Another Finitude

Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy

Agata Bielik-Robson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350225176
• eBook ISBN: 9781350094093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Beginning from the notion of finite life, Another Finitude takes this staple subject from post-Heideggerian philosophy and opposes it to the onto-theological concept of infinity, represented by an eternal absolute. Although critical of Heidegger and his definition of finitude as 'being-towards-death', this book does not revert to the ontological idea of infinity secured in the sacred image of immortality. But it also does not want to give up on infinity altogether; the infinite is transposed, so it can become a necessary moment of the finite life. A theological framework for the new elaboration of the concept of finitude is crucial; but instead of following the Lutheran formula, Agata Bielik-Robson turns to the sources of Judaism. Taking inspiration from the Jewish idea of torat hayim, the principle of finite life, which found the best expression in the biblical sentence: love strong as death; love emerges as the alternative marker of finitude, allowing to us redefine it in an affirmative way. By tracing the avatars of love in the group of 20th-century thinkers, or 'messianic vitalists'–Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Arendt, Derrida, and (deeply revised) Freud–the book attempts to demonstrate the possibility of such affirmation. Love becomes the new 'infinite-in-the-finite'; love in all its forms, from the original libidinal endowment of the human psyche to the last metamorphoses of agape, the Greco-Christian divine love.

Part One

Love Strong as Death: Polemics

1

Falling – in Love

Rosenzweig Versus Heidegger

Could we forget about Heidegger altogether? Oubliez Heidegger? The thought appears tempting, especially after all the revelations about his unabashed Nazi involvement in Black Notebooks, which bring the fiercest imaginable attack on the figure of the ‘metaphysical Jew’, and, for some readers, deliver nothing short of the philosophical justification for the Shoah.¹ Yet, if Heidegger’s thought continues to inspire today, it is because of what still appears as a valid promise of der neue Anfang, the ‘new beginning’: the new thinking of finitude which will overcome the hubristic ‘gigantism’ of modern Machenschaft, supposedly represented by the ‘metaphysical Jew’, and return to the ‘blessing of the limits’, i.e. to the reconciliation with the finite condition of living within the natural immanence.

It is precisely this promise, and the hope that goes with it, that I want to challenge in this chapter. As long as it is not counteracted by an alternative philosophy of finitude, Heidegger’s name will persist as a major inspiration for all late-modern thought wishing to get beyond the crisis of modernity, which has been caused by the ‘machinating’ subject, assaulting the finite world from the transcendent position. Black Notebooks leave no doubt that the most pernicious concretization of the hubristic modern subjectivity is the ‘metaphysical Jew’: the ‘principle of destruction’, Seinsvergessenheit, the forgetfulness of Being, and thus also – last, but not least – Verfallenheit, the fallenness that repeats the modern Fall from Being on the existential level.²

I thus want to present a possibility of a different thinking of finitude, which – by a twist of irony – derives directly ‘out of the sources of Judaism’. Heidegger had been writing against Jews with a vicious consequence, presenting them as agents of machinating ‘gigantism’ and the deepest Verfallenheit – but Jews have been writing again Heidegger too, by attempting to fight him on his own grounds: the philosophy of the finite condition, which – even more ironically – reclaims the ‘fallenness’ and its ‘passion of facticity’ as the true and only dimension of human life, which, in Heidegger’s own words, is indeed ‘completely fascinated by the “world” and by the Dasein-with of Others’ (BT, 220). For, contrary to the cliché Heidegger believed in, Jewish thought does not foster the idea of humanity’s infinite power over nature, given by God to his absolute disposal; it is not about ruthless and detached calculation based on what Hegel called Abraham’s incapability to love. Quite the contrary: it is all about setting the limits, but not by the regressive recourse to the natural boundary in the form of death. If the limits prove to be a blessing, it is not because humankind is forced to return meekly to the totality of Being, by becoming its obedient shepherd who hearkens to its call in the humble posture of Seinsgehören. The only possible limit for the human subject is the other: the freely chosen self-limitation in the form of neighbourly love.

In his critique of Heidegger in Entre Nous, Lévinas complains that in his death-dominated and death-orientated thought there is no place for being-with-the-other. Sein-zum-Tode, being-towards-death, is a solitary enterprise, and the only Mitsein (being-with) which Heidegger envisages in the end boils down, as Lévinas maliciously remarks, to Zusammenmarchieren, marching with: an army of isolated Daseins exercising their authenticity in their totally mobilized Todesbereitschaft, ‘readiness for death’.³ But Lévinas is not the first and not the only Jewish philosopher who uttered his objection to Heidegger’s overestimation of death as the factor determining the finite condition. In fact, there is a whole secret alliance of thinkers opposed to what Harold Bloom, himself a member of the group, called somewhat derisively ‘Heidegger and his French flock’ (AI, xxvii). Despite all the differences between them, Franz Rosenzweig, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas, Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida form an unofficial coalition of thinkers contesting the Heideggerian mode of thinking finitude solely under the auspices of death.

There is also one further feature that they share: the importance of the intellectual heritage of the Song of Songs. Pace the clichéd prejudice, both Christian and Romantic, that perceives Judaism as a mechanical – and thus also machinating – religion of the law, Shir ha-Shirim proves that indeed, this has never been anything but prejudice. Hegel could not have been more wrong when he famously stated that ‘Abraham wanted not to love, wanted to be free by not loving.’⁴ Love that is strong as death – this ‘privileged formulation’⁵ – sheds light on a completely different vision of the finite life in which love, not death, becomes the defining marker of the finitude. Here, the sought-after limit reveals itself through neighbourly love – and it is always and only the other.

In all these approaches, Shir ha-Shirim lends itself to the philosophical speculation that offers a different conception of the finite existence, destined to die but no means exhausted by its lethal destiny; determined to resist the final verdict and gain an intense ‘life before death’, marked by passionate relations with others; limited, yet not by the inner boundary/peras of death, but by the existence of those we love. Far from being obedient ‘Heidegger’s children’,⁶ Rosenzweig, Arendt, Bloom and Derrida offer instead a promise of a different thinking about the finite life, which is not fated with the Heideggerian thanatic closure: a truly non-privative, open and love-capable another finitude. What Nancy summed up in a brilliant stroke of genius – that finitude is not privation – is their sole theme and concern:

Finitude is not the being-finished-off of an existent … butting up against and stumbling over its own limit (its contingency, error, imperfection, or fault). Finitude is not privation. There is perhaps no proposition that is more necessary to articulate today, to scrutinize and test in all ways. Everything at stake at the end of philosophy comes together there: in the need of having to open the thought of finitude, that is, to reopen to itself this thought, which haunts and mesmerizes our entire tradition.

SOTW, 29

If what we are looking for is a philosophy that could do away with the remnants of the acephalic Neoplatonism that continues to measure up everything towards the infinite, another finitude constitutes a solid answer. Love as the marker of finitude deprives it of the stigma of privation and negativity, always implicit in death where Dasein is ‘butting up against and stumbling over its own limit’. Here, the un-essence, transience, indefinity, contingency no longer emerge as negative features of the finite being in passing, but as the condition of the Derridean ‘living/loving’ which loves itself infinitely, yet finds the blessing of limits in intense relations with others. As we remember from the previous chapter, Derrida attempts a translation of Dasein as ‘Here Below’ where the ‘belowness’ accentuates the Diesseits, the this-side’y dimension of the analytics of Dasein properly understood, as opposed to Jenseits, the ‘other side’ of death that catapults the existence above the ‘fallen’ life into the more essential and authentic ‘beyond’. Here I would like to see if the ‘fallenness’ of this ‘Here Below’ can be revindicated as another kind of a Fall: falling-for-life and, at the same time, falling-in-love.

A different death?

Rosenzweig was never properly exposed to Heidegger’s own thought, but nonetheless reacted to the depressingly thanatic climate of his epoch, by trying to resist it.⁷ Rosenzweig’s main question, especially in his later period when he began to conceive his New Thinking, was: is it possible at all to think about our finitude differently, not under the auspices of death – the end, the goal, the final destiny, the ultimate verdict? The whole point of Rosenzweig’s Neues Denken is to venture precisely such an endeavour: to try to think finitude positively, against the long philosophical tradition that stigmatized it as privation. Although often seen as a parallel to Heidegger’s analytics of Dasein, Rosenzweig’s New Thinking is actually the very opposite: despite many deceptively similar formulations, which also portray life as issuing towards death, it is uniquely concerned with the question that could never be properly answered by Heidegger, namely – Is life before death possible? Can living assert itself as such and not be immediately identified with dying?

The seeming paradox, therefore, consists in the simultaneous defence of life as finite and as life: not the shadow of death that informs and paralyses the vital forces at the moment of their inception, but a full ‘healthy’ life which recognizes the ‘sovereignty of death’ (USH, 103) and still affirms itself as a separate category of being. The little book of Rosenzweig called Understanding the Sick and the Healthy endeavours to teach life the lesson of maintaining itself in this paradox without solving or sublating it:

By teaching man to live again, we have taught him to move towards death; we have taught him to live, though each step he takes brings him closer to death … There is no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man, however, has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear. In health, even death comes at the ‘proper’ time.

USH, 102–3

All appearances to the contrary, this is not Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode: it is already a polemical reaction to ‘being-towards-death’, issued from the perspective of the torat hayim, the ‘tradition of life’ that teaches how to live – ‘again’, i.e. after the late-modern Man has been violently reconfronted with his finitude. The little, yet decisive, difference lies in the emphasis Rosenzweig puts on the active resistance of life against death’s chilling influence: on the way the ‘healthy’ subject moves or continues towards death, despite the constant danger of ‘the paralysis of artificial death’, or the ‘death in life’ that would stop him from moving...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface Finitum Capax Infiniti
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Life Before Death, an Outline
• Part 1 Love Strong as Death: Polemics
• 1 Falling – in Love: Rosenzweig Versus Heidegger
• 2 Being-Towards-Birth: Arendt and the Finitude of Origins
• Part 2 Erros, the Drive in the Desert
• 3 Derrida’s Torat Hayim, or the Religion of the Finite Life
• 4 Another Infinity: Towards Messianic Psychoanalysis
• Notes
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Terms
• Copyright