Jewishness and the Human Dimension

Introduction: The Human Dimensionand the Life / Study System

Introduction: The Human Dimension and the Life / Study System What are the two terms in the title of this book? ‘‘Jewishness,’’ though perhaps unfamiliar, presents no problems; roughly, I mean by it all associations that gather around the substantive ‘‘Jew’’ or ‘‘Jews’’ and around the modifier ‘‘Jewish.’’ But what do I mean by linking that to something as potentially grandiose or mystifying as ‘‘the human dimension?’’ First of all, I mean to indicate a view of Jewishness as first and foremost one of the strategies (or sets of strategies) for sustaining the life of Homo sapiens, that is, for integrating creaturely mortality with symbolic consciousness. ‘‘Mortality,’’ here, implies in turn the temporal and spatial bounds, and the limited integrity of the organism. Decades ago John Dewey articulated these dimensions as frames for human being and experience: ‘‘Space . . . becomes a comprehensive and enclosed scene within which are ordered the multiplicity of doings and undergoings in which man engages. Time . . . is the organized and organizing medium of the rhythmic ebb and flow of expectant impulse, forward and retracted movement, resistance and suspense, with fulfillment and consummation.’’1 But the human organism experiences these dimensions as a unified timespace, for, as I have written elsewhere, when we stop in time we dissolve in space. 1 Humans are animals; Jews are animals, shocking as it is (still!) to write or say it; and our dimensionality—our delimitation in time and space—provides us with both the moral problems we have to address and the resources for that address. Our discourses of identity, of ‘‘who we are,’’ are tied inescapably to the borderline that is our skin, but through our symbolic consciousness we constantly reach beyond and within that boundary. It might seem gratuitous to insist on the seemingly obvious facts that what is Jewish is encompassed within what is human; that what is human is inescapably conditioned by our creatureliness ; and that the very possibility of Jewish as of human life is, if not fully within our own power, certainly very much a matter of our own responsibility—were we not so accustomed still to thinking of the symbolic or cultural realms of human life as somehow divorced from, and generally as somehow qualitatively superior to, these material conditions of our discourse. That habit of divorcing and separation creates something I am inspired, by Gail Rubin’s identification of ‘‘the sex / gender system,’’2 to call in turn the life / study system. Rubin’s essay pointed to a naturalized identification of sex and gender—the assumption that ‘‘male’’ and ’’female’’ are perfect binaries and equally valid in biology and culture . It made its critical point by insisting that biology is not destiny ; it showed that ideological categorizations of humans do not map perfectly onto biological categories. My critique starts rather from a naturalized separation of intellectual work, of scholarship and study, from what is glibly called ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘ordinary’’ life. Although I do not purport to dismantle that distinction entirely, I do insist that it is both functional and highly contingent, and I do want to help desolidify it, largely by showing in these essays how my scholarly inquiries grow out of the times and situations in which I write them. Too much criticism , especially when generated within academia, appears oracular , inapproachable, incomprehensible, or irrelevant to most of 2 the human dimension and the life/study system those whom such criticism desperately seeks to touch, partly because it fails to reveal its own contingency. And what a loss! For the text is never given beforehand; it is always discovered, it is always new. It is never quite what the author intended, for no human ‘‘author’’ can divine how his or her intentions will intersect with the conditions of their enactment. If authorship is not quite dead, we do well no longer to treat it as the external effect of solitary genius or stubborn mediocrity. As Hannah Arendt writes, in a book whose title may in truth be the most direct inspiration for this one’s, ‘‘It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves its purpose; but it is also because of the medium, in which action alone is real, that it ‘produces’ stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things.’’3 The idea of the solitary hero...