Network member Julia Ng
Julia Ng (Goldsmiths London), Judaism, Daoism, and the Elimination of the Unsayable (Benjamin, Buber)
Where? Kardinaal Mercier Room, Institute of Philosophy, Leuven (Belgium)
When? 12 May 2026, 3:30 PM- 5 PM
What? Judaism, Daoism, and the Elimination of the Unsayable (Benjamin, Buber)
To genuinely grasp the "highly political" relation of language to deed, Walter Benjamin writes in his well-known letter to Martin Buber on 17 July 1916 declining the latter's invitation to contribute to his journal "Der Jude," it is necessary to dispose of viewing language as a medium for expressing pre-formed motives and "correct absolutes" and regard instead the exposition of the unsayable in the core of what is said to be true efficacy in respect to politics and Judaism alike. What if Benjamin's letter to Buber were a document of their disagreement not only on the political theology of the speech act but also on how to understand the social and political significance of Daoism? By 1916, Buber and Benjamin had already come into critical altercation over the former's book "Daniel" in the context of the Freie Studentenschaft. Buber had subsequently invited Benjamin to contribute to "Der Jude"—a term understood by Buber as incomprehensible without the interpolation of the Daoist conception of "return"—and had published translations, prefaces, and lectures on this affinity that were widely read, including amongst members of the youth movement such as Benjamin and Kafka (who did publish in "Der Jude" in 1917). At the same time, Benjamin was coming to terms with his own relation to the student movement through his writing, for instance "Das Leben der Studenten" and "Metaphysik der Jugend," the latter overtly in the terms of Daoist ideas to which he had first been introduced by Gustav Wyneken. How and with what consequences might centering their competing understandings of Daoism compel us to reevaluate the concepts of "Judentum," "Politik," and indeed the "Verhältnis zum europäischen Krieg" at the center of Benjamin's disagreement with Buber's political theology? My paper develops these questions from Buber's and Benjamin's writings circa 1916 and proposes a speculative response thereto based on Benjamin's conception of the written image around his essay on Kafka in 1934, as the clouds of another "europäischen Krieg" were beginning to gather.
Who? Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and founding Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. She specialises in the links between modern mathematics, political thought, and theories of history and language in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin. She is the co-editor (with Peter Fenves) of the critical edition of Walter Benjamin's Toward the Critique of Violence and associated fragments (2021), which contains her new translation of the essay, as well as an edition of Werner Hamacher’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin (2020), both published with Stanford University Press. She is also the co-editor of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School: Special Issue of the Modern Language Notes 127.3 (2012). Prior to joining Goldsmiths, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.
Network member Charles Lesch
Event on Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman's New Translation of Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed, December 17, 2025, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Click here to download the poster with program details and bar code for registration.
Network member Daniel Herskowitz
Conference: "Jewish Thought and Empire: 1830-1939", 8-9 December 2025, University of Antwerp.
Network member Fanny Söderbäck
Organizer workshop "Between the Jewish Baltic and the Black Atlantic" in Stockholm, Sweden, October 9-10, 2025.
Network member Georgiana Diana Apostica
Ideologies of Conservation and Transformation
Round Table Summer Symposium - Bruno Kessler Foundation (Institution of Religious Studies)
23-24 June 2025
Co-organizer FoReSt (Forum for Religious Studies, Bruno Kessler Foundation)
Speaker at the 19th World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem), August 4-8, 2025.
Network member Suzanne Last Stone
Organizing: "Law and Antisemitism" Conference, March 8, 2025, Cardozo Law School; Conference on "Work and Human Purpose", to be held Spring 2027, Cardozo Law School.
Network member Bryan Cheyette
Keynote lecture "Jewish Studies after October 7"at the British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies, July 7-9, 2025.
Call for Papers: click here.
Network member Caroline Sauter
Workshop „Zum Stern: Judaism - Christianity - Islam in Franz Rosenzweig’s World and Thought“
organized by Caroline Sauter / Galili Shahar / Christian Wiese
Frankfurt, 17-18 February 2025
https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/166510616.pdf
Workshop „Über dem Abgrund. Zum Hebräischen“
organized by Caroline Sauter / Galili Shahar
Frankfurt, 09.05.2025
https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/171472893.pdf
Network member Hannah Sabrina Hübner
Co-organizing Workshop "Materialism. Between Totality and Plurality", Goethe University Frankfurt, 30-31 January 2025.
Network member Randi Rashkover
- Conference on Contemporary Jewish Thought and Theology (Princeton University, Spring, 2025).
- American Academy of Religion, 2024.
- Society of Biblical Literature, 2024.
- Co-editing issue for the journal 'Religions' with Yonatan Brafman and Leora Batnitzky on Contemporary Jewish Thought and Theology.
Network member Elad Lapidot
Network member Benjamin Balint
Network member René Bloch
Lecture series on "Les débuts de la philosophie juive dans l'antiquité" at the Collège de France. January 22, January 29, February 5, February 12 2025.
Network member Sergey Dolgopolski
Talmud and Psychoanalysis
University at Buffalo, Department of Jewish Thought Presents: "Talmud and Psychoanalysis" with Dr. Daniel Strauss
19 November 2024
Network member Ulrich Baer
How to Think and Act Politically with Hannah Arendt
September 20, 2024 | 2:30 pm – 4:30 pm EDT
Special Seminar on the New Edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind.
In a proposal for her final, unfinished book, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt asserts that thinking, willing, and judging “are constitutive for all political action.” In this special seminar, the editors of a new, annotated, critical edition of The Life of the Mind, Wout Cornelissen (Radboud University) and Thomas Bartscherer (Bard College) lead a discussion moderated by Ulrich Baer about one of Arendt’s animating questions: Can the three mental activities—thinking, willing, judging—condition us to act politically and to “abstain from doing evil”?