Chinese Modernity in German Jewish Thought

A British Academy symposium on the circulation of images of China in German Jewish letters of the early 20th century.

Venue: Stewart House 2/3, Senate House London
Date: May 3, 2024 from 3:30-6:40 pm

Too often, critical discussions around antisemitism and anticolonialism seem completely at odds with one another. This workshop asks whether a consideration of the images of ‘China’ that circulated amongst German Jewish thinkers might help complicate or resolve this impasse by suggesting a different orientation to both the Christian-colonial project and the racialisation of work. How were these images of China used to imagine different ways of organising social, political, and economic life in a context of intensifying antisemitism, capital-critical sentiment, and ambivalence towards the European legacies of imperialism and colonialism in the ‘Orient’?

Free and open to the public, though registration is required. 

To register, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chinese-modernity-in-german-jewish-thought-tickets-805024077687 

For more information, please visit https://daoismandcapitalism.wordpress.com/. 

This event is the second of three associated with Dr. Julia Ng’s British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship project Daoism and Capitalism: Early Critical Theory and the Global South (MCFSS23\230039). Thanks also go to Goldsmiths’ Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought and Royal Holloway’s Centre for Continental Philosophy for their generous support.

Programme

3:30-3:45 pm
Welcome and Introduction: Daoism, Capitalism, and German Jewish Thought
Dr. Julia Ng (Goldsmiths)

Ideas circulated from a modernizing China in the 1910s and 1920s amongst major German Jewish thinkers as they grappled with their own modernity and contemporaneity. How useful or limited is “Orientalism” as an interpretive framework for grasping the career of these ideas, and might competing “Orientalisms”—that of Buber, for instance, referring to quite a different “Orient” altogether, or Marx, which points towards China as a historical entity—complicate the picture in illuminating ways?

3:45-4:25 pm
Rosenzweig, Hegel, and ‘Oriental Messianism’
Dr. Daniel Weiss (Cambridge)

Hegel famously portrayed Jewish messianism as characterized by an ‘Oriental’ orientation that fails to produce effective agency in history.  By contrast, Franz Rosenzweig reaffirmed key elements of Jewish messianism criticized by Hegel, including elements that could outwardly appear linked to passivity or non-action.  However, Rosenzweig treats the Jewish orientation not as weak or ineffective, but as a committed stance that will lead the world to messianic redemption and to the overthrow of ‘illusory’ power-claims.  We will see that, although Rosenzweig himself criticizes various aspects of Daoism, his account of Judaism shares elements in common with various nineteenth and early-twentieth German portrayals of Daoism.  As such, we can understand him as calling into question dominant Christian portrayals of both Judaism and Daoism, and seeking to reclaim the supposedly ‘Oriental’ characteristics criticized by others.  Rosenzweig’s development of a modern, challenging account of Judaism can thus be understood parallelling the ways in which European writers contended with ways in which China’s modernizing developments likewise presented a challenge to dominant Western preconceptions.

4:30-5:10 pm
Ex Oriente Lux: Martin Buber’s Dao-Hasidic Mysticism of the Worldly
Professor Agata Bielik-Robson (Nottingham)

Martin Buber’s interest in Chinese Daoism begins very early in his intellectual career and coincides – not at all accidentally – with his interest in Hasidism: both are treated by him as the cases of “spiritually rich” Orientalism which he opposes to the disenchanted West. Between 1906-1909, he writes The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, The Legend of the Baal Shem, and the Hasidism inspired Ecstatic Confessions, but he also, under the influence of Wang Qingdao, the visiting lecturer at the Berlin Seminar for Oriental Languages, publishes Talks and Parables of Zhuangzi (1910) and  Chinese Ghost and Love Stories (1911) which offer a partial translation of Liaozhai Zhiyu, an early eighteenth century compilation of folktales done by Pu Songling. From this time on, Daoism – interpreted in close comparative relation to Hasidism – will never leave Buber, although he will modify his attitude towards its main concept, the Dao, over time. While in Buber’s early phase, Dao is most of all a notion of a “mystical unity” connecting the sage with the essential oneness of the world, in the later dialogic phase (beginning with his 1923 I and Thou), Dao emerges rather as the Path: the dynamic way into and through the world appreciated in its concreteness and multiplicity. Thus, in his Ascona lecture on Daoism, delivered in 1924, Buber repudiates his earlier “escapist” mysticism of the One, which now transforms into a “intraworldly” mysticism of the Two, strongly focused on the ultimate realness of the particulars, never again to be considered as an ontological “illusion.” Just as before Dao represented for him a transcendental oneness underlying all, closely corresponding with the Hasidic understanding of God as the ehad, the One pervading all creation – now it represents for him a Path into the World, where creation is to be conceived as “individuation of all things,” this time corresponding with the other meaning of ehad: not simply one, but strictly singular and unique. In my paper, I will present this trajectory in close parallel with Buber’s changing views on Hassidism, but will also juxtapose Buber’s use of the Chinese motifs with Martin Heidegger’s turn towards Daoism as instrumental for his post-war Kehre which redefined the relation between Being and beings in favour of the latter. In both thinkers, the Dao conceived as a Path into (and of) the World plays an important role in their turn towards the worldly.  

5:15-5:55 pm
Kafka’s Dao and the Reverse of Possession
Dr. Julia Ng (Goldsmiths) 

Reading, inter alia, Kafka’s Zürauer Aphorisms and the fragment “Workforce without Possession” alongside works of Daoism and on contemporaneous China that were consulted by Kafka, this paper explores how Kafka’s treatment of figures of ancestrality, nonhuman animation, and reversion opens up questions of ‘race,’ community, and political-economic organisation. 

6:00-6:30 pm
Roundtable

6:30-6:40 pm
Q&A 

About the speakers

Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on all areas of Jewish philosophy with special emphasis paid on modern Jewish thought, from Spinoza to Derrida. She is the author of Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (Bloomsbury 2019), Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (Routledge 2014), and co-editor of Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influences (Routledge 2014) and Tsimtsum and Modernity (2021).

Daniel H. Weiss is is Polonsky-Coexist Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He is author of Paradox and the Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion (2012) and Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence (2023), among other publications, and co-editor of multiple books, including Scripture and Violence (2020) and Tsimtsum and Modernity (2021). Actively involved in the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, he is a recent recipient of a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.

Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and founding Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. She specialises in philosophical approaches to literature, modern German-Jewish thought, early 20th-century Germanophone literatures in their transnational contexts, and history of critical theory. Recent publications include her translation and critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence” (with P. Fenves; Stanford UP, 2021) and articles in Theory Culture & Society, Paragraph, CR: New Centennial Review, Modern Language Notes, diacritics, and Critical Times. Funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, she is currently completing a book on Daoism and Capitalism, which has also received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the Center for Jewish History (NYC), and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.