Violence and Messianism

Jewish Philosophy and the Great Conflicts of the Twentieth Century

Petar Bojanić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351722940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Violence and Messianism looks at how some of the figures of the so-called Renaissance of "Jewish" philosophy between the two world wars - Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber - grappled with problems of violence, revolution and war. At once inheriting and breaking with the great historical figures of political philosophy such as Kant and Hegel, they also exerted considerable influence on the next generation of European philosophers, like Lévinas, Derrida and others.

This book aims to think through the great conflicts in the past century in the context of the theory of catastrophe and the beginning of new messianic time. Firstly, it is a book about means and ends – that is, about whether good ends can be achieved through bad means. Second, it is a book about time: peace time, war time, time it takes to transfer from war to peace, etc. Is a period of peace simply a time that excludes all violence? How long does it take to establish peace (to remove all violence)? Building on this, it then discusses whether there is anything that can be called messianic acting. Can we – are we capable of, or allowed to – act violently in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah and peace? And would we then be in messianic time? Finally, how does this notion of messianism – a name for a sudden and unpredictable event – fit in, for example, with our contemporary understanding of terrorist violence? The book attempts to understand such pressing questions by reconstructing the notions of violence and messianism as they were elaborated by 20th century Jewish political thought.

Providing an important contribution to the discussion on terrorism and the relationship between religion and violence, this book will appeal to theorists of terrorism and ethics of war, as well as students and scholars of Philosophy, Jewish studies and religion studies.

1 Violence and Illness

Figures of the Other, Figures of Hegel

Immediately, I insist on the word “other.”

In Greek, o allos¹ also designates the foreigner, the remaining other, one other who is still (an)other. How can we follow (I hesitate to speak of thematization and study) the action (ergon) toward the other or speech (logos) about this other (or the work and action of this other)? Or conversely, how can we follow resistance to the other and resistance of the other in such a complicated context and on a path that begins with an imaginary analogy of sovereignty (again, logos) and ends with attributes (emphasis on the plural) of violence? How can we follow the transformations and deformations of allergologies or the allergologic within the framework of potential alternative strategies such as immunologies or (auto)immunologies, and how, simultaneously, can we seek the promising form that announces and opens greater security and protection for the other?

How at all does the detection of a violent act, or many violent acts against another – this being the premise of any allergology or immunology (does allergy not already belong to autoimmune strategies?) – protect (an)other? To be clear, the question is not how does it protect me or us or the selfsame or even my relation with the other (proving the benevolence and wholesomeness of the other), but precisely and above all the other. Does perhaps the protection of the other as other, certainly protection from me, from my intervention or assimilation, assume nothing but acquiescence to allergy, to prevention and distance in relation to the other? And does allergy or immunity from the other protect the other from me?

Similarly, can the finesse and the eventual move from allergologies into (auto)immunologies first overcome all the problems that concern the changes in meaning and context? Does (auto)immunology produce greater protection of the other by retreating before it, because the selfsame (I or we) opposes itself to itself as another? That is, does the selfsame divide itself internally, calling itself into question, because it recognizes itself as enemy and other, because it struggles against itself and its own fictions and fantasies regarding enmity and allergy?

Lévinas asks:

Can the Same [le Même] welcome the Other [l’Autre], not by giving the Other to itself as a theme [en se le donnant pour theme] (that is to say, as being) but by putting itself in question? Does not this putting in question [mise on question] occur precisely when the Other has nothing in common with me, when the Other has nothing in common with me, when the Other is wholly other, that is to say, a human Other [lorsqu’il est tout autre, c’est-à-dire Autrui]?²

All these questions, I repeat, are to be found in the shadow of the question regarding resistance to (something) other and resistance to another. Further, all these questions unfold in a complicated context made up of the analogy of sovereignty (the state and the sovereign organism) and various attributes of violence and war. Although the controversial status and primacy of the various elements that comprise this (bio)analogy (and counter-analogy) – the whole, the totality, the state, the community, the organism, the body – has for centuries been at the forefront, I insist that this whole time, chronic illness has also been the secret condition and factor of possibility of this analogy.

Illness provides the framework, is both the beginning and end of my inverted and intersected questions: Hegel’s illness of sovereignty and his homeopathic strategy, Rosenzweig’s therapy and infusion into the sick and paralyzed body of the philosopher (“alle Symptome von akuter Apoplexia philosophica”),³ Lévinas’ discovery that the origin and birth of philosophy is in allergy (“la philosophie est vraiment née d’une allergie”),⁴ Derrida’s epithets and attributes of violence⁵ and his construction of immunity and autoimmunity as the foundations of the community.⁶ I would first divide these four analogous interventions and four disparate actions into two columns, that is, I would simultaneously classify four sets of thoughts on violence into only two: on one side are Hegel, “the mystic of violence,” as Benjamin calls him,⁷ and Rosenzweig, Hegel’s moderator (and generally one of his most important readers⁸); on the other side are Emmanuel Lévinas with his own reader (and occasionally unjustified moderator) Jacques Derrida. This division can be seen as a series of banal interruptions and uneven gaps in the chronology of a single column.

If I now had to formulate an initial, new, and different division on the same axis along which these texts link and overlap with one another, then I would experiment and formulate things entirely differently. I would choose between the following two options. Either I would declare all four of these great gestures and readings, these great books of violence and enmity, as moderating efforts – for they are all moderators, all attempting to soften the extreme elements and differences that precede them (even Hegel himself or perhaps especially Hegel). Or, I would single out Rosenzweig’s and Lévinas’ gesture(s), as having in common that they are the first and only event in the history of Western thought. In their view(s), for the first time, it is not a question of a short episode, intermezzo, or of catching breath amid histories of violence and the infinite belief that force can execute some goal, that is, that there is no justice, law, or order without use of violence or war.

Only this second option would then mean that this was an event par excellence, rare or unrepeatable, because it is strongly opposed to both the context in which it appears and everything that precedes it. But also because, paradoxically, it owes its influence and its duration, I would even say its survival, to all that follows and comes after it. Thus, placed between Hegel and Derrida are Rosenzweig and Lévinas together (in spite of all of Lévinas’ wariness and hesitation regarding Rosenzweig’s reading of Hegel).⁹ This option would open two problems and several layers of uncertainty and different types of responsibility.

First, following some of Derrida’s objections from “Violence and Metaphysics,”¹⁰ either Rosenzweig’s or Lévinas’ position (and I dare say that they complement one another perfectly, as each reads different books by Hegel) ought to always be able, in any situation of renewed trust in violence (meaning today, right now), to prove its adaptability and opposition to Hegel. The demand, for example, that Lévinas neither repeats nor affirms, but also does not hide his immanent Hegelianism (“Lévinas is very close to Hegel, much closer than he admits, and at the very moment when he is apparently opposed to Hegel in the most radical fashion”¹¹), could be fulfilled by constant comparison of this position against various Hegelian formulas and combinations.

The second point, or the second responsibility, produces the first and boils down to what comes after Derrida and his (auto)immunology (as I have already mentioned, for my scaffolding to be justified at all, it is necessary to believe at least a little in its potential and its future).¹² In order to survive, to remain a paragon event, Rosenzweig-Lévinas’ intervention that strikes at the principles of violence and war (the very first institutes of philosophy), would have to patently manifest its advantage in opposing the great mystifiers of violence prior to Hegel. I am thinking here of Kant and recent tendencies to inaugurate his 200-year-old fantasies about peace as still the most efficient response humanity has to the crisis in international law and to renewed justifications of violence and war.

Three gestures by Hegel from his lectures on the philosophy of law, three steps in the construction of a fatal analogy, could perhaps form the first condition for the construction of a strategy that holds together a few elements: war, violence, sacrifice, sovereignty, negation, enemy, and other. But before discussing these gestures by Hegel and Hegel’s construction (as I wish to call it, since it is exclusively Hegel’s and could be the condition for any theory of violence, war, sacrifice, enemy, etc. in Hegel), here are two parameters I am using as a preamble to this Hegelian construction:

(a) I am attempting to uncover the Hegel mediated by my reading of Rosenzweig and Lévinas. In other words, the elementary construction the two moderators instantly recognize as Hegelian and immediately oppose. Rosenzweig uses an analogy of the sick philosopher, the patient, of an idealism that needs overturning. What is it that needs overturning in Hegel? Or conversely, what is it that is sick in Hegel and turned upside down? What in Hegel is already in Rosenzweig’s sanatorium?

As we have observed, our patient suffers from a radical inversion [einer vollkommenen Umkehrung] of his normal functions. It may be necessary to reverse the inversion, that is, turn matters upside-down [dass es also notwendig ist, diese Umkehr ihrerseits wieder umzukehren].¹³

(b) I am attempting to find the construction that within itself holds, and then implies, all of Hegel’s potential theories of violence, negation, enemy, war, etc. A theory like that, an always problematic and debatable reduction of diverse Hegelian ideas and fragments, must, for instance, cover: two places in the Science of Logic on violence that comes from outside, on the other and on the reaction to the other (“Wirkung und Gegenwirkung”), and on the purpose and mechanical violence (“Der ausgeführte Zweck”);¹⁴ the determination of determination, negation, limit, and absolute other from the Enzyklopädie (as well as from the Science of Logic);¹⁵ the argument regarding the other as evil, on self-recognition in the other from the 1805–6 semester (Jenenser Realphilosophie);¹⁶ differing versions of the struggle for recognition [der Kampf des Anerkennens], wars and confrontations among states, but also positions concerning external or apparent beginning of states [äusserliche oder erscheinende Anfang], despite understanding violence as the basis of right [Grund des Rechts] or violence as a substantial principle of states;¹⁷ followed by Hegel’s muddled suggestions concerning first violence [erste Gewalt], about the violence of the hero, about the conversion of violence into right, and about the battle for right, etc.

Here are three fragments that, I believe, most efficiently construct the path towards Rosenzweig and Lévinas.

After two paragraphs (§ 160 and § 161) in which he delves in detail into war and sacrifice for the state, at the very end of paragraph § 162 of his lectures on Natural Law in Heidelberg (1817/1818), Hegel speaks of Kant’s project of eternal peace issuing from the idea that there should be no war. War, however, says Hegel, is ethically necessary because without war, the people would drown in their private life, in security and listlessness, and would be easy prey to other peoples. Hegel varies this idea in multiple places in texts from different years.¹⁸ He continues:

In truth, this is a thought first expressed some thirty years ago and filled with benevolence, that the human race build a single state.¹⁹ What holds the individual states together in such a league of all states is merely an “ought,” and the whole league is based on free choice [Willkür]. At all events the individual must desire the opposite of war; but war is a philosophically essential element of nature [aber der Krieg ist ein philosophisch wesentliches Naturmoment].²⁰

It is as if Lévinas himself formulated these two phrases, to be found nowhere else in Hegel’s texts in any form – moral necessity of war and war as something essentially philosophical. War is indeed der Naturmoment, much as states are small natural units that strive towards a unified whole. And this movement toward a unified whol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Violence and Illness: Figures of the Other, Figures of Hegel
• 2. Translating War into Peace: quid pro quo
• 3. Love of the Enemy
• 4. Grounds for War
• 5. “Pazifistischer Zug”
• 6. “That aftertaste of violence”: Violence against Violence
• 7. Sacrifice: Word, Institution, Institutionalization
• 8. “Divine Violence,” “Radical Violence”: Korah’s Rebellion
• 9. Victory
• Index