German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy by Vivian Liska (review)

Vivian Liska's book examines the literary and philosophical legacy of five major German-Jewish writers—Kafka, Benjamin, Scholem, Arendt, and Celan—beyond the purview of the immediate "German" and "Jewish" cultural and historical contexts. The book discusses the ways in which their ideas have been appropriated by subsequent intellectuals and philosophers belonging to the postmodernist camp (in its deconstructive variant), as well as to more recent theorists with a distinct "Pauline" orientation in thought, such as Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek.

The question that frames the study concerns the afterlife of Jewish tradition in modernity, understood theologically in terms of a disruption in the transmission of revealed law. Although most of the German-Jewish thinkers under discussion were not particularly familiar with Jewish tradition, their thought was nevertheless oriented towards recovering remnants of this lost tradition in their critical discussions of election, exile, cultural transmission, and messianic anticipation of redemption. Thus, the references to Jewish tradition emerge in the works of these German-Jewish authors "as a complex questioning of the Enlightenment." And Vivian Liska goes on to assert that "their critique is neither reactionary nor conservative nor progressive; rather, it generates … alternative ideas of the modern subject in its apprehension of itself, of others, of history, of transcendence, and of the transmission of tradition" (4).

Liska suggests that the focus on the rupture in tradition, rather than on the residues of tradition itself, in the works of these German-Jewish writers has generated a widespread appeal that extends beyond German, Jewish, and German-Jewish contexts. Indeed, the limited Jewish knowledge of the majority of these thinkers has inspired a general focus on their underlying diffuse Jewish subjectivity rather than on traces of the Jewish tradition in their works. Accordingly, the study seeks to recover these traces, not only by addressing various aspects that pertain to Jewish tradition (such as a temporality of deferral or a concern with worldly, everyday life), but also—and crucially—by showing how the Jewish dimension in the thought of these German-Jewish writers emerges through the confrontation with subsequent readings of their works.

Liska locates the decisive Jewish dimension in the works of the five German-Jewish writers in the unresolved tension between modernity and the Jewish tradition. But she also argues that this tension is subsequently transformed in postmodernist theory, and then entirely dismissed or denied by some of the most prominent intellectual figures active today. In this sense, the afterlife of German-Jewish thought forms a "tenuous legacy." Although the resonance of the German-Jewish writers under discussion has increased over the years in academic and popular circles, this assertion, as Liska observes, "is less valid for their legacy among the current generation of thinkers who occupy a leading role in the intellectual imagination of the present. In recent years, thinkers who continue to invoke these earlier figures considerably alter or dismiss the Jewish dimension of their writings, mounting critical challenges to this approach that embraces the unresolved tension between Jewish tradition and modernity" (5).

In response to the challenge of the "Pauline turn" in contemporary critical thought, each section of the book seeks to recover elements of Jewish tradition that persist in modern German-Jewish thought. This is done by highlighting each particular German-Jewish author's approach to a key concept in Jewish tradition: the first section, on tradition and its transmission, focuses on Arendt; the second section, on the interaction between law and narration, focuses on Kafka; the third section, on messianic language, focuses on Benjamin; and the fourth and last section, which deals with the interrelations between notions of exile, remembrance, and exemplarity, focuses on Celan.

Through close and sensitive readings of these texts, which often involve minute or implicit shifts, correlations, and disjunctions, Liska demonstrates how German-Jewish writers staged a precarious balancing act between modernity and elements of Jewish tradition, thereby producing an unresolved tension that partially or wholly disappears in the case of later thinkers. At...