Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism
440
Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism
440Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804760416 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2009 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture |
| Pages: | 440 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d) |
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Inventing New Beginnings
On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern JudaismBy Asher D. Biemann
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6041-6
Chapter One
BeginningsThresholds of Continuity
To begin-to ignore or suspend the undefined density of the past-is the wonder of the present. -Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other
Mitten hinein versetzt zu werden, ist am besten. -Ernst Bloch, Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie
I
Where to Begin
"Where to Begin?" Roland Barthes' well- known essay of 1970 plants this question into the mind of an imaginary student who, though not unaware of the "divergencies of approach," feels uncertain how to approach and where to enter the jumble of a "text's plural." Unable to find "the" beginning, the student finally despairs, for there simply is no beginning at the beginning but only an arbitrary thread to grasp, a first thread, which then unravels to reveal a system of simultaneous codes, meanings, and themes. What makes this unraveling possible is that texts are not run-proof, that we can pull an end and arrive in the middle of its plenitude. But for Barthes, the "I" approaching the text "is already itself a plurality of other texts, ofcodes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)." When the imaginary student pulls a thread, no more than the middle unravels: He is cast "in medias res," Barthes writes, thrown into the midst of things, into a beginningless flux. He is verwebt (interwoven) in history; verstrickt (entangled) in stories. He is in the midst, but he is unable to begin at the beginning.
To be sure, being in the midst of a difficult flux, without beginnings and without shelter, as John Caputo described "radical hermeneutics" in the 1980s, has become a familiar motif in our time. When measured by our day-to-day experience, however, the beginningless, authorless text seems to resist intuition. Our conscious lives rarely are in flux but, instead, saturated with beginnings, beginnings that we begin, and beginnings, which-as it appears to us-begin on their own, like the "beginning" of a new day. Beginnings, as we are likely to experience, exist well apart from any "one" beginning at the beginning. They are, as Catherine Keller aptly wrote, "going on." Even Barthes' imaginary student might experience, while entangled in the middle, a beginning in some sense. Like Dante's traveler, he begins in medias res, somewhere in the middle of a path-but he still makes a beginning.
Ambiguities
The nature of beginnings is no trivial matter and the term itself is ambiguous. A verbal derivative, beginning, always indicates an action or, to paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, the action of entering upon action. At the same time, the word beginning functions as a mode of existence, an "entering upon existence," as the dictionary defines it, or as Aristotle put it in the Metaphysics: "the first out of which something exists or comes into being or is recognized." This ambiguity of action and existence has rendered the beginning a quasi-creative principle in itself, a dynamis and product of the nous poietikós. Conversely, this ambiguity already foreshadows a duality of longing that we attach to beginnings: The nostalgic longing for origins and first beginnings in the past, and the forward-looking desire for beginnings that we can begin to shatter the sameness of the before.
Rudolf Carnap, in his now-classic essay "The Elimination of Metaphysics," points to this very ambiguity and longing to demonstrate how, in metaphysics, the gerundial "beginning" became the beginning, how an empirical (though interpretive) description of actions or events was transformed into the "principium" or arché. Metaphysical systems, Carnap argued, rely largely upon the hypostatization of similar derivatives to create words deprived of their day-to-day meaning without, however, being given another meaning of their own. Nothing in our experience can correspond to the beginning as an active first principle, much less to the beginning as a primordial "first." The metaphysical arché, the self- generating origin of all things, the hypostatized act of beginnings, for Carnap, is a philosophically meaningless term.
But it is surrounded by an aura. A particularly inconspicuous term of what Adorno called the "jargon of authenticity," the beginning belongs to both our everyday use of language and to a "higher" plane of being. "Words of jargon," Adorno writes, "sound as if they said something higher than what they mean." The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto compared this "something higher" to a musica di vocaboli resonating in all metaphysical terms to conceal their meaningless contents. But the beginning, unlike other metaphysical terms, impresses primarily through its ordinariness and by the habitual grammar that surrounds it. The music of beginnings is as solemn as it is mundane and often inaudible. The jargon of beginning, to most of us, does not appear to be jargon at all. To the contrary, beginnings seem to firmly belong to our daily, pedestrian vocabulary and, indeed, to the categories of thought by which we order the world around us.
A Desire for Beginnings
Reason, as Kant remarked in his first Critique, has a desire (Bedürfnis) for beginnings. It is this desire that brings reason also to its first antinomy: the world as begun and un- begun. But it is the same desire that grants reason-practical reason-its freedom: The freedom for which every beginning of an action becomes a "first beginning." In Kant's third antinomy, therefore, it is the ability to begin that removes reason from the causality of the phenomenal world, setting it free from the laws of nature that only know "subaltern beginnings," beginnings by comparison, but no "first beginning." To be sure, the antinomies of pure reason must remain antinomies, but the desire for first beginnings, which is a desire for freedom, also becomes a transcendental possibility. The beginning in reason turns antinomy into autonomy.
Hans Blumenberg, writing about Descartes' method of reductive doubt, speaks of a "self- conception of reason as the Organon of beginning," likening, in fact, the Cartesian self to the myth of a creatio ex nihilo. 15 Reason, as Blumenberg sees it, not only begins before all beginning, before all time and history, but also is conscious of its beginning a beginning. "The absolute beginning, which inaugurates history," he writes, "also prohibits itself to have a history-and this means: it is not only a primary thesis (Urthesis) but also a response to crisis." In this self- awareness of reason as the power of beginning, which, in Kant, will become a desire for a beginning that is "unconditioned by time" (nicht unter Zeitbedingungen), lies, for Blumenberg, the self- awareness of the modern age as a Now torn from the continuity of aging time: as a beginning in the critical, decisive moment. Modernity is the beginning against history, while historicism, as we shall see later, will interpret itself as a protest against the "absolute beginning" of reason.
We shall view, in this study, beginnings as forms of inner perception that determine the structure of our reason and the logic of our desires. "Beginning," as Edward Said noted in his 1975 monograph on this subject, "is not only a kind of action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness." "Consciousness," wrote Emmanuel Levinas in 1968, "is a mode of being such that beginning is its essential." In this respect, Said reasoned, beginnings are different from origins, whose meaning always is "passive" (something that, as we will see later, is not necessarily the case). Beginnings, for Said, have intentions, which origins do not. Origins "are," but beginnings "produce." They produce difference-difference which, as Said writes, "is the result of combining the already-familiar with the fertile novelty of human work in language." As such, Said's beginning also creates authority: "it constitutes an authorization for what follows from it." It is an authorization that limits and enables. It limits because it requires reference and repetition-and it enables because reference and repetition give authority to both the beginning and the beginner. In the affirmation of the beginning lies the affirmation of the author as creator. Most important for Said, beginnings are acts of transformation: "[T]here must be the desire, the will, and the true freedom to reverse oneself, to accept thereby the risks of rupture and discontinuity; for whether one looks to see where and when he began, or whether he looks in order to begin now, he cannot continue as he is." Thus the act of beginning is accompanied by the necessity of change, even reversal. Beginning, as Maurice Blanchot wrote, is a risk.
We have already formulated three fundamental features in our grammar of beginnings: difference, authority, and transformation. As we seek to understand what it means not only to begin but to begin anew, to restore beginnings, we must first look at beginnings as actions of consciousness, as creations of the poetic mind, decisions in time more than moments or points of origin that are empirically "at hand." The great ambivalence of beginnings is that they are acts of undoing and making, acts of tearing apart and putting together. What begins dismembers time. The beginning, Blanchot reminds us, is an act of violence. It sets, as Aristotle clearly saw, a limit (péras) a limit that subverts continuity and defines selfhood against otherness. Our desire for beginning is a desire for caesura, but what begins also creates an order, conjoining, like the limit, two separate realms. The human being, as Georg Simmel once put it, is the "conjoining being" and at the same time the one "that must always separate, for it cannot conjoin without separating"; it is the "liminal being" (Grenzwesen) that does not have limits. The beginning would thus be like Simmel's images of "bridge" and "door," a human way of crossing against the odds of the given and of closing off a "piece of home" from the "uninterrupted unity of natural being." It would be like the inward-outward swinging door itself, whose threshold is the symbol of human meaning and dignity: the symbol of "the possibility to step at any moment outside the limit into freedom." Therefore, we will regard beginnings as actions and modes of thought, as bridges and doors, that establish and permeate our historical existence and, in fact, our most elementary experience of time.
Beginnings and Counter-Time
"The riddle of time," as the Dutch theologian Gerardus van der Leeuw wrote, "is the riddle of the beginning.... We live out of the fact that we always begin anew: on awakening in the morning, at the beginning of the year, with every task we undertake, with each move from one place to another." Even in absence of one "true" beginning at the beginning, there must be small, microchronic beginnings along the middle: births, mornings, awakenings, that order our temporal existence. Without beginnings, there would be anarchy, the state of an-arché-the un-begun. Beginnings create temporal formations, a sense of before and after, a sense of change and difference, but also a sense of completeness. It is through beginnings that mechanical time becomes poetic time: a time with meaning. "[M]an can by his own providence and magically establish time," continues van der Leeuw: "He can make a beginning."
That beginnings are made and postulated, rather than given and found, shall be our first presupposition. "Mere flux, aimless and meaningless," John Dewey once wrote, "starts at no definite point and arrives at nothing." In the flux of time, in the concatenation of events, there are no beginnings other than the beginnings we narrate into it. Events happen; but once we begin to reflect upon what happened, once we reconstruct and tell, events will appear to us, however crude, as a sequence of beginnings and ends-as stories. Thus we further presuppose that to speak of a beginning implies the language of a plot, a language Aristotle called myth. Beginnings make plots, and plots that are whole require beginnings (archai), middles (mésoi), and ends (teleutai). The beginning, then, seems inextricably entwined in narrative thinking, a plotting forward that by necessity unfolds toward a temporal horizon. We cannot use the word "beginning" without, at the same time, presupposing the possibility of a plot. "The plot," as Paul Ricoeur puts it, "places us at the crossing point of temporality and narrativity." But it also places us, as Aristotle knew, at the crossing point of history (historia) and poetry (poíesis). Poetry, for Aristotle, is "more philosophical and serious than history," for it is in poetry alone that plots-the mirrors of human action-take form: While history can concern itself only with "singular facts" (kat'hékaston), poetry offers the universals (kathólou) of human experience that make single facts intelligible. Ricoeur takes this to its logical conclusion: that history without poetry remains incomprehensible. "[T]o be historical," he writes, "an event must be more than a singular occurrence, a unique happening. It receives its definition from its contribution to the development of a plot." For history to be imagined and told, a plot-like structure must be in place. The "emplotment," as Hayden White put it in his influential book Metahistory, "is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind." It is the plot that gives meaning to a story beyond its mere "follow-ability." Such a plot may be simple, a merely episodic or linear succession of events or it could be rendered more complex by an unexpected "turning" (peripéteia) or "reversal" (metábasis). If, as Ricoeur argues, narrativity and temporality are not only "closely related" but even "reciprocal," then the complexity of the plot must add to the complexity of our conceptions of time and history. What begins must also have a plot, must unfold in what Ricoeur calls "narrative time," but what begins must also break through time. In every narrative, there lies a "temporal dialectic" for Ricoeur, a dialectic between the chronological succession of episodes and a nonchronological configuration for which scattered events become "significant wholes." The configuration might resist chronology, might resist time, yet, it is through configuration, the dimension of a-chronicity, that plots become whole, that beginnings become centers of meaning. It is precisely this narrative a-chronicity that allows for the plot to gain complexity, to bend time, stretch and compress it, to introduce reversals and the paradox of repetition.
"[I]n every plot," writes Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending, "there is an escape from chronicity." The paradox of narrative time is that it dismembers the time it creates, that it rebels against its own temporal reality. All beginnings are both inside and outside of this temporal reality. They establish chronicity, chronological order, but they also subvert this order. Therefore, this will be our third presupposition: That beginnings can both create and correct time, both tell and resist history; that beginnings are neither chronological nor truly a-chronological but, rather, signs of counter-chronology-of counter time.
II
The World Is Narrated
The beginning as a philosophical aporia is known to us from Hegel's Science of Logic: "What begins exists already to the same extent as it is not yet." To Hegel, the beginning represented a paradoxical "unity of being and non-being." "What is beginning," he writes, "... still has to approach being. At the same time, the beginning already contains being, a being, however, that distances itself from non-being...." The beginning, therefore, cannot be "pure nothingness," nor can it be a mere state of being: "It must be a nothingness from which something emerges." In the beginning, Hegel argues, being separates itself from nonbeing, as much as nonbeing yearns to become being. The beginning, in this way, is an act of differentiation, a "mediation of non-being." It is an action, above all, not being, but an act of becoming, a making: the beginning is-literally speaking-what "makes the beginning" (was den Anfang macht).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixPreamble....................1
Part One (Recto) Thinking in Renaissance or A Grammar of Beginnings 1. Beginnings: Thresholds of Continuity....................23
2. Beginning Anew: The Palingenesis of Memory....................63
3. Turning: Transformations into the Open....................106
Part Two (Verso) Writing in Resurrection or The Semantics of Restoration 1. The Imperishability of Being: Writing Jewish History in Resurrection....................165
2. The Retrieval of Ambivalence: Jewish Renaissance and the (Re-)Turn(-ing) to/of Tradition....................222
3. The Unfinishedness of Return: Renaissance and the Reaestheticization of Judaism....................274
Abbreviations....................307
Notes....................309
Index....................415