Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy

Martin Kavka. Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + xiii. Cloth, $65.00.

In Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, Martin Kavka traces a subterranean history of what he calls "thejewish meontological tradition," a recurrent encounter with questions of non-being both indigenous to Jewish religious and philosophical thinking and arising in the Jewish relation to Greek meontology and its ethical afterlife in Western philosophy. Kavka argues that these strands of meontological ideas in turn inform a crucial mode of Jewish messianic thought, providing it with conceptual and discursive resources that allow it to refashion itself, "demythologizing the concept of the Messiah" by minimizing its interpretation as an historical and political telos, and rethinking messianism in terms of subjectivity, as the construction of "the ethically responsible self (197). Kavka's primary points of reference in Jewish thought for the conjunction of the ideas of "nothing" and "the messianic" are Maimonides, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Emile Fackenheim, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Kavka locates the key points of the "Greek" discussion of meontology in Plato and Husserl, as well as Hegel, Schelling, and Heidegger. It is by extending the notion of non-being to what he argues are "closely associated ideas" such...