Tosafot Gornish Post-Kant: The as Political Thought

Sergey Dolgopolski

Tosafot Gornish (TG)1 is a fourteenth-century commentary on the Tosafists, the thirteenth-century commentators on the Talmud, which in turn is a fourth- to eighth- century commentary on third-century texts (the and its parallel traditions). Preserved only in fragments, and written in the margins of Talmudic manuscripts, TG has been marginalized by the history of Talmud in- terpretation as well. This is because the latter has been understood primarily in legalist terms, not in terms of philosophical or intellectual innovation, let alone in terms of political thought. Otherwise, TG would be one of the central ele- ments in the history of Talmud interpretation, one in which Aristotelian logic and Talmudic rhetoric come together to shape a version of Talmudic rational- ism in contradistinction from ’s philosophical rationalism, which denied the rationality of the Talmud. As Israel Ta-Shma puts it,2 TG is distinct in its way of approaching every argument in the Talmud or in the Tosafists; TG constantly asks why an argument was carried out in this particular way as op- posed to another possible way. This characteristic is both necessary and insuf- ficient for understanding the role of TG in the bi-directional inquiry about the political this essay conducts. There is more: TG makes previous interpretations of the Talmud look either underestimated or unsatisfactory, unless they are explained according to a new criterion, that of logical necessity. TG privileges Aristotelian logic in the same way in which Maimonides privileged it in his early work Milot ha-higayon,3 and in the same way in which Maimonides continued

1 I thank my colleagues, teachers and friends Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Shai Ginsburg, Sarah Hammerschlag, Aaron Hughes, Noam Pines, James Adam Redfield, Bruce Rosenstock, and Zvi Septimus for fruitful discussions of this project in various stages of its development. I would like to thank R. Yehoshua Greenberg for a series of productive conversations, in both face to face and electronic modalities of encounter, about TG. I would also like to recognize the support of the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professorship I was granted to rely upon in preparing this essay for publication. 2 See Israel M. Ta-Shma, Ha-sifrut ha-parshanit la-Talmud be Eropa uvi-tsfon Afriqa: qorot, ishim veshitot. Part 2. : Magnes, 1999. 3 See Maimonides, Israel Efros, Mosheh Ibn Ahitub ben Tibon and Jerónimo: Maimonides’ Treatise on Logic (Maḳālah fi-ṣināʻat al-manṭiḳ): The Original Arabic and Three Hebrew Translations. New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1938.

© sergey dolgopolski, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004345331_004 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-nc 4.0 license.Sergey Dolgopolski - 9789004345331 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 05:12:14AM via free access Tosafot Gornish Post-kant: The Talmud As Political Thought 75 to privilege it in the Guide and in the Mishneh Torah. The innovation of TG consists in using logic to control rhetoric by proving the rhetorical arguments of the Tosafists and in the Talmud to be rational according to the standards of Aristotelian logic. This stands precisely in contrast to Maimonides, who used Aristotelian standards of logic to dismiss rhetorical modes of analysis in the Talmud. Such new orientation to Aristotelian logic also explains TG’s marginal- ity in a legalistic view of Talmud interpretation: Aristotelian analysis does not immediately lead to new legalist achievement, despite a potential for doing so through the fine distinctions that TG teaches us to draw, the potential of which was uncontestably proven in Isaac Canpanton’s reception of TG in his version of Talmudic rationalism. Yet if the tradition of Talmud interpretation is under- stood not only as a legalist tradition but also as a tradition of political thought, TG comes front-and-center. That, however, can only be shown with recourse to concepts and categories of political thought post-Kant, which explains why, in what follows, I invoke a post-Kant reader of TG to draw the implications and to show the heuristic importance of TG for political thought. If approached from a post-Kant perspective on judgment and decision, TG shines anew and pro- vides new intellectual resources for contemporary political thought. To recall and to wit: Kant introduced the faculty of judgment as opposing any dogmatic application of rules to a case; however, per Hannah Arendt,4 he did not venture to describe political judgment. In contrast, Carl Schmitt programmatically im- plies the impossibility of political judgment, replacing it with decision on ex- ception from the law. Jacques Rancière counters Schmitt by defining political thinking and action through the unwelcome but necessary element of perpet- ual dis-agreement between parties as they share words but bypass each other in understanding their meaning.5 Yet despite all these differences, Arendt, Schmitt, and Rancière remain transcendentalists in Kant’s sense: they all allow for a transcendentalist solution of the dogmatism-versus-skepticism dilemma by introducing conditions of possibility of experience that are both internal to and independent from that experience. TG, in contrast, is an instance at which an alternative solution of the dogmatism-skepticism dilemma both lurks and calls for articulation. Reading TG post-Kant allows us to discern this attempted solution and to describe it as apodictic irony, a notion that I will be develop- ing in this essay. Reading TG also requires us to look back at the Talmud from TG’s perspective, showing how TG constructs the past of the Talmud. In that

4 See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (trans. R. Beiner; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 5 See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (trans. Julie Rose; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Sergey Dolgopolski - 9789004345331 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 05:12:14AM via free access 76 Dolgopolski perspective, the Talmud is logically under-appreciated, for which TG compen- sates by combining Aristotle’s apodictic thinking with satire, which, according to Daniel Boyarin,6 is intrinsic to the Talmud’s rhetoric. The complication is that TG’s perspective on the Talmud also occludes that combination of satire and logic, because TG not only reduces satire to irony, but also relegates too much of irony in the rhetoric of the Talmud to the control of apodictic logic of the necessary and the impossible. TG thereby reduces (not to say pigeonholes) both irony and satire of the Talmud’s political and legal thinking to the domain of the possible, the traditional domain of Aristotle’s rhetoric. TG’s apodictic irony thus both creates and occludes the view of the Talmud as an indepen- dent tradition of political thought. The complex dynamic of this creation and occlusion in one and the same act can be described as that of effacement—the appearance of that which disappears precisely at the moment of appearance. TG effaces the Talmud and commentary as an independent tradition of politi- cal thought. This explains the bidirectional movement in this essay. Invoking a post-Kant reader of TG helps to capture that effacement of the Talmud as political thought; by the same token, that move highlights this effacement’s implications for the current debate about understanding the political, no lon- ger only in terms of judgement, decision, and disagreement, but also in terms of apodictic irony as a non-transcendentalist and therefore suppressed alter- native to the hitherto dominant transcendentalist trends in political thought. To begin, a contemporary polemical context helps set the task of the essay. Mutually exclusive theories of t