Translating Hebrew into Greek : the discursive hermeneutics of Emmanuel Levinas\u27s Talmudic readings

This dissertation examines Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic readings and the hermeneutics employed to translate the Talmud into modern language. Levinas claims to be translating “Hebrew” into “Greek” by rendering into a universal, philosophical language (“Greek”) the ethical structure of subjectivity (“Hebrew”) within the Talmud. Since they investigate the structure of subjectivity, extensive use of his philosophical works and the influential works of others are used to analyze his Talmudic readings. Chapter One places Levinas’s project against the background of the Talmud, Judaic tradition, and projects like Rudolf Bultmann’s New Testament readings and Thorleif Boman’s comparative study of Greek and Hebrew. A brief abstract of Levinas’s philosophy emphasizing his understanding of the hermeneutics of subjectivity is given. Chapters Two and Three examine Husserl and Heidegger’s formative influences, especially their hermeneutics of everyday experience, wherein Levinas locates the essential flaw of Western philosophy, which begins with an already constituted subjectivity. Although all three view the structure of hermeneutics as essentially discursive, Levinas insists that the subject is not the source for these discursive structures, or even for its own subjectivity. Rather, that source, where any philosophical understanding must start, is the Other. Levinas sees exhortations against things like “sorcery” and “temptation” as the Talmud’s mode of resisting and restraining subjectivity’s natural tendency to seek out its own freedom and power. Western philosophy, however, actually tends to either start from this condition or work toward it. Chapter Four discusses the idea of infinity according to Levinas and Descartes, and its role in founding consciousness. In this respect, infinity coincides with the idea of God . Chapter five looks at ethics and its relation to the structure of subjectivity. Levinas reads the Talmud in light of the ethical situation confronting the subject in the encounter with the Other. The Other actually establishes subjectivity and its discursive hermeneutical structures, so subjectivity begins and continues as an ethical response. The Conclusion looks at the idea of “messianic politics,” showing how Levinas describes the structure of subjectivity as a unique “chosenness,” revealing its discursive hermeneutical structures to be orientating the subject to future ethical responses

Accounting Historians Journal, 2003, Vol. 30, no. 1 [whole issue]

June issu

Auschwitz has Happened: An Exploration of the Past, Present, and Future of Jewish Redemption

Ch. 1: Introduction: A Destruction without Adequate Precedent. Ch. 2: Rupture and the Holy Ideal: Redemption in the Hebrew Bible. Ch. 3: Giving the Sense: The Rise of Commentary. Ch. 4: Rabbi Eliezer’s Silence. Ch. 5: Gold and Glass: Ethical Rupture in Mystical Union? Ch. 6: Our Impossible Victory

Health Care Providers’ Consciences and Patients’ Needs: The Quest for Balance

Recent controversies, such as the HHS rule on insurance coverage of contraceptive and sterilization services, raise fundamental and politically consequential questions. But they take place against a backdrop of longstanding tensions between claims of conscience and laws of broad scope and application—tensions well-known to experts but less so to public officials and most citizens. In a new paper, William Galston and Melissa Rogers provide a broad overview of conscience from a religious, philosophical and legal perspective, and then home in on conscience in the context of health care. The paper surveys current federal and state law and regulation governing the right to conscientiously object in the provision of health care, and explores the ongoing tensions between claims of conscience and calls for access. The paper concludes with suggestions for policymakers when shaping laws and regulations in this arena

Errans:Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing

Today’s critical discourses and theorizing vanguards agree on the importance of getting lost, of failure, of erring — as do life coaches and business gurus. The taste for a departure from progress and other teleologies, the fascination with disorder, unfocused modes of attention, or improvisational performances cut across wide swaths of scholarly and activist discourses, practices in the arts, but also in business, warfare, and politics. Yet often the laudible failures are only those that are redeemed by subsequent successes. What could it mean to think errancy beyond such restrictions? And what would a radical critique of productivity, success, and fixed determination look like that doesn’t collapse into the infamous ‘I would prefer not to’? This volume looks for an answer in the complicated word field branching and stretching from the Latin errāre. Its contributions explore the implications of embracing error, randomness, failure, non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines, discourses, and practices, with critical attention to the ambivalences such an impossible embrace generates.‘Submit Your References’: Introduction | ARND WEDEMEYER | 1–18The Punakawans Make an Untimely Appearance: In Praise of Caves, Shadows, and Fire (or A Response to Plato’s Doctrine of Truth) | PRECIOSA DE JOYA | 19–47The Animal That Laughs at Itself: False False Alarms about the End of ‘Man’ | JAMES BURTON | 49–74Not Yet: Duration as Detour in Emmanuelle Demoris’s Mafrouza Cycle | ROSA BAROTSI | 75–92Incomplete and Self-Dismantling Structures: The Built Space, the Text, the Body | ANTONIO CASTORE | 93–112Camera Fog; or, The Pendulum of Austerity in Contemporary Portugal | MARIA JOSÉ DE ABREU | 113–40Rinko Kawauchi: Imperfect Photographs | CLARA MASNATTA | 141–58Inbuilt Errans: What Is and Is Not ‘Radical Indifference’ | ZAIRONG XIANG | 159–75Errant Counterpublics: ‘Solidarność’ and the Politics of the Weak | EWA MAJEWSKA | 177–99‘The Exile from the Law’: Keeping and Transgressing the Limits in Jewish Law | FEDERICO DAL BO | 201–31Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 24 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-24

Narratology, Hermeneutics, and Midrash

The contributions compiled in this volume comprise studies of Jewish texts – biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern – as well as of patristic and medieval Christian texts, and in one case, a passage of the Muslim text par excellence, the Quran. The authors, scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies, Catholic and Protestant Theology, Islamic Studies, German philology etc., invited to reflect on texts of their respective disciplines in context-sensitive interpretations, taking into account the link connecting Midrash, hermeneutics, and narrative, provide illuminating narratological and/or hermeneutical insights into the texts in question. The interdisciplinary dialogue that characterized the conference “Narratology, Hermeneutics, and Midrash” that gave rise to the volume proves to be rich and full of potential for further research in the direction proposed by the Series Poetics, Exegesis and Narrative. Studies in Jewish literature and art

Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary, and Visual Enumeration

This open access book attempts to show that an examination of the list’s formal features has the potential to produce genuine insights into the production of knowledge, the poetics of literature and the composition of visual art. Following a conceptual introduction, the twelve single-authored chapters place the list in a variety of well-researched contexts, including ancient Roman historiography, medieval painting, Enlightenment periodicals, nineteenth-century botanical geography, American Beat poetry and contemporary photobooks. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book is a unique contribution to an emerging field dedicated to the study of lists