Jewish Thought in Light of Deleuze and Guattari Studies

Dear Colleagues,

In his magnum opus, Difference and Repetition, Deleuze lays out his “transcendental empiricism”, where the instance (or mode) generates or brings along a “custom-made” organizing principle (or substance) rather than vice versa, and, given multiple instances, mutually exclusive plenitudes nonetheless “intensively” coexist and interpenetrate. In his subsequent works, often co-written with Felix Guattari, this type of pluralism with the pure difference (versus contradiction and binary logic) as its engine, incarnates into “becoming animal”, “body without organs”, “rhizome,” “nomadism”, “micro literature”, and many other ground-breaking concepts, symbols, icons, and cognitive maps that have rendered Deleuze, since his death in 1995, one of most prominent post-structuralist philosophers with vast influence across the humanities, social sciences, and the outskirts of the natural and rigorous sciences.

One of the strengths of this Deleuzian philosophy of multiplicity is its doing away with what Deleuze has called “ideology.” As opposed to some poststructuralist philosophy, and especially to the still abundant vulgar Deleuzianism, which “affiliates itself with every form of radical opposition to prevailing or traditional forms” (Carroll 2004), proper Deleuzianism, despite being radical and experimental—and despite, or rather due to, implying a strife (generative difference) rather than reconciliation (pre-established difference) between the variants—is not a militant philosophy. Symbolically, refusing to follow the (back then) trendy rhetoric against metaphysics—ostensibly dogmatic and rigid—Deleuze declared himself to be a metaphysician. The implication, when it comes to religious thought, is that Deleuzianism does not imply destruction, or even deconstruction, of “transcendental signifiers” such as “God” or systems such as tradition and orthodoxy. Somewhat to the contrary, its implied imperative is to repeat them (with Difference). Indeed, Deleuzianism is already highly fruitful in religious and theological thought in the academy and elsewhere.

When it comes to Jewish thought and Jewish traditional texts, putting them in dialogue with Deleuzianism should prove to be particularly fruitful, given that Deleuze intensively draws on and is inspired by Jewish writers and thinkers such as Kafka, Bergson, and Spinoza, and does so, moreover, by often putting their Jewishness to the fore. Some current works do indeed explore the “Jewishness” of Deleuzianism and vice versa. A prime example is Sergey Dolgopolski’s 2009 monograph, What is Talmud, where he shows both Deleuzianism and the Talmud to reinvent Sophism and “uproot the philosophical violence” done to it.

However, such scholarly work is relatively scarce, and this Special Issue aims to contribute to and boost Deleuzianism in reading Jewish texts, reflecting on the philosophy and history of Judaism. It welcomes studies applying Deleuze’s concepts and ideas from across his oeuvre to interpreting biblical, rabbinic, medieval, Hasidic, kabalistic, and Jewish Modern thought. This Special Issue will especially endorse studies that contribute to the question of whether Jewish thought, psyche, and traditional texts are essentially Deleuzian—that is, whether they are particularly compatible with Deleuze’s philosophy and logic of multiplicity—to the level, perhaps, of informing the latter via Jewish writers and texts which Deleuze studied and drew on.

Themes for submissions include, but are in no way limited to, the following:

• Laws of Sacrificial Offerings in the bible and Talmud in light of the concepts of “becoming animal” and “body without organs”;
• Eye-witnessing in Talmudic law in light of the concept of “impersonal eye” (developed in Deleuze’s cinema studies);
• Pragmatics and semiotics in the midrash or kabbalah in light of the concept of “transcoding”;
• Kabalistic abiogenetic theories in light of the principle of Difference and Repetition;
• Jewish process theology (Max Kadushin, Hans Jonas) in light of Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming;
• Talmudic halakhic discussion as “micro-literature”/micro-phenomenology;
• Philosophy of Time: From Shneur Zalman to Deleuze via (descendent of Hasidic family) Bergson.

Reference

Carroll, Joseph. 2004. Literary Darwinism. New York: Routledge. p. 25

Dr. Iddo Dickmann
Guest Editor

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• continental philosophy
• Deleuze
• Guattari
• Bible
• Talmud
• Kabbalah
• Jewish philosophy