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217 6 Saying Nihilism A Review of Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s Burnt Book Martin Kavka With the recent translation of Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud,1 once again the argument appears that Judaism has always been inseparable from the type of hermeneutics embodied by what Edith Wyschogrod has termed differential postmodernism, a term that primarily refers to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida.2 Ouaknin’s language in Book Two will be overly familiar to readers of these authors. Here, he analyzes two Talmud passages as “openings” upon the themes of the self-effacing nature of the book and the erotic appeal of the transcendent—the former is a central theme in the entire Derridean corpus,3 and the latter is central in the work of the early Levinas.4 By choosing a narrow focus—only these two Talmud passages, B. Shabbat 115a–116a and B. Yoma 54a, and no others—Ouaknin’s argument achieves a great degree of elegance that minimizes the potentially jarring effect of constantly oscillating between the differing rhetorics of the fourth and the twentieth centuries . I am not trained as a Talmudist, but in my mind there is no question that Ouaknin has successfully argued for a certain family resemblance between Talmud and postmodern philosophy, two modes of thinking that are at first glance wildly disparate. The fact that this is a sustained argument from within Talmudic texts makes the achievement all the more impressive. Book Three of Ouaknin’s text, on the theory of the book in R. Nahman, serves as a modern model of the lived performance of the hermeneutic approach detailed in Book Two. This goes further in proving Ouaknin’s thesis, since the analysis of R. Nahman not only amplifies the previous arguments about the self-effacement of writing in the light of the theory of shevirat ha-kelim (the breaking of the vessels) in Lurianic Kabbalah, but can also turn the reader trained in postmodern texts back to Derrida’s groundbreaking essays on performative utterances.5 This is not to say that Ouaknin’s text is without problems, and this chapter will mention three problems briefly before turning to the fourth. First, Ouaknin accuses historians of killing their texts (BB, p. 58): “a thing can be objectively knowable . . . only when it is so dead that it is only of purely historical interest.” When this is applied to the Talmud, the historian is by extension accused of being the cause of revelation’s inaccessibility to the culture of today. Yet Ouaknin’s strident ahistoricism, in which ideas exist in a vacuum, allows bizarre shadings of thought to occur. Ouaknin establishes a strong Athens-versus-Jerusalem tone throughout, especially where the thought of Martin Heidegger is concerned (e.g., 218 Martin Kavka BB, pp. 96n. 22, 164, and 292–294). Nevertheless, he also interprets the dialogic theory of Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer to be in the spirit of Talmudic “open-ended discussion,” makhloket, and indeed goes so far as to link the project of Being and Time itself to the questioning spirit of Talmud (BB, pp. 88– 89, cf. pp. 97nn. 38, 39, 41). Second, most of Ouaknin’s citations from Blanchot and Levinas are given as prooftexts for his arguments, yet he omits any mention of the philosophical conditions for the position of these arguments within the philosophical tradition. In other words, it is one thing to say that Levinas states that the language of the question is a fissure in the Greek rhetoric of absolute knowledge (BB, pp. 160f.); it is another to explain how certain readings of Heidegger, Hegel, and Aristotle lead to this assertion; it is yet another to argue that Levinas’s reading constitutes a prima facie denial of Greek thought; it is still another to argue that Levinas’s interpretation of Greek thought is correct in the first place. Ouaknin only remains at the first of these four levels; to be sure, The Burnt Book is about Talmud and Breslav Hasidism, not about twentieth-century phenomenology. Nevertheless, as I shall demonstrate, when such phenomenological questions are broached, the need to reshape Ouaknin’s thesis becomes particularly urgent. Third, I wonder whether the rhetoric of openness, questioning, and can really be applied pari passu from philosophy to Judaism. Ouaknin argues for Judaism as a radical “antidogmatism” (BB, p. 159) and leads the reader to believe that every halakhic ruling is caught up in a web...

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