Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond

Six: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Political Theology: Beyond Sovereign Violence

s i x Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Political Theology: Beyond Sovereign Violence Overview In the previous chapters I have attempted to show how Rosenzweig frees Mendelssohn’s vision of Jewish existence as embodied revelation from its repression beneath the edifice of idealist philosophy, an edifice constructed in the aftermath of the Spinoza Quarrel. Breaking through the systematizing philosophy of 1800, Rosenzweig opens a path toward a Judaism lived as a continuing conversation between the generations, a dogma-free sociality that is, for Mendelssohn, the model of enlightened, democratic sociality more generally. But Rosenzweig’s conception of Jewish life as lived outside of politics and history is very far indeed from Mendelssohn’s hope that Jewish corporate existence might provide a model for an enlightened civic polity. This chapter and the next seek to draw Rosenzweig closer to Mendelssohn . I will argue that what stands in the way of a rapprochement between Rosenzweig and Mendelssohn on the plane of politics is Rosenzweig’s 244 Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Political Theology 245 conception of the state as created and sustained by violence, a view that runs counter to Mendelssohn’s conception of the state as, ideally, the institutional framework created and sustained by the will to perfect the world through benevolence. For Rosenzweig, the state by its very nature seeks to usurp the place of God in the world; for Mendelssohn, it can become the expressive medium of God’s will. With these two very different conceptions of the state, Rosenzweig’s and Mendelssohn’s political theologies are bound to diverge. I will argue in this chapter that we can take a first step towards a rapprochement between Mendelssohn and Rosenzweig by unpacking the political implications present in Rosenzweig’s concept of creation as ‘‘constantly brimming-over newness . . ., the ‘beginning’ from where the constantly new births of the plenitude spring up’’ (Star 145; 148). To see how this concept of creation can be made the basis of a political philosophy, I will turn to Hannah Arendt and her discussion of how the power of ‘‘beginning’’—the ‘‘absolute of temporality’’ as she also calls it—is the founding principle of the democratic state. Bonnie Honig has recently proposed an approach to Rosenzweig’s and Arendt’s concept of the miracle—and miracle is but another name for the unprecedented singularity of ‘‘beginning’’—that is very close to what I am arguing for in this chapter. Like Honig, I read Arendt’s effort at describing the democratic power of the miracle of natality to be ‘‘a deliberate effort to counter Schmitt’’ (Honig 2007: 82). Arendt’s miracle, Honig explains, is ‘‘a metaphor for action in concert rather than the identity -forming division of friend-enemy’’ (82). Thus, the Arendtian miracle stands opposed to the violent irruption of the sovereign decision in a time of exception whose power Schmitt likens to a miracle. While I entirely agree with Honig that Rosenzweig’s concept of the miracle (and creation) is directly related to Arendt’s and, like hers, stands in complete contrast to Schmitt, I do not think Rosenzweig himself imagined that it could be used to articulate a democratic, redemptive political praxis against the sovereign decisionism of Schmitt. In this chapter I will show how, in fact, Rosenzweig and Schmitt are in fundamental agreement about the nature of sovereignty as revealed in the irruptive violence of a decision to risk the state’s very existence in war. I think that Honig would agree that Rosenzweig’s discussion of the state in the Star has too quickly abandoned the space of the political to the inevitable violence of war. In order to recuperate a redemptive , democratic politics from Rosenzweig’s concept of creation, I will, like 246 Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Political Theology Honig, draw upon Arendt, but I will also situate Arendt in relation to the political theologies of Mendelssohn and Spinoza. Then, in the next chapter, I will unpack, with the help of Stanley Cavell, the political implications of Rosenzweig’s concept of language as the site of revelation. Aided by the political philosophies of Arendt and Cavell, I seek to establish a rapprochement between Mendelssohn and Rosenzweig on the plane of the political. Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell share Rosenzweig’s fundamental concern to restore philosophy’s faith in ordinary language and the human world that language helps to sustain. It is not at all accidental that Arendt and Cavell foreground the...