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Tarrying with the Apocalypse: The Wary Messianism of Rosenzweig and
Levinas
Agata Bielik-Robson
To cite this Article Bielik-Robson, Agata'Tarrying with the Apocalypse: The Wary Messianism of Rosenzweig and
Levinas', Journal for Cultural Research, 13: 3, 249 — 266
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14797580903101169
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797580903101169
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ISSN 1479–7585 print/1740–1666 online/09/03-40249–18
This article is aimed against the recent practice of narrowing the concept of messianism to its “hot” — or, in Kafka’s words, “impatient” — version, today usually associated with the name of Saint Paul (in Jewish, Christian, and post-secular interpretations). This “impatient messianism”, championed by Taubes,
Agamben, Badiou and [Zcaron] i[zcaron]ek (regardless of all differences between them),
privi-leges the situation of apocalyptic anomy in which Law becomes sublated or, simply, negated. Contrary to these readings, I would like to remind us of a “subtler language” of Jewish messianism, elaborated mostly by Rosenzweig and Levinas, which treats the Law not as an enemy but as its — however ambiguous — ally.
[A]s far as the jurist is concerned, as long as it is possible to find even one jurid-ical form, by whatever hairsplitting ingenuity, this absolutely must be done, for
otherwise chaos reigns. This is what [Schmitt] later calls the katechon: The
retainer (der Aufhalter) that holds down the chaos that pushes up from below.
That isn’t my worldview, that isn’t my experience. I can imagine as an apocalyp-tic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is. But I under-stand that someone else is invested in this world and sees in the apocalypse, whatever its form, the adversary and does everything to keep it subjugated and suppressed, because from there forces can be unleashed that we are in no position to control. (Taubes 2003 p. 103)
This article is a critical response to the recent practice of narrowing the concept of messianism to its “hot” version. This “impatient” form of messian-ism, championed by Agamben, Badiou, Benjamin, Taubes and [Zcaron] i[zcaron]ek as the
modern readers of Saint Paul, is characterized by one distinctive feature that is present in the work of each of its advocates, regardless of the differences between their positions: it privileges the situation of apocalyptic anomy which denies the Law any redemptive function. All of these authors closely associate messianism with antinomianism, which they interpret as a straightforward
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opposition to all varieties of law, subsumed under the sweeping generalization of torah-nomos-ius.1
Thus, in The Political Theology of Paul, Jacob Taubes (2003) follows Benjamin and Schmitt in advocating for a full suspension of the Law, which allows for a moment of discontinuity in the life of the faithful and leads to a renewal of the covenant; according to Taubes, the Letter to the Romans presents Christianity as emerging from the foundation of a New People, who subsequently live in a permanent state of exception, without the normative guidance of any law. In a similar vein, Alain Badiou (2003) argues in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism for reading the messianic gesture politically, which he claims consists in a non-dialectical rejection of the Law as a principle of death that obstructs and retards the promised explosion of pure life, finally free of the crip-pling dialectic of commandment and sin. Allying himself with Badiou, Slavoj [Zcaron] i[zcaron]ek
(2003) also makes the case for a radical politicization of the Christian message in The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, yet he challenges Badiou’s all too affirmative praise of life; for him, the gist of Paulian messianism is the dialectical negation of the Law, which sets free the revolutionary energy that has been bound and imprisoned within it. Finally, in a gesture polemical to Badiou (as well as, indirectly, [Zcaron] i[zcaron]ek), Agamben (2005) proposes a subtler solution
in The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans that involves a deactivation of the Law, preserving its validity and simultaneously making it inoperative by giving way to a purer form of the messianic promise.
Again, despite all the differences, these are each examples of what might broadly be called a “messianism of destruction”, in which the impulse to save the world is inextricably bound with the impulse to destroy it. Following the description of Taubes, this messianism is willing to “let it [the world] go down” in its flawed present form in order to reveal a dimension of the sacred void from which one could begin totally anew, ex nihilo. In these works, the Law figures as a mere “retainer”, the structuring factor of reality that simply preserves its illusory status. Consequently, this strain of thought is estranged from — even hostile towards — the notion of the Law as a “helper”, comparable to Jewish Halacha, which functions in teaching one how to walk2, how to get up from the Fall and wander through the world as it is, here and now, however imperfect. The classic messianic accusation against the Law appears in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence”, which constitutes a precursory text to all the subse-quent critiques of the Law that I have mentioned. Benjamin defines the Law as an agent of “mythological violence” which establishes and maintains a net of guilt that spreads over the living; this Schuldzusammenhang forces its victims to subsist in a diminished state of “mere life”, and thereby “retains” or holds them back from achieving a “higher life” in which they would be able to fully enjoy
1. This formulation comes from Taubes, who describes Paul’s refutation of law as deliberately non-specific: ‘Does he mean the Torah, does he mean the law of the universe, does he mean the natural law? It’s all of these in one’ (Taubes 2003, p. 24).
2. This is one of the possible senses of the word, which literally means ‘path’; the core
heh-lamed-kaf also signifies ‘getting on a journey’ and ‘preparing to travel’.
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their innocence. Therefore, the Law must be destroyed, together with the whole fateful arrangement of being:
Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythical manifestation of immediate violence shows itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion concerning the latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its histor-ical function, the destruction of which thus becomes obligatory. (Benjamin 1978, pp. 296–297)
The golden road to the palace of the “blessed life” necessarily leads through the Apocalypse; “divine violence” must be unleashed, “violence outside the law, pure immediate violence”, so that “the rule of myth”, sustained by the cyclical renewal of “mythical forms of law”, can be broken once and for all (Benjamin 1978, p. 300).3
Gershom Scholem associates this hot and impatient messianism of destruction with the peculiar, Gnostic type of utopia, which combines progressive and restor-ative elements: it wants to save the world by reverting it to an original pleromatic state of existence which, when conceived in terms of our creaturely condition, cannot be distinguished from nothingness.4 Following Scholem, we could there-fore say that this version of messianism proceeds in the mode of a direct imitatio dei, especially in its Kabbalistic, Lurianic version, where God, in the beginning, creates nothing, and only then does the world emerge, always already fallen, deficient and pervaded by the primordial vacuum. The world occurred by cata-strophic mistake — and only the cancellation of this error, a kind of redemptive double negation, can return things to their proper status within the unimpaired Godhead. Tikkun, therefore, is understood here in a regressive manner: as a return to the pre-creational pleroma. There is an obvious whiff of such pleromatic regression in all the hot messianic solutions mentioned above: Taubes’s primor-dial, anarchic and sovereign reverse of the Law; Badiou’s gesture of “voiding”, which deconstructs all structures and discourses and thereby returns us to the horizontal community of sons; [Zcaron] i[zcaron]ek’s fascination with revolutionary violence that
exposes the Lacanian Real of the world’s ultimate nothingness; and Agamben’s openly Gnostic interpretation of the Paulian hos me as the proper messianic atti-tude that nihilizes and thus deactivates mythical structures of being.
Another characteristic feature of this hot version of messianism is that it perceives created reality as absolutely and uniformly fallen, unworthy of any “spiritual investment”. All “stages of existence”, whether governed by a
3. In ‘Fate and Character’, a text written around the same time as ‘Critique of Violence’, the perni-cious mythological roots of the Law as the exponent of a prehistorical fate are exposed in an even more accusatory way: ‘Mistakenly, through confusing itself with the realm of justice, the order of law, which is only a residue of the demonic stage of human existence when legal statutes deter-mined not only men’s relationships but also their relation to the gods, has preserved itself long past the time of the victory over the demons’ (Benjamin 1978, p. 307).
4. In ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism’, Scholem (1995, p. 4) interprets the restorative element of messianic utopias as a desire to reinstate ‘what is ancient, to bring back that which had been lost; the ideal content of the past at the same time delivers the basis for the vision of the future’.
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prehistorical “law of the earth”, the revealed Law of the Torah, or an abstract legal law, appear equally contaminated by the Fall. Therefore, hot messianists do not believe in exodus; they completely reject the act of “exit” from the bondage of nature which, according to its advocates, occurred within the immanence of created reality and made possible the establishment of a new — anti-mythological and anti-naturalist — mode of existence. Having no such point of reference within the Heilsgeschichte, which spreads before them as a flat and uneventful “night of creation”, hot messianists also typically require a powerful Messiah figure, bestowed with “strong messianic power”, able to conduct the total destruction of this world from the outside. Thus, to paraphrase Derrida’s formulation, we can say that their position involves a strong “messianism with Messiah”.5
Yet, within the messianic tradition of Judaism there also exists a subtler idiom that, in contrast to the radical “messianism of destruction”, we can call a “messianism of reparation”. The primary difference between the two is that the latter treats the Law as its — however ambiguous — ally rather than its enemy. Rather than a restorative return, tikkun in this case designates a more pronouncedly proleptic act of reparation: a future-oriented work of redemption, which only in this manner constitutes a truly separate category within the triad of “creation—revelation—redemption”, not to be confused with the simple and purely destructive reversal of the erroneous moment of the divine fiat. Created reality may thus be fallen and full of errors, but this night is not so dark as to be entirely without scattered sparks that form constellations, or guiding stars, enabling us to navigate through the murky waters of creation. The main event that makes this basic orientation possible is revelation, which, in this more traditional version of Jewish messianism, is always associated with the gift of the Torah. The most immediate consequence of this position is the act of exodus, the exit from the world of natural law into the desert where the Law of Teaching can be practised and a new type of community can be formed on the basis of the non-coercive idea of the covenant.
This vision of redemption is therefore uniquely reliant on the “weak messianic power” attributed to man, who is precisely not meant to imitate God but to do something that only man can do. God can only create or destroy — man, however, can mend. The power of man is weaker, but also subtler — and if there is any sense in the idea of the covenant, in which, to borrow from the words of Abraham Heschel (1955), God is also in search of man, it is only because of man’s ability to repair what is wrong in a world that is neither absolutely perfect nor completely fallen: just separate. Here, the concept of the Fall, which fuels all the hot versions of messianism, is replaced with the subtler concept of “separa-tion”, which makes the act of creation something of a necessary blunder: weak and subtle messianic action does not want to cancel out creaturely existence but to work within its separate condition. For if the world is to be saved, then it can only be done in separation. Furthermore, if it is to be saved from within, then it
5. Jacques Derrida (1994, p. 28) speaks about ‘messianism without messiah’.
is only thanks to the Law, which teaches man “how to walk” in created reality. And finally, if it is to be saved by the Law, then it is only thanks to the bearers of Halacha — the Pharisees, “the separated ones” — who know that due to this condition of separation, God’s teaching “is no longer in heaven” but belongs wholly to this world only.6 Relying only on the weak messianic power of man, this wary messianism does not really need a Messiah; it can delegate him to an ever-advancing future, when, as one of the Midrashes says, “He is no longer needed”. Here, as in Levinas’s (1994) “Talmudic readings”, the figure of the Messiah is not the one of passive waiting, but quite to the contrary, it is a normative figure of the total sum of redemptive actions that should be — but, in reality, never can be — undertaken by a single man. We could say that this is, in an almost Derridean formulation, a “messianism without Messiah”.
When hot messianists talk about the Law — and Benjamin here is the most paradigmatic example — they always tend to collapse the difference between types of law, between Recht and Gesetz, or the “nomos of the Earth” and “theo-cratic Law”, which becomes insignificant from the radically antinomian perspec-tive. However, it is precisely this “subtle” difference that constitutes the core of the redemptive struggle, undertaken by those more cautious thinkers who warn against playing too closely with messianic fire. The event of exodus marks the turning point in the history of redemption, when the Law of the Torah violently opposes itself to the law of nature and, in contrast with the latter’s universal rule without exception, exemplified by the all-levelling hand of fate, acquires militant features. That is to say that the Law of the Torah becomes — prima facie quite paradoxically — antinomian with regard to natural (or in Benjaminian idiom, mythical) laws. Wary messianists are well aware of the fact that the Law may also be prone to corruption, especially when it begins to imitate the intransigence of natural laws, from which it was supposed to offer liberation, but this is not its primary or only possible manifestation.
Quite to the contrary, the emergence of the Law out of the commandment of neighbourly love in Franz Rosenzweig’s (1985) The Star of Redemption shows that its messianic function lies precisely in its antinomian stance towards the well-ordered, yet meaningless, rule of natural totality. In Rosenzweig, the Law is dialectically double-faced and makes sense only as a dynamic structure: it has the anarchic and heavenly aspect of the commandment to love, which comes with revelation, and the disciplined earthly aspect of the Halachic order, which channels and makes the dispersed energy of the former operative. In this case, the only justification for the existence of the Law is that love alone is not enough. Without the legal arrangement, which teaches love “how to walk” about
6. This is an allusion to the famous Talmudic story from Bava Meci’a (folio 59b), which describes the
conflict between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua concerning the proper interpretation of Halacha.
When the former calls upon God to support his arguments with miracles, the latter retorts, ‘lo
besh-amaiim’ (‘it is no longer in heaven’), to which Rabbi Jeremiah comments: ‘The Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai, (and is thus no longer in heaven). We pay no heed to any heavenly voice, because already at Mount Sinai You wrote in the Torah (Exod. 23:2): “One must incline after the majority”’ (see Scholem’s ‘Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories’, Scholem 1995, p. 291).
the separated reality of creation, love would not only remain “blind” but would get lost and forget the memory of its transcendent origin: it would confuse itself with the order of being and become complicit in its preservation, instead of maintaining the antinomian impulse. Without the clothing of the Law, which preserves the heteronomy of the transcendent source of the commandment to love, love would share the fate of the Kabbalistic Shekinah, which wanders through the creaturely realm helplessly with no sense of redemptive orientation. The same intuition concerning the dialectics of love and Law can be found even more emphatically in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, whose ethical project is conceived in extremely anti-naturalistic terms and clearly aims at devising the most antinomian force within the creaturely universe.
Within the following text I would like to endorse the strategy of “wary messi-anism” and to demonstrate that, despite all possible corruptions and deviations, such a dialectical war of two laws, natural and moral, implies a more active and mature standpoint: religiously, ethically and politically. This position will be presented using two examples of “tarrying with the Apocalypse”: first, the defen-sive claim of Levinas that Talmudic ethics is the only organized form of antino-mian energy, and, second, more successful in my account, Rosenzweig’s project of taming down messianic fire with the “lightning rod” of Halachic prescriptions. Instead of playing with fire, this “wary” approach engages in a constant struggle with the ever-renewing powers of “what is”: be it the neo-mythical naturalism that threatens social formations with totalitarian closure, the Heideggerian project of the immanence of Sein, or the claustrophobic horrors of the Levinasian il y a. By contrast, hot messianism, with its radically lawless antinomianism, always risks a deepening of the Fall into an even lower stage of amorphy: instead of taking us to the level of an all-encompassing, exceptional love, it risks bringing us down to the nature-like state of exception where divine intervention cannot be distinguished from sheer senseless violence.
Levinas’s Hyperbole
Let me begin with Levinas, whom I would like to praise and criticize simulta-neously. Many commentators feel deeply uneasy about the Levinasian project of radical ethics and it is not difficult to understand why: his seemingly well-ordered Talmudic style hides a deeper dimension of violently apocalyptic antino-mianism, which constantly clashes with the more conservative elements of his thought. Levinas’s ethics is polemical toward Christianity, particularly toward its hidden Marcionite agenda which wants to sever any relation between the Law and love: and if Levinas often sounds somewhat perverse, especially to Christian ears, it is because he made it a point of honour to refute Marcion (together with all hot Marcionite messianists) by emphatically endorsing everything he has to say about Judaism and the seemingly cruel, unloving God of the Old Testament. He is thus ready to defend all those aspects of the Law that are strictly condemned by Benjamin and the other aforementioned “Marcionites” as
festations of the mythological oppressiveness of the fallen creaturely world. However, he defends them not for the sake of the oppressiveness as such, but because he understands the exigency of the Law in terms of the war it wages on the oppressiveness of Being.7 Therefore, he defends the Law as violent and coercive in order to posit a force that would be able to effectively counteract the violence and coercion inherent in the structure of ontological totality. Passive obedience, the military discipline of the Teaching, the non-negotiable trauma of the encounter with the Other: all these features of his ethics totally exclude any moment of spontaneous concession, any “love and understanding”, deliberately, as well as polemically, building on the motif of absolute coercion which reflects the intransigent heteronomy of the Law. The “inverse order”, in which the receivers of the Torah are supposed “first to act, then to listen”, anti-nomically reverts the usual order of earthly immanence that is governed by the principle of ethical autonomy, where the moral subject is expected first to understand and only then to undertake action. The Law of the Torah, which comes with strictly transcendent revelation, cannot be contaminated or compro-mised by any immanentist principle; it has to preserve its perfect heteronomy if it is to wage a victorious war on Being. It has to be superimposed violently and accepted all at once, without any deliberation, if it is to oppose itself to ontological violence:
Torah [says Levinas in the second Talmudic reading] is constantly exposed to a danger, because being itself is nothing but violence, and nothing can be
threat-ened with this violence more than the Law of Torah which says a distinct No. The
Law, which inhabits fragile human consciousness, is not well protected; it is
exposed to all sorts of dangers. (Levinas 1995, p. 50)8
This last remark formulates a particularly strong reproach against Christian teaching of moral autonomy, both in its Augustinian and Kantian versions, which also underlie “hot” messianic hopes. Human consciousness is not the best guard-ian of the Law’s inflexible heteronomy, for it tends to contaminate it with more plastic “attitudes” that lead to the internalization of the Law and thus to its dissolution in either the spontaneity of love or the rationality of the categorical imperative.
Aware that he has to struggle with the predominant Christian prejudice of moral autonomy as an allegedly higher form of ethical consciousness, Levinas deliberately chooses a rhetoric of shocking hyperboles which rests on one extremely counterintuitive equation: Apocalypse is Law — Law is Apocalypse. The Law has not been given to us to make us live better or to provide us with shelter within creaturely immanence — but to destroy it, leaving us homeless, yearning and “chained to the absolute” (Levinas 1995, p. 61), figured as “emphatic externality, a hyperbole of perfection” (Levinas 2000, p. 301). This
7. Since Levinas explicitly poses his philosophy of the Talmudic Law against Heidegger’s teaching on
the immanence of Sein, I will be using in this specific context the Heideggerian notion of Being; in
other cases, which do not involve an overt polemic with Heidegger, I will simply say ‘being’. 8. All translations from Levinas (1995) and Levinas (2000) are my own.
mind-boggling short-cut can be seen as both Levinas’s strength and weakness. The strength is its hyperbolic, almost manic-obsessive exposition of the true nature of the Judaic Law as strictly heteronomous, “out of this world”, having nothing in common with the realm of fallen immanence, coming from above to wipe out the scandal of being:
From its very beginning, the Torah challenges being in its claim to stand beyond good and evil. By questioning the absurdity of “that’s the way it is” of Power, the man of the Torah transforms being into history. The rational process shakes real-ity. Unless you accept the Torah, you will never leave this place of despair and death … you will never break this mass of being which rests so content in itself … Only the Torah, this seemingly utopian knowledge, gives man his place. (Levinas 1995, p. 51)
However, the weakness of Levinas lies in the unintended danger incipient in his hyperbolic rhetoric — the danger of collapsing the essential difference between two types of messianic destruction, which at the same time constitutes the most valuable element of Levinasian thought: the “hot” apocalyptic destruction that strikes with immediate violence, and the milder, more dialectical, delayed destruction of things that realizes itself in a constant war against ontologism, i.e. the dependence of creaturely things on the ensnaring structures of Being.
It must be stated very firmly that this difference cannot simply be reduced to the Taubesian opposition between the “serious” Benjaminian desire for the direct intervention of divine violence and the timidly “playful” annihilation as if, repre-sented by Adorno’s dandyish aestheticism (Taubes 2003, pp. 70–76). Levinas’s project goes beyond this rather crude dualism. Here, the destructive — obviously, positively destructive — element of the Law lies in an ingenious transference of the annihilating apocalyptic force beyond the sphere of purely ontological crite-ria: it is not being in its totality that must be destroyed, but the very principle of being as such that governs creaturely reality. According to this subtler reason-ing, the sheer destruction of the created world, seemingly so radical, merely inscribes itself in the very logic of being and thus, paradoxically, perpetuates its essentially pagan “ontologism”: the Heraclitean—Heideggerian polemos of appearing and disappearing; the Nietzschean interplay of creation and destruc-tion; the Greek imprisonment in the metaphysical dualism of being and nothing-ness. As a redemptive force, the Law wants something more: it wants to transgress the cycle of coming in and out of being; or, in more biblical terms, it wants to get out of the Egypt of ontologism itself. Redemption is not just destruction — and the Law, its instrument, does not want to annihilate things, but only (only!) to make them exist in a way that is disobedient to the rules of Sein; in other words, it wants to destroy precisely what Heidegger wanted to cherish and preserve in his gesture of Gehörsamkeit — the beingness of beings. It wants us to live autre-ment qu’être (“otherwise than being”), in a way that would not be dictated by the dark rein of il y a, this anonymous, ever self-renewing mass of “essence” that “knows no respite” from itself (Levinas 2000, p. 300). The war on Being waged by the Law of the Torah does not play according to the ontological rules, where
destruction means simply annihilation, but imposes its own rules — thanks to which our existence can be wrenched from the snares of ontological totality.9
The Law is thus the proper vehicle of yetziat mitzraiim, the exodus from the tyranny of being, and it is neither compliant with created reality nor ontologi-cally hostile to the very fact of its existence. This unique conception of the Law is Levinas’s greatest speculative achievement, which modifies — perhaps even radicalizes — one of the central motives of Jewish Gnosis, namely the antitheti-cal relation between God and creaturely reality. In the case of Levinas, there-fore, we are not dealing with a pious guardian of the “well-ordered house of Judaism”, who shudders at the slightest “apocalyptic breeze” (Scholem 1995, p. 32), but with a truly serious apocalyptist, whose daring outdoes the hottest messianic aspirations of universal destruction. In “Noten zum Surrealismus”, Jacob Taubes (2002, p. 138) defines Jewish Gnosis (i.e. mostly Kabbalah and its various, more or less heretical followers, like Kafka or Benjamin) as a system assuming the idea of God to be a radical “antithesis (Gegenprinzip) to the world”, which, according to him, must “be understood as negation of the world and polemically determine the opposite of the transmundane God to the world”.10 Therefore, from the perspective of radical Gnosis, it is either God or the world. They are, ontologically speaking, irreconcilable.
However, Levinas goes even further (although Taubes would not agree) and demands a solution to the idea of radical transcendence that goes beyond meta-physics (meta-metaphysics) and its dualistic ontological orders. The alien God, the “unknowable, unnameable, unspeakable, boundless, nonexistent” (Gold 2006, p. 150) sovereign, who threatens to annihilate the world as His mighty antithesis, now displays His radical otherness in a sphere that truly matches his alterity, namely in the ethical: he destroys ethically by undermining the world as radically transcendent Goodness. Therefore, divine violence is not eliminated. To the contrary, its antithetical power is now subordinated to an alternative messianic vision: natural being is infected with the ethical idea, which disturbs and derails the smoothness of its ontological mechanisms. The Law, acting as a virus in the organism of being, can now also be seen in a completely different light: not as a hateful tool of Gnostic archons, designed to keep the world in its scandalous status quo, but as an effective instrument of Apocalypse itself, which
9. Perhaps this would be the best way to understand the old messianic topos that became particu-larly popular in the circle of Scholem, Benjamin and Bloch (also recently undertaken by Agamben) — namely that of a ‘small adjustment’. It compares the Messiah to a ‘golden hand’ who merely contrib-utes a small ‘trick’ to created reality, which then, unexpectedly, appears in its full glory. The ‘small adjustment’ would be a sort of magical repair, the one we manage to achieve when we kick the tele-vision set in hopeless despair — and lo and behold, it suddenly works again, better than ever. It thus involves violence but of a much more delicate kind, which does not destroy wholesale, targeting only the specific error within creaturely reality (although we can never know exactly what it is).
10. I quote this line on Gegenprinzip from Joshua Robert Gold’s translation in his article ‘Jacob
Taubes: Apocalypse from Below’, where he also comments: ‘What is crucial about this
characteriza-tion is that the radical and irreconcilable opposicharacteriza-tion between God and the profane excludes the possibility of realizing the divine in the here and now’ (Gold 2006, p. 150).
does not simply destroy reality, but rather persecutes, traumatizes and shakes being out of its self-content and natural automatism.
This ingenious revision of the traditional Jewish Gnostic motif of antithesis locates Levinas in a curious third position between humble orthodox piety, which treats obedience to the Law as a positive manifestation of covenantal trust in God, and a heretical challenge to pious theodicy, which seeks its natural mode of expression in the antinomian subversion of every law, the Law of the Torah included. Levinas’s differentia specifica consists precisely in his use of the antinomian technics in the defence of the Law: all his effort goes in protecting the Law against “mythic” corruption, i.e. against its fall into a closed, mechan-ical system, imitating the laws of Being-Nature. It is, therefore, in the desert of il y a where the Law as such becomes truly operative: undisturbed by the beauty of appearances and lures of participation, it walks the limping walk of Jacob through the voided reality in its severe service of the Other. Therefore, the Law becomes the only guide for the perplexed in the world, where there is no clear direction, no up and down; where all spontaneous, “natural” intuitions have been drained and negated.11
The Law, unlike love, cannot be spontaneous; it must contain an element of constraint, awkwardness and irreducible heteronomy — even to the point of absurdity.12 Its absurd “hump” cannot be flattened into the impulsiveness of moral sentiment, self-evidence of rational decision or the smoothness of custom. Only in such a formulation can being be prevented from cheating it or intercepting it with its seductive spontaneity. For if exodus is to be completed, the force that helps us to do it must bear a mark of heteronomy, unless, of course, we are granted the magical powers of Baron Münchhausen, who cheerfully pulled himself out of the swamp. We could thus paraphrase the famous sentence of Walter Benjamin (1998, p. 36) from the introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama — “Truth is the death of intention” — and say that in Levinas’s case it is the Good which is the death of intention: as an apocalyptic, antagonistic force from beyond being, the Good traumatizes the subject and thus kills every-thing in him that belongs to the sphere of life — his nature-like spontaneity of conatus, as well as his intentionality, a priori well adapted to the world of being. Here, it is the Law that is the most direct instrument of apocalypsis, for in every
11. In the fourth lesson of his Talmudic readings, Levinas (1995, pp. 105–106) rebukes those Jewish believers who complain that Judaism made them ‘lose contact with the world of nature’: ‘For it is precisely Judaism which wanted to introduce an interval of reflection between us and natural spon-taneity … even in the smallest practical actions, we need a little break, a little suspense between us
and nature, when we fulfil our mitsva, our religious order. Clean and ordinary interiorization of the
Law equals the disappearance of the Law.’
12. There is a long tradition in Judaism of approaching the teachings of Jewish Law as opaque, i.e. only partly understandable in terms of a service to another fellow being. For instance, Moses
Maimonides points to the double nature of mitsvot, which have a ‘rational’, easily internalizable
aspect of neighbourly love and an ‘irrational’ one that cannot be explained on the basis of moral
autonomy. The former type of law is called mishpatim and the latter hukkim, but in fact the
elements of both aspects are present in every single commandment. See Maimonides (1993).
Halachic commandment there shines “the severe light of the divine that destroys”.13
Rosenzweig’s Sedative
The position that I am presenting here is entitled “wary messianism”, but thus far I have said little about it: Levinas is certainly not a cautious thinker. If he has an issue with the “hot”, revolutionary messianism of thinkers such as Benjamin, Taubes or, partly, Scholem, it is not that it aims at the destruction of the world, but only that it conceives of this destruction in crudely ontologi-cal terms. Levinas’s ethiontologi-cal hyperbole — the strong light of the Goodness that destroys — rightly causes anxiety in many of his commentators, for, despite his explicit intention in his Talmudic readings, it does not lead to an endorsement of the rich palette of Halachic Law, but merely to one recurrent act, as a direct manifestation of divine violence, not very far, indeed, from the one postulated by Benjamin: radical subjective tzimtzum resulting in substitution, i.e. a death-for-the-other. In Levinas’s formulation, the Law becomes an apoc-alyptic device paradoxically antinomian in its struggle with the natural law of being — as well as life. At the same time, however, it eventually loses one of the most characteristic features of Jewish Law, which, to emphasize once again, is teaching man how to walk and not how to prostrate oneself in the face of the other; how to live, and be blessed with “more life”, rather than how to die.
Thus, if Levinas’s purpose was to combine the apocalyptic element of annihi-lation with the positive element of instruction, teaching how to live “otherwise than being”, the actual outcome seems to fall out of balance: the destructive force of revelation gets the upper hand, and instead of an intensified life happily breaking out of the ontological cycle marked by the rule of death14, it leads the subject to the very gates of death, demanding from him a radical sacrifice of substitution. “The subject can be thought outside being”, says Levinas (2000, p. 273) in Otherwise Than Being, “as the one truly exceptional and expelled, as the one who is responsible”, i.e. ready to “reject his own being for the sake of the other”. Therefore, it is not life that changes its characteristics and becomes “deontologized”, but death: “to be able to die”, the main attribute of all crea-turely existence caught in the net of being, becomes something qualitatively else, something autrement qu’être, when it takes the form “to be able to sacri-fice oneself” (Levinas 1995, p. 65). And even if Levinas, in order to counteract this thanatic conclusion, wishes to enhance the disciplinary aspect of the Law, in which “the ego can also be summoned to take care of itself” (1995, p. 64), this “wisdom of love” (2000, p. 271) appears as somehow appeasing and secondary to
13. This phrase — das strenge Glanz des Kanonischen das vernichtet — comes from Scholem’s (1973,
p. 276) ‘Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala’ (‘Ten Unhistorical Theses on Kabbalah’).
14. ‘As a being, human subject is subjected to the concept which surrounds his singularity and engulfs him in the universal, i.e. in death’ (Levinas 2000, p. 290).
the true “madness of love”15, which stubbornly pushes toward one powerful conclusion — that to be otherwise than being means to be ready to annihilate one’s being in the act of self-sacrifice.
Levinas openly admits that he was deeply influenced by the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, but it seems that, at least in this one respect, he did not read his precursor carefully enough. In his desire to radicalize Rosenzweig, Levinas, in fact, only succeeds in damaging the delicate equilibrium that constitutes the idea of the Law in The Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig understood the dialecti-cal position of the Law perfectly well: partly messianic and partly apodialecti-calyptic in its violent opposition to the bondage of natural law but also reluctant toward the radical annihilation of the world, which he intended to preserve in its separate status. In Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, the Law is thus conceived of as a device that simultaneously uses apocalyptic energy and infinitely delays the ultimate fulfilment of apocalypsis as the total destruction of the world. There-fore, the Law aims at neither the preservation of the created world (as in Benjamin’s and Taubes’s accusations, who see in every law an element of the mythic and self-perpetuating structure), nor its ethical destruction (which, at least in Levinas’s hyperbolic paraphrasing, threatens to annihilate not just natu-ral life but simply life as such), but the redemptive transformation of creaturely reality. For anyone who has read Hegel this phrase must sound familiar, and Rosenzweig, who was a great Hegelian scholar himself (even though everything he wrote after his conversion to Judaism was directed against the philosophy that started in Ionia and culminated in Jena), coined his idea of the Law as a suspended destruction of the creaturely world in clear reference to Hegel’s famous definition of work as an activity dialectically mediating between the preservation and annihilation of its object.16 The works of Law — as opposed to Christian acts of love — have nothing grandiose, sublime or lordly about them; they are non-spectacular acts of reparation, defensively keeping at bay great apocalyptic issues, and as such are comparable to those small repairs of hollowed pots or torn garments, traditionally offered by East European Jewish tinkers and tailors (perhaps it is not by accident that both torn garments and broken vessels are favourite Kabbalistic, and then Hassidic, metaphors of the brittleness of creaturely reality?)
Although Rosenzweig, following Rabbi Hillel, truly believes that all Judaism can be reduced to one commandment — “Love Thy Neighbour!” — he also believes that love alone just will not do. This message may not be obvious for the readers who usually concentrate on the first two parts of The Star of Redemption
15. This is obviously an allusion to Simone Weil, which Levinas, who deeply disliked her strongly anti-Judaic and quite Marcionite contempt for the Law, would certainly not have enjoyed; yet,
para-doxically, the persecutory—sacrificial tone of Otherwise Than Being, very far indeed from the praise
of temimut, the joyful simplicity of the Talmudic heart, makes him chime very closely with his
intellectual enemy. ‘Madness of love’ is a term frequently used by Weil in her book Intuitions
pré-chrétiennes, translated as Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (Routledge, London, 1998).
16. See section ‘The Formative Process of Self-Enfranchisement’, para. 196 in Hegel (1967).
and then feel strangely uneasy about the last sections, in which Rosenzweig sings such a high praise of ritual that some of his commentators, most notably Gershom Scholem, accused his vision of Judaism of being unbearably “church-like”.17 But the issue that usually escapes Rosenzweig’s critics is precisely the problem of antinomianism, however implicit and inarticulate it remains within this seem-ingly pious thought, which, on the surface, avoids any “Gnostic” or critical tone towards God and his creation. For Rosenzweig, the most pressing issue is to preserve the transcendent, antithetical force of revealed love which, in order to keep its otherworldly status, cannot become too worldly — too secular and too relaxed within the world — as happens, in Rosenzweig’s opinion, in the case of Christianity. We find here the same distrust toward love as an emotion that can become complicit with the “spontaneity” of being as in Levinas — but unlike Levi-nas, Rosenzweig does not want to do away with love completely. In the fallen universe (or to put it more gently, in the non-perfect universe that is merely prone to falling), love, embraced fully and uncritically, can only indicate a moral impasse: more of the same that does not qualitatively change creaturely reality and hence does not lead to a redemptive progress. Love, therefore, must also fall — but, paradoxically, it is all for the better, for by falling it becomes strangely effective: blinded, it stumbles into the nearest thing and, quite unexpectedly, becomes the most “useful” love of the neighbour. When it is a “purposeful act”, love appears useless, but when it falls and stumbles, blinded and intentionless, it turns into an ethical advantage. Hence, in his constant polemical reference to Hegel, Rosenzweig substitutes the “cunning of love” for the Hegelian “cunning of reason”:
Love cannot be other than effective. There is no act of neighborly love that falls into the void. Just because the act is performed blindly, it must appear some-where as effect — somesome-where, and there is no telling some-where. If it were performed with open eyes, like the purposive act, then indeed it would be possible for it to vanish without a trace. For the purposive act does not enter the world broad and open, off guard and unpremeditated … Quite different, then, is the act of love. It is very unlikely really to reach the object toward which it was running. It was, after all, blind. Only the sense of touching the nighest had provided it with knowledge of the object. It does not know where best to penetrate the object. It does not know the way. Seeking it thus blindly, unguarded, unpointed — what is more likely than that it should lose its way, than that it should never get to see the object for which it was originally intended? Granted that it arrives some-where, indeed at more than a single Anywhere is consequence of its broadside diffusion. Perhaps it is not too much to say that all actual effects of love are side-effects. (Rosenzweig 1985, p. 269)
17. In his essay ‘On the 1930 Edition of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption’, Scholem (1995, p. 323)
says: ‘The deep-seated tendency to remove the apocalyptic thorn from the organism of Judaism makes Rosenzweig the last and certainly one of the most vigorous exponents of a very old and very powerful movement in Judaism, which crystallized in a variety of forms. This tendency is probably also responsible for the strangely church-like aspect which Judaism unexpectedly sometimes takes on here.’ Needless to say, my interpretation goes somewhat against the grain of Scholem’s reading.
And it is only later that these “side-effects” are organized and disciplined under the supervision of the Law, which changes the emphasis of the blind love-action and makes it concentrate precisely on what initially only seemed to be its unin-tended consequence: the neighbour. Blind love, therefore, acquires sight thanks to Halacha; it can only truly function when instructed by the Law, that is, instead of stumbling, it can “walk”. Hence, the odyssey of love begins with revelation and mystical love, which makes God its sole, yet unattainable, object; it passes through fervent neighbourly love, which transfers the love for God onto all “nigh-est” things, but still proceeds “blindly”, only accidentally stumbling into the “nearest” objects; and it ends with mature, disciplined love, which recognizes the neighbour as its true target and takes the lawful form of ritualized action. Unless it transforms itself into Law, love is always in danger of being either a little too high or a little too low to complete its redemptive task; either too mystical and thus solipsistic — “Loved only by God, man is closed off to all the world and closes himself off”, says Rosenzweig (1985, p. 207) — or too natural and spontaneous, but then too “pagan”, too much in harmony with the creaturely world. It can be either too destructive — for the mystic may already feel too elevated to have a “spiritual investment in the world as it is” — or too compliant, too compassionate for the existent reality. Yet, although clothed in the disciplin-ary form of the Law, it is definitely love which is destined by Rosenzweig to fulfil the messianic mission of liberating each and every single thing, encountered as a “neighbour”, from the bondage of ontological totality. The antinomian force of love, opposing the laws of the natural order, where everything merely subsists, as in the case of a general category18, thereby consists in emancipating things to the status of irreplaceable singularities, that is, in turning them into images and likenesses of the already singularized, “meta-ethical” man, who, precisely as such, is also the primary tselem (“likeness”) of God. This future world of messianic nominalism, where everything shall exist as a “fully alive” (belebt) singularity, can thus be seen as an equivalent to — or perhaps a better version of — Levinas’s state of “otherwise than being”, which will have destroyed the imperial rule of ontological totality (Rosenzweig simply calls it the rule of logos) but, at the same time, reconfirms and reinforces the existence of things as radically singled out and separated “metalogical” units:
The bond of the consummate and redemptive bonding of man and the world is to begin with neighbor and ever more only the neighbor, the well-nigh nighest … (Love) glides from one bearer to the other, the next one, from one neighbor to the next neighbor. It is not satisfied until it has paced off the whole orbit of creation … it leaves its traces everywhere in its migration by providing the plural of things everywhere with the sign of singularity. (Rosenzweig 1985, p. 235)
18. In Rosenzweig’s notation, this mode of existence is symbolized as B = A, which means that
within the creaturely world, all ‘singularity’ (Besonderheit) exists merely as ‘generality’ (
Allge-meinheit) and never becomes ‘fully alive’ (belebt) as itself.
But this process of “glid[ing] from one bearer to the other”, this gradual “pac[ing] off [of] the whole orbit of creation” cannot happen all at once; the apocalyptic energy of love has to be “retained” if it is not to destroy but to trans-form creaturely reality. The obstacle of ritual, a stumbling block of heteronomy that will disrupt its spontaneous overflow, must slow its restless negativity down. Thus, while in Hegel, the rush of negativity is being slowed down in the works of the Slave, living in “the fear of the Lord”,19 in Rosenzweig, the revolutionary discharge of love is counteracted by the controlling device of the Law as the non-negotiable given. Both, however, derive their notions of “retainers” from the same proverb in the Book of Job: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” (Job 28:28). In Rosenzweig, the element of “fear”, interpreted as non-negotiable respect for the Law’s heteronomy, leads to the “wisdom of love”, as opposed to love’s “madness”.
Although Gershom Scholem felt no sympathy for Rosenzweig’s project, it was nonetheless he who spotted the crucial role of the Rosenzweigian concept of the Law as a defensive mechanism, a sort of stopping device, designed to interrupt, arrest and attenuate the apocalyptic fire, to prevent both the subject and the world from instantaneous annihilation. To explain the functioning of this defence, Scholem introduced two useful metaphors. First, the traditional meta-phor of lightning that symbolizes the vertiginous moment of revelation as an antagonistic flash of the transcendent in the immanent: an infectious fire that, when left uncontrolled, burns the soul down to cinders (which is precisely what happens in Levinas, for whom the traumatism of revelation necessarily leads to sacrificial death in the act of substitution). The second metaphor, of his own making, is the one of a “lightning rod”: the device which both uses and tames divine energy, directing it towards the ground of the creaturely condition, and thus makes it separate, “no longer in heaven” (lo beshamaiim). Thus, between revelation itself and the religious ethics of the Law, which, in fact, is nothing else but the other name of the “lightning rod”, there appears a moment of non-iden-tity, a very Derridean différance indeed, in terms both of “difference” and “delay”:
Here, in a mode of thought deeply concerned for order, it (the anarchic element) underwent metamorphosis. The power of redemption seems to be built into the clockwork of life lived in the light of revelation, though more as restlessness than as potential destructiveness. For a thinker of Rosenzweig’s rank could never remain oblivious to the truth that redemption possesses not only a liberating but also a destructive force — a truth which only too many Jewish theologians are loath to consider and which a whole literature takes pains to avoid. Rosenzweig sought at least to neutralize it in a higher order of truth. If it be true that the lightning of redemption directs the universe of Judaism, then in Rosenzweig’s work the life of the Jew must be seen as the lightning rod whose task it is to render harmless its destructive power. (Scholem 1995, p. 323)
19. See the section ‘Fear’, para. 195 in Hegel (1967).
Scholem himself, personally more prone to apocalyptic solutions, feels somewhat ambiguous toward Rosenzweig’s wary and considerate ways. He praises Rosenz-weig for noticing the apocalyptic breeze at all, which “provides some fresh air in the house of Judaism” (Scholem 1995, p. 323). Yet, he criticizes him for his general intention to appease “the anarchic element”, which, as I have attempted to demonstrate here, is neither completely true nor fair: the lightning rod of rituals and Halachic orders does not serve to render the destructive power of apocalyptic revelation “harmless,” but to make it effective; it is not to manifest itself in futile “restlessness”, but in concrete mitsvot. The Law, therefore, is a defensive mechanism, but not in a purely pejorative sense; like all Freudian Abwehrmechanismen, it also has a functional side of a necessary compromise formation between the commandments of other-worldly love and the necessities of the fallen worldly condition.
The intention of both philosophers, Rosenzweig and Levinas, is thus similar — they both want to use revelatory energy as a redemptive ethical force, and thus change the plane of the messianic concern: from the ontological to the strictly moral. Yet, the difference lies in the way in which they perceive the true locus of commandments. Whereas Levinas locates ethics in the flash of revelation itself, which, as a “madness” of anarchy and amorphy, undermines every form as such, Rosenzweig doubles this locus, introducing in between an essentially defensive moment of a form-giving neutralization. It is no longer the strong light that destroys but energy harnessed to redemptive works, in which the subject passes this energy from one neighbouring thing to another, thus aiming at the redemptive transformation of the whole world. This careful channelling, which does not allow the catastrophic repetition of the “breaking of the vessels”,20 is absolutely necessary if the hand of the world clock is to move from the stage of passive revelation to the stage of active redemption, where “the love for God is to express itself in love for one’s neighbor” (Rosenzweig 1985, p. 214). It needs the unbreakable vessel of the Law that burns a steady flame of “effective” neighbourly love, constantly fuelled by apocalyptic lightning.
***
In his “Reflections on Jewish Theology”, Scholem (1976, p. 277) claims that messianism is a distinctive feature of the entire “living Judaism”, which includes not only Benjamin with his peculiar Sabbatian-Frankist, radically antinomian twist, but also Franz Rosenzweig, a law-obeying, pious Jew. Despite his own reluctance concerning the all-too-patient Rosenzweigian strategy of postpone-ment, where the Law becomes a “lightning rod” for the apocalyptic fire of revelation, Scholem does not deny Rosenzweig access to the messianic. In my analysis, I have tried to facilitate this problematic access and show that by inventing the defensive mechanism of the “lightning rod”, Rosenzweig makes the Law function within the messianic logic of redemption — as a mediator or an
20. This, obviously, is the famous Lurianic motif of shevirath ha-kelim, which begins the cosmic
catastrophe of creation.
“endurable portion” of the original, violent “flame of love”, given with revela-tion. Here, the Law emerges as a delayed destruction of the creaturely world, where it is not beings but being as such that becomes the proper target. And it is precisely this delay and partial neutralization that allows the apocalyptic energy contained within the Law to be more precise in the act of targeting its enemy; instead of exploding the whole of creaturely reality, deemed wholesale as fallen and unworthy of any “spiritual investment”, it provides a more subtle missile which destroys only those aspects of “beingness” or “ontologism” that directly oppose the redemptive process.
Rosenzweig thus manages to achieve a wary, truly man-made form of messian-ism, which does not pretend to imitate or follow God directly, but adds a characteristically human, covenantal contribution to the process of redemption. Positing itself between two lordly powers — creation and destruction — it offers modest “works of the Slave” that do what only humans can do: meticulously mend, fix and repair, constantly lifting the world from the lowest realms of the creaturely condition.
Such an approach complicates the simplistic opposition of “retainer” and “apocalyptist” that has been bequeathed to us by Taubes. The Rosenzweigian “lightning rod” works neither as a simple Aufhalter (retainer), which treats Apocalypse as its adversary, nor as a “hastener”, pushing towards the eschato-logical state of exception. The Law itself, when seen through this metaphor, becomes a form of messianic energy (a structure that brings the lightning down to the ground) — and more than that: the only form that this originally anarchic and anomic energy can acquire to become effective in the world of creation and manifest itself in concrete works. And as a form — i.e. never a direct negation — of apocalyptic fire, the Law is also in its own dialectical way antinomian, that is, antithetical to the rules of creaturely life, which it slowly transforms, patiently anticipating the advent of the messianic “otherwise than being”.
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