Séminaire "Politique de la littérature" - Axe 1 "Poïétique et Politique"

Conférence de Daniel Boyarin (University of Berkeley) et Sergey Doldopolski (University at Buffalo) :  " Talmud, Diaspora and the Jewish (No-)State  "

animée par Elad Lapidot (Université de Lille)

Jeudi 27 avril 2023 de 17h30 à 19h en visioconférence

Participer à la réunion Zoom :
univ-lille-fr.zoom.us/j/93130489013

contact : elad.lapidot@univ-lille.fr

Abstract:

Calling into question the meaning, wisdom and perspectives of a Jewish nation-state has perhaps never felt so timely as in the last weeks. Beyond difficult questions that concern the specific political situation and orientation of the current State of Israel, and the specific role played by the commitment of this State to Jewishness, current events reinvoke more fundamental debates with respect to the meaning of statehood for Jewish collective being. If certain current of contemporary Judaism, especially in Israel since the 1967 war, has celebrated the Jewish Nation-State as the end of Jewish exile, the abolishment of diaspora, and the messianic redemption of Jewish and perhaps of human history, others have been warning that statehood, Israeli or any, is rather Judaism’s demise. The latter indicated that it was not statehood, but diaspora that has been the basic condition for the development of historical Jewish cultures – and of Jewish literatures, first and foremost the Talmud, which, as Daniel Boyarin argued, has been the Jewish “travelling homeland”. Is the Jewish Nation-State the new Jewish exile from the talmudic homeland?

In this panel, Elad Lapidot (University of Lille) will speak about these questions with two prominent experts for talmudic culture and literature, Daniel Boyarin (University of Berkeley) and Sergey Dolgopolski (University at Buffalo). In his new book, The No-State Solution. A Jewish Manifesto (Yale UP, 2023), Daniel Boyarin offers an altneu answer to the question of the collective identity of Jews as a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty. Sergey Dolgopolski’s last book, Other Others: The Political After the Talmud (Fordham UP, 2018), staged a critical conversation between contemporary political theory and a literary-theoretical exploration of the Talmud.

Sergey Dolgopolski’s general area of interest is the variety of ways in which philosophy and literature interact, creating new philosophical concepts and new literary forms. He specializes in the Talmud as a body of text and thought seen from poetic, rhetoric and philosophical perspectives, with a particular interest in mutual hermeneutics of philosophical, rhetorical and Talmudic traditions, and with emphasis on mutually shaping engagements of poetic Talmudic and philosophical thinking. Among his publications: Other Others: The Political After the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2018), The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (Fordham U. Press, 2012), What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (Fordham U. Press, 2009).

Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor Emeritus of Talmudic Culture and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley received his Ph. D. in 1975 from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He has been an NEH Fellow (twice), a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, a holder of the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin and a Ford Foundation Fellow. He spent the academic year 2012-2013 as a fellow of the Wissenschaft Kolleg in Berlin and a von Humboldt Forschung Preisträger at the FU Berlin in 2017. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2006. Recent Publications: The No-State Solution, A Jewish Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2023), Judaism: the Genealogy of a Modern Notion (Rutgers University Press, 2018), A Traveling Homeland: The Talmud as Diaspora (Penn: 2016).