Another Finitude

"Another Finitude invites conversation with many other traditions and schools of life ... This ongoing imaginary symposium is keeping my own thinking and practice fresh and lively. I do warmly recommend this book and am looking forward to the next. * Philosophical Practice * After God, Nature. Four hundred years of intellectual history have unfolded along this trajectory, with the great theological promise of immortality slowly giving way to the finitude of existence understood according to a naturalistic conception of 'life'. But to live according to nature is perhaps even less advisable than to live under an eternal God, for nature becomes biopolitics, life becomes resource, individuation dissolves into the organic. Is there an alternative to God or Nature? This book presents one. Drawing on a series of Jewish thinkers who imagine ""another finitude"" that does not reduce to natural life, Bielik-Robson shows how the prevailing course of intellectual history can be steered toward the redemptive resources of love without lulling into eternity. Diagnostically acute, erudite, creative and rigorous, this is a contemporary guide to the perplexed that forges a third way beyond God and Nature. -- Michael Fagenblat, Senior Lecturer in the department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies, The Open University, Israel Much of modern Jewish philosophy is dismissed as a simple assimilation by Jews to Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment vocabularies and norms. In Another Finitude, Agata Bielik-Robson redescribes part of the Jewish philosophical canon in terms of its protest of Christian and post-Christian philosophies that insist that earthly existence is impoverished, and that we are in debt to God for even that mere life. Jewish philosophy becomes, on Bielik-Robson's impressive reading, a therapy that produces happiness in life because it does not aspire to any eternal beyond. Another Finitude shows why the humanities, and the universities, need to foreground the voices and arguments of the thinkers whom she treats. -- Martin Kavka, Professor of Religion, Florida State University, USA Agata Bielik-Robson brilliantly draws upon a range of thinkers under the heading of ‘messianic vitalism’ in order to construct an innovative and needed reconstruction of finitude: a finitude that affirms life not merely as a precursor to death, but as a form of existence that can, paradoxically, make room for the infinite within, rather than going beyond, finite life. In the process, she shines light on the death-orientation that characterizes much of modern and contemporary philosophy, and gives us tools to differentiate such frameworks from a mode of thinking that is oriented ‘toward life’. -- Daniel H. Weiss, Polonsky-Coexist Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, UK"