Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem are regarded as two of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Together they produced a dynamic body of ideas that has had a lasting impact on the study of religion, philosophy, and literary criticism.
Drawing from Benjamin's and Scholem's ideas on messianism, language, and divine justice, this book traces the intellectual exchange through the early decades of the twentieth century—from Berlin, Bern, and Munich in the throws of war and revolution to Scholem's departure for Palestine in 1923. It begins with a close reading of Benjamin's early writings and a study of Scholem's theological politics, followed by an examination of Benjamin's proposals on language and the influence these ideas had on Scholem's scholarship on Jewish mysticism. From there the book turns to their ideas on divine justice—from Benjamin's critique of original sin and violence to Scholem's application of the categories to the prophets and Bolshevism. Metaphysics of the Profane is the first book to make this early period available to a wider audience, revealing the intricate structure of this early intellectual partnership on politics and theology.
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I
- MESSIANISM
- 1. The Messianic Idea in Walter Benjamin's Early Writings
- The Messianic State: Does the Messiah Initiate or Consummate?
- The Division of the Holy and Profane
- The Messianic Intensity of Happiness
- Tragic Devotion
- The Worldly Restitution of Immortality
- Nihilism
- 2. Gershom Scholem's Theological Politics
- Tradition and Anarchism
- Zion: Anarchist Praxis or Metaphor?
- A Programmatic Torah
- Revolutionary Nihilism
- Cataclysmic Anarchism
- Critical Anarchism
- Part II ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE AND THE NAMES OF THINGS
- 3. On the Origins of Language
- Metaphor of the Divine
- The Magic of the Inexpressible
- Symbolic Revelation
- Magic and the Divine Word
- Reception as Translation
- Misinterpreting the Sign
- Judgment
- Jewish Linguistic Theory and Christian Kabbalah
- 4. Gershom Schole and the Name of God: "On Language as Such" Reconsidered
- Structure of Symbolic Mysticism
- The Creating Word and Unpronouncable Name
- Matter and Magic in the Torah and Its Letters
- Grammarians of the Name
- Microlinguistic Speculation
- Metaphysics of the Divine Name
- A Microlinguistic Science of Prophecy
- A Messianic Conception of Language
- Part III A REDEMPTIVE CONCEPTION OF JUSTICE
- 5. Prophetic Justice
- On the Origins of Evil
- Worldly and Divine Restitution
- Theses on the Concept of Justice
- The Justice of Prophecy
- 6. Justice, Violence, and Redemption
- Judaism and Revolution
- Violence and the Politics of Pure Means
- Divine Postponement, Judgment, and the Question of Violence
- The Righteous, the Pious, the Scholar
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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