Idolatry and Representation: the Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered

Ochs - Rosenzweig as Postcritical Jewish Philosopher - JCRT 2.1

Rosenzweig as Postcritical Jewish Philosopher

a review of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered, by Leora Batnitzky (Princeton University Press, 2000); $41.50.

Peter Ochs
University of Virginia

Leora Batnitzky has revised her Ph.D. dissertation into a book that is of great significance for those who think about religion, theology, philosophy and culture from a postmodern perspective. Emmanuel Levinas is perhaps the most widely read 20th century Jewish philosopher, both among Jewish and also Christian postmodern and postliberal thinkers. But Levinas considered his own work an extension of Franz Rosenzweig's, and more technically minded scholars of modern Jewish thought devote as much attention to Rosenzweig as to Levinas ' to both the teacher and his prize student. Along with his own teacher Hermann Cohen and his peer Martin Buber, Rosenzweig played a dominant role in wresting modern Jewish philosophy and theology from its exilic wanderings within the conceptual architectonic of Kant, Hegel and other disciples of post-Kantian idealism and conceptualism. Because his work emerges from deep within this architectonic, some critics read Rosenzweig as still too much a Hegelian (or phenomenologist or Schellingian Kantian in the broader sense). But this is to mistake the context of his work for its claims. Like those of any pioneering thinker, his writings deliver innovations and reformations in a doubly coded language: on one side the language of his own formation and intellectual culture, but on the other side the new-old language of his reforms. His reform, in other words, is not a new claim within the terms of the old language, but a transformed language for delivering claims. Such a reform can be difficult to read or to read well. Batnisky reads Rosenzweig very well and enables a broad audience of readers to read well, and clearly, along with her.

An Overview of Batnitzky's Theses

Batnitsky's Rosenzweig as Postcritical Jewish Philosopher

Peter Ochs is Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia, and Director of its new Program in Jewish Studies. He's cofounder of the Society of Textual Reasoning and the Society of Scriptural Reasoning. Most recent book publications are Reviewing the Covenant, eugene Borowitz and the Postmodern Renewal of Jewish Theology and the co-edited volume, Christianity in Jewish Terms.

2000 Peter Ochs. All rights reserved.
Updated 07/28/21.
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