Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays

by Gillian Rose

Judaism and Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime Other of modernity. Gillian Rose continues to develop a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction. The chapters cover Judaism and philosophy, ethics and law (Halacha), 'The Future of Auschwitz', post-modern theology, Judaism and architecture, Judaism in Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno and Derrida, and modern Jewish thinkers - Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, Benjamin, Strauss, Arendt, Weil and Levinas. The opposition between philosophical reason and Judaic ethics is shown to ruin the possibility of critical reflection and of political action. The risks of critical rationality are reformulated for modern philosophy and for modern Jewish thought.

Genres: Philosophy, Judaism, Religion, Nonfiction, Theology

297 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Gillian Rose (20 September 1947 – 9 December 1995) was a British scholar who worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Notable facets of this social philosopher's work include criticism of neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, along with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought."

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was honestly a letdown. I was expecting a more rich elaboration of the thesis of the broken middle teased in the Introduction. From what I could gather, this thesis promises some form of a courageous refusal of the double blackmail of modernity and postmodernity.

Instead I found out the majority of the essays (with the exception of essays 2, 8 and 12) only develop this perspective obliquely and half-heartedly. As a result, the mildy confrontational tone adopted by Rose comes across as unwarranted and preachy. Many essays repeat the same exhortation to stay with the trouble and work through the phenomena of formal equality and chronic social inequality that perhaps singly defines our era but without developing it further. Despite this lack of thematic of thematic density, I found the essays 'Architecture to Philosophy: Postmodern Complicity' on the postmodernity's use and abuse of the biblical and talmudic story of the Tower of Babel and 'Nietzsche's Judaica' on the ambiguous nature of geneological analysis of 'types' (e.g. priestly, prophetic, warrior-aristocratic) I found to be exceptional and compellingly argued.

On the whole and individually for the most part the essays show promise but the execuation is sorely lacking.

[bookcasewalls]

Rose memorably claimed that she taught herself German by reading Adorno, which might give a sense of her prodigious intelligence and the concomitant difficulty of her writing. These essays are hard, in content and sometimes in style. They assume a great deal of previous reading and thinking - Kant, Hegel, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weil, Levinas, etc - some of which I lacked, to my detriment. As with any collection of essays, there were also some that appealed to my interests more, and some I was content to skim. Even within essays (especially the long piece on Benjamin), there were sections which held more and less interest for me.

Two general points emerge. One, Rose likes to set up comparisons and dialogues between two thinkers - and then critique and move beyond them by positing connections and similarities. As a method, this privileges openendedness and conversation over system as much as she does in the content of her philosophy (as I understand it, this is part of what she means by the 'broken middle'); but it does make reading her essays more rewarding when you're not learning the positions of three thinkers (the two she discusses and her own) all at once. Again, she's difficult and uncompromisingly well-read: so she is worth reading carefully, and rereading. Two, her critiques of almost everyone can be boiled down to 'they neglect law' (and therefore, deal inadequately with the political realm). This is a good insight, but she doesn't develop it very much in itself in this collection - I assume she does so more in her monographs. Although she doesn't say much about Arendt, to me she looms fascinatingly over this argument.

Really, more than anything, this book made me want to read more Rose (and more of her foundations and interlocutors) and grapple with her thinking more deeply. Even if some of it went over my head, an impetus to further reading is always a good enough takeaway.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ridiculously dense and obscure, absurdly erudite, unforgiving both in its prose style and in the scope of the ideas its discussing, this is a hard book to judge. Initially setting out to deconstruct the premise that Judaism is somehow outside modernity, or that spiritual Judaism somehow provides bulwark against the dead values of Enlightenment rationalism, most of the essays only tangentially fulfill the promise of the (absolutely astounding) introduction, a blistering slaughter of the essentialising, parochial, pathetic logic of identity politics with its perpetual attempt to find nice, self contained catgeories to anihilate the class experiences of whole groups of and of the wider post structuralism that subtly underpins it. In an era where the zionist, fascist, settler colonial, Aparteid genocidal pariah state of Israel likes to drapse itself in the most abject and ill fitting clothing of the legacy of Jewish suffering and Jewish history to legitimise its butchery, and where hordes of the intellectually catastrated western media and political figures blurt the word "ANTISHEMEJIZZUM" so hard at any and all critiques of that fucking gangrene spot of a stare you'd think they're veins will burst open, anything which decides to challenge head on the supposed caging of Jewish identity into a fixed box is welcome. Indeed, just on an education level, many of the things Rose brings to the table about Judaism were extremely insightful, especially in just how radically different many of its precepts are compared to its disgusting bastard offspring Christianity.

Indeed, the best essays are the ones closest to her opening essay. Certainly, her essay on Adorno and his relation to Hegel's dialectic and on Nietzsche, are simply some of the best I've ever read on the subject, staggeringly insightful and mind blowing in analysis and almost worth the price tag. Both those, along with the introduction, are 5 stars. Others are almost unreadable in how niche and esoteric their subject matter is (at least 2 i outright skipped), some are repetitive and boring (she makes a valiant attempt to make Walter Benjamin's work understandable and relevent to wider sociology, probably the best attempt, but im not going to pretend i really get, or for that matter care at all for anything Benjamin wrote). As a complete book its pretty much a failure, rather loosely connected and requring a VERY high level of foreknowledge on philosphy, and specifically of religiously grounded philosphy, but individally some of its isolated parts are simply brilliant. There's enough in here for me to value, even if overall it was fairly exhausting.

2 stars is for overall book. Really its more like 2.5, but I think 3 is too much. As I say, hard to judge.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest contributions to modern Jewish thought. The essay on Nietzsche is a must, and the essays on particular thinkers (Strauss, Adorno, Derrida, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, Benjamin, Weil and Levinas) represent outstanding engagements with their thought. The architecture bits at the end are difficult for the layman, but contain tantalising insights and reward careful reading.

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Learned a few interesting things from the 2 chapters I read (6/7) and, for that alone, it was very worth it!