Uncommon Friendships

An Amicable History of Modern Religious Thought

Young

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781621893943
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Uncommon Friendships explores the often-overlooked dynamic of interreligious friendships, considering their significance for how we think about contemporary religious thought. By exploring the dynamics of three relationships between important religious thinkers--Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, and Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement--this study demonstrates the ways such friendships enable innovation and transformation within religious traditions. For each pair of thinkers, the sustained engagement and disagreement between them becomes central to their religious and philosophical development, helping them to respond effectively and creatively to issues and problems facing their communities and societies. Through a rereading of their work, Young shows how such friendships can help us rethink religion, aesthetics, education, and politics--as well as friendship itself.

Part One

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

and Franz Rosenzweig

one

The Star and the Rays Speech and Scripture

Colleagues, friends, confidants—and yet, an infinite distance separated Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in their friendship, marked by what both saw as the universal separation of Jew and Christian. Across this distance, they engaged in one of the most productive, seminal dialogues of any two thinkers. Despite their opposition, rivalry, and occasional hostility, they remained faithful friends. Rosenstock1 would later describe Rosenzweig as “my partner in the dialogue of life.”2 As Salomon Malka writes, “They were linked by an indissoluble friendship and an absolute hostility”3—even, one might add, beyond the grave.

In their friendship marked by the twists and turns of fortune, Rosenzweig and Rosenstock present a fascinating case study in how factors beyond one’s control shape one’s intellectual trajectory, even as one’s friendships may help one to remain true to oneself within these changing circumstances. If one looked at Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s lives in five-year intervals, beginning in 1910 at the start of their friendship,4 one could hardly have predicted where they would be in the next stage of their lives. From his status as a rising lecturer in law and history to his work studying grammar, from his involvement in adult education to his reflections on the history of revolutions, at each stage Rosenstock’s work shifted dramatically from its previous emphasis. Rosenzweig’s briefer career is no less remarkable, moving from his studies in the philosophy of history, “into life” in writing the Star of Redemption during the First World War, to running the Lehrhaus and translating poetry, before finally focusing on biblical translation while fighting the disease now known as Lou Gehrig’s (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS), to which he succumbed in 1929. What is astonishing, though, is that even through these transformations, each author remained committed to the issues and methodology that occupied both of them from the beginnings of their correspondence.

The distance between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock has only widened posthumously, as the reception of their work has differed greatly. While Rosenstock was better known in academic circles in Germany during the 1920s, and taught at Dartmouth until 1957 in the United States, today he is mostly remembered for his correspondence and friendship with Rosenzweig, and is otherwise largely relegated to obscurity. By contrast, Rosenzweig’s work has become central to a renaissance of post-critical Jewish philosophy—though only after being largely ignored during his life. Even in recent scholarship clarifying the depth of Rosenzweig’s engagement with and interest in his German cultural context, the centrality of the relationship to both of their works has largely remained unexplored.

The full story of their friendship, however, is even more complex. Since an essay by Harold Stahmer in 1986, scholars have started to wrestle with the previously concealed correspondence between Rosenzweig and “Gritli,” Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy (1893–1959), Eugen’s wife. This correspondence consists of over 1,500 letters, mostly between 1917 and 1922 (the letters from Gritli to Franz were, not surprisingly, destroyed by Rosenzweig’s wife Edith).5 The letters both clarify and complicate how we understand Rosenzweig’s work and life in this period, as they testify to both his love for Gritli and a brief affair between them in 1918.6 Indeed, the letters are perhaps most significant in showing Gritli’s impact on one of the most profound and acclaimed dimensions of the Star, Rosenzweig’s interpretation of revelation through a commentary on the Song of Songs. This section was, in Rosenzweig’s words to Gritli, “not to you—but yours.”7 The letters unequivocally demonstrate how central Gritli was to Rosenzweig’s work and life in this period, as he often stayed with Margrit’s family and even wrote some crucial passages of the Star in her family’s home in Sackenheim. She remained central to his life even after his marriage to Edith, albeit from more of a distance. While Edith’s decision to exclude the remaining letters from the published version of Rosenzweig’s letters was understandable, their son Rafael’s generous endorsement of the letters’ publication in a supplemental volume has undoubtedly benefited Rosenzweig scholars, even in complicating many received assumptions about Rosenzweig’s work.8

Needless to say, given the focus of this work, the letters further complicate the already enigmatic friendship between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock. Rosenstock’s 1960 description of their friendship, published with their exchange from 1916 in Judaism Despite Christianity, minimizes Gritli’s role in their relationship and their work, even though he was fully aware of the letters (and the affair) at that time. Thus, a focus on their friendship risks downplaying her importance once more. However, the letters themselves testify to how much Rosenzweig identified Gritli with Rosenstock; on many occasions, he references writing to Eugen through Margrit. Rosenzweig frequently mentions the importance of Eugen’s writings to his thought, as well as how he feels that Rosenstock has misunderstood him.9 Recently, Zachary Braiterman has challenged the prevailing focus on Gritli, arguing that the homoerotic, masculinist conception of religion that Rosenzweig develops in his correspondence with Rosenstock—and, even in the discussion of revelation in the Star—objectifies and excludes Gritli, rather than making her central.10 Finally, there is the question of how their friendship persisted despite the jealousy and emotional conflict that Rosenzweig’s passion for Gritli created—as Rosenstock and Rosenzweig remained close up through Rosenzweig’s death.

Thus, while recognizing that this work’s focus on their friendship risks marginalizing Gritli once more, the Gritli letters actually warrant renewed examination of the Rosenzweig-Rosenstock friendship. In what follows, then, I will draw upon the letters where appropriate, to help explore and interpret the dynamic interchange in the work of Rosenzweig and Rosenstock. Moreover, in the focus on how friendship affects religious thought and practice, it is clear that, beyond the Star itself, Rosenzweig and Rosenstock shared intellectual interests and approaches that have contributed greatly to Rosenzweig’s prominence in modern Jewish thought. It is by paying attention to these other dimensions of their work that I will unpack often-overlooked dimensions of their friendship.

In the next three chapters, this work will explore how Rosenzweig and Rosenstock engaged in the study of speech, history, and education in ways that helped them to challenge established modes of thought in each discipline. The Gritli letters, I hope, will help us to recognize the provisional nature of this study, since the focus on their friendship inevitably abstracts from their lived experience, even as it shines an interpretive light on their work. What both the recent emphasis on Gritli and Braiterman’s forceful response miss is the way that Rosenzweig and Rosenstock appropriate and transform each other’s conceptual approaches, in ways that lead them to innovative forms of reflection and practice. While I am somewhat skeptical of Braiterman’s claim that Gritli is excluded or silenced in the course of their exchange, his work is important in that it highlights the interconnections between thought, desire, religion, and embodiment for Rosenzweig and Rosenstock.

This chapter explores the centrality of speech to the philosophical and theological work of Rosenzweig and Rosenstock. Both are frequently described as “philosophers of dialogue,” but this only begins to suggest their detailed engagement with particular forms of speech as the embodiment of psychological, social, and scientific relations among humanity and with God and the world. The central place of speech in their work first appeared in the course of an exchange of letters between them in late 1916, while both were serving in the German army during World War I. Rosenstock first developed his grammatical approach in his work The Practical Knowl-edge of the Soul (Angewandte Seelenkunde), which he sent in draft form to Rosenzweig during this wartime correspondence,11 and which he later wanted to dedicate to Rosenzweig when it was published in 1924. I...