Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (review)

In Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, Martin Kavka traces a subterranean history of what he calls "the Jewish meontological tradition," a recurrent encounter with questions of non-being both indigenous to Jewish religious and philosophical thinking and arising in the Jewish relation to Greek meontology and its ethical afterlife in Western philosophy. Kavka argues that these strands of meontological ideas in turn inform a crucial mode of Jewish messianic thought, providing it with conceptual and discursive resources that allow it to refashion itself, "demythologizing the concept of the Messiah" by minimizing its interpretation as an historical and political telos, and rethinking messianism in terms of subjectivity, as the construction of "the ethically responsible self" (197). Kavka's primary points of reference in Jewish thought for the conjunction of the ideas of "nothing" and "the messianic" are Maimonides, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Emile Fackenheim, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Kavka locates the key points of the "Greek" discussion of meontology in Plato and Husserl, as well as Hegel, Schelling, and Heidegger. It is by extending the notion of non-being to what he argues are "closely associated ideas" such as those of not-yet being, otherness, and absence that Kavka establishes the connection between what might appear to be the "pure" ontological or metaontological question of "nothingness" and the more ethical (and less apocalyptic) strands of messianic thought. This is a bold strategy, since some readers might object that these ideas are not fundamentally meontological, but are foreign imports from ethics or even psychoanalysis. Kavka, however, argues persuasively for their relevance; indeed the real significance of his book is to show the fundamental interimplication of meontology and these other modes of what he calls "limit thinking," both in and between the discursive worlds of "Athens" and "Jerusalem."

I cannot here do justice to Kavka's remarkably erudite discussions and strong interpretations of this wide range of texts. His readings of Plato and Maimonides, Husserl, Cohen, and Levinas are especially striking and constitute significant contributions to the discussion. If I am somewhat less convinced by his discussion of Rosenzweig, this is in part because Kavka here seems uncharacteristically to take on a polemical mode, having made a decision to set Rosenzweig versus Levinas. Indeed, this is a refreshing change from the common tendency to take at face value Levinas's claim that every page of Totality and Infinity is saturated with Rosenzweig, but it also seems to reduce the complexity and depth of Rosenzweig's thinking to a mode of static communalism. Kavka writes from a distinctively Levinasian perspective, where the question of the nature of the encounter with alterity (is it preserved as such or reduced to a mode of the same?) is the final arbiter of a text's or thinker's value. And the decision to take on that particular position not only allows for the strong, clear insight that Kavka demonstrates throughout this book, but must necessarily bring as well at least one point of blindness, which here (I would argue) is marked by Rosenzweig

Kavka concludes with an especially strong and nuanced reading of Pesikta Rabbati, a difficult to date text (usually located somewhere between the third and ninth centuries CE) associated with a group that calls itself "The Mourners of Zion." Kavka argues that Pesikta Rabbati is a key exemplification of meontological messianism, or what he calls "messianism without content," since it evacuates all literal messianic ideology while preserving the liminal experience of otherness that, Kavka argues, forms messianism's essential structure. Kavka's reading once again draws on Derrida's work on the messianic, but this time as inflected by Derrida's considerations of mourning, which are informed by the ideas of the Hungarian psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok. Derrida was a strong supporter of Abraham and Torok and argued for the ontological significance of their theory of "incorporation" as a mode of failed or pathological mourning that preserves an aspect of the lost object in an...