Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy

FOUR: The Lonely Woman of Faith under Late Capitalism; or, Jewish Feminism in Marxist Perspective

FOUR ‰ Jean Axelrad Cahan The Lonely Woman of Faith under Late Capitalism; or, Jewish Feminism in Marxist Perspective ‰ Introduction It is dif¤cult to decide whether to characterize the current condition of Jewish philosophy generally as one that is optimal or one that is an instance of Brodskyian boredom.1 In either case, the ¤eld seems to be marked by complete agnosticism as to what to expect of itself, not to mention what is to be expected of theology or God; indecision as to whether it is or is not possible to “stand outside” one’s own identity in order to contemplate it; and the occasional tone of moral indignation notwithstanding, no discernible concern with the extreme needs of populations who do not share in the economic well-being of American academia.2 It seems to me that while it is possible that we may thus inadvertently have arrived at a Rawlsian “original position” from which to devise new philosophical principles, an “unencumbered self” that is the better suited to undertaking new commitments and projects in a new, globalized society, what we are really experiencing is an abandonment of the project of philosophy altogether. In my opinion, this would be a bad thing. And so the general view of this paper will be one of nostalgia for Western Marxism, understood in a particular way, in lieu of the “nomadic” mood of much recent writing in Jewish feminist thought, especially that which has joined in postmodern ambitions.3 107 The Lonely Woman of Faith under Late Capitalism Of course, since for Marxism “the critique of religion is the beginning of all critique,” at ¤rst glance it is dif¤cult to see how Marxist philosophy could have anything valuable to contribute either to Jewish philosophy generally or to Jewish feminism in either its theoretical or practical concerns. The Jewish conceptions of divine being, historical redemption, and many other topics are simply not reconcilable with Marxism’s analysis of the same. To Marx, Judaism was both the source and the culmination of alienated thought in Western civilization; it was the most egregious form of religious consciousness, ¤rst correctly analyzed by Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity; and Jewish ideas most completely represented the distortions of the capitalist mode of production.4 Nonetheless, I shall maintain that certain aspects of Western Marxism— its engagement with Western philosophy, especially German Idealism; its mode of critique of history and politics as exempli¤ed in English and French Marxist historiography; its retention of universal concepts and capacity for abstraction in the course of its analysis of the concrete; its analyses of commodi¤cation and of daily life; and its overall critical and oppositional stance toward the dominant forces and powers of a given epoch— can serve as a useful foil, if not a signi¤cant corrective, in Jewish feminist thought. Contemporary Jewish feminist philosophy, building on the work of Foucault and other postmodern thinkers, intends to dissolve the categories and methods of Western philosophy, arguing that the rationality that is the supreme value of that tradition is a specially male type of rationality serving largely male intellectual and social interests.5 But this criticism of Western philosophy weakens more than it liberates; it denies what men and women have in common, namely, the capacity to reason, to form and re¶ect on their friendships, as well as to think about the far greater economic divisions between nations, regions, and hemispheres. The insistence on a universal capacity to reason does not imply that there will be or need be universal agreement on what values and norms ought to be pursued. It only means that the vocabulary of philosophy can serve as a universal means of dialogue on great questions. Let me explain a bit further what I mean by this. ‰ I. Marxism, Feminism, and Jewish Philosophy As is well known, at least since the time of Kant, philosophers have hesitated and argued about whether distinctively philosophical reasoning exists , and, if it does, what useful or edifying purpose it serves. This is not the place to rehearse the case for each side of this issue. I will only point to the 108 jean axelrad cahan model of philosophy represented in Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. For Habermas, given the prevalence of disagreements about values, practical requirements of the moral life, and so on, the task of philosophy is to participate in discourse about...