Exemplarity and chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the nation of philosophy (Jacques Derrida, Franz Rosenzweig)

This dissertation is on the one hand a study of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida: It traces an aspect of Derrida's thought—his interest in philosophy's relationship to its specific cultural instantiations—from his earliest work on Husserlian phenomenology to his most recent writings. I particularly emphasize Derrida's explorations into the philosophical significance of assertions of national identity in the seminar cycle he conducted from 1984 to 1988 under the heading “philosophical nationality” and in a number of publications that can be seen as growing out of that project. These writings explore what he terms the “exemplary” structure of discourses of national affirmation—their quality of asserting the most universal, “philosophical” values in the name of the most particular national, cultural, or linguistic entities. I show that this elaboration of a theory of “exemplarism” is continuous with an ongoing preoccupation in Derrida's work with the question of how to account for philosophy's cultural determinations without giving up on its universalist aims—that is, without succumbing to a cultural relativism. Further, I discuss the ethical dimension of the problematic of “philosophical nationality” in view of Derrida's ongoing engagement with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In view of the prominent place of German-Jewish authors in the “philosophical nationality” corpus{09}and of reflections on Jewishness in his considerations of universality and particularity, this dissertation pairs Derrida's philosophy with that of Franz Rosenzweig (which was also a primary influence on Levinas), who developed a theory of Judaism for which election is essential, and who understands this Jewish chosenness in an “exemplarist” sense: in terms of the Jews' role in a universal human history. Drawing in part on his reception of the philosophy of Hermann Cohen, I present Rosenzweig's theories of Judaism, translation, and time and history as both serving to illuminate, and as illuminated by, Derrida's writing on the problem of particularity and universality for philosophy, and on questions relating to the Judaic.