“2” in “Talmud and Philosophy” | Open Indiana

אין סכין מתחדדת

A knife is not sharpened

GENESIS RABBAH 69:2

Some conjunctions make a statement. The mere apposition of two terms, their plain placement next to each other, one with the other, one and the other, connected with and may suggest a community and story, or history, where none seem to exist—beyond, perhaps, the fact of belonging to the same language or only to language in general, to logos—and sometimes not even this. The word and suggests, displays and demonstrates, or attests to an already-existing union and coexistence, copresence of the two, but by this very display and unexpected force renders visible what has so far been near absolute nonconnection, coabsence without so much as the connection of disconnection, less than different: disparate and dispersed beyond all and.

This, or something like this, applies to philosophy and Talmud.

BETWEEN T AND T

Or we should write, rather, philosophy and talmud. The drama of this conjunction takes place between T and t, Talmud and talmud, a proper name and a concept. Sergey Dolgopolski already opened that space: “By the seemingly innocent omission of a grammatical article,” the the, that is, the space between “‘the’ Talmud . . . as either a traditional source or a historical project” and “Talmud (without the the) as an intellectual project.”¹ This was the difference between a historical project and an intellectual project, a difference between history and thought as different projects—both specific, temporally or historically identifiable undertakings, both, with or without the, properly named Talmud. To conjoin Talmud and philosophy on an equal footing or heading, an additional “seemingly innocent omission” or rather downsizing or reduction is required, by mere optics, from T to t, from name to concept, from thought as a project to thought as a discipline, like philosophy. Two concepts or forms of thought, philosophy and talmud, would be thus united or reunited in thought, and their conjunction and would be a connection of thought, a logical preposition, strictly speaking, no longer an indifferent and but some mode of conceptual synthesis. The only remaining perplexity would be that they—philosophy and talmud—were ever apart.

Yet the opposite seems to be the case. The conjunction of philosophy and talmud, historically and contemporarily, is far from obvious. Their conjunction is a statement. Whether two concepts or disciplines or modes or forms or configurations of thought, the space between them, the space of the and and the and not is not the purely conceptual, logical, or epistemological space. Rather than philosophy and talmud, their relation might be more appropriately designated as Philosophy, Talmud, two proper names connected by no article, no logical or grammatical relation, interrelated by sheer exterior, nonlogical space. Talmud and Philosophy would be the enigma of thought separated or dispersed by space of nonthought, it would be the question concerning the relation between Philosophy and Talmud as, to quote Dolgopolski, “traditions of thought.”² The space of nonthought, where thought can be separated, where concepts and forms of thought may exist with no logical connection, not even and, would be the space or dimension of “tradition,” a dimension of time or history, or, more fundamentally, a dimension of memory where thought exists in the plural, as projects or traditions of thought, for instance, Philosophy and Talmud.

For instance, and: What is the perspective from which these words are or may be spoken? From what point of view and what project or tradition of thought may the conjunction of Talmud and Philosophy be attempted? Is there a third, “neutral” or even comprehensive perspective? Wouldn’t such a synthetic, synoptic perspective abolish and absorb the space of nonthought between Talmud and Philosophy? Does such a perspective have history or tradition? And who may claim to speak from and for this perspective? Who might be the voice of such a tradition? May I be that voice, may “we,” that is, the collective epistemological and logical space in which this text may exist and speak, which can be tentatively identified as Western academic or scientific or something similar? All discourse on “traditions of thought” or “traditions of discourse” commits to self-identification.

From a neutral perspective, Philosophy and Talmud seem to be equally visible, accessible, and present: comparable. They are “commensurable and mutually irreducible ways of thinking,” Dolgopolski writes.³ Are they really equally present for us, these two traditions? Are they equally present in the locus of these words, the place in which their names, Philosophy and Talmud, are brought in conjunction? Dolgopolski’s observation on the conditions or preconditions of observation—a phenomenologically foundational observation then, which marks a point of departure for his observation on Philosophy and Talmud, and for mine, walking here in his footsteps, in his “tradition,” so to speak—is not the Talmud’s visible and accessible presence but rather the opposite, an absence or concealedness, what he calls “effacement” of Talmud. For us, for our thought, Talmud, as a way or form of thought, exists in a certain mode of absence, effaced. All contemplation, observation, and theory of Talmud must essentially be a phenomenology of effacement, phenomena of absence.

One first obvious phenomenon of the absence of Talmud, of Talmud as thought, of Talmud from thought—our thought—is Philosophy, both in its manifest, evident presence and in its specific presence for us and in us, namely, as philosophy. In our epistemology, both conceptually and institutionally, philosophy is a synonym of thought: not our thought but thought per se. If Talmud, as a tradition of thought, is absent for us, it is from our thoughts that it is absent, and the site of this absence is philosophy. On the most evident level, the Talmud is absent from philosophy. Talmud is no topos and no locus for the thought and theory that guide our knowledge, not even our knowledge of Talmud. In “Philosophy and Talmud,” it is the former that is supposed to shed light on the latter, not vice versa.

It is important to remember that this felt presence of philosophy in our epistemology is not unproblematic, philosophically speaking. “Philosophy,” if there ever was one, has shown itself in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a contentious and schismatic designation. Think of the chasm between “Anglo-American” and “Continental.” Contemporary philosophy, like that of the Heideggerian school, has thus generated a discourse whereby the seeming presence of philosophy for us is the phenomenon of its real absence, the face of its effacement, so to speak, or that “philosophy” itself is the state of oblivion of thought. Could it be the same effacement as the Talmud’s? Are Talmud and thought conjoined in oblivion? Heidegger might say that the self-oblivion of philosophy consists of forgetting itself as memory, a memory or tradition, forgetting Philosophy—genealogically and etymologically Greek. Is the invisibility in philosophy of Greek—and Latin, German, French, and English—the very effacement of Talmud from thought?

However, as Dolgopolski indicates, “effacement”—very much like Heidegger’s “concealedness”—is “a dynamic process of the appearance of something at precisely the singular moment of its disappearance.”⁴ Like philosophy effaces Philosophy, talmud also disappears first not in philosophy but in its own appearance—for us. More precisely, the absence of talmud from thought takes place not as pure invisibility of talmud or nonexistence of any knowledge of talmud but as a specific knowledge, a specific perception and conception of the singularity of the talmudic way or form or tradition of thought, a specific perception of talmudic singularity, the talmudic kind of singularity, whereby this singularity has nothing to do with thought. I suggest that the specific perception of talmudic singularity, which effaces and renders absent for us talmudic thought, is the “Jewish.” It is the Jewish, rather than Philosophy, that seems to be the main site of talmud’s absence.

A better way of describing the relationship is to say that they are complementary sites. Tentatively and schematically, I suggest that “philosophy,” understood as thought without tradition, memory, or language, pure logos transcending all difference, universal, is complemented in our epistemology by “the Jewish,” standing for the singular as particular, in the sense of identity and difference beyond or before and outside all thought, logos and reason. The paradigmatic phenomenon of Jewish a-logical difference, Jewish particularity, is the Jewish human collective, understood as ethnos: the collective beyond or before thought, polis outside logos. It seems that it is within this category of Jewish particularity that talmud has been perceived by contemporary knowledge as the Talmud—as a central phenomenon of this particularity. From all textual and intellectual projects identified as “Jewish,” it is indeed the Talmud, much more than the Bible or Kabbalah or Jewish philosophy or theology, that has been most identified with Jewish ethnic particularism and opposed to universalism and philosophy. Thus when philosopher Alain Badiou, a contemporary prophet of universalism, looked for a concise formula of contemporary Jewish particularism, he called it SIT: “the tripod of the Shoah, the State of Israel and the Talmudic Tradition,” connecting Talmud to particularistic politics of Jewish race and state.⁵

Talmud’s absence is present less in our philosophy’s disregard or dismissal of Jewish particularity than in its affirmative epistemological performance. The very concept of “Jewish Studies” could be read as Western epistemology’s translation, and thus equivalent and substitution, of “Talmud.” Textual traces for this conceptual substitution, or supersession, can be found in the archives of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.⁶ The foundational epistemological operation of the Science of Judaism, bequeathed to Jewish Studies, has been the de-epistemization of the Jewish: Jewish being and phenomena perceived paradigmatically not as forms of knowledge, theory, and thought but as objects of knowledge arising from non-Jewish, universal epistemology and thought, arising, ultimately, from philosophy.

It is this process of de-epistemization, de-logization, or effacement from thought that a more patient study could trace within the production and performance of Jewish Studies’ Jewish Talmud, in Talmudic or Rabbinic Studies. It is there that talmud, as a way of thinking, is effaced by Talmud, as a tradition of thought, which is effaced by the Talmud, as a text, the paradigmatic perception of which shifts from logos to literature to history to document to manuscript, none of which function as media of thought but as phenomena of the nonthought that is Jewish being. Talmud is accordingly epistemologically present, known as a document of Jewish culture. Christine Hayes identified and criticized one point in this process, the shift of Talmud from literature to document, as “reductive historical analysis,” which perceives and reads the text as a mere indication, a symptom or trace of “economic, political, national, and social” circumstances.” ⁷ In perfect solidarity with this process are attempts to identify universal—philosophical—thought in Talmud despite its particular Jewishness, such as pointing at the way it deploys Aristotelian logic, for example. Within the category of “the Jewish,” however, such attempts never escape some kind of apologetics, which, to avoid “triumphalism,” veer into a harsher critique of Talmudic Jewish particularism, of Talmud as Jewish particularism. Such a critique presupposes itself as self-critique and thus more self-flagellating and more self-affirmative—the less Talmud, the more Jewish.

It is thus that the Jewish—Jewishness, Jewish existence, the human being, existence, and agency who understands and performs itself as “Jewish”—constitutes the presence of Talmud’s absence for our knowledge and thought. This is not to say that Jewish existence has nothing to do with Talmud, or vice versa. On the contrary, what allows the one to operate as absence of the other is precisely a profound relation and intimacy, a relation of a certain deep and mutual negation, radical existential negation, something like the intimacy of enmity: “enmacy.” This enmacy immediately suggests a complexity or paradox at the very heart of the notion of enemy, an enemy who, by the very radical existential negativity of their foreignness, would necessarily and essentially be always already present, in negative and in absentia, in the being of the self—such that the Jewish, as the absence of Talmud, would exist, in negative and in absentia, in the Talmud itself as its inner condition of nonbeing and disappearance and effacement, which would then be always already self-effacement. Would Talmud’s effacement by the Jewish accordingly be Talmud’s self-effacement as the proper phenomenality—mode of appearance, of Talmud—perhaps very much like self-concealment constitutes for Heidegger the proper truth of Being, its unconcealedness?

To start thinking in this direction or any direction toward Talmud as—a way, a form, a tradition, a mode, a configuration of—thought, and then toward Talmud and Philosophy, Talmud and philosophy, we must go beyond Talmud’s absence, beyond the Jewish. More accurately, we must go beyond or rethink the configuration of philosophy and the Jewish as a certain contemporary configuration of thought and temporal-historical singularity, in which they appear as universality and particularity, universality versus particularity, mutually exclusive. Since this contemporary configuration appears paradigmatically as the opposition among thought, knowledge (episteme), reason, and logos (universal philosophy) on the one hand and historical collective human existence, ethnos or polis, polis as ethnos (the particular Jewish people) on the other, what needs to be rethought is the relation between logos and polis as present and familiar to us through the configuration of philosophy and the Jewish, or rather only the Jewish, as polis that breaks with logos. This rethinking needs to take the form of a logo-political critique or polemics against our universalism, that is, the notion and form of universalism that organizes our epistemology.

This self-critical exercise of what I wish to call logo-politics or political epistemology should, as already noted, take into consideration and make use of existing projects of logo-political self-critique in contemporary philosophy, such as Heidegger’s, rendering visible the absence(s) that our present effects and effaces. This disclosed absence is the space and horizon, the Nicht-Da, where absents, like Talmud, may re-reappear. Beyond the Jewish and philosophy, a phenomenology (or aphenomenology, i.e., logos of a-phenomenon, of nonappearing) of Talmud must discover or recover, recall or remember talmudic thought not just as different or an alternative to the Judeo-philosophical, ours, but as rival, not to say hostile, logo-politics.

DISAGREEMENT

As previously mentioned, my contemplation follows a path that has already been charted by others. I mostly take inspiration from and struggle with—or, as the rabbinic saying goes, sharpen my knife against the knives of—Daniel Boyarin and Sergey Dolgopolski, or Dolgopolski devei Boyarin. It is to their conversation, their tradition—or, perhaps, to reference Dolgopolski—their “dance” that I wish to join via disagreement: disagreeing with or declining or even breaking the dance—is this still dancing?

Yet before the dis-, I state the agreement, or, rather, agreements; there are at least five, and they are fundamental. First, in both Boyarin’s and Dolgopolski’s work, I read on different levels of explicitness the attempt to recall and read the Talmud as thought—a form, a mode, a tradition of thought—with its own specific configuration of the relationships between episteme or logos and polis, its own political epistemology or logo-politics. Importantly, both Boyarin and Dolgopolski engage with the highly specific and unique form of Talmudic discourse, the specific logics of its logos, the specific Talmudic “rhetoric,” as they say, as constituting or performing eo ipso Talmudic politics before or beyond any Talmudic discussions pertaining to specific “political” themes, such as public institutions, the king, the courts, and so on. Second, this specific Talmudic logo-politics is asserted by both Boyarin and Dolgopolski as a logo-political act, in other words, not just as a theoretical, epistemological operation of suggesting another Talmudic model of logo-politics next to the more well-known, say, “philosophical” model but also as an act of opposition, resistance, or defiance, a political act of positing Talmud versus Philosophy. Third, their opposition to Philosophy is conducted as opposition to universalism, in the name of difference. Fourth, both Boyarin and Dolgopolski read Talmud beyond or before, which means against, the Jewish, at least in the most basic sense that they both are attentive to the fact that the Talmud hardly ever speaks of and never identifies itself or any of its many selves, “itselves,” as “Jewish.” This should be noted as a fact, which must nevertheless be interpreted as more than a unique feature of terminology and linguistic usage since the few mentions of “Jews” in the Talmud prove that the Talmudic selves know they are being designated as such by others, their nonuse of this designation for themselves must be understood not just as performance of difference but as an act or even project of logo-political resistance. Fifth, the consequence, which I more draw from than read in their work, is that contemporary efforts of recovering Talmudic logo-politics are required to assert themselves not only in opposition to Philosophy but, even more so, in—a much more complex and delicate—resistance to the Jewish.

These five elements in addition to a crucial sixth, the element of effacement, that is, a phenomenology of the effacement of Talmudic logo-politics by Philosophy and the Jewish, were assembled most explicitly and articulately in Dolgopolski’s last book Other Others: The Political after the Talmud. I now wish to discuss my agreements and disagreements by taking a closer and unavoidably simplifying look at one of the book’s basic lines of argumentation.

I focus on the book’s central argumentative axis, which positions Philosophy and Talmud relative to one another, as two traditions and disciplines of thinking regarding their different relations to “the Political”: “Talmud and philosophy as two commensurable but mutually irreducible ways of thinking the political that fruitfully can be brought into an explicit dialogue one with another.”⁸ The nature, conceptual possibility, and potential fruitfulness of such a dialogue remain open questions, considering that Dolgopolski claims that the two traditions of thinking the political have engendered two different political models or approaches, representing “two approaches to the experience of human existence [that] are mutually exclusive.”⁹ Mutual exclusiveness, however, seems to be a less favorable precondition for dialogue and more so for war.

A main thread in Dolgopolski’s portrayal of Philosophy’s political epistemology leads to a radical image of antidialogical destruction and extermination. The paradigm for this epistemo-political portrait of philosophy is a Kantian “subject of reason,” a purely reasonable subject, whose pure logic supersedes all positive and empirically and historically given realities.¹⁰ The collective existence, polis, or earth, to use Dolgopolski’s geophilosophical terms, that arises from this epistemology is the “intersubjective space,” a world of “isolated thinking subjects” where—in a dystopian vision echoing Hannah Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism, Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of individualism and communitarism, and Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism—the total logic of “the industrial, postindustrial and informational” moves to supersede and to efface the political itself.¹¹ Dolgopolski is closer to Nancy and Schmitt than to Arendt because he identifies the historical paradigm of this supersessionist and eliminatory philosophical logo-politics in the paragon of liberal enlightenment, that is, universal humanism. Modern universalism is the deployment of philosophy’s eliminatory logo-politics by means of the figure of “‘the human’ as a would-be common denominator capable of bridging all cultural, ethnic, racial, moral, sexual and geopolitical differences.”¹²

Philosophy’s antidifference politics, which Dolgopolski exemplifies in two modern thinkers who explicitly spoke for difference, Carl Schmitt (who, according to Dolgopolski, subjected difference to “political theology”) and Jacques Rancière (who would have subjected difference to “political ontology”), culminates for Dolgopolski not just in assimilating and obliterating all differences under “the human” but, more radically, in denying and negating all other, nonassimilable kind of differences and positive identities, all “other others.” As a paradigmatic “other other” that has been negated by modern philosophy’s intersubjective, universalist logo-politics of “the human,” Dolgopolski points at the modern figure of “the Jew,” constructed by modern political epistemology as the negative counterfigure of “the human” and so preprogrammed for extermination. It is this twentieth-century event of extermination of the Jewish other others that would mark a limit and end of philosophy’s universalist “human” politics, both a conceptual and a real historical end: “After what the Holocaust names, insufficiently, the human can no longer be automatically granted the status of a common denominator.”¹³

Despite the precautionary qualification (automatically), the violence of the image summons the perspective not so much of a fruitful dialogue between Philosophy and Talmud, as rather of a turn from Philosophy to Talmud. If Philosophy’s intersubjectivity effaced the political, this effacement is linked to the effacement “of the Talmud as the political,” such that Dolgopolski suggests turning to Talmud not for the sake of “Jewish” Studies but for the fundamental sake of recovering the political itself, a non-self-effacing version of the political, “of which the Talmud might be the only surviving, or at least the only available, but in no way the only possible example.”¹⁴

As noted previously, Dolgopolski recognizes the Talmud’s political performance primarily not in any specific content but in the form of Talmudic discourse. Similarly to Boyarin, Dolgopolski discerns the formal specificity of Talmudic logos, in contrast to philosophical logics, in categories of literary studies. Both Boyarin and Dolgopolski analyze the Talmudic text as a genre of literature, deploying categories from Russian formalism, mainly Bakhtin. One may wonder whether philosophy and literature, as epistemological notions and domains, really or necessarily feature opposite or “mutually exclusive” discursive forms, or whether they are, as can be observed in the institutional epistemology of American academia, complementary. This would require asking about the epistemological meaning of knowing Talmud as and under the scientific regime of “literature,” which, in contrast to “philosophy,” seems to be constituted on a fundamental split between knowledge (literary theory) and its object (literary text), Talmud being paradigmatically allotted to the latter and so de-epistemized as a document of Jewish literature and culture. Here lies the bud of my disagreement or of the difficulty I identify in Dolgopolski’s and Boyarin’s phenomenology of Talmudic logo-politics. It seems that their accounts, at least at some central points, manifest a certain antiuniversalism that consists of asserting particularism; an assertion, however, that ultimately functions not as the negation but as the very performance of universalism.

In contrast with philosophical universalism, for which Talmudic singularity arises from Jewish particularity, as an illegitimate (ethno-)political break with logos, which thus must be banned from universal thought (“philosophy”), Dolgopolski and Boyarin point to Talmud as featuring an alternative logics, and thus logo-politics, of difference. The fundamental question concerns the nature of this Talmudic difference and, more specifically, its difference from philosophy. The difficulty shows itself in Boyarin’s interpretation of Talmudic logics of difference with Bakhtin’s category of “satire,” which Boyarin identifies as a foundational feature of the Hellenistic culture of “rational inquiry as the way to truth.”¹⁵ He accordingly merges rather than distinguishes rabbinic and Socratic dialogues, both only representing difference and dialogue, while actually being “anything but dialogical, incorporating rather all voices into one single consciousness, that of the ‘author,’” “Plato or the stamma.”¹⁶ Talmudic difference thus appears as the inner relation of a self to itself—“self-critical voice,” “second-order reflection”—that is, as the very constitution of modern philosophy’s “subject of reason.”¹⁷ This epistemology seems to correspond to Boyarin’s logo-political interpretation of Talmudic difference as “diaspora,” which does not counter philosophy’s subject (the “human”) but perfects it by liberating it from the last nonlogical contingency of territory, such that it is everywhere at home, Talmud being its “traveling homeland.”¹⁸ It is hard not to see in Boyarin’s diasporic vision a paradigm of what Dolgopolski calls “the intersubjective space.” According to this logic, the singularity of Talmud, like all other diasporas, is ultimately the empirical particularity of the individual, politically speaking, the collective individual, “the Jewish.” For our epistemological system, beyond pure form, what Talmud says, actual Talmudic logos, would be a document of Jewish cultural difference, which for thought is a matter of indifference.

The same difficulty is ultimately presented by Dolgopolski’s account, although his argumentation is explicitly antiphilosophical. Indeed, against philosophy’s “intersubjective space,” superseding and sublating any positive difference—and so any politics—by the universal logics of the reasonable subject, Dolgopolski describes Talmudic logo-politics as “interpersonal,” which he defines as “a way of thinking and acting in society that both involves a multiplicity of positions and does not involve any rigid connection between any position and any individual who performs it.”¹⁹ “Interpersonal” space would avoid both communal and individual totalitarianism. It would be a logo-political space without a transcendental subject, seemingly without an “author” but of an essential multiplicity of “positions,” of “personae.” Both notions, “position” and “person,” suggest an aspect, perspective, face, or hypostasis of a certain whole, that is, the totality of a literary unit, which Dolgopolski’s Talmudic readings most often perform as a theatrical play, with various “characters.”

Thus Dolgopolski describes Talmudic logics underlying interpersonal multiplicity as logics of refutation, in which “positions can stand only in their mutual contradistinction,” that is, connected through disagreement.²⁰ However, as Dolgopolski emphasizes, in reference to Boyarin, Talmudic disagreement does not aim at “cultivating arguments for argument’s sake or remaining genuinely open to an unknown truth that it is the goal of the discussion to attain. The new Babylonian dialectics contributes to the reaffirmation of the authority of the traditions of the past.”²¹ If Talmudic dialectics has no author, it is nonetheless subject to an authority. This authority is typically present in or through the Mishnah; however, it is present in a mode of absence, of open and uncertain past such that disagreement—refutation and counterrefutation—is subjected to the task of establishing the “truth of tradition,” in other words, by way of remembering. Stating that in Talmud, “rational thinking becomes subservient to the task of memory and of remembering,” Dolgopolski asserts the given positivity of Talmudic tradition versus pure, autonomous reason of Kantian epistemology.²² However, just as Kant’s transcendental reason is ultimately united by the individual I, the “subject of reason,” in Dolgopolski’s account, the positive authority of tradition subjects all differences to an ultimate unity: all disagreement remembers. Rather than interrupt or break universal logos, Talmudic dialectics would perfect it, enhancing a static, Kantian state of reason to a dynamic, Hegelian spatiotemporal event, which Dolgopolski describes as “carnival” or “theater” but more often as “dance,” a “dance of memory.”²³

As in the case of Boyarin’s satiric diasporism, Dolgopolski’s carnival of remembrance also features a Talmudic logic of difference that is nonetheless generative of a higher form of a unified system of reason—a subject or state. Talmudic logo-politics emerges as the universal pure form for the space between different interpersonal carnivals, other “Talmuds,” which would ultimately be an intersubjective or interstate space, readily evocative of the international nation-state system arising from our current epistemo-politics. This universality of pure talmudic form, however, implies the extreme particularism of the Talmud’s actual content, which would be contingent on and indifferent to universal thinking—a “Jewish” culture. Talmudic logics (“talmud”) would render Talmudic logos (“the Talmud”) indifferent for thought.

To further articulate the difficulty identified in Boyarin’s and Dolgopolski’s groundbreaking phenomenologies of Talmudic logo-politics, and to begin pointing at the alternative direction I propose, in the next section I revisit one of the two thinkers that Dolgopolski presents as paradigmatic for modern philosophy’s politics, Carl Schmitt. Despite Dolgopolski’s critique of Schmitt, Schmitt’s political theology and state theory seem to offer an intensive confrontation with the same fundamental difficulty that I analyze, such that it may provide a helpful conceptual framework for approaching Talmudic political epistemology. Certainly, any explicitly logo-political investigation must acknowledge and address the paradox or scandal of referring to “the crown jurist of the Third Reich” as a gateway to Talmud.²⁴ Indeed, far from wishing to blur this skandalon, I think there is here, on the contrary, a central, extremely sensitive and difficult point, too complex to be appropriately analyzed here, that touches and renders tangible the stakes and dangers of searching for Talmud contra the modern Jewish. Such a quest is obligated to confront—and open new perspectives for the confrontation with—the historical forms of the anti-Jewish.²⁵

EVIL

Schmitt’s basic intellectual project, as he characterized it in his famous essay in Political Theology (1922), was, in essence, logo-political. Schmitt called it a “sociology of juridical concepts.”²⁶ By this term, he did not mean the empirical study of social conditions giving rise to legal notions. What he meant was the relation between, on the one hand, socio-logy—the fundamental logos of society, its “metaphysics” or, as Schmitt says in a later text, its “concept of truth”—and its legal and political institutions, on the other hand.²⁷ Schmitt’s basic interest was in the relation between society’s logos and its polis. Significantly, metaphysics is, in Schmitt’s perspective, sociology, and the political appears as the juridical, Schmitt’s most intimate element, which is the proper logos of the polis: not politilogy, science of the political, but law, nomos, as the very logos that is the polis. “Sociology of juridical concepts” is, accordingly, the interaction between two types, forms, or events of logos, the metaphysical/social and the political/juridical, which are related but separated and feature a radical split or break in logical totality. It is this break of logos that stands at the center of Schmitt’s thought.

His initial observation in 1922 was of a fundamental logo-political break in the society of “modern Europe.” In contrast to critical visions of totalitarianism in the age of reason, Schmitt pointed to a significant dissociation between modern Europe’s political organization and its thought, a break between European Staatslehre, which is not only theory or science but also doctrine, art, and practice of the state, “the juridical,” and the specific European metaphysics from which this doctrine, according to Schmitt, arises—“theology.” Schmitt understood this modern rupture between the state’s logos and its underlying theo-logos to be a detheologization of the essentially theological, an operation and event of “secularization.” This is the logo-political meaning of Schmitt’s most famous dictum in Political Theology: “All significant concepts of modern state doctrine are secularized theological concepts.”²⁸

The crucial element in Schmitt’s observation was highlighting how this logo-political break is constitutive for the state’s most intimate logos, that is, for its nomos, its Recht, modern state law. Against jurists such as Hans Kelsen, who identified between the state and its law, between the state law and the state as a “state of law,” Rechtsstaat, a systematic, self-contained normative totality—which is how state law constitutionally defines itself, de jure—Schmitt’s 1922 essay indicated how state law is de facto founded on a break with law, norm, and logics. As positive law, modern state law draws its validity from no law or norm, reason, logos, or truth but—similarly to Dolgopolski’s “tradition”—from absolute authority. Schmitt quotes Hobbes: “Autoritas, non veritas facit legem”: “It is authority and not truth that makes the law.” Absolute authority, seen from inside of the legal system that it makes, from inside state law, appears as its exception: as the ultimate power that is not subject to the law—“the sovereign.” The state sovereign is thus an a-legal, a-logical being, it is no institution or corporation but a “person,” by which Schmitt does not mean, like Dolgopolski, a position within a discourse but rather an individual, nonincorporated body, physis arising from no idea, reason, or logos, which can thus be the absolute origin of law, as a “personal command” (ibid., 36). The sovereign act, which founds the logical structure of state law, is thus absolutely nonlogical; it follows from no norm or discussion, inferable (ableitbar) from nothing, arises from nothingness, aus einem Nichts, an absolute act ex nihilo, which Schmitt famously terms Entscheidung: “decision.”²⁹ “Decision liberates itself from all normative bind and becomes in the true sense of the word absolute.”³⁰

Five years later, in 1927, Schmitt extended his observation of this a-logical logo-politics from the specific political organization of the modern European state to the very essence of politics, to “The Concept of the Political.”³¹ In this essay, Schmitt defined the polis, the “political” collective or group, as a grouping that, whatever the constitutive logic and norm of its internal association—religious, ethnic, national, moral, and so on—defines itself in contradistinction to another, foreign group, whose foreignness is identified by the first group as constituting a radical opposition to and negation of itself. The relation of “opposition” and “negation” suggests logics. Schmitt’s point was, however, that whatever the original, internal logos of the grouping may be, the opposition with the external foreign becomes political, an opposition with something external and foreign, when it detaches itself from any logos. Thus political negation is no longer logical or normative but existential or ontic, “seinsmäßige negation of another being [Sein].”³² Political opposition is, for Schmitt, essentially and paradigmatically—if usually only potentially and virtually—war, a polemos that is no “polemics,” no “discussion.” War does not contrast logical entities or discursive “positions” but rather physical bodies in a negation that is not epistemological but ontic: a negation not of refutation but of “physical death.” The polis lives in view of its death, which appears in the famous Schmittian figure of the Feind, the “foe,” the political enemy. The identification of the foe, which is at once a declaration of war and a declaration of independence, and, eo ipso, the constitution of order and law is a sovereign act, which follows from no norm, reason, or logic. It is pure decision. The modern state would be an accomplished form of a-logical polis because the ultimate definition of the state collective, as well as the boundaries of its authority and law, follows no reason but the arbitrary, physical, and geographical border. A modern state exists as an individual political unity not by virtue of its conceptual legal singularity but rather by virtue of its separate geographical territory.

Any attempt, like Dolgopolski’s, to present Schmitt’s thought as representative of modern universalist humanism would have to account for the fact that Schmitt did not criticize and did not propose to repair or bridge the break or rupture of logos that he observed as constitutive to politics and even more so to the modern state. On the contrary, it is this break, manifesting itself as initially noted in the modern dissociation between politics and metaphysics, in “secularization,” that Schmitt asserted as the heart of the forgotten metaphysics, that is, theology, which he thus proposed not as refutation but as a legitimate authority and foundation for the a-logics of Western politics. There would be a logos of the political break of logos, and this logos is the theo-logos, such that theos, God, would stand for the end of logos and the beginning of polis.

At the end of logos and the beginning of polis stands God or, rather, the discourse of God, theo-logos, which enacts or represents or simply is God in absence. Theology takes place in the absence of God. It is, in fact, the absence of God and not God’s omnipresence or omnipotence that is at the heart of Schmitt’s theology. Schmitt’s theological reflections say nothing of God. His theological passages, such as Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), focus not on God’s presence but on human institutions and politics as performing God’s absence, paradigmatically his representation through the Catholic church.³³ The most crucial aspect of theology for Schmitt, which turns God’s absence into the condition or element of politics, pertains not to God but to the “nature of man” and its social implications. Schmitt’s theology is primarily social anthropology. Its fundamental logos, as Schmitt initially learns from the Catholic contrarevolutionists, is that human nature is sin. Man is by nature evil.³⁴

What is evil “by nature”? That human nature is evil means human evil does not lie in any specific bad mood, evil state of mind, or malicious intentions to do “bad” things. On the contrary, it means that people do evil even and precisely when they have good intentions. In other words, evil as human nature and sin as a human state designate a condition in which human beings are—or, socio-anthropologically speaking, humanity is—unable to be and do good, precisely due to their good intentions, due to the humanly good reason, knowledge, and logos. Under these conditions, humans are in their essence and being, in their physical existence a seinsmäßige negation of the good, or a foe. The sociological consequence is that any attempt to enact and institute the good, to create a good order, society, and law, must assume a foreign collective, which by its own logic, society, and law, by its very essence, being, and best behavior is its enemy, its foe: enmity thus beyond any logic, dia-logos, and discussion, beyond any possible understanding. Evil is the human condition of essential, structural war. “The fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man leads, just as does the distinction of friend and enemy, to a categorization of men and makes impossible the undifferentiated optimism of a universal conception of man.”³⁵ Theology would accordingly be the logos of the break of logos and, so, of the seinsmäßige “division of men,” as Schmitt says. “A theologian ceases to be a theologian when he no longer considers man to be sinful or in need of redemption and no longer distinguishes between the chosen and the nonchosen.”³⁶ Theology would be the logos of the political.

What follows from this “political theology” (in fact, a pleonasm), which is thus informative for any contemplation of talmudic versus philosophical logo-politics, is a powerful critique of universalism. The greatest threat, the greatest evil in the human condition of essential evil is to declare evil itself a foe. Declaring war on evil is always already the victory of war, the victory of evil. As Schmitt shows, declaring war on evil is declaring war on war, a war on the distinction between friend and foe. This war on human division—hence on the political itself—must be declared in the name of human unity, in the name of humanity. War on war is a war on polis in the name of logos: peace, justice, reason, progress, civilization, and God or Christ. It is a just war, a crusade. As a war, however, this just war on war, human war on war necessarily has a foe, who must be identified, declared, and fought against as inhuman. Just war is, Schmitt observes, necessarily a war of Vernichtung, of annihilation and extermination. “The war is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity. Such a war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed.”³⁷ It is again in Hobbes that Schmitt finds “the correct recognition that the conviction of both parties about the true, the good and the just leads to the most terrible hostilities, ultimately also to the bellum of all against all.”³⁸

The basic, universal politics that arises from Schmitt’s theology is accordingly antiuniversalism: the politics of maintaining human division, maintaining foe and war by keeping separate polis and logos, politics and reason, knowledge or truth. This concerns the basic nature of human praxis, the basic human act underlying all politics: an act that breaks with logos, that is, decision. The fundamental decision is the decision on the decision: theology. Theology would be the logos of decision, that is, a-logical logos, a truth or revelation that is not inferred, proven, or justified but positively declared: dogma.³⁹ Similarly, the logos of the polis is a logos of decision: “the juridical” not in the sense of the normative and the legal but in the sense of the judicial, the judgment, a decision by no reason but on authority. “Such a decision in the broadest sense belongs to every legal perception. Every legal thought brings a legal idea, which in its purity can never become reality, into another aggregate condition and adds an element that cannot be derived either from the content of the legal idea or from the content of a general positive legal norm that is to be applied. [. . .] In every transformation there is present an auctoritatis interposition.”⁴⁰

Schmitt provides no systematic or detailed description, even in outline, of the specific historical doctrines and institutions that would have arisen from this theo-logo-politics, which, following his thought, could function as a hermeneutical key for reading the history of Roman Catholicism. Catholic antiuniversalism, a paradoxical universal antiuniversalism, opposition to universalism in the name of universalism serves Schmitt first and foremost, as noted previously, as the raison d’être or the irraison d’être of the modern state, the consummated polis founded on the division between polis and logos: autoritas, non veritas facit legem. For Schmitt, this division of power from truth ensures the essential nonuniversality, the essential individuality or particularity of the state, singularity without reason as a limited authority on a limited territory, which can therefore fight only limited wars on limited foes for limited causes. The great achievement of modern state doctrine, according to Schmitt, was to institutionalize the political world as a pluriversum, a plurality of sovereign states. State doctrine, which perfects the political idea, is a logo-politics of difference. Each state maintains law within: a state law in which evil is legalized and is criminal, not foe. Politics and war are kept outside, between states in a paradoxical state of interstate law, a law on war, the fundamental purpose of which is to ensure that war is not legalized, so that the enemy—a mass murderer—is never criminalized, never brought to justice.⁴¹

Whence arises Schmitt’s own foe, his own war—and politics. If the crusades and religious wars were the premodern foe of the political, the evil faced by the modern state, the modern figure of radical evil, the foe of the foe, and so of Schmitt’s Political Theology, is the modern opposition to the theo-logo-polis. This is not “secularism” per se because secularism does not eliminate but rather presupposes theology, so that the modern state, as noted previously, could be seen as the very reality of secularism.⁴² Antitheology abolishes God and Evil, reunites logos with polis, and so, for Schmitt, abolishes politics and declares war on war. Schmitt recognized two basic forms of modern antitheology. First, anarchism, or revolution, is a programmatic and explicit anti-theo-logos. It denies God, asserts human reason, and fights the state. This antitheology, however, still takes the form of theology. For political theology, revolutionary antitheology is not absolute, seinsmäßige negation, not a foe. Political theology and anarchism still have something in common. Schmitt claims that Bakunin, Lenin, and Mao “knew what they were doing.”⁴³

The real foe of Schmittian political theology is not anarchism but liberalism. Liberalism does not negate theology logically but rather ignores theology, negates it ontically—seinsmäßig. Liberalism exists in a world of evil, a political world; it exists as worldly evil, as a state, the liberal state—but without knowing it. Liberalism, Schmitt says, has neither theology nor a theory of state.⁴⁴ In other words, liberalism completely ignores the break of logos. There would be a liberal illusion of universalism very similar to the one criticized by Marx. Liberal metaphysics is physics, natural science; its politics is police and policy of neutrality and depoliticized technology. It sees no decision, only “eternal discussion”; no sovereign, only legal system. The foe of liberal politics, which declares itself “nonpolitical,” is consequently politics. Liberal distinction between friend and foe is a distinction between nonpolitical and political. Liberal wars are wars on war, imperialistic wars in the name of peace and humanity, necessarily taking the form of Vernichtung crusades with limitless technological power.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Schmitt fought his war against this evil in the name of the state. In his later years, he still understood the evil of both revolutionary and liberal universalism as an imperialistic abuse of the state system.⁴⁵ But is imperialist universalism an abuse of the sovereign state? If the state is a limited, individual, and particular polis, has not its discourse and logic, its modern state logos been essentially humanistic and revolutionary, essentially universal? Are not modern state and modern reason interlinked, as Dolgopolski argues? Schmitt’s account seems to indicate that they are: sovereignty is the state of an absolute self, a self-identical and self-sufficient individuality, an individual totality, which is the very condition of the perfect system of reason and law, the perfect autonomy. It seems that the sovereign state must understand itself as a Rechtsstaat, a state of law, which stands for universal human values, such that its—territorial—limitation is indeed purely contingent. State logos is in its essence total and universal, precluding any logo-political break. It is therefore the same difficulty that arises from both Schmitt’s antiuniversalist state and Boyarin’s and Dolgopolski’s antiuniversalist Talmud. Both accounts feature a logic of difference, of a supposed break in universal logos, which nonetheless generates perfect individual subjects, perfect individual selves, who, precisely because they are liberated from universality, are no longer subject to anything but their own law, hence absolute. If I subscribe to Boyarin’s and Dolgopolski’s attempt to identify a Talmudic logo-politics that would present an alternative to universalism, I also acknowledge the paradox of the logic of difference as it transpires in Schmitt’s political theology of the sovereign state.

In late Schmitt, there is a brief and undeveloped point at which I believe he saw a way out of this paradox. In the 1963 preface of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt acknowledged the intimacy of state and imperialism, be that the intimacy of “abuse.” Accordingly, against the evil of liberal imperialism, he could no longer suggest a dogmatic logos of separation between polis and logos, a logos of a-logos, a theo-logos. He could no longer assert theology against imperialism. Instead, Schmitt evoked a more radical break of logos, which he proposed by way of a postmodern observation: “The time of the systems is gone.”⁴⁶ The end of the system signifies the end or break of logos in its basic coherence and unity, namely, in its basic faculty of generating a totality of meaning and signification, a break of logos as indication, revelation, and dogma, which may serve—even by abuse—as a principle of sovereignty. Schmitt named two ways to perform this break. One was “historical reflection,” which is what he did in Der Nomos der Erde.⁴⁷ The second one, “contrary to it,” he wrote, was “to leap into aphorism,” that is, broken and fragmented logos, which, he added, “for me, as a jurist, is impossible.”⁴⁸ It is the possibility and perhaps the historical actuality of something like aphorism as a logo-political principle that I wish to contemplate now through a phenomenology of Talmud.

EXILE

I start by restating the basic logo-political plot that I find helpful to elicit from Schmitt. His political theology, as already noted, is a logos of the absence of God. This logos of absence—the absence of the object or reality or being to which the logos, as theo-logos, refers—is eo ipso logos of logos or discourse on the knowledge of God in God’s absence. Theology of absence is epistemology, an epistemology of absence, which is another pleonasm, insofar as epistemology is logos, or knowledge, of knowledge; that is, by definition epistemology is always at a distance from and in the absence of the object of knowledge, in the absence of Truth. Schmitt shows this absence of God or Truth—theology or epistemology—to be the very element of the political. The political would be the enactment and performance—in the broadest sense, knowledge or consciousness—of God or Truth, of the “Universal,” as absent; politics would be the performative disruption of logos, a disruption that is nothing but logos itself as performance, that is, not as perfect substance but as a not-yet-perfected event. The greatest challenge of political theology or epistemology, of logo-politics, is to maintain the tension of presenting absence (of God, of Truth) without abolishing either presence or absence.

Schmitt’s Roman Catholic legacy, as it shines through his work, institutionalizes the logo-political tension through the separation between—and cohabitation of—church and state as two separate polities with two separate logoi. I mentioned previously how Schmitt’s work problematizes the logo-political performance of the state, whose sovereignty structurally tends to transgress its limits—tends to the evil of imperialism. It is important to ask to what extent the same problem may be also demonstrated with respect to the church, which, according to Schmitt, performs the presence of absence by way of representation.⁴⁹ Be that as it may, I suggest that Talmud may be contemplated as performing the same fundamental logo-politics of absence—in a fundamentally different way. My comparative observation is that Talmudic logo-politics does not primarily perform the break as a separation between two polities with two logoi but as a break in the very being of polis and the very being of logos. Talmud is the performance of logos as text and polis as exile. Accordingly, talmudic logo-politics is a counterperformance both to the perfectly universal logos of philosophy and to the perfectly particular Jewish state.

What is Talmud? Be it logos as thought (talmud), it is essentially Talmud, a thing or being, logos as text. I contend that this text is not just logo-political—not just logos underlying a polis or the political—but is itself a logo-political unity, a logo-polis, the performance and being of a polity. Talmud is not just logos but also the relation of logos to logos and, more specifically, the performance of one logos (Mishnah) by another logos (Gemara).⁵⁰ This interlogos, or intertext, even if it does generate a certain identity or self, a certain Talmudic self, is, however, no “self-reflection.” It rather features something like the broken relation that Schmitt observed between modern metaphysics and law.

The question of Talmud is accordingly eo ipso the question of Mishnah—and in a certain way, the obverse is true. The Talmud exists in the element of the Mishnah. Mishnaic logos constitutes the basic environment and fundamental logical features of all Talmudic logos. Despite the attempt to reinscribe the Talmud in thought, as talmud—or rather for the sake of this inscription, which must take the Talmud in its singularity—it is crucial to note that the discursive constitution of the Talmud, the Mishnah, as a discourse, does not feature the formal, logical characteristics of the philosophical, metaphysical, theological, scientific, or even literary discourse but rather of what Schmitt called “the Juridical.” As obvious as this may seem, it is nonetheless an epistemo-politically challenging acknowledgment because “legalism” is the reproach on account of which philosophy has often and typically excluded “the Jewish” from thought. As Kant famously said: “Jewish faith, in its original setting, is a compendium (Inbegriff) of mere (bloß) statutory laws,” wherefore “the Jewish” is neither a religion nor a church.⁵¹ No doubt, the specific perception of the juridical as “statutory laws” better describes Maimonides’s Mishnah than the Talmud’s Mishnah, as Dolgopolski showed.⁵² But the categorical rejection of the legal and juridical as the foundation of Talmud seems to have been constitutive for apologetics of “Jewish thought,” which tended to focus on Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah.⁵³

In characterizing the Mishnah as “juridical” and not “legal,” I break with the apologetics and do not, for instance, assert, against Kant, the rationality and order of the Mishnaic legal logos. On the contrary, I accept Kant’s description of “statutory laws” as a raw, naked—“bloß”—form of reason, an undeveloped or broken mode of logos. In fact, it is due to its Mishnaic constitution that Talmudic literature may be contemplated as a phenomenon of disrupted logos. I am thinking of all the basic features of the Talmud as logos, discourse or text, that instead of consolidating or remembering its literary unity, as Boyarin’s and Dolgopolski’s accounts suggest, rather fragment or dismember it: a multiplicity of tongues, authorities, and voices; the lack of author; and, most fundamentally, the lack of logical or narrative continuity and unity. These are the features of a fragmented logos, which lack the inner unity of a self-identical self, of a “subject of reason,” which may be embodied as the “author,” as “Jewish.” Mishnah structures Talmud as a logos with an entirely external unity, the unity of the page, a compendium of separate independent fragments or “aphorisms,” as Schmitt imagined logos to be after “the time of the systems.” As “a jurist,” he thought aphoristic logos was “impossible.” By “jurist,” however, Schmitt must have meant a Rechtswissenschaftler, a “scientist” or scholar of law since aphorism seems to be the basic form of juridical logos. It is as law that the Mishnah structurally sets Talmudic logos in the mode of interruption, as “a very strange book indeed, a unicum even on the rabbinic scene, a fortiori in world literature, one composed of many and disparate elements, all ‘mixed up’ with each other.”⁵⁴

I continue contemplating the Mishnah as the Talmud’s basic juridical logos in agreement with Kant and Schmitt, who identify law, imperfect logos, as the proper logos of the polis. Kant’s full observation is that “Jewish faith, in its original setting, is a compendium of mere statutory laws, on which a state constitution was founded” (my emphasis). The Mishnah, as law, is the constitution of a polis, a politeia.⁵⁵ This is what makes Talmud, a broken logos, properly logo-political. However, Schmitt’s work has also demonstrated that the polis, instituting the break of universal logos, what he called “evil,” precisely as institution, as a “state,” essentially tends toward self-absolutization and self-totalization, thus threatening to become the ultimate figure and source of evil, “imperialism.” Finding that Mishnah, the basic logos of Talmud, is juridical is therefore insufficient for establishing the nature of the logo-political break performed by the Talmud because the juridical break of logos is also the basis of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, and the modern state. The crucial question concerns the precise identity and nature of the polis for which the Mishnah is the basic law and logos.

I suggest that the Mishnaic polis is the Talmud. In fact, as noted previously, Talmud is one logos, Gemara, acting on or performing another logos, Mishnah. Talmud is action on Mishnaic juridical logos, an action on the authority of Mishnaic law. In this sense, the Talmud may be said to be praxis on the basis of Mishnaic constitution and, so, a Mishnaic polity. If the Mishnah is logo-political, the Talmud is a logo-polis. This is the sense by which I subscribe to Dolgopolski’s description of “the political” in the Talmud not just as logos or text but also as actual performance—dance, play, theater, carnival. The fundamental Talmudic political performance of the Mishnaic law does not, however, proceed by way of application, that is, the realization of the juridical logos in the realm of things, the fulfillment of the law (πληρῶσαι) in a Jewish subject, or—at least not primarily—by way of establishing or remembering the law, as Dolgopolski argues. This is a description that better fits the concept of mishnah (literally, “repeating, reiterating, reciting”). Talmudic actualization of Mishnaic law seems to paradigmatically take the form of what Talmudic discourse typically considers to be the fundamental mitzvah, both law and practice, namely, the very praxis of talmud, or Aramaic Gemara: the praxis of something like “study.”

Talmud is, accordingly, the practice of law as study. More accurately, Talmud puts the law into practice by performing the act of study on the law, which, without suspending the law, turns it into an object, an element, and a medium of study. Gemara is in this sense the translation of nomos in torah. Talmud performs Mishnah as torah. Mishnah-based study, talmud torah, takes place in the element of the law and as performance of the law, such that its study is studium: never pure theory but self-application, essentially praxis. In Talmudic discourse, talmud is not just “study” of Torah but typically עסק התורה, the concern, business, or work of torah. This, as mentioned previously, may be deemed as the paradigm or principle of Mishnah-abiding praxis, which functions as the constitutive principle of the Talmudic polis, hence a state of study.

The question of the Talmud’s essence is accordingly the question of the nature of Talmudic “study.” Its basic function, as noted, is to translate nomos into torah. In other words, Talmud acts on the law, a fragmented, imperfect logos, but instead of immediately fulfilling it—and thus healing and perfecting it as a direct, uninterrupted reference to the immediate reality of life, life beyond logos and law, “Jewish life”—Talmudic study enacts law as the imperfect, ongoing logos that it is. Talmudic study renders Mishanic law visible as logos. Talmud thus employs on the Mishnah the basic operations of logification, of turning or re-turning immediate data into discourse, image to concept. There are first and foremost the operations of question and negation, which Dolgopolski identified in the rhetorical forms of refutation and disagreement. But disagreement remembers, and refutation, or relative negation, as Hegel showed, is the very act of absolutization. In performing Mishnah as imperfect logos, Talmudic studium seems to deploy operations of question and negation more specifically and radically on the very logical quality of Mishnaic logos, that is, questioning or disrupting it as logos. In other words, Talmud questions—and thus renders visible or establishes—Mishnaic discourse not only and not paradigmatically as indicative or dogmatic (not just by objecting to what Mishnah says); rather, Talmud also questions the very signification and signifying function of Mishnaic logos. Talmud, as the translation of nomos into torah, translates or returns indication to signification, words to signs and letters.

A common procedure for this purpose, already featured in the Mishnah, is the representation of direct (immediate) through indirect (mediated) speech, namely, the quote. The quote produces the double effect of enacting law as broken logos. First, it fragments the unity of logos, an effect not of remembering but of dismembering logos. This rupture in logos as logos interrupts the fundamental logical operation and unity of signifying, of referring to and rendering visible an object or concept and so creating some representation, perception, or realization (in Husserlian terms: Anschauung, “intuition”) of having a meaning. This interruption of signification, of object-intuition, however, creates, as a second basic effect of talmud, another intuition or visibility, namely, of the sign itself. Talmud exposes the law as words in language. Here, words means neither the “signified” (not meanings or concepts) nor pure “signifiers” but rather signifying things, which have not only a semantic being but also a real, physical existence: letters. Talmudic translation of law into logos, of Mishnah into Torah, then, enacts law not exactly as logos but—in Derridean terms—as gramma, that is, as writing or text, as the individual corpus of the Mishnah. Talmudic performance thus “fulfills” the Mishnaic law in the sense of realizing and materializing it as logos, by solidifying its signs not just as moments in time but also as things in space. Referencing Dolgopolski, Talmud thus generates not only memory but also earth. In Talmud, the Mishnaic juridical logos becomes a real and actual site for its own interpersonal performance, the site of its Talmudic polis.

It is in this nonmetaphoric, literal sense that Talmud may be described as a “traveling homeland” in the sense that the text is the real, physical place of the Talmudic polity. The reality of this polis would be the reality of its sign, whose signification (its function of referring to and indicating or naming some “thing”) was interrupted, broken, or suspended. “Traveling homeland” would therefore mean not that Talmudic polis is everywhere “at home,” as Boyarin’s notion of diaspora asserts, but rather that Talmudic polis has its sole place in Talmudic text, is thus nowhere, in no real place “at home.” Talmud is the logo-polis of exile. This exile is universal because it is exile not only from a specific land but also from the very dimension of extratextual territory, namely, from the perfection of logos and meaning as an immediate, sovereign presence, as pure intuition and bare life. Talmud is exile not just from Judea but also from the Jewish. The singularity of Talmudic deterritorialization requires further patient analysis.⁵⁶ Its exilic operation would need to be distinguished from diaspora as well as from Gnostic Entweltlichung, which, based on Hans Jonas’s analysis, does not exercise exile from all presence but rather causes a shift, switch, and turn from worldly to otherworldly presence.⁵⁷ This line of contemplation would further allow—and require—a clearer perspective on the Talmudic polis as a historical logo-political project of universal exile in relation to Rome as a project of universal state and presence, a project of Empire.⁵⁸ Additional focus should be directed toward the aforementioned relation between the two different logo-political responses to Roman imperialism that are the Roman Catholic Church, instituting a separation of powers, and the Talmud, instituting something like underground opposition or resistance, world polis in exile.

YISRAEL

Taking a more specific look at the Talmudic text, I return to the question of Talmudic political singularity, that is, the question of the Talmud’s people, and, more specifically, the question concerning the exact logo-political nature of this singularity in relation to the Jewish and particularism. I previously noted the absence of “the Jewish” as self-naming in the Talmud—but what’s in a name? In what way is “the Jewish” categorically different from, say, “Yisrael,” one of the more common names used by Talmudic discourse for designating its political self?⁵⁹ Significantly, there is no Talmudic tractate dedicated to “Yisrael” or to determining other basic categories and issues regarding the Talmudic self. There is no Talmudic constitution. Insights gained from Schmitt’s work emphasize the significance of a tractate dedicated to the Talmud’s foe, avodah zarah, which I suggest as a central topos for examining the Talmud’s logo-political understanding of itself and for the reading of which I now provide a few reflections.

Avodah zarah, literally foreign work, worship, performance, or praxis, functions in Talmudic discourse as a Schmittian concept for the foreignness that constitutes an existential, ontic negation of the Talmudic self.⁶⁰ Not only is avodah zarah punishable with death, but the foreigners in Mishnah Avodah Zarah are considered potential murderers.⁶¹ Maimonides could thus posit the prohibition on avodah zarah as being “against all of the mitzvot,” such that “Yisrael who performed avodah zarah is like a goy.”⁶² In modern discourse, this ontic negation was transposed into the logo-politics of “the Jewish.” R. Adin Steinsaltz’s Introduction to Tractate Avodah Zarah describes avodah zarah as “the complete negation of the Jewish essence.”⁶³ Similarly, in Jewish Studies, avodah zarah is typically understood as dividing between “Jews and non-Jews.”⁶⁴ I claim—or rather indicate elements for the claim—that this is a paradigmatic instance of effacement of Talmud by the Jewish, an effacement that is connected to the very understanding of avodah zarah or, more fundamentally, to the very reading or even perception of the words עבודה זרה, namely, to the understanding—and the translation—of these words as a name for idolatry.

According to scholarly research, the Mishnaic term avodah zarah, which, before naming anything, signifies “foreign work,” can be read in relation to and as acting on—that is, interpreting and replacing or refuting—the proper biblical term for idolatry: the worship of elohim aherim (אלוהים אחרים), “other gods.”⁶⁵ Notably, the postbiblical transformation of this notion, for instance, in the Mishnah’s contemporary Tertullian, into the category of idolatria, literally meaning “the worship of small images”, removes the direct reference to “other gods” and thus all reference to the master referent “God.” The category of idolatry accordingly transforms the prohibition on “other gods” to a preclusion of and prohibition on any direct reference to God as the paradigmatic referent, the paradigm of paradigm, the paradigm of idol: of idea, form, and image. Idolatria signifies and precludes the idolatry of theology, of the discourse on—and, so, the cult of—the object “God” as the Object-God. The Mishnah also speaks of avodah zarah as the worship of images.⁶⁶ The concept avodah zarah, however, effects a further refutation or suspension of the notion of “idolatry.” It suspends not only the reference to the object “God” as the master image but also the reference to the idol, to the object “image” itself. The category avodah zarah thus performs a radicalization of the prohibition effected by the category idolatria by instituting the idolatry of “idolatry,” that is, the idolatry of seeing the problem of idolatry in the identity of its object, rather than in the—foreign—quality of its praxis (latria).⁶⁷ Consequently, the category of avodah zarah signifies and precludes the cult of objects, primarily in the foundational praxis of objectification, namely, doxic or indicative discourse, perfected logos. The negation of avodah zarah is the interruption, suspension, and performance of logos as event and verb, as ongoing signification—signification without perception, or Talmud.

The basic project of Mishnah Avodah Zarah is to suspend the image, beginning with the image of the suspended image, the image of “avodah zarah.” The Mishnah does this by suspending any notion of avodah zarah as a foreign substance and retrieving the ontic opposition effected by the category avodah zarah, that is, the contrast between the avodah zarah praxis (the foreign) and the Mishnaic praxis (the self), from a substantive, static being to the process of signification, from perfected to imperfect logos. The Mishnah transforms the sociopolitical opposition caused by the prohibition on avodah zarah, which is the foundational principle of its political project, from the physical, absolute negation of war (as the Bible prescribes in relation to worshippers of “other gods”) into a dynamic configuration of relative tensions and negotiations, from polemos to polemics. This is done foundationally through the inscription of avodah zarah as a legal category within Mishnaic law and thus as an institution of the Mishnaic polis. The first provisions of the Mishnah institute and regulate commerce and the limits of commerce with avodah zarah practitioners. These practitioners are not referred to as “evil” (ontically negative) but as שוטים (“fools”), the epistemically negative with whom the Mishnah stages polemic dialogues.⁶⁸

Mishnaic laws on avodah zarah thus constitute what Moshe Halbertal called a “neutral space,” which he described in Enlightenment terminology as a “common ground of humanity and citizenship shared by all regardless of their particular historical identity.”⁶⁹ According to Halbertal, this neutral human polity would suspend the political significance of communal particularities and suspend the significance of the political by referring it to “the real,” such that Mishnaic law would do nothing more than “reflect a reality of two communities, Jewish and pagan, entangled with one another, within the Hellenistic cities of the land of Israel.”⁷⁰ In this context, Halbertal’s suggested perspective of the enlightened “neutral human” recalls Schmitt’s critical observation on the intimacy between liberalism and imperialism since, in this Hellenistic context, creating a neutral space for the coexistence of “entangled” Jews and pagans, and others, was the project of imperial Roman law.⁷¹ Halbertal acknowledges that the Mishnaic category of avodah zarah does not limit or relativize but rather universalizes the application of the biblical prohibition on idolatry.⁷² The neutrality of the space generated by Mishnah Avodah Zarah is the universalization of the Mishnaic or, to use Halbertal’s categories, “Jewish” space. Because of the operation of logification and deontologization—and so universalization—carried out by the category of avodah zarah, the Mishnah can be interpreted as an imperial Jewish, not Roman, project in which “the Jewish” presents itself as the neutral, “the human,” which may therefore generate the common space—a Jewish State—of Jews and pagans, of Jews and non-Jews, who, in this configuration, would represent the nonneutral and nonhuman.

I suggest that it is as resistance to this potential imperialism of Mishnaic logification of antiidolatry law, as resistance to Halbertal’s “Jewish” reading of the Mishnah, that we can read the Talmudic performance of the Mishnah. This is the second element of my claim that the Jewish reading of Avodah Zarah effaces the Talmud: a basic Talmudic operation on Mishnah Avodah Zarah consists of interrupting and breaking the Mishnah’s seeming neutrality by shifting the problem of avodah zarah, of the foreign objectifying praxis from the foreign to the self or, more accurately, by interrupting the objectification of the difference between foreign and self—by rendering visible and suspending the image of the anti-Talmudic Foreign vis-à-vis the image of the Talmudic Self.

I emphasize here the discursive process set in motion by the first Gemara Avodah Zarah, which begins by questioning the most fundamental identity of the Mishnaic self as text: its orthography.⁷³ The Talmudic performance undoes Mishnaic neutrality by reconfiguring the relation between the anonymous, direct-speaking Mishnaic law and avodah zarah practitioners—goyim—as a political opposition between the named entities “Yisrael” and “The Nations of the World.” The naming is followed by imaging, an eschatological vision based on Isaiah 43:9, in which Rome and Persia, the literal Nations of the World, the two world empires, are presented not as idolatrous but as fully subscribing to the same fundamental praxis that defines the Mishnah’s rabbinic polis against the foreign praxis of avodah zarah. The empire is imagined as being based on the praxis of torah, עסק התורה, through the people of Yisrael. This vision demonstrates or renders imaginable how the Mishnah could function as the constitutive logos for an imperial polis. Yet what renders this imperial performance of the Mishnah “foreign” to the Talmud and Talmudic Yisrael is, according to the Talmudic vision, the adherence of the Nations of the World to the principle of the absolute, sovereign ontological “self”—their own selves, Yisrael’s self and the separation thereof. The Talmud conceives of avodah zarah as the praxis of the collective “self” (לצורך עצמכם, “for the sake of your [common] self”).

By contrast, the logo-political singularity of Talmudic Yisrael would not arise from its sovereign individuality, its absolute particularity, its perfected existence as a substantive self. On the contrary, the singularity of Yisrael would consist of rejecting absolute sovereign selfhood, which goes hand in hand with resisting all perfected systems of logos and meaning. Yisrael’s singularity is linked to the semantic imperfection of the Talmudic logos, the Torah, as gramma, a signifying thing, which, as noted in the Talmudic narrative, cannot be comprehended by a concept but only indicated as “this” (זאת).⁷⁴ Talmudic Yisrael thus emerges as the universal project of exile of the political self from a territorial presence to the homeland of text. Therefore, it can be concluded that the ultimate foe of the Talmud, whose negation would ontically define the Talmudic self, is not Rome and Persia or any other “foreign” nations but the Talmudic self—Yisrael—in its nonexilic mode of substantive particularity. The ultimate foe of the Talmud, with whom the Talmud stages no polemics and who can thus be said to be the Talmud’s actual ontic negation and ultimate avodah zarah, may be designated as “the Jewish.”

ELAD LAPIDOT is Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His publications include Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism; Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary (with R. Bar) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 1; Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik; and Être sans mot dire: La logique de Sein und Zeit.

NOTES

1. Dolgopolski, What Is Talmud?, 7, 1.

2. Dolgopolski, Other Others, 8, 200, 209.

3. Ibid., 8.

4. Ibid., 2.

5. Badiou, Polemics, 230. For a critical analysis, see Lapidot, “Jew, Uses of the Word.” But see Badiou’s less-known self-correction in his exchange with Ivan Segré in Segré, “Controverse sur la question de l’universel” and Badiou, “Discussion Argumentée.”

6. See Elad Lapidot, “On the Translation of Philosophy.”

7. To the effect of effacing “the special characteristics of rabbinic texts,” see Hayes, Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, 8, 5, and 9, respectively. It should be noted, however, that Hayes understands the task of her reading of the Talmud, in the occasion tractate Avodah Zarah, as gaining “insight into the rabbis’ view of Jewish-Gentile relations in Palestine and Babylonia” (30), that is, Talmud as a literarily complex perspective on Jews.

8. Dolgopolski, Other Others, 8.

9. Ibid., 92.

10. Ibid., 28.

11. Ibid., 31, 1.

12. Ibid., 9.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 4.

15. Boyarin, Socrates; understanding “satire” “in the sense of satura, a mixture of things that don’t belong together, of things that contradict each other, not as a censure of immorality” (27), what Boyarin terms the “seriocomical”: “we find the same rabbis as the producers of all that is ethical, religious, and fine in the tradition and as being involved in wild aggadic narratives that so sharply disturb and disrupt the picture of the rabbis as objects to be imitated and indeed the picture of the Torah as eternal and holy,” 22; ibid., 29.

16. Ibid., 31.

17. Ibid., 32.

18. Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland. For a more detailed critique, see Lapidot, “Deterritorialized Immigrant.”

19. Ibid., 30.

20. Ibid., 62.

21. Ibid., 32.

22. Ibid., 11.

23. Ibid., 91, 188, 94.

24. Frye, “Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political”; Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden.

25. I developed this question in my last book, Jews Out of the Question.

26. Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 47.

27. Schmitt, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen,” in Der Begriff des Politischen.

28. Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 43.

29. Ibid., 38.

30. Ibid., 18.

31. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen.

32. Ibid., 31.

33. Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus. In this sense, “Political Atheology,” a title that Dolgopolski, on Boyarin’s suggestion, contemplated as expressing his distance from Schmitt, could also describe Schmitt’s own project (see Dolgopolski, Other Others, x).

34. Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 61–63; Der Begriff des Politischen, 55–63.

35. Ibid., 60.

36. Ibid., 59.

37. Ibid., 34–35.

38. Ibid., 60.

39. Schmitt does not explicitly analyze the theological form of the dogma. He does, however, comment on his great source of inspiration, Donoso Cortés, that “in his systematic train of thought there was an effort to be concise in the good dogmatic tradition of theology” (Politische Theologie, 66), a description that may apply to Schmitt.

40. Ibid., 36–37.

41. Schmitt, “Vorwort,” in Der Begriff des Politischen, 9–11. See also Lapidot, “Prisoner-of-War.”

42. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 72.

43. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 12; Politische Theologie, 70.

44. Ibid., 57.

45. Schmitt, “Vorwort,” 15: “The revolutionary abuse [Mißbrauch] of concepts of a classic legality.”

46. Ibid., 16.

47. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde.

48. Ibid., 16.

49. Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus, 14.

50. I consider Mishnah and Gemara as two logoi, two regimes of discourse, which, even if they do determine the dominant and defining features of two textual corpora, respectively, are nonetheless not neatly separate between these corpora but are present in both.

51. Kant, Die Religion, 125.

52. Dolgopolski, Other Others, 144–55.

53. See the critical discussion of this tendency in the work of Gershom Scholem, as recently offered by Raz-Krakotzkin, Toda’at Mishnah, Toda’at Mikra.

54. Boyarin, Socrates, 23. This raises the question concerning other rabbinic textual corpora, which are also edited in the form of compendium but are less obviously “juridical” than the Mishnah, such as midrash.

55. Or, as Ron Naiweld describes it, “an imagined political regime”; see his “The Rabbinic Model of Sovereignty,” 409.

56. See Dolgopolski, “How Else Can One Think Earth?”; Lapidot, “Deterritorialized Immigrant.”

57. See Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist I; Gnosis und spätantiker Geist II. See Lapidot, “Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist II.”

58. For a recent discussion of the Mishnah as a juridico-political project inscribed within the imperial context, see Naiweld, “The Rabbinic Model of Sovereignty.” Naiweld suggests that “the imperial model can [. . .] be regarded as the infrastructure of mishnaic politics,” 415. In contrast with my contemplation of Talmudic polis as a universal counterimperial project, however, Naiweld observes that Mishnaic rabbis “did not conceive their Israel as a universal political entity but as a particular one” (416), such that their “resistance” to Rome would have proceeds for the cause of particularism.

59. I use the orthography “Yisrael” rather than the more common “Israel” to interrupt and destabilize the indicative force of this sign and render it visible as a sign.

60. Zohar, “Idolatry,” indicates that the “foreign” of avodah zarah means not just “other” but also “illegitimate.” See also Zohar, “Partitions around Common Public Space,” speaking of the “extreme demonization” (155) of avodah zarah practitioners, which “justifies negating their existence” (156). By contrast, Naiweld interprets the Mishnaic category of avodah zarah as introducing the rabbinic “god to the imperial system as one other god—the best for those who believe in him, and simply ‘other’ or ‘foreign’ for those who not.” Naiweld, “The Organization of Religious Signs.”

61. M. Avodah Zarah 2:1.

62. Maimonides, Moses, 1135–204. Mishneh Torah: Hu Ha-Yad Ha-Ḥazaḳah. Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Ḳuḳ, 2:7–8.

63. Steinsaltz, “Hakdama LeMasekhet Avodah Zarah,” in Talmud Bavli: Masekhet Avodah Zarah, 7.

64. See, for example, Hayes, Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, 24; Furstenberg, “The Rabbinic View of Idolatry,” 366; Gvaryahu, “A New Reading,” 207.

65. See Naiweld, “The Organization of Religious Signs”; Zohar, “Idolatry,” 66.

66. M. Avodah Zarah 3:1–3; Gvaryahu, “A New Reading,” 221.

67. Zohar refers to the “consciousness of the worshipers” (“Idolatry,” 75). From here arises the linguistically unique rabbinic use of the expression avodah zarah, as observed by Zohar, “designating the object of the action (what is worshipped) through the form of the verbal noun (the worship)” (“Idolatry,” 65).

68. M. Avodah Zarah 4:7, 3:4.

69. Halbertal, “Coexisting with the Enemy,” 163.

70. Ibid., 159.

71. See Naiweld, “The Organization of Religious Signs”: “The problem of cohabitation of Jews and Gentiles was an imperial one.” Naiweld thus lays the ground for a reading of Mishnah Avodah Zarah in the context of the Roman Empire and as a project within the imperial order.

72. Ibid., 161.

73. B. Avodah Zarah 2b.

74. Ibid.

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