PHIL 3520/RELJ 3559/JWST 3559. Continental Philosophy Confronts Israel

Spring 2017, University of Virginia

Instructor: Michael Weinman

Time and Place: Tu/Th 2:00- 3:15PM, Nau 142

Email: mdw4h@eservices.viriginia.edu

Office Hour: Thursdays, 1:00 – 2:00 PM; New Cabell 227

Course Description

This course aims to investigate the representation of Israel in works by canonical authors within the tradition of 19^th- and 20^th- century European, so-called “Continental,” philosophy. But which “Israel”? Should this name indicate Eretz Israel, which itself can refer to either the land or the nation of Israel, or both? Or Am Israel, the people of Israel whether construed as living in “diaspora” or “exile” or which, after the establishment of the modern State of Israel, is sometimes thought to coincide with Eretz Israel? Or does “Israel” simply mean Israel or Israel-Palestine, that is, since 1948, the modern nation-state that bears a tortured relation to the Palestinian Territories?  Our course attends to all of these senses of the name “Israel” and in so doing aims to map out the interwoven and incompatible ways in which Judaism and the Jewish state bring to the fore the deeper and perhaps universal tensions inherent in the very idea, and surely in the practice, of secular modernity.

We proceed in three units. The first focuses on Hermann Cohen’s influential if controversial approach to the role of Judaism in the west—his “Messianic Liberalism”—and the anti-Zionism that he saw as a logical and necessary consequence thereof. Here we read Cohen’s magisterial Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. In the second unit, we follow the “afterlife” of this text first through his students Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and then into the debate about Israel, Judaism and Zionism between Jacques Derrida and Emanuel Levinas, which derives from their competing responses to these three figures. The closing third unit unites the main concerns in the first two units by tracing their further development through the students of Cohen’s students such as Hannah Arendt down to two recent controversial works which respond both to them and to Derrida and Levinas: Judith Butler’s Parting Ways, and selections from Vattimo and Marder’s Deconstructing Zionism.

Course Readings (all ordered at UVa Bookstore)

Arendt, H. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Penguin.

Butler, J. 2013. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia.

Cohen, H. (Kaplan, tr.). 1995. Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. New York: Oxford.

Cohen, H. and Martin Buber (Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, eds.). 1995. “A Debate on Zionism and Messianism,” in The Jew in the Modern World, ed. New York: Oxford.

Levinas, E (Hand, tr.).  1990. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rosenzweig, F (ed. Nahum H. Glatzer, ed.). 1998. “Zion and the Remnant of Israel,” in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Vattimo, G and M. Marder, eds. 2013. Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Requirements

Attendance is expected. More than two absences (absences from two sessions of 90 minutes) in a semester will result in a participation grade reduction of one grade step (e.g., B+ to B). 

Writing Assignments (and late submission policy): Over the course of the semester, you will complete two brief essays (ca. 1500 words each), called “unit essays,” one each responding the material in each of the first two units respectively. Building upon these, you will close the semester with a final essay of approximately 2500 words in length, should be a substantial response to a theme of your choosing, drawn from the class readings as you will have already worked on them in the unit essays. In order to ensure the essay's success, you will submit a proposal that will include both a 500-word abstract of what you will show in the essay and how you intend to do so. Essays that are up to 24 hours late will be downgraded one full grade (from B+ to C+, for example). Essays submitted more than 24 hours late, if accepted at the instructor’s discretion, will be submitted within four weeks of the deadline and cannot receive a grade of higher than C. Thereafter, the student will receive a failing grade for the assignment.

Grade Breakdown

50% Unit essays; 10%: Participation; 10% final essay proposal; 30%: Final essay

Course Schedule (texts marked green in Collab; all others in course texts listed above)