Deconstructing the Talmud

The Absolute Book

Federico Dal Bo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315459875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

This monograph uses deconstruction—a philosophical movement originated by Jacques Derrida—to read the most authoritative book in Judaism: the Talmud. Examining deconstruction in comparison with Kant's and Hegel's philosophies, the volume argues that the movement opens an innovative debate on Jewish Law.

First, the monograph interprets deconstruction within the major streams of continental philosophy; then, it criticizes many aspects of Foucault's and Agamben's philosophy, rejecting their notion of law. On these premises, the research delivers a close examination of many fundamental aspects of the Talmud. Consequently, it provides a short history of Rabbinic literature, a history of the dissemination of the Talmud from Babylon to Northern France, and an analysis of Talmudic vocabulary from a deconstructive perspective. Each key concept of the Talmud is analysed according to the deconstructive dialectics between orality and writing. Closing with a comparison between the Talmud and Derrida's most enigmatic text, Glas, the study argues that deconstruction dismantles the traditional notion of the Talmud to outline a new approach to Jewish Law.

Reading the Talmud through deconstruction, this new angle makes the volume an essential resource for students and scholars interested in Jewish studies, continental philosophy, and the Middle East.

1 Speech and writing

On deconstruction

Someone’s honest reaction to the idea of ‘deconstructing the Talmud’ would probably be to ask himself what the Talmud and deconstruction each are. Only then would he care to know about the nature of their relationship. At first, the notion of ‘Talmud’ is more or less clear. The Talmud can be identified with a concrete object—a set of large volumes written in Hebrew alphabet that are likely to occupy the bookshelves of scholars, educators, libraries, and so on. For the time being, one can accept the trivial, almost positivistic identification of the Talmud with a cultural object—one would say: with its actual presence—and be happy with the vague idea that it is an authoritative Jewish religious book. Only later will it emerge that the notion itself of ‘Talmud’ hardly overlaps with its physical presence on shelves, much less with its complex ‘history’ in Jewish literature.¹

One, two, or three Derridas?

Deconstruction originates from the assumption that language is no neutral means of communication but rather a complex structure that simultaneously shows and hides truth. Accordingly, philosophical investigation has the cultural, intellectual, and even metaphysical duty to expose this fundamental ambivalence, trying to resolve contradictions. In this respect, deconstruction resonates with some ordinary presuppositions of any other critical theory, especially with the claim for intellectual self-awareness. And yet deconstruction has many specific traits that distinguish it from any ordinary hermeneutics: a very peculiar style of writing, a highly complex way of expounding texts, and a very specific interest in Western metaphysics.

At first, deconstruction does not appear to qualify as a valid way to read a difficult text like the Talmud—the most authoritative book in Judaism. Deconstruction relies on a series of presuppositions—on the ambivalent nature of language, on the way of examining texts, and on the way of commenting on them—that clash with the sober, logical, and often economical way of arguing that is typical of the Talmud. Besides, deconstruction is also very controversial, especially for many American philosophers, who barely suffer the way in which classical texts are analysed. Some of them even believe that deconstruction would be only a fashionable way of writing abstruse texts that no one can fully understand—ultimately, a lesser by-product of German ontology. If all this is true, an important question arises: what is the advantage of using deconstruction to read the Talmud instead of any other kind of hermeneutics? In order to answer this difficult, yet important question, it is necessary to learn some fundamental principles of deconstruction and its understanding of the nature of text, and finally verify whether they offer a particular way of addressing a work like the Talmud.

Deconstruction is universally associated with the Jewish-French scholar Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), one of the most representative figures in post-war French philosophy. His work mostly consisted of developing a specific form of semiotic analysis that largely elaborated on Heidegger’s notion of ‘destruction of metaphysics’ (Destruktion der Metaphysik). It is questionable whether deconstruction is a coherent, solid philosophical sentiment or, rather, an umbrella term covering the long evolution of Derrida’s thought. Recent scholarship usually distinguishes between three important phases in Derrida’s thought: a post-phenomenological one, a bio-political one, and an ethical-political one.²

In his post-phenomenological phase (1960s to 1976), Derrida worked heavily on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s premises. He especially argued that Western philosophical and theological thought would constantly have attempted to claim for two contradictory, yet complementary assumptions: first, a purity of origin in speech should always be preserved in its written repetition in Holy Books; second, this alleged purity would always be threatened by being corrupted in its copying. With respect to this, deconstruction would more subtly have claimed that speech was ‘always already’ impure at its origin, ‘always already’ written, copied, and ‘always already’ iterated. These famous assumptions were dealt with in detail in a number of important works: Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962), Speech and Phenomena (1967), Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), Dissemination (1972), and Margins of Philosophy (1972). These works—some of which were received only later in the English-speaking world—provided the foundations of deconstruction. They qualified the notion of ‘deconstruction’ especially with respect to Heidegger’s notion of ‘destruction’ (Destruktion), shifting the latter’s ontological premises into a more prominent textual orientation. In short, this first phase of Derrida’s thought manifested a clear preference for theory over ethical and political topics. While Foucault at the time was posing the basis for his ‘archaeology of knowledge,’ Derrida was still refraining from addressing the relationship between biological life and the political. There is the impression that Derrida was reluctant to thematize these topics, suggesting the dangerous implication that deconstruction was not interested in life and politics, history, and society, so that it would rather limit itself to hermeneutics.

The bio-political phase of Derrida’s thought (1976–1993) is a turning point in the evolution of deconstruction. Derrida emphasizes his already established interest for psychoanalysis and reinforces his confrontation with Foucault—whose Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and especially his seminal Discipline and Punish (1975) were establishing a firm ground for historical-cultural investigations. Foucault’s ‘archaeological method’ was implicitly used already in his works from the 1960s—especially in Madness and Civilization (1960), The Birth of Clinic (1963), and The Order of Things (1966)—but it was especially in the ’70s that it emerged as a solid alternative to deconstruction. Foucault’s ‘archaeological method’ especially argued that philosophical investigation should not focus on the (explicit) ‘statements’ of a discipline but rather on the (implicit) ‘rules’ that govern their meaning. While contrasting the post-structuralist assumption that syntax and semantics make expression meaningful, Foucault rather argued that ‘discursive power’ actually determines the process of signification. This emphasis on the concrete presence of power in philosophical discourse probably encouraged Derrida to progressively abandon his previous eminently post-phenomenological ground and to pay more attention to bio-political issues. Without implying that his previous post-phenomenological and ontological themes should be abandoned, Derrida began to treat Freud’s psychoanalysis in a more substantial way. In his The Post Card (1980) and Psyché (1987), Derrida implicitly addressed Foucault’s method, while arguing that ‘the invention of truth’ and its ‘common rules’ shall be subject to deconstruction, in consideration of ‘two competing meanings:’ the idea that a discovery is an event occurring ‘a first time’ and yet the expectation that ‘a technical apparatus’ can productively be invented and indefinitely reproduced.³ As a consequence, the notion itself of ‘discursive practice’ should be deconstructed, addressing Foucault’s naive implications that there is a body of autonomous, historical rules. Differently from that, Derrida rather argues that ‘in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse.’⁴

The last phase of Derrida’s thought (1993–2004) is usually acknowledged to be especially oriented to ethical-political issues. The publication of a series of works—Spectres of Marx (1993), Politics of Friendship (1994), and Rouges (2004), in particular—clearly evidenced the emergence of Derrida’s interest in political issues. Some argued that Derrida was undergoing a sort of political turn that distinguished him at least from the recent reception of deconstruction in the Anglo-Saxon world as a sort of radical hermeneutics. He rather claimed for the extra-institutional nature of deconstruction and especially insisted that ‘the thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of the différance always a thinking of the political.’⁵ Again, this was not meant to be an easy, naive correlation. On the contrary, while advocating the mutual relationship between deconstruction and politics, Derrida argued for something more subtle than a generic philosophical commitment in the present. He rather suggested that there is a ‘double-bind’ associating deconstruction to political thought, as if deconstruction had a political nature and the political a deconstructive one.

The distinction between these three phases offers a comprehensive insight into the evolution of deconstruction from its original post-phenomenological premises to its latest developments. It clearly emerges that Derrida progressively abandoned his initial post-phenomenological orientation, prominent in his first works, for a more post-hermeneutical one, usual in his later works, and was influenced especially by other prominent figures—the literary theorist and critic Paul De Man, for instance, and the so-called ‘Yale critics,’ an American hermeneutical school. This survey cannot explain enough about deconstruction but still provides some essential coordinates to appreciate its historical complexity. More problematically, it also assumes that deconstruction was interrupted with Derrida’s premature death in 2004. This bio-bibliographical survey is probably useful for those unfamiliar with deconstruction and its origins. Nevertheless, it posits some problems for more advanced readers.

First of all, it tends to suggest that deconstruction would inexorably be associated with the person of Derrida in the strictest sense of the expression: deconstruction would be something personal. When assuming that Derrida would be the ‘founder’ of deconstruction—whatever this might mean in the present case— one would also imply that deconstruction is not a ‘method,’ virtually transferable to other thinkers and other contexts, but rather a ‘style of writing.’ Many detractors of deconstruction would insist on its lack of methodology, its obscurity in language, and idiosyncratic connection to Derrida. It was especially Habermas who associated deconstruction with a form of radical thought that contributes nothing to cultural criticism, and therefore is ultimately redundant. In his influential The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Habermas deplored Derrida’s uncritical reception of Heidegger and the latter’s post-Romantic mysticism. Habermas assumed that deconstruction would ultimately result in a metaphysics of textuality—in the worst sense of the expression:

as a participant in the philosophical discourse of modernity, Derrida inherits the weaknesses of a critique of metaphysics that does not shake loose the intentions of first philosophy. Despite his transformed gestures, in the end he, too, promotes only a mystification of palpable social pathologies; he, too, disconnects essential (namely, deconstructive) thinking from scientific analysis; and he, too, lands at an empty, formula like a vowal of some indeterminable authority. It is, however, not the authority of a Being that has been distorted by beings, but the authority of a no longer holy scripture, of a scripture that is in exile, wandering about, estranged from its own meaning, a scripture that testamentarily documents the absence of the holy.⁶

This harsh critique of Derrida is quite ungenerous, although it raises a number of important issues that are particularly pertinent to the question of ‘deconstructing the Talmud.’ Even before revising Habermas’ argument, one might argue, quite naively, that deconstruction would be the perfect tool for reading a Jewish religious book, provided that it would no longer recognize any divine authority in it. This is indeed a crucial point that will be discussed below.

For the time being, one can simply record Habermas’ harsh criticism and evaluate its impact on a larger scale. Habermas’ rejection was also reinforced, yet in a lesser form, by Apel, who similarly deplored the lack of public dimension in Derrida’s thought.⁷ As a consequence, deconstruction was practically banned from the most important German publishers since the mid-1980s, impacting on its penetration in the German-speaking world. The later reconciliation of Habermas and Derrida at the turn of the century possibly manifested only their convergence on secondary matters—their common disapproval of American foreign politics after 9/11—but had little impact on the history of deconstruction in Germany. Although translations and re-publications of Derrida’s seminal works were eventually planned, this late reconciliation could only make it more blatant that deconstruction had lost its main battle in Germany. Deconstruction has never succeeded in being acknowledged in Germany as a positive transformation of Heidegger’s ‘destruction of metaphysics.’ Therefore, deconstruction could enter the public debate only from the service entrance—discussing only some aspects of contemporary politics and loosely assuming that philosophy would be a ‘social critique’ of its time.

Oddly enough, similar arguments were occasionally maintained also by those who intended to support deconstruction against its fierce criticism from German scholars. For instance, one can think of the American scholar Richard Rorty, who insisted on speaking of deconstruction as a sort of ‘literary practice,’ particularly resonating with many assumptions from American pragmatism. In his famous article ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida’ (1978) but also in his later volume Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty argued that deconstruction succeeded in escaping from the stringencies of traditional philosophical discourse and fulfilling the need of ‘privatized thinking:’

the later Derrida privatizes his philosophical thinking, and thereby breaks down the tension between ironism and theorizing. He simply drops theory— the attempt to see his predecessors steadily and whole—in favor of fantasizing about those predecessors, playing with them, giving free rein to the trains of associations they produce. There is no moral to these fantasies, nor any p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Talmud tractate abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Speech and writing: on deconstruction
• 2 On Messianism and Jewish Law
• 3 A short ‘deconstructive history’ of Rabbinic literature
• 4 Writing and orality from the Geonim to the Tosafot
• 5 A deconstructive analysis of Talmudic vocabulary
• 6 Beyond the ‘Absolute Book’
• A short glossary of Rabbinic and Talmudic terms
• Bibliography
• Index