Another Finitude - (Political Theologies) by Agata Bielik-Robson

Book Synopsis

Beginning from the notion of finite life, Another Finitude takes this staple subject from post-Heideggerian philosophy and opposes it to the onto-theological concept of infinity, represented by an eternal absolute. Although critical of Heidegger and his definition of finitude as 'being-towards-death', this book does not revert to the ontological idea of infinity secured in the sacred image of immortality. But it also does not want to give up on infinity altogether; the infinite is transposed, so it can become a necessary moment of the finite life.

A theological framework for the new elaboration of the concept of finitude is crucial; but instead of following the Lutheran formula, Agata Bielik-Robson turns to the sources of Judaism. Taking inspiration from the Jewish idea of torat hayim, the principle of finite life, which found the best expression in the biblical sentence: love strong as death; love emerges as the alternative marker of finitude, allowing to us redefine it in an affirmative way. By tracing the avatars of love in the group of 20th-century thinkers, or 'messianic vitalists'-Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Arendt, Derrida, and (deeply revised) Freud-the book attempts to demonstrate the possibility of such affirmation. Love becomes the new 'infinite-in-the-finite'; love in all its forms, from the original libidinal endowment of the human psyche to the last metamorphoses of agape, the Greco-Christian divine love.

Review Quotes

After God, Nature. Four hundred years of intellectual history have unfolded along this trajectory, with the great theological promise of immortality slowly giving way to the finitude of existence understood according to a naturalistic conception of 'life'. But to live according to nature is perhaps even less advisable than to live under an eternal God, for nature becomes biopolitics, life becomes resource, individuation dissolves into the organic. Is there an alternative to God or Nature? This book presents one. Drawing on a series of Jewish thinkers who imagine "another finitude" that does not reduce to natural life, Bielik-Robson shows how the prevailing course of intellectual history can be steered toward the redemptive resources of love without lulling into eternity. Diagnostically acute, erudite, creative and rigorous, this is a contemporary guide to the perplexed that forges a third way beyond God and Nature.

Agata Bielik-Robson brilliantly draws upon a range of thinkers under the heading of 'messianic vitalism' in order to construct an innovative and needed reconstruction of finitude: a finitude that affirms life not merely as a precursor to death, but as a form of existence that can, paradoxically, make room for the infinite within, rather than going beyond, finite life. In the process, she shines light on the death-orientation that characterizes much of modern and contemporary philosophy, and gives us tools to differentiate such frameworks from a mode of thinking that is oriented 'toward life'.

Much of modern Jewish philosophy is dismissed as a simple assimilation by Jews to Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment vocabularies and norms. In Another Finitude, Agata Bielik-Robson redescribes part of the Jewish philosophical canon in terms of its protest of Christian and post-Christian philosophies that insist that earthly existence is impoverished, and that we are in debt to God for even that mere life. Jewish philosophy becomes, on Bielik-Robson's impressive reading, a therapy that produces happiness in life because it does not aspire to any eternal beyond. Another Finitude shows why the humanities, and the universities, need to foreground the voices and arguments of the thinkers whom she treats.

About the Author

Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. She is the author of Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (2014).