Sergey Dolgopolski

State University of New York | SUNY · Jewish Thought

This article offers an anthropological and theoretical-archeological comparative exploration of agency, responsibility, and alterity in the Late Ancient Iranian Talmud and its reading in contemporary Manhattan. The guiding question is how the classical rabbinic imagery and conceptualization of the “Goy” or “non-Jew” are implicitly recast in the mod...

Are we down to earth in our connection to earth? If we are environmentalists concerned with "environmental crisis," then does our guiding notion of "environ-ment" (and the by necessity implied notion of a center-most often with a human there) get closely enough to the earth? Departing from either localism or cosmo-politanism in thinking earth, glob...

Asking the question of the emergence of the modern other, the paper explores the inversion of relationships between wife and woman, husband and man in an archeological analysis of a Talmudic reading by Emmanuel Levinas “And God Created Woman.” The theoretical framework of inquiry focuses on the development of relationships between the human on the...

This essay articulates a structural feature and difficulty in the notion of universal humanism: the mechanism of inner exclusion. First, by discussing the historical paradigm of membership in “Israel,” a conceptual–theoretical description of inner exclusion comes into view. There then follows a comparative analysis of inner exclusions in three disc...

Where does the archive of the Rabbinic Rhetorical Schools in Sepphoris, Caesarea and Tiberias belong in the formation of modern subjectivity and humanity? In his archeology of modern subjectivity, Alain de Libera answers a similar question about Church Fathers to locate the beginnings of both (1) a modern human as a willing and thinking subject and...

“Talmud” means in Tannaitic Hebrew “learning,” “study,” or more precisely “expounding.” From the Middle Ages and on, the term came to refer to two corpora of rabbinic literature from Late Antiquity, called, respectively, Palestinian Talmud, or “Yerushalmi,” and Babylonian Talmud, or “Bavli.” Even broader, the term can mean rabbinic literature in La...

This chapter focuses on Jews, political reason, and the concept of the human and the Jew, discussing the varieties of representation that play a role in perception, consciousness, and rationality. In this context, the figure of the Jew is presented as a type in European discourse, conceptually unrelated to ancient Jewish self-understanding and inst...

Theory has often been coded as “Jewish”—not merely because Jewish intellectuals have been central participants, but also, this book argues, because certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theoretical questions across the humanities. In the range of violence and agency that can attend the appellation “Jew,” Jewishness is revealed as a rheto...

Denying recognition or even existence to certain others, while still tolerating diversity, stabilizes a political order; or does it? Revisiting this classical question of political theory, the book turns to the Talmud. That late ancient body of text and thought displays a new concept of the political, and thus a new take on the question of excluded...

The chapter analyses how the question of the political in two currently predominant and competing schools of political thought, political theology, exemplified by Carl Schmitt, and political ontology, exemplified by Jacques Rancière. The notion of the other others comes front and centre in this analysis. In political ontology, the concept of the po...

The chapter analyses the modern political notion of the “Jews,” and the role of that notion in both political ontology and political theology versions of the political. The key notion of the effacement of the political in political theology and political ontology develops further in the argument in the chapter. The political becomes “effaced” that...

The chapter shows how among tradition-oriented scholars of the 20th and early 21st century, the interpersonal in the Talmud became effaced in the notion of a universal subject of reason, ultimately conceived of as pure thought and denying any intrinsic necessity of the intersubjective, let alone the interpersonal. At the center of the discussion is...

The chapter expands the notion of Talmudic refuting to translate it into a certain structure of personhood in an interpersonal relationship. It stages a conception of personhood, which neither “subjectivist” nor “relativist” notions of the humanity of humans can either fully grasp or fully efface. At issue is a possibility for a conception of human...

The “Introduction” formulates the question of the political, and in particular of the emergence and erasure of the political from the horizon of currently predominant political thought in political theology and political ontology. The “Introduction” further attunes the readers to the dynamic key of “effacement” as both emergence and erasure, thereb...

The chapter works through the emerging and disappearing notion of the political in the Talmud, with the notion and practice of refuting, and the underlying notion of interpersonality rather than intersubjectivity at the center. The analysis in the chapter advances through a case study of a particular notion of refuting in the Talmud, the notion of...

This chapter addresses an early modern instantiation of the effacement of the interpersonal political in the Talmud by conceptions of universal (inter)subjectivity and logical-apodictic reasoning. This process first tacitly erases the interpersonal political in the late ancient Talmud by reducing it to dialectical irony. In a second step, the erasu...

The chapter accounts for how the rabbinic political was constructed and thereby productively lost in Jewish secularizing modernist thought and literature of Franz Kafka, Chaim Bialik, and Walter Benjamin. Modernist notions of logical implication, literary expression, and language are at the center of analysis in this chapter, as it articulates a cr...

This chapter explores an implication of the question of effacement of the other others, which this book advanced, for and in thinking the Earth. Mobilizing the question of the other others to think the Earth anew is no more but also no less than an articulation of yet another, perhaps the most important part of the question: How, or is it possible,...

The paper explores the role of competing notions of what does it mean to have a testament of the law of the past in Christian and Rabbinic corpora of text and thought. The argument probes and renegotiates the complex relationships of the Christian suspension of Old Testament by the New Testament and the Rabbinic suspension of (any) new testament in...

This article explores the rhetoric of regret as a way to rethink the aesthetic dimension of two hitherto artificially separated late ancient corpora of thought—rabbinic and “pagan.” Moving away from the thinking in terms of historicist “influences” I arrive at a point of mutual illumination of the corpora, thereby advancing a new model of philosoph...

This article explores the rhetoric of regret as away to rethink the aesthetic dimension of two hitherto artificially separated late ancient corpora of thought rabbinic and "pagan." Moving away from the thinking in terms of historicist "influences" I arrive at a point of mutual illumination of the corpora, thereby advancing a new model of philosophi...

Abstract This article traces a historical shift, and in particular its erasure from memory on the intellectual map of the West, in concepts of subjectivity across practices of rabbinic thinking in late antiquity, medieval interpretations of the Talmud, and modern talmudic scholarship. I first introduce a comparative perspective that relies on a mut...

Focusing on the characters in the Talmud, the chapter applies renegotiates modern theories of sense and truth to describe the protocols of making the sense. If this process is no longer attributed to a named person, and in particular to an anonymous one, how the characters in the Talmud participate in the process of making sense of the texts of the...

What does “to think” mean at the age of technology from mechanical machinery to its most advanced forms of computing? The chapter situates the tradition of thinking in the Talmud in juxtaposition with philosophical and rhetorical traditions of thinking vis-a-vis technology, in particular in view of the impasses of thinking in the context of technol...

The chapter articulates the difference in the understanding of the role of memory in thiniking in modern ways of thinking, and in the way of thinking displayed in the late ancient texts of the Talmud. The chapter gives voice to otherwise tacit Cartesian foundations of modern Talmud scholars in their thinking about thinking in the Talmud.

The chapter describes Talmud criticism as a hitherto predominant modern “scientific” approach to the archive of texts and the body of thought called, to use its medieval name, “The Talmud.” It further outlines the trajectory of moving through (even if not “beyond”) Talmud criticism and the tacit philosophical subscriptions it runs towards asking ab...

The chapter justifies disconnecting thinking in the Talmud from a person, either named or anonymous, either historically really, or literary-fictional. More broadly, the chapter disconnects thinking displayed in the Talmud from the notion of a “thinking subject.”

The chapter re-evaluates the resources of the theory of “redactors” in view of the Talmudic virtual. The analysis heuristically juxtapose Kulechov’s and Eisenstein’s theories and practices of film-montage with the theories and practices attributed to alleged anonymous redactors of the Talmud in the modern theories of the Talmud’s redaction. Undoing...

This concise chapter summarizes, in twenty items, the main conclusions and recommendations of the book. Generally, it calls upon a further development of international—both conventional and customary—criminal law, with a view to a more effective prevention and, as the case may be in the future, repression of the crime of aggression.

Deciphering the figure of “The Author” in the Talmud, the chapter develops a framework of analysis, where it actively engages the resources – the approaches and theories – of Talmud criticism while broadening the context of inquiry to include conflicting rhetorical and philosophical understandings of what it means to remember and what role thinking...

This chapter reintroduces Augustine as a resource for thininking about thinking without the thinking subject by highlighting the role of memory in Augustine, and engaging resources of Talmud criticisim to negotiate an extension of Augustine’s model of thinking in remembering to apply to Talmudic discussions.

The book shows how the characters in the Talmud live their lives as performances of remembering the past traditions better. As the book argues much life of the characters means constant verification of the memory of the past through intrinsically open process of refuting, counterrefuting, and reinventing, that gives the characters their authority,...

This chapter traces how modern interpreters construct Maimonides by reenacting, in a new way, how Maimonides constructs the “ancient” Talmud as a merely rhetorical form of thinking, as opposed to a rational, philosophical mode of thought, and redeems the content of the Talmud in a new, more philosophical-rationalist form, that of a legal code. It t...

The Open Past challenges a view of time that has dominated philosophical thought for the past two centuries. In that view, time originates from a relationship to the future, and the past can be only a fictitious beginning, the necessary phantom of a starting point, a chronological period of "before." This view of the past has permeated the study of...

True disagreements are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement, and provokes unsettling questions: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine relationship between minds? Are disagreeme...

This chapter addresses the question: What is Talmud? According to Gaon, the Talmud originated from a project of emending the printed Talmudic texts based on considerations of his own and others' intellectual experience of Talmudic learning. In the 19th century, the Vilna Gaon's view on the Talmud won another continuation. The book of the Talmud the...

This chapter explores the written work of R. I. Canpanton entitled The Ways of the Talmud. It studies this work of Talmudic methodology in order to compensate for the lack of its existence in English and to show how his book corresponds empirically to the theoretical perspective established in the first chapter.

This chapter examines Canpanton's concept of the art of Talmud in more remote instances of its emergence, both traditional and academic, by studying an example of the Talmud of late antiquity seen in Canpanton's conceptual perspective. Canpanton's turn from the Talmud as an object of either tradition or its history to Talmud as a rational art of it...

This chapter discusses Canpanton's intellectual art of Talmud particularly the category of disagreement back to the context of the Western philosophy of agreement. It analyzes the import of Canpanton's art of Talmud and the more general project of Talmud. This general project of Talmud serves as an entrance for a revisitation of the hitherto margin...

This chapter analyzes the Talmud as an intellectual project in one specific historical moment of its emergence—the 15th-century work of Rabbi Izhak Canpanton of Castalia, also known as the Gaon of Castalia, and his followers. It situates the work of Canpanton with regard to the arts of logic, dialectics, and rhetoric in the Aristotelian philosophic...

This chapter discusses the context of Talmud in philosophy and rhetorical theory. It shows the periphery that philosophy has allowed for both rhetoric and the Talmud on the map of Western metaphysics, on which philosophy itself was always at the center. Given the complex and unstable relationships between philosophy and rhetoric on this map, the ch...

True disagreements are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement, and provokes unsettling questions: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine relationship between minds? Are disagreeme...