Franz Rosenzweig

konkrete Zielscheiben Rosenzweigscher Kritik sind, sondern auch darauf, wo
er in jahrhundertenlangen Magiekonzeptualisierung im Judentum zu situieren
ist, welche Traditionslinien er weiterführt und welche Konjunktionen (nun von
diesen Traditionen nicht beabsichtigte) dadurch möglich werden.
– Brigitta Keintzel, Das Und, ein Chiasmus der Seele: Körpererleben
und Sprachbegehren
Das Und, das hier zur Verhältnisbestimmung zwischen Leib und Sprache
verwendet wird, ist mehrdeutig. Es beansprucht nicht einen geschlossenen,
sondern einen offenen Sinn. Gemeint ist damit nicht ein Und, das Leib und
Sprache zu einer übergeordneten Einheit verbindet, sondern ein Und, das
überleitet, trennt und eröffnet. Im Fokus der Betrachtung steht also ein Und,
das die Vielschichtigkeit des Sinns nicht leugnet. Um dies zu verdeutlichen,
wird Rosenzweigs Sprachdenken am Leitfaden des Verbs vorgestellt.
February 23 – Plenary Sessions
– Jules Simon, Rosenzweig and Benjamin. Aesthetics and Politics
My contribution accounts for the stipulated theme of how the “and” functions
in Rosenzweig’s philosophy. In my book, Art and Responsibility, I draw attention
to the connections of what I take to be Rosenzweig’s messianism with his
philosophy of art that he explicitly develops through the three Books of Part II
of The Star of Redemption. I depict that as a “messianic aesthetics” in order
to provide a way to better understand his philosophy of redemption. Arguing
against the grain of conventional readings that Rosenzweig’s philosophy is
a-historical, I maintain instead that a more nuanced and faithful reading
should take into account the underlying logical dynamics of his speech-act
philosophy that become embodied through the role that love relationships—
understood aesthetically on both individual and communal levels—are ways
to ‘redeem’ history messianically, thereby redeeming or creating more just
political communities. This happens at the level of an immanent, normative
critique of the dominant authoritarian pressures to assimilate to existing
social and political conditions. In his Angel of History (2007), Stephan
Moses drew attention to the significant ways in which such dimensions of
Rosenzweig’s philosophy may have influenced Benjamin’s development of a
“weak messianic” process. For Benjamin, that begins with the ‘rupture’ of
actual, material conditions of the unjust socio-political order—in the sense of
a breaking open that happens as a “Jetztzeit” in ‘authentically’ experiencing
works of art. But that “rupture” also includes, for Benjamin, the continuity of
an historical tradition of reading and interpretation that actually (in concrete
historical relations) situates us in an ‘aesthetic’ “hier und jetzt” which—
because those readings/interpretations take the form of ethical critique—is
both revelatory and historically redemptive, that is, politically messianic.
54