Adi Ophir

A Place of Knowledge Re-Created: The Library of Michel de Montaigne

Montaignes Essays were an exercise in self-knowledge carried out for more than twenty years in Montaignes private library located in his mansion near Bordeaux. The library was a place of solitude as well as a place of knowledge, a kind of heterotopia in which two sets of spatial relations coexisted and interacted: the social and the epistemic. The spatial demarcation and arrangement of the site – in both the physical and the symbolic sense – were necessary elements of the constitution of Montaignes self as an object of knowledge and as a subject of discourse. The spatial setting of the library made possible and constrained certain discursive patterns through which words were systematically linked to things, authority was correlated with access and visibility, and the epistemological was coordinated with the social. In this sense, Montaignes library resembled other places of empirical knowledge of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., early laboratories or observatories) in which subjects of knowledge were constituted, objects were posited in their proper phenomenal fields and the entire structure of intellectual activity was reproduced through various cultural mechanisms. But the initial similarity is only apparent. The private library never became a culturally recognized place for knowledge of the self; its heterotopic structure could not have been reproduced without the concrete presence of an author and of a self, while Montaignes skepticism systematically undermined the possibility of the authors position and of the identity of the self.

On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise

(original editor’s note: Almost every political dispute in Israel eventually leads to each side trying to prove its point with reference to “the lessons of the Holocaust.” Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz of the Hebrew University thinks that the conquest of the West Bank may turn Israel into a JewishNazi state; while Menachem Begin claimed that the alternative to fighting the PLO in Lebanon would be to face Auschwitz again—the 15,000 PLO fighters suddenly appearing to have the power and threat of the entire Nazi apparatus of destruction. The attempt to remember the Holocaust has already generated its share of distortions in the political discourse of the State of Israel. . . . )

Shifting the Ground of the Moral Domain in Lyotard’s Le Differend

In what follows I would like to present a major shift in the nature and domain of moral theory implied by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Le Differend. Lyotard does not argue explicitly for this shift, and my attempt to reconstruct it will be analytical rather than interpretative, ignoring (for the purpose of this paper) other works by Lyotard and other issues of related interest in Le Differend. Explicating the implications of a few passages, mainly the definitions of ‘differend’, ‘victim’ and ‘wrong’ (tort), I will articulate the type of moral discourse called for by Lyotard’s text and delineate the new horizons of the moral domain within which such a discourse operates. The results of my analysis may contradict other things Lyotard says, means or implies in other places, and I will not try to reconcile the tensions thus created. Lyotard’s text is but a ladder here; what is at stake in this discussion is not the ladder but the horizon of the moral domain opened from the height of the roof. But it is obviously more than a ladder; it also offers a way to look into “the ethical turn” in postmodern or post-structuralist philosophy, being its most perfect example.

Paul and the Invention of the Gentiles

This paper studies the birth of the concept of the gentile (goy). We begin by presenting an outline of a genealogy of “goy,” as a word and a concept, from the Bible to rabbinic literature, and then focus on one chapter in this genealogy: the meaning and use of ethnê in Pauls epistles. We claim that Paul takes a crucial part in the emergence of the goy in its new, non-ethnic, privatized and generalized sense. In contrast to the scholarly consensus, according to which Pauls simply borrows his binary distinction between Jews and ethnê from an established Jewish tradition, we show that no such tradition existed, and that Paul in fact plays a key role in forming this new meaning of ethnê /goyim and in consolidating the binary division between the Jews and their others. The paper reconstructs the discursive conditions and form of reasoning underlying Pauls novel rendering of ethnê as generalized-individualized others. This calls for a thorough revision of the recent surge of interest in the teaching of Paul by historians, political-theologians and philosophers who all presuppose the Jew-Gentile division as a given.

Models of Critique: Introduction

Critique involves reflection, specifically self-reflection, and as such it is inherently linked with philosophy. Critique calls for change, awareness, liberation from false conceptions, and reshaping of spheres of action and belief. Consequently it is closely linked with the moral and the political. Critique aspires to enhance truth, beauty, and justice and is thus an integral part of science, art, and social action. The present volume tackles issues of critique through a selection of papers originally presented at the workshop on “Models of Critique in the Sciences, Society, and the Arts,” held in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv during May 1996. As the full program indicates, this selection provides only a partial picture of the topics discussed at the workshop. A major consideration has been the publication policy of Science in Context , with its emphasis on science, which is reflected here. We wish to express our gratitude to all the participants for their presentations and contributions to a stimulating exchange of ideas.

The Ideal Speech Situation: Neo-Kantian Ethics in Habermas and Apel

Two important contemporary philosophical programs have revitalized Kant’s critique of practical reason. In the U.S. Rawls has developed his theory of justice as an explicit “Kantian Constructivism.” In Germany Habermas and Apel have launched two separate projects whose affinities override their differences and allow one to speak about a shared program. Habermas’ “Universal Pragmatics” and its derivative “Diskurs Ethik” and Apel’s “Transcendental Semiotics” (or “Transcendental Hermeneutics”) and its derivative “Minimal Ethics” are two versions of a new form of Kantian transcendentalism in general and of ethical formalism in particular. Ours is an age whose intellectual predicament seems to be a sophisticated, linguistically informed historicism and relativism; it is an age in which any attempt to utter a universal claim is immediately deconstructed and shown to be something other than what it purports to be; in such an age these two programs are to be admired. Nevertheless, and fashionably enough, I will try to undermine them, and not only because, having no belief in foundations, I rejoice in deconstructionist work, but also because I think the two programs are ill-founded. I will examine the continental program only, trying to reconstruct what seems to me its principal argument. The main concept that I will explicate and criticize here is that of the “ideal speech situation.” The focus on this concept — and the limited scope of this paper — is a rationale for the preliminary exclusion of Rawls from the present discussion. Rawls’s “original position” can be interpreted as a form of an ideal speech situation or be shown to imply one. If such an interpretation of Rawls is warranted and if my radical criticism of the concept of ideal speech situation is justified, then Rawls’s whole program cannot get off the ground.

Michel Foucault and the Semiotics of the Phenomenal

In every search for knowledge one presupposes that there is more to the phenomenal field one studies than what meets the eye. A play between those phenomena that present themselves to an observer and absent entities or phenomena, and the orders, structures or laws that govern these, lies at the heart of any search for empirical knowledge. On the basis of this play of presence and absence read by a particular discourse into (or out of) a more or less defined phenomenal field, phenomena are constituted qua signs for that discourses participants.