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Summary: Monotheism and the Other
Review: The aim of his book is a fascinating one: Recently many historians, such as Regina Schwartz or Jan Assmann claimed that monotheism was always linked to intolerance - in contrast to the polytheism it had replaced. Santner argues that, on the contrary, the Judeo-Christian legacy opens up a unique way of seeing and accepting the other as he or she really is. The hero of this book is Franz Rosenzweig, a German-Jewish philosopher (1886-1929) who is best remembered for his enigmatic opus magnum "The Star of Redemption", which outlined a philosophy founded in Judaism, but which Rosenzweig refused to call religious. I doubt that anyone has ever claimed to have fully understood "The Star of Redemption"; Santner offers one way of coming to grips with this great work: He offers a Freudian reading of Rosenzweig and a Rosenzweigian reading of Freud, or he at least claims he does. Rosenzweig refused the brilliant career of a conventional university professor of philosophy; he was looking for a different kind of rootedness, which he finally found in the Judaism he had been born into but had so far neglected: There an "ancient treasure chest whose existence he had never forgotten but which he had never fully explored was found to contain his most personal possessions, things inherited, not borrowed." He feels that now he does no longer step outside the flow of life, as he believes academic philosophy does, but can see things in their particularity and singleness even in their "everyday life". Both Rosenzweig and Freud know that man can never know everything about himself; we feel and "excess of demand", but we cannot really explain why this is so and how it works - even with the help of Psychoanalysis. A real "encounter" with the other must be aware of this "surplus"; the other can only be accepted as a B=B, any attempt at categorizing in the manner of B=A will always be off the mark:"To put it most simply, the Other to whom I am answerable has an unconscious, is the bearer of an irreducible and internal otherness, a locus of animation that belongs to no form of life." This, according to Santner, creates the perspective of an "Ethics of Singularity". Santners thesis culminates in the chapter "Responsiblity beyond the Superego". Rosenzweig feels that the capacity to say "I" "only becomes manifest (...) in and through the response to the passionate call of one's proper name". In my opinion there can be no doubt about it that for Rosenzweig this call is God's call, which in turn enables us to see others in a kind of "revelatory love" not as representatives of some kind of universal but as individuals. In contrast to Martin Buber's vision of encounter as a meeting of perfect understanding, however, here the "paradox of revelatory love (...) is, thus that in some sense it reveals nothing." This is exciting stuff, but I somehow feel the book lacks some kind of conclusion. Instead, Santner offers a discussion of the German poet Hölderlin, which may be due to the fact that Santner has worked extensively on Hölderlin. My main qualm about this challenging book, however, is that in many parts it is very hard to read because of its somewhat clumsy language. Both Rosenzweig and Freud are masters of the German language, their style is always clear, Rosenzweig's often particularly elegant (which does not mean he is easy to understand). In contrast to them Santner is at least partly infected by a kind of postmodern academic sociolect which makes him write sentences like the following:
"The libidinal component of one's symbolic identity must be thought of as being "ibidinal" too: a largely unconscious citation of the authority guaranteeing one's rightful enjoyment of the predicates proper to it." If you think this is perfectly normal English you will enjoy the book even more than I did.
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