Dynamic Repetition: Kafka, Rosenzweig and the Messianic Time

The various models of messianism in Judaism seem to be positioned at one of two poles. In some versions, the arrival of the Messiah is dependent on the continual efforts of humankind. This model goes along with an understanding of history as an ongoing succession of events in which the present is causally generated by the past. In some mystical versions of apocalyptic messianism, however, history is ended abruptly by divine forces in a catastrophic event. Here, human actions are meaningless or at best irrelevant. History is ever the same, and true change in reality is beyond human comprehension. In my lecture I will suggest a third model to understanding messianism in modern Jewish Thought: Repetition. To understand the interconnections of redemption and repetition, my talk focuses on the works of Franz Rosenzweig and Franz Kafka. The discussion of Rosenzweig examines his messianic intuitions in his book of translations of Jehuda Halevi’s poems and hymns. Halevi’s poems, usually sung and read at important events of the Jewish calendar, played a significant role in concretizing a peculiar Jewish cyclical temporality to the Jewish community. The talk explores a series of literary maneuvers that Rosenzweig employs to manifest this messianic experience to his readers. Next, I look at a 1921 letter by Kafka in which he discusses Abraham and the story of the Akedah. This short letter showcases the different ways Kafka deployed a model of repetition to rupture identity and transgress against sameness. In thinking of the symbolic position of the biblical patriarch as the point of origin of Jewish history, I point to the messianic gesture in Kafka’s Abraham letter.

Gilad Sharvit is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. He completed his PhD studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Philosophy Department and later accepted postdoc positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University. Sharvit is the author of "Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought" (Brandeis UP, 2022), and "Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom" (Magnes Press, 2021) (in Hebrew) and co-editor and contributing author of the volumes "Modern Jewish Thought on Crisis: Interpretation, Heresy, and History" (De Gruyter, forthcoming spring 2024), “Canonization and Alterity: Heresy in Jewish History, Thought, and Literature” (De Gruyter, 2020), and “Freud and Monotheism: The Violent Origins of Religion” (Fordham University Press, 2018).

Veranstaltungsort: Historicum, K 001

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