Rosenzweig and War. A Question of “Point of View”:
Between Creation, Revelation, and Redemption1
Gérard Bensussan
Université de Strasbourg, France
Translated by Matthew H. Anderson
F
or anyone who knows the Star of Redemption by word
of mouth or who has simply leafed through it without
reading it cover to cover, it is impossible to forget the first
pages on the fear of death and war. They are enthralling by themselves
alone. But they are also gripping because they so strongly associate
philosophy and its venerable history with the violence of war and steer us
toward a “refus[al] to follow” “idealism.”2 Moreover, the writing of these
pages is implicitly related to the experiences of its author in the trenches of
World War I, which only adds to their literary size and scope.
And yet these resounding pages contrast with another passage in
The Star, in the first book of the third part, entitled, “The Peoples of the
World: Messianic Politics,” though the extent of this contrast will have
to be determined (348). When one is familiar with the genesis of
Rosenzweig’s work and his tormented intellectual path, one discerns in
this paragraph a kind of reprise of his project for a book on war, though
in a contorted way and with new implications. The project constitutes a
decisive intermediary stage between Hegel und der Staat, his thesis from
1912, and The Star as it was drafted in 1918 (between these dates, in
1913, Rosenzweig renounced a Christian conversion to “remain a Jew”).3
Rosenzweig chose not to publish his book on war, on its reason and
First published in The New Centennial Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2013, pp. 115–136.
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 27. Henceforth, references to pages in the Star of Redemption
will be given in parentheses after quotations, in the text.
3
Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken Books,
1961), p. 28.
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foundation—his Kriegsgrund, as he put it.4 Peace, according to him, would
have rendered his “war opus” null and void—and this right while it was
being drafted—a book that he had worked on since the first decade of
the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, we do have several layers of this
work, and no doubt even the essentials of its contents, in 11 texts, and in
particular in three studies that preceded The Star. Drafted at the war’s
height, Rosenzweig had wanted to integrate them into the book on
war, but they were then discarded and abandoned. These three texts—
Vox Dei, Cannes et Gorlice, and Globus—outline a geopolitical philosophy of
history. They are centered on “a kind of natural philosophy of war,” to which I
will return.5 What I intend to examine is the divergence, tension, and the
possible difference between this geopolitics of history and the first pages
of The Star, and thus the consistency of Rosenzweig’s comments on war.
1. THE CRY
The first pages of The Star are well known, as I have said, so I will briefly
recall their contents. They begin the work with these first words: Vom Tode,
“From death,” and thus take on the arc or “path” that continuously takes
shape right up to the very last words of the book, Ins Leben, “into life.”
This is a clear indication that an architectonic concern is at work in the book’s
composition, and that the profound meaning of this opening cannot be
reduced or relativized (something that has occasionally been the case with
some young researchers who have taken up readings of The Star). The first
pages are thus the opening of an “opus,” and an opening on war, in a war,
under fire. For example, one can simply read the passage where Rosenzweig
writes that man, to escape the terrible fear of death that he feels in his gut,
buries himself like a worm in the folds of the naked earth, in an attempt to
elude the tentacles that menace him from all sides, hunkering down where
and as he can, screaming out in refusal of this inexorable violence (9). No
doubt, this fear was something that all the soldiers in the trenches
experienced, amid the mud and the blood. In these few lines, Rosenzweig
Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften. I. Bd: Briefe und
Tagebücher, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann. Collaboration
with Bernhard Casper (The Hague: Martinus-Nijhoff, 1979), 334–35, 375, 395
5
Franz Rosenzweig, Die “Gritli” Briefe. Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Inken
Rühle and Reinhold Mayer, with an Introduction by Rafael Rosenzweig (Tübingen: Bilam,
2002), p. 43.
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Gérard Bensussan talks about a singular, universal death, yet the metaphor and the
descriptive traits he makes use of, in all likelihood, are inspired by the
mobile warfare that was typical in the battles of the First World War. The
existential tenor of the analysis is reinforced in large part because of its
concreteness and the experience to which it implicitly refers.
For Rosenzweig, with its battlefields, its massive confrontations
between nations, and its extreme cruelty, the First World War, was the
acid test of thought. This, at bottom, is the meaning behind these first
pages of The Star. It was an acid test of his thought first, and as a
consequence, that of the great “classical” thinkers he inherited in the
development of his own thinking (Hegel, of course, but also the names
that immediately arise in the text: Schopenhauer, Schelling, and
Nietzsche). It was likewise an acid test of the practice of thought itself—
its meanings that were offended by reality, its durability, and the
wounds that it inflicts in life. And the reality that comes to block thought
off from something, to clash against and impede it, was indeed, in essence,
the appalling reality of the death of large numbers of combatants, which is
described by The Star as its pestilential breath, its mortal and ruthless sting.
In this acid test endured by thought, philosophy, according to
Rosenzweig, loses its truth. The first pages of The Star make much of
philosophy’s (ontological-historical) lie and its (existential) lies. They
constitute a damning indictment and could be read as Rosenzweig’s own
Poverty of Philosophy. Faced with the fear of death, which is also the fear of
an ailing body, faced with the terror of mortal beings, philosophy instead
offers its empty, beatific smile. It confuses and, so to speak, “entangles”
men as “it weaves the thick blue haze of its idea of the All” around them,
and, like a vaporous opium, it appears to remove the sting of what
plunges us into the worst of our terrors, through a kind of artificial
hallucination (10). In his notebooks from 1978, Albert Cohen, according to a
similar inspiration, evoked “philosophy, this stringy spiderweb full of
deception,” this “morphine” that would give birth to “invisible
realities . . . this mildew of the fear of death.”6 Philosophy’s foolishness, as
it were; its foolishness and its intoxication, foolishness and relief. The denial
of the cry, denial of the body, denial of the singular’s resistance, as
Rosenzweig says, beneath the sway of “the concept of the One and the All,”
where nothing dies, where everything is in all, and nothing is left out. The first
6
Arthur Cohen, Carnets (Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 1979), pp. 89, 100, 99.
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lesson of the trenches is this: no longer to be easily taken in by idealism,
metaphysics, the universal, and totality, because, in and through war, they
have revealed their hypocritical face, which is unforgettable for anyone
who has caught a glimpse of it.
If, through war, philosophy as a whole (that is, “idealism”) turns out
to be revealed in its lie (in its epistemological and existential falsity), then
Hegel will be at the center of this indispensable process of revealing. His
philosophy is “noxious” (nocive), harmful (nuisible), schädlich. It is an
occasion for damages and disasters, as Rosenzweig says in a letter to Rudolf
Hallo on February 4, 1923.7 Above all because it compels us to think history
as a “spiritual” totality and war as an ontological secret of history. Hegel,
the “bloody German,” tells the truth about philosophy’s lie in some way.8
Something very profound about the straight line linking metaphysics to
politics in the occident is demonstrated through him, as it were. And the
battlefields of 1914-18 will have confirmed this. In a long meditation about
das Jüdische—the Jewish element of thinking—this double lesson of
metaphysics and history directs Rosenzweig to outline the contours of a
“new thinking.” For him, it is a matter of effecting a break with totality,
a break from the universal totalization of all particularities, to recover the
splinters, the elements much older than the All. More precisely, this break
will come about on its own. It is more a question of something that is
already operative than it is of a procedure that needs to be carried out,
since it takes place through the revitalized voice of the singular’s
resistance, which is heard since the beginning of The Star. In his new
thought, Rosenzweig thus tries to undo the entire tradition of Occidental
philosophy, “from Ionia to Jena,” by letting it in some way deconstruct
itself through the interlinked and continuous effect of what is at the heart
of this new thought, the inextricable knot of speech, temporality, and
alterity (18). For the essentialism, for the logical fixity of substances in
traditional ontology, the “New Thought” will substitute “figures,” and
restore them to the life traced in words and its differential grammars, in the
alterity of existence (the alterity of others and the alterity of the self), in time,
the “other” and the “who?” of each individual existence. Levinas and
Heidegger come about through Rosenzweig and his pioneering style. And
the same could be said of Adorno in his well-known proposition, “the All is the
not true.” One could say that Rosenzweig’s “philosophy” is in large part a
thought of temporality that breaks with questioning the essence of time and
7
8
Glatzer, Life and Thought, p. 129.
Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe (Berlin: Schocken, 1935), pp. 351-52.
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Gérard Bensussan is instead devoted to its pure eventuality. In its very movement, temporality
is thus a sign of the impossibility of a ceaseless self-totalizing of an historical
totality. And the phenomenalization of death—in the exemplarity of the
massive and merciless slaughter on the battlefields—is the very source of
revelation.
2. THE GLOBE
Going back to the book on war that Rosenzweig had worked on since 1910,
and which matured throughout 1917 before being abandoned once peace
came about, means moving into territory that is foreign to this revelation. In
short, the argument and rhetorical mode of composition in these texts
seems to be heterogeneous to the existential, or quasi-existential, beginning
of The Star. I will focus in particular, almost exclusively on Globus, which
Rosenzweig himself claimed should serve as the axis, basis, and matrix for
the whole of his projected book. I will thus ignore not only Vox Dei and
Cannes et Gorlice, but also important aspects of Globus itself. What I above
all hope to understand is the heterogeneity of the two texts, or the two
groups of texts, that I have just evoked.
In its length and depth, Globus appears as a very ambitious
meditation of human history. In it, Rosenzweig claims that the Weltgeschichte of traditional ontologies can only be understood as Globalgeschichte, as a world historical dynamic—made worldwide (mondialisée),
and globalized (globalisée). It is remarkable that, with the question of
“world war,” the author of Globus reflects as much about “world” as he
does about “war,” as though it was somehow inappropriate to separate
world and war in this context. Next, Rosenzweig shows that the
globalized historical dynamic is subject to ceaseless forces that are
operative within this worldly expansion (mondanisation), forces that are
in endless competition with one another. The first of these forces is the
separation, the delimitation, and the incessant redrawing of borders that
shift, transform, and cut across the earth—the terrestrial globe in its entirety:
“With the drawing of the first border, humanity takes possession of the earth.
All of universal history is nothing more than an extension of this first
border. . . . To be delimited by borders is in the nature [of the] earth, the
absence of all borders is nothing more than its final end.”9 The land has a
Franz Rosenzweig, Confluences: Politique, Histoire, Judaïsme, eds., G. Bensussan, M.
Crépon, M. de Launay (Paris: Vrin, 2003), p. 37.
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historical “nature,” the border, and a vocation that one could characterize as
metahistorical, the abolition of the border. Through the incision of
borders, the separating and differentiating force comes to be joined or
linked with a unifying force that is just as incessant and active, a dynamic
that belongs to the unification of the world and the globe. This second
dynamic does not imply a simple movement of reversion, a pure and simple
return to the earth before history and before its differentiation via borders
and demarcations. Rather, it is more like a flux that tends toward the
constitution of a network, a tissue of living human relations—but like the
face, it is always implicit, at once detectable and invisible—of a worldwide,
universal human community, internationalized: “to the extent that a
fragment of this image shines, it is impossible for man to devote himself,
with satisfaction, to a land with rigid boundaries, and to confine himself to his
own people. . . . Eternally reawakened and pushed from here to beyond,
among the things he possesses, he continues to keep the memory of what is
not possessed. . . . The unity of the earth is the driving force behind
historical becoming.”10 The difference at the heart of these two forces is in
the difference between the Earth of Creation (before borders) and the
Redemption of the Earth (after their abolition). I am using the major temporal
and temporalizing categories of The Star here, something that Rosenzweig
does not do in Globus, for good reason: only a reading of The Star, which
appeared several years later, justifies their use. Yet Globus must be read in
light of The Star. This hermeneutic grid or matrix is essential. We will see, for
example, that revelation constitutes the ether enveloping the previously
discussed pages on death, since it determines the dimension of lived
experience, existence in war; that is, that which befalls created Dasein, the
creature that is revealed to itself beyond its creaturely status. The two forces
that are constitutive of humanity’s historical genesis, the border and the
global—the two forces which represent a “scene” where the separation
through the tracing of limits and the world as world is played out, the
closed and the open, the finite determinable and the infinite unknowable—
are mobile earths.
But to the Earth, Globus opposes the Sea; to the geographic
spatiality, it opposes a spatiality of nature that is fundamentally different,
thalassographic, which immediately points to something beyond land and
borders. And even if there are maritime borders, which are elusive in a
different way than terrestrial borders, the Sea is still “the image of unity.” It
10
Rosenzweig, Confluences, p. 38.
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Gérard Bensussan may be “nothing more than an image,” but from it, there is a call that
continually “emanates,” an awakening, a memory of the future.11 The Sea
prefigures the world’s transnational unity, which incidentally, was only made
possible by the great discoveries and the great maritime adventures. I note
in passing that, accord- ing to Rosenzweig, unity is to space what eternity is to
time, the former taking place according to the duration of history and the
length of time, the latter according to the dazzling, unexpected moment of
its proliferation.12 Another element should also be pointed out here, because
it enables one to see how the different modalities of the world’s history—
the terrestrial and the maritime, the border and the opening—fit together in
Globus. It is a question of what Rosenzweig calls the two images of the world,
the Homeric (Mediterranean) and the biblical (oceanic). In the Homeric
image of the world, a central sea is bordered by dry land that comprises
the primary organizing element. The Homeric image is the bearer of a
separating force, oriented around a center and calculated limits. It is based
on finitude and organization. In contrast, the biblico-prophetic image
(Rosenzweig is a supporter of second Isaiah) puts an immense land at its
center, a land of kingdoms and empires that, as the prophets say, “pass.” It
is a land of the talmudic malchuyot (chiboud malkhouyot), bordered by a
limitless sea, open to the unknown, the mysterious, and the unsettling: “the
only sea that rises to pummel this compact mass of dry land is the ocean . . .
the immense indeterminate . . . the islands of
Second Isaiah, points
spread across the infinite sea, faraway in the middle of nowhere, beyond
land . . . the gaping abyss where sailors and ships are in danger of
sinking.” 13 Accordingly, it could be said that the biblical image pushes
Ulysses to leave Ithaca, and the Homeric image makes him return to his
native land. These scattered elements that punctuate and structure the rich
analyses of Globus are among its many “figures,” as Rosenzweig tells Gritli in
a letter from August 22, 1918, where he explains how he is drawn to
thinking—and not without pain—between the figure and the concept. 14
Such metaconceptual writing is useful in pursuing a number of European
developments, above all, those pertaining to war and global matters.
Leaving the other questions to the side, what can we take away from
this last point on war? Globus furnishes a framework for a very unique,
Ibid.
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 59.
13
Rosenzweig, Confluences, pp. 80-81.
14
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 128.
11
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historical- philosophical work within which a determinate analysis of war takes
place. In any case, the work is that of a historian, though it is not the strictly
empirical sense. Instead, it falls within the lineage of the great
historiographical tradition that Rosenzweig inherited: Ranke, whose 1833
work, Die grossen Mächte, he directly cites to show that Globus is in direct
“competition” with him; Meinecke, the director of his thesis; Dahlmann,
Stahl, and Treitschke, who are evoked in Hegel and the State as the three
major steps “from Hegel to Bismarck”; or even Naumann, Troeltsch, Kjellen,
and Leusch. This considerable German tradition is inscribed in a very specific
philosophical furrow, one that is outlined in large part by Hegel. In the group
of texts that make up the form and substance of Rosenzweig’s book on war,
war is approached through history, in the roughly philosophical sense,
according to the tradition that Globus’s author inherited. In a long confession
letter to his mentor Meinecke, it so happens that Rosenzweig, to explain his
nonconversion to Christianity— which was also his renunciation of a
university career—and to give an account of what was, in a sense, his Kehre,
more or less says the following: I have undergone a transformation from the
historian I was, eligible for a university lectureship, to a philosopher who is
ineligible for a lectureship. And so I am no longer the historian I was, who was
legitimately fit for a great career. I am nonetheless a philosopher without a
post, an academic without a university.15 I offer this autobiographical sketch
and its threads as ele- ments to help us understand his transition from the
“natural philosophy of war” to the soldier’s cry of mortal terror; from his
apparent historicism to the quasi-expressionist reconstructions. The way
Globus turns and returns within The Star is, in a descriptive way at least, a
matter of the inversion and subversion that result from the conversion of the
non-“conversion,” from one eligible for a lectureship to the ineligible, from
“history” into “philosophy,” academic assimilation to isolation, and indeed, in
dissent of thought, from Christianity and the university to remaining Jewish.
But these turns and actual “conversions” are already at play in a significant
way in “the natural philosophy of war” at work in Globus, something that
imparts its historiographical approach with an unacademic cachet in addition
to a form of thinking that is already quite singular.
3. WAR AND POLITICS
In Globus and its kindred texts, war is thus analyzed historically,
Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher I, pp. 678–82. For an English translation of this
paraphrase, see Glatzer, 96.
15
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Gérard Bensussan world- historically (welt-geschichtlich). It is conceived as the unavoidable
effect— quasi-necessary and immemorial—of the limiting force that
produces borders. And it is played out, in its violence, around the tracing and
retracing of these borders, around the carving up of the globe. War is thus a
force that breaks up the totality that is produced and halted by the world. It
is a force that disorients, redistributes, and retraces. Because it mobilizes
armies, machinery, organizations, and logistical arrangements, it is originally
linked to the constitution of communities, to matters of Nation and State,
and some- times the Nation-State, since it is always directed at the
terrestrial, territorial limit. War is constantly territorializing, deterritorializiing,
and reterritorializing. It erects new states, new empires, and new nations by
destroying others. The horizon of war—which even war itself is incapable
of discerning—is always in the construction of increasingly larger,
territorialized spaces. Its concern in the “world” is always “Homeric.”
(Which world, which form of organization, and which limits?) Within this
horizon, a fairly clear image begins to take shape in a way that is vaguely
menacing. It is the prophetic image of a redeemed and human One-world
(un monde-Un).
And so “each epoch has its concept of the world.”16 In 1914, at the
start of World War I—which was not entirely a world war yet, even if it was
given the “prophetic” designation of being so—we entered into the
epoch of the war-world (la guerre-monde). And as Rosenzweig explains it,
was simply the beginning, since the 20th century was to be its indefinite
extension. The epoch of the war-world is the epoch of states, nations,
and of revolutions, which are all forces that serve to trace and delimit, to
constitute a “We” of diverse communities, whether they are national,
imperial, or transnational. It is more the case that these We’s (ces Nous) are
made up of plural I’s than actual We’s, since these We’s are world
communities. It is the character of nations entering into rivalry with one
another, of We’s that are potentially or actually at war with other We’s. Even
if the We’s of states—more or less broadened, national groups—are not
really the anticipated forms of a One-world, in their own perilous and
uncertain way they nonetheless prefigure and perhaps shape the reality to
come. They are “limited We’s,” separated states that, in their specific
political and historical circumstances—which is what Rosenzweig analyzes as
a professional historian, still eligible for a lectureship— cannot do
16
Rosenzweig, Confluences, p. 39.
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otherwise than go into war against one another.
But as Globus suggests, in the modalities that remain, the
terrestrial, territorial We’s are not without a link to the oceanic We’s. The world
of states in some way prefigures the state of the world without states, but in a
distorted way, where war has its place. But this link is still vague in the book’s
draft. It can in part be seen in The Star’s third part on redemption, in the very
peculiar approach to the issue of secularism. Thus, war is an indication of the
“European” world’s transformation into a world that is worldly and globalized, a
Land that will in some way be like the Sea. Everything happens as if, historically
and politically, the Earth’s roundness (rotondité) had not yet come about, as if
the Kantian communio posses- sions originaria—which the roundness makes
necessary—did not yet justify the appropriation of lands. Indeed, as sociohistorical beings, we still live on a disk-shaped, Homeric land. It would
consequently be a matter of making the truth (long established by Galilean
science and sustained in the pure, practical, and rational concept of an a
priori foundation for the World) come to pass as a political reality. The
prediction and its consequences would then come about by realizing the
global-rotundity of the Earth and Sea.
In the typology and the explanatory structures of Globus, war is
thus presented as a decisive authority: it severs, cuts, divides up, separates,
spreads out, and reassembles. It continues the tracing of borders and
territories through its own bellicose means. But it is not completely
autonomous and sovereign, since it is little more than the ultimate
expression of the terrestrial force of limitation, and it functions in an EarthSea-War alliance. It can only be understood in the dynamic that
opposes it to the oceanic force of world-formation and “perpetual
peace.” So the question of peace itself cannot be posed in an ethereal or
irenic way. It can only be broached with war. It is from this that
Rosenzweig’s complex and ambivalent position on pacifism arises. It
ranges from outright hostility to the naïvety of “beatific pacifism” (as the
French communists put it after the Munich Agreement), to the demand
for a sort of “Jewish” and “authentic” super-pacifism, and even a tactic
of compromise, resulting from the recognition that pacifism also seeks
world peace, a redeemed world, but without either knowing or
understanding it, in such absolute blindness that it is ineffective.17 In a
letter from September 1, 1916, Rosenzweig makes a distinction between
the peace before a war and the peace after, between a heavenly peace, as
17
Rosenzweig, Confluences, p. 462.
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Gérard Bensussan he puts it, the peace of the Earth of the Creation, and a messianic or
world-messianic peace that reigns on the redeemed Earth, on the world
that has finally become world.18 Between the two, the revealed creature
screams at death and cries out about the suffering that the world and war
inflict upon him. The temporalizing conceptual framework of The Star thus
authorizes a certain plurality of “points of view,” in the sense in which
Adorno, writing about Kafka, evokes “the point of view of Redemption.”
Through other elements in the letter on war, one is better able to situate
these two forms of peace and more subtly parse Rosenzweig’s judgments
on pacifism and its various forms. Likewise, it is fruitful to engage in an
analysis of the resemblances and divergences be- tween Rosenzweig’s
position on war and that of Benjamin on violence. Without too much
theoretical difficulty, one could even try to apply Benjamin’s distinction
between mythic/divine violence to Rosenzweig’s approach to war. For
now, I can only sketch a few paths that I will not pursue here.
Instead, I will keep my opening question in mind: is the analysis of war
that is elaborated in Globus and its associated texts compatible in one way or
another with the harrowing cry from the first pages of The Star? And when it
comes to the idea that allows a group of people to spread out, to shift its
borders to the detriment of other groups—with war, the universal motor of
history, being one of the means of appropriation in the world—is this not a
thoroughly Hegelian idea? One only needs to be reminded of one passage or
another from Phenomenology of Spirit or Elements of the Philosophy of Right to
recall that war can be thought of as the “ethical moment,” that is, that it can
be thought of in ways other than as an absolute evil or a purely external
contingency. If Rosenzweig’s position is more or less inscribed in this
Hegelian framework, then can it also be seen alongside the existential
protest that opens The Star?
Rosenzweig’s relation to Hegel—itself a significant subject in
Rosenzweig studies—would have to be explored in detail here. Without
going into specifics, for my part, I strongly doubt that the author of
The Star was either Hegelian or neo-Hegelian. For now, I will just point
out a few notable differences, while focusing on the affinity between the
“natural philosophy of war” and the anguished cry of the terrorized
soldier.
Even if war is the movement that animates global, terrestrial
18
Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, pp. 210-14.
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appropriation and the worldwide spread of nations and empires, this is
never the final word nor the entirety of this movement. The movement of the
Welt-geschichte profoundly animates Rosenzweig’s reading of history as
world-formation, and as a result, of history as war and of war as war-world. To
take the view that this movement is not all (but also that it is not nothing, that
it is “something” to be taken on), means thinking of the universalization
that occurs through the proliferation of borders as the Hegelian “moment”
of history, circumscribed and bordered by its before and its after. This
“moment” carries a truth if it is strictly limited, and produces a lie if it is
extended beyond itself. Rosenzweig deals with Hegel in Hegelian fashion
and “sublates” him with creation/revelation/redemption! The “moment”
thus affirms the truth of a lie. The Hegelian theory of war as “sittliche Tat,”
ethical act, simply points in advance to its Rosenzweigian “noxiousness.” In
other words, it means that the world war of 1914-18 does not invalidate the
ontology of Hegelian history; it validates it. But one still needs to think this
validation—this effect of truth, truthfulness, and verification of war with their
implications for Hegel’s philosophy—by means of war. As Rosenzweig often
points out, idealism has no need of redemption, at least, not any more than
soul has a need for universal history.19 And whenever idealism speaks about
it, it misses the point since, in its place, it only sees anarchy, revolution,
disorder, Bolshevism, and chaos. 20 The historical question and the
ontological determination—that is to say, Hegel’s—are limited because
they can never be linked together without moderating the “in” and the
“against” (le ‘dans’ et le ‘contre’) through their mutual mediation. But what
fundamentally characterizes the prophetic gesture, its “and yet” (son ‘et
pourtant’), is precisely this irreducible tension: “against the world,” but “in
the world”: “‘Dennoch’ gegen die Welt in der Welt.” 21 Blind before
redemption as against-and-in the world without relief (sans relève), the
Hegelian moment must be confined to its own contents and
boundaries, that is, it has to be viewed “from the point of view of
Redemption” to uncover its truth that it itself cannot see. I note in passing
that, in contrast with Hegel, the Rosenzweigian operation is in many
respects analogous to what Maimonides proposed in relation to Aristotle:
Aristotelian philosophy is a philosophy from after the ex nihilo creation,
an ontology of an already- created world, in much the same way that
Hegelian philosophy is a philosophy from before the redemption, an
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 59.
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 201.
21
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 184.
19
20
36
Gérard Bensussan ontology of a world that is yet to be finished. Hegel inevitably tells us
something about history, that is, something about the world in its
creaturely (créaturiel) status, before its redemption, and thus something
about war as interregnum. Against and in this world—considered from the
point of view of creation and the Homeric image—is added oceanization,
a globalization of the world by way of an infinite opening and the
tension around the community of We’s, the fulfillment of an unfulfillable
world, redemption as an extra-historical, history-making, force.
HISTORY, THE CRIME SCENE
It is here that the status of history is contested, something that is a
major issue in Rosenzweig’s thought. Here, an irreducible incompatibility
with Hegel emerges. In a letter to Hans Ehrenberg from September 26,
1910, Rosenzweig determines History as “Tat des Täters,” which means
“the action of an actor” in the criminal sense. And, in an almost
Kafkaesque maxim, he adds: “all actions become sins as soon as they
become a part of History (without the actor intending it to happen).”22
History is the site of a crime, a crime scene (Globus repeatedly uses the
word Szene). But its actors never intended what they have brought
about. There is a kind of historical unconscious, much as there is an artistic
unconscious in the esthetics of the first Schelling. In The System of
Transcendental Idealism, we see that the artist is conscious “from the point
of view” of production, and unconscious “from the point of view” of the
product. He is engaged in the creative act, but he finds himself
disengaged from all intention and will in the final creation. The same
can be said of the historical agent who is confronted by the perverse
effect that belongs to the history he thinks he “creates.” If history is the
scene of a crime, the investigator does not need to justify or absolve the
crime—something that all ontologies do nolens volens, starting with
Hegel. Conversely, the horrors of the crime, and the abominations of war,
do not obviate the mobilization of a host of scientific resources to reveal
them. The mobility and plasticity of the “points of view”
(creation/revelation/redemption) is Rosenzweig’s key that allows us to
understand the implicit compatibility between the first lines of The Star
and the passage in the third part of Globus on “political messianism.” In
22
Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, p. 112.
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Rosenzweig’s thought, history and war are closely associated: they are, in
fact, one and the same issue, one and the same “concept of the world,”
from one and the same epoch. One can readily see how “theology” and
“the point of view of redemption” are so relevant. He proposes, as a
young Marx had done before him, that “all history is nothing more than
prehistory.”23 In this way, he plays the same part and function as the little
hunchback in the first of Benjamin’s theses on history. Except that with
Rosenzweig, he emerges from his hiding place and knocks over the
chessboard. But properly speaking, it is not “theology,” which is quite
significant. In Rosenzweig, the operation is different in that it requires the
dominant theology to be overturned or even destroyed—and such is the
scope of In theologos, which is the opening of the second part of The
Star. When applied to the question of history and politics, war and state,
“theology” is indeed more a matter of modified “points of view.” It is
this analytic of creation/revelation/redemption that accounts for the
extraordinary uniqueness of Rosenzweig’s position on war. It likewise
justifies the link—which, it is true, is always “unstable”— between the cry
and the investigation.24 An understanding of this analytic is crucial if one
is to grasp the meaning of the paragraph on “messianic politics” and its
counterparts from Rosenzweig’s correspondence and journals. For example,
when he evokes the “Jew” and the “Christian” as impulsive elements of
thought, one quickly sees how these elements resume and reconnect with
the difference between the Homeric and the biblical in Globus, and also why
they do so in a contemporary fashion, for and in our world, and indeed also
against. Here, it is a question of the forces of animation behind
Weltgeschichte, that carries within it “two souls” that are more complex
than “Jewish” and “Christian.” These elements, forces, or “souls”
constantly carry world history to the limit of its redemptive implosion.25 To
understand war, to the extent that it is, with revolution, the very life and
breath of the State—and to understand History as War between States, in
the broadest sense—demands that the forces that are pinpointed in Globus
be kept in view in reading The Star. Otherwise, what would prevail would
be the point of view of “German militarism,” that is to say, the “purely
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 511.
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 128.
25
Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften. III; Bd:
Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold Mayer and
Annemarie Mayer. (Dordrecht-Boston-Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), p. 545.
23
24
38
Gérard Bensussan technical notion of war as a battle for honor.” So what are these forces? In
part, it is a force for unification, an ecumenical force, and a force for worldformation through borders, war, and revolution. In this way, the image of the
world promoted by “Homerism” turns out to be profoundly Christian.
Historical Christianity genuinely and authentically carries this globalized
expansion across vast limits, if we can put it that way. This is something that
The Star analyzes quite rigorously in the dynamic and rhythm (scansions)
(Peter, Paul, John) of the Church’s history, that is to say the world: “The
Church no longer sets any outer limits for itself as the empire did; it is on
principle not satisfied with any border, it has no knowledge of renunciation”
(297). Alongside this ecumenical force on Earth, the biblico-prophetic or even
oceanic, Jewish element constitutes one of the two souls, one of the two
animations behind Weltgeschichte. This element is external to history strictly
speaking, while the Homeric-Christian element is internal to its development.
But, closely associated with the internal force, its extra-historicity paradoxically
has an indisputable historical potency. On occasion, Rosenzweig temporalizes
this force or element by calling it the “not-yet.” It ceaselessly carries history
beyond itself, towards a redemption, and towards an Earth that is redeemed in
a We without limits and a One-world.
26
MESSIANISM OR SECULARIZATION:
THE POINT OF VIEW
It is now time to return to the “messianic” paragraph in the third part
of The Star that we have repeatedly evoked. It is extraordinarily rich in
content, and I cannot hope to discuss it in detail. However, I would like to
get hold of the central meaning in a concise way in light of the developments
above. I believe this paragraph must be read as a theory about
secularization. In this context, “messianic” means “secularized,” a
secularized messianism in history’s Johannine events. But we have to be
careful. Rosenzweig’s version of secularization is very unique. Secularization
is analyzed according to a model that has been inverted in relation to the
habitual thematizations, and this model is itself determined by Rosenzweig’s
notions of temporality and historical time. In a rather conventional fashion, at
least since Schmitt (and even a number of his critics), the process of
secularization is described as a transfer of the past’s categories (theological
26
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 91.
39
Proceedings of the Internationale Rosenzweig Gesellschaft
and religious) to the political domain and our contemporary sphere—which is
also the sphere of presence—a lay and disillusioned modernity. The poverty
of this form of analysis, it may be noted, is that it hardly helps one to
understand why these religions remain so alive and why, despite their manic
secularization, they continue in a mode that is entirely distinct from the
recurring “return.” In the end, it really serves no other purpose than to
half-heartedly name what one cannot rigorously think. Rosenzweig also
analyzes modern politics as a secularized form, as a transformation or
transfiguration, but not of the religious into the historical, the ancient into
the new, or the past into the present. Rather, secularization would only be
possible and perceptible from a point after the redemption, that is, from a
point beyond the future (l’à-venir) of the world that is to come.
Redemption, understood as a category of time, or even as an existential of
created Dasein, engages with the idea of mimetic secularization. War,
revolution, and the state are transformed, rivalrous forces of the
Apocalypse, the Messiah, and of the messianic globalization of the world.
This inversion and this secularization, determined as transfiguration of the
future, are only conceivable on the basis of the dynamic premise at work in
a Rosenzweigian consideration of history and extra-historicity. For The
Star’s author, movements of the present are not simply propelled by a past
that would always shove (Stoss) history ahead of itself, progressively and
linearly, but are equally tugged by the future that attracts or drags (Zug) the
present along (348). This principle of an attraction or dragging from the
future is both the key to the process of secularization and the source of
ambiguity in the messianic “point of view.” Messianism is subject to a
temporality where each instant takes precedence over the duration and
either does or does not open time. In fact, it is this temporality, since each
instant is a backdoor through which the future can draw in (aspirer) the
present in its entirety. Messianism is thus aleatory, it is “only possible,” but
it is impossible to escape from this “only possible” of time and the instant.
The messianic schema is introduced in part three in the paragraph on
secularized messianism as a politics of “the peoples of the world.” Its
argument needs to be read in light of the cry that reverberates throughout the
first pages. The cry is the cry of revelation. Rosenzweig’s small text—which can
be read in the appendix of Gritli-Briefe—on the motif of the cry amply
confirms this.27 It is appropriately central since, in the “system” of The Star,
revelation is always central; at each instant I am, to myself, a decentered
27
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, pp. 826-31.
40
Gérard Bensussan center, an existence. It is the creature’s revealed existence that propels its
cry. This cry of revelation forms a condition of the “point of view of
redemption” (messianism and/or secularization) that cannot otherwise stand
on its own. It is the historical tangent formed by the two “points of view” that
comes to announce the possibility of disaster. Indeed, secularization carries
out a historicization of messianism, or its attraction by a history of the
future, by the future represented as history and no longer as a tension of
the instant and eternity. Once it has appeared in history, secularized
messianism runs the significant risk of being caught in the mimetic and
sinister rivalry where the State and its splendors take place. But this is not
always certain, since it can also contribute to dragging the present towards
the future. Rosenzweig gives the example of election. The notion of election is
theological because, dynamically, it fits in with an economy of salvation
(salut). And yet, if election comes to be, or tends to be, “realized” in history, if
it enters into it and if it “falls historically,” as Péguy puts it, then it can turn into
a crime, “Tat des Täters.” The European wars—and notably, the war of 1914–
18 —actually witnessed confrontations been rivalrous and opposed
“elections” in different nationalisms, which are its secular form. War breaks
out then, as the result of a violent and murderous clash between
competing secularized-messianic claims: one nation or another’s vocation of
a universal, global mission—a supreme calling, the devolution of the task of
being humanity’s benefactors to one group of people or another. The
messianic is thus appropriated for strikingly different purposes. Either it is
thought of “differentially,” that is to say, on the model of a progressive
increase in the resorption of differences, with the limited, national We
being the agent (or even as a secularization that, within itself,
continuously absorbs the religious). Or, it determines historicity
“catastrophically”; that is to say, in the fashion of an unforeseeable
instantaneity, an apocalyptic even, or even as a menace carried along by the
future’s attraction of the present (as is the case with Jewish tradition).28 The
Rosenzweigian alternation, differential/katasrophal, is remarkably close to the
Benjaminian formula, konsequent/radikal: “to proceed always radically,
never consistently.”29 This is because they both pose the question of history
from the point of view of “redemption” or “theology.”
In Rosenzweig’s thought, there are temporalities or temporal
modes that scarcely allow themselves to be totalized in a general theory
28
29
Franz Rosenzweig, Zweistromland, p. 72.
Rosenzweig, Briefe, p. 425.
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Proceedings of the Internationale Rosenzweig Gesellschaft
of history and historical time. There is always something remaining and
equivocal in the process of totalization. This does not mean that the
processes involved in knowledge through a totality are futile. Quite the
reverse, they can be constructively engaged, as they are by Rosenzweig as
a historian. In The Star, the names for these temporal modes are Creation,
Revelation, and Redemption. They correspond to what, in thinking of
Adorno, I called “points of view.” The war disclosed to the creature, and,
if I can put it like this, to the creature revealed to itself as creature, as
created Dasein, is undoubtedly the “point of view” that gives rise to the
cry of dread at the start of The Star of Redemption. This revealedexistentielle temporality is neither exclusively nor simply supplementary to
war as seen from the point of view of redemption, from the “messianic”
point of view of a peoples’ politics, considered as a mimetic
secularization of election. It is not inconceivable to think of war as the
Hegelian “moment” of the universalization of the universal, the
globalization of the world, by means of an ecstatic temporality in contrast
to eternity, a violent temporality that suspends and arrests life (462–65).
But this “moment” would not retain the organic-dialectic meaning that is
found in Hegel. If, at a certain ambiguous moment, war was able to give
rise to the apocalyptic, the messianic kairos of the coming, and the sign of
“birth pains,” it still would not start a universal process of reason’s
realization. It has to be thought of “catastrophically,” such that “it
comes, without my seeing it,” as in the talmudic tract of Sanhedrin. The
heterogeneous “points of view” do not make up an identity in formation, a
homogenization of the nonidentical. They instead determine beyond the
concept, angles, and perspectives:
• revealed in the cry: Dasein “screams”; it does not want to
“see” the warring apocalypse;
• created because of the “globe,” the Land of Creation, where the
hope emerges that, despite everything, war retains a “messianic”
dimension of upheaval, redistribution, globalization, a dimension
in the birth of a worldwide community of We’s, a historical
inspiration for redemption—a hope that, at the beginning of the
war, was more or less shared by a number of intellectuals on either
side of the Rhine, something that would carry with it, a bellicoseacademic
ideology
that
Rosenzweig
called
“Professorenkriegsliteratur”;
• Redeemed from the moment this hope is thwarted (and as soon as
42
Gérard Bensussan it is conceived, it is thwarted). Even the limited confidence one has in
the ability of the midwives of war’s history is harmed by war itself. In
the end, the “moral of war” amounts to turning the other nation
into a scapegoat.30 At bottom, war will have changed nothing. It is
not even representative of a real interruption, neither in
Rosenzweig’s personal history, nor in the history of the world: as he
put it in a letter to Hans Ehrenberg in October of 1916: “The war itself
in no way represents an epoch to me: I experienced so much in
1913 that 1914 would have had to be a cataclysm in order to
impress me. . . .”31 Rosenzweig saw a similar disappointment with
the revolutionaries who waited for the “world” war that would give
birth to a “worldwide” revolution. 32 There is neither a single
principle behind its intelligibility, nor a clear victor and vanquished.
It is open territory, open for the “point of view” of redemption,
beyond its secularized figures.
Consequently, Rosenzweig was no longer able to take seriously the
conventional talk and rhetoric after the war; the views about the
increasingly large number of men who were suffering at the front,
about populations mixing together, and about the birth—from out of
the experience on the battlefield—of a new historical collectivity. The
“mysticism” (in Péguy’s sense), along with the mythology of the front
generation, whose consequences one can see all the way up to Being and
Time, were things that Rosenzweig could no longer “take seriously,”
according to the expression in The Star about “the Jew” who still retained
the folkloric remnants that he long considered “beneath him” (351). But
he does not reject the meaning. He himself explained what was at stake in
a rich letter he sent from the front. Despite this, he refuses to see in it
something that Globus even seems to acknowledge. The point of view of
redemption—which, for various reasons, Rosenzweig called the most
unstable or equivocal element in all The Star in a letter to Gritli—will have
to get over the hurdle of its secularization, of its being confused with a
“Bolshevism of the love for one’s neighbor.” From the point of view of
revelation, of existence lived and of the living present of experience
from the trenches, the truth of the cry would not be diminished or divided
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 150.
Glatzer, Life and Thought, p. 42.
32
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 154.
30
31
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at all—it is properly impossible to undercut. But the point of view of
redemption reorients its echoes according to what Rosenzweig observes
in relation to the “interest” that he henceforth brings to the question of
war: “besides, I no longer have any real interest in war.” 33 It is not
indifference or a waning curiosity that is at work here, but an overturning
brought about by an experience of war—before, during, and after—and
thus by a halting and broken temporality. The “scientific,”
historiographical, academic (habilitable) interest in war has greatly
diminished; the truth of the cry still resonates, redemption continues to
draw in the “not yet” of time and waiting. The points of view mutually
determine one another, they correct one another and adjust one
another—but they never outstrip or do away with each other.
I would like to conclude with a kind of excursus, which may not
seem directly relevant, but which is nonetheless very instructive. The
difference between these two kinds of thought is even more striking given
that it arises from a resemblance and proximity that was recognized by
Totality and Infinity’s author. This difference and alterity could be summed up
from the standpoint of the inversion of the subject and the predicate in one
and the same proposition. As we have seen, for Rosenzweig, war as being
affirms Hegel’s historical truth. For Levinas, being as war attests to the
philosophical truth of war. For Levinas, the subject is being. And yet, in a
remark about fear and trembling at the very end of Otherwise than Being, I
feel that I am able to recognize an element of Rosenzweig’s phrasing about
the “points of view,” one of the themes I have tried to develop, a theme that
subterraneously sustains the long meditation on war that Rosenzweig took
up and developed, and then reworked and abandoned since his
experience at the front: “For the little humanity that adorns the earth, a
relaxation of essence to the second degree is needed, in the just war waged
against war to tremble or shudder at every instant because of this very
justice. This weakness is needed.”34
This relation to the second degree warps any thought of satisfaction
and inflicts it with a kind of grief. It makes all justifications and assurances
falter, as well as all struggles and analyses. If war is thought of “as position,
affirmation, and power, then the challenge to this war would not itself be
powerful, nor would it turn this powerlessness into a new affirmation. It is the
relaxation or idleness of a being that leaves no other possible bearing for
Rosenzweig, Gritli-Briefe, p. 137.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, trans., A. Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), p. 185.
33
34
44
Gérard Bensussan the one who claims nothing more than this very relaxation, however
uneasy and trembling.”35 The analysis and denunciation of war would not
drive its instability to the point of a renewed, reconstructed affirmation. The
cry at the opening of The Star can be thought of as the philosophical and
literary expression of this relaxation to the second degree, or of what
Rosenzweig sees to be his loss of “interest,” its decline and relinquishment.
REFERENCES
Cohen, Albert. 1978. Carnets. Paris: Folio-Gallimard.
Glatzer, Nahum N. 1961. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. New York:
Schocken Books. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2006. Otherwise Than Being, or,
Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Rosenzweig, Franz. 1935. Franz Rosenzweig: Briefe. Berlin: Schocken, 1979.
Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften. I. Bd: Briefe und
Tagebücher, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann.
Collaboration with Bernhard Casper. The Hague: Martinus-Nijhoff.
. 1984. Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften. III; Bd:
Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold
Mayer and Annemarie Mayer. Dordrecht-Boston-Lancaster: Martinus
Nijhoff.
. 2002. Die “Gritli” Briefe. Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Inken
Rühle and Reinhold Mayer, with an Introduction by Rafael Rosenzweig.
Tübingen: Bilam.
. 2003. Confluences. Politique, Histoire, Judaïsme. Paris: Vrin.
. 2005. The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
Vanni, Michel. 2004. En Guerre pour Autrui. Internationale Zeitschrift für
Philosophie 1: 78–93.
Michel Vanni, “En Guerre pour Autrui,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1 (2004):
93.
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