Santner - On the Psychotheology of Everyd

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several people have had a substantial influence on the ideas and views presented in this book. I first encountered Rosenzweig while team-teaching a seminar with Robert Gibbs at Princeton University in 1995; I have to admit that at the time I found Rosenzweigs work to be utterly enigmatic, even overwhelmingly so. Nonetheless, Gibbs helped me to see that opening to the difficulties presented by Rosenzweig would have substantial rewards. When I moved to Chicago the following year, I sat in on a seminar on Rosenzweig taught by Paul Mendes-Flohr, who showed the way to a deeper reading of The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweigs principal work; Mendes-Flohr has remained a mentor in all my work on German-Jewish intellectual and cultural history. Over the next few years at Chicago my intellectual life largely revolved around conversations with two philosophers, Irad Kimhi and Jonathan Lear. This book is in large measure an attempt to work through the various questions and themes that filled those conversations. As should be clear from many of the footnotes, this book is also very much part of an ongoing relationship with the thought of Slavoj Zizek, who continues to be one of the major touchstones for my own thinking.

I also want to thank the various friends, editors, and official readers who, at various stages, guided me in the revisions of the book: Judith Butler, Peter Fenves, Kenneth Reinhard, Bonnie Honig, Alan Thomas, Mary Murrell, and James Goldwasser. Much of my work on this book was supported by a grant from the Guggen heim Foundation for which I am most grateful. Many thanks, too, to David Bemelmans for his meticulous copyediting. I would also finally like to thank the people whose intelligence, wit, and love framed the everyday life of this project: Deborah Nelson, Adrienne Hiegel, David Levin, Claudia Edwards, Marcia Adler, and above all and as always, Pamela Pascoe.

INTRODUCTION

I

In recent years, as part of a more general effort to dismantle the impediments to tolerance and cross-cultural understanding in an increasingly global age, scholars have attempted to historicize those impediments, to pro- vide a genealogy of their origins. The thought and hope behind these efforts is that a better grasp of the historical roots of intoleranceof patterns of ethnic, religious, and national enmitywill help people throughout the world to work through these antagonisms and establish a genuine ecumenical framework for living with difference. Several notable efforts in this regard have traced the origins of the most extreme forms of ethnic, national, and religious antagonism to the emergence of monotheism in the West.

In her study, The Curse of Cain. The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, Regina Schwartz argues, for example, that through the dissemination of the Bible in Western culture, its narratives have become the foundation of a prevailing understanding of ethnic, religious, and national identity as defined negatively, over against others. We are us because we are not them. Israel is not-Egypt.1 Schwartz is careful to note that this negative pattern of identity formation could only become a source of real violence, could only carry force when it was adopted by groups who held the reins of power in Christendom (x). But it is nonetheless with the system of distinctions, or rather, the system for the making of distinctions, introduced into the world through the Hebrew Bible that a new symbolic machinery for the production of extreme forms of enmity and violence entered human history. In Schwartzs view, the principle of this new symbolic machine was that of scarcity:

When everything is in short supply, it must all be competed
forland, prosperity, favor, even identity itself. In many bibli
cal narratives, the one God is not imagined as infinitely giv
ing, but as strangely withholding. Everyone does not receive
divine blessings. Some are cursedwith dearth and with
deathas though there were a cosmic shortage of prosperity.
And it is here, in this tragic principle of scarcity, that I find the
biblical legacy to culture so troubling. (xi)

As indicated here, the exemplary instances of identity formation on the basis of a principle of scarcity involve issues of kinship, notably the giving of a blessing to only one of two siblings, a pattern clearly operative in the momentous symbolic investiture of Jacob as Israel:

The tragic requirement of collective identity that other peoples must be identified as objects to be abhorred is manifest in the violent exclusions in Israels ancestral myths of kinship, assuming especially poignant expression in the story of the blessing of Jacob. Here the cost of granting a future to Jacob, that is, the cost of creating Israel... is literally the curse of his brother, Esau, the ancestor of the Edomites....Struc- tures of inheritance, descent, and the conferral of symbolic property in the narrative are in the service of a system wherein identity is conferred at the cost of the (br)other. The Israelites and the Edomites cannot enjoy equally blessed futures. Like the divine favor denied Cain, there is not enough blessing to
go around. (7980)

1. Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain. The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), x. Subsequent references are given in the text.

Schwartz ends her study with an urgent appeal to reimagine the biblical narratives with a boldness exemplified by such revisionist readers of the Bible as Luther, Milton, and Freud: My re-vision would produce an alternative Bible that subverts the dominant vision of violence and scarcity with an ideal of plenitude and its corollary ethical imperative of generosity. It would be a Bible embracing mul tiplicity instead of monotheism (176; emphasis added).

In another recent critique of monotheistic religious traditions, the well-known German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann, has also argued that monotheism has been the single most important impediment to cross-cultural translation, communication, and understanding, and therefore the single most important source of negativity and intolerance in the West.2 According to Assmann, it is only with monotheism that we encounter the phenomenon of a counter-religion, that is, a religious formation that posits a distinction between true and false religion. Before that, the boundaries between polytheisticor as Assmann prefers, cosmotheisticcults were in principle open, the names of gods translatable from cult to cult because of a shared evidentiary base in nature, in cosmic phenomena of some sort. Translatability is, in such a universe, grounded in and guaranteed by ultimate reference to nature. Monotheism, by contrast, because grounded in (revealed) scripture, tends to erect a rigid boundary between true religion and everything else, now rejected as paganism: Whereas polytheism, or rather cosmotheism, rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counterreligion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated (3; emphasis added). According to Assmann, this rupture in patterns and possibilities of cultural translation and, thus, of a genuine cultural pluralisma rupture that has been codified in the West as the Mosaic distinction between Israel in truth and Egypt in errormust be understood as a profound historical trauma, and indeed as one that continues to haunt the West in the guise of vio lence against racial and cultural others. Assmanns project, which he refers to as mnemohistory or the history of memoryhere, that of the figure of Moses in the Westis an attempt to work through this trauma by retrieving the traces, from ancient Rome, to the Renaissance, to eighteenth-century freemasonry, to Freud, of a cosmotheistic legacy within the Mosaic tradition, a legacy rooted in the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenatens original monotheistic innovation. Here too, then, it is a matter of retrieving from within an otherwise intolerant tradition the repressed resources of a new cultural pluralism for the global era.