The papers in this panel re-think the category of philosophy by engaging with the philosophical dimensions of identity, wisdom, and mourning through particular cultural lenses. The first paper examines Gillian Rose’s complex relationship with Derrida, positing him as a representation of "aberrated mourning." It highlights Rose's preference for "inaugurated mourning," drawing connections to early Christian theology while critiquing Derrida's relation to the halakhic figure of the agunah. The second paper explores Glikl’s Yiddish writings, considering how her reflections on “living well” challenge Greek philosophy by promoting a distinctly Jewish wisdom. The paper illustrates how Glikl's writing serves as a philosophical practice aimed at achieving this “counter-philosophy.” The third paper analyzes Frantz Fanon’s analysis of Sartre, examining the role of religion in defining humanity within colonial discourse. The paper explores how Blackness is negotiated through comparison to Jewishness and the entangled narratives of exclusion and fetishism in European modernity. Together, these papers contribute to ongoing discussions of philosophy, identity, and cultural critique.
Joining recent conversations around the work of the British philosopher Gillian Rose, I consider Rose's engagement, not with Hegel, Marx, or Adorno, but with a figure she repeatedly held up as the embodiment of everything she did not want her philosophy to be: Derrida. As a character, I argue, Derrida is crucial to Rose's distinction between the twinned -- enemy -- processes of "aberrated mourning" and "inaugurated mourning." Epitomizing the former, Derrida repeats, for Rose, the halakhic figure of the agunah: the wife deserted by her husband, stuck in a state of waiting for him to return. Through her rejection of the Derridean agunah, I show, Rose articulates her vision of inaugurated mourning -- a vision, she suggests in a footnote, modeled on John Climacus's inaugurated eschatology. I take the footnote seriously, tracking the ways in which Rose's turn to Judaism -- through Derrida -- is bound up with a turn to early Christian theology.
Between 1691 and 1719, the wealthy Jewish merchant Glikl composed a text in Yiddish to document her life and give advice to her children. The form has widely been remarked upon as unusual (Moseley 2006; Davis 1995). Yet these debates on form largely overlook the philosophical questions that underlie her work, which I argue meditate on what it means to “live well.” Glikl’s approach to the question of “living well” relies on her interrogation of Greek philosophy and her preference for something else, what we might call Jewish wisdom or “counter-philosophy” (Bielik-Robson 2014). I show how Glikl’s account of Jewish wisdom responds to what she views as the insufficiencies of Greek philosophy. Next, I show how her embodied practice of writing becomes the method for achieving this wisdom. After critiquing philosophy as a way of life, I show that Glikl demonstrates how writing about life can be a philosophical practice.
Examining Frantz Fanon’s references to religion and fetishism in Black Skins, White Masks, this paper argues that religion is central to his conception of the human in Western colonial discourse, and to his conception of the Black as what the human excludes. Drawing on his analysis of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, it shows how the role of religion in articulating Blackness is negotiated through comparison to Jewishness as another fetishized object of European modernity.