As a political thinker nurtured in early 20th-century German, Hannah Arendt is most often identified with the Greek philosophical tradition. This article argues that the crisis in reality that threw her into politics also, though unacknowledgedly, threw her into ‘Jewish modes of thinking’ as an alternative source where she found the Greek tradition lacking. This claim is controversial, given Arendt’s vehement criticisms of any recourse to the absolute, or metaphysical truths in the realm of politics. Nevertheless, and consistent with a (...) number of early 20th-century Jewish thinkers who explicitly identified the Hebrew God not as the metaphysical but as the condition of possibility for authentic freedom under conditions of finitude, one finds in Arendt a move towards an understanding of the seat of human freedom that sits far more comfortably in the Jerusalem than in the Athens tradition. Specifically, in her emphasis on natality and genuine futurity, one senses a strong resonance with the notion of pure creation in the Hebrew Bible, as one does, notably, in her insistence that forgiveness and promises form the two pillars for human sociality. Throughout the history of Jewish thought, one consistently finds precisely this Arendtian struggle to represent a model of law that holds the tension between binding fidelity to promises, memory and the past, and an openness to futurity, to the infinity of interpretation that gives meaning to those promises. Closely resembling the midrashic tradition, Arendt’s political community of speech is one in which meaning is open ended and plural, allowing for the binding together that sustains a polity, while also opening up to the radically new of each new birth. (shrink)

_Examines the German and Jewish sources of Strauss's thought and the extent to which his philosophy can shed light on the crisis of liberal democracy._.

Leon Kass is much misunderstood. He is not simply a Republican ideologue who tailored his ideas to break out of the ivory tower and into the halls of power. Nor does he ook simply to use human nature as a moral guide. When the full range of his writings is considered and set in the tradition of his teachers, Hans Jonas and Leo Strauss, what emerges is a natural law position colored by religious revelation.

For some years now, an opposition has been drawn, not only among Israeli academics but among politicians and journalists as well, between Jewish nationalist or Zionist thought and the kind of thinking that is called “postmodern.” The argument is that a Zionist cannot be a postmodernist and vice versa, the two being incompatible. It appears that this opposition originated with an identification made between “post-Zionist” historical revisionism (of the kind associated with Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and (...) Tom Segev) and postmodernist methods, assumptions, and claims. In some cases, the identification was made by the “new historians” themselves. While there is considerable bad blood between post-Zionist scholars and those, inside and outside the academy, who defend one or another version of the Zionist narrative, it needs to be demonstrated that postmodernism has nothing to do with their adversarial relations. The effort of this article is to show that, even before postmodernism was heard of, nationalist thinkers such as Rabbi A. I. H. Kook (1865 – 1935), Rabbi M. A. Amiel (1883 – 1946), Rabbi Abraham Hazan (1920 – 2003), and Professor André Neher (1914 – 1988) mounted Zionist arguments of a sort that we now regard as poststructuralist or postmodern. (shrink)

Autopoietic societies have produced three major images of civilization: the Greco-Roman, the Eurocentric Western, and the Settler Society type. The most important incarnation of the latter to date has been America. This article explores the deep-going differences between American and European ideas of civilization. It examines how the American kind of autopoietic civilization expresses itself in preternaturally distinctive conceptualizations of nature and freedom, life and death, order and chaos, city and ecumene. The article discusses the political and social implications of (...) this. (shrink)

This article treats post-Holocaust humanitarianism as a secular version of St Paul’s ‘Jewish Question’: why are there still Jews now that the particularities of Jewish history have universal meaning? It considers Paul’s Judaeo-Christianity, a distinctively Christian embrace of Jewish survival, as the prototype of today’s secular project of conversion to human rights, and asks what it means within this project for Jews to regard themselves as the only Jews. The article concludes by defining an Islamic alternative to the imperial reach (...) of today’s human rights discourse, based on the recent publication of 1981 lectures by the late N. O. Brown, who presented Islam as an alternative to the Pauline synthesis of Athens-Jerusalem that would renew, rather than supersede, the prophetic tradition of Jewish monotheism. Following Brown, the article presents Muhammad as the anti-Paul, and considers the key differences between their respective political theologies on issues such as fidelity, cruelty and particularly the urgency of justice. Islam’s insistence that there is no ‘time between’ the end of evil and the beginning of justice shows the limitations of today’s human rights discourse as a religion of permanent transition that denies urgency to justice itself. The ‘Jewish Question’ that Paul formulated for Christians in a Roman world order thus illuminates issues posed by the Holocaust and Israel for professed humanitarians today. (shrink)

Leo Strauss is one of the few political philosophers of the twentieth century to appreciate the enduring challenge of revealed religion to philosophy. While most of his contemporaries had written o...

Leo Strauss was one of the few philosophers of the twentieth century to see religion as the premier challenge to his own field of study. Most of his contemporaries in philosophy had arrived at the...

This essay explores the use of the concept of the messianic by Giorgio Agamben and Theodor Adorno. Throughout his work, Agamben consistently presents his reading of the messianic as an alternative to what he considers to be the ‘pessimistic’ negative dialectics of Adorno, which he argues ‘is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought’. For Agamben, the messianic brings dialectics to a ‘standstill’. This essay analyzes this deployment of the ‘messianic’ in his thought, and contrasts it with the perspective of Adorno. (...) Agamben’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin is challenged with reference to a debate between Adorno and Benjamin over theology, dialectics, and politics. (shrink)

This article examines Franz Kafka’s The Trial using some of the keys to political thought offered by Javier Roiz and his teachers in the field of rhetoric. Kafka introduced the tragic genre in 20th century literature, reflecting the tensions of the modern citizen that is subject to political institutions that control the destinies and lives of individuals, entering in foro interno and leading to a loss of people’s capacity to judge freely. The masters of rhetoric observe that the formation of (...) the State and citizens’ obedience to laws are two aspects of politics that have deeper philosophical roots than the Cartesian rationalism that dominates in Western Schools, and that the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, between truth and law, is in fact a more complex and richer source of thought. (shrink)

En su Religionskritik Spinozas Leo Strauss sostiene que la crítica de la religión de Spinoza se expresa y fundamenta “en la alternativa cruda y desnuda entre la superstición, el prejuicio, la barbarie, la ignorancia, las tinieblas de un lado, y la razón, la libertad, la cultura, las luces, del otro”. La critica spinoziana de la religión aparece entonces, de acuerdo con Strauss, como “la critica…operada por el Iluminismo mas radical”. Un abismo se abre entre la vida del sabio regida por (...) la razón, y aquella de la multitud sujeta a las pasiones, estableciendo con ello una rígida jerarquía entre dos tipos de hombre nítidamente diferenciados. Nos propondremos en este trabajo examinar esta proposición centrándonos en la necesidad de repensar no sólo el rol de la razón y la imaginación en el discurso político spinoziano, sino fundamentalmente la relación entre una y otra; relación determinante en la constitución de la multitud, y por ello, de la forma política. Nuestro argumento será que en primer lugar esa afirmación no es coherente con la complejidad del texto spinoziano, y en segundo lugar, que la misma constituye el corazón de la interpretación straussiana de Spinoza. (shrink)