Reading Scholem..

In chapter one of The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Scholem quotes a long passage from Maimonides’s “Laws Concerning the Installation of Kings”. Scholem then remarks that “In these measured words of a great master every sentence has a polemical purpose.” This does not of course mean that Maimonides is a polemicist. Scholem is talking about strategic strikes against an enemy in a larger battle. Each statement is simultaneously an attempt to displace and rebuff another position. This of course is what polemic is about. But, just to clarify my previous post, the Polemicist (as I defined him) is someone who makes the enemy into a kind of fetish, a fetish to which he constantly returns and derives some obscure jouissance from doing so. Furthermore, without this enemy he would evaporate, lose his drive and consistency. The one who only engages in polemic, on the other hand, strikes against the enemy only to move forward to his true object. The Polemicist invokes the true object merely as a stick with which to beat the enemy.

But actually, what I wanted to quote was this passage from chapter two of Scholem’s book:

THE 19th century, and 19th-century Judaism, have bequeathed to the modern mind a complex of ideas about Messianism that have led to distortions and counterfeits from which it is by no means easy to free ourselves. We have been taught that the Messianic idea is part and parcel of the idea of the progress of the human race in the universe, that redemption is achieved by man's unassisted and continuous progress, leading to the ultimate liberation of all the goodness and nobility hidden within him. This, in essence, is the content which the Messianic ideal acquired under the combined dominance of religious and political liberalism-the result of an attempt to adapt the Messianic conceptions of the prophets and of Jewish religious tradition to the ideals of the French Revolution.

Traditionally, however, the Messianic idea in Judaism was not so cheerful; the coming of the Messiah was supposed to shake the foundations of the world. In the view of the prophets and Aggadists, redemption would only follow on a universal revolutionary disturbance, unparalleled disasters in which history would be dislodged and destroyed. The nineteenth century view is blind to this catastrophic aspect. It looks only to progress toward infinite perfection.

This also, in part, is why utopia cannot be envisaged. Because the subject who does the envisaging, the frames and metaphors and concepts that are the media of that envisaging, will themselves be smashed or interfered with in the course of 'revolutionary disturbance'.