedly most obvious, the empirical subject, would
actually have to be thought of as something not yet existing; considered
in this aspect the transcendental subject is ‘constitutive’ (Adorno, 1998,
p. 248, translation modified).
The trace of that which is left out—the non-identical—does not lead to a new
and more inclusive concept, but to the critical insight that the social form of
human thought and praxis makes true conceptualization impossible.
Given the last quote, one can perhaps say that Adorno suggests a
materialistic twist of idealist dialectics (in a Marxist manner) in order to
approach subjectivity as something objective, social, and particular. The basic
dilemma with idealism is not its logic, but the general exclusion of concrete
reality from the grasp of this logic, in a way that is ultimately oppressive.
Hence, the integration that is accomplished by idealist logic is real, but its
result must not be legitimatized through this fundamental connection to the
real. From the perspective of Adorno’s materialism, the real itself, as it has
become, is an illegitimate totality, and a dialectical grasp of this reality must
reflect this totality as illegitimate through an attempt to take the side of the
particular objects which suffer within this totality. Instead of being grounded
in an ontologized or transcendental subjectivity, Adorno’s dialectics works
from the viewpoint of a utopian possibility that things could be completely
different. But this possibility is not expressed in a positive way. Instead he
states: “Regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology
of the wrong state of things” (Adorno, 1973, p. 11). Ontologized in this
negative way, dialectics becomes the presupposition for a philosophy in which
the negative moment of thinking is motivated by the totality of things, not
vice versa (as in Hegel).
Adorno expresses this neatly by turning Hegel’s dictum “the true is the
whole” on its head: “The whole is the untrue” (Hegel, 1977, p. 11; Adorno,
1974, p. 50, translation modified). In line with this, the positive result of
philosophy has always to be linked to the negative insight that the generalized
perspective—that is, the concept—“is fused with untruth, with the oppressive
principle” (Adorno, 1973, p. 48). Philosophy must therefore proceed in a
restless manner, as “the prism in which its [the concrete’s] colour is caught”
(Adorno, 1973, p. 57). As a prism it is not in charge of the concrete and the
suppressed object but it spreads the light of “the negativity of the universal” in
a way that “welds cognition to the particular as that which is to be saved”
(Adorno, 1973, p. 48).
3. Philosophy in a Post-Marxist Context
Towards the end of Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes in a way that

summarizes this weak form of philosophical utopianism: “It lies in the
definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it
were total. This is its form of hope” (Adorno, 1973, p. 406). Put differently,
only a conceptuality conscious of the fact that it is incapable of producing a
truthful whole (by means of an ontologized subjectivity into which everything
is integrated) may approach reality in a manner that does not redouble the
untruth of the real. This has significant consequences for philosophy and its
rational ambitions: “Only thoughts which cannot understand themselves are
true” (Adorno, 1973, p. 48). In another context, Adorno develops a similar
idea:
Anything that has a function is already spellbound within the functional

world. Only a thinking that has no mental sanctuary, no illusion of an
inner realm, and that acknowledges its lack of function and power can
perhaps catch a glimpse of an order of the possible and the nonexistent,
where human beings and things each would be in their right place
(Adorno, 1998, p. 15).
The political predicament of idealism is that its oppressive social logic is

misconstrued as a positive force that leads to truth (as integrated wholeness).
However, as several of the quoted statements show, Adorno’s dialectical
alternative does not come forth as a mere rejection of this whole, in a
revolutionary way, but rather as an immanent critique that finds itself
imprisoned by the “untruth of the whole”, which earlier revolutionaries saw
themselves free to overturn. The predicament of thought is that it cannot be
true in itself; its own vision of the new is never to be wholly trusted because it
is shaped by the framework of the old. “A dialectical theory is bound—like
Marx’s, largely—to be immanent even if in the end it negates the whole
sphere it moves in” (Adorno, 1973, p. 197).
The dilemma presented by revolutionary visions in later Marxism is the
failure to cling to this Marxian insight, which was developed in a very
different situation, where the actual untruth of the totality was less dominant
and the lines of flight to a positive concept of freedom were still available.
Adorno’s example is the position of the proletariat and the ruling class within
the social totality: “the proletariat to whom he [Karl Marx] appealed was not
yet integrated into society […], whereas on the other hand societal power did
not yet command the means to assure overwhelming odds for itself in the
event of any serious conflict” (Adorno, 1998, p. 14).
Hence, at a later stage of history, social integration makes successful
practical revolution unthinkable (the proletariat has ceased to be what it was
in the Marxian vision). This is to say that thinking can only become true if it
negates the whole in a revolutionary gesture by revealing the inconsistencies
that now circumscribe everyone and everything, including the idea of
revolution.
Compared to Marx, therefore, contemporary philosophy finds itself in a
completely different situation. It has now missed its opportunity to change
“the world from top to bottom” (Adorno, 1998, p. 14). In this “post-Marxian”
situation, revolution is not the right outcome of immanent critique. Attempts
to recreate a revolutionary idea will soon fall back into an ideology similar to
idealism, in which the negated whole is put up as something that thought
dominates and is dominated by. The revolutionary subject will then take the
role of the transcendental subject and produce an integrated reality, in which
the particular once again crumbles.
Thus, for Adorno, one of the special dilemmas of revolutionary thought
is its basic adherence to Marx’s time-bound rejection of theory in favor of
praxis, as if practice and theory are impossible to combine without selling out
political insight. Adorno turns things around and looks materialistically upon
history as the practical plane where the power of thought is realized as
something that does not equal truth in any idealistic sense. In this way, the
original Marxist concept of revolution is historicized and turned into an object
for critical thought, rather than a practical way of overcoming thought. “The
remaining theoretical inadequacies in Hegel and Marx became part of
historical practice and can thus be newly reflected upon in theory, instead of
thought bowing irrationally to the primacy of practice. Practice itself was an
eminently theoretical concept” (Adorno, 1973, p. 144).
This leads us back to the initial statement about philosophy with which
this essay began: It lives on because its historical moment of realization was
missed. Philosophy’s continued “actuality” (Aktualität)—an allusion to the
title of an early lecture of Adorno from 1931 (Adorno, 2000)—is an indication
of the ultimate incapability of reason to climb out of its predicament; it
continues to be a systematic conceptual embrace of a totality in which the
particular and concrete is downplayed and ill-represented, not to say
extinguished. To reinstate the actuality of philosophy against this negative
background is therefore to call for a changed politico-philosophical vision.
4. Critical Theory and the Messianic
In the last aphorism of Minima Moralia, under the headline Finale, Adorno
states: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of
despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present
themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (Adorno, 1974, p. 247).
A question that follows naturally after my presentation of Adorno’s
basically Marxist insistence on the continued role of philosophy—after the
moment of its realization has been missed—is whether this verdict from
Minima Moralia can shed some more light on Adorno’s concrete
understanding of a possible political potential of “post-Marxian” philosophy.
It has become clear that revolution is out of the question, since the history of
society has moved in a direction that makes it virtually impossible—not to say
inconceivable—to realize a philosophical notion of freedom and liberty by
mere political action. But is there anything else of radical political interest in
Adorno’s rather gloomy vision? He has been severely criticized for his way of
acting in relation to the student revolts in 1968 and 1969 (in 1969 he called
the police when he feared student occupation of the Institute of Social
Research in Frankfurt). Was this a sign of the bankruptcy of his thought in
general, or is there a logic to be found behind the surface of this seemingly
reactionary act? How does Adorno’s Eurocentric, non-revolutionary tenor
match today’s experiences of revolution in contexts such as Egypt and
Tunisia?
My own suggestion is broadly in line with what John Holloway,
Fernando Matamoros, and Sergio Tischler have argued: namely that Adorno’s
political significance lies in the way he detached dialectics from its synthetic
mode (initiated by Hegel and followed by many after him) (Holloway et al.,
2009, p. 6). They argue that notwithstanding its critique of Hegel, Marxism in
general was caught up by this synthetic mode, and this is one reason for the
totalitarian history of Marxism. Adorno’s alternative, non-synthetic way of
being thoroughly dialectical is therefore possible to compare with an anti-
dialectical tradition of “post-Marxist” thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel

Foucault, Michel Hardt, and Antonio Negri.
However, according to Holloway et al., this explicitly anti-dialectical
tradition often slips back into a synthetic mode and becomes focused on an
abstract (idealist) conception of the present, instead of being in contact with
actual problems that thought is faced with:
In the extension of the rejection of the Hegelian synthesis to the

rejection of dialectics altogether, there is a throwing out of the baby with
the bathwater. It is not only synthesis that is abandoned, but also the
central notion of movement through negation. […] Life becomes a
positive concept rather than the struggle against the negation of life.
There is in general a positivisation of thought. Struggles are seen as
struggles for rather than being principally struggles against. The
centrality of crisis (a negative concept) is lost and replaced by an
emphasis on restructuring (a positive concept). Refusal is marginalized
(though not denied) in the movement from the origins of autonomism
(Tronti in his seminal article on “The Strategy of Refusal”) to the post-
autonomism of recent years (represented in particular by Hardt and
Negri). Irony of ironies, a theory of stages makes its reappearance in the
form of changing “paradigms”: the world is to be understood at any
particular moment in terms of the prevalent paradigm of domination.
The rejection of dialectics, because it includes the rejection of negation,
leads precisely to synthetic thought, a thinking that seeks to fit
everything in place with the scheme of the dominant paradigm
(Holloway et al., 2009, pp. 5–6).
According to Holloway et al., what Adorno can bring into the picture is a
correction of certain crucial aspects of the anti-dialectical tenor in recent
political thought. He makes possible a critical view that is unwaveringly
rooted in the contradictions of this world and skeptical to views that relates
the utopian moment directly to the present state of things. The utopian
moment in Adorno is thereby not lost, but his utopianism is of the negative
kind I delineated above. To repeat, this means that the utopian moment does
not lie in a positive vision that is extracted from the present order; it consists
of the refusal to accept that the broken world in front of us can become a
legitimate paradigm in any sense. As I have already hinted, this kind of
utopianism harbors a revolutionary moment, but I will now also claim that this
revolutionary moment is of a messianic rather than of an activist kind. The
next step, therefore, will be to look a bit closer on this messianic aspect in
Adorno’s thought.
Critical theory is the name that Max Horkheimer (one of Adorno’s
closest colleagues) gave to a theoretical perspective that is anchored in the
antagonistic differentiation and division of labor that goes on in a highly
advanced and integrated social totality. Critical theory is not a power that
operates outside this society, but rather a political philosophy that works
dialectically as an immanent force “permeated with the potential of what
could be different” (Adorno, 1998, p. 16). As argued by Adorno in Minima
Moralia, this means that its hope for a different society is weak and related to
the construction of a frangible standpoint from which the flaws of the present
order are clearly revealed. This standpoint is not a stepping-stone from that
which is. It is only a new and revealing perspective. Adorno continues:
Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world,

reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it
will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives
without velleity and violence, entirely from the felt contact with
objects—this alone is the task of thought (Adorno, 1974, p. 247).
This aphorism was written towards the end of the forties, in the immediate
shadow of Auschwitz. This might explain why Adorno continues by saying
that this interpretation of the task of thought is, in some sense, trivial. He
argues that the whole social and cultural situation “calls” for this kind of
radical philosophical enlightenment. And yet, he holds it to be an utterly
impossible task for thought, since the very standpoint he asks for presupposes
exactly the kind of transcendence that his notion of “non-synthetic” dialectics
originally forbids.
Hence, no matter if the step is almost invisible or as small as “a hair’s
breadth,” to climb up to a privileged position beyond this world is a denial of
thought’s obvious entanglement with the very problem it attempts to solve. In
Adorno’s words: “The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for
the sake of the unconditional, the more consciously, and so calamitously, it is
delivered up to the world” (Adorno, 1974, p. 247). From the viewpoint of
dialectics and materialism, therefore, the only responsible philosophical way
to reach for truth is finally judged to be an impossible one. In a later text this
theme is developed in terms of self-critique: “Dialectic is not a third
standpoint but rather the attempt, by means of an immanent critique, to
develop philosophical standpoints beyond themselves and beyond the
despotism of a thinking based on standpoints” (Adorno, 1998, p. 12).
Against this developed notion of standpoints, the idea put forward in
Minima Moralia of a “standpoint of redemption” cannot be a historical
standpoint, or a standpoint within the framework of this world. It is, rather, an
impossible possibility of something utterly different that breaks into this
world and changes it—redeems it—through radical recreation. This quite
obvious messianic dimension is never developed or incorporated
wholeheartedly by Adorno’s critical theory (i.e., his idea of philosophy), but I
would like to argue that it is the messianic dimension of his thought that
makes his dialectics of radical immanence (critical theory, non-synthetic

dialectics) possible in the first place.
This does not lead to the conclusion that Adorno awaits the Messiah or
that his philosophy should be read in light of a religious or quasi-religious
wishfulness. On the contrary, the messianic moment is the utterly unreal
moment, the absolute impossibility that demolishes thought and makes clear
that thought is not enough. But dialectically speaking, even this demolishment
must be philosophized immanently if thought is to stay away from the
idealistic fallacy. “Even [thought’s] impossibility it must at last comprehend
for the sake of the possible” (Adorno, 1974, p. 247). It is the very restlessness
of the dialectical operation that is secured by the messianic moment, not a
concrete hope for redemption. Redemption is not within the reach of thought,
nor within the reach of an activism that has to think the whole in order to act.
5. Walter Benjamin on Language, Nature, and History
It is obvious and well established that Adorno developed this specific notion
of dialectics in close relation to Walter Benjamin’s thought. Benjamin’s early
thought has been described as a Jewish theology of language that took its
point of departure in an eccentric interpretation of the Fall and the human
transgression from paradise to an alienated existence. In an essay from 1916,
Benjamin argues that language (as we know it) was born in the moment when
the human word was put in the place of the god-inspired name (Benjamin,
1997, p. 119). The passage in Genesis where God gives man the task of
naming the creatures (Gen. 2:19–20) is interpreted as the original and true
model of language. Through God’s command, man gives proper names to all
the creatures and this represents a pure language; “a communion of man with
the creative word of God” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 116). This represents a perfect
relation between nature, man, and God. Nature does not speak for itself, but
through the act of naming, its muteness is nevertheless understood as a “bliss”
because the name secures the integrity of the particular (Benjamin, 1997, p.
121).
Compared to the proper name, Benjamin insists that the human word is
an arbitrary sign that makes language into a mere instrument for
communication. After the Fall the relation both to God and to nature was
drastically changed. With the Fall, nature begins its “other muteness” through
the curse of God, and this muteness has ultimately to do with the function of
the human word, which is now inadequate and neglectful with respect to
creation. For Benjamin, this constitutes the “deep sadness of nature”
(Benjamin, 1997, p. 121). While the proper name has an immanent magic,
constituting “the paradisiac language of man” that “must have been one of
perfect knowledge” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 119), he relates the fallen, post-
lapsarian language to an “external magic” of the word, where something
outside the word is inadequately captured. The mute nature is without any
hope of being given a true voice through the word, which leads to a
“mythical” human understanding of nature as something static, lifeless and
open to manipulation, scientific calculation and exploitation.
Through the Fall from paradisiac language, the situation became one of
“prattle,” inadequate signification and multiplicity. “The enslavement of
language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in a folly as its
inevitable consequence. In this turning away from things, which was
enslavement, the plan for the tower of Babel came into being, and linguistic
confusion with it” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 121).
The tower of Babel represents the ultimate consequence of the
appearance of the law, which according to Benjamin has its mythical origin in
the question of good and evil. Paradise did not include a tree that brought
about information about good and evil; rather, the tree was an “emblem of
judgement over the questioner” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 121). Thus, in the young
Walter Benjamin’s view, the emergence of language as signification and
forgetfulness of the things themselves is simultaneous with the emergence of
subjectivity that sets itself apart from the creation it belongs to. “To erect
oneself as a subject is already to fall,” as Irving Wohlfarth has put it
(Wohlfarth, 1989, p. 161).
This means, furthermore, that both history and linguistic meaning are
constituted by the Fall—before the Fall, everything was complete. And, even
more importantly, according to Wohlfarth’s reading of Benjamin, “the Fall is
already, in some sense, the infernal machine of modernity; and modernity the
free fall of history” (Wohlfarth, 1989, p. 161). The historic attempt of the
subject to labor with his language in order to reach fulfillment is in vain.
History cannot be a reasonable process that amends its earlier flaws and
fissures. It is an accelerating catastrophe.
This perspective was exemplified decades later when Benjamin utters his
famous comment to Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which is featured on
the cover of this volume. I quote the entire comment:
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who

seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are
wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of
history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of
events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it
is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives
him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile
of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this
storm (Benjamin, 2003, pp. 392–393).
This comment is a late one (1940), which makes it clear that the young
Benjamin’s theological motifs continued to nurture a severe critique of history
and modernity, long after Benjamin had denounced some of his most explicit
mystical impulses and adopted a more explicit materialist and Marxist
terminology (cf. Pensky, 1993, pp. 233–239).
Paradise is neither awaited nor put forward as a possibility in itself. The
angel is not in charge of anything. The mode is not nostalgic, at least not in a
believing way. Paradise is faint; it is becoming more and more distant and
inaccessible. Thus, the possibility is not one of restoration, but of the creative
construction of a critical dialectical image in which the modern is identified
with the catastrophic archaic origin of history. The absoluteness of negativity
that this image reflects forces thought to take a new stand. The messianic
moment is the sudden light that emerges from the constellation between the
angel and its impotence despite its position above history. It is a light that, for
Benjamin, is tied to a new view of nature, things, history and subjectivity in
the framework of the impotence of human language.
6. Myth and Rationality
In their joint book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Horkheimer and

Adorno work from the thesis that “myth is already enlightenment; and
enlightenment reverts to mythology” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1979, p. xvi).
After my brief presentation of Benjamin’s theology of language, it is tempting
to say that this famous constellation between myth and enlightenment is a
variation on Benjamin’s interpretation of the Fall and the emergence of the
word, history, and subjectivity. And, roughly speaking, I think it is. For
Adorno (and Horkheimer) the dialectical play with the concepts of nature,
myth, reason etc. is part of being fallen (if we use Benjamin’s words). It is the
task of philosophy to realize that it is itself fallen—and it is only in this mode
that it will succeed. Philosophy wants to reach for the things as they are, and
therefore, paradoxically, it has to resist the temptation to conceptualize in a
way that becomes wholly understandable and clear. In Negative Dialectics,
Adorno relates this both to materialism and to the Jewish heritage:
The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only
in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such
absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism
brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be
positively pictured; this is the substance [Gehalt] of its negativity
(Adorno, 1973, p. 207).
Hence, what Adorno thinks of as true rationality, or adequate grasping of

things, is the opposite of the normal stance of calculating science. The rational
always runs the risk of the irrational, and, given this perspective, nature is the
last thing science reaches. Or, to put it differently: myth is the nature that we
meet in science.
But this way of expressing things is not the same as saying that unreason
is good. It is, rather, to follow the Benjaminian insight about the inadequacy
of the word compared to the name, or the failure of our human languages to
be what language is. Nor does the negation of language or rationality mean
that hope lies in the final affirmation of hopelessness. Hope rather resides in
the very possibility of the negation of the idea that the essence of hope is in
the reach of thought. As long as something different is conceivable, the whole
is not completely closed. But this hope is not to be confused with a clear
vision. This is expressed by one of Adorno’s most poetic lines from Negative
Dialektik: “Nur wenn, was ist, sich ändern läßt, ist das, was ist, nicht alles”
(Adorno, 1966, p. 391; this line is defectively translated as: “What is must be
changeable if it is not to be all.” Adorno, 1973, p. 398).
In the situation where the spiritual (subjectivity) is alienated from its
natural origin, and nature is perverted through this very alienation, one must
look for answers in unexpected places. The most spiritual might become the
most natural, and nature might reveal itself as the flip-side of spirituality.
Adorno addresses this in a letter to Benjamin from 1934, in which he tries to
explain how his own present work on the philosophy of music connects with
Benjamin’s theoretical perspective:
Perhaps, this material will seem rather remote to you at first. But I
believe I am also one with you in the conviction that the more remote
matters are not the least significant ones, and the work […] is therefore
much more closely connected with your own interest than the title alone
would suggest. I will simply express the following thought to you for
now: the question concerning the muteness of works of art has led me in
the most remarkable fashion right into our central question, that of the
coincidence of the modern with the archaic. And indeed from the other
end of the spectrum: from the archaic itself. For I have come to realize
that just as the modern is the most ancient, so too is the archaic itself a
function of the new (Adorno & Benjamin, 1999, p. 38).
It is not difficult to see that Adorno is referring to Benjamin’s theological

concept of nature and its muteness, which becomes an acute problem in the
archaic scene where human language becomes indifferent to it and incapable
to lend it voice. And the nature that springs forth from the language of this
fallen spirit is the very myth that supports the modern illusion of progress.
Therefore, according to Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy, even the most
progressive spiritual realities, such as the products of artistic creativity, are
deeply entangled with nature in a way that cannot be conceptualized
straightforwardly, but instead read as constellations or riddles whose answer
“lights it up suddenly and momentarily and consumes it at the same time”
(Adorno, 2000, p. 32). His philosophy of music (and art in general) is

therefore also a philosophy of nature—or more precisely it is a dialectical
philosophy of the natural in the spiritual (myth) and of the mute nature that
human language ultimately resists. In this way, philosophy is not stable, but
wholly dependent on the material world it tries to overcome (myth, language)
and the nature it tries to reach (the mute), which is constantly mixed up
through the consistency and inconsistency of language and thought. “At its
most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology. Its great desire
would be the resurrection of the flesh, a desire utterly foreign to idealism, the
realm of the absolute spirit” (Adorno, 1973, p. 207).
7. Concluding Note on Revolution
To conclude this somewhat impressionistic discussion, I wish to recall the

first statement, where Adorno insisted on the continuation of philosophy on
the grounds that the moment of its realization was missed. As I have tried to
show, this statement can be understood as a Marxist meta-comment on the
limitations of Marxist and revolutionary thought in an age that differ
considerably from the age of Marx.
However, even though this interpretation is fair enough, it will still be
rather uninteresting as long as one does not go deeper into the paradoxical
revolutionary quality that Adorno tries to shield by claiming that “activism
[Aktionismus] is irrational” and “activism [Aktionismus] is regressive”
(Adorno 1998, pp. 271; 273). I have tried to shed light on this revolutionary
quality by referring both to a Benjaminian messianism and a Benjaminian
theology of language that might be seen as an important impulse for Adorno.
Even though I have given a series of examples where Adorno is speaking
“theologically” himself, the messianic influence is not as explicit in his
thought as it is in Benjamin. In Adorno’s texts the problem is more often
presented as a negative utopia or as a conceptual praxis aware of its own
impossibility.
Politically speaking, Adorno’s revolutionary trait is not very fruitful in
the sense that it can lead to a wholly new situation. Adorno denies the
newness of everything new: the new is the archaic, and the archaic is new.
However, if one follow his line of thought back to its theological roots, he still
works from the perspective, or an idea, of a possibility of the wholly new—
the new creation. The theological in Adorno may be reduced to a moment in
the philosophical conception the dialectic of this world, but it is still there to
lend movement to thought. This moment of theological newness in the very
idea of philosophical thinking is a complete newness, which cannot be
brought into the framework of the old, and it is only possible to cling onto if
one rejects the idea that completion and perfection are part of the dialectic that
we face in this world. Adorno’s and Benjamin’s mentioning of the messianic
light is related to this final incapability of thought to stand on its own, and,
more importantly, to thought’s tendency to hubris, which means that it

constantly alienates itself from this world and into a mythological distortion of
it.
To orient oneself politically in this world, therefore, means to be able to
dispense with a strong notion of truth in light of a revolutionary theological
vision that is at hand only as untruth. Truth is to be philosophically grasped
through a meticulous interpretative work within the limits of the experience of
this world, guided by the utopian hope that things must change—always
remembering that the change is not in the hands of thought. In a lecture on
history and freedom, Adorno underlines precisely this: “no embodiment of
spirit that sets out to oppose the course of the world, can be true or false in
and for itself—or rather, independently of its relation to that reality” (Adorno,
2007, p. 58).
To put it differently, the messianic revolutionary moment is locked into
philosophy, and thought is once again entangled with what it set out to
overcome. In this way, it becomes focused on the negative in order to reach
for a dimension of universality that resides in its antagonistic relation to
reality. This philosophical universality, however, is not the universality that
humanity and philosophy has dreamt of since it was expelled from paradise.
Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes

that have happened and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be
cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and
unites it. Not to be denied for that reason, however, is the unity that
cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of
history—the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men,
and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads
from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the
slingshot to the megaton bomb (Adorno, 1973, p. 320).
If this negative universality is seen as the theoretical outcome of philosophy

that missed its moment to be realized, I would argue that Adorno’s critical
theory at least does not stand in absolute conflict with the contemporary
discourse on revolution outside the European and Marxist context. The
revolutionary activities for instance in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia in 2011
resemble a post-Marxist stance of the kind that Holloway et al. criticize in
their attempt to frame the political value of Adorno’s thought.
In this context, I think especially of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
and the democratic hopes they have invested in the multitude (Hardt & Negri,
2005). Since the first parliamentary elections in Egypt after the revolution
were carried through in 2011, giving Muhammad Mursi control over post-
revolutionary politics, his regime already has been dethroned by the military
and a new post-post-revolutionary situation has been instituted. And,
shockingly enough, a majority of the Egyptian people seems now to be in
sympathy with the new military leadership! (Circumstances are changing

rapidly during the summer of 2013, when this conclusion is being written).
This situation is chaotic, indeed, but one can at least see clearly that the
overthrown forces—the old inheritance from Mubarak’s regime—were far
from obviated by the “multitude’s” forceful dethronement of the ruling class.
Hence in the Egyptian case nothing seems clear about the revolutionary power
of the people. People who stood firmly behind the revolution back in 2011,
those who cannot accept either Mursi or the new military leadership, are now
speaking with a new kind of language: “the revolution lives on, although in
silence.” But is this still revolution?
Whatever will come out of the situation in Egypt, one can conclude that
the unredeemed system (the whole) is much more cunning in its resistance
and perhaps not so easy to frame as, for instance, Hardt and Negri’s notion of
“empire” suggests. In that sense, Adorno’s messianic interpretation of the
revolutionary moment—as the critical insight about the impossibility of a
total renewal—is still valid and important because it helps us to avoid
underestimating the problem of positive political concepts, such as the
multitude, and it warns us about the acute risk that such an abstract political
notion easily may degenerate into a new transcendental subjectivity.
Heightened revolutionary rhetoric is always ambivalent, no matter how
commendable it might be.
Four
UTOPIA AND REVOLUTION: THE ROMANTIC

SOCIALISM OF GUSTAV LANDAUER AND
MARTIN BUBER
Michael Löwy
Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber shared a Romantic utopian vision that
inspired their literary, religious, and political writings, and made them into the
twentieth century’s main prophets of community. Let me begin by explaining
what I understand by “prophet,” “Romantic,” and “Utopia.” By “prophet,” I
do not mean a magician that pretends to foresee the future, but, in the truly
biblical meaning one who warns the people of the impending catastrophe and
calls for action before it is too late. “Utopian” should not be understood as, in
the words of The Concise Oxford Dictionary “an ardent but impractical
reformer,” but rather as the partisan of a just and humane social order that
does not—yet—exist anywhere (the original meaning of the Greek word u-
topos).
And by Romanticism I mean not only the German literary school from
the beginning of the nineteenth century, but also a powerful movement of
protest against modern bourgeois/industrial civilization in the name of past
social, cultural or religious values, which runs through modern culture from
Rousseau until our days. The Romantic protest is aimed against the cold,
utilitarian, calculating spirit of the modern (capitalist) age—what Max Weber
called Rechnenhaftigkeit—against the mechanisation and reification of the
soul, and above all against what Weber called die entzauberung der Welt
(disenchantment of the world). To a large extent, Romanticism is a nostalgic
and often desperate attempt to re-enchant the world, through poetry, myth,
religion, mysticism, utopia. A powerful current in Central European culture at
the beginning of the twentieth century, it usually took a conservative and
restorative character—the main exception to this being the Romanticism of
Jewish intellectuals, where we find often socialist, utopian or revolutionary
tendencies.
1. New Community and Socialism
Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber met for the first time in 1899 at the Neue
Gemeinschaft (New Community), a sort of “neo-romantic” literary circle
created that year by the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart, two well known
50 MICHAEL LÖWY
literary critics, which attracted writers and artists such as Erich Mühsam, Else
Lasker Schüller, and Fritz Mauthner (Buber, 1929, p. vii). Curiously
enough—but at the same time, in a manner quite typical both for the
Romantic quest for religious spirituality, and for the assimilation of German-
speaking Jewish intellectuals—their first area of common interest was
Christian mysticism: Landauer was preparing an edition of Meister Eckhart’s
writings, while Martin Buber gave a conference on Jacob Böme. For both of
them mysticism appeared as a fascinating alternative to the empty rationalism,
materialism, and positivism of bourgeois culture. Buber intended to edit, with
the German publisher Diederichs, a collection of essays on European
Mysticism, divided into three sections: German, Slav and Jewish. If the
project was accepted, he would invite Landauer to write a piece on Eckhart
(Buber, 1972, p. 186).
But they had also another, even more important common passion:
Gemeinschaft. According to Hans Kohn, Martin Buber’s biographer, the
meeting with Landauer was “a landmark in Buber’s life. From this day until
Landauer’s death intimate friendship united these two men. Buber’s views on
human communitarian life were decisively influenced by Landauer” (Kohn,
1930, p. 29). Indeed, on social and political issues, Buber was to become, to a
significant extent, a disciple, or follower of his older friend—a debt which he
always acknowledged. As Paul Mendes-Flohr aptly summarized, “without
Landauer it is difficult to appreciate the ideational nuance and passion of
Buber’s conception of politics. [...] Landauer was his alter ego on social and
political matters” (1985, p. 71).
This does not mean that Buber was not a profoundly original social
philosopher. If one compares their key conferences at the Neue Gemeinshaft
in 1900, one can grasp both their common aspirations and some crucial
differences in their thought. In June 1900, Gustav Landauer gave his talk
“Through Isolation to Community,” an important statement of his new
communitarian theory:
The community we long for and need we will find only if we isolate
ourselves as individuals; then we will at last find, in the innermost core of
our hidden being, the most ancient and the most universal community:
the human species [Menschengeschlecht] and the world. Whoever has
discovered this joyous community in himself is enriched and blessed for
all time and is finally removed from the common accidental communities
of our age. Among those old communities which have to be rejected in
order to create the Menschengemeinschaft [human community], there is
of course the State, this “authoritarian communal community” [autoritäre
Gemeinheitsgemeinschaft] (1901, p. 50).
Similar views were expressed a few months later in Martin Buber’s

pathbreaking conference, in the same circle, on “The old and the new
The Romantic Socialism of Landauer and Buber 51
community.” Landauer’s above quoted passage is mentioned, as the most

adequate description of the common experience (Erlebnis—a key term in the
Buberian lexicon) among people searching for a new Gemeinschaft. But
Buber also develops some critical reflections on Ferdinand Tönnies, which
lead him to a new and unprecedented definition of the new community as
“post-social” and not “pre-social” (as in the German sociologist’s well known
opus of 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). This means that the new
community does not hark back to ancient forms, but wants to overcome
modern society, taking into account its achievements, such as the principle of
individual freedom. It is not bound, like the old Gemeinschaft—the tribe, the
clan, the religious sect—by one single word or one single opinion, that soon
freeze into dogma and rigid law, but by common life in freedom and
creativity, which require the diversity of opinions. In a remarkable
sociological summary illuminated by his visionary utopia, Buber argues:
Thus will humanity, which came out from a beautiful but rough
primitive community, after going through the growing slavery of
Gesellschaft (society), arrive at a new community, which will not be any
more grounded, as the first one, on blood affinities
(Blutverwandtschaft), but on elective affinities (Wahverwandtschaft).
Only in it can the old eternal dream be accomplished and the instinctive
life-unity of the primitive human being (Urmenschen), which has been
for so long fragmented and divided, return in a higher level and a new
form (1976, p. 56).
The utopian community is a renewal of the primitive one—an essential

theorem of Romantic social philosophy—but it ceases to be a world of
constraint (Zwang), being bound by the mutual attraction of free individuals
(ibid., pp. 52–56). Mendes-Flohr and Susser perceptively define Buber’s
vision as a sort of non-political anarchism (1976, p. 49).
Both Buber’s and Landauer’s communitarian views were clearly
Romantic not only in their criticism of modern bourgeois, individualistic, and
egoistic society, but also in their nostalgic celebration of the lost
Urgemeinschaft. However, unlike reactionary and conservative German
Romantics, they did not dream of restoration, but of a new form of
communitarian life: in their thought, nostalgia for the past is invested in the
hope for the utopian future.
His admiration for Landauer prompted Martin Buber to ask him a few
years later—1906—to contribute a volume for his series of sociological and
socio-philosophical books Die Gesellschaft: this was to become the book Die
Revolution, published in 1907. This work is a largely unacknowledged
landmark in modern political thought: after Friedrich Engels’ sympathetic but
firm dismissal of utopia, in Anti-Dühring (1878), as a pre-scientific stage in
the history of socialism, this was the first attempt to re-instate the concept at
52 MICHAEL LÖWY
the center of social philosophy. Well before Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia
(1918) and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929), Gustav Landauer
had, already in 1907, raised utopia to a universal human principle, whose
active expression was revolution (1974, pp. 17–18). Landauer’s apology of
utopia was to influence not only Buber, Bloch and Mannheim, but also—
among others—Gershom Scholem, Manes Sperber, Walter Benjamin and the
youth movement Hashomer Hatzaïr. It is difficult to estimate the impact this
book had on his publisher: he certainly shared Landauer’s idea of revolution
as regeneration and his belief that the utopian change will come from “the
unknown, the deeply buried and the sudden.”
Buber also was deeply interested in Landauer’s attempt to reformulate
socialist theory in his document “People and Land: Thirty Socialist Theses”
(1907): if socialism is ever to emerge, it must be built outside the State,
through decentralized communities, making up the “new organism of the
people.” Buber willingly joined the Berlin chapter—named “Gemeinschaft”—
of the Sozialistischer Bund, the libertarian/socialist association created by
Landauer in 1908 on the basis of his “Theses.” In its first pamphlet, “What
wants the Socialist Bund?” the new organisation, which attracted a significant
following (some thousand members), called for an “active general strike,”
through which the working people no longer would work for the capitalists
but for their own needs (see Landauer, 1924, pp. 3–20, 91–95). In the
foreword to this posthumous collection of Landauer’s socialist essays, Martin
Buber celebrates in these “Theses” the “presuppositions of a true socialism”
and pays homage to the visionary character of the Socialist Bund (Buber,
1924, p. iii).
Buber and Landauer also had in common a radical criticism—having
both German Romantic and Jewish messianic inspiration—of the evolutionist
philosophy of progress common to both liberals and Second International
Marxists. They published in 1911, practically at the same time, books where
this new conception of history appears in almost identical terms: it is
impossible to find out who was influenced by the other.
Rejecting the conformist ideology of progressive “improvement”
(Verbesserung), Buber wrote, in his Three Speeches on Judaism: “By
‘renewal’, I do not in any way mean something gradual, a sum total of minor
changes. I mean something sudden and immense (Ungeheures), by no means
a continuation or an improvement, but a reversal and a metamorphosis”
(1920d, pp. 60–61). Rather than hope for ordinary progress (Fortschritt), one
should “desire the impossible (das Unmögliche)” (ibid.). Buber found the
paradigm for such a complete renewal in the Jewish messianic tradition: “The
last part of Isaiah has God say: ‘I create new heavens and a new earth’ (Isaiah
65:17) [...] This was not a metaphor but a direct experience” (ibid.). Landauer
wrote Buber a warm letter on May 1911, referring to his “inner joy” when
reading the book, and emphasizing that he felt that they were “friends going
together in the same path” (Buber, 1972, p. 294).
During the same year appeared Landauer’s Appeal to Socialism, one of

the great works of Romantic socialism in the twentieth century, whose
negative credo is thus summarized: “No progress, no technology, no virtuosity
can bring us salvation and happiness.” Rejecting the German Social-
Democrats “belief in progressive development (Forttschrittsentwicklung),”
Landauer presented his own vision of historical change:
To my mind, human history is not made up of anonymous processes, nor

is it merely an accumulation of countless small events [...]. When
something noble and grandiose, deeply moving and innovative, has
happened to humankind, it has turned out that is was the impossible (das
Unmögliche) and the unbelievable [...] that brought about the turning
point (Landauer. 1919, pp. 11, 44, 108).
Against the positivist/evolutionist perception of progress as quantitative and

gradual accumulation, Buber and Landauer proposed a qualitative conception
of the historical time, where the radical change, the great metamorphosis
result from a sudden irruption of what until then was considered as
impossible. While in Buber this vision has a strong religious/messianic
character, for Landauer the privileged moment of such an irruption is
revolution—but not without religious undertones: in revolutionary events “the
unbelievable, the miraculous move towards the realm of the possible” (ibid.,
p. x).
Karl Mannheim has quite insightfully perceived Landauer as the heir of
anabaptist millenarism and even as the representative of “the Chiliastic
mentality [...] preserved in its purest and most genuine form.” This style of
thinking precludes any concept of evolution and any representation of
progress. Within a “qualitative differentiation of time,” revolution is
perceived as a breakthrough (Durchbruch), an abrupt moment, an experience
lived in the now-time (Jetzt-Erleben) (Mannheim, 1969, p. 196). Manheim’s
analysis is all the more impressive in that it can be applied not only to
Landauer, but also, with a few subtle differences, to Martin Buber, to Walter
Benjamin (his messianic concept of Jetztzeit), and to several other Jewish-
German thinkers.
2. Romantic Judaism
While on the issue of communitarianism Buber followed, in his own unique

way, the ideas of his friend, and while they shared a common revulsion for the
modernist and social/liberal ideology of progress, in another area Landauer
was clearly indebted to him: Judaism.
Before 1908, there are very few references to Judaism in Landauer’s
writings—or even in his letters. In the above mentioned document “People
and Land. Thirty socialist Theses” (1907), after mentioning spiritual figures
54 MICHAEL LÖWY
from every nation (Goethe for Germany, etc) he writes: “The Jews too, have
their unity and their Isaiah, Jesus and Spinoza"—a very characteristic choice,
in which two of the highest representatives of Judaism have little in common
with the Jewish traditional religion or culture (Landauer, 1924, p. 7).
What caused Landauer to turn towards Judaism was not—as in the case
of Theodor Herzl or Bernard Lazare—anti-Semitism or the Dreyfus Affair. It
was his discovery, through the writings of Martin Buber, of a new conception
of Jewish spirituality, a romantic Jewish religiosity.
Landauer showed much interest and sympathy for Buber’s first Hassidic
book, Stories of Rabbi Nachman (1906). He was particularly attracted by the
story called “The Master of Prayer,” which has a strong anti-bourgeois critical
edge: once upon a time there was a “Land of Wealth” where gold, money, and
wealth were the only recognized values, and where the rich were adored as
gods and received human sacrifices; compassion and solidarity were
considered as shameful nonsense. They are finally saved from their folly by
the “Master of Prayer” (Buber, 1927, pp. 77–103). After reading this chapter
to his friend the Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunius (the pen name of
Leopold Wertheimer) and his wife, he reported their reaction in a letter to
Buber: “Deep joy, strong emotion and astonishment was the effect. It is
indeed a marvelous text.” The letter from Landauer was lost, but the comment
is proudly quoted by Buber in a letter to his wife from December 1906
(Buber, 1972, p. 252).
But the real watershed for Landauer was Buber’s The Legend of the
Baal-Schem (1908): it worked on him as a sort of profane illumination (to use
Benjamin’s image). He was not the only one impressed by it: the book had a
tremendous impact on many Jewish—and non-Jewish—intellectuals in
Central Europe because it presented, for the first time, a new image of
Judaism, radically different from both assimilated liberalism and rabbinic
orthodoxy. Among those who were fascinated by it one can find figures as
different as Rainer Maria Rilke, Walther Rathenau, Georg Lukacs, Ernst
Bloch, and Franz Kafka (Mendes-Flohr, 1991, p. 100). For Landauer, as for
several other Jewish intellectuals of German culture, only a Romantic,
mystical and poetical Judaism, such as the one created by Buber from the old
Hassidic legends, could be attractive. It appeared as a direct challenge to the
view of Judaism as a rationalist, non-mystical, anti-magical, and legalistic
religion, presented—in different ways—by German sociology (in the works of
scholars such as Max Weber and Werner Sombart).
In October 1908, shortly after the publication of the book, Landauer
hailed in a letter to a friend “the marvellous stories and legends, from the
tradition of eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish mystical writings of the Baal-
Schem and Rabbi Nachman” (1929, I, p. 218). He also wrote a review of the
book—which was published only in 1910—bringing to the fore its
Romantic/messianic aspects: “The extraordinary thing about these Jewish
legends is [...] that not only must the God who is sought after free people from
the limitations and illusions of the life of the senses, but he must first and
foremost be the Messiah who will lift the poor, tormented Jews from their
suffering and oppression.” The Hassidic tales were the collective work of a
people (Volk)—which does not mean something “popular” or trivial, but
rather, according to Landauer, “living growth: the future within the present,
the spirit within history, the whole within the individual [...] The liberating
and unifiying God within the imprisoned and lacerated Human Being
(Menschen); the heavenly within the earthly” (Landauer, 1910, p. 149).
In this review there is also to be found a sort of confession: Landauer
tells us about the change in his own attitude towards Judaism as a result of
reading Buber’s opus:
Nowhere can a Jew learn, as he can in Buber’s thoughts and writings,

what many today do not know spontaneously and discover only when
there is an outside impusle: namely, that Judaism is not an external
accident (äussere Zufäligkeit) but a lasting internal quality
(unverlierbare innere Eigenschaft), and identification with it unites a
number of individuals within a Gemeinschaft. In this way, a common
ground and a common situation of the soul (Seelensituation) is
established between the person writing this article and the author of the
book (ibid.).
In the first, unpublished version of this review—recently discovered by Paul

Mendes-Flohr—he is even more explicit: “it is precisely through the
mediation of Martin Buber that I have found Judaism” (See Mendes-Flohr,
1991, 107).
In fact, Landauer himself was one of those Jews for whom Judaism had
been an “external accident”: in a letter to the editor of the magazine Zeit in
response to an anti-Semitic article by a certain Von Gerlach, Landauer
qualified his Jewishness as “fortuitous” (Zufall) (Landauer, n. d., MS 432/162;
although the document is not dated, it can certainly be established as having
been written before 1908).
A few years later, Landauer wrote another sympathetic article on Buber:
presenting his friend as “the apostle of Judaism before humanity,” he praised
his Hassidic books, “filled with melancholia, tender beauty, and [...] the desire
to be delivered from earthly oppression.” As a result of his writings—which
had saved a buried and underground tradition from oblivion—"the image of
the Jewish essence (des jüdischen Wesens) became different for Jews and non-
Jews” (Landauer, 1921, 244–246).
In other words, Buber’s Jewish writings were the “outside impulse” that
allowed Landauer to discover his own Jewish identity. It would, however, be
too one-sided to suggest that Buber’s influence alone accounted for his
“Jewish turn”—especially since his religious ideas were themselves deeply
influenced by his social philosophy and by his writings on Christian
56 MICHAEL LÖWY
mysticism. According to Hans Kohn, there are quite a few similarities

between the way that Landauer worked out his translation of Eckhart and the
way Buber undertook his first translations of Hassidic documents. To
illustrate his argument, Kohn quotes from the prospect issued by Landauer to
announce the publication of his Eckhart-book: “Concepts as modernization or
selection are entirely false for this book. [...] It is the reappearence of a hidden
one, which should not be historically honored, but fulfilled in life” (Kohn,
1930, p. 30; see also Altenhofer, 1979). In reality, the two men drew from the
same source of German neo-Romantic culture, and it was from this common
background that a process of mutual influence developed during those years.
In fact, after 1908 Landauer not only interpreted Judaism in the light of
Romantic hermeneutics, but also German Romanticism in terms of Jewish
prophetism. The most astonishing example of this second movement is his
conference on Hölderlin from March 1916, where he compares the hard words
of the German poet—“as hard as the merciless verdict of a God”—with those
of the Jewish prophets, and his ultimate spiritual power, as a modern prophet,
with those of his “brothers of the ancient Hebrew times” (Landauer, 1921, p.
165 n. 168; see also Witte, 1997, pp. 39–41).
The friendship and deep spiritual affinity that united the two utopian
prophets does not mean that there were not important differences between
them. Two issues set Landauer’s thinking apart from Buber’s: Religion and
Zionism.
Whereas Buber’s spirituality falls within the realm of religious faith in
the strict sense, Landauer’s philosophy belongs to the ambiguous domain of
religious atheism. The prophetic, mystical, or Jewish messianic topoi were
secularized in Landauer’s socialist utopia. It is true that this was not
secularization in the usual sense of the word: the religious dimension
remained at the very heart of his political imaginary. It was not simply
nullified but rather preserved/suppressed—in the dialectical sense of
Aufhebung—in the utopian revolutionary prophecy. In Landauer’s mystical
secularization—some authors speak of his “mystical atheism” (Heydorn,
1968, p. 15)—a religious symbolic universe explicitly entered his
revolutionary discourse and imbued it with a sui generis spirituality which
seemed to escape the usual distinctions between faith and atheism. Landauer
refused to believe in a God “beyond the earth and beyond the world”
(überirdischen und überweltlichen Gott); following Feuerbach, he affirmed
that it was man who created God, and not the other way round. But still that
did not keep him from defining socialism as a “religion” (Landauer, 1921, pp.
30, 35).
Landauer shared with Buber an attitude towards the Jewish religion
inspired by the Romantic dialectic of utopia, linking up the millennial past and
the liberated future, tradition preserved in collective memory and
emancipation. In an important article on the Jewish question, “Are these
heretical thoughts?” (1913), he wrote: “the arch-ancient, which we keep in our
soul, is the path taken by mankind towards the future, and the tradition of our
martyred and nostalgic heart is nothing other than the revolution and
regeneration of mankind” (Landauer, 1921, p. 135).
However, he emphasized, much more than Buber, the revolutionary
social and political dimension of Judaism. For instance, in his Appeal for
Socialism (1911) he interpreted Moses’ institution of Jubileum in the
following terms:
The uprising (Aufruhr) as a Constitution, transformation and upheaval as

a rule expected to last for ever [...] were the grandiosity and the
sacredness of the Mosaic social order. We need that once again: new
regulations and a spiritual upheaval which will not make things and
commandments permanently rigid, but which will proclaim its own
permanence. The revolution must become an element of our social
order, it must become the basic rule of our Constitution (Landauer,
1919, pp. 136–137).
This does not mean that Buber disagreed with this sort of argument: he quotes
this same passage at the conclusion of his chapter on Landauer in Paths in
Utopia (1947). But Landauer did not share Buber’s faith in the “God of
Abraham and Isaac.” A note which I found in the Landauer Archives takes up
this theme from another angle: in other religions, the gods help the nation and
protect its heroes, while in Judaism, “God is eternally opposed to servility; he
is therefore the subversive (Aufrührer), the arouser (Aufrüttler), the one-who-
warns (Mahner).” The Jewish religion is evidence of “the people’s holy
dissatisfaction with itself” (Landauer, n. d., MS 432/23). Paul Mendes-Flohr
(1991, p. 108) is right in emphasizing the role of aesthetics in Landauer’s
conception of Judaism, but the social and political dimension are not less
important.
As far as the issue of Zionism is concerned: Landauer was not hostile to
the movement, but had ambivalent feelings. On one side, he rejected what he
considered to be the “cold” and “doctrinaire” concept of a “Hebraic Judaism”
aiming to suppress the German-Jewish, the Russian-Jewish, and the Yiddish
culture (Landauer, 1921, p. 127). But in another article of the same year
(1913) he praises “the movement that, generally under the name of Zionism,
goes through Judaism,” because it has the aim to give “a pure and creative
form” to the specific essence of the Jewish nation (ibid., p. 133). What he
particularly resented was what he called, in an angry letter to the Zionist
educator Siegfried Lehmann, “the falsifying ‘either/or’ choice which a Zionist
calls upon me to make between being a German and a Jew, a European and an
Oriental” (see Mendes-Flohr, 1991, p. 131).
In any case, his true commitment was not, as Buber’s, to Zionism, but to
a sort of messianic diaspora socialism. He believed that the Jewish people had
a specific messianic/revolutionary rôle in modern history: their mission (Amt),
58 MICHAEL LÖWY
vocation (Beruf) or task (Dienst) was to help transform society and create a
new humanity.
Why the Jew? He answers in an astonishing passage from his “heretical”
article from 1913:
A voice, like a wild cry resonating throughout the world and like a sigh
in our heart of hearts, tells us irrefutably that the redemption of the Jew
can take place only at the same time as that of humanity; and that it is
one and the same to await the Messiah while in exile and dispersed, and
to be the Messiah of the nations (Landauer, 1921, p. 125).
This was, of course, a typical form of pariah messianism, which reversed in

the spiritual domain the “negative privileges” (to quote Max Weber) of the
pariah people. In Landauer’s mind, the Jewish vocation dated back to the
Bible itself. In a commentary on Strindberg written in 1917, he claims that
there have been only two great prophecies in human history: “Rome, world
domination; Israel, world redemption.” The Jewish tradition, which never
forgot God’s promise to Abraham—the redemption of the Jew along with all
nations—was evidence of “a messianic conception, a messianic faith, a
messianic will” (ibid., pp. 273, 284).
The Jewish redemptive mission has taken in modern times the secular
form of socialism. Landauer regarded the present condition of Jews as the
objective foundation for their internationalist socialist rôle. Unlike other
nations, Jews had the unique particularity of being a people, a community, a
nation, but not a state, which gave them the historical chance to escape the
statist delirium. According to Norbert Altenhofer (1979, pp. 194–5) Landauer
the anarchist rejected the two dominant currents within the German-Jewish
community: assimilation—which implied accepting the German imperial
State—and Zionism, which sought to establish a Jewish State. This explains
the conclusion of his Ketzergedanken (“heretical thoughts”) from 1913: while
other nations closed themselves in State borders (sich zu Staaten abgegrenzt
haben) “the Jewish nation carries its neighbours in its bosom.” He regarded
this singularity as the surest sign of the Jews “mission towards humanity”
(Landauer, 1921, p. 128).
When Landauer was invited in 1912 by a West Berlin branch of the
German Zionist movement to give a speech on “Judaism and Socialism,” he
put forward the provocative idea that the Galut (exile) was exactly what
linked Judaism to Socialism—a theme that logically ensued from his entire
analysis of the Jewish condition. The Jewish people, he believed, was
particularly qualified for the task of helping to build socialist communities,
because it was less addicted to the cult of the state (Landauer, 1920, p. 51). As
Paul Breines (1967, p. 82) emphasizes, in Landauer’s opinion “the Diaspora
became the social base so to speak of the idea of the Jews as redeemers of
humanity [...]. The dispersion, in fact, freed the Jews; it allowed them to
remain a nation, and at the same time, to transcend that nation and all nations,
and to perceive the future unity of mankind as being made up of a variety of
true nations.”
3. War and Revolution
These differences never led to a clash between the two thinkers: their
friendship and their spiritual Wahlverwandtschaft (affinity) was strong enough
to overcome this and other divergences. But things became different with the
beginning of World War I: here, for the first time, a real conflict emerged.
While Buber, like many other Jewish-German intellectuals, seemed to
follow—admittedly, with ambivalent feelings—the general trend of German
patriotism, Landauer was, from the beginning, a staunch opponent to the war.
In June 1914, just before the war, Landauer and Buber had taken part in
an international cultural meeting in Potsdam, the “Fortes Circle.” When the
war began, several of its members—such as the writers Erich Gutkind and
Florens Christian Rang—sided with the German Reich, and hailed the war as
a fight for German spiritual values against French and English
commercialism. The extent to which Buber shared this viewpoint is unclear.
In any case Landauer expressed, in a letter to Gutkind, his utter rejection of
such views, which he considered to be a sort of perverse aestheticism.
Apparently this critique included Buber, who wrote his friend on 18 October
1914 complaining against what he considered to be an unfair judgement:
“Gutkind reports, that you reproach me—as well as himself—for an
aestheticist attitude; is it possible that you really did misunderstand and
mistake me so much? I cannot believe it” (Buber, 1972, p. 381). Apparently
there was a personal explanation between them, and the quarrel was
neutralised—but the tension remained.
Landauer’s attitude was summarized in a letter from November 1914 to
his friend Fritz Mauthner, who also had taken a German nationalist position:
“I do not have the slightest feeling of association with the policies and actions
of the German Reich” (1929, II, p. 10). In his Journal Der Sozialist, closely
watched by the authorities, he tried to fight German chauvinism by publishing
cosmopolitan and anti-war texts by Herder, Fichte and Romain Rolland. He
also supported the initiatives of the democratic pacifist organisation Bund
Neues Vaterland created in 1915 by some intellectuals (Friedrich Wilhelm
Foerster, Albert Einstein) who favoured an immediate compromise peace. At
the same time, he was deeply wounded by the pro-war position taken by
friends he had trusted, such as Fritz Mauthner or Richard Dehmel (Lunn,
1973, pp. 243–246).
Martin Buber’s views were much less clear-sighted. In the editorial
(Losung) he wrote for the first issue of his Journal Der Jude, in 1916, he took
a highly ambiguous stand: while emphasizing that Judaism as such remained
outside of the war, he praised individual Jewish commitment to the warring
60 MICHAEL LÖWY
hosts as “the discovery of Gemeinschaft” and “the first step to the inner
liberation” (Buber, 1920a, pp. 7–15)! In another essay from the same year,
“The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism,” he celebrated Germany as the only
nation in Europe with spiritual affinity to the Eastern cultures, and therefore
best suited for the historical mission of bringing together Occident and Orient
in a fruitful reciprocity. He also emphasized that, among all European nations,
the German one has had the strongest exchange of influence with Judaism
(Buber, 1916, p. 46). These passages disappeared from the revised edition of
the essay in 1919.
That was too much for Landauer. In a highly emotional letter to Buber,
dated 12 May 1916, he reacted to his friend’s arguments with anger and bitter
disappointment. He found again in these documents “Buber-the-warrior”
(Kriegsbuber) which he had almost forgotten—probably a reference to their
first exchange in 1914. For him, both texts were “very painful, offensive, and
almost inconceivable,” and represented the worst sort of “aestheticism and
formalism” (once again the reproach from 1914). This applied particularly to
the editorial “Die Losung”: what is the meaning of “community” when there
is war and murder? Referring now to the conference on the Spirit of Orient, he
told his friend that he met several young people who used to admire him as a
leader but now, after hearing this talk, saw him as a traitor. Landauer’s own
judgement was somewhat milder: Buber was not really guilty of treason, but
confusion (Trübung). In any case, Landauer considered Buber’s presentation
of Germany as the redemptive nation for the Orient—without mentioning its
policy of colonial conquest during the last decades—as war politics and semi-
official rhetoric (Offiziosentum). And finally, at the end of his letter, he
predicted—quite accurately—that Buber would soon regret these writings,
and no more cooperate with the German war against the other European
nations, as he now did in such a deep confusion (Verwirrung) and
entanglement (Verstrickung) (Buber, 1972, pp. 433–438). For obvious reason
this letter was not included in the selection of Landauer’s correspondence
published in 1929 by Buber.
How did Buber react to this harsh indictment—which was, at the same
time, the testimony of a wounded friendship? The editor of his
correspondence, Grete Schraeder, writes in a footnote after Landauer’s letter:
“Buber’s answer is missing; probably the friends had an oral exchange” (Ibid.,
p. 438). In fact, we know the answer, thanks to a letter discovered in the
Landauer Archive by Eugene Lunn: denying that he had defended the German
war policies, Buber claimed that Landauer had read his article “with the eyes
of fanaticism” and had imposed a political meaning that was foreign to it.
Landauer, in turn, concluded the exchange by saying that Buber, whether he
wanted or not, had played into the hands of the imperialists, although he saw
his friend’s position as an unfortunate effect of the agony of the war. Buber’s
answer is quoted in a letter Landauer wrote on June 2, 1916 (Lunn, 1973, pp.
246–247).
Under Landauer’s pressure, but also following a broader pattern among

leftist intellectuals, Buber became increasingly hostile to the war during the
years 1916–1918. This is already apparent in his polemic with Hermann
Cohen, the champion of German “state consciousness” (Staatsbewusstsein) in
the pages of Der Jude (September 1916): “Humanity is greater than the
State—and to say this, Professor Cohen, is now more than ever the duty of
every man living in God” (Buber, 1920b, pp. 57–58). His articles from 1917
are even more explicitly anti-bellicist: regretting that so many intellectuals let
themselves be regimented by the war-machines, he denounced “this
degenerate (entartetes) war” (Buber, 1920c, p. 113).
Buber’s change of mind permitted their friendship to grow once more, as
the correspondence from those years documents. This does not mean that
some disagreements did not persist, particularly on the political level: Zionism
or Revolution? That issue did not produce the same sort of conflict between
them as the war, but determined, in a decisive way, their different paths
during the crucial years of 1918–1919.
Landauer received the Russian Revolution with enthusiasm, in spite of
his strong hostility to Marxism. A letter to Buber from 5 February 1918
documents in a sharp and concrete way his disagreement with his friend,
whose main interest was, at this precise moment, the future of the Jewish
home in Palestine. Explaining his refusal to participate in a collective book
planned by Buber “against the penetration of imperialism and mercantilism in
Palestine” he writes:
My heart has never lured me to Palestine, nor do I believe that it

necessarily provides the geographical requirement for a Jewish
community (Gemeinschaft). The real event of importance, one that may
even be decisive for us Jews, is the liberation of Russia [...] It seems
preferable to me—despite everything—that Bronstein is not teaching at
the University of Jaffa, but is Trotsky in Russia (Buber, 1972, p. 258).
In spite of this harsh rebuttal, Landauer still showed interest in the

Jewish kibbutzim in Palestine, and agreed to participate in a meeting with
Zionist socialists (organized by Buber) in order to discuss the topic; the
meeting was to have taken place in April 1919, but by that time Landauer was
engaged in Munich with the revolutionary councils. There is a correspondence
between Landauer and Nahum Goldmann on the subject, dated March 1919
(Landauer and Goldmann, 1919, MS Var 432, Files 167–168); it has been
published in Hebrew with an interesting introduction by Avraham Yassour
(Landauer and Goldmann, 1975, pp. 165–175).
Landauer’s attitude towards the Bolsheviks was ambivalent but in the
preface to the new edition of the Aufruf zum Sozialismus (January 1919) he
rejoiced at the news that they—in a similar way as Friedrich Adler or Kurt
Eisner—seemed to overcome their doctrinarism, by giving priority to
62 MICHAEL LÖWY
federation and freedom over centralism and military-proletarian discipline

(Landauer, 1919, pp. vii–viii). But his main interest, during his last year of life
(1918–1919) was the future of the revolution in Germany. His friendship for
Kurt Eisner led him to a decisive commitment to the movement in Bavaria.
As soon as he arrived in Munich in November 1918, Landauer became,
together with Erich Mühsam, a leader of the most radical current, the
Revolutionary Workers’ Council, which included both partisans of Eisner’s
USPD (Independent social-democrats) and anarchists. During the months of
January and February 1919, he was willing to cooperate even with the Munich
Spartacists—who he used to loathe—in the common struggle against the
counter-revolutionary forces, particularly after the assassination of his close
friend, Kurt Eisner, by a fanatical aristocrat (Count Arco-Valley).
Martin Buber followed his friend’s political endeavours with sympathy,
but also with increasing anxiety. He went to Munich in February 1919, and
met with both Eisner and Landauer. In an impressive letter from 22
February—shortly after the murder of the Jewish/Bavarian revolutionary
leader—he described to his friend Ludwig Strauss the “apocalyptic”
atmosphere among the Munich revolutionaries and the “daemonic character
(Dämonie) of Eisner’s divided Jewish soul.” As to Landauer, he “kept faith to
Eisner with an extreme effort of the soul, as a sentinel inspired by a moving
self-denial.” The whole situation, he concluded, is “an unspeakable Jewish
tragedy” (Buber, 1972, p. 67).
When the Council’s Republic was proclaimed on 7 April, 1919,
Landauer accepted to become People’s Commissar for “Enlightenment and
Public Instruction.” He did not have too many illusions regarding the chances
for the longevity of the revolutionary experiment: in a letter to Fritz Mauthner,
written on the same day, he wrote: “If we are allowed a few weeks’ time, then
I hope to be able to accomplish something; it is very possible, however, that it
will last only a few days and then seem as if it had been a dream.” The dream
soon ended in a nightmare: after the defeat of the revolution three weeks later,
on 2 May 1919, Landauer was brutally murdered by counter-revolutionary
troops (Landauer, 1929, II, p. 414). In fact, Landauer had ceased to exercise
his functions of People’s Commissar after April 14, when a Communist
leadership (Eugen Leviné) replaced the socialist/anarchist coalition at the head
of the ephemeral Councils’ Republic. His project of educational reform, based
on a “Revolutionary University Council” was to transform the universities
into a libertarian cooperative society of lecturers and students. Of course, he
did not have time to implement it (see Lunn, 1973, p. 330; for a dramatic
description of his murder by a witness, see ibid., p. 338).
In an article written soon after, Martin Buber paid a moving tribute to
the memory of his friend: “Landauer lived as a prophet of the human
community to come, and fell as its martyr” (Buber, 1919, pp. 290–291). Buber
compared him to his ancestors, the Jewish prophets and martyrs of the past,
and to Christ crucified by the Romans.
In his last will Landauer had made Buber the executor of his estate. The
surviving friend accomplished this mission with exemplary dedication,
publishing Landauer’s correspondence (1929) and two volumes collecting his
articles and essays: Der Werdende Mensch (1919) and Beginnen (1924). But
above all Buber remained all his life faithful to the Romantic, libertarian, anti-
authoritarian, federalist and communitarian socialism of Gustav Landauer, in
all his social-philosophical writings, from The Sacred way (Der heilige Weg)
of 1919, dedicated to his friend’s memory, to his last essays. At a conference
in 1939 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Landauer’s death, he
insisted, referring to the statist-bureaucratic degeneration of Stalinist Soviet
Russia (“a Leviathan that presents himself as Messiah”), that history had
confirmed his ideas: “Landauer had pointed, again and again, with perfect
clarity and consistency, that such an accumulation of power and violence
cannot become socialism” (Buber, 1939).
But it is above all in Paths in Utopia (first published in Hebrew in
1947)—his most important excursion in socialist theory—that Buber pays
homage to Landauer as a thinker. He shared Landauer’s Romantic conception
of the socialist utopia as a revival, a regeneration, a renewal, outside of the
State and its institutions, of ancient communitarian traditions, which remained
present in the collective memory. And, of course, he agreed with his friend’s
conception of socialism as “religion,” in the etymological sense of the word
(religare means to link, to bind), as the free common life of human beings
linked by a common spirit. The definition he proposes for Landauer’s social
philosophy applies perfectly to his own: “Revolutionary conservatism was
exactly what Landauer had in mind; a revolutionary choice of those elements
of social being which deserve to be preserved and are viable in the building of
a new structure.” And, above all, he did share Landauer’s belief in the need to
begin building socialism here and now, by creating an “organic” social life,
through a de-centralised network of local socialist villages or communities
(Buber, 1967, pp. 83, 88).
There are however significant differences between Buber’s utopian
socialism and Landauer’s anarchism: a) the author of Paths to Utopia had a
critical but not negative assessment of Marx’s socialism, and acknowledged
the federalist and democratic content of his writings on the Paris Commune of
1871; b) he did not call for the complete abolition of the State, but only of the
“surplus-State” (Mehrstaat), i.e. that amount of state power that has been
made unnecessary by the people’s capacity of voluntary common life in
justice and order.
Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber were un-armed prophets, to use
Machiavelli’s well-known proposition. They were also Romantic socialists
and communitarian utopists. Was their utopian socialist dream a reasonable
one?
Let me answer with a remark by George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable
man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to
64 MICHAEL LÖWY
adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the

unreasonable human being” (Shaw, 2004, p. 512).
Five
A SECULAR UTOPIA: REMARKS ON THE

LÖWITH-BLUMENBERG DEBATE
Jayne Svenungsson
In the aftermath of the Second World War, European intellectuals exerted

themselves to put into perspective the atrocities committed during the past
decades. How was it possible that Europe—the continent that had allegedly
given birth to the Enlightenment, to modern freedoms and rights, and to ideals
such as tolerance, equality and democracy—had staged this unnamable
horror? A number of liberal thinkers, from Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin to
Swedish political scientist Herbert Tingsten, sought to trace the origins of
totalitarian ideology back to the grandiose philosophies of history of the
nineteenth century. Others, such as the Austrian political philosopher Eric
Voegelin, went even further, arguing that the fatal break happened already in
the high middle ages: it was the millenarian figure Joachim of Fiore who first
turned the eschatological idea of a divine kingdom into the utopian idea of a
perfect society.
When Karl Löwith published his classic study Meaning in History, in
1949, he went still further and traced the modern belief in inner-worldly
progress back not only to Joachim of Fiore, but to the biblical legacy as such.
Löwith’s not uncontroversial thesis was that the view of history that
underpinned modern political ideologies—not merely the extreme totalitarian
ones—ultimately depends on the messianic view of history as a redemptive
process. If Western modernity has been obsessed with the idea of progress
through political and scientific means, it is only because it stands in essential
continuity with the biblical idea of history as a journey towards divine
fulfillment.
Although influential, Löwith’s thesis did not remain uncontested. A little
more than a decade later, at the Seventh German Philosophy Congress in
1962, Hans Blumenberg presented a forceful contestation of Löwith’s
“theorem of secularization,” which was later elaborated in his seminal work
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (the German original appeared in 1966).
Blumenberg rejected the essentialism that Löwith’s argument of historical
continuity seemed to presuppose and argued for the modern age as an
independent epoch which, in important respects, stood in contrast to the
previous theological worldview. Against Löwith’s claim that modern belief in
progress was merely a secular reincarnation of eschatological hope for
redemption, Blumenberg set forth the task of defending the “legitimacy” of
66 JAYNE SVENUNGSSON
the modern age by demonstrating that the distinguishing notions of modernity

were related to their theological precedents only antithetically. It was only
through a decisive break with the theological absolutism of the past that the
modern cultural outlook came of age.
In this chapter I shall revisit the so-called “Löwith–Blumenberg debate”
in order to raise a number of questions relating to the overall theme of this
volume: the relation between the Jewish theological and philosophical
heritage on the one hand, and modern political ideas of utopia, revolution and
social change on the other. Is this relation essentially one of continuity or of
discontinuity? What are the wider philosophical implications of arguing for a
relation of continuity rather than discontinuity and vice verse?
Although I concur with aspects of both Löwith’s and Blumenberg’s
argument, I will argue that both, in the end, fail to do justice to the complexity
of the relation between modern political ideology and its theological past. A
striking common feature in their analyses is the lack of differentiation
between Jewish and Christian traditions within the Western theological
heritage, as well as between different strands within each tradition. Neither
Jewish nor Christian messianism, to take an obvious example, exists in the
singular, but each contains varying and even conflicting expressions
(apocalyptic and restorative, political and apolitical, eschatological and non-
eschatological, etc.). By overlooking these differences, both thinkers are
unable to undertake any qualified reflection on how different theologies can
inspire—and have inspired—rather different strands within modern political
thought.
Above all, and in spite of their opposed positions, Löwith and
Blumenberg share a strong conviction that modern political thought is better
off without its theological past. Here a sharp contrast emerges in relation to a
number of other thinkers that appear in this volume. If Hermann Cohen, Ernst
Bloch, and Martin Buber—for all their differences—were convinced of the
constructive political impulses inherent in Jewish spiritual heritage, Löwith
and Blumenberg remained deeply skeptical about the purportedly constructive
impact of the “Judeo-Christian” legacy on modern thought. It is especially on
this latter point that I will take issue with both authors. Although one can
compellingly argue that theological ideas of redemption have, throughout
modernity, inspired reckless utopian enterprises, one can also, along with
Bloch, demonstrate how the prophetic heritage has inspired numerous
genuinely emancipatory movements. Only when we recognize this complexity
can we fully engage in a critical assessment of the relation between modern
political ideology and its theological past.
1. Löwith’s Secularization Thesis
When Löwith published Meaning in History, he had been exiled for over a
decade. Raised in a Jewish-Protestant middle-class milieu, Löwith belonged to
A Secular Utopia 67
that generation of assimilated German Jews who, to quote Richard Wolin,

“first discovered their Jewishness amid the traumas of political anti-Semitism
as institutionalized under the Third Reich” (Wolin, 2001, pp. 21–29). Löwith
and his wife left for Italy in 1934, but due to the Nazi foreign propaganda they
soon had to leave the country and settled in Japan in 1936. With the Tripartite
Pact in 1940 Japan too eventually became an insecure place, and in 1941
Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich helped Löwith obtain a position at the
theological seminary at Hartford. It was during the years at Hartford that he
started working on Meaning in History, which was published in the same
year—1949—that he left Hartford for the New School in New York, before
finally returning to Europe in 1952.
As Rodolphe Gasché has remarked, it is important to view the evolution
of Löwith’s thought against the background of his “eastward trajectory” from
Europe to Europe, where especially the sojourn in Japan left an unforgettable
impression on him (Gasché, 2012, p. 312). If this observation is true for
Löwith’s thought in general, it is true for Meaning in History in particular.
The work is written by an exiled European intellectual at a time when Europe
lies in ruins. Like numerous other writers at the time, Löwith seeks to come to
terms with the totalitarian degeneration of Western modernity. In contrast to
the common endeavor of tracing the ideological perversions of twentieth
century Europe back to either the Enlightenment or to German Romanticism
(or to both), Löwith sketches a genealogy that brings us all the way back to
the biblical view of history. It was here that humanity for the first time began
to conceive of history as salvation history, as an eschatological drama of
damnation and redemption governed by divine providence. As a consequence,
history was hereafter viewed in the light of an ultimate purpose to which the
destinies of the nations became related. In this respect, the biblical legacy also
had obvious political consequences.
If “Hebrew and Christian thinking” brought the “colossal question” of
history into being—as Löwith suggests already in the introduction to his
study—the ancient Greeks were more moderate in their speculations:
They did not presume to make sense of the world or to discover its
ultimate meaning. They were impressed by the visible order and beauty
of the cosmos, and the cosmic law of growth and decay was also the
pattern for their understanding of history. According to the Greek view
of life and the world, everything moves in recurrences, like the eternal
recurrence of sunrise and sunset, of summer and winter, of generation
and corruption. This view was satisfactory to them because it is a
rational and natural understanding of the universe, combining a
recognition of temporal changes with regularity, constancy, and
immutability. The immutable, as visible in the fixed order of the
heavenly bodies, had a higher interest and value to them than any
progressive and radical change (Löwith, 1949, p. 4).
The passage is worth quoting at length, because it reveals Löwith’s own

philosophical preferences. Although it is never made explicit in Meaning in
History, Löwith actively embraced the Stoic “natural,” that is non-historical,
view of the world as the better part of wisdom in relation to Jewish and
Christian anthropocentrism. As early as 1935, he wrote a study on the eternal
recurrence of the same in Nietzsche’s philosophy, and it has often been argued
that his encounter with “Oriental wisdom” during his five-year stay in Japan
further enhanced his misgivings about the biblical sacralization of history.
I shall have reason to return to these issues later in this chapter, but let
me for the time being focus on the argument of Meaning in History.
Unfortunately, according to Löwith, it is not the ancient Greek but the biblical
worldview that has become constitutive for the Western civilization. This is
the case even as the biblical worldview eventually fades. With Voltaire,
writing in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, faith in divine providence
is explicitly contested. What is not contested, however, is the belief in a
universal history directed toward a single end. This belief is merely
transformed, from the biblical hope of salvation into “an indefinite hope of
improvement” (ibid., p. 111). Nevertheless, Löwith recognizes a crucial
difference between the biblical view of history and secular philosophies of
history from Voltaire and onwards. Whereas the former, although
anthropocentric, maintains a belief in an order that exceeds humanity, the
latter make human will and human reason the leading principle for all history.
This shift is detectable among other things in the view of suffering, or, more
precisely, of humanity’s capacity to cope with evil and suffering. If the
Bible—not unlike the ancient Greeks—expresses a certain humbleness with
regard to the deficiencies of the natural world, modern thought is
characterized by the “illusion that history can be conceived as a progressive
evolution which solves the problem of evil by way of elimination” (ibid., p. 3).
If Voltaire paves the way for the modern utopia of a definitely just
society, this idea reaches its apex with Marx. It is also Marx’s idea of a
classless society that, better than any other secular vision, reveals both the
continuity and the discontinuity of modern secular thought with the biblical
legacy. If Marx is commonly presented as one of modernity’s fiercest critics
of religion, Löwith does not hesitate to inscribe him in the two and a half
thousand years old tradition of Jewish prophetism:
He was a Jew of Old Testament stature, though an emancipated Jew of

the nineteenth century who felt strongly antireligious and even anti-
Semitic. It is the old Jewish messianism and prophetism—unaltered by
two thousand years of economic history from handicraft to large-scale
industry—and Jewish insistence on absolute righteousness which
explains the idealistic basis of Marx’s materialism (ibid., p. 44).
A Secular Utopia 69
The assessment is not without a spark of reluctant admiration, and when

Löwith describes the Communist Manifesto as a “prophetic document” this is
certainly not to be taken merely as a critical remark. If Löwith is appreciative
of Marx’s criticism of social injustice, he remains nonetheless deeply
skeptical toward the quasi-scientific pretentions that underpin his view of
history. After a brief comparison between classical theology and historical
materialism, Löwith accordingly concludes that the latter “is essentially,
though secretly, a history of fulfillment and salvation in terms of social
economy” (ibid., p. 45).
At this point it should be clarified that the argument of Meaning in
History is not intended to be political. As Löwith explains in the introduction,
“the following outline aims to show that philosophy of history originates with
the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfillment and that it ends with the
secularization of its eschatological pattern” (ibid., p. 2). At the explicit level,
Löwith’s concern is thus not about the political outcome of biblical faith, but
merely about its historico-philosophical consequences. Viewed in the light of
the context in which it was written as well as in relation to Löwith’s wider
thought, I nevertheless want to argue that Meaning in History has a political
purpose (cf. Barash, 1998). If we take into account Löwith’s earlier writings,
we soon discover that especially his critical assessment of Marx is part of a
larger argument which is not made explicit in the current work. Already in
1935, Löwith wrote an article on Carl Schmitt (Löwith, 1995), where he
analyses the “decisionism” of Schmitt as a distorted extension of Marx’s
theory of history. With the Marxian concept of ideology, values are made
relative to their place in an objective historical process and ultimately to the
revolutionary goal of overcoming class society. What Löwith is suggesting is
that Marx, by eliminating the reference to extra-historical goals (in a Platonic
or Christian sense), also eradicates the autonomy of any criteria capable of
transcending historical contingency. It is precisely this aspect that reverberates
in the decisionist theories of Schmitt (but also, Löwith later argues, of Martin
Heidegger and Friedrich Gogarten), with the significant difference that these
twentieth century nihilists no longer believed in the dialectical movement of
history toward universal justice. As Jeffrey Barash aptly summarizes Löwith’s
argument:
Once the historical process offers no hope of overcoming the historical

contingency of ideology to encompass a universal perspective, this
contingency becomes the mark of truth itself which, in the context of the
human historical world, can provide nothing more that a mere occasion
for the realization of existential decision (Barash, 1998, p. 80).
In the case of Carl Schmitt, this rejection of a universal perspective uttered

itself in his disavowal of overarching moral principles in favor of resolute
decisions grounded merely in the actual (faktische) alliances of friend or foe

in war.
Although in this early article Löwith turns to Marx in order to detect the
shift in philosophical perspective that paved the way for later distortions, it is
obvious that the real target for his criticism is the right-wing totalitarianism of
Europe—and especially Germany—in the 1930s. However, a decade and a
half later, when Löwith finishes Meaning in History, several nuances of his
argument have disappeared. The explicit reference to Schmitt is gone and, as
already indicated, he de-emphasizes the political intentions of the work. To
the extent to which these intentions nonetheless shine through, another shift is
discernable, for example in the concluding words of his chapter on Joachim of
Fiore’s notion of a “third age” of the Spirit: “The third dispensation of the
Joachites reappeared as a third International and a third Reich, inaugurated by
a dux or a Führer who was acclaimed as a savior and greeted by millions with
Heil!” (Löwith, 1949, p. 159). If his original target was right-wing
totalitarianism, both right and left-wing ideologies are now counted among the
distorted consequences of the Western view of history and seemingly judged
according to the same measure. Above all, the scope of the argument is
extended. Whereas Löwith in his early analyses traced totalitarian ideology
back to nineteenth century philosophies of history, he now makes the much
stronger claim that the root of the evil can be tracked down to Joachim of
Fiore, and ultimately to the Bible. These elaborations certainly rendered his
argument more impressive, but it also made it vulnerable to the charge of
simplifying what was in reality an extremely complex historical development.
2. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
Löwith’s secularization thesis was widely discussed and cited by both

theologians and philosophers during the decade after the publication of
Meaning in History (which was also translated into German in 1953, the year
after Löwith returned to Germany). It was not until 1962 that the thesis was
systematically criticized for the first time. The criticism was launched by
Hans Blumenberg, a younger German philosopher who was partly of Jewish
decent and, like Löwith, had had his share of the Nazi brutalities. At the
Seventh German Philosophy Congress that year, Blumenberg read a paper
which he in the following years revised and expanded into the comprehensive
study The Legitimacy of the Modern Age which appeared in 1966.
As the title indicates, the ambition of the work is to elaborate an apology
for the modern project. Given the intellectual climate of the time, one may
well argue that this was a somewhat unexpected undertaking. From Heidegger
and his disciples to Adorno and the Frankfurt School, the Enlightenment had
been a favorite target in the German philosophical discourse. As Richard
Rorty remarks in a review of the English edition of the book, against this
background, “about the last thing one would expect to come down the pike is
A Secular Utopia 71
a great sweeping history of the course of European thought, built on the

Hegel-Heidegger scale, which has Francis Bacon as one of its heroes, speaks
well of the Enlightenment (of all periods), and suggests that the future lies (of
all directions) ahead” (Rorty, 1983, p. 2).
If we turn away from the inner-philosophical debate and instead consider
the wider cultural climate of the time, Blumenberg’s endeavor is perhaps less
surprising. The 1960s in West Germany—as in most of the Western world—
experienced a number of very concrete social and scientific achievements and,
as a consequence, a regained faith in human capacity and historical
development. This is an equally important background against which
Blumenberg’s defense of modernity must be seen. Having said that, however,
it should immediately be clarified that his endeavor by no means should be
mistaken for an indiscriminate appraisal of progress, least of all in the
deterministic sense that is often associated with the term. If Blumenberg, to
quote Rorty once more, made “all the things that Heidegger made look bad
look good again” (ibid., p. 3), it was not in order to repeat the teleology and
purported inevitability characteristic of earlier German philosophies of
history.
It was in fact his aversion against any purported teleology that inspired
and formed the core of his argument against Löwith’s secularization thesis.
By insinuating that modern theories about historical development were
achieved through the secularization of Judeo-Christian patterns of
eschatology, Löwith committed a fatal reductionist error. Drawing on his own
meticulous account of the intellectual origins of the modern world,
Blumenberg sets out to demonstrate that, by contrast, modernity rests on its
proper foundation and by no means can be reduced to an “illegitimate”
degeneration of earlier theologies of history. Where Löwith sees an essential
continuity, Blumenberg is thus eager to emphasize the discontinuity. Yet this
is not to say that he denies or ignores the apparent structural similarities
between the theological motif of a future redemption and the modern notion
of progress. One may well argue that modern philosophies of history picked
up and elaborated on questions originally posed by medieval theology (such
as the meaning and goal of history). But all that is established by such an
argument is a certain sense of permanence with regard to the questions that
are asked: “The continuity of history across the epochal threshold lies not in
the permanence of ideal substances but rather in the inheritance of problems”
(Blumenberg, 1983, p. 48). If the theorists of early modernity struggled to
make sense of problems that originated in a medieval discourse, the solutions
they offered were quite distinct and derived from entirely other sources.
Which were these sources? A large part of The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age is dedicated to an account of the birth and growth of modern
science and how it profoundly altered the relation between humanity and the
natural world. This is also where Blumenberg locates the sources to what he
considers to be the distinguishing features of modern thought. With scientific
pioneers such as Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler an exploration of the hitherto

invisible world was set forth, the result of which was a constant widening of
the cognitive field. It was the concrete empirical achievements of these early
scientists that successively engendered a more general belief in progress.
Another aspect of the scientific developments in early modernity is that
research was now assigned intrinsic value. According to Blumenberg, this is
where the most important shift in perspective occurs. In the third part of the
study he illustrates by numerous examples—from Augustine’s condemnation
of curiositas to the medieval church’s attempt to quench Aristotelian
influences at the University of Paris—how Christian theologians throughout
history have censured intellectual desire and thus effectively hampered
scientific development. It was precisely this theological taboo that was broken
by the early modern scientists, who turned the perspective around and
declared intellectual curiosity a virtue rather than a vice.
Yet one can ask what it was exactly that triggered the early scientists to
break the taboo against intellectual curiosity. Blumenberg’s answer is that
humanity, at this moment in history, increasingly found itself living in a
universe marked by radical contingency, a world exempt from divine laws.
This discovery prompted humanity to interact with the world in an entirely
new manner, which Blumenberg summarizes in the term “self-assertion”
(Selbstbehauptung). Left alone in a universe indifferent to the fate of
humanity, the human being of early modernity began to elaborate her own
norms for being in the world. Against this background, the modern struggle to
master the world through science and technology appears as an altogether
legitimate endeavor for humanity to secure its existence in a de-enchanted
world.
The remaining question is only why humanity found itself living in a
contingent universe in the first place. Blumenberg has a precise answer also to
this question. Not unlike certain currents in contemporary theology (cf.
Milbank, 1990; Blond, 1998)—but for quite opposite purposes—he traces the
origins of modernity to the nominalist shift that occurred within Western
theology in the late Middle Ages. This shift implied, among other things, that
God from now on was defined in terms of absolute power and undecipherable
will. The long-term consequence of this shift was that humanity learnt to live
in a world characterized by God’s absence:
The modern age began, not indeed as the epoch of the death of God, but
as the epoch of the hidden God, the deus absconditus—and a hidden
God is pragmatically as good as dead. The nominalist theology induces a
human relation to the world whose implicit content could have been
formulated in the postulate that man had to behave as though God were
dead. This induces a restless taking stock of the world, which can be
designated as the motive power of the age of science (Blumenberg,
1983, p. 346).
A Secular Utopia 73
What Blumenberg here suggests is that the modern view of nature, history and
humanity came into being as a reaction against the theological absolutism of
the late Middle Ages: when William of Ockham argued that there was no
rationale accessible to human mind as to why God actualized one possible
world rather than another, he in fact cleared the ground for the scientific
pragmatism of Galileo, Bacon, and all the subsequent theorists who sought to
overcome the deficiencies of nature by transforming it through human
activity.
Blumenberg’s argument for a radical break between the medieval
worldview and the modern age sheds further light on his misgivings about
Löwith’s secularization thesis. Rather than continuing medieval theology by
secular means, modern thought is brought into being through a critical
confrontation with the distinguishing motifs of the dominating theological
worldview. This is also true for the Leitmotiv in Löwith’s genealogy—the
notion of a future redemption. When Löwith argues for a substantial
connection between Judeo-Christian eschatology and modern belief in
progress, he overlooks a crucial difference: whereas the former aims at a
transcendent consummation whose main actor is God, the latter refers to an
immanent process of development whose main actor is humanity. From these
two visions two entirely different attitudes to life follow: in the first case a
passive anticipation of divine interference, in the second an awareness that
history is only as successful as human beings attempt to make it. Blumenberg
never made any secret that his own preferences lay in the latter attitude.
3. Reconfiguring the Debate
Although neither Löwith nor Blumenberg focus particularly on Jewish

cultural heritage, but rather on the “Judeo-Christian” or merely Christian, the
debate brings forth a number of principal questions of interest for the
overarching theme of this volume. In this final section, I will address a few of
these questions with particular focus on the political aspects of their
arguments. But let me begin by bringing attention to the fundamental issue at
stake in the debate between the two thinkers: the nature of the relationship
between the religious heritage of Western civilization and different
philosophies of history and political ideologies throughout modernity. Is this
relation essentially one of continuity or of discontinuity?
The answer, I will argue, is both. In this respect, Löwith and
Blumenberg are both partly right and partly wrong. To pick up a concrete
example, let me return to Blumenberg’s central argument that the theological
absolutism of the late Middle Ages prompted a radical break which resulted in
human self-assertion. The argument, as it is presented in The Legitimacy of
the Modern Age, is certainly compelling, and I contend that it sheds light on
important aspects of the origins of the modern age. However, as the Protestant
theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg has remarked, the force of Blumenberg’s
argument is partly due to what he chooses to leave out. For instance,

Blumenberg pays little attention to the specific nature of biblical creation
theology, where the tendency to see the human being as the head of creation
prompted an emphasis of the independence of humanity with regard to
cosmos. Although this motif from time to time fell into the background, it
remained central within Western theology and—for better or worse—
ultimately cleared the ground for the modern self-understanding of humanity.
Furthermore, according to Pannenberg, Blumenberg exaggerates the anti-
humanist tendency of late medieval nominalism and neglects the fact that the
nominalist theologians not only defended the freedom of God, but also that of
the human being (Pannenberg, 1973). With these aspects taken into account, a
more complex image emerges of the shift from the late Middle Ages to the
modern age.
If Pannenberg—who actually was a disciple of Löwith—makes a case
for Löwith’s secularization thesis, there are nevertheless equally strong
reasons not to over-emphasize the continuities at the expense of the
discontinuities. Now, I would not claim that this is what Pannenberg does;
although he problematizes Blumenberg’s account of medieval nominalism, he
also stresses that the emergence of modernity indeed involved a number of
important ruptures, not least with the rigid system of church authority in the
late Middle Ages. However, if we return to Löwith’s thesis as it is developed
in Meaning in History, there is little space devoted to such ruptures. The
consequence is—and here I concur with Blumenberg’s criticism—that Löwith
fails to do justice to the fact that modern science and politics also involved
decisive breaks with the earlier theological worldview, such as the struggle to
liberate law from ecclesial authorities, or, to pick up the favorite example of
Blumenberg, the struggle to establish free scientific research driven by
theoretical curiosity, experiments and the right to question inherited
authorities.
The point I want to make at this stage is that the relation between secular
modernity and the religious heritage of the West is much more complex than
both Löwith and Blumenberg allow for. As my brief recapitulation of their
arguments indicates, it is easy to isolate either the ruptures or the recurring
patterns in the Western history of ideas and argue for a relation of
discontinuities or one of continuities—whereas a more meticulous account
allows for no such simplifications. This brings me to yet another question
announced in the introduction to this chapter. If the focus on either the
continuities or the discontinuities finally turns out to be a matter of deliberate
choice, one might ask what the underlying ideological assumptions are for
arguing in the one way rather than the other.
Interestingly both Löwith and Blumenberg avoid admitting to any overt
ideological ambitions within their works. This does not mean, however, that
their arguments are free from normative assumptions. As I pointed out in my
presentation of Löwith, his urge to overcome the illusionary attempts to
A Secular Utopia 75
impose a divine order on history can in many ways be seen as a warranted

reaction against totalitarian ideology. But what politico-philosophical
alternative did he propose? The answer is none. Löwith’s philosophical
preferences lay in the Stoic ideal of amor fati, which is to say in recognizing
historical and contemporary social phenomena, but as far as possible
entertaining neither hope nor fear for the future. Yet this is only part of the
picture. For all his incisive critique of Schmitt and of Heidegger—who was
his teacher and mentor for years—Löwith was steeped in the same ideals, and
shared the generational prejudices against the modern world (charged with
instrumental reason, individualism and progressivism). This combination of
cultural pessimism and Stoic detachment sheds further light on Löwith’s
endeavor in Meaning in History, but also on some of the criticism it has
prompted. Thus Richard Wolin writes:
Stoic detachment can too easily be deployed as a pretext for simply

avoiding taking a stand. As such, it threatens to become ideological, a
strategy of complacency vis-à-vis the “human world” and its problems.
When philosophers, as the self-appointed guardians of eternal value and
meaning, shelter “nature” and “cosmos” from the real-world demands of
history, the distinctiveness of the human world—forged in labor,
language, and political practice—disappears (Wolin, 2001, pp. 98–99).
Despite the absence of explicit ideological intentions, Löwith’s argument for

continuity serves to unmask the illusion that history has a purposeful direction
of any kind. The problem, which Wolin hints at, is that Löwith in his criticism
comes dangerously close to a fatalistic indifference which prevents him from
distinguishing reckless utopian enterprises from the entirely legitimate
political developments and progresses of the modern age.
Blumenberg’s apology for modernity is, in many ways, an
understandable reaction against such fatalism. Here we also find the
normative assumptions behind his argument for a radical discontinuity
between modernity and pre-modernity. As his English translator Robert M.
Wallace stresses, Blumenberg “has taken pains to […] defend the
Enlightenment and its would-be continuers (such as Marx) from charges of
fundamentally false consciousness, by reconstructing a legitimate (un-
secularized) concept of possible progress” (Wallace, 1981, p. 79).
Nevertheless, one can ask whether Blumenberg is not also very much a child
of his time, of the progressivist atmosphere of the 1960s. For instance, as
Parvez Manzoor has remarked, Blumenberg’s ideological model of modernity
shows little, if any, awareness of the crisis of knowledge and legitimation
which marked the subsequent philosophical debate in Europe during the
1970s and 1980s (Manzoor, 1987). Furthermore—and with a couple of
additional decades’ perspective—one may remark that his optimistic view of
humanity’s struggle to overcome the deficiencies of nature by transforming it
through human activity is not altogether unproblematic in an age of climate

changes and ecological crises (cf. Monod, 2002, pp. 250–251).
In spite of their contrary ideological positions, as well as the quite
different political implications that arguably follow from each position,
Löwith and Blumenberg nevertheless share one fundamental concern, to
which I shall finally turn my attention. When Löwith traces the excesses of
modern historical consciousness back to Jewish and Christian salvation
history, his endeavor is ultimately to do away with biblical religion and its
understanding of history altogether. Blumenberg, as we have seen, repudiates
this genealogy. But his concern with emphasizing the novelty and
independence of the modern age in relation to its religious past is—no less
than Löwith’s—to defend an account of humanity and nature liberated from
the biblical legacy.
Interestingly, this shared concern has seldom been a matter of discussion
in analyses of the Löwith–Blumenberg debate. Also, very few scholars have
critically discussed the reductionist accounts of the Western theological
heritage that both Löwith and Blumenberg operate with in order to make their
arguments persuasive. The most flagrant example is the lack of differentiation
between Jewish and Christian traditions within European heritage. Löwith, for
all his sensitivity when it comes to criticizing German idealism, most of the
time pictures the “Hebrew and Christian faith in fulfillment” as a seamless
whole, thereby suppressing the particularity of the Jewish view of history and
redemption. If he had devoted more of his attention to this particularity, he
would have been compelled to admit that Jewish messianic expectations
throughout history have looked quite different from Christian expectations.
Especially within halakhic Judaism, redemption has not been linked to
eschatological visions of historical consummation to the same extent, but
rather more to an ongoing transformation of creation through the practice of
the Law in everyday life. A similar observation can be made with regard to
Blumenberg. As we have seen, a central argument in his attempt to legitimate
the modern age is that its idea of progress does not aim at a vast-scale
historical consummation, but rather at a gradual process of development
where the main actor is the human being. However, the latter characterization
could just as easily apply to important strands within Jewish messianism, and
is consequently by no means unique for a culture which has left religion
behind.
By overlooking the differences between the Jewish and Christian
traditions—as well as between different theological strands within each
tradition—Löwith and Blumenberg are not only unable to undertake any
qualified reflection on how different theologies tend to have very different
implications for political thought. They are also, as a consequence, unable to
see any constructive potential in the Western religious heritage for modern
political theory and practice. For Löwith, the ultimate outcome of the
messianic impulse of the biblical heritage is the totalitarian ideologies of the
A Secular Utopia 77
twentieth century, whereas Blumenberg, in equally unflattering terms, depicts

religion as first and foremost an obstacle to the human struggle to create a
better world through political and scientific means.
Here a striking contrast emerges to most of the other thinkers who figure
in this volume. In spite of considerable philosophical and ideological
differences, Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Bloch, Buber, Cohen, Derrida,
Landauer, and Levinas were convinced about the constructive political
impulses inherent in the Jewish spiritual heritage. As is demonstrated
throughout the various chapters in this volume, these thinkers articulate quite
different understandings of the messianic dimension of Jewish thought. But
none of them would think of linking messianic hope for redemption with an
anti-humanist denial of the world, and even less so with totalitarianism. If
what ultimately characterizes totalitarianism in its various shapes is the desire
to make everything present—to install “heaven on earth”—the messianic idea
in Judaism rather teaches us that there is always more to history, more to hope
and strive for, and thus urges us never to grow complacent with the present
state of affairs. Messianism, in this light, appears more like the counter-force
to dangerous utopias, which is the exact opposite of what Löwith claims.
One might even ask whether the endeavor to do away with the biblical
legacy does not in itself come close to a sort of secular utopia, which has both
cultural and political consequences. Whether we want it or not, the biblical
legacy in all its varieties remains the crucible in which the political and
intellectual cultures of the West have been molded. To distance oneself from
this legacy instead of making claims on it as a common cultural concern is,
arguably, to hand it over to the groupings within both Judaism and
Christianity who want their respective tradition to be in ways that correspond
to the excesses which Löwith and Blumenberg see as representative of biblical
religion (dangerous utopianism, censure of intellectual desire,
otherworldliness at the expense of the life here and now, etc.).
Finally, to do away with the biblical legacy for politico-philosophical
reasons is also to fail to see that religion can be an important resource for
constructive political engagement. I even want to argue that Jewish
theology—to cling to the perspective of this book—can, in several ways, be a
critical corrective to the political positions of Löwith and Blumenberg. Thus,
if Löwith’s ideal of amor fati tends to offer little more than a principled
indifference to the dehumanizing logic of the contemporary political and
economic world order, the messianic dimension in Judaism—as Mattias
Martinson argues in relation to Adorno—calls for a radical political
restlessness. Interestingly, it is precisely this aspect of restlessness that Löwith
fails to recognize in the messianic hope for redemption, something which also
sheds light on the disparaging portray he draws of Marxism. In Löwith’s eyes,
the prophetic view of history as a redemptory process—from the Bible to
Marx—seems inextricably linked to dangerous utopianism. But Marx’s
legacy, as it has been displayed by Jewish philosophers from Benjamin and
Adorno to Derrida, can equally be staged as a radical critique of the kind of

philosophy and politics that see redemption or revolution as something which
can be achieved once and for all.
If Löwith comes close to a fatalistic position, which in its indifference
only plays into the hands of the contemporary cultural condition,
Blumenberg’s liberal progressivism to my mind also fails to offer a viable
politico-philosophical alternative to a world order increasingly governed by
the Thatcherist slogan TINA (“there is no alternative”). Here, too, a radical
interpretation of Jewish messianism may offer a critical corrective. In contrast
to Blumenberg’s optimistic account of scientific and political development as
a gradual and accumulative process, the messianic idea in Judaism offers a
more compound notion of progress and change. For instance, as Michael
Löwy shows in his contribution to this volume, Martin Buber and Gustav
Landauer, in spite of considerable differences, both rejected the positivist
perception of progress as quantitative accumulation. Instead they proposed a
qualitative conception of time, where change was conceived of not in terms of
progress, but in terms of a sudden interruption of what until then was
considered as impossible. If Buber’s and Landauer’s criticism was first and
foremost directed toward the contemporary Social-Democrat belief in
progressive reform, today the prime target would rather be the liberal credo of
economic growth as the undisputable matrix of cultural flourishing.
Yet this messianic conception of change in terms of the impossible
(which is, incidentally, also echoed in Jacques Derrida’s later writings on the
messianic) should not be confounded with the year zero romanticism which in
recent years has been (re)launched by figures such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj
Žižek. Drawing explicitly on biblical—or, to be precise, Pauline—
messianism, Badiou and Žižek conjointly argue for an entirely new kind of
political subject, defined by its fidelity to the revolutionary event (see e.g.
Badiou, 2003; Žižek, 2010). The problem, as Daniel Bensaïd (2004) has
convincingly argued, is only that this subject is entirely separated from the
concrete material conditions which in the first place renders a revolutionary
practice possible. In their categorical emphasis on radical novelty, the neo-
Pauline endeavor of Badiou and Žižek prompts a divorce between the
revolutionary event and its historically determined conditions which in the
end tends to render politics impracticable. By contrast, the perhaps most
important contribution of Jewish messianism to political thought is its strong
emphasis on the dialectical relationship between history and event, past and
future, memory and hope. For is it not precisely the practice of memory, of
remembering our history, that reminds us that the struggle for political and
social justice is never achieved once and for all, and which therefore incites us
never to grow complacent and imagine that heaven is around the corner?

Six
THINKING REVOLUTION WITH

AND BEYOND LEVINAS
Carl Cederberg
How does one think the revolution? What does it imply for a philosopher to
conceptualize the revolution? Can we at all “think the revolution” after so
many failed, and failing, revolutions? Perhaps it is possible that this question
is not limited in scope to the work of political philosophers branded or
branding themselves leftist (or conservative), already inscribed in a struggle of
words and concepts. Perhaps, we could be helped by taking up a more
unexpected voice into the philosophical debate.
The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, discussed in this
volume already by Catherine Chalier, is certainly a revolutionary thinker in
the sense that he has revolutionized the way we consider ethics, but he would
not be someone we typically consider as a thinker of the revolution. Indeed he
is not always considered a political thinker. The secondary literature applauds
or dismisses him for his thinking of “the Other,” the ethical dimension of
interhuman relationships. Those who applaud him often do so because he has
made it possible to imagine new ways of thinking the ethical. The ones who
dismiss him often do so because they see him as part of a trend to ignore the
political in favor of exclusive focus on the ethical. This is understandable: one
of Levinas’s articles even bears the title “Politics after!” (Levinas, 1982, pp.
221–228).
There are however, political dimensions to Levinas’s thought—and how
could there not be? Indeed, in locating political thought “after” the ethical,
Levinas is, in fact, framing his political thought, and his own writings make
this clear. Even when he emphasizes the uniqueness of the ethical relation, he
also shows how the political is present in all ethical relations. “The epiphany
of the face,” says Levinas, “attests the presence of the third, the whole of
humanity, in the eyes that look at me” (Levinas, 1990b, p. 235; Levinas,
2004a, p. 213, translation slightly altered). Through the concept of “the third”
(le tiers) Levinas can emphasize the inescapable connection between the
singular, situational and ethical (the other), and the universal, abstract and
political (the third). The political is responsibility thought not only in relation
to one, but for many people and for many situations. Commentators as Robert
Bernasconi (1999), Simon Critchley (2007), Miguel Abensour (2002), and
Jean-Francois Rey (1997) have all, in different ways, shown how Levinas can
help to provide new perspectives on the political. But these comments, helpful
80 CARL CEDERBERG
and insightful as they are, are most often metapolitical rather than political. Is
it possible to chisel out a more concrete political stance from Levinas’s work?
Here, we will ask how Levinas poses the problem of the revolution. However,
this is still a question about Levinas’s philosophy, not a question about how
Levinas personally or privately acted or chose not to act in concrete political
issues.
Can we think the revolution with the help of Levinas? What would this
mean? Levinas certainly did not treat revolution as a central concept of his
philosophy, even in a time where the notion of a world revolution was more
present in political and philosophical discourse. But he did not totally avoid
the topic, and at times opened his thought to a revolutionary vision. In fact, he
dedicated a lecture to the notion of revolution at the Colloque des juifs
internationelles de langue française in 1969: “Judaism and revolution”
(Levinas, 1977, pp. 11–53; Levinas, 1990a, pp. 94–119). What I will
investigate in this article is in what direction Levinas’s thought seeks for a
revolution. What is the revolution according to Emmanuel Levinas?
In order to prepare the ground for an answer to this question, I will start
out by addressing a predominant misconception of Levinas’s philosophy.
Lately, thinkers such as Alain Badiou have associated Levinas with the
contemporary tendency to use ethical formulae in support of a reactionary
political agenda. As I will show, this interpretation was partly inspired by the
image projected from Jacques Derrida’s earlier critical engagement with
Levinas. I will demonstrate how Badiou’s criticism is unjustified, and that
Levinas in fact had already responded to Derrida’s critique. My next step will,
therefore, be to show that Levinas’s philosophy is pervaded by a systematic
revolutionary trope, which he denotes with concepts such as “youth” and
“critique.” He leans on these concepts when articulating in his support for the
‘68 movement, as well as for the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.
Thereafter, I will analyze the one text that Levinas has dedicated solely to the
concept of revolution (“Judaism and revolution,” cited above). Here, in his
reading of a Mishnah text on the limitation of working hours, Levinas argues
for an understanding of the content of the revolution through his ethical
philosophy of the human. Levinas shows that Judaism is not a tradition to be
overcome by revolutionary politics, but that it, through the aid of interpreters
such as himself, can be seen as providing inspiration for revolutionary
thought. Finally, through critical engagement with Levinas’s attempt of
creating an ethical-ontological category of the café, I uncover some
problematics which remain in Levinas's thinking with respect to the
possibility of thinking the revolutionary community.

1. Ethics and Violence
In order to enter the question of Levinas’s relation to revolution, I will first

give an overview of Levinas’s philosophy. Arguably, (cf. Cederberg, 2010)
Thinking Revolution With and Beyond Levinas 81
his original philosophical path took off as early as 1934, in a contemplation of

the notion of the human, which he saw threatened by the advance of National
Socialism and Fascism in complicity with tendencies in modern philosophy.
This does not, however, lead him to a liberal standpoint. On the contrary, the
liberals harbor an all too abstract notion of the human. It is this bloodless
abstraction which paved way for the tendency in early twentieth century
thought to emphasize all things perceived as immanent: race, blood and soil.
Levinas’s philosophy from then on became the attempt to anchor the notion of
the human in a new way, to give a new concretion to the notion of the human.
In his later texts, from the 1950s onwards, he would find a formulation
for this concretion: the responsibility for one’s neighbor (“the other”), an
inexorable and asymmetrical ethical relationship, which can be viewed only
from within, as my singular responsibility for the other. Levinas says that
philosophy has tended to disregard this singular relation in favor of the
general and universal. Since the ethical relation is always singular,
philosophy’s preference for the universal results in a certain blindness for the
ethical. Its striving for universality risks making it an accomplice to
totalitarian violence. This philosophy is even violent in itself, in its disregard
for singularity.
But what of Levinas’s own philosophy? He must, as a philosopher,
negotiate general concepts: the other, ethics, singularity. Are they also
violent? Can philosophy transcend violence? Friedrich Nietzsche had warned
that, since life is inherently violent, the claim to transcend all violence can
only be the largest violence, a violence to life itself. Nietzsche wrote:
To talk of right and wrong as such is senseless; in themselves, injury,

violation, exploitation, destruction can of course be nothing ‘wrong’
insofar as life operates essentially—that is, in terms of its basic
functions—through injury, violation, exploitation, and destruction, and
cannot be conceived in any other way. […] A state of law conceived as
sovereign and general, not as a means in the struggle between power-
complexes, but as a means against struggle itself […] would be a
principle hostile to life, would represent the destruction and dissolution
of man, an attack on the future of man, a sign of exhaustion, a secret
path towards nothingness (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 312–313).
Nietzsche’s main claim is that there can be no justice in itself that stands
outside of violence, since life itself is violent. Thus, it is dangerous to perceive
of a society that is entirely peaceful and just, because this will merely serve to
disguise stronger violence, a violence threatening human life as such.
Nietzsche’s thoughts are echoed by later thinkers. For example, in
“Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida reasons along similar lines. This is his
early and major text on Levinas, where he assails Levinas with difficult
questions. One of the most poignant of these, a question which condenses and
82 CARL CEDERBERG
summarizes the real challenges Derrida puts before the Levinasian project is
the following: in Levinas’s aim to free ethics from the unholy alliance
between ontology and politics, is there not a risk that he might serve to install
a certain pious hierarchy of ethics over politics, of the singular over the
conceptual, which in turn, is in fact nothing but the reign of one concept over
others? For the ethical must still operate within discourse, and therefore
within the political, the conceptual, and the ontological. Between the lines:
does not the (anti-totalitarian) privilege of the ethical over the political lead to
a new totalitarian conception of the political? In Derrida’s view, which echoes
Nietzsche, there is no transcendence from violence, i.e. no privileged ethical
discourse, and if one creates the illusion of such a discourse, one does not
only remain in the fetters of violence, but one forms a new sort of violence
(“the worst violence” (Derrida, 1967, p. 136n; Derrida, 1978, p. 400n), the
violence that would try to extinguish all other violence. “The ethical” can
become a kind of police force, “hostile to life,” in Nietzsche's words, if we
establish a hierarchy of the ethical over the political.
This has been followed up by recent thinkers—such as Slavoj Žižek
(2006), Jacques Rancière (2004), and Alain Badiou (2001)—challenging
Levinas’s preoccupation with the ethical-singular, which in their eyes is an
escape from philosophy’s necessary engagement with the political. Badiou in
particular associates Levinas’s “ethics of difference” to a certain turn towards
ethics in contemporary political discourse, and therefore to a fuzzy “politics of
values.” This discourse is often operated by politicians in hiding different
sorts of conservative or other geopolitical agendas—such as waging war in the
Middle East, and being able to send soldiers to these wars, because they are
labeled just, and because they are allegedly fought for the “rights of others.”
For Badiou and similar critics, saying that ethics precedes politics would
mean opening the doors to a certain form of ethico-political rhetoric (for we
are never outside politics, but only establish hierarchies within politics). Since
these allegations are made in very sweeping and indirect ways, it is also
difficult to free Levinas from them. I will in the following argue that Levinas
is unjustly associated with this kind of discourse. Badiou is right to criticize
the contemporary employment of ethical tropes in politics, and
“Levinasianism” might well provide some fuel for this “intellectual
counterrevolution” (Badiou, 2001, p. li). However, Levinas was well aware of
this problem; the dialogue with Derrida, as well as the events of 1968, helped
him bring this understanding to the forefront of his philosophy.
2. A Levinasian Politics
In the following, I will show how Levinas escapes the criticism exemplified
above by Derrida and Badiou. If we content ourselves with what Catherine
Chalier writes in this volume, I fear that this criticism would be hard to refute.
Here, Chalier warns against revolutionary hope as a violent hope, and
juxtaposes it with her readings of Jewish hope and of Levinas, which is a turn
towards an “inner ‘point’ uncontaminated by evil.” Such a turn would
certainly be a turn away from a revolutionary thought of the political, towards
a focus on the immediate and ethical. And this is, in a sense, fine. Levinas was
not revolutionary in the immediate political sense, and perhaps neither is
philosophy in general, inasmuch as it must have the time to reflect upon, and
not already be an instrument for, political action. Of course, philosophical
thought can inspire revolutions. Or it can turn thought away from burning
political issues; such is the accusation against Levinas. As Louis Althusser
(one of Badiou’s philosophical heroes) wrote, “Simply put, the recourse to
ethics so deeply inscribed in every humanist ideology may play the part of an
imaginary treatment of real problems” (Althusser, 2005, p. 258). Althusser
was, of course, not referring to Levinas but to the advance of a “Marxist
humanism” in the 1960s. But Althusser is highly relevant, since his fear of a
turn from the material scientific language towards a pathetic language of
ethics inspires much of the contemporary criticism targeted at Levinas, most
notably Badiou’s.
Interestingly, Levinas has dedicated a short text to Althusser, the
existence of which Levinas’s critics seem conveniently to ignore. In this short
essay entitled “Ideology and Idealism” from 1972 (Levinas, 1982b, p. 17–33),
Levinas defends Althusser against Claude Bruaire’s rationalist criticism.
Althusser had introduced a notion of “suspect reason,” which from Bruaire’s
rationalist position appears as a weakness, a philosophical surrender. For him,
Althusser’s “critique of ideology” seems to hold reason to be suspect merely
because it has not provided the right proofs. Bruaire argues that philosophy as
suspicion of ideology is a self-contradiction. On its own terms, philosophy can
be nothing but ideology. Levinas, however, takes a step beyond the debate and
provides a justification for Marxism outside of the terminologies of Bruaire
and Althusser.
He argues along the following lines: in order for reason to truly be
reason, it must be able to lead humanity towards that which is good. And in
that case, it must be sensitive to injustice and must respond to the social
injustices of the world. Yet, many of these injustices are inflicted or allowed
by scientifically rational systems. Therefore, there needs to be a reformed
understanding of scientific rationality. A Marxist critique of rationalism is
justified by the injustice suffered by the proletariat. But the reason operating
in this justification can never be made totally independent of the process of
justification. Levinas warns against the totalitarian risks of this
conceptualizing world-view. Therefore, reason per se must be made suspect.
Levinas does not therefore argue for irrationalism, but that the abstractness of
reason ought to be judged from the standpoint of people’s actual needs. Here
we find a surprising Levinasian justification for Marxism as a science, with a
key suggestion of how Marxism can avoid falling into the traps of brutal
dogmatism and bureaucratic inhumanity.
84 CARL CEDERBERG
Even when Levinas warns against the danger of totalizing abstractions,

he still affirms this conceptualization and generalization as necessary. Ethics
requires ontology and politics, the very conceptualizations which must make
us lose sight of our neighbor. Why? Even if conceptualization and abstraction
do not exhaust the signification of speech and of language, as soon as we
speak, we conceptualize. Conceptualization is a condition of the possibility of
philosophy. As noted, not only by Derrida, but by Levinas himself (cf.
Levinas, 1990c, p. 81; 2004b, p. 115), Levinas must conceptualize the very
phenomena that stand for a transcendence of conceptualization. The singular
is a generalization. But the movement from the singular to the general, from
the ethical to the political, is not simply a movement away from the ethical.
The movement from the ethical to the political also lies inscribed within the
ethical. The responsibility for one person, generalized and conceptualized to
the responsibility for many, is the justification of politics. This means also that
the ethical is already political, and must become political. The Levinasian
name for this is “the third” (le tiers). Levinas’s usage of this term in
Otherwise than Being is an attempt to reflect upon the very possibility of a
philosophy such as his. Levinas concedes that he cannot operate apart from
this level of conceptuality—but this relationship works both ways. The
political and ontological concepts are also ethically overdetermined, which
means that they receive their meaning from the responsibility for one’s
neighbor.
The description of the subject as already responding to the other, being
“one-for-the-other,” is not a statement concerning the goodness of human
nature, but the result of a philosophical reflection on the discourse of politics,
ethics, philosophy, and critique. In order for these discourses to have meaning,
Levinas argues, we have to assume the-one-for-the-other, the possibility (or
perhaps hope) of being for the other in spite of oneself. This is a notion
carried by these discourses and traditions. Of course, one has to be critical
also of these traditions, but the very movement of critique will carry the signs
of the one-for-the-other. Critique, the act of disclosing the hypocritical, is only
possible against a background of—at least—hope for ethical self-
transcendence. This critique is the universal possibility of revolutionary
thought, of what Levinas in his short piece “Without Identity” named youth.
In this text, published in the small volume Humanism of the Other
(Levinas, 1996; Levinas, 2003), Levinas finds inspiration in the ’68
movement and especially notes the critique of humanism. As the title of his
book suggests, Levinas sees himself as in a certain sense renewing the thought
of humanism. But on the other hand, in the movement of anti-humanism, he
finds a more truthful understanding of the human than in traditional
humanism. The youthful movement of critique, cutting through the layers of
self-complacent humanism, finds its foundation in the structure of what he
calls the one-for-the-other—the irreducible element of subjectivity which lies
in the element of responsibility for others. He goes so far as to say that this
critique has a better understanding of the human than the humanists. When
Levinas calls the movement “youth,” he denotes a certain relationship to
temporality, trying to capture the piercing movement of critique rather than an
established set of values. Of course, this does not mean a farewell to values.
But if we see the good as that which is to be preserved, uncontaminated from
evil, it seems that one will easily find oneself in the other mode of
temporality, that of the humanists aiming to preserve that which for the critics
is already ideology and hypocrisy. This is not necessarily wrong. If one was to
opt for radicalism over conservatism by default, the choice of political outlook
on life would be based on a preference of temporal modes (the future over the
past, and the movement over the stance) rather than of views of the world.
This would be, as we shall see later, too “formal” an understanding of the
revolution.
Of course every formulation of critique will wither away into jargon and
clichés. Youth ages, and so did the revolutionary 68’s. But this does not do
away with the value of critique, of youth. The concept of youth has provided
us with a vantage point from which to view Derrida’s Nietzschean critique of
Levinas. The very claim that an economy of violence exists, enveloping all
human interaction, is not a neutral statement but a critique. This critique can
only be understandable as such from the viewpoint of the responsibility for
others. If there were no such conception of responsibility, violence could not
be understood as such; there would be nothing to be violated. Thus,
responsibility is the condition which makes critique possible, by disclosing the
economy of violence. Yet, any act of responsibility can be put to a new
critique—the perspective of critique is not stable. Responsibility is not an
inner point of goodness to which one can return. This is why I am slightly
worried about what Catherine Chalier writes earlier in this volume. According
to Chalier, Levinas teaches that it “remains possible to find the way back to a
‘point’ hidden within ourselves that is not contaminated by evil.” In my
reading of Levinas, this is not how he conceptualizes the ethical. He explicitly
warns against the idea that the one-for-the-other would be an inner safe harbor
(Levinas, 1990c, p. 214; Levinas, 2004b, p. 136); it can only be seen as the
movement of ethically informed critique and self-critique.
However even if there must be this movement, its measure cannot lie
within itself as movement. Youth implies novelty, but novelty is not always
best. In his presentation “The youth of Israel” (Levinas, 1977, pp. 54–81;
Levinas, 1990a, pp. 120–135) on Colloque des juifs internationelles de langue
française, Levinas somewhat sarcastically mourned the death of a true
revolutionary spirit in the uniformism of popular culture: “Long hair worn as
a uniform—now there is a the big scandal of long hair” (Levinas, 1977, p. 61;
Levinas, 1990a, p. 124). Revolutionary spirit cannot be for its own sake—this
does not exhaust the meaning of youth (Levinas, 1977, p. 71; Levinas, 1990a,
p. 130). This point is made somewhat differently in another Talmudic lecture
in the same volume, “Damages due to fire” (Levinas, 1977, pp. 149–180;
86 CARL CEDERBERG
Levinas, 1990a, pp. 178–197). Funnily, the theme of hair and age reappears.
From the Gemara he quotes the story of a middle-aged man with two wives,
one old and one young, struggling over his identity. The young wife tears of
all his white hair, the old wife tears out all his black hair, leaving him bald
(Levinas, 1977, p. 176; Levinas, 1990a, p. 195). The parable speaks of the
futility in the struggle between conservatism and modernism, between
“maturity as conservatism and youth as a search for novelty at any price.” The
point lies again, not in whether one is conservative or modern, but in the
ethical content of the political. The measure of critique is responsibility. The
same may be said with regard to his understanding of revolution.
3. The Term “Revolution” in Levinas’s Work
A scan through Levinas’s published work with the help of Christian Ciocan’s
and Georges Hansel’s Concordance (Ciocan & Hansel, 2006, pp. 711–712)
shows that “revolution” is not a central notion in his work. Most often when
he uses the word “revolution” it is in order to describe a revolution of thought,
such as: German idealism (Levinas, 1979, p. 25); the phenomenological
reduction (Levinas, 2001, p. 222, Levinas, 1991, p. 92); Buberian (Levinas,
1987, p. 29) or Bergsonian (Levinas, 1987, p. 118) thought; or when he sees
his own work as an interpretation of Kant’s Copernican revolution (Levinas,
1995, p. 72, p. 216).
This can be seen as an irrelevant metaphor, and can perhaps sometimes
be justly dismissed as a façon de parler, but the expressions become more
interesting if we add that in “La philosophie et l’Éveil,” he speaks of
philosophies, in the transcendence of stable Weltanschauungen, as
“permanent revolutions,” finding this transcendence, of course, in the ethical
relation to the other, itself a “permanent revolution” (Levinas, 1991, pp. 97–
98). For Levinas, philosophical critique is in itself a revolution: it must strive
towards erupting the totality of a system—and as we saw in the discussion of
youth, critique is not merely a matter of cool theoretical speculation.
In the French context in which Levinas works, “Revolution” does not
only imply a future world revolution. The concept refers also to the French
Revolution, which Levinas always mentions in positive terms, linking it to the
emancipation of European Jews which began with that event (Levinas, 1998,
p. 159). Since the French revolution, he says, the struggle for human rights
has had the style of a revolutionary struggle. Human rights are surprisingly
often connected to the idea of revolution, and said to have a revolutionary
content (Levinas, 2006, p. 151; Levinas, 1987, p. 162; Levinas, 1991, p. 216).
Is this a traditionalist viewpoint, in assimilating a revolutionary spirit to the
more liberal western complacency of human rights, or is it revolutionary, in
that it sees the truth of human rights to lie beyond liberalist jargon in a
revolutionary spirit? As I have already argued, this dichotomy between radical
and traditional does not capture Levinas’s political thought. When discussing
the Russian Revolution, Levinas employs a more hesitant attitude. But

interestingly, when criticizing it, he presents it as the corruption of a true
“revolutionary generosity” (Levinas, 1998, p. 102). On a biographical note, it
might be added that Levinas’s family fled to Ukraine when the Russian
Revolution broke out and spent a year there. But these experiences did not
cause him to lose his belief in the idea of revolution.
All in all, Levinas most typically uses the term revolution in connection
to a justified hope in a better order of society. But he is not consistent in his
use of the term. In “Ideology and Idealism,” for example, Levinas keeps the
notion of revolution at a distance, treating it as an all too ideological term of
the Marxists, justified only by the local rebellions against injustice. Here, the
rebellion is the real and local, the revolution the abstract and global (Levinas,
1982b, pp. 26–27). Since revolution is not a key concept in most of his texts,
this kind of survey of his work can only give hints. Instead, I shall turn to a
text where Levinas really attempts to think the meaning of the revolution, and
relate this to what I have shown to be the main structures of his political
philosophy.
4. “Judaism and Revolution”
The place where Levinas directly opens his own thought towards revolution is
in his Talmudic lectures. Here he often relates Judaism to the notion of
revolution, sometimes equating the hope for revolution with the hope for
justice (Levinas, 1977, p. 97). The socialist dream of justice for all is inspired
by Judaism, yet he warns of the crimes committed “in the name of freedom, of
revolution, and even of love” (Levinas, 1982, p. 23). Judaism does thus not
have an unambiguous relation to revolution. It has, as Levinas writes, inspired
both the patience of the oppressed and the impatience of the revolutionaries
(Levinas, 1987, p. 179).
Levinas has devoted one entire Talmudic lecture to the topic of
“Judaisme et révolution” (Levinas, 1977, pp. 11–53; Levinas, 1990a, pp. 94–
119), which we will here interpret at some length. He begins with a text from
the Mishnah:
He who hires workers and tells them to begin early and finish late cannot
force them to do it if beginning early and finishing late does not conform
to the custom of the place. Where the custom of the place is that they be
fed, he is obligated to feed them: where it is that they be served dessert,
he must serve them dessert. Everything goes according to the custom of
the place. (Levinas, 1977, p. 15; Levinas, 1990a, p. 94).
This quotation from the Mishnah, does this not today sound as a support of
subalterns in their struggle against neoliberalism’s blindness to “customs of
the place”? However, Levinas does not focus so much on the notion of
88 CARL CEDERBERG
custom, remarking only that the usage of this term does not indicate a
“conservative and counter-revolutionary traditionalism” (Levinas, 1977, p. 22;
Levinas, 1990a, p. 101). On the contrary, Levinas reads from this passage a
“sublime materialism,” or even a “materialist humanism” (Levinas, 1977, p.
16; Levinas, 1990a, p. 97). What the text shows is that the human basic needs
of sleep and food are not negotiable, not subject to sale and purchase. “Food is
not the fuel necessary for the human machine” (Levinas, 1977, p. 16; Levinas,
1990a, p. 97). What is negotiable and limited is, rather, the freedom of the
employer. Levinas shows that human rights are not only the classically liberal
rights of liberty and property, but are also social rights, for example the rights
of the workers. While the freedom of capital expects that everything is
negotiable, Levinas in his reading of the Mishnah clearly shows that the rights
of the workers are human, non-negotiable rights. And Levinas observes, in a
somewhat condensed argument, that the rights are here as always discussed as
the rights of the other. But even if he does not elaborate this point here, this
makes perfect sense: rights are here discussed not from the viewpoint of the
worker claiming his rights, but from that of the employer obliged to observe
the rights of the worker. And what also becomes clear from this Mishnah
passage is that rights do not appear by way of an imagined social contract,
mutually beneficial to both parties. The freedom of capital must be limited
from the viewpoint of my original obligation to the other. As Levinas writes:
“in the forest of wolves, no law could be introduced” (Levinas, 1977, p. 21;
Levinas, 1990a, p. 100).
But: It would seem that I am digressing from the topic, the idea of
revolution. And so is Levinas, in the text that I am interpreting. In what way is
this then a text on revolution? The text was, as I have mentioned, first
produced as a lecture at the yearly Colloque des intellectuelles juifs de langue
française. That year, 1969, the topic of the colloquium was “Youth and
revolution.” Levinas holds, probably with a polemical edge against others
presenting that same year, that revolution shall not be defined purely formally
as a violent overturning of society. Rather, “revolution takes place where one
frees man; that is, revolution takes place where one tears man away from
economic determinism” (Levinas, 1977, p. 24; Levinas, 1990a, p. 102). It
concerns a vision of a political realization of the ethical relation to other
human beings. This text, therefore, sheds a light on that which we know as
“the political” in Levinas’s thought. As I have repeated, for Levinas, the
political stands for the necessary abstraction and dilution of the ethical. Since
I am responsible before everyone, Law, Justice, and the State are all needed in
order to distribute my responsibility and calculate how it is best met in
political actions and institutions. Knowing this, we can now understand that
revolution must be seen as the fulfillment of those ideals. Somewhat later, he
defines it very succinctly as “the realization of the order where Man is
defended” (Levinas, 1977, p. 35; Levinas, 1990a, p. 108). As was mentioned
already, Levinas’s whole oeuvre is aimed towards this, what he sees as the
mission of philosophy as well as of Judaism: the salvation of the “humanity of

man.” This might well seem a hazy and ideological concept, but here we see
this salvation tied to a notion of revolution, a revolution with a content.
Althusser, and later Badiou, taught us that there is nothing with less
content than the notion of the human. But let us be reminded of two things:
firstly that the employment of the notion of the human in Levinas does not
invite to a essentialist humanism, but to a radical ethical critique; and
secondly that Levinas reaches this definition of revolution in a comment to a
text on the limitation of working hours. It might seem surprising that Levinas
chooses to discuss a text concerning the limitation of working hours, within a
lecture on Judaism and revolution, since the topic seems neither revolutionary
nor religious. But if we rightly understand how Levinas conceives religion
(well known from other texts) and revolution (which we are learning from this
text) it altogether makes sense. He exclaims: “I am even inclined to believe
that here are not many other ways more urgent to love God, than to establish
these working hours correctly” (Levinas, 1977, p. 26; Levinas, 1990a, p. 103).
Levinas’s consistent insistence throughout his “religious” texts, that the
Jewish understanding of God only receives its true meaning in the actions
towards other people, is here repeated in a version closer to day-to-day
politics than is usually the case.
For Levinas, then, there is nothing apolitical about Judaism. In the
political struggle between left and right, Levinas sees in Judaism a certain
tendency towards the left, in its defense of the human person, (which he
associates with Marxism) and holds that Judaism can sometimes even justify a
violent revolution. But he still resists describing Judaism as leftist, because he
does not want to “identify the destiny of Judaism with the destiny of the
proletariat” (Levinas, 1977, p. 46; 1990a, p. 114). For Levinas, Judaism goes
beyond socialism. Judaism has its roots, Levinas says, in a collective
sensibility, in infinitely demanding responsibility. It is demanding to the point
(as he says here and at many other places in his later texts) that the persecuted
bears responsibility of the persecutor. One way of making sense out of this
remark that has disturbed so many is to note that responsibility should not be
confused with guilt. I may be innocent in being persecuted, so I have no guilt
in the situation, but I still have a responsibility for the situation that I and my
persecutor am in, and thus for the persecutor. Levinas expresses this also in
another way: “it is as if, beyond the social and economic alienation, there is
another alienation which haunts man” (Levinas, 1977, p. 47; Levinas, 1990a,
p. 115). Whereas the proletariat must strive to be dis-alienated, he does not
think that Judaism should strive for the dis-alienation of Man in the sense of
dreaming of a time when responsibility is no longer necessary. This is a theme
to which he returns in other texts, and which helps to safeguard against an
idea of harmony towards which either the subject or humanity should strive.
Levinas’s remark on Judaism going beyond socialism is thus not a final
stab in the back of socialism, but an insurance against socialism taking the
90 CARL CEDERBERG
position of a metaphysical principle, likened to the good for man. In this

sense, as an answer to the first of our initial questions, Levinas is a thinker
who thinks with the possibility of a revolution, rather than against it. But he
perceives the revolution through the ancient tradition of Judaism, from which
he distils as the central tenet the singular responsibility of each and every one
for each and every one. The need for a socialist revolution comes, of course,
from the knowledge that society is organized such that some people suffer as a
result of this organization, that people are ignored, excluded, exploited, etc. It
is, as we learned from “Ideology and Idealism,” his text on Althusser, from
these injustices that socialism receives its justifications.
5. No revolution in the café?
I think that Levinas presents a very convincing reinterpretation of the concept

of revolution. It is difficult, however, to envision the revolutionary community
from the perspective of Levinasian philosophy. This problem can be
illustrated by a rather surprising topic that appears at the end of “Judaism and
revolution”: the café. Guided by some remarks in his source text, Levinas
enters into a discussion of the café as a symbol for the distraction typical of
modern society:
The café holds open house, at street level. It is a place of casual social
intercourse, without mutual responsibility. One goes in without needing
to. One sits down without being tired. One drinks without being thirsty.
All because one does not want to stay in one’s room. You know that all
the evils in the world occur as a result of our incapacity to stay alone in
our room [Levinas is referring to Pascal]. The café is not a place. It is a
non-place for a non-society[…] It is because one goes to the café for
distraction that one can stand all the horrors and injustices of a world
without soul (Levinas, 1977, pp. 41–42; Levinas, 1990a, pp. 111–112).
Obviously, this is a provocation, intended to get the attention of his listeners.

Levinas goes on to explain that this is meant as an ontological claim:
I am not waging war on the corner cafés—and I do not want to have all
the café keepers of Paris rise against me. But the café is only the
realization of a form of life. It proceeds from an ontological category
that Rabbi Eleazar ben Rabbi Simeon perceived in the simple inn of his
time, a category essential to Western being, perhaps to Eastern being,
but rejected by Jewish being (Levinas, 1977, p. 42; Levinas, 1990a, p.
112).
The café is no place for revolutionaries it seems. Are the revolutionaries in the
cafés inauthentic? Of course, Levinas is making the café into an ontological
category, the (non-)place for distraction, for avoiding taking responsibility

over the world—which one, according to the dictum Levinas borrows from
Pascal, does in one’s room! This is odd, even as a metaphor. Are we to sit at
home, waiting for the beggars, widows, and orphans? Do we perhaps see here
a general lack in Levinas’s thinking?
Levinas’s view of the political, as well of the ethical, is founded on
responsibility towards others, and the impermissibility of human suffering. On
the political plane this means that Levinas thinks in opposition to a politics of
identity and community, a politics based on sharing an imagined or real
essence with others. His politics is instead based on the idea of a response to
others regardless of what is shared between one and the other. This is the basis
of universal rights of all kinds, such as the right to life, to not being exploited.
It is the basis for the rule of law, for a secularist politics. But regarding the
dimensions of the political which concern a “we,” and a life lived in shared
concerns and interests with others, Levinas has little to say. It is as if the only
legitimate reason for getting involved with political life would be the suffering
of others. This is a problem in the Levinasian conception of the political.
Political involvement for the sake of one’s own desires (that are or are not in
conflict with others’ desires) can of course be suspect, but is not by default
wrong. Levinas spends so much energy on showing that a happy and self-
satisfied community is ethically and politically suspect that it becomes
difficult to form a positive view of human co-existence from his thought. But
a radical critique needs to grow within a joint public realm. This brings us
back to the café, which is a good symbol of happy public co-existence, and
which need not be at odds with responsibility. In Strukturwandel der
Öffentlichkeit, Jürgen Habermas (1962, §5) convincingly argued that
European public space was invented in the coffee houses of Paris and London
in the turn of the seventeenth century. Clearly, Levinas has not given enough
thought to cafés.
Levinas did, however, invest a lot of thought into the concept of
happiness. In Totality and Infinity, he describes the life of the ego as
happiness, as an original enjoyment of the world. When Levinas lets the
domain of the ethical come in as a rupture of this world, this is never intended
as an ode to abnegation, but as a description of the ethical—which is the
possibility of living for others in spite of oneself, i.e. privileging the other
above myself. This implies a situation where my joy stands in conflict with
the well-being of the other. And this is of course not always the case: in the
case of friendship, love, and erotic relations to the other, I can take joy in the
enjoyment of the other, enjoy the other’s enjoyment. In the end part of
Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes these relations, in particular the erotic,
in contrast to the ethical relationship, which is the relation that he privileges
above the others. Why so? Is not the relationship where the joy is shared
better than the one where our desires stand in conflict? Levinas’s point is that
it is only the situations where I am forced to respond to the other instead of
92 CARL CEDERBERG
prolonging my own interests that really bring the ethical to the fore. The
loving, sharing situation is not a symbiosis. Even when I am in love, I am still
a distinct individual with appetites and desires produced from my own unique
perspective. The reminder that the other—the other that I love, as well as
those others that are outside the loving relationship—must concern me in spite
of these appetites and desires is the point from which a critique of human
relations must operate. But, as he also says in Totality and Infinity, enjoyment
is already better than mere existence, or ataraxia (Levinas, 1990b 154;
Levinas, 2004a, p. 145). And only one who can enjoy life can give from the
pleasures of life to the other. The reason for this is that
the transcendence of the face is not enacted outside of the world […]
The “vision” of the face as face is a certain mode of sojourning in a
home, or—to speak in a less singular fashion—a certain form of
economic life. No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted
outside of economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and
closed home (Levinas, 1990b, p. 187; Levinas, 2004a, p. 172).
“The home” for Levinas is a term for our capacity to prolong, maximize, and
protect our enjoyment of life. The idea of a home that must be kept
harmoniously intact in ordered to be opened to the stranger rests on a
patriarchal view of society, which we can trace throughout the tradition of
philosophy, or at least from Aristotle to Levinas. However, the concept of the
home is defined on the basis of the economy of enjoyment, rather than vice
versa. This lets us question Levinas's notion of the home, retaining his idea,
however of an economy of enjoyment as a prerequisite to the ethical. My
positive claim is, then, that the economy of enjoyment must not be isolated to
the home. Levinas, of course chooses to favor the home over the café out of a
fear of distraction. Distraction means non-responsibility: the café stands for a
communication where I cannot be sure that I will act responsibly towards the
other, and Levinas therefore disqualifies it as the environment for responsible
action. But can there ever be such a safe zone of responsible life? In fact, it
was Levinas who said that all communication with others is a “dangerous life,
a fine risk to run” (Levinas, 1990c, pp. 190–191; Levinas, 2004b, p. 120).
This is true for my contacts in the café as well as those in the home (say, with
Mrs. Levinas). He says that Judaism rejects the café. This may be true of some
interpretations of Judaism, but is this true of Judaism per se? Would it not be
more in keeping with Levinas’s interpretation of Judaism as already
secularized to welcome this forum for enjoyment and debate in the public
sphere, in spite of the risks that it holds?
Today, the café is hardly this forum. The café in this form is a dated
phenomenon; it brings to mind in particular a certain European culture,
ranging from the turn of the seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth
century. With new media, new modes and forums for public enjoyment and
interaction have appeared and replaced and transformed the old forums for
public communication. The community of the café should not be idealized. To
be sure, the community of the café was predominately a European male
middle class privilege. Who picked, transported, and ground the beans, who
built the coffee machine, who served the coffee and who swept the floors of
the café? Who took care of the children while the debate was flowing in the
café? Clearly the communication taking place in the café, no matter how
“responsible” and politically avant-garde, was made possible due to various
unjust structures of society. This is true also of the café’s modern
counterparts, such as the so-called social media; the structures upholding the
communication in these forums can be unjust in new ways, and offer new
modes of distraction from political responsibility, and they must also be
questioned and criticized. But all critiques of injustice need these public
forums, in order to be developed and spread. Thus, any such critique will be a
critique of the culture in which the criticism itself is produced: it is a self-
critical process, where conservatism can offer as much danger of distraction
as “modernity.” Levinas’s name for this incessant movement of critique was
“youth.” This movement has revolution as its goal. Levinas's thought is
precisely not counter-revolutionary (as Badiou claims), but strives for
revolution as the “realization of the order where Man is defended.”

Seven
TOPOS AND UTOPIA: THE PLACE OF ART IN

THE REVOLUTION
Alana M. Vincent
The beginnings of the Jewish renaissance preceded the appearance of

“The Jewish State” by several decades. […] With the advent of Herzl,
however, Zionism was no more a matter of domestic concern only. It
was no longer an internal Jewish problem only, not a theme for
discussion only at Zionist meetings, not a problem to heat the spirits of
Jewish writers. The problem of Jewish exile now occupied a place on the
agenda of international affairs.
Louis Lipsky, Introduction to Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State

(1988, p. 14)
Representatives of all countries and nations! […] Confess: Now, when

Lenin sits in the Kremlin, there is no sliver of wood [for heating], smoke
rises, the wife is angry—do you now have “national art?”
Marc Chagall, “On Jewish Art—Leaves from My Notebook”

(1922, p. 39)
As Mattias Martinson has written, Adorno begins his Negative Dialectics

reaffirming the standard Marxist critique of philosophy: philosophy left to its
own devices “is tragically incapable of materially actualizing the human
freedom it constantly prates about in spiritual terms. Consequently, it cannot
become a force of true political liberation or reconciliation” (p. 34). One may
think the revolution, but so long as thinking is all one does, the project of
revolution is truly utopian, in the original sense highlighted earlier in this
volume by Michael Löwy: incapable of existing in any particular place. The
revolution needs not only to be thought, but to be actualized; the
transformation of utopias into actualized spaces of redemption is not a purely
philosophical enterprise, but rather a task of worldmaking, in which every
sphere of human activity is invested.
In taking this position, I am reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human
Condition slightly against the grain, though not, as I will briefly argue, in a
manner which would be entirely unrecognizable to the author. Arendt presents
that work as, in large part, a critique of Marxism’s prioritization of the value
of labor—and, indeed, she places labor at the very bottom of her hierarchy of
96 ALANA M. VINCENT
human activity. She figures the laborer as animal laborans—not even

including them in the genus homo—imprisoned “in the ever-recurring cycle of
the life process […] being forever subject to the necessity of labor and
consumption” (Arendt, 1998, p. 236). In Arendt’s reading of Marx, labor is a
ceaseless, inescapable cycle of production and consumption, in which no
lasting gain is made—everything produced by labor is also consumed in order
to feed the continuation of labor (ibid., p. 99). This cycle of ceaseless toil is,
in Arendt’s own words, “redeemed” by the intervention of “higher and more
meaningful activities” (ibid., p. 5), performed by homo faber (who creates
artifacts and stories which endure beyond the cycle of labor) and zoon
politikon, who acts in the political and social spaces which Jon Wittrock
discusses at some length in chapter 11.
Arendt is vocal in her defense of the value of political action, over and
against any form of material production, and it is thus very easy for a reader to
overlook the fact that in spite of her prioritization of the political, the separate
spheres of human activity which she describes in The Human Condition are
actually interdependent. This becomes especially clear in her development of
the concept of natality, in which she looks to the promise of new life coming
into the world to redeem action from the “irreversibility and unpredictability
of the process started by acting” (ibid., p. 237). There is, however, nothing so
linked to the ever-recurring cycle of the life process as the life process itself:
the ever-recurring cycle of birth and survival and death, from which humanity
seeks redemption through the construction of structures more enduring than a
single life, be they physical—the work of homo faber—or political, located in
the realm of action. But in the end, it is the basic reality of animal laborans,
“the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth,
metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced
and fed into the life process by labor” (ibid., p. 7), which Arendt’s thought is
not only unable to transcend, but to which she looks for the assurance of
continuity which not only gives meaning to, but indeed makes possible, the
various activities by means of which humans attempt to transcend it.
The interdependence between the various spheres of human activity also
comes to the forefront in the section titled “The Permanence of the World and
the Work of Art,” where Arendt writes:
If the animal laborans needs the help of homo faber to ease his labor
and remove his pain, and if mortals need his help to erect a home on
earth, acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his
highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and
historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them
the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not
survive at all (ibid., p. 173).
Topos and Utopia 97
My purpose in this chapter is to take seriously the place of activity beyond the
political in the task of worldmaking that is necessitated by the revolutionary
philosophies discussed elsewhere in this volume, and to examine how, in two
concrete cases, the work of homo faber attempted to transform a utopian
vision into a concrete topos. I will first, and at greater length, discuss the case
of the early Bezalel School as an example of such a process of negotiation,
highlighting the manner in which it both was driven by and supported the
political project of the early Zionist movement, arguing that the rise of
European nationalism and the concomitant emphasis on national spirit and
folk culture expressed through the arts, coinciding as it did with debates over
the integration of Jews into European society, led to an emphasis on Jewish
material production as a locus of identity negotiation.
I will then, by way of a counterpoint, turn briefly to the work of Marc
Chagall, who presided over the Vitebsk People’s Art School in the years
immediately following the Russian Revolution. Chagall is a considerably
more complex political actor than was the founder of Bezalel, Boris Schatz;
while at various points in his career he appeared to be aligned with the Bund,
with Zionism, and points in between, if there is a consistency to his politics it
is that he aligned with whatever party or movement appeared, to him, to offer
him a platform from which to promote his vision of the future of art. In this
regard, Chagall’s work also functions as a locus of identity negotiation, but
the identity in question belongs to the work itself, rather than the culture
which produced it. Nevertheless, it is the work of Chagall, rather than Bezalel,
which has become emblematic of “Jewish art,” and this chapter will conclude
by discussing the way in which Chagall mobilized both Revolutionary politics
and the actual topos of the town of Vitebsk in order to fuel the production of
symbolic utopias.
1. Nationalism, Art, and the Invention of Aniconism
Discussions about Jewish material production—visual images and the lack

thereof—quite naturally tend to center around the Second Commandment and
the variations in its interpretation which have arisen at different times and
places. There exists a large body of material on these questions which I shall
not review here, save to note two points.
First: that interpretations of the commandment have tended to be both
more and less permissive than modern philosophers and art critics have
understood—more, in the way that Talmud tractate Rosh Hashanah brings
into question R. Gamaliel’s diagram of the phases of the moon (a series of
simple geometric symbols) (BT Rosh Hashana 24A), and less in that the
Shulhan ’Arukh’s exhaustive discussion of what sorts of images are permitted
and what are prohibited serves to create rather more loopholes than it closes;
this, I note in passing, having argued the point at length in previous papers
(Vincent, 2013). It is interesting to note, however tangentially, that the story
98 ALANA M. VINCENT
of the Shulhan ’Arukh is itself bound up in the emergence of ethno-linguistic

nationalism, as the reception of Karo’s commentary was instrumental in
constructing a coherent Ashkenazi identity (Davis, 2002).
Second: that the issue of graven images has always been intimately
entwined with negotiations over the borderland between Jew and non-Jew;
this is what I will argue, albeit in rather more constrained terms, in this paper.
The Second Commandment has become an important explanatory mechanism
for art historians in terms of accounting for the perceived absence of Jewish
art—or minimizing the existence of Jewish art, whether (as in several cases
chronicled by Olin, 2000) as a strategy to demonstrate Jewish cultural
inferiority, or in order to emphasize the exceptional nature of a particular
Jewish artist. And it has also become an important feature of contemporary
discussions of art within Jewish Studies (see Raphael, 2009; and Rosen,
2009). In spite of this, the story of Jewish art in the modern era has, in fact,
relatively little (though not nothing) to do with the Second Commandment
save for the way that both art and the biblical prohibition against it function to
mediate between Jewish and non-Jewish conceptions of identity and
nationhood.
Kalman Bland has argued that medieval Jewish aesthetics tended
towards the hyper-visual, and the idea of visual restriction governed by the
Second Commandment entered into Jewish consciousness by way of Kant and
Hegel, in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century—the period in which
European nationalism came to prominence, and the beginning of Jewish
emancipation and widespread debate over the proper relationship between
Jews and the nations in which they lived. The series of negotiations about the
distinction between public and private space, what constitutes “culture” and
the extent to which participation therein defined membership in society, all of
these cultured the development of the self-perception of the European Jewish
communities, as well as the way in which these communities were (and are)
viewed by outsiders. These debates were especially tense in the regions of
present-day Germany where Jewish emancipation was enforced following the
Napoleonic conquest of 1811–1812; the fact that the integration of Jews into
society was imposed by an invading force added an extra dose of resentment
to an already tense relationship (Batnitzky, 2011, pp. 32–33). Attempts to
allay this suspicion led Jewish leaders to emphasize Judaism’s religious
character, over and above any political or national content that might be
inferred from the system of Jewish law (halakah) (ibid.). Kant’s spiritualized
reading of the Second Commandment, “perhaps the most sublime passage in
the Jewish law,” akin to Christian “presentation of the moral law,” served to
advance this project by overtly linking the practical, everyday halakah to a
transcendent telos, thereby legitimizing halakah on spiritual, rather than
political, grounds (qtd. in Bland, 2000, p. 15).
Indeed, in writing Jerusalem, or, On Religious Power and Judaism some
seven years before the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, Moses
Topos and Utopia 99
Mendelssohn attempted a very similar argument, removing halakah from the

realm of the political and into the private domain (Batnitzky, 2011, pp. 22–
23). While “Kant praised the work highly”, he was evidently unconvinced by
Mendelssohn’s argument; his fondness for the Second Commandment is
rather the exception to his general dismissal of Judaism as “a collection of
mere statutory laws” rather than a proper religion (ibid., pp. 23–24). By
contrast, Hegel saw in the Second Commandment proof positive of Judaism’s
inadequacy as a religion, noting that “the Jews and the Turks have not been
able by art to represent their God, who does not even amount to such an
abstraction of the Understanding, in the positive way that the Christians have”
(qtd. in Bland, 2000, p. 15). However, Hegel’s larger project left Jewish
thinkers somewhat more room to maneuver; Bland asserts that
they used Hegelian categories and principles to prove Kant wrong when
he declared Judaism lacking in true religion, ethical significance, and
universal concern. When they finished their work, Judaism became
fundamentally aniconic, pre-eminently spiritual, coterminous with
ethics, and quintessentially universal (ibid., p. 16).
Margaret Olin has noted that the discipline of Art History also developed
during the nineteenth century, largely in Germany and, at least in part, as an
overtly nationalist undertaking, especially in the context of the 1871
unification of the various German states into a single country (2000, pp. 7–8).
Olin traces three main narratives about Jewish art which developed over the
course of the century: of “Jews as exotic purveyors of fantasy” (which Olin
attributes to nineteenth century interpretations of biblical descriptions of the
Temple and its furnishings, although Bland traces the trope of exotic and
excessive Jewish visuality back to the medieval period), of Jews simply
lacking a national art of their own (but being capable, and perhaps even
interested in, imitating the art of other nations), and of Jews as actively hostile
to images (ibid., p. 17). It is this last trope which she connects directly to the
Second Commandment, as well as to Hegel and his intellectual heirs. The
perpetuation of these tropes through the emerging academic discipline of Art
History, as well as through Hegelian nationalism kept the ideas derived from
the Second Commandment alive even among Jews who considered
themselves thoroughly secular and assimilated. It is this combination of
Hegel’s theory of national spirit expressed through art with the last two tropes
which had attained prominence by the time Boris Schatz sought permission
from Theodor Herzl to found the Bezalel School in Palestine, in order to
promote Jewish nationhood through the creation (ex nihilo) of a distinctive
Jewish national art.
100 ALANA M. VINCENT
2. The Bezalel School
Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State offers up a vision of Jewish nationalism

that is, if not consciously utopian, then certainly conscious of its potential to
be perceived as utopian, with all the negative connotations of impracticality
the term carries; the very first pages of Herzl’s preface to the work are spent
in an attempt to defend against such a perception. Herzl is, instead, at pains to
emphasize the immediate practicality of his proposals, sketching a
comprehensive plan for the building of his new society—or, rather, the
transfer of European Jewish society to a new location, maintaining the class
structures and habits of living to which the potential emigrants were
accustomed, with the sole exception of the entrenched cultural anti-Semitism
which, in Herzl’s analysis, was the inevitable result of Jewish presence in
Europe. Herzl argues that the process of emigration will offer great
opportunity for class mobility, but—perhaps understandably, insofar as the
pamphlet is, in part, a plea for investment and thus consciously courts the
good will of the wealthy—only upwards mobility, as the poor and working-
class Jews who constituted the early waves of the settlement project benefitted
from the boundless economic opportunities of the new country; Herzl is
otherwise at pains to lay out plans for business owners and the upper classes
to transfer their wealth and standard of living with as little risk of loss as
possible:
We shall not leave our old home before the new one is prepared for us.
Those only will depart who are sure thereby to improve their position;
those who are now desperate will go first, after them the poor; next the
prosperous, and, last of all, the wealthy. Those who go in advance will
raise themselves to a higher grade, equal to those whose representatives
will shortly follow. Thus the exodus will be at the same time an ascent
of the class (Herzl, 1988, p. 82).
Unlike Herzl, who grew up in a highly assimilated family, Boris Schatz came
from a traditional Eastern European Jewish community; his father was a
teacher at the local ḥeder. He was born in Vorna, Lithuania, in 1867 and was
educated at a yeshiva in Vilnius, before leaving to attend art school, first in
Vilnius, then in Warsaw, and finally in Paris, where he was a student of Mark
Antokolski (Bertz, 2003, pp. 248–249). Inka Bertz notes that
Antokolski, famous in Russia for his depiction of Ivan the Terrible and
other patriotic gestures, still belonged to the generation of the
Peredvishniki, the “Wanderers.” In their concept, art had to be national
art, expressing “the spirit of the people”, and at the same time being
comprehensible to “the people”, since its task was to educate “the
people” (ibid., p. 249).
Topos and Utopia 101
The influence of Antokolski on Schatz is clear, both in terms of style—as both

artists favored a naturalism that was increasingly out of step with the avant-
garde mainstream—and in terms of philosophy; there is some evidence that
Bezalel was Schatz’s attempt to carry out a plan originated by his mentor
(Manor, 2005, pp. 6–7). Schatz’s first major experiment with creating a
nationalist art was in Bulgaria, where he worked from 1895 to 1905; his
experience there provided the basis for the later work of the Bezalel School
(Bertz, 2003, p. 249). It is worthwhile to note that, while the Bezalel style
promoted by Schatz drew on “ethnic types” as an expression of the “spirit of
the people” (a concept borrowed from the Peredvishniki), Schatz’s prior
participation, as a Lithuanian Jew, in Bulgarian nationalist art indicates that he
was not entirely committed to the idea of a specific, ethnically-based and
genetically-transmitted, national genius. Rather, the adeptness with which he
adopted a Bulgarian style, and the methods he used at Bezalel to encourage
the development of a Jewish style, suggest that he viewed the national spirit as
a combination of elements from the local environment and history of a
community which, while specific to that community, remained accessible to
anyone with the will to immerse themselves in them. There is, of course, a
clear parallel between this cultural immersion and the process of religious
conversion.
The Bezalel project developed within the wider context of the European
folk revival (Manor, 2005, p. 6)—although even in this, Bezalel was
somewhat behind the times for, as Bezalel was just beginning, the folk craft
revival in Western Europe was already coming to its end: for example, the
main publications of the British Arts & Crafts movement, Craftsman and
Handicraft, ceased publication in 1912 and 1916, respectively. At the same
time, too, the Bezalel project also echoed the trope of European Jews as
strangers in a strange land, divorced from their own cultural roots. In an early
pamphlet promoting the school, Schatz lamented the inevitable assimilation of
Jewish artists to their diasporic environments:
In order to develop his talents the Jewish artist must leave his Jewish
environment and study in foreign countries, be influenced by a foreign
spirit and work on foreign subjects. Thus, gradually, without noticing it,
he removes himself from the Jewish people (qtd. in Manor, 2005, p. 15).
Schatz designed the Bezalel program with the aim of helping diaspora Jews to
recover from this assimilation, or to avoid it all together, by immersing
themselves in what he considered a pure Jewish (“Hebrew”) culture, just as he
had immersed himself in Bulgarian national culture during his time there.
Dalia Manor, the leading expert on the Bezalel School, describes at some
length the steps that Schatz took to secure a proper environment in which to
enculturate his students, from instruction in the Hebrew language, to the
acquisition of a wide collection of local flora and fauna as well as
archaeological artifacts and local crafts for students to study (Manor, 2005,
pp. 25–28). The result of this program was a visual vocabulary
drawn from several sources: the past (Jewish symbols, the works of
Jewish artists, archaeology, and the depiction of the Holy Places); the
present (Zionist symbols and figures); and the environment of Eretz
Israel (flora and fauna, ethnic prototypes, the pioneer life, and scenic and
historical sites). An additional preoccupation was the revival of ancient
elements such as the Hebrew letter and biblical topics (Cohen, 1994, p.
145).
What emerged in the early twentieth century from the workshops of the
Bezalel School was an art deliberately grounded in motifs from the craft
traditions of the Levant region, rather than from the folk traditions of
European Jewish communities, which were thought to be too derivative of
non-Jewish cultures. That the folk traditions of European nations were
increasingly considered to be central to the expression of national spirit
rendered Jewish folk culture from the same areas suspicious, as Jewish
craftswork very often bore a strong regional resemblance to non-Jewish works
(for a lengthy discussion of Jewish visual borrowing in the medieval period,
see Kogman-Appel, 2001). However, a recourse to non-European craft motifs
did not grant the artists of Bezalel the political or cultural legitimacy which
they sought within Europe. Rather than contesting their exclusion, as Jews,
from participating in any European nationalist undertaking, this strategy
served to confirm the basis of such an exclusion, which is not to suggest that
Jews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were not very often
ardent patriots of the country in which they resided—the historical record is
clear that a large majority of Jews were deeply dedicated to their country—but
rather that Herzl’s analysis of anti-Semitism as embedded in European society
was proven sadly correct; insofar as the logic of nationalism depends upon the
creation of a group of outsiders against which the nation might define itself,
Jews have tended to play the symbolic role of outsider far more often than
they have been privileged insiders.
In acquiescing to the exclusion of Jews from European space, Bezalel
surrendered any claim Jewish art might have made for significance as a
Western tradition, relegating it instead to the Orient (a move which Zachary
Braiterman (2012) has recently, and appropriately, termed “auto-Orientalism”
(see also Braiterman, 2013)). Moreover, while within Europe the craft revival
could be seen as a re-injection of national spirit into the bland and soulless
work of academic art, non-Western craft was still treated as a lesser form of
production, a fact of which Schatz himself was well aware (see Winter, 1975,
p. 36). Manor reports that he published his very first paper on the issue of
Jewish national art in 1888 (nearly twenty years before he began the Bezalel
project) and, following his opening statements about the nature of art and
beauty,
Schatz then suggests that the talent for painting and sculpture which was
recently recognised among Jews was wasted on decorative religious
objects. Although the makers excelled in their craft it was not highly
appreciated and they were only titled ‘craftsman’ (Manor, 2005, p. 10).
The tacit acceptance of craft as a lesser form of production proved

problematic to Bezalel in two respects. First, because initially the skilled
craftsworkers employed at the school were primarily of non-European origins,
it gave license to the already existing tendency of European Jews to
Orientalize; rather than reclaiming these craft traditions as part of their own
cultural heritage, and the craftsworkers (especially the Yemenite Jews
employed as silver-workers) as equal inheritors, they instead exoticized the
craft traditions, and transformed craft practitioners into a subaltern group, in
need of the economic support that craftswork provided (although the craft
workers at Bezalel were also notoriously—and controversially—underpaid;
see Manor 18) but incapable of doing the hard work of translating craft motifs
into expressive art forms; this task was reserved to the predominantly
European students of fine art at the school (Manor, 2005, pp. 14, 17; for the
problems this generated among the European students, see ibid., pp. 24–26).
Second, because Bezalel did continue to engage in a very deliberate
mixing of fine art and craft production, it undermined the project’s claim to
artistic significance, as Nurit Shilo Cohen has made clear:
It is unclear which aspect of the institution was most important to

Schatz—whether he wished to establish a Jewish academy of art,
utilising the craft departments which furnished the local population with
an income as an excuse for obtaining support and financing, or whether
he really wished to develop a mass industry of popular crafts alongside
an academy of art. It is important to note that there was no clear-cut
separation between the two parts of the institution. The art students were
obliged to study crafts while the craftsmen studied drawing in night
classes. Schatz believed that it was impossible to be an artist without
being an artisan, and that artisans should learn the art of painting
(Cohen, 1994, p. 142).
While the two forms of production and their practitioners existed side-by-side,
the mutual enrichment that Cohen hints at here, and that I agree was Schatz’s
aim, never really emerged; instead, the products of the early Bezalel School
were received as almost entirely commercial in nature, as craft of high
technical proficiency but limited aesthetic value: “‘fancy articles for luxurious
tourists’ whose aesthetic value ‘is not of this time’” and which never quite
acquired the veneer of artistic respectability which it desperately sought

(Manor, 2005, pp. 20–23).
The early Bezalel project’s strategy was by no means a resounding
success, in large part because neither its founders nor its audience could ever
completely divorce themselves from the aesthetic heritage of Europe. This
was attested to in part by the school’s closure in 1929, and again by the
critical reception that greeted the New Bezalel School when it opened in 1935,
which tended to echo critiques of the original Bezalel School. W. A. Stewart,
writing in 1944, reported that
The Yemenite Jews have always produced fine silver and gold filigree,
but some of the younger men have received training at the new Bezalel
school of applied arts and are now turning out fine table silverware of
simple and good design, for which there is always a limited number of
buyers. Their jewellery has been modernized also, and is more
acceptable to the European section of the public than the over-ornate and
weak ornaments of the Yemenite tradition. On the whole it can be said
that silver-work and jewellery are of fine craftsmanship with designs
tending to follow the simple forms of modern European design (1944,
pp. 267–268).
Likewise, William Schack, in 1966, wrote that “Aside from western art, in
which, as has been noted, the historic gaps are large and hard to fill (we shall
see whether the Israel Museum will be able to snare Old Masters permanently
as it did for an opening loan exhibition), the Israeli museums have a good
sampling of eastern art in some limited areas” (1966, p. 382). The local and
particular continue to be measured against their relation to the (European)
universal, the former valuable only insofar as they proved access to, or serve
to in some way illuminate, the latter; the “many notable objects” in Bezalel’s
“large collection of Near Eastern, and especially Persian, art ranging over a
thousand years” (which had, by the time Shack wrote, been incorporated into
the newly-opened Israel Museum) held little value in comparison to the Old
Masters which it lacked (ibid.). This is a sharp departure from the motivation
behind the original Bezalel collection, which originated in 1906, when Boris
Schatz began to gather objects, including “samples of Jewish ritual objects,
works by Jewish artists, and local archaeological items” in order for Bezalel
students to study and base designs on them; the school also hosted a museum
of natural history, featuring flora and fauna from the region, developed for a
similar purpose: “The singularity of Bezalel [...] lies in its motivation: the
attempt to create a total environment, a ‘Hebrew’ environment influencing
everyone and everything in it” (Cohen, 1994, p. 140).
The failure of the original Bezalel School was, in part, and in spite of
the eventual success of the new incarnation of the project which opened in
1935, a failure of this vision: it was, from the beginning, precisely not a total
“Hebrew” environment, but rather a response to the European environment,

and no amount of effort on the part of Schatz, the other staff, or the students
of the school could sever those roots. In this regard, the project of creating art
which reflected the national spirit may be deemed a backhanded sort of
success: the nation-building project as a whole has tended to re-inscribe the
problematic aspects of European culture from which it has struggled, and
proven unable, to free itself. This was noted as early as 1966, when Schack
chronicled the emerging role of the country’s museums in promoting and
maintaining a European cultural outlook: “What the Israeli leaders fear, now
that the emigrants from the Oriental countries constitute a majority of the
population, is levanization” (1966, p. 378).
The deliberate attempt at constructing a Jewish national art at the Bezalel
School both attempted to assert Judaism’s equal standing with the national
cultures of Europe and acknowledged the degree to which Judaism was
excluded from European culture; both attempted to elevate Jewish cultural
production to the same level as that of European nations, and also implicitly
accepted European narratives concerning Judaism’s lack of a truly native
artistic culture. The complex picture which emerges from the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, and with which contemporary scholars still contend,
is one of Judaism as a cultural system that, in its scripture, its philosophy, its
history, and its art, is both embedded in and also very much outside of the
culture of Christian Europe which is still, in spite of the best efforts of
scholars of and from other cultures, the basis for ideas of the universal. In the
end, the Bezalel project proved unable to extricate itself from the system of
cultural hierarchy it was meant to provide an alternative to. It was from first
principles engaged in upholding precisely the notions of creativity, of
belonging, and of cultural relevance which taken together served to enforce
Jewish alterity.
3. The Vitebsk School
In contrast to Bezalel’s failed project of creating a Hebrew national art totally

divorced from European influence stands the work of what may be loosely
termed the Vitebsk School—although Aleksandra Shatskikh is swift to point
out that the notion of a particular Vitebsk School “is without legitimate
standing in the history of Russian art” (2007, p. 11). By this, Shatskikh does
not mean to suggest that either Yehuda Pen’s School of Drawing and Painting
(which operated from 1891 until 1918), or the Vitebsk People’s Art School,
which was founded, at the invitation of Anatoly Lunacharsky (Harshav, 2004,
p. 242), under the guidance of Marc Chagall during his time as Commissar of
Arts in post-Revolutionary Vitebsk, are not acknowledged as legitimate
institutions, but rather that there is no particular overarching style associated
with Vitebsk—at least, prior to the advent of the Suprematist-influenced
Unovis movement, led by Kazimir Malevich, which very quickly eclipsed

Chagall’s vision at the People’s Art School (Shatskikh, 2007, p. 146).
In spite of his 7 November 1918 speech celebrating the Revolution as
“the collapse of the Academies of the ‘Professors’ and the restoration of the
power of Leftist Art in Russia” (Chagall, 1918, pp. 28–29), Chagall’s school
was organized in the classical European fashion, with artists accepting
students into their individual studios; while it did include studios dedicated to
decorative arts, such as that presided over by Ksana Boguslavskaya
(Shatskikh, 2007, p. 35), there was no overarching curriculum that forced
students to move back and forth between disciplines, as existed in the Bezalel
School. Nor was there an attempt to create a totalized academic environment
in which a particular sort of artistic output might be encouraged; rather, the
work of the school was itself part of the Revolutionary project of creating a
totalized civic environment in which the ideals of the 1917 Revolution might
be fully realized. To this end, much of the school’s early output involved
decorating the city of Vitebsk for various public celebrations. While the
school existed in the broad milieu of the post-Revolution Jewish cultural
renaissance described by Kenneth B. Moss (2009), and was certainly not
inimical to a Bundist cultural vision, to the extent that the school attempted to
use art to promote a national identity, that identity was Russian (and
Revolutionary); the number of Jewish artists in the school’s ranks was a result
of the ethnic makeup of the area, and served as confirmation of the ability of
the new world order to absorb ethnic differences.
This is not without its historical irony, as the work of Chagall rather than
any artist associated with Bezalel, is now the most readily recognizable
Jewish art of the twentieth century. His success is due, in no small part, to his
ability to assimilate the concerns of the European avant-garde (Fauvism,
Cubism, Surrealism) into his own, clearly identifiable, artistic style, and that
style mattered more, to the art-purchasing public, than the clearly Jewish
subject matter—or, at least, the style helped to render the subject matter
palatable. But the question before us in this chapter is not the question of what
makes Jewish art, but rather how art is mobilized in service of Revolutionary
and Utopian visions; in this regard, Chagall’s work in Vitebsk in the years
1918–1920—and later on in Moscow, from 1920–1922—is difficult to assess,
as Chagall himself appears ambivalent towards the project of the proletarian
revolution, and perhaps towards revolution in general. Or, rather, his
understanding of that project is so much in contrast with other visions of
Revolutionary Art, such as Unovis, that it hardly seems related.
Chagall was not particularly interested in the idea that animated so many
movements of Revolutionary Art—Futurism, Suprematism, Proletkult, etc.—
“that concrete reality could be changed by art and hence by the artistic will”
(Bird, 1987, p. 223). While he paid lip service to this concept, he never
appears to truly embrace the position that the purpose of art is to promote the
Revolution. Rather, he saw in the Revolution an opportunity for greater
artistic freedom. These two ideas are not necessarily mutually exclusive, of
course—as Chagall’s tenure as the Commissar of Arts demonstrates, for at
least some time his vision was sufficiently in harmony with the post-October
government for each to perceive the other as a source of support.
The eventual division and collapse of relationship between Chagall and
the Revolutionary government can be understood best as follows: for Chagall,
Art was Revolution; for the Revolutionaries, the Revolution itself was the
highest form of art. Hints of this division could be seen even as early as 7
November 1918, in Chagall’s speech “Art on the Anniversary of October,” in
which he both aligns art with Revolution and at the same time insists on its
autonomy:
Art lived and will continue to live by its own laws. But in its depths, it
undergoes the same stages experienced by all humanity, advancing
toward the most revolutionary achievements. And if it is true that only
now, when humanity has taken the road of the ultimate Revolution, can
we speak of Humanity with a capital H, even more so, can Art be written
with a capital A only if it is revolutionary in its essence (Chagall, 1918,
pp. 28–29).
Statements such as this one sound appropriately revolutionary, but Chagall

consistently prioritizes the autonomy of art, which “lived and will continue to
live by its own laws” over and against the need for art to be “written with a
capital A only if it is revolutionary in its essence.”
What in 1918 was merely hinted at comes fully to the forefront in
Chagall’s 1919 essay, “The Revolution in Art”:
When we speak of Proletarian Art, we are usually thinking of its

important and undisputed ideas and tasks: who would agree to remove
its “content”? But here we encounter the “subject matter.” Do you think
that if the “subject matter” represents the life of a worker or of a peasant,
rather than insects, and in an uninspired way, it is Proletarian Art?
No, I will never be convinced that Antoine Watteau, the painter of
elegant parties and the refined reformer of the plastic art of his century,
is inferior to Gustav Courbet solely because the latter represented
workers and peasants on his canvases. But the art of today, like the art of
tomorrow, doesn’t want any “content,” and only reluctantly does it
accept compromises and concessions in this realm. So we must be wary
about defining Proletarian Art. Above all, let us be very careful not to
define it by its ideological content, in the usual sense of that word. It is
precisely this aspect that we must banish definitively (Chagall, 1919, p.
31).
Chagall’s eventual definition, in this same essay, of “Proletarian Art” as art

which is made by proletarian painters hardly seems convincing following this
defense of Watteau’s decidedly bourgeois Rococo style—and it is Watteau’s
style, rather than his content, which most differentiates him from Courbet, the
latter of whom produced his share of canvases on themes more classically
aristocratic than “workers and peasants.” And this is the core of the issue:
Chagall is willing to include Watteau in his definition of Proletarian Art
because he is a good artist; he is “the refined reformer of the plastic art of his
century,” much in the same way that the drunken and ineffective Noah was
righteous in his generation (Rashi on Genesis 6:9): while neither may appear
particularly admirable when judged by the standards of subsequent
generations, nevertheless their efforts within their own context are worthy of
praise. Watteau contributed to what, in Chagall’s mind, is the true struggle of
the Proletariat: the advancement of the work of Art—not, it must be noted,
“the inaccessible ‘Art for Art’s sake’” (Chagall, 1919, p. 30) that Chagall
accused even other Revolutionary artists of pursuing; not the abstract
geometric formalism which the Futurists and their successors envisioned as
the new Proletarian style (though there is some question as to how accessible
the Proletariat found it (Bird, 1987, p. 224)), which is itself a continuation of
the trends of the previous century’s academic art, but rather an art which turns
the progress of formalism on its head, placing the resources of the entire
history of art (and not merely the most recent era) in the hands of the
Proletarian painter, of which Chagall himself was the ideal type.
Chagall’s attempt to redefine Revolutionary Art away from either formal
or content-based concerns (that is to say, from being either geometric
abstraction or pictures of workers) was essentially a self-protective move; he
was attempting to develop a definition that permitted his own images, with
their idiosyncratic style that owed more to the French avant-garde and Russian
folk art than to the influence of Futurism, and their deeply personal (in fact,
often autobiographical) presentation of local and Jewish subject matter, to not
only inhabit Revolutionary space, but to define it. In this regard—in this
regard and no other—Chagall’s project was as much a failure as the Bezalel
School’s; his students at the Vitebsk People’s Art School eventually preferred
the approach of Malevich, and in 1920 Chagall departed Vitebsk, first for a
brief tenure as a designer in the Moscow Yiddish Chamber Theatre, and then,
in 1923, back to Paris (Shatskikh, 2007, pp. 146–147).
4. Art as Topos and Utopia
Chagall’s lack of success as a state artist in post-Revolutionary Russia should

not be misread as a failure of his vision of Revolutionary Art. To the contrary,
the body of work he produced over the course of his career achieved precisely
the aims that he set out in his writings of 1918–1919: his style lived by its
own laws, assimilating to itself anything which progressed Chagall’s vision,
and ignoring a great deal of influence which Chagall considered incompatible.

And, as he predicted in his 1919 essay, “The voice of the masses will always
recognise the truth” (Chagall, 1919, p. 31)—his work, far more than that of
the colleagues whom he left behind in what had, by then, become the USSR,
continues to have a large audience outside of the academic elite.
I would suggest that Chagall’s success comes, in part, from his use of
space, in contrast both to the Bezalel experiment and the Revolutionary avant-
garde to which his contemporaries Malevich and El Lissitzky belonged. The
latter was very literally Utopian; its tendency towards geometrical abstraction
prevented it from forming any connection to an actual place, or the people in
it. Suprematism may have sounded very convincing as a manifesto, but in
practice it was too much an insiders’ game to make much connection with the
Proletariat it purported to serve. By contrast, the Bezalel project was very
nearly pure topos, attempting to rescue Jews from oppression in Europe by
creating a Levantine cultural imaginary; it floundered in its inability to
divorce itself from the former completely enough to fully inhabit the latter,
and failed to create the Utopia it sought in real space. Chagall played in the
space between topos and Utopia, anchoring his fantastic, dream-like
landscapes—even those which purport to be images of Jerusalem, the space
which so captivated the Bezalel artists—with the image of the skyline of
Vitebsk (see also Vincent, 2010, pp. 155–156). Certainly, this is an idealized,
nostalgic Vitebsk, cleansed of all the disappointments that caused Chagall to
leave it, not once, but twice; it is transformed in art from topos to Utopia—
and only in art is such a transformation possible.
Eight
BERLIN DEBATES: THE JEWS AND THE

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Oleg Budnitskii
The pogroms of the Civil War period that resulted in the deaths of at least tens
of thousands of Jews were one of the most debated topics in the Ukrainian
Jewish press in the early decades of the twentieth century; the Democratic and
Socialist press also paid a considerable amount of attention to this subject. In
the 1920’s, journalists and historians who worked for the “pogrom
commission”—the Central Aid Committee for pogrom victims in Kiev—
issued a series of research publications based on documents that had been
collected in an archive of Eastern European Jewry in Berlin, which was
established in 1921, at the instigation of Ilya Cherikover. The foundational
collections of this archive were formed from materials which had been
gathered by the “Editorial Panel”—a subsidiary of the Central Aid
Committee—that began operating in May 1919; the work of this “pogrom
commission” was reinvigorated in Berlin. Thus, Nochum Shtif’s book
Pogroms in Ukraine: The Period of the Volunteer Army was written in Kiev in
March 1920, published in Russian in 1922 and appeared in Yiddish in 1923.
That year also saw the publication of Cherikover’s first volume of The History
of the Pogrom Movement in Ukraine 1917–1921, with a foreword written by
Semyon Dubnov (Budnitskii, 2005, pp. 276–280; Roskies, 1984, pp. 138–
140).
In his book, among other things, Shtif aimed to show the “organic,
interworking connections between the pogroms, as part of military routine, the
military and the socio-political programme of the Volunteer Army.” The
author considered the program of the White Army to have “contained features
of restoration and return to the pre-revolutionary Russia.” Pogroms were “a
reaction against the emancipation of the Jews, itself a result of the hateful
revolution; it was the anti-revolutionaries’ first step in an attempt at re-
enslaving the Jewish population” (Shtif, 1922, pp. VII–VIII ). However,
Shtif’s opinions regarding the links between the pogroms and the Volunteer
Army programme were somewhat mistaken. To be more precise, he was
wrong about the connection between the pogroms and the official ideology of
the White Movement leaders. The Declaration of the Volunteer Army was
written by a leader of the Russian liberals, Pavel Miliukov, who, officially,
always promoted equal rights for the Jews. In practice, however, Anton
Denikin’s troops became infamous for bloody pogroms and mass looting, to
112 OLEG BUDNITSKII
which the commanding officers turned a blind eye (Budnitskii, 2005, pp. 158–
344). It is not surprising then, that for Eastern European Jews, the White
Movement became synonymous with pogroms.
Taking into consideration the degree to which pogroms were part of the
White Army strategy, it is easy to understand how much of a shock it was for
the Jewish community of Berlin, not to mention the Jewish émigré community
as a whole, to see a group of Jewish public figures and journalists calling for a
war on Bolshevism and suggesting that Jews should accept responsibility for
taking part in the revolution. This group, who called themselves The National
Union of Russian Jews, blamed their fellow Jews for not lending enough
support to the efforts of the White Army in its struggle against the Bolsheviks.
Among the Union members were Iosif Bikerman, Daniil Pasmanik, Veniamin
Mandel’, Grigorii Landau, as well as less well-known figures, such as Isaak
Levin and Linskii (Naum Dolinskii).
In the beginning of 1923, Bikerman, Mandel’, and Landau presented a
series of lectures in Berlin concerning the revolution and the role of the Jews
in it. This campaign was started by Bikerman; in his paper, Russia and the
Russian Jews, presented on 17 January 1923, he attempted to defend his
fellow Jews, who had been accused of destroying a “blossoming Tsarist
Russia” (Rul’, 1923a, p. 5; Rassvet, 1923, p. 17). According to him, “Russia’s
downfall began during the preparations for the February revolution, in which
Jews played no part.” However, Russian Jews were not altogether forthright in
refusing to accept their responsibility and blaming anti-Semites for

everything. Jews have an aloof attitude towards martial conflict; they
had never operated weapons, nor were they ever competent fighters,
although they did take an active part in the revolution. The Jewish
masses are even proud of figures such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and
Trotsky. It is wrong to say that Jews do not hold responsibility for
Trotsky, for it is evident that Jews are proud of Spinoza and Einstein
(ibid.).
According to Bikerman, the biggest enemy to both Russia and her Jews were
the Bolsheviks. However, he also attacked those Jews who “sought to impede
Russia’s regeneration” (ibid.). This group consisted of Zionists, who not only
distracted Jews from participating in modernizing Russia, but also encouraged
them to collaborate with the Bolsheviks; “autonomists,” whose intentions
were to orchestrate a secession of one large state into many smaller ones, so
that Jewish autonomy could be easier to gain; and the entire Jewish
community who were fearful that the downfall of the Bolsheviks would be
followed by White Army pogroms. Bikerman entered into a direct dispute
with Shtif: he put the pogroms in the context of the Civil War and argued that
the anti-Jewish pogroms were part of the all-Russian demise. “A strong
Russian statehood is essential for the Jews,” concluded Bikerman (ibid.).
Berlin Debates 113
On 3 March, the famous publisher and philosopher—not to mention Iosif

Gessen’s right-hand man on the editorial board of the Rul’ newspaper—
Grigorii Landau presented a lecture with an almost identical title, Russia and
the Russian Jewry. Like Bikerman, Landau both defended and blamed the
Jews at the same time. He argued that Jews were not to be blamed for
“inciting revolution”:
Therefore, the level of Jewish engagement in both the pre-Bolshevik and

Bolshevik revolutions was all the more astonishing. […] The picture is
[truly] paradoxical: having not participated in any preparations for the
revolution, the Jews took part in its delivery and execution, contrary to
their own urgent, fundamental interests (Rul’, 1923c, p. 5; Dni, 1923a, p.
5).
According to Landau, “the present accusations [made against the Jews] are
taken out of all proportion. Now, in the midst of ruin, suffering, and the
destruction of the state and possibly even culture, it is essential that one holds
himself to account and finds the truth” (ibid.). The truth was that “the Jewish
semi-intelligentsia became receptive to ideas of unrest and thus committed a
treachery against both Russia and their own people” (ibid.). The three
movements—Socialism, nationalistic separatism, and revolutionary
tendencies, widely spread among the Jewry—had a devastating effect on it.
Landau concluded: “There are no contradictions between Russia’s interests
and those of her Jewish population. The Jews are interested in revival of the
Great Russia. […] Most of them wish this and strive towards it. Russia’s
revival is only possible through a triumph of morality and sobriety; through
freedom from self-deception; through a conscious appreciation of collective
interests” (ibid.).
The series of lectures delivered by the Kayshchiesya (repentant)
concluded on 21 March 1923 with a paper by Veniamin Mandel’ who stated:
The widely circulated view that ‘Jews destroyed Russia’ has very little
to do with the truth. Even if it was possible to equate Jews with the
Bolsheviks, it would still have been inappropriate to hold them
responsible for Russia’s demise, as the Bolsheviks themselves proved to
be only a consequence of said demise. What truly obliterated Russia was
the February revolution, which was orchestrated by the Russian elite and
the state and public bodies, which Jews were not part of. The revolution
was realized by sailors, the St. Petersburg proletariat and the St.
Petersburg garrison. None of these groups claimed any Jewish members
either. However, the Jews did engage in the development of the
revolution, as well the Bolsheviks’ torturous devastation of Russia. The
Jewry cannot deny its responsibility for its participation in blatant
barbarism committed by the Bolsheviks. If a Jewish nationalist
114 OLEG BUDNITSKII
collective exists, if this collective is truly proud of its heroic founders,

then it must also accept liability for those Jews who sought to destroy
the prevailing political order (Mandel’, GARF, F. R-5769, op. 2, d. 5, l.
70).
Expanding on his point, Mandel’ noted: “we are ironically labelled as

‘repentant Jews’ [Kayshchiesya]. We do not see any shame in repentance. On
the contrary, if the act of repentance is earnest it results in rehabilitation. We
wish for the Jewish community to critically reassess the direction it had
followed up until the present time, to stop using old, clichéd vocabulary and to
recognise the mistakes it had made” (Mandel’, GARF, F. R-5769, op. 2, d. 5,
l. 72).
These lectures prompted comments in the press as well as heated debates
in the lecture hall itself, which occasionally continued until well after
midnight. On 28 March, the Zionist Matfey Gindes presented a paper entitled
The Jewry and Contemporary Russia: A response to the Kayshchiesya. This
lecture was arranged by the Organisation of Russo-Ukrainian Zionists and
was meant—as is made clear by its subtitle—as a response to the previous
series of lectures by Bikerman, Landau, and Mandel’ (GARF, F.P-5769, op. 1,
d. 68, l. 73). According to Gindes, Jewish involvement in the revolution could
be explained by their living conditions and the official government policies
for “which Jews could not be held accountable.” “Persecutions forced the
Jews to eradicate damaging elements from their community.” Gindes thought
that the Jewish choice to support the Bolsheviks was inevitable. The only
other alternative would have been the White Army, which “tied military
strategy to anti-Jewish pogroms. The Jewish community should not align
themselves with the latter, but there are no other political forces present on the
scene.” The author considered the new line of thinking to be the “first sign of
the forthcoming Jewish admission of defeat, which one can notice in the mood
of the Jewish people,” and an attempt to “destabilise the foundations of equal
rights for the Jews.” “Raising [...] the question of penitence in those moments
when one’s neck is environed by a noose of political backlash [...] is
unacceptable. The penitent catchphrase should be answered by a slogan that
calls for a firm [collective] memory. This is the principal weapon in
possession of all Jewish people in their battle against its enemies” (Rul’,
1923e, p. 9). Alas, it remained unclear how exactly this “firm memory” could
help the Jewish people overcome their enemies, whoever they may have been.
Various Berlin-based Jewish and Russian public figures took part in
these debates, with discussions taking place not only immediately after the
lectures, but also during specially arranged debating sessions where many
participants spoke several times. The results of these discussions were
summarized at a meeting held on 19 April 1923. It is interesting to note that
Zionists, Monarchists, and (very few) supporters of Bolshevism all shared the
Berlin Debates 115
same floor. It seems that this was only possible in the Berlin of the early
1920s.
Let us explore the most characteristic statements of those present at the
debates, including the main speakers. This discussion is reconstructed on the
basis of anonymous reports from Russian émigré newspapers published in
Berlin. One of the principal questions discussed was that of “accountability”
with regards to pogroms. Also discussed were the views on Zionism and
Bolshevism, potential avenues for Russia’s reconstruction, her new structure,
and the role of the Jews in this new, hypothetical country.
The well-known economist Boris Brutskus, who had been forced to flee
Russia on the infamous “philosophers’ ship” in 1922, explained that the
Russian Revolution “was rooted deeply in the depths of the Russian psyche.
An elemental force in the form of Russian folk-Bolshevism burst through to
the fore. The Russian people have made their own history” (Rul’, 1923b, p.
5). One cannot separate the Jews from ordinary Russians when the question of
accountability arises. The close relationship many Jews had with Bolshevism
was determined by the condition in which they lived in pre-revolutionary
Russia. Brutskus both argued against and agreed with the Kayshchiesya: “It is
difficult at this moment in time to come up with a recipe for deliverance, but
one can only salute those Jews who express desire to support Russian
statehood” (Dni, 1923b, p. 7).
The Zionist activist and historian of pogroms Iosef Schechtman
proclaimed: “Zionism is the only solution for a nation inhabiting foreign
states. The Jewry does not have any other allies. The White Movement is only
an attempt to restore the Tsarist regime, which is inevitably linked with
pogroms” (Rul’, 1923g, p. 5). Schechtman noted that Tsarist rule and
oppression of the White Guardsmen had become so tiresome for so many, that
it was impossible not to become a revolutionary: “The February Revolution
should be highly praised because it resulted in dispensing the Pale of
Settlement, Numerus Clausus, and other restrictions” (Dni, 1923d, p. 5). Yet
another Zionist, Israel Trivus, said that “the Kayshchiesya harm not only the
Jewish people, but Russia too; their activities do not shed light on the Jewish
question but instead complicate it. They uphold the popular belief that Jews
are responsible for Russia’s collapse. The image of the revolutionary Jew is a
myth, because Jews are traditionally very conservative. It is not the Jews who
should repent, but those who carried out anti-Semitic policies” (Rul’, 1923f, p.
5). Trivus and Mandel’ did not disagree about the conservatism of the Jewish
people. However, Mandel’ thought that, even though the revolution displayed
typically Russian characteristics, the Russian Jewry contributed to it in
particular, and therefore ought to take responsibility for their participation.
“Zionism does not offer the Jews anything substantial,” Mandel’ said, “it
acted as a catalyst for Jewish emancipation from the Russian state for some
Jews, while the Russian Jewry [at large] had merged with Russia and her
116 OLEG BUDNITSKII
culture” (Rul’, 1923g, p. 5). Mandel’ believed that Jews should aim to
reinstate the “Great Russia” in which the Jewry would flourish.
Landau echoed Mandel’s statement: “It would be untrue to say that Jews
do not have allies. It is necessary to be more active in Russian political life.”
The Zionist tendency to avoid Russian politics puts Jews on a “road to
nowhere” (ibid.). Landau particularly directed his accusations at the Jews for
not doing enough to support the Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon, who was
imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1922: “These protests are even more
necessary, because the Jews themselves would often turn to the public opinion
all over the world when persecuted for their faith” (ibid.).
Bikerman attacked not only the Jews associated with Communism, but
also the Zionists. They “got carried away with the prospect of creating their
own nation state, dragging the Jewish masses along with them, distracting the
community from tackling the question of how to face Russia’s new fate” (Dni,
1923c, p. 5). Speaking at the debates, Bikerman reiterated that although
“pogroms were unfortunate events, they were unavoidable and even natural
under the circumstances.” In another presentation, Bikerman talked about the
idealism of the Whites, and stated that applying the word “pogroms” to their
actions would be a “misuse of the word” (Dni, 1923b, 11 March, p. 7). It was
these comments by Bikerman, as well as those made by Landau (although
formulated less harshly), which initiated a vehement reaction. The editor and
publisher of the Russian Economist magazine, Anatoly Gutman, stated that
pogroms cannot be justified by the Civil War: “The commanding officers
never attempted to curtail the carnage as the White Army enacted genocide.”
However, he conceded that at the “present moment” one should concentrate
on overthrowing Bolshevism, rather than on the critique of the White
Movement: “Russian Jews must be Russian patriots and therefore enemies of
Bolshevism” (Rul’, 1923b, p. 5).
A Jewish sympathiser of General Kornilov, one Shifrin, “painted a
picture of Jewish persecution by the Whites” (ibid.). Shifrin must have
belonged to a handful of Jews serving in Volunteers’ Army when it had
indeed been voluntary (i.e. before the secret decision to reject Jewish
applicants).
Naum Gergel’, a member of the “pogrom commission,” who was later to
publish an article analyzing pogroms’ statistics after many years of research
(see Gergel’, 1928, pp. 106–113), and whose data on the victims’ numbers,
sex, and age remain the most authoritative to this day, gave the most
boisterous presentation. Taking part in the debates following Landau’s lecture,
Gergel’ stated that one should discuss Landau’s position, rather than the
question of Jewish culpability: “Let [Landau] explain where he stands with
regards to the White Movement and the pogroms committed by Denikin’s
troops. Bolshevism is a negative phenomenon. However, one does not wish to
return to the times of the Beilis Case either” (Dni, 1923b, 11 March, p. 7). The
severity of Gergel’s speech was probably toned down for newspaper
Berlin Debates 117
publication. The reporter noted that Gergel’ had spoken abrasively and a
portion of the audience left the auditorium in protest.
A biographer of Emperor Nicholas II, Sergei Oldenburg, spoke in
defense of the White Army, calling it “the nucleus of future Russia” (Rul’,
1923b, 10 February, p. 5). Another monarchist, Maslennikov, a member of the
3rd and 4th State Dumas and later a member of the Supreme Monarchist
Council abroad, came out in support of the Kayshchiesya: “Bolshevism is the
product of an illness festering in the Russian soul, and the Jews—Trotsky,
Radek, Litvinov et al.—are responsible for upholding its stability. Without
their actions, the Russian revolution would have limited itself to a cruel but
impotent and short-lived riot.” Concluding his statement, Maslennikov said
that it was “necessary for everybody to work towards rebuilding the Great
Russia” (Dni, 1923e, p. 5). “Everybody,” by implication, suggests that
Maslennikov believed that the Jews should also contribute to this endeavor.
This view was not widely shared by other right-wing politicians.
A certain Kuznetsov, a Moscow industrialist, considered the Jewish role
in reinvigorating Russia, making a call to write off “all old accounts”: “Jewish
merchants and industrialists are essential for Russia of the future. The only
way that this Russia could be created is through application of collective will
and energy.” (Rul’, 1923h, p. 5)
It is curious to note that some of the Kayshchiesya shared monarchists’
opinions. They obviously saw in the monarchy (naturally, an “enlightened”
one) a guarantor of order and stability. Thus, Mandel’ sung a veritable “paean
to the future monarchy, free from the Black Hundreds” (Rul’, 1923d, p. 5).
Meanwhile, one Minskaia confidently reflected that in the recent years, 9 out
of 10 Jews leaned to the right and began to feel a “melancholy longing for the
Tsar” (Rul’, 1923g, p. 5). Daniil Pasmanik, yet another “Jewish monarchist”,
took part in the Berlin debates by correspondence, as it were—from Paris,
where he was living at the time. In the beginning of January 1923, Pasmanik
published a book in Paris titled Russian Revolution and Jewry (Bolshevism
and Judaism). He argued that Judaism and Bolshevism had nothing in
common, and that blaming the Jews for playing a decisive role in the Russian
Revolution is nonsensical, at least if you consider the statistics. However, he
also wrote:
It is not enough to say that the Jewish people are not responsible for
certain actions which were carried out by members of its community.
We are responsible for Trotsky until we distance ourselves from him,
just as the Russian people are responsible for Lenin, Chicherin, and all
the traitor generals, until they distance themselves from them. [...] We,
the Jews, do not have a right to keep our heads in the sand (Pasmanik,
1923b, pp. 11–12).
118 OLEG BUDNITSKII
In 1923 Pasmanik published a compilation in two volumes, under the title

Diary of a Counter-Revolutionary (he was the only contributor). Among other
issues, he expressed his attitude towards the monarchy:
It is hard to be a monarchist, when you are told that the anti-Jewish

pogroms, unprecedented in scale, will form the new monarchy’s
foundations. It is not possible for a nation to wish to be sacrificed. That
is clear and simple. The loud and ignorant monarchists scare away
Russian Jews. If I prefer monarchy, it is because I believe in its cultural
and creative potential, as only this potential can help monarchy revive
and resurrect the Great Russia. [...] When the Russian Jewry is freed
from the nightmare of pogroms, it will become far more pro-monarchist
than many Jewish intellectuals expect (Pasmanik, 1923a, pp. 24–25).
Pasmanik suggested that the Russian émigré community and even the anti-
Soviet opposition in the USSR, when in a state of emergency, should follow
Italy’s example by consolidating around a single political figure, as the
Italians had done with Mussolini. “As an evolutionist, I am not ecstatic about
the emergence of Fascism, but I see it as a historical necessity,” wrote
Pasmanik (1923a, p. 30). Of course, one has to bear in mind, that in the
beginning of 1923, Fascism had not yet acquired the same notorious
reputation as it would in later years. Still, using Fascist Italy as a model for
solving the “Russian Question” shows that the author lacked not only political
intuition but also taste.
Holding an entirely contrary opinion was a certain Kaplan, who claimed
that the Soviet state was the only power which is capable of bringing about
order while boosting Russia’s prestige: “soon, Parisian hegemony will be
transferred to Moscow” (Rul’, 1923f, p. 9). One Epfel’baum, who called
himself a sympathiser of the Third International but was not a member of any
political party, said that both Zionists and the Kayshchiesya were united in
“bowing to the Whites, so that they can show how distant they are from
Bolshevism […] The monarchists Landau and Bikerman must decide whose
side they are on: Nicholas’s or Cyril’s.” Epfel’baum stated ironically that the
future [Russian] monarchist newspaper to be published in Berlin will be
funded by the Jews (Rul’, 1923g, p. 5).
In the words of the journalist Ilya Trotsky (no relation to Leon Trotsky),
the Kayshchiesya disassociated themselves from the Jewish public. “It is
unclear whether the balance of power in a future Russia will shift to Miliukov
or Kerensky,” said the journalist, “but it is certain that neither Markov nor
Maslennikov will succeed in gaining any authority and, in fact, it is even more
humiliating to be led by them. Only in 1917 were the Jews freed from their
legally inferior position. By not accepting this, the Kayshchiesya are
condemning themselves to absolute isolation” (Dni, 1923d, p. 5). Trotsky was
entirely correct. The group of “repentant” or “responsible” Jews (as they were
Berlin Debates 119
mockingly called in émigré circles [Gul’, 2001, p. 150]) was rejected by the
largely indignant wider Jewish public. This was reflected in the Jewish press,
irrespective of political affiliations. Shloyme (Solomon) Gepshtein, the editor
of the Zionist Rassvet, responded to Bikerman’s lecture by comparing him to
an incompetent solicitor:
one should listen to what he has to say, and then hire another solicitor.
He cannot be trusted with the ‘Jewish case.’ The man in the street would
formulate the reason in layman’s tongue: ‘my lawyer must be first and
foremost my lawyer.’ In my opinion, we, Zionists, have worked out a
formula which has won us international support from the Jewish masses
in all countries. This formula is based on the paramount importance of
Jewish national interests, honour and dignity in any delusionary or
challenging circumstances (Gepshtein, 1923, p. 5).
Like most of Bikerman’s critics, Gepshtein especially condemned the author’s

explanation of the reasons for the pogroms, which seemed to border on
justification. Gepshtein recollected a scandalous remark made by a Bund
ideologue, Vladimir Medem, concerning the pogroms at the time of the first
Russian revolution: “Jewish blood spilled during the pogroms greased the
gears of the Russian revolution!” Gepshtein wrote that “Bikerman consoles
himself with the same philosophy, only he reverses it: “Jewish blood spilled
during the pogroms greased the gears of the Russian statehood and counter-
revolution” (ibid., p. 6).
Iosef Schechtman expressed his opinion of Bikerman’s text (published in
the volume Russia and the Jews, more on which below) in almost exactly the
same words:
Around the time of the first Russian revolution of 1905 and the pogroms
that followed, the late Medem, one of the leaders of Bund, said: “Jewish
blood spilled during the pogroms greased the gears of the Russian
revolution.” Now comes Bikerman, the Jewish apostle of the Russian
counter-revolution, demanding that the Jewish people should not blame
the ‘Whites’ for spilling Jewish blood, but instead consider it as a
consequence of the Civil War. He encourages the Jews to satisfy
themselves with this explanation, extend their hands out to those who
have spilled Jewish blood and be happy that this blood greased the gears
of the Russian political backlash (Schechtman, 1923, pp. 3–4).
The Parisian anti-Zionist newspaper The Jewish Tribune also published a

response to the Berlin debates. In relation to the Kayshiesiya, the views of the
Zionists and their critics differed little. In the article On Responsibility and
Irresponsibility, Alexander Kulisher ironically stated:
120 OLEG BUDNITSKII
We are undoubtedly progressing. Up until now, the question about

‘Jewish responsibility for the Russian revolution’ was posed only by
anti-Semites. Now, certain Jews are beginning to raise this question, too.
A whole series of confessionary guilt-trips under the banner of
‘responsibility’ has commenced among the Russian-Jewish émigrés
living in Berlin (Kulisher, 1923, pp. 3–4).
Kulisher cited Edmund Burke’s words about not being able to fathom a single
accusatory speech against an entire people. Closing his statement, Kulisher
said that
discussions about ‘responsibility’ in relation to undefined and

disorganised groups, who have no ‘common will’ and cannot commit
crimes or repent their sins, cannot have any purpose or goal apart from
evoking fear and paranoia. Anti-Semites, who talk about ‘Jewish
responsibility,’ know exactly why they do it. Mr. Landau and Mr.
Bikerman do not, therefore their statements are irresponsible (Kulisher,
1923, p. 4).
The discussion almost dried out when this polemic resurfaced on the pages of
Berlin periodicals after the publication of Russia and the Jews in early 1924,
which featured not only essays by Bikerman, Landau and Mandel’, but also
texts by Daniil Pasmanik, Isaak Levin and Linskii (Dolinskii). Most of the
authors of this compilation expanded the ideas which had previously been
touched upon in their lectures, or, like in the case of Pasmanik, in his previous
publications. The principal concepts of this volume can be summarized as
follows: first of all, for the Jews, Bolshevism is an absolute evil which should
be fought against. Second, many Jews are conservative by their nature and are
generally found to be interested in stability—a point which can be proved by
historical evidence. To claim that they strive for ruin and revolution is at best
a mistake and at worst, a slander. Finally, due to certain historical
circumstances—for example, the anti-Semitic policies of the Tsarist
government—quite a few Jews actively took part in the Russian revolution.
The Jewish people need to take responsibility for this, distance themselves
from these Bolshevik Jews, and take on an active role in attempting to restore
the Russian state.
The introduction to the volume, titled “To the Jews of All Countries!”
reads:
In this time of trouble, all Russian Jews have had to part either with their
lives or private possessions. Jewish culture and dignity have been
degraded, forced into a helpless and miserable void and pressured by
grief into a slow and quiet death. Our shrines are desecrated; our culture
has been trampled upon and turned inside out. Just like the Russian
Berlin Debates 121
people, hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews have been exiled and are
now forced to traverse the globe. For us it is our second Diaspora, a
Diaspora within a Diaspora. […] The National Union of Russian Jews is
strongly convinced: for the Jews, as well as all peoples of Russia,
Bolshevism is the prime evil and our sacred duty is to fight it with all
our strength for the sake of humanity, culture, the motherland and the
Jewish people. Our goals are to spread this conviction among Jews all
over the world—but first and foremost, among the Russian Jews, to
mobilise the Jewish public opinion in all countries for the war against
Bolshevism and to rebuild Russia (Bikerman et al., 1978, pp. 5, 7).
The volume’s authors spoke out against Bolshevism, as well as Socialism as a

whole. To quote Landau: “Socialism has undermined and led to the
degradation of Russian economy, with the Jewish economy being completely
dismantled as a result. In one blow, it has destroyed Jewish trade, property
and urban life” (Landau, 1978, p. 111). The contributors condemned not only
the Bolshevik October Revolution, but also the February Revolution—the
“sacred cow” of the Russian liberal-democratic community. They condemned
it even more harshly than the October Revolution. Bikerman wrote:
Every Jew, who does not fantasise that Jews can walk on water, or that
in the middle of collapsing kingdoms and dying nations we can stay
calm, because we are protected by a magic spell that turns centuries of
accusations into perpetual innocence, must remember that the February,
and not the October Revolution, was responsible for Russia’s demise
(Bikerman, 1978, p. 21).
And Isaak Levin stated:
Ascertaining Jewish responsibility for Jewish involvement in the

Bolshevik movement often brings about confusion and irritation within
Jewish circles. […] The denial of Jewish responsibility is in many ways
based on misunderstanding. It goes without saying that when talking
about responsibility, we mean moral, rather than criminal, responsibility.
If one is to uphold the point of view that the Bolshevik revolution
achieved only destruction, without accomplishing anything positive,
then Jews, insofar as they form a national collective of sorts, cannot be
in denial of, or ignore the responsibility for, the Jewish involvement in
the revolutionary movement (Levin, 1978, p. 123).
But who were these Bolshevik Jews? Mandel’ pointed out that “the immature
and pretentious half-wits whose only intention is the proliferation of their
careers, as well as degenerate fanatics and even sadists, whom the Bolsheviks
met ‘with arms wide open’, come from both Russian and Jewish
122 OLEG BUDNITSKII
communities” (Mandel’, 1978, p. 201). In order to explain active Jewish

participation in radical movements, not only in Russia but also in Europe,
Levin brought forward a slightly more complex argument. According to him,
the Jewry found itself suspended “between the old Jewish culture, from which
it has distanced itself, and the Judeo-Christian culture in a variety of its
national forms, with which it had not yet fully assimilated... Great numbers of
Jewish Bolsheviks, on the one side, and Jewish NEPmen, on the other, show
how severe the divide within the Jewish culture is.” Levin suggested that the
goal of the Jewish people should be to “find the cultural compost underneath
their feet” (Levin, 1978, p. 138).
The volume received even stronger criticism than the lectures. “The holy
conclave presiding in the German capital has aimed high to save Russia. It
sees no better alternative, other than attacking their own brothers, the Russian
Jews,” wrote Solomon Pozner in the Jewish Tribune (Pozner, 1924, p. 1). The
Jewish community was especially outraged by attempts to “whitewash the
Whites.” The White Movement had been soiled with so much dirt and blood,
especially Jewish blood, that doing this would prove extremely difficult, if not
impossible. Vasilii Shul’gin, one of the ideologues of the White Movement,
proclaimed that the movement was started by “near-saints” but was later
hijacked by “near-bandits” (Shul’gin, 1989, p. 292). The leader of the White
Movement in southern Russia, General Denikin, did not veer far from
Shul’gin in characterizing his former subordinates: “Where military trophies
and requisitions end,” he wrote bitterly in Essays on Russian Troubles, “lies a
dark moral void of violence and plunder […]. It is pathetic to console oneself
with the fact that the Reds were far worse than us. Weren’t we the ones who
were meant to be fighting precisely against violence and violators?” (Denikin,
2003, pp. 134–135).
For his part, Linskii presented rather vivid accounts of the treatment that
Jews received from the White Movement, which proved that any collaboration
between the Whites and the Jews was out of the question, and even the
presence of Jews on the territory occupied by “volunteers” was extremely
dangerous. Solomon Pozner sought to highlight this point: “Why have Mr.
Landau and Mr. Bikerman chosen not to read the article written by their
colleague, before sitting down to pen their own terrifying philippics?” Pozner
quite rightly pointed out that “the patriots who presented their moralising
lectures [...] had not lived through the hurricane sweeping across southern
Russia. They do not wish to know how severe it had been or what it had done”
(Pozner, 1924, p. 2). This comment was a transparent hint at the fact that
Bikerman and Landau spent the Civil War years either on the Bolshevik-
controlled territories, or abroad. They had neither witnessed the anti-Jewish
pogroms, nor were they able to experience their immediate consequences. All
their arguments about the White Movement, therefore, were speculative.
Berlin Debates 123
Pozner correctly assumed that Bikerman believed that Russian Jews

were afflicted by their devotion to the February Revolution. Pozner concluded
his review, or, to be more precise, his rebuke, with the following passage:
If only the Berlin grouping of the supporters of the old regime were not
blinded by the desire to turn back the wheel of history, they would not
have written indecent articles about ‘wide spread irresponsibility,
boundless verbal immorality and triumphant superficiality.’ It would
cease to play the absurd role of the healer of national wounds and would
stop distributing superlative advice regarding the war on Bolshevism.
After all, Russian Jews fight Bolshevism to the best of their ability,
without having to be reminded of it (Pozner, 1924, p. 2).
The volume spurred on a different reaction from Nikolai Berdiaev:
When I was reading Russia and the Jews, I strongly felt the deep, tragic
self-realisation of the Russian Jews, who love their native country, do
not like the revolution and wish to be Russian patriots. I do not agree
with many of the ideas expressed in this volume; however, I respect the
effort of the group united by the volume, which aims to establish the
dignity of Russian Jews without using the revolution in the Jewish
interests. This brings to mind how deep and maybe hopeless the tragedy
of the ‘Jewish question’ is (Berdiaev, 1924, p. 2).
Berdiaev approached the problem from a theological and philosophical, rather

than political, perspective. He attempted to engage with the “Jewish question”
as if it was a question of “inner Christian conscience.”
However, Berdiaev’s outlook was that of an outsider. Unlike Berdiaev,
Russian Jews were not able to engage with the ideas expressed in the volume
from a philosophical perspective, because they could not free themselves from
its political context. It was Semyon Dubnov who most clearly formulated the
attitude of the Jewish community in Berlin towards the Kayshchiesya:
The arrival of Jewish reactionaries, led by the former radical-democrat

Bikerman, is perhaps the most pitiful episode in the life of the Berlin
émigré community. Along with other repentant democrats, he founded
the National Union of Russian Jews and published a collection of
articles attempting to prove that by neglecting to join forces with the
Whites against the Bolsheviks, Russian-Jewish leaders had not
performed their patriotic duty. During the Civil War, however, those
same Whites turned out to be rabid supporters of the Black Hundreds
and became responsible for pogroms (Dubnov, 2004, p. 533).
124 OLEG BUDNITSKII
However, the Whites never accepted the Kayshchiesya in their camp. The
famous philosopher Ivan Il’in, who, in the words of one of his
contemporaries, “spent the Civil War lecturing in a Red university,” engaged
in a relatively frequent correspondence with General Piotr Vrangel’ while
living abroad (Il’in was expelled from Russia in 1922). The philosopher was
sincerely devoted to the General and even signed his letters “White.” In
October 1923, Il’in sent to the General a Memorandum about the current
political situation. Il’in believed that Jews could prove useful in a potential
anti-Bolshevik coup d’etat, but
only if they were able to secure a guarantee against any further reprisal.
[...] They tested the ground for this by presenting a group of repentant
patriots (Pasmanik, Bikerman, Landau and Mandel’), who cunningly
provoked the right-wing into public debates. This group ‘defends’ the
White Army and enjoys unfounded trust from respectful public figures
(Struve). Bikerman even entered negotiations with the Supreme
Monarchist Council on behalf of the group (having the intelligence
services in mind) (Il’in, 1996, p. 227).
The Kayshchiesya was small in number and not particularly influential. So

why did their ruminations provoke such a fervent reaction and so many
rebuttals, which could even be collected in a book, not dissimilar in size to
Russia and the Jews? The situation can be explained thus: the Kayshchiesya
touched upon many sensitive questions, including a particularly sensitive one
regarding the role of Jews in the revolution. The community of Jewish public
figures, who were all thrown out of Russia as a result of the revolution, could
not come up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Most of them echoed
Dubnov’s sentiment, first expressed in Petrograd on 8 June 1917, at a Jewish
rally:
Several demagogues have emerged from our milieu. They align

themselves with heroes of the streets and prophets of usurpation. They
speak publicly, hiding under Russian pseudonyms, as if ashamed of their
Jewish origins (Trotsky, Zinoviev et al). But perhaps they should use
their Jewish names as pseudonyms instead, because as far as we are
concerned, these people have no roots among us (Dubnov, 2004, pp.
533–534).
It may seem a little problematic to dismiss Jewish “heroes from the street” as
mere renegades and immature adolescents. Far too many of them were
involved in the revolution to make such generalizations.
The Menshevik St. Ivanovich (Semen Portugeis’s pseudonym) expressed
a more earnest view fifteen years after the Berlin debates had first taken place.
He contemplated the persecution of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and argued that
Berlin Debates 125
the percentage of those who lost their social status was much higher among
the Jewish population than among Russia’s other peoples. He wrote:
Punishments of biblical proportions rained down upon the Jews, not

because they were Jews, but because they were bourgeois. These
punishments were executed by Jewish Bolsheviks and renegade Jews
from other political parties. Quite frequently members of the
‘bourgeoisie’ were chased, abused and tortured by ‘children’ of the same
Jewish community, seduced by Bolshevism. […] This prosecutor and
torturer was not an outcast [dover-aher] but ‘our very own Iankel’’, the
son of Rabbi Moshe from the Kasrilovka village; a mostly harmless boy,
who had failed his Pharmacology exams last year but passed Political
Literacy this year, with flying colours (Ivanovich, 1939, p. 46).
Of course, Bolshevik Jews were not all ne’er-do-well pharmaceutical students,

pretentious half-wits and immature degenerates. Just like all the other
inhabitants of the former Russian empire, the Jews experienced the revolution
and the Civil War which followed it. However, something else was also true:
the revolution opened up many new opportunities for Jews, one of which was
to obtain political power. Revolution was not only something to be endured; it
was also something to be induced. Thousands of “young men from
Kasrilovka” chose not to miss out on this opportunity. “Leather jackets”
suited them well enough, and so they became the faithful soldiers of the
Revolution.
The experience of the Civil War demonstrated to the majority of the
Jewish population in Russia that they were more likely to feel safe and content
under the Soviet rule. Furthermore, the Soviet regime opened up new avenues
previously inaccessible to Jews: education, professional career advancement,
and the possibility of political influence. However, these indulgences had a
price: religion, language, and culture all had to be forfeited. In short, for Jews,
the price of admission to this new society was the surrender of their national
identity, which they had previously managed to keep intact for thousands of
years, including the two-hundred-and-fifty years of living in the Russian
empire.
In the mid-1920s, members of an ethnographic expedition to the former
Pale of Settlement unearthed “in every corner, evidence of apostasy—each
one more unusual than the last.” In Rogachev “the elders were experts in the
Talmud; the youth were communists and their children were non-Kosher,
having not been blessed by infant circumcision.” In Gomel, the local children
were singing outside the synagogue, in Russian and Yiddish: “Down with
monks, rabbis and the priests!” When an uncircumcised young boy was seated
by his grandfather in front of the Torah, and asked “What do you want to do
when you grow up, Berka?” he responded with a pompous air: “First of all, I
126 OLEG BUDNITSKII
am not Berka. I am Lentrozin [a combination of Lenin, Trotsky and

Zinoviev], and I am going to work for the Cheka” (Tan-Bogoraz, 1926, p. 25).
Shtetl boys moved to the cities so that they would have a better chance
of becoming engineers, poets, chess players, musicians or secret service
agents. The provincial world, with its religious dogmas and strange traditions,
became foreign to them and they lost interest in their heritage. The Russian
Revolution revolutionized “Jewish streets,” too. Russian Jewry was broken
apart, much like the rest of the country. Talking about its common self-
interests was no longer possible. However, Jewish public figures—both the
Kayshchiesya and their opponents—did not wish to admit this to themselves.
Even Kulisher, in his critiques of Bikerman and Landau, called the Jewry
disparate, disorganized, and lacking a united “will”—yet at the same time
contradicted his own thesis by claiming that the ideological position of the
Kayshchiesya played into the hands of the enemy by not adhering to the
virtues of the Jewish people.
It is obvious that Kulisher, as well as other authors writing for the
liberal-democratic Jewish Tribune, the members of the National Union of
Russian Jews, the journalists of the Zionist newspaper Rassvet, or even the
“harmless boys from Kasrilovka” (who grew to become Bolshevik Party
apparatchiks), all had different concepts of who the enemy was and what
exactly Jewish virtues consisted of.
Nine
JEWISH RATIONALISM, ETHICS, AND

REVOLUTION:
HERMANN COHEN IN NEVEL
Elena Namli
In 1912 Hermann Cohen, at that time the world’s most influential neo-Kantian
philosopher, retired from his chair in Marburg and moved to Berlin and the
Academy of Jewish Sciences. Now he had time to complete his seminal work
Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism—the last great systematic
expression of Jewish rationalism in the twentieth century. Cohen’s firm belief
in the power of reason is, of course, a feature of neo-Kantian philosophy and
originates from the passionate rationalism of Kant and the Enlightenment.
However, most neo-Kantian philosophy has been shaped within Christian
contexts, which makes Cohen’s rationalism especially interesting. As a
European Jew and one of the leading German philosophers, Cohen confronted
the growth of anti-Semitism by reclaiming what he thought was the liberating
power of universal human reason. Listening to many sad stories told by his
Jewish students from almost all over Europe, Cohen still insisted that the
emancipation of Jews cannot be separated from the liberation of the entire
humankind and that this universal liberation should be grounded in human
reason alone.
In this chapter, I will analyze Cohen’s ethical and religious rationalism
alongside his vision of liberation, and argue that, despite many historical
failures of universalistic and rationalistic projects, Jewish rationalism and
universalism has great moral and political potential and still can inform
current philosophical discourse on social revolution.
I will first present some fundamental features of Cohen’s religious
rationalism. Hermann Cohen suggested a variant of universalist ethics that
was simultaneously informed by Kantian rationalism and based upon what
Cohen argued was the most important meaning of the Jewish monotheism and
messianism. Secondly, I will analyze this rationalism in relation to a
philosophical and political controversy that appeared among Hermann
Cohen’s Russian students in post-revolutionary Nevel and Vitebsk. I will
show how Matvei Kagan was using Cohen’s ethics and religious rationalism
in order to develop a morally legitimate vision of social revolution, and
contrast Kagan’s interpretation of Cohen with Mikhail Bakhtin’s severe
criticism of Cohen’s rationalistic ethics. Lastly, I will argue that the current
political situation both invites us to reclaim the tradition of Jewish rationalism
128 ELENA NAMLI
and its universalistic ethics, and also calls for a certain modification of that
tradition.
1. Jewish Monotheism as a Vision of Justice on Earth
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyze Hermann Cohen’s entire

system. It is widely recognized as a well-structured and complete version of
neo-Kantian philosophy, including a theory of knowledge, logic, ethics, and a
philosophy of religion. Regarding the latter, a nuanced analysis of the Jewish
tradition, in an explicit and well-informed dialogue with Christian theology,
makes Cohen’s philosophy of religion a unique philosophical heritage. Let us
recall its main content. Being a variant of the neo-Kantian tradition, Cohen’s
philosophy of religion is rationalistic in that religion is explained and
practiced, first of all, as morality within the borders of human reason. The
central thesis of Cohen’s interpretation of the Jewish religion is his statement
that Jewish monotheism contradicts every form of ethical particularism.
Following Jewish thinkers such as Saadia Gaon and Maimonides, Cohen
insists that Judaism as a monotheistic religion is necessarily bound to a
universalistic and rationalistic vision of social justice.
Jewish monotheism is interpreted by Cohen as a belief in a unique God,
rather than a belief in one God. Chapter I in Religion of Reason Out of the
Sources of Judaism, the first edition of which was published in Leipzig in
1919, has the title “God’s Uniqueness” and in its very first line Cohen states:
“It is God’s uniqueness, rather than his oneness, that we posit as the essential
content of monotheism” (Cohen, 1995, p. 35). According to my reading of
Cohen, the main meaning of this is that Judaism, as an authentic monotheism
and in opposition to both polytheism and Christian traditions, denies a
tendency towards the deification of the human and the humanization of God.
Cohen’s philosophical idealism finds its theological parallel in the confession
that “[o]nly God has being. Only God is being. And there is no unity that
would be an identity between God and world, no unity between world and
being” (Cohen, 1995, p. 41). This radical monotheism becomes, then, a
foundation of Cohen’s view of the relation between God and the human as a
correlation. There are several descriptions of the correlation of God and the
human in Cohen’s Religion of Reason but there is one which is absolutely
crucial for his argument in defense of ethical universalism:
Out of the unique God, the creator of man, originated also the stranger as
fellowman. […] “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the
stranger as for the homeborn; for I am the Eternal your God” (Lev.
24:22). This reasoning is quite instructive: it deduces the law pertaining
to the stranger from monotheism. And it is particularly instructive that
monotheism is expressed here through an appeal to “your God”. Because
Jewish Rationalism, Ethics, and Revolution 129
the Eternal is your God, you must make one law for the stranger as well
as for yourselves (Cohen, 1995, p. 124–125).
How does the radical difference between God and the human transcend the
moral difference between neighbors and strangers, thus transforming the
stranger into the fellowman? The Eternal is “your God” first of all in terms of
justice. The unique God relates to the human by means of justice and law,
which signifies that the human should relate to God by treating the other (the
stranger) with justice. Cohen’s interpretation of monotheism, which very
heavily stresses the radical difference between God and the human, implies
therefore that injustice—unequal treatment of men—violates the very ground
of Jewish religion. To treat the stranger unjustly (unlawfully) is to break the
correlation with God, whose main attribute is justice. Cohen’s correlation is
thus a normative principle that stipulates the human’s obligation to recognize
God’s uniqueness by means of respect and just treatment of the (human)
stranger. There is no other way of the authentic worshiping of one God.
There are three obvious challenges that Cohen’s interpretation of Jewish
monotheism and its ethical implications must respond to. The first is the fact
that the imperative to treat the stranger by means of one and the same law
(universal justice) is not the dominant trend in the history of Judaism. The
second is the political challenge of the preservation of Jewish culture as the
one threatened by the more powerful Christian states. The third is the
challenge of social and economic inequality. Religion of Reason deals mostly
with the first and the third challenges, while the second one is addressed in
several other works by Cohen which were originally included in three
posthumous volumes, Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften (Cohen, 1924).
As has already been mentioned, Cohen argues in favor of a special
interpretation and practice of Judaism. Its origin is first of all the rationalism
of Maimonides that stresses the centrality of moral and political universalism
and the moral and political heritage of the prophets. Religion of Reason is one
long historical and systematic argument in support of this interpretation. Even
in his other writings, Cohen defends this universalistic and rationalistic vision
of Judaism. In the article “Affinities Between the Philosophy of Kant and
Judaism,” first published in 1910, he states that “Judaism simply denies any
possible conflict between the concepts of God and of moral reason. Moral law
must and can be both: the law of God and the law of reason” (Cohen, 1993, p.
81). Maimonides, whom Cohen describes as a genius of Jewish rationalism,
contributed to its development by his use of the techniques of negative
theology in order to produce an advanced philosophical interpretation of
creation. According to Cohen, Maimonides arrived at this position through a
particular consideration of the negative attribute of privation: “The share of
reason in religion has to discover what the logical meaning of the originative
principle is for the problem of creation. And this was the meaning for the
problem of creation that Maimonides bestowed upon the negative attribute of
130 ELENA NAMLI
privation. God is not inert; this means: he is the originative principle of

activity” (Cohen, 1995, pp. 63–64). In Maimonides, Cohen finds a
philosopher who suggested an illuminating interpretation of the uniqueness of
God as a basis for morally responsible human activity. Cohen emphasizes
that, in many regards, Maimonides was developing further the ancient
tradition of Jewish rationalism. According to Cohen, Saadia Gaon, with his
famous The Book of Belief and Opinions (Gaon, 1951), belongs to this
tradition.
It is not my aim to compare Cohen’s interpretation of Judaism with its
historical and contemporary alternatives. As, for example, Michael Walzer
argued in his keynote at the conference on Jews and the Left at the YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research (May 6, 2012), “the dominant historical and
contemporary trends in Judaism are rather hostile to political engagement in
the name of universal social and religious justice.” What has been
dominating—and still dominates—Judaism is, rather, a belief and practice that
confirms that there are different laws that should justifiably govern relations
within the community and outside of it. Despite this, I believe that Religion of
Reason is an impressive hermeneutical apologetics of Judaism as it was
understood and practiced by many heirs of Maimonides, and that we have
good reasons to view Cohen’s interpretation of Judaism as legitimate.
The second and third challenges to Cohen’s understanding of Judaism
are more important for my analysis, and in some regards influence how
Cohen’s defense of the historical legitimacy of the tradition of Maimonides
might be evaluated. Cohen believed that Jewish religion could not be
preserved by means of political isolation. He argued strongly against Zionism
of his time and, not least in polemics with Martin Buber, defended a vision of
a Europe where Jewish communities would develop their cultural uniqueness
and simultaneously contribute to the states to which they belong. Cohen
suggested several arguments in favor of this position. One was the questioning
of political isolation both as such and in contrast to what Cohen describes as
the messianic mission of Judaism (Cohen, 1995, pp. 360–363). Another was
the idea that Jewish culture was better preserved and distinguished by means
of the practiced dedication to the Law than by means of political segregation
(Cohen, 1995, pp. 365–367). Cohen was well aware of the scale that European
anti-Semitism reached by the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite this,
he believed in a future where the tradition of European humanism would
prevail over different forms of political nationalism.
Tragically enough, Cohen viewed the German culture as the one which
best promoted a further development of the Jewish religion. This anticipated
development had to do with the increasing dominance of the Jewish messianic
idea as universal messianism, thus overcoming its nationalistic connotations.
In “The German and the Jewish Ethos” from 1915 Cohen writes:
[…] the Jew saw his Messianic idea revitalized in and through the
German spirit. For Herder ushered in the dawn of a new humanity so
that the Messiah of the prophets, that most unique possession of the Jew,
was restored to him in the idealistic postulate of German ethics, a united
mankind. […] Now we can understand the impact Mendelssohn had
upon German Judaism, not so much as a Jew who believed in
Messianism but as a German whose thought was closely akin to German
humanism and German ethics. And now we can understand, too, why
German Judaism has exerted and continues to exert such a profound
influence on the Jews of all other countries… I believe that the Jews of
France, England, and Russia owe a debt of filial piety to Germany, for it
is the motherland of their soul to the extent that their religion constitutes
their soul (Cohen, 1993, pp. 182–183).
How are we to interpret and evaluate these lines while being aware of the
verdict the history of the twentieth century pronounced over “the German
spirit” and its relation to the Jewish tradition? There is of course a too-narrow,
idealistic understanding of German culture in Cohen; he one-sidedly points
out the tradition of German philosophical idealism in its Kantian version as
the most important cultural heritage of Europe and seeks to develop its
universalistic and religious potential. The political processes that resulted in
the popular support of Hitler and the Nazi regime are much more complex
than the shortcomings of the German philosophical idealism, but we should
still admit that Cohen’s firm support of German philosophical idealism and its
Kantian model of universalism must be questioned. When reading Cohen
today it is easy to see inconsistencies of his universalism. On the one hand,
Cohen defended humanism as the ideal of a united humankind; on the other,
he viewed one specific culture, the German, as the main representation of this
humanism. The latter can easily be used in order to legitimize exactly that
kind of suppressive particularism that Cohen meant to overcome. Later in this
essay I will come back to this inconsistency as revisited by some of Cohen’s
students. For now, I would like to stress that a universalistic vision of
emancipation ends in a destructive self-contradiction if it includes any kind of
belief in the superiority of a particular culture. As many philosophers from the
period after the Second World War have shown (Levinas and Derrida can be
mentioned here as thinkers related to both German idealism and Jewish
religious heritage), universalistic claims on behalf of a particular culture
produce violence rather than liberation. One of the most apparent risks of such
universalism is the firm conviction that those who disagree with “universally
valid” rational propositions don’t need to be listened to but might, or even
should, be persuaded to accept the “universally valid” beliefs.
Let us now turn to the third challenge to Cohen’s understanding of the
Jewish tradition, namely the issue of social inequality. Cohen is very clear
regarding this point, and claims that the unity and equality of humankind is
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the correlation of God’s uniqueness and that “[t]he social differentiation

between poor and rich poses the most difficult question for the concept of the
human, for the unity and equality of men” (Cohen, 1995, p. 128). According
to Cohen, “[m]onotheism completes its development in the prophetic teaching
[…]. The prophet […] knows only correlation of God and man, of man and
God. He is therefore as much interested in politics as in the divine rule of the
world” (Cohen, 1995, p. 132). The idea of correlation implies the human
capacity to discriminate between good and bad and, most of all, between well-
being (of the unlawful) and truthfulness. In Cohen’s own words, “[t]he
distinction between good and bad comes to nothing if it coincides with the
distinction of well-being and ill” (Cohen, 1995, p. 133). Further, to
discriminate between good and bad means for Cohen to recognize the
suffering of the poor as a sin calling for atonement. In a direct polemic against
Christianity Cohen states that social suffering, and not death, constitutes the
main moral concern of an authentic religion. He writes:
Suffering only reaches ethical precision as social suffering. Whoever

explains poverty as the suffering of mankind, he creates ethics, or, if not
philosophical ethics, yet still religion with its share of reason. Only the
religion of reason is moral religion, and only moral religion is truthful
and true religion (Cohen, 1995, p. 135).
Cohen thus believes that genuine monotheism must recognize social suffering
as immoral and fight it morally and politically. Cohen is explicitly skeptical
towards mysticism, and denies its capacity to grasp the true meaning of God’s
oneness. According to him, there are prophets of the Bible who, by means of
moral and political indignation, reach a proper understanding of the
uniqueness of God. The two very last chapters of Religion of Reason are
dedicated to the issues of justice and peace. Cohen states that violation of
justice infuriates the prophets and causes them to “make God the advocate of
the stranger, the orphan, and the widow” (Cohen, 1995, p. 430). Cohen is very
clear about the political implication of his reading of the prophets, and claims
that the justice of Jewish monotheism “had as its consequence the relativity of
the principle of property—this bulwark of egoism, of eudaemonism, of
opportunism and everything else that is opposed to religious morality”
(Cohen, 1995, p. 430). In “The Style of the Prophets” Cohen comments on the
likeness of the Hebrew terms anavah (humility) and aniyut (poverty) as used
in the Talmud. In this context he claims that “[t]he poor man is a living
contradiction of the concept of human equality, the equality of God’s children.
[…] Human beings are not meant to be divided into free men and laborers. All
men are equal, for all have been called upon to lead a moral life” (Cohen,
1993, pp. 116–117).
It is obvious by now that Cohen views social inequality as a sin against a
unique and just God, and calls for a religiously motivated political fight
against social inequality. Even Cohen’s interpretation of Jewish messianism is

political and universalistic. Cohen perceives messianism as moral and historic
optimism, and compares it to the spirit of the French Revolution (Cohen,
1993, p. 89). Messianism is about human history, perceived from a moral
perspective and changed by moral action. In his article “The Messianic Idea”
Cohen expresses very clearly his vision of human history as essentially
different from natural history in that “it is an account of the development of
moral beings” (Cohen, 1993, p. 126). In messianism, Cohen seems to have
found the religious basis for politically relevant morality, or rather the concept
of the political action as based on moral grounds. He states:
But man’s hope is transformed into faith when he no longer thinks of

himself alone, of his salvation here and now, or of his eternal salvation
(the latter, if I may say, with calculating sanctimoniousness). Hope is
transformed into faith when man associates with the emergence of a
community whose concerns will reach beyond its everyday concrete
reality. […] As faith in mankind, Israel’s faith is hope. And it is this
epitome of Israel’s prophetism, this hope in mankind’s future, that
comprises the substance of the Messianic idea (Cohen, 1993, pp. 123–
124).
The reading of Cohen presented here implies that his rationalistic

interpretation of Jewish monotheism, understood in terms of rationally
justifiable morality, leads to such a vision of morality that both legitimates
and demands political action. This action is revolutionary in character in that
it questions private property as, on the one hand, the main cause of poverty,
and on the other, as an effective tool for the alienation of human beings from
their fellowmen, and therefore from morality and God.
Having thus analyzed the basis for Cohen’s universalistic account of
Judaism, and the important role that rationalism plays in this account—as well
as some of the difficulties with this interpretation—I would now like to
scrutinize the ethical dimension of Cohen’s view of the Jewish tradition.
Cohen believes that Jewish monotheism, viewed through the lens of
correlation, contains a great potential for liberation. This liberation is not an
eschatological redemption, but rather a political liberation from suffering as a
social phenomenon. Therefore, it is a human responsibility. Cohen’s
interpretation of Judaism is heavily influenced by Kant, and therefore may be
subjected to the same criticism often directed at Kant: that his understanding
of religion is far too reductionist. For Cohen as well as for Kant, every
genuine religious belief has a practical relation to the (God-given) moral law,
rather than any kind of religious mysticism. Whether we agree with this
critique or reject it depends both on our view of the historically legitimate
forms of Judaism and on our normative attitude towards the relation between
religious beliefs and social liberation. If we reject the ideal of political
134 ELENA NAMLI
liberation as a religious ideal, it would be reasonable to question Cohen’s

interpretation of the Jewish religion. However, what I would like to do is to
discuss Cohen, taking as given the acceptance of the ideal of religion as a
morally and politically liberating force.
When reading Cohen, we realize that his thought was informed by
experiences of violence, exclusion, and segregation that most of the European
Jews shared. To Cohen, the improvement of this situation meant a political
struggle that is morally justified and therefore based on a universal vision of
emancipation. Cohen believed that the ideal of universalism developed by the
German philosophical spirit had enriched Jewish messianism in this regard.
He writes:
By pointing to a Messianic future, the prophets intend both to improve

their people morally and heal it politically […] the Messianic hope also
provides, as it were, a guide-post for the individual in need of comfort
and seeking redemption from sin. He is uplifted by the promise of a
united mankind: “so that all peoples may be united by one bond”—this
is the prayer of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, days of reconciliation
for all nations as well as for the individual (Cohen, 1993, pp. 180–181).
Cohen claims, further, that this type of messianism was reshaped by the spirit
of German idealism and its ideal of a united humankind. As expressed in
Kant’s categorical imperative, the universal form of morality has to do with
the categorical demand to always respect humanity in every person.
Discussing similarities between Kant and Judaism, Cohen posits that
“[m]ankind is man’s final purpose and goal. And the individual, being and
end-in-himself, must therefore never become a ‘mere means’ for other men.
This idea of mankind gave rise to development of socialism” (Cohen, 1993, p.
180). I agree with Cohen’s evaluation of Kant in that Kant’s vision of
liberation links political progress to the expectations of moral improvement of
all and everyone.
As we have seen, Cohen views Jewish monotheism as a genuine form of
this kind of universalistic humanism. Every violation of the rights of the other
is a sin against the unique God who relates to human beings through the
medium of justice. To liberate the Jewish people means, therefore, to liberate
them from oppression and into the structure of justice which encompasses
both promises and demands.
Cohen’s universalism in both ethics and the philosophy of religion was
explicitly connected to rationalism. In his own words, “[w]ithout the basic
notion that all men are equally endowed with reason, there can be no all-
encompassing concept of man” (Cohen, 1993, p. 75). This rationalism is not
empirical in character—it does not state that everyone is rational. What this
rationalism means is a normative idea that everyone should be treated as a
rational person or, in theological terms, that one (unique) God gives all human
beings one and the same law by which to discriminate between good and evil.
What can be said about Cohen’s religious ethics today? Has its
universalism and rationalism been totally discredited? Are not particularistic
visions of liberation that neither expect nor demand trans-contextual
agreements more reliable after all? Should we reject Cohen’s vision of Jewish
messianism as a naïve or even dangerous utopia? These questions call for a
further investigation. Therefore I suggest we now take a short journey
following some of Cohen’s students and heirs.
2. Making and Thinking History in Marburg and Nevel
Professor Cohen’s classes attracted many students of Jewish origin, both

during his time in Marburg and after his retirement in Berlin. Being the first
Jew who was granted a professorship in philosophy in Germany, Cohen
encouraged Jewish youth to study philosophy in Marburg, and many Jewish
men from different European countries managed to come. Some of Cohen’s
Jewish students became famous philosophy professors—for example, Ernst
Cassirer; others, such as Kurt Eisner (mentioned in Michael Löwy’s essay in
this volume) were killed while trying to realize the religious ideal of social
revolution. However, in this essay I would like to recall the destiny of another
“group” of Cohen’s students, namely, those whose philosophical engagement
was interrupted by the Russian Revolutions in the beginning of the twentieth
century but who still continued to perceive history in terms of Cohen’s
philosophical and theological rationalism.
There are two small towns in Belarus—Vitebsk and Nevel—that at the
beginning of the twentieth century were part of Russia and had a large
proportion of Jews in their population. Vitebsk is known, at least for those
who appreciate the great Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Chagall was born in
Vitebsk in 1889 and later lived and worked there in 1914–1915, and again
after the October Revolution 1917. As Alana Vincent discusses in her chapter,
in Vitebsk Chagall started his famous Academy of Art, to which he also
invited Kazimir Malevich. But post-revolutionary Vitebsk was not just the
Vitebsk of Chagall’s La promenade, it was also a place where a group of
talented young philosophers were trying to think through the ongoing Russian
Revolution by recourse to the philosophical tools from Marburg. Mikhail
Bakhtin was the leader of the group that first emerged in Nevel in 1918 and
later moved to Vitebsk. The seminar Bakhtin and his friends organized in
Nevel was called the Kantian seminar (kantovsky) and its participants had
several ambitious projects for a further development of neo-Kantian
philosophy. For historical reasons most of those projects remained unrealized,
but there are some interesting trends in the heritage of the Nevel and Vitebsk
seminar that I would like to take a closer look at.
136 ELENA NAMLI
Among the participants of the seminar there was Matvei Kagan who had
studied philosophy in Berlin and Marburg. With his traditional Jewish
educational background, Kagan—unlike for example Boris Pasternak (who
studied in Marburg 1912 but was not interested in following Cohen to
Berlin)—appreciated the opportunity to study under Cohen in Berlin where
the great philosopher focused on the Jewish tradition. Kagan’s family has
managed to preserve 48 pages of notes on Religion of Reason, which are a
witness of Kagan’s deep involvement with Cohen’s interpretation of the
Jewish tradition. In 1918, Kagan wrote an obituary for Hermann Cohen, in
which he tried to give a short summary of his former teacher’s most important
philosophical achievements. Among other things, Kagan emphasized the
special contribution Cohen had made to the philosophical analysis of morality,
as well as his rationalistic understanding of religion (Kagan, 2004, pp. 39–44).
Kagan states that in his Kants Begründung der Ethik Cohen “gives us the
main problematic of Kant’s ethics when it is following the right direction of
the history of ethics and philosophy” (Kagan, 2004, p. 39). This “right
direction” is understood by Kagan as “[t]he idea of being as duty (dolznogo
bytiya),” as “the problem of moral being, of the moral obligation” (Kagan,
2004, p. 39). Kagan claims that Cohen’s development of Kantian philosophy
could be described as a further critique of metaphysics and an attempt to
construct ethics as a strictly critical discipline. Of crucial importance for
Kagan is Cohen’s analysis of the will (practical reason) and its unique
character when compared with theoretical reason. It becomes obvious that
Kagan reads Cohen in a revolutionary context when he compares Cohen’s
grundgesetz der Wahrheit with the Russian revolutionary philosopher
Mikhailovsky’s notion of pravda-spravedlivost (truth-justice), and states that
ethics should in the main be constructed as a social science (Kagan, 2004, p.
40). Furthermore, Kagan rightly emphasizes that Cohen’s “religion of a united
humankind” and of one God is social and based on ethics.
In the manuscripts that have either survived in Kagan’s family archive or
were published between 1918 and 1922 there is one dominant theme: history
as a human activity and moral responsibility. In an article from 1923, Kagan
argues that Judaism brings history into existence by articulating the idea that
the “historical task consists of the incompleteness of the world, the world
must be created and justified through labor” (Kagan, 2004, p. 174). Kagan
seems to believe that European culture finds itself in a special kind of crisis
that has something to do with forgetting this historical task. Kagan states that
European culture is marked by a “psychologization” of human personality that
prevents human beings from becoming agents of history, which is to say
creators of “new heaven and new earth” (Kagan, 2004, p. 181). Judaism
should counteract this crisis by remaining “the monastic culture of history”
and by reclaiming history as meaningful—a morally responsible and rational
activity directed towards the future. Kagan presents this vision of history in
opposition to Christian culture with its confession of the already realized

messianic event (Kagan, 2004, p. 181).
In another draft, Kagan argues that freedom and emancipation are
essentially religious values, and that “world, life, eternal life, being, God—are
such freedoms.” They are freedoms because they proclaim the possibility of a
radical change of the world, i.e. a revolution. In Kagan’s words, “[…]
freedom as such is unthinkable as a mere progress, as a mere evolution.
Revolution belongs to freedom” (Kagan, 2004, pp. 187–188). According to
Kagan, history is only possible as a product of practical reason (“reason of
free will and justice”) and labor. History is never given; it is always a task that
is thought of in terms of moral demands and therefore revolution is “an
illustration of this moral demand” (Kagan, 2004, pp. 213–216). It is obvious
that Kagan thinks of revolution in terms of the ethical and religious categories
of freedom, justice, and collectively recognized goals. Both being an agent of
history and being related to history are characterized, according to Kagan, by
judging history in terms of pravda-spravedlivost (truth-justice) (Kagan, 2004,
p. 404). Furthermore, to be an agent of history is simultaneously a process of
creating oneself as a personality. Kagan writes: “Human being as a historical
being is always a task, always not yet completed” (Kagan, 2004, p. 409).
Matvei Kagan has not written enough to make it possible for us to
evaluate his views on history and ethics. However, we can use his works in
order to recreate the philosophical atmosphere of the Kantian circle in Nevel.
For example, it becomes clear that Mikhail Bakhtin’s project of creating a
philosophical phenomenology of moral act and his non-orthodox
interpretation of the meaning of Christian morality were strongly influenced
by Cohen’s reading of Kant, as well as by Cohen’s and Kagan’s critique of
Christian theology. Bakhtin’s only philosophical work Toward a Philosophy
of the Act (Bakhtin, 1993) is written in Nevel and Vitebsk. Kagan’s idée fixe
about history as a moral task is further developed by Bakhtin, whose ambition
in the text is to reclaim the Kantian ideal of the uniqueness of practical reason.
I have analyzed Bakhtin’s ethics in greater detail elsewhere (Namli, 2009).
What I would like to point out here is the religious and neo-Kantian roots of
Bakhtin’s understanding of morality as grounded in the phenomenological
incompleteness of the I. I-for-myself, which is one of the three main
categories of Bakhtin’s ethics, is never given (in contrast to I-for-the-other
and the-other-for-me); it exists as a task, it is a creation of its own responsible
acts that are always directed towards the future. For Bakhtin, as for Levinas,
the act of responsibility brings its subject into being. Bakhtin writes:
I-for-myself constitute the center from which my performed act and my

self-activity of affirming and acknowledging any value come forth or
issue, for that is the only point where I participate answerably in once-
occurrent Being; it is the center of operations, the head-quarters of the
commander-in-chief directing my possibilities and my ought in the
138 ELENA NAMLI
ongoing event of Being. It is only from my own unique place in Being

that I can and must be active. My confirmed and acknowledged
participation in Being is not just passive (the joy of being), but is first
and foremost active (the ought to actualize my own unique place). This
is not a supreme life-value that systematically grounds for me all other
life-values as relative values, as values conditioned by that supreme
value (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 60).
Bakhtin claims that there is no I-for-myself existing in itself as a given value.

Rather, there is a possibility of being, an event of being (sobytiie bytiia),
which can and must be performed by the I-for-myself from its unique place in
the being (to come). The interpretation of incompleteness that Kagan develops
in his philosophy of history becomes the thesis of Bakhtin’s moral
philosophy. What distinguishes Bakhtin from Kagan is the former’s negative
evaluation of Cohen’s rationalism and historical optimism. The contrast is
illuminating: while Kagan believes in the power of practical reason as the
main bases of the political action, Bakhtin questions Cohen’s (and Kant’s)
rationalism by rejecting their vision of a universally valid social and political
ethics. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin transforms Kagan’s
incompleteness of a historic personality into a phenomenological
incompleteness of the I. We will return to this difference, which is important
for the purpose of my essay, but let us first say a few more words about
Kagan’s views on revolution.
According to my reading of Kagan, his justification of revolution cannot
be explained as resulting from a positive evaluation of the Russian
Revolutions of 1917 and their effect on the emancipation of Russia’s Jewry.
As, for example, Oleg Budnitskii demonstrates in his research on the history
of Russian Jews, many of them were granted rights and unprecedented
political possibilities as a result of the Russian Revolutions (Budnitskii, 2012).
But what is true of many Russian Jews does not seem to be the case with
Matvei Kagan. For him personally, the October Revolution 1917 meant many
troubles, and his political activity decreased dramatically after the October
Revolution. Before leaving for Germany Kagan was active in the Social-
Democratic Party. The situation he found when he returned to Russia from
Germany in 1918 “horrified him” and, according to his own reminiscence, it
took him six years “to accept the fact of the completed Revolution” (Kagan,
2004, p. 27). Therefore, I believe that Kagan’s view on revolution as a
genuinely historical event is mostly the result of his philosophical and
religious understanding of the history of humankind as radically different
from natural developments based on necessity.
For obvious reasons, Kagan did not write down any explicit analysis of
the Russian Revolutions. It is, however, possible to use Kagan’s view on
history in order to critically evaluate the political and social processes in
Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is beyond the scope of my
essay to engage in such an evaluation, but I believe that the October

Revolution, interpreted in a longer historical perspective, would fit some of
Kagan’s criteria and fail in relation to others. It is even reasonable to suggest
that Kagan, who went to Marburg already a social-democrat, became attracted
by Cohen’s vision of political action based on practical reason, while the
pragmatism of the Bolsheviks turned him away from the political life in the
post-revolutionary Russia. What is more important than these suggestions is
the fact that even during the period 1918–1924, when Kagan was rejecting the
revolutionary nature of Russian politics, he believed in revolution as a
religious and moral instrument for the transformation of natural development
into historical. In my reading of Kagan, this belief is related to Cohen’s
rationalism in that it stipulates the ideal of practical reason as capable of
universally valid justification of the historical tasks that human beings are
religiously obliged to realize. It is of great importance that Kagan does not
view social revolution as an event beyond the power of reason and moral
judgment. On the contrary, he views revolution as a product of practical
reason.
Already in Nevel the members of the Kantian seminar developed
different approaches to the issue of rationalism. While Kagan remained a part
of the tradition of rationalism that emphasizes the universality of practical
reasoning as posing rationally justified and politically relevant goals and
norms, Bakhtin developed a critique of this kind of rationalism and
universalism. For Bakhtin, the universality of morality has little to do with the
logical necessity of theoretical reason. Instead, it is based on the universally
valid form of responsible human action: the general phenomenological
structure of moral responsibility. Unfortunately, it is not possible to trace any
documented connection between this controversy and the differences between
Kagan’s and Bakhtin’s views on the Russian Revolution. But thinking of
many striking similarities between Bakhtin’s ethics and that of Levinas, I
believe that even for Bakhtin his attempt to overcome what he believed was
the shortcomings of Cohen’s rationalism was related to the political
developments in post-revolutionary Europe. It seems at least possible to
assume that while Kagan, following Cohen, viewed rationality as a rationality
of morally justified political goals, Bakhtin and Levinas focused on
responsibility as a means of resurrecting personal morality within the political.
Regardless of all the political and moral failures of human beings, there is
always moral responsibility, and for both Bakhtin and Levinas this
responsibility was not a result of action—either performed or unperformed—
but the basis of its very possibility.
I believe that the members of the Kantian seminar in Nevel and Vitebsk
discussed the theme of moral responsibility and history in direct relation to the
rationalism of Hermann Cohen. While, during the disputes in Berlin that are
described in Oleg Budnitskii’s contribution to this volume, representatives of
the Jewish intelligentsia from Russia differed in their views on the Jews’
140 ELENA NAMLI
involvement in and responsibility for the Russian Revolutions on mainly

ideological grounds, the members of the Nevel seminar were looking for a
new concept of political responsibility by suggesting different philosophical
interpretations of practical reason. Matvei Kagan was following Cohen’s
rationalism and believed in the capability of practical reason to discover
universally valid moral norms and political goals, while Bakhtin rejected this
kind of rationalism. At the same time, both philosophers agreed with Cohen
that (genuine) religion—Judaism for Kagan and Christianity for Bakhtin—
was a pure, and therefore universally valid, form of radical moral
responsibility.
When I think of the differences between Bakhtin’s and Kagan’s
interpretations of practical reason, I find Bakhtin’s skepticism towards any
possession of power to be of great importance. While for Kagan the main
“function” of practical reason is to open up history by means of critical
reasoning and revolutionary action in the name of social justice, Bakhtin
believes that the uniqueness of practical reason consists of turning every
moral norm into a radical personal responsibility of the I towards the other.
Very much like Levinas, Bakhtin believes that the universality of morality
belongs to the unique phenomenological form of the moral act. He refuses to
suggest any general norms and argues instead that the “essence” of practical
reason is about re-directing every socially valid and always contextual norm
towards the personal responsibility of the I. Kagan remains within the
traditional rationalistic discourse of social justice. Following Cohen’s
interpretation of Jewish ethics, he conceives of practical reason as a socially
and politically transformative power. The ideal of social revolution, which
Kagan approved of, was not a revolution of a historical-materialistic type, not
a necessary result of materialistically determined processes. On the contrary,
it was a genuinely historical event breaking the necessity of natural evolution
by means of morality, and therefore of reason.
The political developments in Russia cut off the theoretical debate
between Matvei Kagan and Mikhail Bakhtin. Neither Kagan nor Bakhtin had
the opportunity to further elaborate on political and social morality and its
relation to religion. In Russia a long period of ideological monopoly by the
state-sponsored Leninism went over into the uncritical and therefore complete
rejection of the heritage of the Russian Revolutions. Only now are we
reaching a point where it becomes possible to critically discuss the history of
the Russian Revolutions. Is the failure of the Russian project of political
liberation a strong reason to approve of Bakhtin’s skepticism towards Cohen’s
and Kagan’s firm belief in the power of universal reason? Should the only
justified function of universal morality be to uncover various forms of power
abuse that tend to hide themselves behind great universalistic projects such as
humanism, communism, democracy or human rights?
3. Liberation and (an) Open Universality of Morality
Was Hermann Cohen wrong when he defended his optimistic vision of Jewish
rationalism with its universalistic view of human liberation? I do believe that
finding a form of universal ethics that might survive, and even counteract,
political abuse is a very difficult task. To shape universalism in such a way
that it empowers a politics of emancipation and simultaneously resists the
temptation to view one’s own traditional rationality as generally binding is
still a valid ideal—impossible to fully realize and simultaneously vitally
important for the politics of liberation.
What is most attractive in Cohen’s philosophy of religion is its potential
to interpret religion as a restorative power, capable of bringing morality back
into politics. This is of special importance in our technocratic era of neo-
liberalism with its cynical slogan “There Is No Alternative.” I agree very
much with Catherine Chalier, who in chapter 2 of this volume highlights the
hope of the Jewish tradition as an always-morally-engaged hope. A religiously
approved political liberation should not be formed as a mere fight for
particular interests, even if such interests are totally legitimate. The
revolutionary (!) hope articulated in terms of Jewish tradition should be
striving to counteract both the political passivity of despair and the moral
cynicism of realpolitik. Therefore, I believe it is worth trying to reclaim some
of the ideas of Hermann Cohen’s religion of reason.
Cohen belongs to the tradition of ethics that points to liberation as the
main criterion of tenable social ethics. He interprets this liberation as a social
liberation of the oppressed which is, simultaneously, a liberation into genuine
relationship with God. Both liberations are marked by lawfulness and
dedication to reason. For Jewish religion to be a genuine monotheism means
to profess one unique God as the legitimate power behind a single and
universally valid moral law. Justice is the main attribute of the unique God,
and the rationalism of Cohen’s principle of correlation stipulates that religious
ethics can only approve of political action that aims at inclusive justice and
law. Such action might start in a particular experience of oppression but is
driven by the potential of a broader social solidarity.
As mentioned earlier, Cohen was not consistent when he simultaneously
argued in favor of ethical universalism, and also claimed that German culture
should be regarded as the most genuine representation of this universalistic
quest. It is not difficult to understand Cohen’s glorification of German culture
as a pragmatic strategy undertaken by a Jewish professor in Germany. It is
even possible to suggest that, while claiming rationalism and humanism to be
the essential feature of German culture, Cohen hoped to defeat the expansion
of anti-rationalistic trends in German philosophy at the beginning of the
twentieth century. But this kind of pragmatism must be rejected in the name
of Cohen’s own vision of moral law as the law of one unique God and one
universal reason. Using liberation as the main criterion makes it necessary to
142 ELENA NAMLI
reject every claim of universality on behalf of an agency that is suppressing

the other.
How, then, are we to evaluate Cohen’s vision of Jewish emancipation? I
do believe that, despite the horrible history of the twentieth century, a genuine
political and cultural emancipation of the Jews should be envisioned in
universalistic terms. Radical responsibility for the other can and should be
transformed into concrete visions of a just society and such visions should be
informed by the knowledge of, and compassion for, the oppressed. How, then,
to reduce the risk—inherent in every universalistic project—of the
marginalizing reason and the experiences of the other in the name of “the
universally valid”? I would argue in favor of a vision of universalism as a
theory of open universality. My inspiration in this regard is Michael Walzer
who suggests a politically and religiously attractive form of Jewish ethics. In
his Tanner Lectures, delivered in 1989 and entitled Nation and Universe,
Walzer differentiates between two kinds of universalism, namely “covering-
law universalism” and “reiterative universalism” (Walzer, 1989, pp. 510–
511). Walzer tests these categories by applying them to different
interpretations of Judaism and nationalism. He argues that the covering-law
universalism is present within Jewish tradition, and states that “[t]he Jews
were chosen for a purpose, which had to do not only with their own history
but also with the history of the human race” (Walzer, 1989, p. 510). Walzer is
critical of this kind of universalism because it tends to devalue experiences of
the other and presents liberation as one and the same for all peoples. In a clear
contrast to this kind of universalism Walzer presents a reiterative universalism
of the Jewish tradition, quoting from the prophet Amos: “Have I not brought
Israel out of the land of Egypt, And the Philistines from Caphtor, And the
Syrians from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). This vision of liberation opens up for a
plurality that is based on a universal rejection of oppression:
Liberation is a particular experience, repeated for each oppressed people.

At the same time, it is in every case a good experience, for God is the
common liberator. Each people has its own liberation at the hands of a
single God, the same God in every case, who presumably finds
oppression universally hateful (Walzer, 1989, p. 513).
Walzer encounters the same challenge as Cohen in that he is looking for an

ethics of liberation that could be harmonized with, or even based on, Jewish
monotheism. Informed by experiences of different historical forms of
colonialism and imperialism legitimated by different universalistic projects,
Walzer is skeptical towards the idea of one law for all peoples. In Amos,
Walzer finds a universalist narrative that says that there is one God and many
blessings (Walzer, 514). I find Walzer’s reiterative universalism inspiring
because it seeks to combine the ideal of universal liberation with the firm
rejection of every politics built upon cultural superiority. At the same time, I
disagree with Walzer’s interpretation of the meaning of “one law.” While

reading Cohen I realize that his “unique God with one law” does not mean the
same conventional regulation for all peoples. What Cohen’s “one law” means,
according to my reading of him, is the single theological and rational criterion
for a law to be moral: the prohibition of an unequal treatment of the other.
Precisely this makes the law into an effective tool of social liberation.
Therefore, I would argue in favor of open universality as a social ethics
that presents universality as the main normative criterion for the justification
of different projects of liberation. These cannot be anything but specific
political and religious projects, but there is an urge for a universal liberation
incorporated in such projects that prevents them from experiencing any
concrete political achievement as complete. In relation to the controversy
between Kagan and Bakhtin, this means an attempt to use them
complementarily. Bakhtin is correct in warning against generalized norms and
pointing at the universality of the radical demand as directed to the I. What
has to be done from a moral perspective should be done by “me”—this is the
imperative of moral responsibility that distinguishes it from a political act. But
this kind of ethical critique of power does not offer any alternative
constructive program that can inspire political acts of liberation. Therefore
Kagan’s belief in religious ethics as a ground for social liberation has the
advantage of reasoning in favor of concrete political change. It remains within
the moral domain as long as the urge for universal liberation is kept alive.
Then we always need power analysis (that can be performed in terms of
Bakhtin-like phenomenology) which is able to prevent successful political
projects from claiming themselves to be de facto universally liberating.
Why, then, is a universalistic liberation more tenable than a
particularistic one? I believe that the main argument is that such a vision
encourages political agency that seeks to transform an unjust society and at
the same time contradicts any claim to “a completed revolution.” For any
social group to be liberated, it must liberate itself from the particular injustices
that it suffers. As Iris Marion Young demonstrated in her Justice and the
politics of difference (Young, 1990), every legitimate vision of justice must be
based on insight into particular types of oppression. At the same time, as soon
as such a vision of moral justice inspires people to act politically, the risk of
suppressing other types of injustices re-emerges. To recognize this risk is not
an easy political task, but a universalistic ethics has tools to fulfill it.
Therefore, I find Cohen’s interpretation of Jewish monotheism to be a
still valuable attempt to grasp this dialectics of particular injustice and the
moral shortcomings of particularistic emancipation. “Unique God is your
God” is a vision of a liberation that says that the very recognition of the
particular (otherness in phenomenological and religious terms) calls for
universal justice. This justice must be based on an experience of particular
oppression and carried on as a universal project of liberation. Only then does
144 ELENA NAMLI
it become possible to approve of a revolutionary hope and simultaneously to

reject its claim to become complete.
Ten
REFLECTIONS OF REVOLUTIONARY
MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN YIDDISH
POETRY: THE CASE OF PROLETPEN
Alexandra Polyan
Nisht keyn blumen-krentsl No bunch of flowers

Oder a heyb mit hitl— Or doffing your hat
Iz far hayntike meydlekh Can be used to express your affection
A libes-mitl. To a contemporary girl.
S'helft nisht afile Even vowing

Eybik libe tsu shvern. An eternal love won’t do.
Haynt muz men andersh Today you have to
Di libe derklern: Express your feelings differently.
Lemoshl: For instance:
Dayne tseyn— Your teeth

Klore vayse Are snow white
Vi a stade vayse shof Like a herd of white sheep
In a hunger-marsh. On a hungry march.
Dayne lipm— Your lips are young and smart

Yunge kluge Like two slogans
Vi tsvey lozungen, Which don’t let you
Vos lozn zikh nisht blofn... Fall prey to a bluff.
Yosl Cutler, from “Libe-derklerung”

(1934, p. 11)
In the 1910–1930s, leftist ideas were extremely popular in American Jewish

thought. As Edna Nahshon has put it, many American Jews “saw no
discrepancy between their Jewishness and their socialism. On the contrary,
these two elements were seen to have been complementary and mutually
nourishing” (1998, p. 2). Jews accounted for up to one third of the total
membership in the Socialist Party, the Communist Party (founded in 1919),
and the International Working Order (ibid., pp. 2–11).
146 ALEXANDRA POLYAN
For the new generation of immigrants, leftist political activities seemed

kosher enough. Pro-Soviet feelings among Russian Jewish immigrants can be
explained, first of all, by the immigrants’ pre-revolutionary experience
(Lederhendler, 2008, pp. 245–254).
Chapter 8 in this book, by Oleg Budnitskii, is devoted to the political
debates about Jews and their role in the Russian Revolution which occupied
Russian–Jewish émigré circles in Berlin, 1923–1924. Residing in Weimar
Germany, the Russian émigrés had quite a notion of what was happening in
Soviet Russia and the USSR, there were political and economic ties between
the two countries, though not extremely strong. The participants of the
discussions had faced both the Russian Revolution and the Civil War in
Russia, and had experienced the Bolshevik policy towards Jewish
communities and traditional Jewish culture, developing therefore a
complicated collective attitude to the events of 1917–1920s. Unlike their peers
in Germany many American Jewish leftists had left Russia before the
revolution: they had only a rather vague notion of what was happening in
Russia, and more specifically in the former Pale of Settlement, but clear
reminiscences of what Jewish life in the Russian Empire had looked like. The
new forces that put an end to the anti-Semitic, oppressive tsarist regime were
mostly welcomed, and everything connected with the Russian Revolution was
taken as progressive and friendly. As Eli Lederhendler (2008, pp. 253–254)
wrote, “(a)s Russian autocracy had been the epitome of the evil, the revolution
that caused its downfall could be nothing less than the epitome of political
virtue and the root of salvation.” One more reason to welcome the Russian
revolution was the success Yiddish had in Soviet Russia (later, the Soviet
Union) (Michels, 2001, pp. 34–37).
The Jewish leftist community grouped around the two main newspapers:
“Frayhayt” (later—“Der Morgn—Frayhayt”) and “Forverts,” both pro-Soviet
in their political sensibilities, but anti-communist at home (ibid.). In the
course of time, the attitude toward the USSR became more critical as a result
of the worsening situation of the status of Soviet Jews and increasing attacks
against Jewish culture in official Soviet propaganda. One of the crucial
turning points was 1929, the year of riots and pogroms in Hebron (Katz, 2005,
pp. 10–13). Moscow demanded that these events should be seen as an episode
of the Arabs’ struggle against British imperialism. Numerous intellectuals
refused to agree with such an approach and left the “Frayhayt” (Srebnik,
2001, p. 85), but some leftists supported Moscow’s demands and branded all
the expressions of sympathy for the victims as “Zionist bacchanalia”
(Pomerants, 1935, p. 81). The latter movement is the focus of the chapter at
hand.
On September 13, 1929, several poets led by Alexander Pomerants
declared the creation of a new poetic group: Proletpen. In 1930, the group
published its first anthology, called Union Square after the location of mass
demonstrations in New York. Before that, several participants of the
Reflections of Revolutionary Movements in American Yiddish Poetry 147
movement had issued a magazine called “Yung Kuznye” (first published in

1924), and in 1926, they had launched a youth magazine, “Yugnt.” The
group’s best known representatives (beside Pomerants) are Arn Kurz, Yosl
Cutler, Yitzkhok (Y. E.) Ronch, Yosl Grinshpan, Menke Katz, and Nokhem
Vaysman.
According to a widely accepted developmental narrative, the history of
American Yiddish Poetry consisted of three movements, or waves, which
succeeded each other: first, there was the Proletarian poetry (Morris
Rosenfeld, Morris Vinchevsky, Yoysef Bovshover, Dovid Edelshtadt);
followed by the neo-Romantics (symbolists) called “Di yunge,” literally “the
youth,” or “the young ones” (Zishe Landau, Mani Leyb, Moyshe Leyb
Halpern, H. Leyvik [Leyvik Haplern’s pen name], Yoysef Opatoshu, and
others); and, finally, the Inzikhists, or Introspectivists (Yankev Glatshteyn,
Arn Glants-Leyeles, Nokhum Minkov, B. Alkvit [Eliezer Blum’s pen name],
Bernard Lewis, and others). Indeed, some chronological sequence may be
detected in the history of these three movements: the Proletarian poets became
famous as early as the 1890s; the first manifesto of “Di yunge” was published
in 1907; and the “In zikh” group launched its first almanac as late as 1919.
The idea that American Jewish poetry developed in three stages was
introduced by the Inzikhists, who tended to position themselves as the “crown
of creation,” the most innovative and experienced ones, whose texts are
characterized by the most complicated poetics and the most intricate structure.
But none of these movements disappeared when the next one came into
existence. In the 1920s all three circles were active and enjoyed literary
success, and the latter two movements are sometimes grouped together and
called “the second period” of Yiddish poetry in America (Katz, 2005, p. 6).
There are multiple problems with this view of the history of Yiddish
poetry in America. To begin with, the Inzikhist version limits itself
exclusively to poetry created in New York. It does not take into consideration
any Yiddish poetic movements that existed in the Midwest (e.g. “Yung
Chicago”), or in California. Another problem is that the Inzikhists’ outline of
the history of Yiddish poetry in America emphasizes the disappearance of
political content: as one moves on in time, socialism and revolutionary motifs
become increasingly marginalized. Even early on, “Di yunge” blamed the
proletarian poets for serving as the “rhyme department of the Jewish labor
movement” and for being too politically concerned, and the Inzikhists joined
in this reproach. The present chapter examines the leftist movement known as
Proletpen, which was active in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Proletpen
did not fit the Inzikhists’ theory, and therefore was not mentioned in their
program articles—although they were well acquainted with the movement,
and one of its members, Arn Kurz, published his poems in “In zikh,”
occasionally using his pen name, “Figaro,” prior to aligning with Proletpen.
Like other Yiddish speaking poets of America, the leftists were
immigrants. As Ruth Wisse notes in her study of “Di yunge,” those who came
to America resembled their counterparts belonging to the Second Aliyah. Both

groups consisted of young men and women who were brought up in
traditional communities and rebelled against this orthodoxy. They were the
first generation to receive a secular education and to read secular books. The
two groups left Russia due to the same reasons, but responded differently to
new circumstances they faced: the “olim,” as well as those who stayed in the
“old home,” pioneered collective structures, while the immigrants to America,
where no collective structures were needed for their survival, developed
individual initiatives (Wisse, 1988, pp. 4–5). In this respect, the leftists
constituted an exception. They were not fascinated with the freedom of
private enterprise that America provided, nor were they fascinated with
America as a whole. They criticized the state for its unhealthy social structure,
unfairness and inequality, and for the huge discrepancy between official
propaganda and reality:
Es marshirn tsuzamen der toyt un der Death and hunger march together,
hunger,
S'shteyen in reyen di himl-kratser un Skyscrapers and dugouts are placed
erd-shtiber, next to each other,
Un in ale radios vert eyn lid And all the radios broadcast the same
gezungen— song—
Dos lidl fun glaykhkayt un menchn- The song of equality and love of
libe. fellow men.
Es shrayt af di gasn der hunger fun In the streets, starvation of children

kinder, yells,
Es voyen fun shtiber di leydike teler; Empty plates howl from poor houses;
Es fresn un zoyfn, vi gekekhlte And the rich gorge and drink hard,
rinder, like overfed cattle,
Di raykhe, un tantsn af “charity”- And dance at charity balls

beler.
(From “S'iz dos land,” in Ronch, 1936, p. 34).
Unlike most of their American counterparts, the leftist poets stood up for
collective structures, not for the sake of national survival, but for the sake of
class struggle. The interests of class surpassed those of nation. The authors of
the “Editorial notes” in the Union Square almanac quote Lenin’s words about
the “coexistence of two nations within each contemporary nation and two
national cultures in each contemporary culture” and Stalin's famous statement
about every culture being bound to be “national in form and socialist in

content”:
The Proletpen declares: everyone who speaks on national culture in a

capitalist land, contributes to the unity of the nation, but betrays the class
struggle and becomes an enemy of the working class. The Proletpen
whole-heartedly accepts Stalin’s attitude to the issue of national culture
(Union Square, 1930, p. 8).
As a conclusion, the editors of Union Square assert:
The Proletpen proclaims a merciless struggle against any expression of

national culture in capitalist lands and against all the elements who strive
to protect and confirm the unity of the bourgeois nation in any cultural
form.
The literati which group around the “Union Square” are the only
immense literary force to have a literary talent to serve the working class
(ibid., pp. 8–9).
The Proletpen poets joined the network of social organizations created by

communist groups in the USA and proclaimed literature to be one of servants
of the ideology. The editors of the Yugnt magazine wrote in the preface to the
first issue: “Founding this magazine, we are trying to create the center for all
clubs for the young” (Yugnt, 1.1, 1926, p. 1). Clubs were an important tool in
propagating the new ideas and the new aesthetics (cf. Nahshon, 1998, pp. 18,
83).
The Proletpen poets regarded themselves as giving protection and voice
to the working class, without regard to race or nationality. The audience
would be described, as Pomerants puts it, as “Idn, negers, daychn, rusn,
grikhn, italyener—khaveyrim fun zelbm klas” (Jews, the African American,
the German, the Russian, the Greek, the Italian—friends belonging to the
same class) (Pomerants, 2005, p. 124)—or, as Arn Kurz has it “idn, poyerim
un eskimosn” (Jews, Christians, and Eskimos) (1927, p. 43).
One of the most widely discussed topics in Proletpen’s poetry is the
attitude of American society towards African Americans. Unlike “di yunge,”
who cherished America for its “freedom from persecution” (Wisse, 1988, p.
5), the left accuse it of persecuting people of color. The Scottsboro trial
(1931–1937), when nine young African-American men were charged with
alleged gang-rape of two white women and sentenced to death, but eventually
set free after having been imprisoned for 6 years, became the symbol of this
outrageous discrimination (Glaser and Weintraub, 2005, pp. 133–134). Y.E.
Ronch, Betsolel Friedman, and Avrom Victor devoted long poems (each
called “Scottsboro”) to this trial. Sore Barkan, Moyshe Shifris, Malka Lee,
Isaac Prints (Itzik Grinberg, who also adopted the penname Ber Grin), and
Zishe Vaynper also contributed to the subject. The most rigorous advocate of
the blacks is Ronch, who also studied the treatment of attitudes towards the
blacks in Yiddish literature and found a great similarity between the Jews and
the blacks. He wrote:
A Jewish writer, a son to a suffering and protesting people, can feel and
hear the Afro-American’s silent or actual protest even unwillingly
(Ronch, 1945, p. 224, translation from Yiddish).
And also:
What our literature lacks is an image of a Jew sympathetic to the needs

of the black who has many times sacrificed himself in struggle for the
rights of the black: in strikes, in evictions, in pickets. Many Jews have
gone to jail for standing up for the African-American rights […] The
Jew and the Afro-American are fellow-sufferers. They know that in
struggle for their human rights they will chum and close the ranks (ibid.,
p. 250–251).
One of the situations frequently described in Proletpen’s poetry is lynching.

White people are depicted as cruel, crazy, wicked and distorted: the African-
American hero of Ronch’s poem “In Alabama” is lynched as a result of an
insane old maid’s denunciation. The whole white population of the city comes
to his execution, observes it with malicious joy, and, after he has been hung,
everyone tries to cut off a piece of his body as a souvenir.
Naturally enough, the authors anticipate the African-Americans rising in
rebellion and taking revenge on their murderers. Yosl Cutler’s poem “Neckst”
(1934, pp. 181–182) depicts a lynching, and ends up with black man
executing several judges. The African-Americans have no way out but to join
the revolutionary movement. Norman Tiboro, a young black man who has
been rescued from lynching at the very last minute and cannot initially believe
in his narrow escape, decides to become an agitator and to stir the workers
masses to action:
Ikh greyt zikh tsu. Ikh lern zikh I get prepared. I teach myself.
aleyn, I go to any place where there are
Ikh gey ahin vu s'zaynen arbeter workers.
faranen. The ignorant Louisiana masses
Es heybm on dem klasnkamf Are beginning to understand the
farshteyn principles of class-struggle.
Di masn fintstere fun Louisiana.
Zey veln shoyn nekome nemen They will take revenge

Far mir, far Freddy Moor un andere For me, for Freddy Moor and the
martirer. other martyrs.

Ikh for arum un red fun shtot tsu I travel from town to town
shtot, And teach how to be a struggle
Ikh lern tsu zayn a kemfer-firer. leader.
(From “Norman Tiboro dertseylt,” Ronch, 1936, p. 60)
A true African-American leader, like the imprisoned Angelo Herndon (as

depicted in the poem “Bloy-groz,”—“Bluegrass,” a reference to the state of
Kentucky) would not be frightened by the whites and their judgment, and
neither would his compatriots be:
S'vaksn Angelos af dorem-erd, Angelos grow on Southern soils,

Vi kentokier bloye groz, Like Kentucky bluegrass,
Vos keynmol vert es nit tseshtert One can never get rid of,
Un vakst af tsu lokhes yedn balebos. It grows in spite of every peasant.
Fun Fulton-turme laykht zikh likht From Fulton Jail shines the light
Fun nayntsn-yerike martirer-oygn. Of 19-year-old martyr’s eyes.
Zey lakhn in ponem fun merder- They laugh right to the judges’—the
gerikht murderers’ face
Un viln zikh nit boygn. And refuse to bow.
Zey veysn, az Angelo bald vet They know, Angelo will soon
Dokh vern der balebos Become a master
Iber erd sovetisher, In the Soviet land
Af doremdikn bloyen groz. And on the bluegrass in the South.
(Ronch, 1936, p. 64)
Another persecuted immigrant minority that leftist poetry often depicts as

sharing in the Jewish workers’ lot are the Italians. The 1911 fire at the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York killed 144 female workers, most of
whom were either Jewish or Italian. Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian
revolutionary heroes, were also respected by the Jewish left. In Sore Barkan’s
poem “Italyenishe mulyers” and Yosl Grinshpan's “Di mayner-mishpokhe,”
Italian emigré workers appear as the poetic self’s colleagues and close friends
(Glaser and Weintraub, 2005, pp. 66–69 and 70–73).
The leftist poets were also concerned with international politics. Any
contemporary event that had to do with class struggle attracted their attention.
One of the authors of Yugnt magazine wrote in March 1927:
The eyes of the whole world are turned to China. Every day we wait
impatiently for the news that come from there. Every brain wonders,
whether or not the Cantonese will reach Shanghai. Or will they be

stopped by the united forces of Chinese and foreign imperialists (Yugnt,
1.4, 1927, p. 9)?
The Chinese events of 1927–28 are mentioned in several publications, both

poetry and prose (e.g. Union Square, 1930, pp. 164–167, 230–234). Proletpen
sympathized with all revolutionary movements, e.g. in Nicaragua and Mexico:
All the young workers must rally—more closely than they have ever
done it before,—must form a united front and, as well as the older
workers, begin their vigorous struggle against imperialistic wars,
interventions into Nicaragua, Mexico and China, as Lenin has directed
us (Yugnt, 1.3, 1927, p. 6).
However, while feeling bound to fellow-proletarians belonging to different

nations and being concerned with the international class struggle, the
Proletpen poets expect their audience to remain Jewish—it is no accident they
address their readers in Yiddish. One of the goals proclaimed by Alexander
Pomerants was to “resist the assimilation” (Pomerants, 1930, p. 215).
The poet is perceived as a worker, a folk leader and a fighter himself.
Amelia Glaser mentions that most Proletpen writers actually belonged to the
middle class, but their poetic heroes worked in sweatshops or factories.
Factory labor becomes a metaphor of poetry:
Tools, factories, and machines symbolized the worker’s party, and for
Proletpen represented the production of Poetry itself. Present in many of
these poems is a rhythm borrowed from the factory. This is particularly
true in the case of Kalman Hayzler’s machine poems. Repeated phrases
such as ‘at the machine, at the machine’ and ‘she grows wild, she grows
wild’, suggests a poetry that comes from the repeated sounds of factory
labor (Glaser and Weintraub, 2005, p. 97).
Another common metaphor in Proletpen poetry is that of struggle. B. Fentster

compares himself to a soldier who is ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of
the party and the class he belongs to:
Tsen mayne royte, flaterdike fonen, Oh ten of my red burning flags,

Ikh shtey itst unter aykh in kom- I stay nearby in a gesture of
salut, communist greeting,
Vi a royt-armeisher soldat— Like a soldier of the Red Army—
Ir vet mikh shtendik shoyn You’ll always have to remember me,
dermonen,
Az mayn klas gehert mayn yeder To remember that every drop of my
tropm blut, blood belongs to my class,
Az mayn partey gehert mayn yede And every act of mine belongs to my
tat. party.
(From “Yubiley-gezang,” in Union Square, 1930, p. 64).
Proletpen is totally pro-Soviet. As Dovid Katz (2005, p. 20) has shown, this
empathy grew stronger after the famous Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s
visit to America. Depicting injustices embedded in American life, inequality,
and the wicked structures of American society, the leftist poets emphasize the
difference between the USA and the USSR, where they believe there to be no
persecution on the basis of race, and political power belongs to the working
class. The Soviet Union becomes an embodiment of the ideal society: a
Utopia. It is an enormous country with fertile fields and gardens, where
people are healthy, happy, and full of joy, in contrast to diseased American
society:
Aza land faran. Aza land faran. There is such a land, there is such a
land.
A land fun felder zang balodene, A land of fields with loaded ears,
Vu s'zingt di freyd aroys fun fule Where joy sings from everywhere,
zashikes,
Un seder harbstike in shefe bodn And the autumn gardens are full and
zikh. abundant.
Aza land faran. Aza land faran There is such a land, there is such a
land
Fun vinters frostike tif-shneike, Of frosty snowy winters,
Un rufn ruft men es dos land dos And this wonderful land is called
zeltene,
Sovetn-land—dos land fun arbeter. The Soviet land—the land of the
workers.
(B. Ts. Burshtok, from “Aza land faran,” in Yugnt, 1, 1926, p. 10).
Mir viln do, vi in Sovetn-land, Like in the USSR, we will here

Iber aykh tseshpiln oktoberishe teg! Perform on you the October days!
Un fun der Bowery, vi fun Fifth And about the Bowery, alike about
Avenye, 5th Avenue,
Vet demolt shoyn gor andersh zayn One will be able to tell something
vos tsu dertseyln! completely different!
Vayl do, vi in Sovetn-land, veln mir Because here, like in the USSR, we
zumpm trikenen un heyln un undzere will drain the marches and heel
firer ourselves,
Fun di avtobusn And our bus drivers
Veln far arbeter-turistn Will tell the working tourists

Mit likhtike penimer dertseyln With bright faces
Di kranke, di toyte geshikhte The unhealthy, the dead story
Fun ayere zumpm. Of your marches.
(From “Bowery,” Kurz, 1930, pp. 12–13).
When comparing the subways in two cities—Moscow and New York—Arn

Kurz (in “Sobvey”) describes the subway in New York as a dismal place
crowded by wretched tired people, in contrast to that of Moscow, which is full
of joy and singing (Kurz, 1966, pp. 25–32).
The aesthetic ideal that Proletpen strives for is that of Soviet literature,
described as having a “simple, healthy, fresh, trembling, joyful, festive sound”
(Pomerants, 1930, p. 216). The proletarian writers are to “do their best to get
rid of inzikhistishe, reyzenistishe un leyvikistishe fintiflyushkes—literary
gimmicks typical for In zikh, Avrom Reyzen and H. Leyvik” (ibid.). These
movements and writers, along with “Di yunge,” East Broadway, and
“Forverts,” are framed as stubborn aesthetic enemies of the leftists. The
opponents are accused of being “petty bourgeois” (Union Square, 1930, p. 5),
indifferent for the workers’ needs and deaf to history:
Somewhere you can find life, somewhere there is a battle—the whole

human race is sinking in blood. The revolution and the civil war in
Russia. People strive, hope, struggle—but our poets only have nothing to
do with it (Pomerants, 1935, p. 8).
The concept of “art for the sake of art” is, therefore, also criticized. The
leftists consider meeting the needs of the working class and helping its
struggle to be their main goal.
This attitude was also shared by the ideologists of the leftist Yiddish
Theatre in New York called Artef (from Arbeter teater-farband, or “Workers’
theatrical alliance,” which included Moyshe Olgin, David Pinski, David
Abrams, Melech and Kalman Marmur, Shachno Epstein, Moyshe Nadir, and
others). They understood this “fresh sound” also to be in congruity with the
spirit of the age. The Soviet literature and theater were blessed with this
sound, whereas the theaters in America—either English or Yiddish—lacked it.
Nathaniel Buchwald, dissatisfied with the situation on stage, wrote: “Life
pulled in one direction, to world upheavals, to Revolution, to Soviet Russia, to
collective consciousness and collective action, [while] the theatre still busied
itself with bygone idylls, Hassidic legends, all kinds of tall tales, or with the
routine of bourgeois life, family drama and romantic complication” (Nahshon,
1998, p. 22). Their other reason to stick to the Soviet literature, an entirely
aesthetic one, is apparent from the first reason: Soviet theater was considered
a source of creativity and avant-garde invention essential for handling the
challenges of modernity. The Artef ideologists were inspired by the State

Jewish Theater (Goset, performing in Yiddish) as well as by Russian-speaking
Soviet theater and even by Hebrew Habima (ibid., pp. 22–23). Some Yiddish
plays by Soviet playwrights were put on stage at Artef: Arn Kushnirov’s
“Hirsch Leckert,” M. Daniel’s “Fir teg” (“Four days”), Avrom Veviorka’s
“Diamonds,” and the Yiddish translation of Maxim Gorky’s “Yegor
Bulychov” (ibid., pp. 89–114).
Especially interesting is the movement’s attitude towards religion.
Proletpen is anti-traditionalist, but we will not find in its poetry caricatures of
rabbis, Hasidim, synagogues, etc. There is one unsympathetic depiction of the
church—the hero of Martin Birnbaum’s poem “Ba Yezusn tsu gast”
(“Visiting Jesus”) tries to find the spiritual values he seeks inside a church,
but soon becomes bored and leaves (Glaser and Weintraub, 2005, pp. 82–
87)—and several satiric poems by Yosl Cutler which are based on twisting
biblical texts and prayers, but usually the leftist poets do not struggle against
religion. Instead, they create a religion of their own, a parallel faith. Its new
teacher and religious leader—for all intents and purposes, its new Christ—is
Lenin. His portrait is an icon for a Jewish tailor staying at a hospital,
bedridden by a “proletarian disease”, and longing to take part in a
demonstration:
Patsyentn tseklept hobm bilder The patients have pinned up on the

Fun alte zhurnaln un bleter: walls pictures
Bilder fun lekhtsnde lustn Taken from old magazines and
Fun bilike heldn un reter. papers:
Pictures of desired joys
And of pedestrian heroes and savers.
Nor ibern bet funem yidishn shnayder But over the Jewish tailor’s bed
In a roytn papirenem reml In a red paper frame
Geshturemt a fester hot Lenin, The rigorous Lenin stormed
Geturemt a vant hot fun Kreml. And the Kremlin wall towered.
(From “Lenin (Baladish),” Ronch, 1936, p. 46)
Lenin is the only one who can lead the army of the hungry and free them from
their chains:
Far yedn betndikn vey-geshrey For every beseeching cry of pain

Fun horike, farhorevete hent, Of hairy overworked hands
Iz do a shtolik-feste Lenin-rey, There is Lenin’s line, firm like a
Vos shturemt soynes vaklendike steel,
vent. That demolishes the enemies’
wobbling walls.
(From “Lenin reyen,” Ronch, 1936, p. 47)
The Christ-like depiction of Lenin could have been inspired by his Soviet cult:
Lenin has been compared to the Sacred Helmsman; his openness, directness,
and love for the commoner were emphasized (Weisskopf, 2001, pp. 344–345,
357–359).
The new religion also has its martyrs: for example, a communist from
Texas who dies in jail and an executed German communist called Engel,
whose grave becomes an object of worship (Nahshon, 1998, pp. 45, 115–116).
Such an attitude towards the revolutionaries fits excellently with the paradigm
of the struggle between the forces of good and evil—or the Soviet Union and
tsarist Russia—adopted by the Jewish leftists. As Lederhendler puts it: “an
entire generation of Jews in the ranks of the American radical left invested the
mystique of the Russian revolution with its particular fervor, identified with
its myths and venerated its heroes as political saints and martyrs” (2008, p.
253). The oddest expression of such balance is Yosl Cutler's ironical
theomachic romanticism. In his cycle “Munter-klang” (1934), there is a poem
called “Simkhe be-reb Krizis”—Simkha, the son of Crisis. The protagonist, a
poor worker, being unable both to buy enough food for his family and to
afford a seat in a synagogue for the Yonkiper service, speculates:
Oyb Yonkiper nisht fostn If I don’t fast on Yom Kippur

Un nisht blozn dem bloz? And don’t blow the shofar,
Vet Got on di parnose God will lose his salary
Vern arbetsloz. And will become unemployed.
Iz poter an eysek And that’s the end of it—solved

Mit khap un mit lap. The problem in no time.
Vet God perzenlekh God Himself will have to
Muzn zukhn a “job”. Seek for a job.
Un vos vet er vern— And what can He do?

A klezmer af a bas? Play the bass, be a klezmer?
Un efsher farkoyfn Or maybe sell
Khlebnovi kvas. Corn kvas?
Un efsher vet er shraybm Or maybe He will write

A tilem-eynakter, A one-act play based on the Psalms?
Un vern in “Forverts” Or maybe become a junior editor
Der unter-redaktor. In Forverts?
(From “Simkhe be-reb Krizis,” Cutler, 1934, pp. 185–186)
One more example is Arn Rapoport’s poem “Un es dreyt di rod,” or “And a
wheel spins,” which provides an alternative version of mayse-breyshis (the
creation story). The whole world is reduced to industry, which has been
created by the evil will of a Pre-Historic Man (Urmench). He invented a
wheel, “and saw that it was good,” then he created a machine “in Our image,
according to Our likeness.” In the end, the whole of humanity is subsumed in
the process of mechanization: “he who had seen the tohu va-vohu before the
act of creation as well as he who saw the form, who filled the heart of the
Earth and who cast a hammer—have been making a machine ever since”
(Rapoport, 1935, pp. 74–75).
The concept of a new era, which began with the emergence of the new
ideology, is also religious. As Mikhail Krutikov notes, “The revolution of
1905 had a tremendous impact on the consciousness of Russian Jewry. For the
first time in history, large numbers of Jews became active participants in
Russian politics. ‘I do not know how others number the years. But I count
them from 1905,’ wrote the Yiddish poet David Einhorn years later”
(Krutikov, 2001a, p. 74; see also Trachtenberg, 2008, for more concerning the
impact of the Russian revolutions on Yiddish thought). The “new linear
revolutionary chronology” is opposed to the traditional calendar based on
natural and religious cycles (Krutikov, 2001a, pp. 88, 115–116). The
Proletpen authors share this new chronological concept. They describe the
present as a moment of birth—for example, Arn Kurz writes about “di velt
vos halt in vern,” “the world that is becoming a world at the moment” (Kurz,
1927, p. 43).
The Proletpen poets proclaim October to be the crucial point in the
history of the world. By this, they do not mean simply the month of the
Russian Revolution. More often, two Octobers are mentioned: the historical
one, belonging to the past, and a metaphorical, forthcoming one. Pomerants
calls for a hastening of “the coming of the common American-Soviet October,
of the World October” (1930, p. 217). Yuri Suhl uses the metaphor of a
physical calendar:
Ikh bleter durkh dem yerlekhn I leaf through a calendar

kalendar:
Khadoshim zaynen haynt farton in And all the months seem military.
krig.
Nor s'halt an oyg af yedn front fun But the fronts of all lands are
ale lender supervised by

Der komandir—Oktober— The commander—October—
Bolshevik. Bolshevik.
Un az der tog ba undz vet kumen in And, whenever the day comes—
detsember, whether in December,
In yanuar, in yuli, tsi in may— Or in January, or in July, or in May—
Zayn vet dos der tog der lang- It will be the long-awaited day,
dervarter, It will be October anyway.
Zayn vet dos oktober say vi say.
(From “Oktoberdik mayn lid,” in Glaser and Weintraub, 2005, p. 230)
The Proletpen poets emphasize that they are future-oriented and the future—
in history as well as literature—belongs to them. This idea is related to the
messianic perception of revolutionary events. For some writers, as Krutikov
puts it, the Revolution “was the beginning of the Messianic age that would
eventually lead to the redemption of all mankind in the form of liberation
from any oppression, including anti-Semitism” (Krutikov, 2001a, p. 75).
The leftists describe revolution in terms borrowed from the Lurianic
Qabbalah: “it emitted the energy of the working masses and spread it all over
the world” (Union Square, 1930, p. 209). In Nokhem Vaysman’s poem
“Funken fun doyres,” the Revolution is compared to sparks dispersed by the
past generations, which are being gathered at present and will form a
purifying flame (1930, p. 129). The metaphor of sparks to be turned to flame
was frequently used by the Russian Bolsheviks, alongside the idea of
succeeding the previous generations in their struggle. Lenin writes in his
declaration about the newspaper Iskra (“Spark”): the historic task of the
Proletariat is “to finish the stubborn struggle of quite a number of perished
generations with our victory over the hateful regime” (Lenin, 1967, p. 360).
Ironically, such a perception is one of the signs of Leyvik's influence on
the Proletpen. Leyvik, one of the most prominent authors among “Di yunge,”
also associated the Messiah’s arrival with revolutionary struggle (Shalit, 1945,
pp. 17–20, 31–47; Niger, 1920, p. 19). In addition, the “Di yunge” poets were
instrumental in rendering the image of Jesus Christ “kosher” enough for
Yiddish literature (Hoffman, 2007). So, ironically, the Proletpen poets share
this strange fusion of religious and anti-religious, of Jewish and Christian with
their literary opponents.
This combination of Jewish and Christian motives reflects a wider
phenomenon—a complex balance of the national and the international that
both Proletpen and their opponents shape in their writings. Despite
proclaiming themselves to be enemies of national culture, the leftists also
struggled against cultural assimilation and the Americanization of Jewish
workers (Pomerants, 1930, p. 215)—which is to say: they remained concerned
with national issues. They wrote in Yiddish, doing their best to expand its
expressive abilities. This was similar to the balance of the Jewish and the
universal in the aesthetic program of In zikh: they argued that “All the high
achievements of poetry—the highest—are possible in Yiddish” (Harshav,
1986, p. 780), and used Jewish themes and motifs from Jewish folklore while
attempting to be universal and to address the whole human race (Krutikov,
2001b, p. 208). It is also worth mentioning that rhythmic experiments were
most prominent in the poetry of the inzikhists and the Proletpen, out of all the
Yiddish poetry movements.
One more feature Proletpen, “Di yunge,” and the inzikhists have in
common is the idea of the emergence of the poetic movement itself. The
Proletpen authors insist on their independence from all literary heritage, both
of the past and of contemporary European, American, and Yiddish literature.
For example, in his poem “Sacco Vanzetti,” Arn Kurz calls for getting rid of
all classic Italian culture (Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo), referring to
Marinetti and his appeal to demolish museums and libraries; the protagonist of
his poem called “Miguel Cervantes” provocatively turns out to be an illiterate
Spanish peasant whose sons have joined the revolution. But, simultaneously,
the Proletpen poets embrace links to Soviet literature and to one of their
predecessors, Morris Vinchevsky, adopting a widespread cliché and calling
him grandfather (Union Square, 1930, pp. 3–4). The same idea of
“discontinuity of Yiddish literary development” and “symbolic patricide”
regarding the tradition of Yiddish literature is also typical for In zikh and for
“Di yunge” (Krutikov, 2001b. p. 206; Wisse, 1988, p. 58). The inzikhists also
share the leftists’ approach of giving credit to their immediate predecessors,
while rejecting the classics of Yiddish literature—but in the case of the
Inzikhists, this accepted teacher is claimed to be the whole world culture.
Perhaps it is this peculiar combination, both accepting and rejecting the
literary legacy, being both Jewish and universal, religious and anti-religious,
which unites such different trends and can define the American Yiddish
poetry of the interwar period.
Eleven
NIHILISM AND THE RESURRECTION OF

POLITICAL SPACE: HANNAH ARENDT’S
UTOPIA?
Jon Wittrock
“‘Wherever you go, you will be a polis’”
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

(1998, p. 198)
The first half of the twentieth century, in Hannah Arendt’s view, suffered
from the coming to fruition of nihilism, as traditions that had been disrupted
by the growth of the sciences and the adherence to conventional morality
came to be shallow and easily abandoned: “in passing from hand to hand,”
Arendt (2006a, p. 201) writes, cultural values “were worn down like old
coins. They lost the faculty which is originally peculiar to all cultural things,
the faculty of arresting our attention and moving us.” So, she concludes, with
a startling analogy, morality had been reduced to a set of seemingly arbitrary
customs, “which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble
than it would take to exchange the table manners of a whole people” (Arendt,
2003, p. 43).
Arendt draws upon diverse traditions precisely to deal with the
disruption of traditions—that is, she approaches them in order to find
practices which can stabilize human life, when the stability of received
traditions has been disturbed. Instead of the moral conventions transmitted by
religious and philosophical traditions, she wants to retrieve elements from
these traditions which can mitigate the risks of cruelty inherent in an uncritical
submission to political authority once conventions have become empty. Thus,
the unpredictability and irreversibility of human action, she says, can be
mitigated by promise and forgiveness—the former is a crucial part of classical
political practices, but formulated most strongly as a promise of hope in
Christianity, whereas the “role of forgiveness in human affairs” was, she
claims, discovered by “Jesus of Nazareth” (Arendt, 1998, p. 238).
Furthermore, she locates the discovery of conscience in the inner dialogues of
Socrates, but as a “side effect. And it remains a marginal affair for society at
large except in emergencies” (Arendt, 2003, p. 188). It is in exceptional
situations, where conventional morality no longer seems to be able to guide
162 JON WITTROCK
us, or has collapsed, that we most need these stabilizing elements, inherent in,
but often obscured by, traditions.
Arendt’s drawing upon Christianity as well as classical Greek and
Roman elements in addressing the problems of the contemporary world,
however, raises the question whether she was indeed in any sense a “Jewish
thinker” and what, if anything, this entails for her political thought and its
contemporary relevance. In the following, I will argue that Arendt’s thought
can be characterized as a hybrid drawing upon diverse elements—Jewish,
German, Christian, Classical—an observation that can be extended to an
understanding of her advocacy of political spaces, which can be seen, in a
certain sense, as both utopian and messianic. Thereafter, Arendt’s writings on
revolution will be used to further illuminate her thought on political space,
and on the many anti-political forces preventing political spaces from arising.
Finally, I will advance a critique of certain blind spots in her view of the
political, and suggest some paths forward.
1. Arendt’s Thought: Tragedy and Hope
To claim Judaism as the exclusive, or even predominant, influence on

Arendt’s thought would certainly be absurd—but it would be equally absurd
to deny that her Judaism had any influence on her thought. She was,
undoubtedly, a Jewish thinker, absorbed by the horrors that confronted the
Jewish populations of Europe in the twentieth century. But she could also be
called a German thinker engaging with issues pervading the wider German
cultural milieus within which she was born, raised, and educated, as well as an
American thinker—commenting on the origins and fate of the American
republic—a Greek and a Roman thinker, engaging with classical sources with
a sense of urgency in the sincere belief in their continued and supremely
contemporary relevance. She was even, albeit to a limited extent, a Christian
thinker, if only in the sense that she stressed the role of hope and rebirth in
Christianity and referred explicitly, as we have seen, to the Christ figure.
In her review of The Jewish Writings, a collection of Arendt’s essays and
articles from the 1930s to the 1960s, Judith Butler recalls the clash between
Arendt and Gershom Scholem. The latter, in the wake of Arendt’s Eichmann
in Jerusalem, accused her of a certain lack of love; namely of Ahabath Israel,
“Love of the Jewish people” (cf. Butler, 2007). To which Arendt (2007, pp.
466–467) responds: “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or
collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor
the working class or anything of that sort.” Arendt does not deny her
Jewishness, but she views this fact not in the light of the love of a people, but
rather with “a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been
given and not made; for what is physei and not nomō” (ibid., p. 466). What is
so significant here, and what is easily overlooked because we take it for
granted—indeed, as a given—is that in expressing her basic relation to being
Nihilism and the Resurrection of Political Space 163
Jewish, Arendt does so by recourse to Greek words, as if that were the most
natural thing in the world to do. In pointing out her own simply given
Jewishness, Arendt simultaneously manifests an enthusiastically acquired
Greekness. She was born Jewish, but she made herself Greek, by her own
choices, expressed in her works. So when Arendt (ibid., p. 466) concludes this
line of argument by stating that the gratitude for what is simply given is
“prepolitical, but in exceptional circumstances—such as the circumstances of
Jewish politics—it is bound to have also political consequences,” it would
hardly be unexpected if those political consequences, to her, would be tied up
not only with the givenness of being Jewish, but also with an acquired
condition of Greekness. And this is indeed the case.
In The Human Condition, Arendt appears to be telling the following
story: the ancient Athenian pólis featured a desirable political space, which
manifested physically in the sites and institutions of democracy. True, this
space excluded slaves and women—the “chief merit” of the pólis, according
to Xenophon, Arendt (1970, p. 50) notes, “was that it permitted the ‘citizens
to act as bodyguards to one another against slaves and criminals so that none
of the citizens may die a violent death’”—but for those who were included it
provided a platform for excelling, for appearing as unique human beings
amongst others, and at the same time, made it possible to meet others in their
uniqueness.
This tension, in the human condition of plurality, gave rise to narratives
of tragedy and excellence, constituting a shared web of meaning predating,
but also pervading, political life in the pólis. Arendt speaks admiringly of the
heroic ethos of Homer, and of the possibilities that the political space of the
pólis, transforming the aristocratic deeds of archaic Greece, offered for men to
distinguish themselves, and to gain an immortality of reputation: “The polis
[…] gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the
scene of their daring will not remain without witness” (Arendt, 1998, p. 197).
The politics of the pólis, then, did not simply replace the kind of violent and
heroic deeds lauded by epic poetry. Rather, it constituted their continuation by
other means. The other great classical model of a political space was provided
by the Roman Res Publica, which appeared to guarantee collective survival
even in the face of individual mortality, and which Arendt also holds in high
regard.
Unfortunately, a series of historical developments came to shatter not
only these models, but also the tendency of such political spaces to emerge at
all. Late classical and early Christian philosophy came to downplay the
importance of this shared political space of speech and interaction in favor of
otherworldly concerns, and the withdrawn ways of life that appeared
alongside them. Furthermore, work, which entailed the crafting of those
lasting objects which provide this fragile space of appearance with its physical
durability in a shared, human world, came to be increasingly replaced by
164 JON WITTROCK
labor, which consists of mere processes of reproduction in a circle of

production and consumption, in which nothing seems to be lasting.
Arendt could be compared to a tragic storyteller, gazing into the
madness and horrors of the twentieth century, and turning from there to reread
the history of political thought as too often including a failure to take seriously
what she saw as its prime subject: the political itself. Admittedly, not only the
focus on the pólis, but also the tragic element of her theorizing, could be read
as an expression of her philhellenism, a concern with an idealized version of
ancient Greece which she shared with many in the intellectual milieu of
Germany during the first half of the twentieth century.
Even, however, if “Arendt expresses a tragic pathos with respect to the
losses incurred by the modern age” (Passerin D’Entreves, 1994, p. 27), her
philhellenism is not exclusive in nature—neither in terms of her descriptive
narratives, nor in the very ways in which her historical understanding of the
past and future of the political is construed. In the former case, Arendt draws
upon, besides the Athenian pólis, models as distinct as the Roman Res Publica
and the councils or soviets of the Hungarian and Russian Revolutions,
respectively (regarding the role of councils and soviets, cf. e.g. Arendt, 2006b,
pp. 258–259). In the latter case, her understanding of history is certainly
imbued with a tragic sensibility, but again, not exclusively so: there is also
arguably a messianic streak in the hopeful anticipation of radical renewal and
future transformation—Arendt (1978, p. 217) even introduces the concept of
natality to stress the ever-present renewal of the human world: “The very
capacity for beginning is rooted [...] in the fact that human beings [...] again
and again appear in the world by virtue of birth.”
Who, then, is the hero of Arendt’s narrative? It seems at first glance to
be political space itself, which performs a series of wondrous deeds at the
outset but is then slain. Hence, the ensuing history of Western political
thought constitutes a series of misunderstandings and strange omissions in the
absence of the hero who is already dead. However, the space of appearance is
not really bound to the pólis or the Roman Res Publica. These two are not
merely relics to be studied by the historian, but rather exemplify something
desirable that can potentially be realized anywhere, at any time. There have
been subsequent political spaces, but they have been fragile and succumbed to
the threats posed to them by other forms of politics. Yet all of them remain
desirable models, examples of something that ought to be resurrected. No
transcendent paradise or realized condition of global justice, but political
space itself, as a domain for the interaction of free and equal human beings,
was and remained Arendt’s utopia.
2. Political Space and the Abyss
To act freely means to be able to begin something anew: it entails the

immediate disclosure of who I am, in the moment, among my equals. But
while such spaces of appearance have indeed arisen, on occasion, during the
millennia following the fall of the Roman Republic, they have been the
exception, provoked by the exceptional: for example, the American
revolution, in which the founding fathers acted politically, claiming to do so
out of duty, but finding happiness therein (cf. Arendt, 2006b, pp. 117–123).
Or the resistance against occupation by Nazi Germany, a moral or political
duty but also strangely joyful—commenting on French poet and resistance
fighter René Char, Arendt (ibid., p. 272) writes of his “frankly apprehensive
anticipation of liberation; for he knew that as far as they were concerned there
would be not only the welcome liberation from German occupation but
liberation from the ‘burden’ of public business as well.”
This really is a tragic narrative, then, but there is also the possibility of
remembrance, of returning to the past in pursuit of those fragments of it that
may be retrieved into the present, and there, transformed in relation to a novel
context, into a treasure (cf. Arendt’s poetically rendered characterization of
Walter Benjamin in Benjamin, 1969, pp. 50–51). Thus, there is a promise of
redemption in the resurrection of political space, and Arendt’s works
articulate that promise. In other words, she can be read as an unrelenting
prophet formulating the promise of the possible return of true and lasting
political spaces.
But here we naturally ask: why? Why ought we to consider the return of
political spaces as a great promise? Is it because of the benefits they bestow
upon us, outside of them, in their effects after the fact? Do they, for example,
counter the threats of totalitarian politics? No, that does not seem to be the
case. While a multiplicity of political spaces, of centers of power, is indeed a
model distinct from totalitarian centralization—as well as from representative
democracy—this does not mean that, causally, they prevent these latter
tendencies from arising. On the contrary, political spaces, whether in the guise
of workers’ councils or local democratic structures, have proved painfully
fragile and have fallen beneath the onslaught of the development both towards
totalitarian centralization, as well as towards the bureaucratization of liberal
democracy.
When Arendt ends On Revolution by quoting from Sophocles’ Oedipus
at Colonus, “Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far
the second-best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible
whence it came,” this could be considered a damning indictment on the folly
of all things political, of worldly action—but for Arendt, of course, the very
opposite holds true: “it was the polis, the space of men’s free deeds and living
words, which could endow life with splendour” (2006b, p. 273). It is precisely
because of the ultimate futility of all strivings, of the impermanence of all
things, of the many disappointments in leaving behind the hopes of youth,
because nothing lasts and not the least because of the horrific terrors of this
world, that the political space is needed. It provides redemption, not to
anything outside of it, but in itself.
166 JON WITTROCK
Arendt’s promise is indeed a message of joy. She does not propose to

save the world in any economic or ecological sense; rather, she wants to
restore joy and meaning to it. While she does allude to classical justifications
of the political space in preserving the memory of great deeds, it is really the
joy and the very meaningfulness of political action itself that is preeminent,
that is the great discovery of the pólis, that is its true “treasure,” which is to be
recovered for the contemporary world. But there is yet another angle that
needs to be explored. There is another relationship between political space
and the horizon of totalitarianism, as well as the pursuit of meaning and joy.
When Arendt and her husband, she recalls in an interview, first heard
rumors of the horrors of the Shoah, in 1943, they found them hard to believe.
But when confirmation came that the industrial production of terror and death
was indeed occurring, she felt as if “an abyss had opened.” It seemed beyond
both reason and forgiveness: “This,” she adds: “ought not to have happened”
(Arendt, 1994, pp. 13–14). Arendt’s persistent advocacy of stable and lasting
political spaces ought to be perceived against the horizon of the horrors of
twentieth century totalitarianism and genocide. The opposite of the horrifying
conditions of the death camps would seem to be either a metaphysical,
transcendent paradise, or some earthly condition that would allow for
everything that was denied the victims of totalitarian regimes. Arendt opposed
self-chosen withdrawal from political life, as well as marginalization and, of
course, the gradual denial of political belonging to human beings which
culminated and still culminates in torture, camps and genocide. So Arendt’s
persistent calls for lasting political spaces can be viewed against the horizon
of the horrors of the reduction of human beings to non-human status: to enter
the political space of appearances as one free human being amongst equals,
and to be allowed the dignity and joy of doing so, does not cancel out,
causally, the risks of totalitarianism. Neither does it comprise the only feasible
source of joy and meaning for actual human beings. But it arguably provides
the starkest contrast to totalitarianism imaginable. It is the most visibly
opposed condition to that of the abyss.
3. Revolution, Power, and Violence
Arendt’s slim 1969 essay On Violence, firmly rooted in its historical context,
comprises a compact presentation of several of her core concerns. First and
foremost, she seeks to divorce, conceptually, power from violence: while the
two, empirically, may intermingle in various ways, for Arendt, violence often
arises when power is lost, or to destroy power. Thus, her notion of power, as
“the human ability not just to act but to act in concert,” corresponds to an
Aristotelian understanding of the political (Arendt, 1970, p. 44. Cf. e.g.
Aristotle, 1996, pp. 13). Furthermore, for Arendt, power must arise from
coordinating action freely, not from coercion; this entails that one either meets
one’s equals in a political space—her ideal—or, when hierarchical
organization is needed, that such networks are driven by free consent, rather
than coercion. Hence, “Power is never the property of an individual; it
belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps
together,” and “[w]hen we say of somebody that he is ‘in power’ we actually
refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their
name” (Arendt, 1970, p. 44). Coordination, in so far as it is hierarchical and
does not rely on sheer coercion, on violence or the threat of violence,
functions by recourse to authority: “Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition
by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed”
(ibid., p. 45). And authority, in turn, derives in the familial sphere from the
simple fact of parenthood (and in patriarchal contexts, the father is elevated
above all others), and in politics from legitimacy: “Power springs up
whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy
from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may
follow” (ibid., p. 52).
In other words, the origins of the polity are crucial. It is hardly
surprising, then, to find Arendt stating, in her posthumously published
notebooks, “The problem of politics: the problem of grounding” (Arendt,
2002, p. 36; author’s translation of “Problem der Politik: Problem der
Gründung”). Revolutionary transformations could constitute what Arendt
(1970, p. 7) calls events, “occurrences that interrupt routine processes and
routine procedures.” But for them, or any other event, to carry the promise she
hails, they must entail the opening up of genuinely political spaces, arising
“out of acting and speaking together” (Arendt, 1998, p. 198)—a meaningful
revolution, from Arendt’s perspective, is a revolution which establishes
lasting political spaces.
At this point, however, we need to ask what is or who are holding back
such free action, thus restraining the political? Several factors are mentioned
by Arendt throughout her works, such as: I) the belief in a transcendent
horizon, which can include religious-eschatological hopes, or an ideological
belief in progressivism (Arendt [1970, p. 25], at least, distinguishes between
the two); II) the need to, not necessarily work, but labor, to produce rapidly
for consumption, or if not strictly speaking a need, a compulsion to be
integrated in the unrelenting processes of production and consumption, or to
be stigmatized and punished by society, or, of course, in many countries, the
very real risk of life-threatening poverty; III) violence, exerted by those who
wish to dispel power (i.e. concerted action), but also IV) the bureaucratic
machines of modern and contemporary politics, in which “politics has become
a profession and a career,” and “the ‘élite’ therefore is being chosen according
to standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical”
(Arendt, 2006b, pp. 269–270). Crucially, however, (V), this
professionalization of politics within the confines of party-apparatuses also
parallels the extension of bureaucratic machinery into ever larger spheres of
life, entailing “the rule by nobody,” which is not necessarily “no-rule; it may
168 JON WITTROCK
indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its cruelest and
most tyrannical versions” (Arendt, 1998, p. 40). This “rule by nobody” is
cruel, since there is no longer anything singular with which to communicate
grievances, and nothing highly visible, at which to direct anger: “Politically
speaking, the point is that loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute
violence for power” (Arendt, 1970, p. 54).
So those are anti-political tendencies which need to be addressed,
whether there is a revolutionary transformation or not. Unfortunately, Arendt
tells us too little about the social preconditions for maintaining a lasting
political space: what about social cohesion? Arendt came to distinguish
between the political and the social spheres, respectively, each working with
their own core principles. In the former sphere, equality is, or ought to be, the
ideal, but it is also “clearly restricted to the political realm. Only there are we
all equals” (Arendt, 2003, p. 204). The social sphere, however, operates
according to a different logic: “What equality is to the body politic—its
innermost principle,” Arendt says, in one of those typical Arendtian
formulations which are simultaneously off-putting and oddly endearing,
“discrimination is to society” (ibid., p. 205). But that is surely one-sided: a
less confrontational thinker might have chosen to start with association
instead. Anyway, association and discrimination characterize the social
sphere, but they ought not to give way to “mob rule,” people ought to be “law-
abiding” (ibid., p. 202). So while there is power—free, coordinated action—in
the social sphere, it ought not to be allowed to crystallize into violence. By
contrast, political power does operate by recourse to legal sanctions, and
legitimately so.
To her great credit, Arendt often refused to play the usual social games
of association and discrimination and she was not afraid to be controversial
and defend notions which ran counter to popular opinions. It might be
interesting to recall the headline of one review of Eichmann in Jerusalem in a
Jewish journal at the time: “Self-hating Jewess writes pro-Eichmann book”
(Cf. Elon, 2006, p. xx). But Arendt’s own willingness to be controversial and
open to debates on sensitive issues does not imply that social cohesion is
unimportant, or that her hopes for political spaces can dispense with these
factors.
“Local self-government and mixed Jewish-Arab municipal and rural
councils, on a small scale and as numerous as possible,” Arendt (2007, p. 401)
wrote, in 1948, “are the only realistic political measures that can eventually
lead to the political emancipation of Palestine. It is still not too late.”
Significantly, Arendt claims, here, that those would be the only realistic, not
the only desirable, measures. However, she consistently offered virtually the
same response to any political problems and conflicts on which she
commented—and in the end, this is only comprehensible if we focus on her
hopes for political spaces: as spaces of meaning and joy, as desirable
regardless of context. When addressing the specific problems of the formation
of Israel in the midst of hostile neighbors, Arendt does so by recourse to the

same ideal that she would apply to virtually any conflict or political problem
she analyzed; in maintaining her basic political belief regardless of context,
Arendt remained surprisingly consistent. But she was so, pertaining to what
she saw as made: that which is nomō and not physei.
4. Tensions: Universality and Particularity
Even among Arendt’s admirers, there is an often frank admission of some of

her flaws: “Arendt frequently frustrates” (Calhoun and McGowan, 1997, p. 1),
“we may well find her categories too vague and her concepts lacking adequate
definition” (Lang and Williams, 2005, p. 9), her understanding of Plato “rests
on a sometimes flatfooted reading of The Republic” (Euben, 2000, p. 151),
and when reading The Origins of Totalitarianism, Samantha Power states, in
introducing that work, that “one is tempted,” at times, “to throw the book
down in disgust over an essentialization or simplification” (2004, pp. xii–xiii).
Yet she continues to attract attention, due to the widespread perception that
she was, in spite of these flaws, on to something important in her portrayal of
the lack of political spaces and the threats of nihilism.
If Arendt consistently advanced any notion of salvation in this situation,
it was not transcendent, but immanent and, in her specific understanding,
political: she persistently advocated the resurrection of durable political
spaces of human interaction, ultimately as a source of meaning and joy in
themselves. To her mind, transcendent hopes, whether this-worldly, other-
worldly, or a combination of the two, tended to obscure and in the end
eradicate the very hopes she held herself. That is to say, whether in the guise
of religious hopes for the afterlife or for divine intervention, or in the guise of
ideological hopes for a promised future realm of justice, such projects tended
to at best ignore the immanent meaning of, and at worst destroy, those
political spaces which she defended.
This raises the question concerning the universality or particularity of
Arendt’s proposals. On the one hand, her advocacy of political spaces remains
heavily dependent on a few major examples derived from classical antiquity
and Western early modernity—primarily ancient Greek and Roman political
models, and the American Revolution. In her approach, Arendt mirrors a
German philosophical methodology, common from the eighteenth to the
twentieth centuries, of contrasting the problems of the present to a (perhaps
somewhat idealized) image of Greek antiquity.
Furthermore, her advocacy of political spaces and the immanent
meaning or joy of politics may seem somewhat one-sided—as if this is the
solution to any number of social and political ills and dilemmas which she
persistently holds on to. On the other hand, her persistency in favor of
political spaces does not exclude a reliance of their cultural context. Indeed,
Arendt realized that any political space is anchored in and penetrated by a
170 JON WITTROCK
shared cultural world, the practices of which are needed to stabilize the
potential dangers of the unpredictability and irreversibility of that very action
which she lauded. And this only deepens the tension between universality and
particularity. On the one hand, there is a universality of advocacy in Arendt,
in her consistent calls for stable political spaces, as opposed to authoritarian
rule, bureaucratic technocracy, and representative democracy. On the other,
there is the fact that any such political space will have to be stabilized by
recourse to the practices of its cultural context. And here, as we have seen,
Arendt again draws heavily upon what is commonly perceived as a Western
heritage, frequently stressing classical and Christian sources. This, however,
far from excludes the possibility of drawing upon corresponding practices of
promise and forgiveness in other contexts. But many questions remain
concerning how to ensure the cultural cohesion that a shared political space
would seem to presuppose. Is it really realistic to rely on the eventual
integrative function of political interaction per se? Unfortunately, there is
scarce real world support for such high hopes.
Finally, at the most fundamental level, there is yet another tension in
Arendt’s thought between universality and particularity, concerning sources of
existential meaning. In taking a decisive stand in favor of political spaces,
Arendt can be dismissive towards alternative sources of existential meaning.
Whether political spaces can really be stabilized and secured against the
threats of nihilism and violence without recourse to widely shared historical
narratives, with their attendant rituals and symbols, locating a source of
meaning beyond them, either in hopes for other-worldly salvation, or for some
this-worldly redemption, or vision of a collective historical fate, remains
unclear, to say the least. And this, in turn, raises several crucial questions
concerning the symbolic reproduction of identities in relation to conflicts in
the social sphere. In the end, one is almost forced to conclude, whether
willingly or not, that her call for political spaces simply becomes a competing
narrative in itself, in relation to other religious and ideological narratives, in
the sense of offering a source of existential meaning as well as being attached
to the consistent claim of constituting the best and perhaps necessary way of
addressing almost any problem.
Arendt’s ideal strikes me as both attractive and fascinating, but it is so in
much the same way as, say, the image of people floating above Earth in
gigantic space stations, which occupied public imagination during much of the
time that Arendt was making her arguments for political space—it seems
utopian not only in the sense of proposing a not yet realized ideal for human
existence, but also in the sense that it seems disconnected from the more
grubby realities of human existence and interaction. Had it been possible to
reach a marginalization of conflicts of interests with the aid of technological
wonders and material abundance, and had people been slightly more cerebral
and altruistic, Arendt’s ideal might already have succeeded and become the
model for political rule in some global federation of councils. As it is,
however, there remain stark conflicts of interest, and these are still mitigated
through the precarious balancing of influence and the continuous symbolic
reproduction of identities.
Any political space has to be situated in, and stabilized with recourse to,
inherited norms, which, while open to reinterpretation, must first be retrieved
from somewhere and passed on to someone. This suggests that political
spaces will take on distinct forms depending on, and relying upon, the shared
cultural contexts in which they are embedded. And any calls for political
spaces in the Arendtian understanding need to be more sensitive to conflicts
of material interests, the issues of association and discrimination, as well as
the symbolic reproduction of collective identities. Arendt’s thought does not
so much incorporate a hidden reliance on some particular cultural context,
which she attempts to force on others by claiming it is in some sense
universal. She is very clear that her ideal is rare and fragile and derived from
very specific historical examples. Rather, the problem is her unwillingness to
deal in depth with the relevance of the symbolic reproduction of identities,
and the way in which, more generally, the material and symbolic conflicts of
the social sphere inevitably impact on the interaction of political space, which
may even prevent it from taking on the form of a meeting of unique equals in
the first place. Perhaps this is ultimately what so provoked many of her
fiercest critics—neither a lack of love of the Jewish people, nor self-hatred,
but a certain blindness on her behalf. Being Jewish is not simply something
naturally given, but a set of understandings and self-understandings which are
continuously symbolically reproduced, contested, and reinterpreted—both
physei and nomō.
Twelve
LEFT (IN) TIME: HEGEL, BENJAMIN, AND

DERRIDA FACING THE STATUS QUO
Björn Thorsteinsson
Is the world doomed? Is humankind heading towards extinction? Can
catastrophe—environmental, economic, political, and, eventually, at once
universal and personal—be avoided? Should we even try to avoid it? Indeed,
should we even spend time worrying about it? Will things perhaps take care of
themselves or, in other words, will something—a god, nature, science,
technology, even politics—save us?
Why ask such questions? Why should we even let them, in their almost
unbearable and brutish banality, color the pages of our academic products?
And who are we anyway (to deal with them)? In the name of what, and in the
hope of achieving what?
In the following, an attempt will be made to produce what we might call
a piece of philosophical theatre that addresses these questions through an
intermingling of, mostly, three voices from the past two centuries or so.
To begin with, we will attend to the way in which the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida crossed paths with the German system-thinker
G.W.F. Hegel, demonstrating that the former’s relation to the latter is not as
simplistic as some might think. This will be brought out through a discussion
of Glas, a book written by Derrida forty years ago and dealing explicitly with
the Hegelian legacy. As it turns out, this textual analysis will lead us to an
examination of Walter Benjamin’s writings on history and dialectics, through
which we hope to locate, within the body of Hegel’s work as inherited by
Derrida, a certain materialist and messianic conception of temporality,
historicity, and subjectivity. Thus, in the end, we will try to show how the
three thinkers we engaged with can present us with a way of thinking about
historicity and temporality that does not exclude the irruption of the other or
the avoidance of catastrophe. All, of course, in the name of the hope that, after
all, redemption is still possible in face of the ongoing temptation of
resignation, apathy, and conformism—as well as, who knows, revolution.
1. On Derrida’s Intricate Relation to Hegel
Let us stipulate, at the outset, that there exists a prevalent “common opinion”
about the relation between Derrida and Hegel. Derrida, the inventor of
deconstruction, the thinker of différance and of archi-writing—of writing as
174 BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON
the “foundation without foundation” of reality, which also means that there is
no fixed ground, there are no stable units, only “traces,” each of which is only
“the trace of a trace” (Derrida, 1982, p. 26)—forever stands opposed to the
absolute, all-encompassing, self-sufficient, and self-identical system of
thought proposed by G.W.F. Hegel. According to this view, then, the entire
force of Derrida’s thinking seeks to demonstrate that the totalitarian
aspirations of the system are doomed to failure. Why and how is that? The
shorthand answer would be the following: because of the remains. Something
always remains, something that the system has not yet accumulated and
incorporated into its all-devouring and insatiable body—something which
resists the system, something other which, in its very singularity, always
springs forth or returns. And the shortcoming of the system, its failure, would
be, quite simply, that it neglects—omits, passes over, misses—the structural
nature of the remains. But, of course, the system does not stop there, nor does
the charge against it: faced by the remains or by the resistance, the system will
always react (in spite of itself, betraying its totalitarian ambition) in such a
way as to strive to exclude them or repress them. This repressive and
exclusive moment is by definition unthinkable by the system, but through this
move, it quickly assumes the figure of an inhumane, intolerant, and heartless
machine—reacting, precisely, to anything or anyone new, unforeseeable and
exceptional in a profoundly unjust way—manufacturing, instead, relentlessly,
an ongoing apology, at once repetitive and inventive, of the reigning state of
affairs.
Now, if these remarks are true, or, more specifically, and retreating to
our context here, if they truly apply to Derrida’s reading of Hegel, then
Derrida would join, without reserve, the society of latter-day philosophers
who see Hegel as essentially a reactive thinker, one that ends up advocating a
closed reading of history, a properly sterile notion of progress, and a
disempowering conception of the subject. As examples of such thinkers, one
could of course cite Theodor W. Adorno (cf. Mattias Martinson’s contribution
to the present volume), Gilles Deleuze (whose relation to Hegel may still be
more complex than is often assumed) and, more recently, Alain Badiou, who
has expressed doubts about the idea, which he attributes to Hegel (as well as
to Martin Heidegger), that “there is a History of being and thought,” against
which Badiou affirms that “rather there are histories of truth, of the
multiplicity of truths” (Badiou, 2005, p. 136). But the advocates of the closed
reading may also be found among those who relate to Hegel’s legacy in an
apparently positive way, to the point of conceiving of themselves as his
disciples. A prime example here would, of course, be Francis Fukuyama’s
influential and controversial “end of history” reading of Hegel. It should not
be forgotten that when advancing his hypothesis, Fukuyama very openly
proclaimed himself to be a faithful disciple of Hegel—as well as of Karl
Marx, even if his main mentor and inspiration should, perhaps, be proclaimed
to be Alexandre Kojève (Fukuyama, 1992, pp. xii, xvi–xviii, xxi).
Left (in) Time 175
The point I wish to raise here is, quite simply, that the issue of the
reading of Hegel, the question “How should we read Hegel?” is very much
alive today. This question cannot be neglected by us, the a/historical beings
that we have become, caught as we are between the seemingly irrational and
erratic, and unending, course of history and the relentlessly self-serving
discourse of the end of history—between revolts, protests, and popular
movements on the one hand and economic rationality, the “no alternatives”-
doctrine and imperial brutality on the other hand. As many writers, such as
Michel Foucault (1981, p. 74), have pointed out, Hegel is with us, whether we
like it or not—for is he not, to deploy a somewhat risky metaphor, the mother
of all thinkers of historicity as well as of a possible end to history? The
question of the relation of any human being, or beings, to the past, present,
and future, the question of the development of history—objective or
subjective, deterministic or open—can hardly be posed without some
reference to Hegel, however unconscious or unavowed. What is more, owing
to the cunning conception of the nuts and bolts of his system, his specter will
haunt us all the more if we neglect the task—the admittedly scholarly and
intellectual task (“thou art a scholar, Horatio, speak to it!”)—of addressing it.
It is my contention that Derrida did not fail to attend to Hegel’s ghost, or
Geist. This claim, when properly read, entails that Derrida’s interpretation of
Hegel turns out not to be as schematic and simplistic as implied by the
“common opinion” described above. This is not to say, however, that
Derrida’s encounter with Hegel is characterized by unproblematic acceptance.
Let us put it this way: there is at least one Hegel from whom Derrida wishes
to distance himself, with whom he begs to differ. And perhaps this Hegel is
(more or less) the one that has, for one reason or another, been mobilized and
given the status of “common opinion”. But there are other Hegels, other
manifestations of his spirit—or of his nature, or of his Idea—which Derrida
wants to engage with.
In this context, then, I see Derrida as having contributed to, or prepared
the way for, what Slavoj Žižek calls “a kind of ‘return to Hegel’,” a revival
which claims, quite emphatically, that “[t]he current image of Hegel as an
‘idealist-monist’ is totally misleading: what we find in Hegel is the strongest
affirmation yet of difference and contingency” (Žižek, 1989, p. 7). For Žižek,
thus, Hegel should not be reduced to a proponent of the end of history, or,
which comes down to the same thing, as an apologist for the status quo. I will
attempt to show that Derrida would agree with such a reading of Hegel—
inspired, possibly, by a strand of thinking, represented by Walter Benjamin,
that entertains a close and essential relation to Jewish messianism.
2. Derrida’s Glas (Hegel’s Left)
One way to argue for the complexity of Derrida’s relation to Hegel is simply
to point to a very concrete thing: Glas, Derrida’s bi-columnar 1974 book
which, to a great degree, focuses on Hegel. To be more precise, one of the

book’s two columns, the left one, offers an exceedingly complex, ambitious,
well-documented, sensitive, and thorough reading of Hegel’s body of work—
“a tour de force of Hegelian scholarship,” in the words of Simon Critchley
(1998, p. 197). (For the sake of completeness, let us note that the other
column, the right one—left uncited here—is more or less dedicated to Jean
Genet.) The gist of the Hegel reading offered in Glas should, in my opinion,
be seen in the light of a well-known remark made by Derrida in an interview a
few years before the publication of the book:
We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in

a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this
point. In effect I believe that Hegel’s text is necessarily fissured; that it
is something more and other than the circular closure of its
representation. It is not reduced to a content of philosophemes, it also
necessarily produces a powerful writing operation, a remainder of
writing, whose strange relationship to the philosophical content of
Hegel’s text must be re-examined, that is, the movement by means of
which his text exceeds its meaning, permits itself to be turned away
from, to return to, and to repeat itself outside its self-identity (Derrida,
1982, pp. 77–78).
In other words, there is (always) something left in Hegel, something that we—
the “we” of which Derrida speaks here, thus calling us forth, interpellating
us—should attend to and bring out. There is a “remainder of writing” in Hegel
which forever disrupts the circular closure of his Encyclopedia, of the self-
identical and immutable systematic construct that seems so concrete and
lifeless. Hegel, Derrida tells us, is alive—but this life apparently is not in any
way to be seen as absolutely divorced from death. After all, did he not die in
1831? Still, his writings live on: his philosophy, his oeuvre which, we should
remember, was in a strong sense what he lived for. And, what is more,
according to Derrida this work should not be seen as merely “dead letters”
stored in a few volumes—for, after all, as Derrida puts it, Hegel was not only
“the last philosopher of the book” but also “the first thinker of writing”
(Derrida, 1976, p. 26).
In this spirit, then, the immense reading machine that is Derrida’s Glas
sets out to do justice to the complexities of Hegel’s thinking. One of the key
operations performed by the book consists in reconstructing and
deconstructing the porous membrane separating the last two stages of the
development contained in the Phenomenology of Spirit: the stages of absolute
religion (or revealed religion) on the one hand, and absolute knowing (which
Derrida unfailingly abbreviates as “Sa” for the French savoir absolu,
inevitably connoting the Freudian “Id,” ça in French) on the other hand. Let
us note that the passage from absolute religion to absolute knowing has to be
Left (in) Time 177
seen as one “example,” an example among others, of “what is at stake” in

Hegel’s system in its entirety. As Derrida puts it, the relation between these
two terms is a “hinge” of the system (Derrida, 1986, pp. 218–291); or, in other
words, and in view of the particularities of this same system: on this passage,
the system itself hinges. The difference between the two terms, of course,
comes down to the very classic, and very Hegelian, difference between in-
itself and for-itself, between potentiality and actuality. Absolute religion is
potentially equivalent with absolute knowing; what is already-there is the true
content, albeit in slightly insufficient form; what is not-yet-there is the full
self-consciousness of the content. As Derrida explains:
Absolute religion is not yet what it is already: Sa. Absolute religion (the
essence of Christianity, religion of essence) is already what it is not yet:
the Sa that itself is already no more what it is yet, absolute religion.
The already-there of the not-yet, the already-no-more of the yet
cannot agree [s’entendre] [sic] (Derrida, 1986, p. 218; for comparison to
the original, see Derrida, 1974, p. 244).
The shortcoming of absolute religion lies in the fact that it remains on the
level of Vorstellung, of anticipatory representation (to use Derrida’s
explicatory rendering of the German word; Derrida, 1986, p. 219). As Derrida
puts it, in absolute religion “[t]he unity of the object and the subject does not
yet accomplish itself presently, actually, the reconciliation between the subject
and the object, the inside and the outside, is left waiting. It represents itself,
but the represented reconciliation is not the actual reconciliation” (ibid., pp.
219–20).
In other words, and to repeat, the mode of representation of absolute
religion, this Vorstellung or picture-thinking (as A.V. Miller’s translation of
Hegel’s Phenomenology has it) of the absolute, is not the whole story—for the
very surpassing of religion by absolute knowing means, according to Hegel,
that the content of religion, “the highest content,” finally comes to full self-
consciousness within philosophy—which means, of course, that the mode of
“mere” representational thinking is left behind to make room for genuinely
conceptual thinking—thinking as such, which seizes the content and frees it of
any kind of material support, thus overcoming the last cleavage separating the
content from itself. Then, the final reconciliation of the spirit with itself takes
place—the circle of absolute knowing is closed.
Be that as it may, then, but still we have to ask—we, readers and
inheritors of Hegel: what is the time of this latter representation—of the
representation of the final reconciliation presented to us by the last chapter of
the Phenomenology of Spirit? Has the final reconciliation really taken place,
once and for all? Do Hegel’s works, each on their own and all of them as a
whole, constitute and bring about the fulfillment of the becoming of the spirit?
In that case, could there still be time, could there still be spirit—and if so, in
what sense? How does one live, how are we, supposedly living and spiritual
beings, supposed to live inside the circle of absolute knowing? Is there really
life within that circle? If so, is that intelligent life? Spiritual life? Has the
already-there become absolutely predominant, has it come to reign supreme—
is there nothing (left) that is not-yet? In what sense is history finished, and in
what sense not?
Hegel has a response to this question, which, it must be added, can
justifiably be seen as the question of the system. Obviously, then, Hegel has to
have the answer to this question—if he didn’t, his system could hardly be seen
as complete, it would come down to a question with no answer. The answer,
as it (will) turn(s) out, lies at once on the surface and in the depths of the
system—but a very good formulation of it can be found in the aforementioned
last chapter of the Phenomenology, the one on absolute knowledge (das
absolute Wissen). But before we turn to that chapter, let us take a brief look at
the other end of the Phenomenology, namely the introduction to the book.
There we find another renowned passage in which Hegel describes our (or
cognition’s) mistaken efforts to capture the Absolute and bring it to us, against
which Hegel affirms the necessity of recognizing the fact that the Absolute we
are seeking, our Absolute, the only Absolute we will ever get, is already “with
us, in and for itself, all along, and of its own volition” (Hegel, 1977, p. 47). To
this poignant remark Hegel adds, a little further on, that, owing to the fact that
we thus start off, in our search for the Absolute, by presupposing “that the
Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and
separated from it, and yet is something real,” we thus exclude cognition from
the truth while acting as if cognition was on the side of truth, and thereby our
search for truth, which “calls itself fear of error,” merits, rather, to be called
“fear of the truth” (ibid.). Thus we find ourselves poised between error and
truth, confusing the two, looking for truth all around, on the other side, instead
of turning our gaze towards ourselves and our nearest surroundings, this side.
This, however, does not entail that we have already become one with the
Absolute—even if it is on our side, it is still removed from us, there still is a
gap. Accordingly, and moving now to the chapter on absolute knowing, we
find ourselves in the open space (and in the open time) that takes the form of
the hiatus between spirit (and/or consciousness) and the concept. “Time is the
Concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as
empty intuition [Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist und als leere
Anschauung sich dem Bewußtsein vorstellt],” writes Hegel, drawing the
following conclusion: “for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and
it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Concept, i.e. [as
long as it] has not annulled Time [deswegen erscheint der Geist notwendig in
der Zeit, und er erscheint so lange in der Zeit, als er nicht seinen reinen
Begriff erfaßt, das heißt, nicht die Zeit tilgt]” (Hegel, 1977, p. 487; Hegel,
1988, pp. 524; emphases in original). Everything here hinges on the “as long
as”—as long as the concept has not yet “caught up with itself”, as long it has
Left (in) Time 179
not yet (completely) returned to itself, the advent of the end, of the end of
history—of the spirit—remains to come, even here, at the end of the
Phenomenology. Therefore, as long as this is so, spirit is still (left) in time:
“Time […] appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet
complete within itself” (Hegel, 1977, p. 487). We are not yet at the end of
history—the annulation has not yet been achieved, the circle has not been
closed.
Or—and here we go again—has it? Is Hegel’s philosophy not (supposed
to be) the “grasping of Spirit’s pure Concept”? Does the realization that time
is the Dasein of the concept not already annul time? Let us read further. The
above-named incompleteness of spirit, and the injunction that follows,
consists of “the necessity to enrich the share which self-consciousness has in
consciousness” (ibid., p. 487). Does the realization that we spoke of, the
realization that we have just arrived at, towards the end of the
Phenomenology, not fall within the category of such an enrichment? Is this
realization not a matter of self-consciousness coming to increased
consciousness—that is to say, in this particular and unique case: complete
consciousness?
Still—and the very fact that the question returns, and remains, seems,
when properly conceived and thought through, ample proof that there is no
end to history, not yet—spirit must still be in time and, hence, there must be
time remaining. But why? Where does this injunction, this “must” come
from? The response goes as follows: even if spirit must necessarily seek its
own fulfillment, which is also its own suppression, and even if the realization
that this is so amounts, in a sense, to the achievement of the suppression, it is
also the case, still, that “Spirit is necessarily […] immanent differentiation
[Unterscheiden in sich]” (Hegel, 1977, p. 488; Hegel, 1988, p. 525). The last
sigh of the dialectics of spirit thus turns out also to be, eternally, its breath of
life. For, to turn now to another beginning, namely to the Preface to the
Phenomenology, Hegel insists that “[i]n my view, which can be justified only
by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and
expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (Hegel,
1977, pp. 9–10). How should this notion of the Subject be understood, then?
Let us read: “[…] the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or,
what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of
positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This
Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity” (ibid., p. 10).
Let us leave it there and step back and gather our senses. What these
incursions into Hegel’s Phenomenology demonstrate is that there can be no
question of assuming that Hegel’s own idea of his system is devoid of “living
Substance,” or, in other words, of subject as radical negativity. “In my view,”
as Hegel modestly puts it, this is what the full development of the system
should make the reader realize. There is no substance without subject—(at
least) as long as there is spirit, as long as we (someone, anyone) are left in
time. The complete and final grasping of the pure concept of spirit has not
happened—yet; because spirit is still negativity, it is (still) appearing in time,
or in other words, there is still time. Indeed, spirit is appearing here and now,
in us, before us, in our very act of asking the question, the question of the
system itself. And this asking is always also a kind of resistance—to the very
idea that history could be finished, here and now. Of course it isn’t! Just open
your eyes and look around! This indignant realization of the “not-yet” is
absolute knowing. And this entails also, as Derrida meticulously brings out in
his analysis of these issues in Glas, that the limit between absolute religion
and absolute knowing has not been crossed, and left behind, once and for all.
Thus, absolute knowing circumscribes the very dialectic of substance and
subject, of the end and the ever new beginning. The schism, the gap is still
there, but in a different mode, for it has been posited, i.e. represented, or, in
other words, laid bare for us to behold:
The reconciliation has produced itself, and yet it has not yet taken place,
is not present, only represented or present as remaining in front of,
ahead of, to come, present as not-yet-there and not as presence of the
present. […] Consciousness represents to itself the unity, but it is not
there. In this does it have, it must be added, the structure of a
consciousness, and the phenomenology of spirit, the science of the
experience of consciousness, finds its necessary limit in this
representation (Derrida, 1986, p. 220).
This, then, would be as far as we can go with the system. A lesson waits to be
learned, one that can for instance be formulated thus: “[…] if philosophy—
Sa—was considered to be the myth of absolute reappropriation, of self-
presence absolutely absolved and recentered, then the absolute of revealed
religion would have a critical effect on Sa. It would be necessary to keep to
the (opposite) bank, that of religion […], in order to resist the lure of Sa”
(ibid., p. 221). Revealed religion thus assumes the guise of the very resistance
to totalization. Hidden in these formulations, there is an injunction that
Derrida does not fail to spell out. In French: “Il faut se donner le temps. Le
reste du temps” (Derrida, 1974, p. 252). Or, in the English translation: “It is
necessary to give oneself time. Time’s remain(s)” (Derrida, 1986, p. 226). We
have to give ourselves time, presuppose that there is time, that there will be
time—the time that remains, the remains of time. Such is the injunction
ceaselessly directed towards absolute knowing by what has not yet seized
itself fully in its concept and thus represents the necessity and presence of
time—absolute religion.
Left (in) Time 181
3. Benjamin—Being a Dialectician
Avid readers of Walter Benjamin will have discerned familiar themes in what
has been said here—not least in the conclusion of our analysis of the relation
between absolute religion and absolute knowing in Hegel which carries more
than a distant echo of Benjamin’s famous metaphor involving the puppet of
historical materialism and the dwarf of theology at the opening of his Theses
on the Philosophy of History. Furthermore, in The Arcades Project (Das
Passagen-Werk), Benjamin develops his much-discussed concept of
“dialectical image,” defining it as “an image that emerges suddenly, in a
flash.” To this he then immediately adds the following clarification: “What
has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up in the now of its
recognizability” (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 473). In other words, the dialectical
image concerns the relation of “what has been” to the “now.” However, what
defines it as dialectical image is the fact that what has been appears, to the
observer, in a flash. The effect of the dialectical image is a rupturing of the
smooth and continuous progression of time. Essentially, such images possess
a unique capability to open up time, paving the way for a genuinely subjective
intervention into the smooth and unproblematic running of the machine of
history:
For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a
particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility
[Lesbarkeit] only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding “to
legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their
interior. Every present day [Jede Gegenwart] is determined by the
images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular
recognizability [Erkennbarkeit]. In it, truth is charged to the bursting
point with time (Benjamin, 1999a, pp. 462–463; Benjamin, 1991, pp.
577–578).
The concepts at stake here stand in close relation to the conceptual

constellation developed by Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of
History. There, Benjamin offers us, for example, the following delimitation:
“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty
time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (Benjamin, 1999b,
pp. 252–253; Benjamin, 1974, p. 701). Now it is precisely the conception of
time as homogeneous or empty—which he relates alternatively to historicism
and to (social-democratic) conformism—that Benjamin sets out to combat in
his Theses. What is wrong with such an attitude towards time, among other
things, is that it functions as a justification of the present situation, or, in other
words, it only contributes to the dominant interpretation of history—the
history of the victors. The historicist, for example, sincerely believes that
“nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history”
(Benjamin, 1999b, p. 246). This stance ultimately boils down to the standpoint
that we, in our present situation, have no obligations towards the past or
towards the claims staked upon us by the no longer living. For us, past
generations are gone, but they are no more lost than anything else; they are
safely preserved in the grand museum of history, and therefore we do not need
to pay any attention to them as anything other than curious artifacts. Implicit
here is a naïve and uncritical (and doubtless familiar) idea of progress (ibid.,
p. 252)—an idea that inevitably serves as “a tool of the ruling classes” (ibid.,
p. 247).
Against this subservient and disempowering attitude, Benjamin advances
another conception of time, an essentially messianic conception that he wants
to relate to historical materialism in order for the latter to become what it truly
should be. We can regard materialism in this context as referring to a certain
sympathy with the victims, with the slain and the fallen in the process of
history. If there is ever to be a genuine redemption of humankind as such, and
not only the ultimate and categorical triumph of the victors (the strong, the
mighty, the wealthy), the downtrodden need to be rehabilitated. This can only
happen through the “dialectical” leap into the unknown, the “leap in the open
air of history” that Marx termed revolution (ibid., p. 253). The revolution is
bound to take place “in an arena where the ruling classes give the commands”
(ibid., p. 253), simply because there is no other arena—which means, among
other things, that the notion of history that prevails, in this arena, is the
conformist-historicist one. Revolution entails, precisely, that “the
revolutionary classes” (ibid., p. 253), or “the struggling, oppressed class”
(ibid., p. 251), make “the continuum of history explode” (ibid., p. 253).
To mark the opposition between the historicist and the historical
materialist even more clearly, let us reproduce Benjamin’s Thesis XVI in its
entirety:
A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which

is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.
For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.
Historicism gives the “eternal” image of the past, the historical
materialist supplies an experience of the past that stands separate. The
historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called
“Once upon a time” in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of
his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history (ibid., p.
254).
The reason why the historical materialist “remains in control of his powers” is
precisely that he resists the temptation to depict history as a homogeneous
continuum of internally indiscernible events which follow each other in
smooth procession. Against this harmless and diluted conception, he is
conscious of the fact that he is facing a certain danger: “every image of the
Left (in) Time 183
past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens
to disappear irretrievably” (ibid., p. 247). Against this threat, the historical
materialist strives to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger” (ibid., p. 247). This entails an awareness of the way in which a
particular “historical subject” can appear in the form of a “monad,” in which
“thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions” (ibid., p.
254). In this moment of history condensed into a monad, the historical
materialist “recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put
differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (ibid.,
p. 254). And it is precisely in virtue of this notion of specific “condensed”
moments—which Benjamin also calls “chips [Splitter] of Messianic time”
(ibid., p. 255; for comparison to the original, see Benjamin, 1974, p. 704)—
that the historical materialist severs himself from the impotent conformism of
the historicist.
Now let us return to Hegel and ask: how should we relate him to this
conceptual scheme? In order to address this question, we need go no further
than to Benjamin himself. In one of his “first sketches” for The Arcades
Project, he writes:
On the dialectical image. In it, time dwells [steckt]. It already dwells in

Hegel’s dialectic [Sie steckt schon bei Hegel in der Dialektik]. But this
Hegelian dialectic knows time solely as the properly historical, if not
psychological, time of thinking [Denkzeit]. The time differential
<Zeitdifferential> in which alone the dialectical image is real [wirklich]
is still unknown to him (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 867 [translation altered;
word in angle brackets in original: Benjamin, 1991, pp. 1037–8]).
To unravel these somewhat cryptic remarks a little, let us note that Benjamin
claims that time, by which he clearly means the temporality of the now
(Jetztzeit), really is contained in Hegelian dialectics—making it possible, by
the same token, for the dialectical image to arise within the Hegelian scheme
of things. However, Benjamin reproaches the Hegelian conception for
reducing time to a “time of thinking” which Benjamin further qualifies as
“properly historical” (implying historicism) or even “psychological.” This
implies, for Benjamin, that the Hegelian conception of time does not allow for
the dialectical image to fully realize itself—in the sense of becoming effective
(wirklich); or, in other words, what Benjamin calls “the time differential”—by
which he seems to mean some sort of a tangent touching the unfolding path of
time, allowing for it to “tangent off” in a radically new direction—is quite
simply unknown to Hegel, or, at the very least, inoperative within the
Hegelian system.
In light of the above, I want to suggest that Hegel would not be
insensitive to dialectical images in general—or to the “time differential” or the
“historical index” in particular. Rather, responding to the Hegelian injunction
regarding the necessity of a subject (implied in the interlacing of absolute

religion and absolute knowing) would always entail, and presuppose, a
sensibility towards dialectical images. For Hegel, dialectical images would
take the form of those “little pieces of the real” that one encounters within
substance, and that allow genuine action to take place; such action, in turn,
affirms and confirms one’s status as participating in truth or “the whole” as
not only substance, but also subject. Thus, within Hegel’s system, dialectical
images serve to demonstrate that the whole is not yet the true, at least not in
the sense of the whole truth. As Žižek points out, and Hegel would doubtless
have agreed, the “positive-empirical activity [of the subject] is possible only if
he structures his perception of the world in advance in a way that opens the
space for his intervention” (Žižek, 1989, p. 218). This realization of the need
for subjective structuring of perception, in order for the possibility of
subjective intervention to exist, is yet another name for absolute knowing.
With reference to the common Benjaminian theme of dreaming and waking
up, we may say, thus, that it matters what and how we dream, and that we
then realize this in the course of waking up. Only in this way can substance
also be(come) subject. Let us not fail to see that this is an injunction. And
dialectical images are, by definition, those “things” that we encounter within
substance that arrest us—interpellate us—and (have the potential to) “wake us
up,” awaken our desire as well as our indignation, and turn us into subjects.
Benjamin writes:
Being a dialectician means having the wind of history in one’s sails. The
sails are the concepts. It is not enough, however, to have sails at one’s
disposal. What is decisive is knowing the art of setting them (Benjamin,
1999a, p. 473).
This setting of the sails only becomes possible after the advent of absolute
knowing—given that this last term is “nothing but a name for the
acknowledgment of a certain radical loss” (Žižek, 1989, p. 7)—a loss which
comes down to the realization that substance is still incomplete and that the
subject is still called for. But it also entails a sense of what Hegel called
“positing the presuppositions,” defined by Žižek as a “retroactive conversion
of contingency into necessity, in this conferring of a form of necessity on the
contingent circumstances” (Žižek, 2008, p. 131). Perceiving the dialectical
image in its moment of legibility, attending to the splinters of messianic time
when they arrive—and, while we wait, setting the sails, in the name of the
nameless oppressed, for a justice to come: preconditions of subjectivity, of
breaking out of the circle, of reinventing reality—of revolution.
Left (in) Time 185
4. Reading—Citations
To finish, let us read the beginning of Glas—its left column, the one that is
dedicated to Hegel—which starts in mid-sentence:
what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?
For us, here, now: from now on that is what one will not have been
able to think without him.
For us, here, now: these words are citations, already, always, we will
have learned that from him.
Who, him? (Derrida, 1986, p. 1).
These strange sentences invite a number of questions. Why are these common
words, “for us, here, now,” citations? Citations from where? Or, to repeat
Derrida’s own question: “Who, him?” My hypothesis is that the answer is not
only the obvious one: “Hegel”—but a slightly more complex formula, which,
nevertheless, is Hegelian in its very structure: we should think of this figure,
who has taught us something about citations and about the “for us, here,
now,” not only as Hegel, but also as Benjamin. For, in this context, we should
recall the point made by Benjamin that citations can be piercing, and that they
can arrive at their moment of readability any time—thus becoming what he
terms citations à l’ordre du jour (Benjamin, 1999b, p. 246). For us, here, now,
readers of Hegel and/or Benjamin and/or Derrida, any moment, indeed, is, or
should be seen as, “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter”
(ibid., p. 255).
Thus we remain poised—between the already-there and the not-yet.
Positioning ourselves, here and now, in this in-between, we become capable
of appreciating the import of the dialectical images that appear, sometimes,
for those who remain sensitive to them. Derrida has a name for this between:
différance. We are in différance—and, as such beings, we are subject to the
call of justice; a justice to come which is not transcendent but seizes us here
and now, when we least expect it, in a more or less unexpected and
unforeseeable figure—summoning us, precisely, to act as subjects within the
social substance.
As Catherine Malabou (2005) has pointed out, Hegel, towards the very
end of his life, left us some sort of a testament, contained in his introduction to
the second edition of the Logic, completed on November 7, 1831, seven days
before his death. A testament to those left behind: instructions, but also an
injunction:
A plastic discourse demands, too, a plastic receptivity and understanding

on the part of the listener; but youths and men of such a temper who
would calmly suppress their own reflections and opinions in which
original thought is so impatient to manifest itself, listeners such as Plato

feigned, who would attend only to the matter in hand, could have no
place in a modern dialogue; still less could one count on readers of such
a disposition (Hegel, 1989, p. 31).
Now I have been giving some indications to the effect that in Benjamin and
Derrida, Hegel may have found two such “good” readers—characterized by
the “plasticity” that is needed to genuinely receive and understand the “plastic
discourse” that, surprisingly, Hegel makes his own work, at the eve of his life,
out to be. Maybe Benjamin and Derrida provide us here with a good example
to follow. A lot—if not everything—hinges upon it. For, as Benjamin (1999a,
p. 473) puts it, “the catastrophe is the status quo.” Or, more explicitly:
Definitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe—to have missed

the opportunity. Critical moment—the status quo threatens to be
preserved. Progress—the first revolutionary measure taken (Benjamin,
1999a, p. 474).
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Oleg Budnitskii is Professor of History and Director of the Center for the
History and Sociology of WWII, Department of History, National Research
University-Higher School of Economics, Moscow. His recent publications
include Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920
(Philadelphia, 2012, trans. of Russian ed. of 2005), Debate about Russia: V.A.
Maklakov-V.V. Shulgin. Correspondence 1919–1939 (Moscow, 2012, editor,
in Russian) and Archive of Jewish History, vol. 6 (Moscow, 2011, editor and
contributor, in Russian). The study which appears in this volume was
implemented in the framework of the Basic Research Program of the National
Research University Higher School of Economics in 2014.
Catherine Chalier is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris Ouest

Nanterre. Her many publications include Emmanuel Levinas: L’utopie de
l’humain, (Albin Michel, 1995), La trace de l’Infini: Emmanuel Levinas et la
source hébraïque (Le Cerf, 2002) and Spinoza lecteur de Maïmonide: La
question théologico-politique (Le Cerf, 2006). Her most recent publications
are Le désir de conversion (Seuil, 2011), Kalonymus Shapiro: Rabbin au
Ghetto de Varsovie (Arfuyen, 2011) and Présence de l'espoir (Seuil, 2013).
Carl Cederberg is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Södertörn University,

Stockholm. In 2010 he defended his doctoral thesis entitled Resaying the
Human: Levinas Beyond Humanism and Anti-Humanism. He is currently
involved in a research project on Central and East European narratives on
Europe.
Michael Löwy, born in Brazil in 1938, lives in Paris since 1969. He is

presently emeritus Research Director at the CNRS (National Center for
Scientific Research). His books and articles have been translated into twenty
nine languages. Among his main publications are Redemption and Utopia:
Libertarian Judaism in Central Europe (Stanford University Press, 1992), and
Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (Verso,
2005).
Mattias Martinson is Professor of Systematic Theology and Studies in

Worldviews, Uppsala University. He is the author of Perseverance without
Doctrine: Adorno, Self-critique, and the Ends of Academic Theology (Lang,
2000) and has written numerous articles on Adorno and Critical Theory.
Martinson’s two most recent books develop the concept and praxis of
‘experimental theology’ and explore the cultural dialectics of a post-Christian
situation.
Elena Namli is Professor of Ethics and Research Director at the Centre for
Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. She has published three
monographs and several articles on Russian philosophy and theology. Her
current work deals with post-colonial critique of traditional liberal
understandings of the concept of human rights.
Alexandra Polyan is Research Fellow at the Department for Jewish Studies,

Institute of African and Asian Studies, Moscow State University. She is
member of the editorial board of the annual of Jewish Studies
“Tsaytshrift/Chasopis.” In 2013, her co-authored book on Russian-Jewish
Berlin in the 1920–30s (Budnitskii and Polyan, Russko-yevreyskii Berlin,
1920–1941. Moscow, Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2013) was published.
She has also published numerous articles on Yiddish, prosody of American
Yiddish Poetry and of Hebrew Maskilic Poetry, and the history of Russian-
Jewish Berlin. She is translator of Zalmen Gradowsky’s “In harts fun
genem”—the diary and literary notes of an Auschwitz Sonderkommando
(Moscow, 2011).
Victor Jeleniewski Seidler is Professor Emeritus of Social Theory at the

Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. His many
publications include Shadows of the Shoah: Jewish Identities and Belonging
(Berg, 2000), Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2007),
Remembering Diana: Cultural Memory and the Reinvention of Authority
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Remembering 9/11: Terror, Trauma and
Social Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Jayne Svenungsson is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at

Stockholm School of Theology. She is currently involved in the research
program Time, Memory and Representation: A Multidisciplinary Program on
Transformations in Historical Consciousness. Among her recent publications
are Den gudomliga historien: Profetism, messianism och andens utveckling
(Glänta, 2014) and (with Jonna Bornemark and Mattias Martinson),
Monument and Memory (LIT Verlag, 2014).
Björn Thorsteinsson holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Université Paris VIII

(Vincennes-St. Denis). He is the author of La question de la justice chez
Jacques Derrida (L’Harmattan, 2007) and of the chapter on Jacques Derrida
in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology (2011), as well as of
numerous articles on topics within phenomenology, poststructuralism,
German idealism and critique of ideology. He currently holds a research
position at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Iceland.
Alana M. Vincent is Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the University of Chester.

She is the author of Culture, Communion and Recovery: Tolkienian Fairy-
Contributors 203
Story and Inter-Religious Exchange (Cambridge Scholars, 2012) and

Remembering Amalek: Religion, War and National Identity (Pickwick, 2013),
as well as a number of articles and book chapters on modern Judaism and
religion and the arts.
Jon Wittrock is Doctor of Political and Social Sciences of the European

University Institute, where in 2008 he defended his Ph.D. thesis, Beyond
Burgenland and Kakanien? Post-National Politics in Europe: Political
Justification and Critical Deliberation. He currently teaches at Södertörn
University, Stockholm. His research focuses on the intersection between
religion and politics with a particular emphasis on historical perspectives. He
has published two anthologies in Swedish and is currently engaged in several
international publication projects.
INDEX
Abraham (biblical), 23, 57, 58 Bible, biblical, 4, 23–25, 27, 28, 48, 58,
absolute, 65, 67–69, 70, 74, 76–68, 98–99,
evil, 120 102, 125, 132, 155
knowing, 174, 176–178, 180, 181, 184 Bikerman, Iosif, 112–113, 114, 116,
religion, 176–178, 180, 181, 184 118–121, 122–124, 126
The, 35, 178 Blum, Léon, 30
Adorno, Theodor W. 3–4, 11, 33–48, 70, Bloch, Ernst, 1, 3, 11, 17, 24, 27–29, 31,
77–78, 95, 174 33, 52, 54, 66, 77,
Negative Dialectics, 33, 37, 44, 95 Blumenberg, Hans, 1, 4, 65–66, 70–78
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 44 Bolshevi(k)(ks)(sm), 11, 16, 17, 61, 112–
aesthetics, 57, 98, 149 118, 120–126, 139, 146, 158
anarchism, 2, 11, 12, 51, 58, 62, 63 Böme, Jacob, 50
aniconism, 97–99 Buber, Martin, 4, 9–12, 16, 19, 49–57,
Angelus Novus (Klee), 43 59–63, 66, 77, 78, 86, 130
animal laborans, 96 The Legend of the Baal-Schem, 16, 54
anti–Semitism 15, 54, 55, 67, 69, 100, Stories of Rabbi Nachman, 54
102, 112, 115, 120, 127, 130, Bund, 16, 17, 19, 27, 52, 59, 97, 106, 119
146, 158
Antokolski, Mark, 100–101 Cassirer, Ernst, 135
archi–writing, 173–174 Chagall, Marc, 5, 95, 97, 105–109, 135
Arendt, Hannah, 6, 77, 95–96, 161–171 Civil War (in Russia), 5, 111, 112, 116,
art 2, 3, 5, 45–46, 50, 95–109, 135, 154 119, 122–125, 146, 154
assimilation, 50, 54, 58, 67, 99, 100, 101, Cohen, Hermann, 3, 5–6, 12, 61, 66, 77,
106, 108, 122, 152, 158 127–143
Augustine of Hippo, 72 Religion of Reason Out of the Sources
Auschwitz, 10, 41 of Judaism 128–131, 135
community, 4, 12, 29, 49–51, 52, 58, 60,
Baal Shem Tov, 9, 54 62, 63, 80, 90, 91, 93, 101, 121,
The Legend of the Baal-Schem (Buber), 133
16, 54 Jewish, 13, 14, 31, 61, 98, 100, 102,
Badiou, Alain, 78, 80, 82–83, 89, 93, 174 112, 114, 116–118, 122–125,
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 127, 135, 137–138, 130, 146, 148
139–140, 143 communitarian(ism), 4, 12, 50, 51, 53, 63
Bacon, Francis, 71, 73 communism, Communist Party, 27, 29,
Bergson, Henry, 23, 86 62, 116, 125, 140, 145, 149, 152,
Berlin, Isaiah, 9, 65 156
Benjamin, Walter, 7, 20, 33–34, 42–46, anti-, 16, 146
52, 53, 54, 77, 165, 173, 175, Communist Manifesto, The (Marx), 69
181–186 conformism, 7, 52, 173, 181, 182, 183
Bensaïd, Daniel, 78 conservativ(e)(ism), 4, 49, 51, 63, 79, 82,
Berdiaev, Nikolai, 123 85–86, 88, 93, 115, 120
Bezalel School, 5, 97, 99, 100–105, 106, Copernicus, Nicolaus, 72
108, 109
correlation (between God and man), faith (religious), 24–27, 29, 56–58, 68,
128–129, 132, 133, 141 69, 71, 76, 116, 133, 155
creation, 26, 31, 42, 43, 46, 74, 76, 99, Fall, the, 42–44, 45
129, 137, 147, 157 feminism, 3, 10, 11, 16, 17, 20,
re-, 34, 41 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 56
Critchley, Simon ,79, 176 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 59
Christian(ity), 1, 4, 6, 10, 13–15, 20, 26, First World War, see World War I
50, 55, 66–69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 98, Foucault, Michel, 40, 175
99, 105, 123, 127, 128, 129, 132, Fukuyama, Francis, 174
137, 140, 149, 158, 161–162, Futurism, 106, 108
163, 170, 177, see also Judeo-
Christian Great War, see World War I
Galilei, Galileo, 72, 73
Deconstruction, 173, 176 Galut, see exile
Deleuze, Gilles, 40, 174 Gaon, Saadia, 128, 130
democracy, 17, 65, 140, 163, 165, 170 Genet, Jean, 176
Denikin, Anton, 111, 116, 122 Gogarten, Friedrich, 69
Derrida, Jacques, 6–7, 77, 78, 80–82, 84, Goldmann, Nahum, 61
85, 131, 173–177, 180, 185–186 Gramsci, Antonio, 11
Descartes, René, 14
dialectic(s)(al), 3–4, 5, 7, 35, 36–42, 44, Hardt, Michael, 40, 47, 48
46, 56, 69, 78, 143, 173, 179, halakah see law
180, 182–184 Hasidism, 9, 32, 54–56, 154
Dialectic of Enlightenment Haskalah, 17
(Horkheimer and Adorno), 44 Heb(ew)(raic) (mode of thought), 17–18,
Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 33, 37, 19, 20, 57, 67, 69, 76
44, 95 (language), 61, 63, 101, 102, 132
dialectical image, 44, 181, 183–184, (people, culture), 24, 28, 56, 101,
185 104–105,
difference, 173, 185 Hebrew Bible 3
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 16 Heidegger, Martin, 69, 70–71, 75, 174
Duma (State Duma), 117 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6–7,
13–14, 24, 33, 34–40, 71, 98–99,
ecology, 16 173–179, 181, 183–186
Eisner, Kurt, 61–62, 135 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 59, 131
embodiment, 3, 10, 12, 13–14, 15–17, Herzl, Theodor, 54, 95, 99, 100, 102
18, 47, 153 history, 1, 3, 6, 7, 17, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30–
Enlightenment, 11, 17, 25, 41, 44, 65, 67, 32, 34, 38, 43–44, 47, 52, 53, 55,
70–71, 75, 127 57, 58, 63, 67–68, 71–73, 75–78,
Counter-, 9 105, 115, 123, 131, 135, 136–
Jewish, see haskalah 140, 142, 154, 157, 158, 164,
eschatology, 11, 71, 73 173–175, 178, 180–184
ethics, 5–6, 17, 29, 80–84, 99, 127, 128, Angel of (Klee), 43–44
131, 132, 134–143, end of, 174–175, 179–180
exile, 31, 58, 66, 67, 95, 121 of
American Yiddish poetry, 6, 147
Index 207
art, 99, 105, 108 “Ideology and Idealism” (Levinas), 83,

ideas, 74 87, 90
Judaism, 129, 138 imperialism, 60, 61, 142, 146, 152
Lithuania, 2 injustice, 16, 69, 83, 87, 90, 93, 129, 143,
Marxism, 39 153
philosophy, 136 Isaiah (prophet), 9, 25, 27, 28, 52, 54
political thought, 164 Israel
Russian Revolution(s), 140
(as metonym for the Jewish people),
society, 39
15, 24–25, 26, 58, 85, 133, 142,
socialism, 51
162
Meaning in History (Löwith), 65–70,
(geographical) 12, 102, 104, 105, 169
74, 75
messianism in, 3, 11, 26, 30, 31, 57,
65, 76, 133 Jewish law, see law
natural, 104, 133 Joachim of Fiore, 65, 70
Judaism, 1, 5, 10, 15, 17, 28, 52, 53–58,
philosophy of, 65, 68–71, 73, 138, 181
59–60, 76–78, 80, 87, 89–90, 92,
personal or familial, 9, 10, 23, 27, 101
98–99, 105, 117, 127, 128–131,
salvation history, 67, 69, 76
133–134, 136, 140, 142, 162
teleological view of, 24, 26, 28, 29,
47, 65, 67–69, 71, 75, 77, 136– Judeo-Christian, 11, 71, 73, 122
137, 182 justice, 1, 15, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 30–
32, 63, 69, 81, 87, 88, 132, 134,
universal, 47, 69
136–137, 143, 164, 169, 184,
Holloway, John, 39–40, 47
185
Holocaust, 2, 12–14, 20, 166
social justice, 78, 128–130, 140, 141,
homo faber, 96–97
hope, 3–5, 7, 13, 23–32, 37, 45, 69, 75, see also injustice
78, 84, 87, 133, 141, 165, 169,
kabbalah, 3
173
Kagan, Matvei, 127, 136–140, 143
in Christianity, 161–162
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 6, 11, 14, 15, 24–25,
messianic, 1, 42, 65, 68, 77, 133, 134,
86, 98–99, 127–128, 129, 131,
167
political, 2, 19, 35, 47, 51, 82, 144, 133–138
168 Kayshchiesya (repentant), 113–115, 117–
118, 123, 124, 126
Horkheimer, Max, 40, 44
Kiev, 111
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 44
Klee, Paul, see Angelus Novus
humanism, 15, 17, 19, 83, 84–85, 88, 89,
Kepler, Johannes, 72
130–131, 134, 140, 141
anti-humaism, 74, 77, 84 kingdom (of God), 11, 26, 65
Kojève, Alexandre, 174
Kropotkin, Pyotr, 12
idealism, 34–36, 38, 46, 76, 83, 86, 87,
89, 128, 131, 134
labor, 15, 18, 40, 42, 75, 95–96, 132,
identity, 86, 97, 98, 106, 125, 128, 176
136, 137, 147, 152, 164, 167
Jewish identity, 55
politics of identity, 91 Landau, Grigorii, 112–114, 116, 118,
ideology, 4, 34–36, 38, 52, 53, 65, 66, 120–122, 124, 126
Landauer, Gustav, 4, 12, 49–63, 77, 78
69, 70, 75, 83, 85, 111, 149, 157,
law, 11, 43, 51, 67, 72, 74, 76, 81, 88, 91, materialism, 2, 7, 28, 29, 34, 35, 36, 38,
98–99, 107, 108, 128–130, 133, 41, 44, 46, 50, 68–69, 88, 140,
135, 141–143, 168, 169 173
left (political), 6, 12, 18, 19, 70, 89, 130 historical materialism, 140, 181, 182–
leftist(s), 20, 61, 79, 89, 106, 145, 147, 183
148, 149, 151, 153–156, 158, Matamoros, Fernando, 39
159 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 153
Lenin, Vladimir, 95, 117, 126, 148, 152, Mendelssohn, Moses, 99, 131
155–156, 158 Messiah, 17, 20, 24–27, 30–32, 42, 55,
Leninism, 140 58, 63, 131, 158, 185
Levinas, Emmanuel, 2, 3, 5, 15, 17, 24– Messiani(c)(sm), 1–5, 7, 11, 16–17, 19,
26, 29–32, 77, 79–93, 131, 137, 24, 27, 30–31, 33, 39–42, 44,
139, 140 46–48, 52–53, 54, 56, 57–58,
“Ideology and Idealism”, 83, 87, 90 65–66, 68, 76–78, 127, 130–131,
liberation, 3, 20, 60, 131, 133–134, 135, 133–135, 137, 158, 162, 164,
141–143, 158, 165 173, 175, 182–184
from occupation, 165 midrash, 30
Jewish, 3 Milosz, Czeslav, 29
of Russia, 61 modernity, modern age, 35, 43–45, 49,
political, 34, 95, 133–134, 140 51, 53, 56–58, 65–68, 70–76, 81,
universal, 6, 127, 143 86, 90, 93, 98, 104, 112, 155,
liberal, liberalism 20, 52, 53, 54, 65, 78, 164, 167, 169, 186
81, 86, 88, 111, 141 monarchist(s), 114, 117–118, 124
libertarian(ism), 10, 12, 16, 17, 19–20, monotheism, 5, 127–129, 132–134, 141–
52, 62–63 143
Litvak(s), 2, 9 Mursi, Muhammad, 47–48
Löwith, Karl, 1, 65–71, 73–78 mystic(ism)(s), 16, 44, 49, 50, 54, 56,
Meaning in History, 65–70, 74, 75 132, 133, see also kabbalah
Lukacs, Georg, 16–17, 54
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 105 natality, 96, 164
National Socialism, 81
Maimonides, Moses, 128, 129–130 nationalis(m)(t), 59, 97–99, 101–102,
Malevich, Kazimir, 106, 108, 109, 135 113, 130, 142
Mandel, Veniamin, 112–117, 120, 121– Jewish nationalism, 99, 100, 105, 113,
122, 124 119, see also Zionism
Mann, Thomas, 33 national spirit, 97, 99, 101–102, 105
Mannheim, Karl 52, 53 negativity, 37, 44, 179–180
Manor, Dalia, 101–104 Negri, Antonio, 40, 47–48
Marx, Karl, 3, 10, 13, 15, 28, 31, 34, 38, neo-Kantian philosophy, 6, 127–128,
46, 63, 68–70, 75, 76, 174, 182 135, 137
The Communist Manifesto, 69 neoliberalism, 19, 87
Marxis(m)(t)(ts), 2, 4, 11, 12, 18, 24, 28, Nevel, 6, 127, 135, 137, 139–140
33–34, 36, 44, 46, 47, 52, 61, 69, Nevi’im, see prophetic literature
76, 80, 83, 87, 89, 95–96 New Bezalel School, 104
post-, 37–40, 47 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 67
nihilism, 23, 161, 169, 170
Index 209
Orient, 60, 102 Rabbi Nachman bar Yaakov (Talmud),

Oriental, 57, 68, 105 31
Orientalism, 102–103 Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, 54
auto-Orientalism 102 Stories of Rabbi Nachman (Buber) 54
Orwell, George, 29 rationalism, 5, 11, 15, 20, 50, 83, 127,
129–130, 133, 134–135, 138–
Palestine, 61, 99, 168 140, 141
Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 73–74 redemption, 1, 3–4, 7, 11, 16–17, 19, 20,
paradise, 42–44, 47, 164, 166 30–31, 33, 39, 41–42, 58, 65–67,
particularism, 6, 128, 131, 135, 143 71, 73, 76–78, 95–96, 133, 134,
particularity, 3, 10, 13, 15, 58, 76, 169– 158, 165, 170, 173, 182
170, 177 religion, 17, 18, 28, 49, 54, 56–57, 63,
Pasmanik, Daniil, 112, 117–118, 120, 68, 76–77, 89, 99, 125, 128–134,
124 135, 140, 141, 155–156, 176–
Peredvishniki, 100–101 177, 180–181, 184
plurality, 142, 163 Religion of Reason Out of the Sources
pogrom, 5, 111–112, 114–116, 118–119, of Judaism (Cohen), 128–131,
122, 123, 146 135
pólis, 163–164, 166 revealed (absolute) religion, 176–177,
political space, 6, 162–171 180–181, 184
Pomerants, Alexander, 146–147, 149, resistance, 24, 48, 174, 180
152, 154, 157 French, 165
Pozner, Solomon, 122–123 Res Publica, 163–164
progress, 1, 11, 14, 16, 20, 28, 29, 43, 45, revelation, 10
52–53, 64, 65, 71–72, 73, 75–76, revolution, 1–7, 11–12, 13, 16, 17, 19,
78, 108, 135, 137, 174, 182, 186 20, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32–33, 35,
progressiv(e)(ism), 1, 45, 52–53, 67, 68, 38–40, 46–49, 52–53, 56–57,
75, 78, 146, 167 61–63, 66, 69, 78, 79–80, 83,
Proletkult, 106 85–90, 93, 95, 97, 105–109, 111,
Proletpen, 6, 145–147, 149, 150, 152– 113, 115, 120, 127, 135–141,
155, 157–159 143–144, 146–147, 150–152,
prophet(s), 4, 23, 25, 27, 28, 49, 56, 62, 154, 162, 167–168, 173, 182–
63, 124, 129, 131–132, 134, 142, 184, 186
165 American, 165, 169
prophetic literature, 3, 24, 56, 66, 132 French, 133
prophecy, 19, 28, 56, 58 Russian (1905), 119, 157
prophetism, 11, 56, 68, 133 Russian (1917), 5–6, 17, 61–62, 97,
public, 92, 93, 104, 106, 112–114, 116, 106, 111–115, 117, 120, 123–
118, 119. 121, 124. 126, 165, 126, 127, 135, 138–140, 146,
170 154, 156–159, 164
public (realm)(space), 16, 91, 92, 98 February, 112–113, 115, 121, 123
power, 11–12, 15, 20, 30, 31, 37–38, 41, October, 121, 135, 138–139, 153,
48, 56, 63, 72, 81, 106, 118, 125, 157–158
127, 138–141, 143, 153, 165, Revolutionary Workers’ Council
166–169, 182 (Munich), 62
Ricoeur, Paul, 30 Tikkun Olam, 3, 11, 12, 21

Rocker, Rudolf, 12 Tillich, Paul, 67
Rolland, Romain, 59 Tischler, Sergio, 39
Romanticism, 49, 78, 156 Tolstoy, Leo, 12, 18
German, 4, 9, 51–52, 56, 67 topos, 49, 97, 109
socialistic, 4, 53 totalitarianism, 70, 77, 166, 169
romantic, 16, 17, 49–51, 54, 56, 63, 147, totalitarian ideology, 65, 70, 75
154 Trotsky, Lev (Leon), 61, 112, 117, 118,
Rorty, Richard, 70–71 124, 126
Rosenzweig, Franz, 27, 29 Trotskyism, 29
Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 49 Treblinka, 9–10
Schack, William, 104 Union Square, 146, 148–149

Schatz, Boris, 5, 97, 99–105 universal, 3, 6, 13–15, 17, 31, 33, 34, 37,
Schmitt, Carl, 69–70, 75 47, 50, 52, 68, 69, 79, 81, 84, 91,
Scholem, Gershom, 1, 52, 162 99, 104, 105, 127–131, 133–134,
Schraeder, Grete, 60 138–143, 159, 169–171, 173
secular, 1–3, 12–17, 24–26, 28, 44, 56, universalism, 3, 5–6, 10, 12, 15, 19–20,
58, 65, 68, 73–75, 77, 91–92, 99, 127–129, 131, 134–135, 141–
148 142
secularization, 56, 65, 69–71, 73–74 USSR, see Soviet Union
Second Commandment, 97–99 utilitarian, 49
Second World War, 2, 66, 131 utopia, 1–6, 12, 13, 16, 17–19, 28, 33,
Shabbat, 16 37, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51–52,
Shaw, George Bernard, 63 56–57, 63, 65–66, 68, 75, 77, 95,
Shoah, see Holocaust 97, 100, 106, 109, 135, 153, 162,
Spinoza, Baruch, 23, 54, 112 164, 170
spiritual, 56–60, 66, 77, 95, 98–99, 155,
178 Viln(a)(ius), 2, 7, 9, 17, 100
spirituality, 54, 56 violence 27, 29–31, 41, 63, 80–82, 85,
socialism, 12, 17, 19–20, 51–53, 56–58, 122, 131, 134, 166–168, 170
63, 81, 89–90, 113, 121, 134, Vitebsk, 97, 105–106, 108, 109, 127,
145, 147 135, 137, 139
socialist, 4, 10, 12, 27, 49, 52, 53, 56, 58, Vitebsk School, 5, 97, 105, 108
61–63, 87, 90, 111, 145, 149 Voltaire, 68
Soviet Union, 18, 109, 118, 146, 153,
156 Warsaw, 9–10, 100
State Duma, see Duma Weber, Max, 17, 49, 54, 58, 114, 116–
status quo, 175, 186 117, 124
Stoic(s), 23, 68, 75 White Army, 5, 111–112
Suprematism, 106, 109 White Movement, 111, 115–116, 122
Weil, Simone, 15
Talmud, 5, 24, 26, 27, 31, 85, 87, 97, William of Ockham, 73
125, 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 13–14, 17–20
temporality, 7, 11, 26, 85, 173, 183 Wohlfarth, Irving, 43
Tikhon (Patriarch), 116 World War I, 59–61
Index 211
Yiddish, 2, 16–17, 57, 108, 111, 125,

146–147, 152, 154, 155, 157,
159
literature, 6, 147, 150, 158–159
Yugnt magazine, 147, 149, 151
Zionism, 2, 12, 56–58, 61, 95, 97, 130

Zionist(s), 5, 27, 57–58, 61, 102, 112,
114–116, 118–119, 126, 146
Žižek, Slavoj, 78, 82, 175, 184
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JEWISH THOUGHT, UTOPIA,

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover design: Studio Pollmann

Other Titles in PAR

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Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson. The Curve of the Sacred.

Deane-Peter Baker and Patrick Maxwell. Editors. Explorations in

Editorial Board of PAR

Rod Nicholls (webmaster) Harriet E. Barber

ONE Tikkun Olam—“Repairing the World”:

TWO Jewish Hope Versus Revolutionary Hope 23

THREE Adorno, Revolution, and Negative Utopia 33

FOUR Utopia and Revolution: The Romantic Socialism

FIVE A Secular Utopia: Remarks on the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate 65

SIX Thinking Revolution With and Beyond Levinas 79

SEVEN Topos and Utopia: the Place of Art in the Revolution 95

NINE Jewish Rationalism, Ethics, and Revolution:

ELEVEN Nihilism and the Resurrection of Political Space:

WORKS CITED 187

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 201

Gershom Scholem has famously described Jewish messianism as “a theory of

“only” secularized theological notions, or do they exist in their own right?

philosophical and historical perspectives, and between theoretical perspectives

thus eliminates the idea of a final redemption or revolution. In Adorno’s view,

how Emmanuel Levinas poses the question of revolution. Cederberg takes

particularism, Cohen nonetheless viewed one specific culture, the German, as

Derrida’s relation to Hegel. Far from a simple rejection of Hegel as an anti-

Uppsala, December 2013

TIKKUN OLAM—“REPAIRING THE WORLD”:

1. “I create new heavens and a new earth.” (Isaiah 65:17)

I was born in London and subject to an unspoken contract that the

dominant masculinity. Consciousness-raising could be understood as a

Jewish feminist traditions to question the patriarchal terms of Jewish

In September 1948, Wittgenstein travelled to Vienna to visit his sister

Wittgenstein had felt a need to make a confession, which included possibly

later work, as Monk recognizes, an idea of central importance is “that there is

Marx remains, in this regard at least, trapped within a tradition of

Wittgenstein was interested in the possibilities of people living

inspired earlier generations of Jewish libertarian radicals who were suspicious

there is hope only when hope is no longer permissible. What is

In a commentary to his translation of a poem written by Yehudah haLevi,

promise. This is a typical attitude of “the better” ones that Rosenzweig

What, then, becomes of hope?

3. Back to Jewish Hope

and not be content by pretending that we will do that afterwards. We have to

ADORNO, REVOLUTION, AND NEGATIVE

Theodor W. Adorno to Thomas Mann,

especially to address Adorno’s deep involvement with Benjamin’s thought. I

1. Marxism against Marxism

Given Adorno’s own intellectual investments in German idealism and Marxist

connected with unambiguous and positive political hopes and expectations

such conceptualization. On this ground he concludes: “all concepts, even the

When the standard structure of society is the exchange form, its

3. Philosophy in a Post-Marxist Context

Towards the end of Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes in a way that

Anything that has a function is already spellbound within the functional

The political predicament of idealism is that its oppressive social logic is

4. Critical Theory and the Messianic

dialectical tradition of “post-Marxist” thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel

In the extension of the rejection of the Hegelian synthesis to the