Papers by Agata Bielik-Robson
Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, 2021
Faith and Knowledge, Reconsidered: Modern Religion and the "Time of Life" Almost twenty-five year... more Faith and Knowledge, Reconsidered: Modern Religion and the "Time of Life" Almost twenty-five years have passed after the publication of Jacques Derrida's 1996 seminal essay, "Faith and Knowledge: Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone," one of the most important, but also most enigmatic post-secular texts of late modernity. Six articles in this issue are devoted directly to Derrida's essay. The other two can also be read along them as dealing with broadly conceived post-secular issues. They all can be brought under the traditional heading of "faith and knowledge" -simultaneously in recognition of Derrida's title and in opening a wider perspective on fides et ratio today (a few decades after the famous 1994 Capri seminar on religion). Derrida participated in the seminar with his 2000 essay (Glauben und Wissen), on the same subject, along with the equally famous intervention of Jürgen Habermas. The main theme of Derrida's take on the confrontation between fides and ratio is the analysis of the relation between modern philosophy/knowledge and modern religion/faith: a complex co-dependence which challenges Hegel's conviction that philosophy had managed to sublate religion completely and allowed for the survival of its most valuable contents in a new rational form. 1 Pace Martin Hägglund's thesis, (according to which Derrida's philosophy should be classified as "radical atheism" in the Hegelian vein), 2 the essays in this volume present Derrida's thinking on religion as far more ambivalent, leaning toward not so much atheism as radical iconoclasm which does not annul the idea of divinity, but rather hides it away from sight. As Derrida often admits, radical apophatic iconoclasm often goes hand in hand with an atheistic approach, but it nonetheless should not be mistaken with the latter: it is rather an a-theism which mistrusts open theological discourse, 1) "Faith already has the true content. What is still lacking in it is the form of thought":
esej w Literaturze na Świecie, nr 3-4 (2025), 2025
Recenzja książki Marka Bieńczyka, "Rondo Wiatraczna" (Karakter, Kraków 2025)
chapter in "Political Theology and Its Discontents," eds. Daniel Cho and Bostjan Nedoch (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), 2025
One of the most common clichés defines Judaism as the “religion of the Father.” For some this is ... more One of the most common clichés defines Judaism as the “religion of the Father.” For some this is just a neutral description referring to the fatherly aspect of the Jewish God; for others this is the very epitome of the patriarchal prejudice which privileges the masculine Father Figure at the expense of everything maternal. In my paper, I would like to challenge this well‑established association, by pointing to the simple fact that Jews themselves very rarely – if ever – describe their religion in openly patriarchal terms. This qualification came from the outside. On the one hand, the term – “religion of the Father” – derives from the Christian reception of Judaism, which contrasted it to the “religion of the Son.” On the other hand, the association of Judaism with patriarchalism often emerges on the self-professed “pagan” side of the divide, aiming at the critical rejection of the whole Judeo‑Christianity as the “counter‑religion” which as the first dared to oppose the original maternal matrix of cosmotheism: Mother‑Nature. My purpose here will be to demonstrate the inadequacy of such description. By engaging with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic take on Judaism, I will try to prove that Judaism can by no means be identified as the “religion of the Father.” Neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, it is rather a bold attempt to redefine the functioning of our psyche in such a way that she can liberate herself from the family romance and enter a new horizontal space no longer dominated by the hierarchical reference to these two most powerful figures of origination, the Mother and the Father. Judaism may thus be characterised as a religious code of parenticide, conceived as a necessary condition of liberation.
chapter in Doing Metaphysics in a Diverse World How We Make Sense of Things Across Cultures, Edited by Stephen Green (London-New York: Bloomsbury, 2025), 341-360, 2025
The subject of this chapter is the comparative analysis of the concept of the beyond in relation ... more The subject of this chapter is the comparative analysis of the concept of the beyond in relation to being and becoming. Following the revised theory of the Axial Religions (Weber, Jaspers, Eisenstadt), it focuses on the ‘invention of the transcendence’ as the new model of approaching the metaphysical status of the beyond: the novelty consists in creating a ‘contrast’ between the transcendent and the immanent orders. This contrasting tension between the transcendence and the immanence varies from maximal to minimal in the axial traditions – Abrahamic, Buddhist, and Daoist – but it never disappears completely. In the more static models, based on the transcendence conceived as the foundation of the ‘eternal structures of being,’ the immanent time and becoming will be reduced to a minimal significance. In the dynamic models, based on the contrary vision of the beyond as critical of and antithetical to the order of being, time and becoming will be increased in their value as the ‘history of redemption’ – either the possibility of repairing the world and lifting it to the transcendent ideal or the apocalyptic awaiting of the end of the world as unworthy of any ‘spiritual investment.’
review in Political Theology (February 2025), 2025
chapter in Hans Jonas. The Early Years, eds. Daniel M. Herskowitz, Elad Lapidot and Christian Wiese (London: Routledge, 2025), 178-200., 2025
Had Jonas ever overcome his fascination with Gnosis? According to the prevailing opinion among Jo... more Had Jonas ever overcome his fascination with Gnosis? According to the prevailing opinion among Jonas’s scholars, his later reflections on responsibility to nature should be inscribed in the tendency characteristic of many thinkers called by Richard Wolin ‘Heideggers children’: initially marked by the Gnostic aura of the Weimar era, they all eventually put themselves to the task of ‘overcoming Gnosticism,’ which would leave the dualistic influence of Heidegger, Barth and Harnack behind and attempt a return to the classical sense of participation in the natural cosmos. According to this Blumenbergian narrative, the post-Gnostic trajectory of Jonas’s thought can be compared to the similar one of Leo Strauss and other late-modern ‘Aristotelians’ who changed camps from Gnosticism to Naturalism. By pioneering the ‘third overcoming of Gnosis’ and turning towards the phenomenon of life, Jonas recreates a philosophy of physis which recuperates the Aristotelian notion of the spontaneous purposefulness of nature. Yet, as demonstrated by Jonas’ ample use of the Lurianic ‘speculative mythology’ in his post-war period, the story cannot be that simple. Yes, it is true that Jonas attempts to overcome dualistic Gnosis the most powerful modern manifestation of which he locates in Heidegger’s doctrine of Geworfenheit, being-thrown into an alien world – and yes, he also advocates a return to nature as the one metaphysical house of man and things, mind and matter. But does it mean that what he thus wishes to recover is the Aristotelian eidetic teaching of the ontological good of being? Not necessarily. By taking Jonas’s ‘tentative myth’ seriously, I will propose a different scenario of Jonas’s ‘overcoming of Gnosticism,’ consisting in the following transformation: from the dualistic type of Gnosis, which he made an explicit object of his early studies, to a dialectical type of Gnosticism, which he implicitly assumed in his later period while borrowing heavily from as well as modernizing the kabbalistic doctrine of Isaac Luria.
article in Teksty Drugie nr 2 /2023, “The New Humanities”, 2023
Today, we apparently live in an epoch of the end. The idea of living in the end times became toda... more Today, we apparently live in an epoch of the end. The idea of living in the end times became today so hegemonic that it began to generate a new universal “existential mood.” We live in a “culture of the end”, and this can be observed in all social fields, from art to politics, from science to popular humour. Yet, in the history of Western thought, the concept of the end is not new at all. To some extent, we might even say that we have always lived in the end times. In fact, the idea of the end has shaped a large part of continental philosophical tradition, stretching from Biblical motifs of apocalypse and the end time to Hegel’s idea of the end of history, where
it is meant as an apex of the progress of freedom. According to Hegel, the End of History is not a violent finale of the world, as well as our lives in it, but a telos: a desired goal of the historical development. The last representative of the Hegelian optimism was Francis Fukuyama who, spurned by the fall of communism, urged us to greet “the end of history” – the global victory of liberal democracy – as the most welcome event that would stabilize the world politics and let it flourish, by preventing alternative revolutionary ideas to come to the fore. Yet, this type of metaphysical-historical optimism, so characteristic for the last decade of the second millennium, quite suddenly waned: the narrative of the desired goal gave way to the narrative of the imminent end as a threat to the world’s existence. The evocation of the apocalypse due to climate change and natural catastrophe to convictions about fatal inevitability of war and destruction of both mankind and the whole planet marks a stark contrast between the past-optimistic and contemporary-pessimistic narrations of the end. The essay attempts to elucidate the reasons why this sudden change occurred.
it is meant as an apex of the progress of freedom. According to Hegel, the End of History is not a violent finale of the world, as well as our lives in it, but a telos: a desired goal of the historical development. The last representative of the Hegelian optimism was Francis Fukuyama who, spurned by the fall of communism, urged us to greet “the end of history” – the global victory of liberal democracy – as the most welcome event that would stabilize the world politics and let it flourish, by preventing alternative revolutionary ideas to come to the fore. Yet, this type of metaphysical-historical optimism, so characteristic for the last decade of the second millennium, quite suddenly waned: the narrative of the desired goal gave way to the narrative of the imminent end as a threat to the world’s existence. The evocation of the apocalypse due to climate change and natural catastrophe to convictions about fatal inevitability of war and destruction of both mankind and the whole planet marks a stark contrast between the past-optimistic and contemporary-pessimistic narrations of the end. The essay attempts to elucidate the reasons why this sudden change occurred.
esej w Literatura na Świecie 1-2/2023, 2023
Czy ktoś jeszcze potrafi oprzeć się wrażeniu, że żyjemy w epoce końca? Stało się ono tak wszechwł... more Czy ktoś jeszcze potrafi oprzeć się wrażeniu, że żyjemy w epoce końca? Stało się ono tak wszechwładne i przemożne, że wytwarza nową zbiorową Stimmung: coś, co Martin Heidegger, już w latach dwudziestych poprzedniego wieku, próbując uchwycić dekadencki klimat kultury zachodniej, określał jako "nastrój egzystencjalny". Życie w kulturze wyczerpania nie jest już kwestią indywidualną, to potężne kolektywne doświadczenie, które łamie zastane kody kulturowe i powoli kształtuje nowe języki. Jednym z nich jest literatura Michela Houllebecqa.
chapter in Rosenzweig Jahrbuch, Bildung, Sprachdenken, Übersetzung | Bildung, Language Thinking, Translation, vol. 10/ 2024, Karl Alber, Baden-Baden, 111-128., 2024
There is a line of continuity between Roswenzweig’s major philosophical enterprise in The Star of... more There is a line of continuity between Roswenzweig’s major philosophical enterprise in The Star of Redemption and his seemingly more ‘existentialist’ thought in the Frankfurt period. What unites these two projects is the constant effort to ward off the ‘spectre of Gnosticism’ which, as Benjamin Pollock has shown recently in his study on Rosenzweig’s early fascination with Marcion, was also the case of personal auto-exorcism. By using the term of Hans Blumenberg – ‘overcoming of Gnosis’ – I want to show how Rosenzweig, once taken over by Marcion and Karl Barth, gradually departs from their ‘Gnostic’ premises in the struggle which is simultaneously biographical and theoretical, and – it needs to be said at the very beginning – not always successful (though in my essay I will be as kind to Rosenzweig as possible).
chapter in Political Theology Reimagined, eds. Alex Dubilet and Vincent W. Lloyd (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 2025
Does critical theory have theological roots? In this essay, I attempt to show that it does indeed... more Does critical theory have theological roots? In this essay, I attempt to show that it does indeed: Its very concept of critique was made possible by the Jewish messianic tradition, which involves a highly specific notion of transcendence. Unlike in the Platonic metaphysics, where epekeina tes ousias (beyond being) designates the superessential highest point of the great chain of beings, in Jewish messianism the divine transcendence is most of all a standpoint from which the metaphysical totality can be seen and judged. The Jewish messianic transcendence, therefore, signifies not the highest possible ontological perfection but, rather, a place from which it is possible to criticize the whole of creation as lacking thereof: It constitutes the transcendental possibility of the critique as such.
chapter in Talmud AND Philosophy, eds. Sergey Dolgopolski and James Adam Redfield, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2024: 21-50, 2024
There are many ways in which the positioning of Talmud AND Philosophy can be understood: as conju... more There are many ways in which the positioning of Talmud AND Philosophy can be understood: as conjunction (perhaps leading so some elusive synthesis), as neutral juxtaposition, or as opposition (‘and’ as ‘versus’). But I want to propose something else: a certain reading of Talmud as a meta-philosophical document, which first creates a necessary condition for any reason, be it a philosophical logos or a rhetorical scriptural reasoning. By referring to the famous lo bashamayim fragment from Baba Metzia (59b) – most probably the best known Talmudic story, frequently quoted by Scholem, Levinas, Taubes, Biale, Boyarin, and many others, and the most exquisite example of the Talmudic tradition of refutation – I want to demonstrate that it delivers a set of transcendental conditions of any rational discussion, before any specific definition of the ratio, including the Western philosophical one. I want to call this transcendental meta-philosophical position a decentred theism: in opposition to the theocentric ‘theological absolutism,’ which turns the divine infinite vantage point into the ‘measure of all things,’ the rabbinic decentring creates a distance from the overwhelming divine verdicts, which allows the finite minds to develop their own reasoning. The refutative No against the miraculous interventions from above, which automatically trump any argument from below, is here a necessary defense mechanism without which no ‘finite thinking’ could ever emerge.
Teksty Drugie, 2010
W epokowym dziele Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, czyli Prawomocność ery nowoczesnej, Hans Blumenber... more W epokowym dziele Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, czyli Prawomocność ery nowoczesnej, Hans Blumenberg opisuje późnośredniowieczny proces, za sprawą którego filozofia, dotąd królowa nauk i najbliższa służka teologii, powoli wypada z roli prawodawaczej i obniża status, stając się częścią artes liberales, czyli sztuk wyzwolonych. Od samego początku zatem wyzwolenie myśli filozoficznej wiąże się ze spadkiem w akademickiej hierarchii, a narodziny humanistyki -jeśli spojrzeć na nie z czysto uniwersyteckiej perspektywy -otacza aura infamii, czegoś nie do końca godnego. Jestem przekonana, że ta zasada, łącząca wolność z degradacją, a przynajmniej z niepewnością statusu, obowiązuje do dziś. Swobodna myśl i akademicki establishment po prostu nie idą ze sobą w parze. Czerpiąca z feudalnych wzorców władzy kariera profesorska i humanistyczny talent, nieustannie wobec władzy podejrzliwy, rozchodziły się od zawsze, ale ostatnio znalazły się w otwartym konflikcie. Weźmy choćby Stany Zjednoczone z ich niesamowicie rozkręconym przemysłem akademickim, z całą tą Ivy Ligue niezmiennie górującą na wszelkich listach "naukometrycznych"; nie da się ukryć, że amerykańska humanistyka to w dużej mierze rynek wtórny, poddający nieustannemu recyklingowi idee, które narodziły się gdzie indziej, czyli w Europie. Dekonstrukcja, ostatni wielki towar eksportowy Francji, w warunkach europejskich była myślą stosunkowo żywą; Derrida, uniwersyteckie enfant terrible, nigdy nieprzyjęte do Akademii Francuskiej (która ostatnio wzięła w swe szeregi Jean-Luc Mariona, tego straszliwego fenomenologicznego nudziarza), narobił mnóstwo ożywczego zamieszania, otwierając skostniały idiom filozofii na literaturę, religię i politykę. W Ameryce zaś dekonstrukcja niemal natychmiast zamarła, przybierając formę nieznośnej maniery kampusowej: izolowanej, snobistycznej, bez jakiegokolwiek otwarcia na otaczający świat. Smut-
chapter in Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci, eds, The European Reception of John D. Caputo’s Thought: Radicalizing Theology (New York: Lexington Books, 2023), 113-30, 2023
The purpose of my essay is to juxtapose John D. Caputo’s reflections on the ‘weakness of God’ wit... more The purpose of my essay is to juxtapose John D. Caputo’s reflections on the ‘weakness of God’ with a seemingly very similar attempt of Jacques Derrida to venture beyond the paradigm of power and create a new notion of ‘the unconditional without sovereignty,’ which, in Derrida’s writings usually associates with the name of Khora or, as he calls it in Foi et savoir, the ‘infinite wound.’ The metaphor of the wound could indeed suggest that Khora is a ‘weak’ form of the divine, as in Caputo’s interpretation – yet, the danger inherent to Caputo’s concept of the ‘weakness of God’ is that it offers nothing more than the inversion of the paradigm of sovereignty and, precisely because of that, still remains within this very paradigm. I thus try to prove that the simple reversal, even if partly fuelled by the Derridean deconstructive critique of divine potestas, doesn’t yet do the trick. I argue that, in order to approach the non-sovereign origin of letting-be (Seinlassen), one cannot rely on the idea of the depletion of power, but must search for a completely new set of categories, which would evade the context of power altogether.
article in Philosophies 2024, nr 9, vol. 134., 2024
This essay reflects on the concept of the death of God as part and parcel of modern philosophical... more This essay reflects on the concept of the death of God as part and parcel of modern philosophical theology: a genre of thinking that came into existence with Hegel’s announcement of the “speculative Good Friday” as the most natural expression of die Religion der neuen Zeiten, “the religion of modern times”. In my interpretation, the death of God not only does not spell the end of the era of atheism but, on the contrary, inaugurates a new era of characteristically modern theism that steers away from theological absolutism. The new theos is no longer conceived as the eternal omnipotent Absolute but as the Derridean diminished Infinite: contracted and self-negated—even “onto death”. Such God, however, although coming to the foremost visibly in modernity, is not completely new to the monotheistic religions, which from the beginning are engaged in the heated debate concerning the status of the divine power: is it absolute and unlimited or rather self-restricted and conditioned? I will enter this debate by conducting a comparison between the two traditional models of divine self-restriction—Christian kenosis and Jewish-kabbalistic tsimtsum—and then present their modernised philosophical variants, most of all in the thought of Hegel.
article in teksty drugie 2023, nr 1, s. 21–32, 2023
The Eternal Contemporaneity of Trauma, or, On the Pathologies of Polish Memory Let us start with ... more The Eternal Contemporaneity of Trauma, or, On the Pathologies of Polish Memory Let us start with the wrong kind of remembering that considerably impedes any openness to the future. This is the subject of Friedrich Nietzsche's notable treatise "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," which can be read in two ways: either as a direct attack on the "parasite of memory," which lodges itself in the human mind and sucks the vital energy out of it, or-in a more dialectical manner-as a subtle guide that illuminates the difference between pathological and nurturing memory.2 I will follow the second reading-even if it goes against Nietzsche's intentions-as alongside the "antiquarian" memory, which overburdens the psyche with commitments to past things whose traces memory tries to preserve, there is also a kind of active remembering that is governed by a sense of responsibility for the future. When Nietzsche defines humans as beings that are capable of making promises, he does it on the grounds of their ability to properly remember those commitments-all the more so as a substantial number of those are of the negative kind: "Never again!" Therefore, only well-structured memory permits us to escape the circle of fruitless repetition and to break the bonds of harmful projects. Contrary to what Karl Marx has claimed, not every tragedy reappears as farce; it most often returns simply as another tragedy. The idea that good memory can bring deliverance from the vicious circle of compulsive repetition shows up in Sigmund Freud's essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."3 In both these works-of Nietzsche and Freud-a certain paradox comes to the fore, as good, appropriate remembering turns out to be, in part, forgetting. Here the Nietzschean aktive Vergessenheit is above all the ability to gain some distance to the things that were, by framing them as proper past, that is, as something that no longer exists. Proper memory would therefore draw upon the dialectical power of forgetting, which distances past things from the field of the living present, preventing the specters of past events from casting a shadow on the time experienced here and now. While Nietzsche calls the ever-present past a "destructive force," Freud talks in this context of the repetition compulsion, which he also places on the side of the death instinct. The past that cannot become the future and reappears incessantly
article in Pólemos 2024; 18(2): 293–315, 2024
The apocalyptic genre was from the beginning in the centre of the theologico-political discourse ... more The apocalyptic genre was from the beginning in the centre of the theologico-political discourse which, according to Jacob Taubes, always has to choose one of the two fundamental options: either in favour of the apocalypse ("from above," as in early Schmitt, or "from below," as in Taubes himself), or against it in the katechonic defense against the apocalyptic chaos and destruction (late Schmitt). In Taubes's account, apocalypse is simultaneously revelatory and destructive. By assuming the standpoint of the Last Judgment, it passes an ultimate verdict without appeal over the worldas indeed in Taubes's most famous statement: "I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is. I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it come down." It is precisely this form of position assuming the uncompromising perspective of the Last Judgment, which will occupy me in my essay. I want to approach critically the most recent phenomenon of what we may call an absolute judg-mentailityor, in Nietzschean terms, a "mentality of judgment"which takes apocalyptic form of a violent negation, exposing the whole "world as it is" to the scorching light of the verdict and leaving no space that would be free from adjudication.
chapter In Zäsuren / Caesurae: Paul Celans Spätwerk / Paul Celan's Later Work, eds. Chiara Caradonna and Vivian Liska, Wallstein Verlag 2024., 2024
4 I add this translation of Patrick Mensah, following closely the French version of Hölderlin's p... more 4 I add this translation of Patrick Mensah, following closely the French version of Hölderlin's poem, because it is essential for Derrida's analysis of Scholem's speech; especially important here is the word »husky« which does not appear in Hamburger's version: Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 83.
Chapter 9 in Unfinished God: The Speculative Philosophical Theology of Ray L. Hart, edited by Alina N. Feld and Sean J. McGrath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024)., 2024
In this essay, I focus on Ray L. Hart’s innovative idea that Godhead is structured like a languag... more In this essay, I focus on Ray L. Hart’s innovative idea that Godhead is structured like a language. This hypothesis emerges in his magisterial book, God Being Nothing: Toward a Theogony, but is already present in nuce in his earlier work, Unfinished Man and the Imagination. Hart, however, does not define it that way: the allusion to Lacan who claimed that the unconscious is structured like a language is on my part intended for polemical reasons. For Lacan, any articulation (parler) of the linguistic substance of the unconscious (langage) is a betrayal and distortion of the latter: a parlêtre that creates a false symbolic order of being as merely an illusory reality. For Hart, on the other hand, the easy Gnostic condemnation of ens creatum as a distortion, falsity or nothing when compared to the hidden Real, defines the essence of nihilism as dangerously characteristic ‘of much modern and postmodern thought’ (GBN, 6). In order to avoid nihilism, Hart constitutes his Godhead as a ‘nothing that is’ (GBN, 9), but does not ex-ist until it becomes something. It does not represent an evasive Real which negates reality of all actualized being, by reducing it to a mere epiphenomenon: instead, the real is real only and insofar as ‘becomingly real-ized’ (GBN, 31). Unlike in Lacan the parlêtre is a real being constantly emerging out of the apeiron of the Godhead in the act of creatio continua: ‘indeterminate Godhead is rendered determinate God the Creator, calling forth from nothing the determinate human creature who, as image of God, preserves a residuum of indeterminacy over which she is to preside’ (GBN, 223-24). Both moments – of nothing and being – must thus be maintained and related to one another in a non-antagonistic manner: this is the poetic task of the human creature as simultaneously imago Dei and ad imaginem Verbi, reflecting both the Ungrund of Godhead and the power of the Word represented by God the determinate.
article in Stasis nr 15 (1/2023), 2023
The purpose of this essay is to analyze the theodicy of violence in its two different forms: the ... more The purpose of this essay is to analyze the theodicy of violence in its two different forms: the antinomian and the hypernomian. The theodicy of violence deliberately blurs the lines between the messianic idiom of Walter Benjamin's Toward the Critique of Violence (2021), with its stark contrast between mythic and divine violence, and the Lacanian idiom of various subjective positions toward the symbolic order. While the antinomian line turns out to be close to the discursive strategies of the Hysteric, the hypernomian line resembles those of the Pervert. My goal is to present them in purely descriptive and value-free terms. I will thus begin with the close reading of the Critique of Violence, which is, in fact, an apology of a certain form of political violence, and then juxtapose it with another praise of violence, originating in Slavoj Žižek's deliberately "perverse" reading of both Paul and Benjamin. The difference between them will be revealed by the Benjaminian phrase: for the sake of the living. I will try to prove that while violence for the antinomian/hysterical line can be justified only with regard to life conceived as survival, for the hypernomian/perverse line violence becomes a goal in itself.