On the Outlook

On the Outlook Figures of the Messianic

Edited by

Thomas Crombez and Katrien Vloeberghs

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

On the Outlook: Figures of the Messianic, edited by Thomas Crombez and Katrien Vloeberghs This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2007 by Thomas Crombez and Katrien Vloeberghs and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-246-1; ISBN 13: 9781847182463

Ohne das Herbeifhrenwollen des Messias vor seiner Zeit ist die Zukunft keine Zukunft, sondern nur eine in unendliche Lnge hingezogene Vergangenheit. Without the desire to make the Messiah arrive before his time, the future is not a future but only a past drawn out to an infinite length. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlsung (The Star of Redemption, 1921)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................ix Introduction..........................................................................................................1 Chapter One Discontinuous Historiographies Process and Event in Rosenzweigs Messianic Conception of History Elke DUBBELS (Humboldt University Berlin) ................................................9 Benjamin, Critical Theory, and the Promise of Loss Pieter VERMEULEN (University of Leuven)..................................................21 Derrida and the Problem of the Secularized Messianic Eddis MILLER (University of Pennsylvania) ................................................35 Revelation and Renewal: History, Human Progress, and the Messianic Idea in Cohen and Rosenzweig Ingrid ANDERSON (Boston University).........................................................45 Chapter Two Historical Contexts of Messianism The Unforgiven: Erri de Lucas Reminiscences of Revolution Joost DE BLOOIS (University of Amsterdam)................................................61 Adams Return to the Garden: The Political Messianic in German Expressionism and Activism Lisa Marie ANDERSON (Hunter College, New York) ...................................71 Chapter Three The Poetics of Messianism Reading Gods Book to the End: Antinomianism and the Avant-garde Thomas CROMBEZ (University of Antwerp) ................................................85 Celans Mandorla and the Poetics of Messianism J.D. MININGER and Jason Michael PECK (University of Minnesota) ...........95 The Messianic Experience and the Arrest of the Sovereignty of Language Job DE MEYERE (University of Tilburg) ....................................................105

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Table of Contents

Babbling Redemption: Agambens Messianic Infancy Katrien VLOEBERGHS (University of Antwerp)..........................................115 Chapter Four Human Agency and the Coming of the Messiah Actively Messianic? Scholem on Benjamins Theory of the Messianic Tammy Lynn CASTELEIN (University of Amsterdam) ...............................123 Messianic Progress: Continuity and Interruption in Cohen, Bloch and Benjamin Melissa BLACKIE (University of Toronto) ..................................................133 Universal Political Messianism: A Dialogue with Levinas First Talmudic Reading Anya TOPOLSKI (University of Leuven) .....................................................141 Beyond Impotentiality: Agambens Messianism after Auschwitz and the (Un)doing of the Adornian Law Ayala AGRANAT .........................................................................................151 List of Contributors..........................................................................................163

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is based on lectures presented at the international conference for junior scholars On the Outlook: Figures of the Messianic, organized by Thomas Crombez and Katrien Vloeberghs within the context of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, in May 2006. This fruitful academic encounter was the second initiative in a series of bi-annual graduate conferences organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies. The conference offered a forum to present new research on historical messianism and explore the contemporary modes and stakes of messianic thinking in twentieth-century philosophy and literature. Moreover, it turned out to be a unique opportunity for a meaningful exchange between junior scholars and senior academics, who generously agreed to serve as respondents during the conference. We thank Joachim Leilich, Vivian Liska, Karl Ivan Solibakke and Bernd Witte for their invaluable feedback. The editors are pleased to present the fourteen essays that form the result of this enriching dialogue. We wish to thank all the researchers and volunteers who contributed to the conference and the publication. Without the confidence, the logistic and financial support of the Institute of Jewish Studies and the University of Antwerp, neither would have been possible. We greatly appreciated the contributors interest, cooperation, and enthusiasm during the reviewing and editing process. Our special gratitude goes to the referees who provided succinct comments and constructive suggestions: Vivian Liska, Etty Mulder, Rico Sneller, and Karl Ivan Solibakke. Being on the outlook for that which is coming is obviously not only a metaphor of the messianic. We have been looking forward to presenting a wide range of perspectives and insights into the state of messianism in twenty-firstcentury academia.

INTRODUCTION
Thomas Crombez and Katrien Vloeberghs, University of Antwerp

This volume explores the traditional and contemporary modes of messianic thinking, in their close interaction with both previous and actual political contexts and theoretical discourses. The essays address the ways in which todays messianic thinking relates to its historical Jewish and Christian origins, and how it deals with the legacy of its early twentieth-century precursors, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Bloch, Gerschom Scholem, and Theodor W. Adorno. In the past few decades, philosophers and political thinkers repeatedly drew upon the millennial tradition of messianism in their efforts to come to terms with the injustices of the present. Their conceptions build upon and revise, modify or radicalize politico-theological theories developed in the period between the two World Wars by thinkers who, in the face of doom and destruction, reverted to ancient Judeo-Christian visions of redemption. Historically, attitudes toward messianism interact with the political and historical conditions as well as with the prevailing theoretical and philosophical discourses of their times. Cross-fertilization between messianism, politics, and philosophy also inform recent conceptualizations of history and time, language and the law in the writings of Emmanuel Lvinas, Jacques Derrida, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben. The essential character of messianism may well be precisely its particular relation to the law. This statement by Giorgio Agamben confirms a renewed interest in the interstices between theological, mystical, political, and juridical discourses. In the Jewish tradition, the relationship between messianism and the law ranges from ideas of an absolute restoration of order when all the ancient laws will again be in force (Maimonides) to visions of the eventual suspension of the law as such (known as antinomianism). Several contributions in this volume deal with this crucial field of tension. The analysis of messianism in contemporary discourse encourages reflections on the following questions: How does messianism figure in modern and contemporary philosophy? How does it relate to todays state of affairs in the juridical, political, and social realm? Is it still primarily a Jewish concern, and how has it interacted with other religious and political traditions? How does the impact of Jewish messianism on modern philosophy compare with and relate to other influences of Jewish thought, such as the legalistic tradition? Should

Introduction

Kantian and Neo-Kantian schools of thinkingviewed by some as close to a more mainstream tradition of Jewish ethicsbe considered in opposition to or as secularized variants of messianic ideas? These were the central questions of two linked conferences organised by the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp. Adjacent to the International Conference Messianism and the Law (11 and 12 May 2006), an academic gathering was organised for young researchers in philosophy and literature studies, preoccupied with the question of messanisms role today. The title we chose had to reflect the feelings of expectancy that go with the growing interest for the messianic today, as well as with messianism proper. When, in January 2006, the call for papers for On the Outlook: Figures of the Messianic was distributed, the response from junior academics working in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States was overwhelming. Seventeen scholars were selected to present their research at the Junior Scholars Conference, which took place in Antwerp. Of these insightful contributions, fourteen were reworked into the essays that make up this volume. The structure of the conference is mirrored in the structure of the book. The most crucial philosophical aspect of messianism undoubtedly concerns the divergent conceptualizations of history and figurations of time developed by philosophers and theologians of the messianic. In the first chapter, Discontinuous Historiographies, we study the peculiar conceptions of time that messianism harbours. Elke Dubbels provides a close reading of Franz Rosenzweigs seminal book Der Stern der Erlsung (The Star of Redemption, 1921) in order to answer the question whether the coming of the messiah signifies the end of a historical process, or, on the contrary, a break into history. The intriguing point of departure of Pieter Vermeulens essay, Benjamin, Critical Theory, and the Promise of Loss, is the almost epidemic appearance of quotations from the celebrated Theses on the Philosophy of History in the writings of contemporary Critical Theorists. Since the 1980s, Vermeulen argues, thinkers such as Geoffrey Hartman, Eric Santner, Irving Wohlfarth, and Alan Liu have dedicated the project of Critical Theory to the chronicling of the losses incurred by the triumphant march of progress. This program of restitution should compensate for our ages indifferent availability of historical data. Critical Theory then becomes a work of mourning, the verification of the possibility of loss. Eddis Miller questions in his essay Derrida and the Problem of the Secularized Messianic the status of religious motifs in philosophy, particularly the messianic. When one invokes terms such as the messianic, are these

On the Outlook: Figures of the Messianic

concepts being employed in a strictly metaphorical way? In the particular case of Derrida, what is the condition that dictates the use of religious language? The last essay from this chapter returns to Rosenzweigs messianic project, but studies it from a wider perspective. In Revelation and Renewal, Ingrid Anderson examines how Rosenzweig approached the writings of his mentor Hermann Cohen. His reflections on history and Judaism appear to have arisen from Cohens version of universal socialism, inspired by the Jewish tradition. Historical Contexts of Messianism introduces two distinct forms of messianic thinking within their original milieu. The sparks of messianic hope are not only determined by philosophical motives and particular manifestations of a philosophy of history, but are also tributary to specific historical circumstances. Joost de Bloois reflects on messianic traces in the recollections of the violent postwar decades in Italy, the so-called anni di piombo (years of lead). Examining the novels and essays by Erri de Luca, he discovers that this writers generation still functions as the unforgettable of recent Italian history, an unacceptable remainder for current politics. De Bloois draws on Benjamin and Agamben to show that the remnant also represents an experience of the present, a messianic now that has to be understood as an injunction for fulfilment. The second contribution by Lisa Marie Anderson examines the function of the messianic in the German artistic debates at the dawn of the twentieth century. Anderson finds two cultural movements, expressionism and activism, vehemently discussing a brand of messianism which channels its longing primarily into the aesthetic realm. Their quarrels elucidate the position of the political within the structure of messianism. Numerous thinkers and authors from the twentieth century have located instances of the messianic in literature and the arts. The Poetics of Messianism, the third chapter, offers a selection of case-studies from literary history (the historical avant-garde, Paul Celan), as well as from literary theory (especially the work of Giorgio Agamben). In Reading Gods Book to the End, Thomas Crombez studies the peculiar suitability of messianic discourse to describe the ambitions, hopes and failures of the twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes. He argues that two conflicting strands from Jewish messianic thought may help to conceptualize the nature of the avant-gardes: Rosenzweigs vision of redemption materialized through liturgical time on the one hand, and Sabbatai Sevis antinomian conception of the Messiah as one who will put an end to all existing laws on the other. J.D. Mininger and Jason Peck consider the difficulties and contradictions of a poetics of messianism, through a close examination of Celans poem Mandorla. They find echoes of the Apostle Pauls messianism, and suggest that

Introduction

Mandorla is a figure that acknowledges the slight displacement between a poetics of messianism and the impossible poetics of the Messiah. Job de Meyeres contribution The Messianic Experience and the Arrest of the Sovereignty of Language examines how, in recent continental philosophy, the messiah is transformed from a purely religious figure into the symbol of an unexpected and non-calculable event. De Meyeres focus is on the human linguistic condition, which he analyses through the writings of Derrida. The ultimate ineffability of language, that there is no final ground or foundation for the many meanings it expresses, can be described with Agamben as a banrelation. Drawing on the latters reflections on infancy, which are used to criticize the deconstructionist view of language, De Meyere situates the messianic in the weak force that accompanies the human linguistic condition. The final essay of this chapter, Katrien Vloeberghs Babbling Redemption: Agambens Messianic Infancy, further explores the unique relationship between language and infancy in the work of Giorgio Agamben. She shows how Agamben, by accentuating the disruptive potential of the child, endows the figure of infancy with an anarchic dimension, a genuine power of resistance against the integration into a linear development, subject formation, and the symbolic order. The messianic moment is located precisely in this instance of discontinuity, enhanced by infancys perpetual potentiality and impure liminality. Human Agency and the Coming of the Messiah, the fourth and final chapter, focuses on the problematic of mankinds messianic haste and hesitancy. The first contribution, Actively Messianic? by Tammy Lynn Castelein, describes the reception by Gershom Scholem of his friend Benjamins peculiar version of Jewish messianism. She demonstrates how Benjamin expressed in his writings an impact of cabbalistic doctrine, which was communicated to him mainly through Scholem, by integrating the motif of shattering and restitution (tikkun) into his writings. According to Scholem, Benjamin is still completely embedded in Jewish-theological discourse, a conclusion which Castelein calls into question. Melissa Blackie discusses in her text Messianic Progress the problematic of continuity and interruption in the work of Hermann Cohen, Ernst Bloch, and Benjamin. Although all of them were concerned with interpreting history from a messianic point of view, they did not agree on the crucial question which type and degree of agency humans can dispose of in bringing about the messianic future. The ameliorist answer of Cohen is contrasted with the radical discontinuity of the messianic intervention stressed by Bloch and Benjamin. The third essay of this chapter is Anya Topolskis Universal Political Messianism. Focusing on Emmanuel Levinas annual Talmudic Readings at

On the Outlook: Figures of the Messianic

the Colloque dIntellectuels Juifs de Langue Franaise, she investigates how Levinas tried to recover the legacy of rabbinic Judaism for twentieth-century European philosophy. She retrieves in his idea of messianic politics the conceptualization of a non-catholic universal politics. The role of Auschwitz in Agambens conceptualization of messianism forms the starting point of Ayala Agranats contribution, entitled Beyond Impotentiality. The final essay in this volume discusses Agambens figure of the messianic remnant. The remainder as a theologico-messianic term is applied to the problematic of testimony in the context of the Shoah. Not only does Agambens conception of messianism illuminate his treatment of Auschwitz, but also the reverse. Auschwitz, or better, relating to Auschwitz, is ethically essential for the construction of his messianic program for the now. From the joint conferences, Messianism and the Law, and, On the Outlook: Figures of the Messianic, it became unmistakably clear that Jewish messianism, its reception, and its reworkings in western philosophy and literature constitute a central theme of current doctoral and postdoctoral research. The contributions of this book make apparent a remarkable tendency in current junior scholarship concerning messianism. Into a highly theoretical field, the authors introduce a basic ethical impulsehow to deal with the injustices of the present, and how to envision the (im)possibility of a better future.

CHAPTER ONE DISCONTINUOUS HISTORIOGRAPHIES

PROCESS AND EVENT IN ROSENZWEIGS MESSIANIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

Elke Dubbels, Humboldt University Berlin

Are there conditions for the coming of the Messiah, or does the Messiah come without preconditions? Is his coming the end of a historical process, or is it, on the contrary, transcendent to history, a break into history? These closely linked questions lead the way to the centre of debate between different positions concerning Jewish messianism. Nowadays, scholars who are interested in the philosophical impact of Jewish messianism tend to stress the position that rejects the notion of a historical process. As no historical process determines the coming of the Messiah, this position acknowledges the absolute openness of the future that cannot be derived from the past. It is this absolute openness towards the future that makes Jewish messianism an apt point of reference in the contemporary philosophy of the event. Derrida, for instance, relates the unexpected character of the event to the coming of the Messiah, which can occur at any moment (Derrida 60). In Franz Rosenzweigs major philosophical-theological work Der Stern der Erlsung (The Star of Redemption, 1921) one can find the notion of the coming of the Messiah described as an unpredictable event which can occur at any moment, as well as the notion of a redemptive process through which messianic timein Rosenzweigs idiom the Kingdom (das Reich)is being realized. Is this one of the contradictions in The Star of Redemption which Rosenzweig was unwilling or unable to solve? Such contradictions have been revealed by Myers, although he does not specifically refer to a contradiction between process and event (103). Rosenzweigs approach is, in this respect, less contradictory than it is novel, insofar as it cannot be reduced to either one of the traditional positions. (The same holds true for Walter Benjamins Theologischpolitisches Fragment, as Irving Wohlfarth has demonstrated [168].) First of all, one has to consider that Rosenzweigs notion of a redemptive process is not congruous with the development of the history of the world, though it takes place in the world, and not in a transcendent realm or within the soul. Moreover, the redemptive process, the growth of the Kingdom (das Wachsen des Reichs), is not synonymous with a linear process of homogeneous time. Rosenzweig rejects such process because it is related to the idea of progress from classical philosophy of history (The Star of Redemption

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Process and Event in Rosenzweigs Messianic Conception of History

244). Instead he presents an incalculable process which comprises incomparable instants. The way in which these instants are connected, i.e., the way in which they form a process, is not conceptually elaborated by Rosenzweig. Instead, he operates with metaphors and allusions. He suggests that salvific history is about the world of objects becoming singular by having their generic names transposed into proper names. This idea is then combined with the metaphor of the growth of the Kingdom. Both elements refer to strands of cabbalistic tradition, as will be shown. (So far, Karl Erich Grzinger and Moshe Idel have dealt with similarities between Rosenzweigs works and elements of the cabbala, though in a more general way.) Rosenzweigs view of history is directed against what he understands to be the Hegelian perspective of history, or the assumption that world history forms a divine process in itself. His estimation of Hegels philosophy was already ambivalent before World War I. After the war, Rosenzweig became an outright anti-Hegelian thinker (Moss, Der Engel der Geschichte 51-67). World history, dominated by nation states, will not free us from violence, but it is the arena of endless wars. If Rosenzweig nonetheless clings to the idea that there is a process of redemption going on in history, this has to be read as a non-Hegelian process. Instead of subsuming single events in a divine process which guarantees that history is evolving towards a state of perfection, even against the intentions of the actors (in the light of Hegels famous List der Vernunft), Rosenzweig emphasizes that the process of redemption is constituted by the singular ethical acts of man. But what holds these acts together so that one can speak of a process at all? Here, the growth of the Kingdom functions as an absolute metaphor (Blumenberg). It offers the image of a wholethe whole of a processwhich cannot be proven theoretically and which can only be represented metaphorically. Such absolute metaphors orient the human attitude towards the world and are of pragmatic (that is in Rosenzweigs case, of ethical) value. Rosenzweig draws this metaphor from the cabbalistic-mystical notion that the redemptive process concerns the animation of being which is effected by ethical deeds that sow the seeds that are called to give names (Star 258). The redemptive process is not only a matter of ethics in Rosenzweig, but also bears a relation to world history. In the second part of The Star, Rosenzweig outlines a messianic conception of history as a precarious intersection of the history of the world and the growth of the Kingdom. Das Reich Gottes setzt sich durch in der Welt, indem es die Welt durchsetzt (Stern 266). (The English translation tries to render the pun of the German original, but is misleading: The Kingdom of God is enforced in the World by forcing itself upon the world [Star 256].) The intersection causes a disturbance (Star 257), the world is interspersed (durchsetzt) with the growth of the Kingdom. Thus, the redemptive process

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11

interrupts the historical continuum of self-identical, homogeneous instants of time. From the perspective of the world, the redemptive process is not even perceivable as a process, but only as disorder (257). Therefore, one could say, what will have been a process from the standpoint of redemption, are discontinuous events from the perspective of the world. To put it differently: from a standpoint within world history, redemption is an unpredictable event, whereas from the standpoint of redemption, there will have been a process leading to redemption, consisting of discontinuous events.1 In Rosenzweigs Star, redemption is thus characterized by a dual temporality, with redemption being both present and future, both an always present process (which appears to be not a process, but a disorder of singular, discontinuous ethical acts) and a future event (which will reveal that there has been a process) (Gordon 195). In the following section, I will examine how the cabbalistic-mystical process of the growth of the Kingdom is connected with the event character of the ethical act. Both are important in the second part of The Star where Rosenzweig develops, one might say, a hermeneutics of existence in theological categories (creation, revelation, and redemption). Only in the third part of The Star, with which I shall deal in the last section, does world history come to the fore in a more elaborated manner. Here, Rosenzweig construes Judaism and Christianity as speculative figures with Judaism having no relation to world history anymore, and Christianity becom[ing] master over time (Star 358-359). As Christianity, according to Rosenzweigs construction, conceives of all subsequent time from Christs life on earth until his return as one great present (359), it proceeds on an eternally present way and thus not only defeats time, but runs the risk of turning redemption into a concern of world and church history (390). If this reads at first glance like an extremely critical view of Christianity, one has to consider that without Christianity, redemption would lose all relation to history. But this goes against Rosenzweigs intention to read world history as both a condition of redemption and separate from redemption. I will argue that Rosenzweig presents Judaism and Christianity as mutually corrective counterparts. By turning away from history, Judaism preserves the idea that the coming of the Messiah is an unpredictable event and thus splits the present, which Christianity lays claim on, so that it opens up to the future. The dual temporality of redemption, the notion of which one can gather from the second part of The Star, does not allow a full present. A present that is always beside itself questions every goal which world history claims to have reached. Thus, the splitting of the present will prove to be one way to understand the intersection of the process of the growth of the Kingdom with the process of world history.

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Process and Event in Rosenzweigs Messianic Conception of History

The Demand for Names and the Growth of the Kingdom

In the hermeneutics of existence, which Rosenzweig delivers in the second part of The Star, a demand for names (201) orientates a subjects understanding of his or her being in the world. This demand for names does not only indicate the ethical character of Rosenzweigs hermeneutics of existence, but also points to the name of a particular religious tradition. In Jewish tradition, the revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai is tantamount to the revelation of Gods name. What Rosenzweig calls the growth of the Kingdom is a transformation of the world (252) by which the world of thingliness opens up to the realm of revealed names (201, 203). Structurally, the proper name is the linguistic means by which a subject becomes addressable. Rosenzweig introduces the value of the proper name in accord with this structural argument. The proper name is the address of a call which cannot be evaded, for the proper name designates the particular [] which has no concept (190). The call of the proper name cuts off every exit to objectification (189). Addressability thus becomes the foundation of responsibility. The individual discovers its singularity by a call (Where are you?, 189) that does not determine it with regard to content, only demonstrating that he or she has no alibi in existence, to use a phrase by Mikhail Bakhtin (literally, that he or she occupies no further place in existence) (Bakhtin qtd. in Eskin 76). Thus, the demand for names is a demand for addressability of absolute singular individual[s]. The demand for names also denotes a demand for historical names in Rosenzweig. The transition from a personal revelationin which a singular individual is constituted, responsible to Gods call and the demand to love himto a historical revelation is posited rather than logcally demonstrated. (According to Moss, the historical revelation has the status of a projection of a basically personal experience in Rosenzweigs Star, without Moss giving projection a pejorative connotation [System und Offenbarung 96].) Rosenzweigs description of this transition reads as follows:
Personal lived experience is bound to the proper name, thus demands being founded in Creation, that Creation we had already previously called Creation of Revelation, historical revelation. [] So the foundation must bring to the lived reality in the world a center and a beginning in one, the center in space, the beginning in time. [] Foundation and Revelation, center and beginning all together, is the Revelation of the divine name. (Star 202)

This passage demonstrates how Rosenzweig combines his theory of the proper name with the Jewish tradition that understands the revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai to be the revelation of the divine name. The letters of the divine

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13

name have brought forth the 22 letters of Hebrew alphabet, of which not only the Torah consists, but from which the world was made. According to the cabbala, there is not only one divine name, but the Torah is written in divine names. In the cabbalistic tradition, one either ponders the secret of the divine names in the Torah which are thought to correspond to the ten divine Sefiroth (divine emanations); or one attempts to find out what the divine names are by way of permutation and recombination of the letters of the Torah. This ecstatic form of cabbala is characterized by a messianic tendency because the absolute text does not already exist, but has to be produced by special methods (see Idel, Kabbalah, ch. IX; Kilcher 56). In contrast to the symbolic way of the Sefiroth, this second approach was called the path of names by Abraham Abulafia, one of the most famous representatives of ecstatic cabbalistic tradition. There is a path of names also in The Star though it does not exactly run the same way as Abulafias path of names. The transformation of the world (252) (Weltwanderung) which occurs in singular ethical acts, or acts of love (230), comes about by sow[ing] the seeds that are called to give names (258) (Keime von Namen). The transformation of the world is a transformation of language at the same time. It is the transformation of generic names into proper names that leads the way from the realm of created things to the realm of revealed names (203). What in Abulafia are divine names, are proper names for the created things in Rosenzweig. Yet, it is striking that Rosenzweig does not give any hints in The Star that he understands the name as expressing the essence of a thing (or as translating its essence into language which is the way Walter Benjamin describes the adamitic language of names in his essay ber Sprache berhaupt und ber die Sprache des Menschen). With regard to the implications of Rosenzweigs language philosophy in The Star, it is more accurate to speak of a transposition than of a transformation of language. If one understands creation in The Star as this past tense of inherited structures (Gordon 196), these structures can be thought of as language structures that condition speaking without determining it. With French linguist mile Benveniste, one can distinguish between language as a repertoire of signs and a system to combine them, on the one hand, and as a discrete and each time singular action, on the other (Benveniste 286). Thus, the language of Creation covers language as a conditional system of grammar and dictionary, and the speaking language of revelation relates to the event of using language in an always singular moment with concrete speakers (Star 200-201). In Abulafia, the divine names appear after the disintegration of social language into meaningless units (Idel, Kabbalah 236). For Rosenzweig, to transform language means to redeem the object from its fixedness and set it in motion (Star 253) by making the object able to answer, transposing it from the accusative (140) to the vocative (189).

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Process and Event in Rosenzweigs Messianic Conception of History

The transformation of the world (252) is a process producing singularity as a constituent of the We all of the future messianic community (270):
If a not yet is written above all redemptive union, the only result can be that, for the end, it is the present moment precisely that occurs, whereas for the universal and highest reality, it is, to begin with, the neighbour who is precisely there (dass fr das Ende zunchst der gerade gegenwrtige Augenblick, fr das Allgemeine und Hchste zu-nchst das jeweils Nchste eintritt). [] Instead of the plural, which contains things as singular substitutes of their kind, and instead of the singular where the soul experiences its birth, it is the dual that prevails here [] for it is understandable that it nowhere has a solid point to hook onto [] it slides from one carrier to the other [] the whole circuit of Creation. [] But it only apparently surrenders its power to the plural; in reality, it leaves traces of this wandering from place to place by introducing everywhere, into the plural of things, the sign of singularity. (252) [T]he We is the community of everything developed from the dual. (254)

As this passage shows, the messianic community is constituted by singularit[ies]. (This reading diverges from Gordons claim that there is an ontological priority of community in Rosenzweig [see Gordon 198-202].) The sign[s] of singularity are tantamount to the seeds that are called to give names, with the latter formulation indicating that there is a process of growth in this apparently indefinite wandering (258). Indeed, here one encounters the junction of process and event in terms of an ethical act which cannot be predicted and which nonetheless forms part of a redemptive process in history. Rosenzweig highlights the event character of the act of love towards the neighbour who is precisely there (das zu-nchst Nchste).2 Out of ethical reasons, the act of love must be unforeseen (232). It even
needs disappointments so as not to [] freeze into a schematic and organized act. It must avoid having any past and must have in itself no will for a future, a goal; it must be an act of love totally lost in the moment. (231)

Though the act of love is turned consciously and actively toward the given neighbour in the moment, obviously [it] anticipates the whole world in the will. The nearest thus becomes a placeholder of the farthest. And just the fact that every moment can be the last makes it the origin of the future, as a series of which every member is anticipated by the first one. Without the anticipation of the goal right in the next moment, without the desire to make the Messiah arrive before his time, the future is not a future but only a past drawn out to an infinite length (243-245).

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The series of anticipatory acts of love intervenes into the natural growth of life (241), thus bringing forth the growth of the Kingdom. The growth of the Kingdom is unforeseeable (243) (unberechenbar) and yet, [t]here is a law effective in the order where things move toward mans act of love. However, this order is not visible to the subject. Moreover, it is neither congruous with the law of [] evolution of natural history nor with the course of universal history that keeps going along. On the contrary, the acts of love affect anarchy, disorder, disturbance to peacefully growing life and break into the structured edifice of universal history (257-259). Rosenzweig holds that world history as well as natural history constitutes the foundation of redemptive acts of love though the latter only seem to have anarchical effects to both of them. These acts of love form a redemptive process to which there is an invisible law. This claim leads up to the symbol of the tree of life which stretches out only the opened buds to the inspiring love, thus illustrating the law which is supposed to be effective in the order where things move toward mans act of love (258-259). The symbol of the tree of life embodies the growth of the Kingdom. It becomes the symbol for the mystical process of the animation of being (Verlebendigung des Daseins, Stern 250) and guarantees the coherence of the singular acts of love. This process is mystical in the original sense because the law of its order remains hidden. Even the very fact that a process is taking place remains invisible. The notion of an invisible process aside of world history is common to cabbala. Lurianic cabbalawhich has been handed down to posterity in a book entitled Ez Hayyim (The Tree of Life)claims for example that the invisible history of the souls runs beside a visible world history. As the rhythms of both forms of history differ, the event of redemption is the end of an invisible process as well as the unforeseen event of a break, depending on the perspective. In Rosenzweig, the question of whether the coming of the Messiah is an unforeseeable event or the end of a process is also a matter of perspective though it is not a matter of two courses of history running separately from each other, the one being only the history of souls, the other world history. Rather, Rosenzweig argues that the growing Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the world are never beside each other (Star 256) for [d]as Reich Gottes setzt sich durch in der Welt, indem es die Welt durchsetzt (Stern 266). The redemptive process consisting of discontinuous acts of love takes place in the world which gets interspersed (durchsetzt) by it. The mystical solution to the tension between process and event guarantees that there is a hidden unity among the discontinuous ethical deeds Rosenzweig focuses on in the second part of The Star. There will have been a process to be perceived from the standpoint of redemptionwhich is no subjects standpoint.

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Process and Event in Rosenzweigs Messianic Conception of History

The dual temporality of redemption, the Kingdom being as much present as [] in the future (Star 241), implies a splitting of the present which never coincides with itself, since it is always also a future. This accounts for the disorder and disturbance which the growth of the Kingdom causes to both natural and world history. Time loses its assumed homogeneity; what is present is as much future. Thus, the linear order of time is shaken. No process of world history determines redemption in Rosenzweig. Instead, world history is the foundation of the growth of the Kingdom, by which it gets interspersed at the same time. The process of the growth of the Kingdom interferes with the process of world history in such a way that it subverts the notion of a linear, continuous process of homogeneous time. To put it differently, the past loses the appearance of a solid, homogeneous edifice (259) and regains event character. The past is not finished off; what it will have been is open to the future. As regards causality in history, it follows from this that the past does not determine the future, but only holds possibilities for it. Indeed, this is the notion of history which one can find in a passage of the last part of The Star. This part contains some more observations on world history, and will be dealt with in the following section.

Judaism and Christianity on History as a Condition of Redemption

Rosenzweig writes about the eighteenth century:
[F]or the first time the demands of the Kingdom of God seriously began to be turned into demands of time. Only since then were all those great works of liberation undertaken, which, as little as they already constitute the Kingdom of God, are yet the necessary conditions for its coming. Liberty, equality, fraternitychanged from heartfelt words into the slogans of times. (305)

This passage is remarkable because in general, Rosenzweig is very critical about world history in The Star. World history as the history of states is ruled by violence, by war and revolution. The eighteenth century gave birth not only to the great works of liberation, Rosenzweig mentions in above quote, but also to the nation state which cannot but lead to war. Due to his interpretation of Hegel as well as of Augustine, Rosenzweig holds that Christianity gave redemption a historical progressive form. (On the intertextual relations between Rosenzweigs Star and Augustines works, see Ciglia.) By claiming a historical beginning for redemptionthe works of Christthe idea could arise that redemption is successively unfolded in history. In Christianity, the coming of the Kingdom could thus become a concern of world and church history (390), Rosenzweig argues.

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Rosenzweigs approach to Christianity and Judaism in the last part of The Star is speculative insofar as both come to stand for ideas which are supposed to be effective in history. This type of Ideengeschichte was quite popular in Germany in Rosenzweigs time. In contrast to Christianity, Rosenzweig construes Judaism metahistorically. He places it beyond history claiming that it has already finished off with its history in biblical times; it is symbolically already at the goal anticipating redemption by ritual and liturgy. Though Judaism has symbolically already reached the goal and does not participate anymore in world history, it preserves the consciousness of the still unattained redemption (348). What does this speculative, antithetical construction of Judaism and Christianity mean with regard to world history? Rosenzweig claims that to Judaism, history is meaningless; it does not represent a condition of the coming of the Messiah which will be an end or rupture to history, not its goal. Christianity, on the other hand, tends to sacralize world history thus making it not merely the condition, but the medium of redemption. A messianic conception of history which would correspond to the growth of the Kingdom as outlined in the second part of The Star, can be thought of only as a mixture of Jewish devaluation and Christian sacralization of history. Only in this perspective does it become understandable that Rosenzweig speaks about history as a necessary condition, but not a determination of the coming of the Kingdom. In Rosenzweigs construction, Judaism and Christianity thus represent corrective counterparts to each other. Judaism reminds Christianity of the inescapable difference between the demands of the Kingdom of God and the demands of time (Zeitforderungen), whereas without Christianity, redemption would lose all relation to history. The mixture of Jewish devaluation and Christian sacralization of history brings forth the dual temporality of redemption with the effect that the present does not coincide with itself. As a consequence, this messianic conception is directed against a closure of history by a present which imagines itself as fulfilment of the demands of the Kingdom of God in history. The acknowledgment that the present never coincides with itself, that it is never fully present, indeed subverts all politicaltheological strategies to legitimate a claim to power.

Bibliography
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Process and Event in Rosenzweigs Messianic Conception of History

BLUMENBERG, Hans. Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. CIGLIA, Francesco Paolo. Der gordische Knoten der Zeit: Aspekte des Dialogs zwischen Rosenzweig und Augustin. Franz Rosenzweigs neues Denken: Internationaler Kongress Kassel 2004. Ed. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Vol. 1. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2006. 323-345 (forthcoming). DERRIDA, Jacques. Eine gewisse unmgliche Mglichkeit, vom Ereignis zu sprechen. Trans. Susanne Ldemann. Berlin: Merve, 2003. ESKIN, Michael. Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelshtam, and Celan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. GORDON, Peter Eli. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. GRZINGER, Karl Erich. In Rosenzweigs Seeledie Kabbala. Messianismus zwischen Mythos und Macht: Jdisches Denken in der europischen Geistesgeschichte. Eds. Eveline Goodman-Thau and Wolfdietrich SchmiedKowarzik. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994. 127-139. IDEL, Moshe. Franz Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah. The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr. Hanover: UP of New England, 1988. 162-171. . Kabbalah: New perspectives. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. KILCHER, Andreas B. Die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala als sthetisches Paradigma: Die Konstruktion einer sthetischen Kabbala seit der Frhen Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998. MOSS, Stphane. Der Engel der Geschichte: Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem. Frankfurt am Main: Jdischer Verlag, 1994. . System und Offenbarung: Die Philosophie Franz Rosenzweigs. Trans. Rainer Rochlitz. Munich: Fink, 1985. MYERS, David N. Resisting History: Historicism and its discontents in GermanJewish thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. ROSENZWEIG, Franz. Der Stern der Erlsung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. . The Star of Redemption. Trans. Barbara E. Galli. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2005. WOHLFARTH, Irving. Nihilistischer Messianismus: Zu Walter Benjamins Theologisch-politischem Fragment. Jdische und christliche Sprachfigurationen im 20. Jahrhundert. Eds. Ashraf Noor and Josef Wohlgemuth. Paderborn: Schnigh, 2002. 141-214.

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Altmann described the relation between the Kingdom and history in Rosenzweig as follows: [T]here exists, strictly speaking, no history of the Kingdom, only a prehistory of it (Altmann 134). This has been one of the starting points for my investigation. 2 The English translation renders the sense of concrete presence of the one who is by chance the most next, but it misses the temporal sense of das zu-nchst Nchste (next for the time being).