Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy

Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy contests the ancient opposition between Athens and Jerusalem by retrieval of the concept of meontology - the doctrine of nonbeing - in one strand of the Jewish philosophical and theological tradition. This book offers new readings of important figures in contemporary Continental philosophy, critiquing arguments about the role of lived religion in the thought of Jacques Derrida, the role of Greek philosophy in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethical import of the thought of Franz Rosenzweig. Kavka argues that the Greek concept of nonbeing (understood as both lack and possibility) clarifies the meaning of Jewish life. This concept allows these thinkers to articulate Jewish life as centred on messianic anticipation, the hungering after a stasis that philosophy has traditionally associated with the concept of being.

• First book written in English to specifically treat the philosophical concept of nonbeing in any theological context • Offers new readings of Derrida, Levinas, and Rosenzweig • Critiques arguments about the role of lived religion

Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction: from Athens to Jerusalem; The thesis and two corollaries; A Preliminary Sketch of the Argument; A Note on Gender; Part I. The Meontological Conundrum: Emil Fackenheim and Emmanuel Levinas on the Athens-Jerusalem Conflict: 1. Critical meontology: Emmanuel Levinas; 2. Dialectical meontology: Emil Fackenheim; Part II. Beyond ‘Beyond Being’: Nonbeing in Plato and Husserl: 3. The problems of Middle Platonism; 4. The inadequacy of uni-faceted definition; 5. Nonbeing, otherness, and the coherence of disparate elements; 6. Phenomenology and meontology; Part III. Nonbeing as Not-Yet-Being: Meontology in Maimonides and Hermann Cohen: 7. Return; 8. Maimonidean meontology; 9. The extirpation of the Passions in Maimonides; 10. Meontology in Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis; 11. From teleology to Messianism: Cohen\'s interpretation of Maimonides; 12. The integration of the community: Religion of Reason; Part IV. Nonbeing Ensouled, Nonbeing Embodied: Rosenzweig and Levinas on the role of the other in redemption: 13. The soul, faithful in pathos; 14. The body, faithful in Eros; Conclusion: deepening the roots of the meontological Jewish tradition, or contra the Derridean ‘Messianic’; Mourning between introjection and incorporation; The mourners of Zion, hadomim lo; Swallowing tears.