posted December 31, 2009
Write a 5-7-page report on a piece of secondary literature on Rosenzweig and/or Levinas. Following is a list of items to choose from - feel free to suggest other titles that seem to be important, but that I may have missed.
Each seminar participant should choose a different item to review. Please be prepared to make your selection by January 11, so that we can coordinate among participants. The reports are due on February 10. In addition to submitting a printed copy in my department mailbox, please also send your report to me by e-mail attachment. I will distribute the reports to all participants. They will then serve as the basis of our class meeting on February 22.
Your report should give a basic characterization of the work you're discussing: What are its scope, its aim, its disciplinary approach, and its agenda with respect to the study of Rosenzweig/Levinas? In what sort of a context or framework does the author place Rosenzweig and/or Levinas? What larger phenomena or issues does the author take Rosenzweig and/or Levinas to represent or illustrate? What sort of an understanding in particular of Jewish philosophy/thought is the work operating with, or trying to promote? How is the author intervening in the previous scholarship? Are there assumptions guiding the interpretations that are worth highlighting? Are you able to say whether the account is persuasive? Whether it is original or represents a creative approach? Does it raise new questions that ought to be pursued further? Are there significant limitations to the approach?
Be sure to discuss your choice with me well in advance; I will be able to make some comments about the work you've chosen, and about why I've included it in this list.
Note that some items might not (yet) be available in Mills Library (though all have been requested to go on reserve), so be sure to allow time to obtain your selection by Interlibrary Loan or other suitable means.
(in roughly reverse chronological order:)
Elliot R. Wolfson:“Light Does Not Talk But Shines: Apophasis and Vision in Rosenzweig’s Theopoetic Temporality” in Elliot Wolfson and Aaron Hughes, eds., New Directions in Jewish Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009).
AND
"Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig," Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997): 39-81.
Mara H. Benjamin, Rosenzweig's Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Myriam Bienenstock, Cohen face à Rosenzweig: débat sur la pensée allemande (Paris: Vrin, 2009)
Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Lévinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Leora F. Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
Randi Rashkover, Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig, and the Politics of Praise (London: T & T Clark International, 2005).
Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Oona Eisenstadt, Driven Back to the Text : The Premodern Sources of Levinas' Postmodernism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001).
Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).