Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy

TWO: Thinking Desire in Gersonides and Spinoza

TWO ‰ Idit Dobbs-Weinstein Thinking Desire in Gersonides and Spinoza ‰ Apologos: Philosophy as a Political Act My preliminary remarks seek to articulate both the immediate and the mediated background for the following essay. These comments seek to clarify, ¤rst, the manner in which the essay should and should not be read, and second, what I understand by feminist Jewish philosophy. Before I begin with the substantive provisos, I wish to outline a very brief personal, purportedly less philosophical, background to the essay. When I was ¤rst asked to participate in a conference as well as contribute to a volume on “feminist Jewish philosophy,” explicitly as an historian of philosophy, I was simultaneously attracted and repelled by the prospect of participating in this endeavor. The reasons for my ambivalent, affective response were the same: namely, there were some ¤ne (very few) women working speci¤cally on (or out of) the history of Jewish philosophy, some of whom were also political feminists; there were some ¤rst-rate, contemporary feminist philosophers, who happened to be Jewish but whose work, deliberately or not, ignored the history of Jewish philosophy. To my knowledge, however, there were no contemporary philosophers who re¶ected on any dimension of the uncanny relations between their various belongings/commitments: Jewish, philosopher, historian of philosophy, feminist, let alone who thematically explored them. I deploy the language of relations, or belonging/commitments deliberately . For, above all, I question the implicit assumption that the practice of 52 idit dobbs-weinstein the history of philosophy (let alone philosophy) is a-political. Rather, I insist that, and seek to elucidate how, the so-called history of philosophy or the formation of its canon is the result of theological-political repression rather than philosophical necessity. That is, the so-called history of philosophy is the manifestation of a theological philosophy that, even in its secular form, expresses (and con¤rms) the ideology of the victors. But whence my ambivalence? For at least two decades, my academic compulsion has been motivated by a shadow or spectral dialectic between the historical disappearance/repression of a Judeo-Arabic (i.e., Averroist) philosophical tradition and the theologico-political expulsion of materiality/body/woman/jew/other, from access to the philosophical logos. Therefore, I doubted that I either could contribute to or bene¤t from participation in this conference. Were it not for the fact that I was speci¤cally asked to contribute to the historical part of the project, I may not have experienced the same deep ambivalence. For my entire project puts into question the division between the history of philosophy and the practice of philosophy. Differently stated, since I have long been engaged in dialogues with philosophical texts written by dead male philosophers who, when they are read at all, are suspect to feminist philosophers, on the one hand, and with contemporary feminist philosophers , who do not read them but trace their provenance, inter alia, to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the Frankfurt school, on the other (as if their thinking occurred ex nihilo), since these dialogues are motivated by a single compulsion and form a single inquiry, I could not disengage one aspect of the study from the other without distortion or repression. Loath to renege on a commitment, however, I decided to explicitly bring the apparent tension between historical and contemporary feminist philosophy into relief in order to indicate ways in which such engagements make possible thinking “otherwise.” In order to underline the importance of reading history otherwise, of wrenching it out of the necessary, homogenous continuum (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin),1 I must be explicit about what I regard as the task of a philosopher, especially a feminist Jewish philosopher today. All too brie¶y, if the metaphorical shadow of Socrates’s trial and death hung over the thinking of Maimonides, Averroes, Gersonides, Spinoza, and others, albeit in different ways, it gained its embodied compelling force from the experiences of concrete, material theologico-political oppressions, repressions, and persecutions . Likewise, if philosophy is still possible today, especially feminist Jewish philosophy, it must begin, quite literally, after Auschwitz, which is to say as the concrete material experience of horror, a horror accompanied by 53 Thinking Desire in Gersonides and Spinoza the shocking awakening from the narcotic effects of religious and metaphysical illusion/superstition, an illusion grounded on the claims to a universal, that is neutral, history and philosophy—a claim that is ironically a-historical, a...