Raphael Zagury-Orly Interview | Alex Gilbert #252

Raphael Zagury-Orly is an Israeli philosopher. He is currently Visiting Lecturer of Philosophy at the Catholic Institute of Paris and since 2019 program director at the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris). He is also Associate Member at the Centre de Recherche sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL, EHESS-CNRS). Between 2003 – 2014 he was Professor of Philosophy at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Israel) and, between 2010 – 2014 he directed its MFA Program. 

Raphael Zagury-Orly has held positions as Researcher at the Asia and Europe in a Global Context Institute at the Universität Heidelberg (Germany) and Visiting professorships of Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Roma – Sapienza in 2015-2016, the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung – Karlsruhe in 2014-2015 and at Sciences Po – Paris between 2016-2019. 

In 2015, he co-founded, with Charlotte Casiraghi and Robert Maggiori, the Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco: https://philomonaco.com

In 2021, he published at Les Liens qui Libèrent (Paris): Le dernier des sionistes, and in collaboration with Joseph Cohen, at Galilée (Paris): L’adversaire privilégié. Heidegger, les Juifs et nous. 

In 2024 he published together with Joseph Cohen an English text (in Germany) entitled To Live and Die in History and together with Isabelle Alfandary and Sandra Laugier Where is French Philosophy heading?  

Since 2004, he is Scientific Editor at the Resling Publishing House in Tel-Aviv, where he has supervised numerous Hebrew translations of Derrida, Deleuze, Bataille, Lyotard and Anders.  

He is the official curator for the Night of Philosophy in Tel Aviv (Israel) since 2015. 

What are your thoughts on the reception of The Privileged Adversary and your work on technique? 

Raphael Zagury-Orly: The reception of The Privileged Adversary is of great concern and interest for me. The question of technique as well, since I work extensively on Gunther Anders’ reading of Heidegger and on his own reflection on the nuclear deployment of technique. All philosophical reflection today, and more particularly all reflection on history and historical events, cannot avoid engaging in the question of technology. I published and prefaced in Hebrew his fascinating and moving correspondence with Claude Eatherly, the pilot who assisted in dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. There is also an article on Anders in the book To Live and Die in History, which I published this year with Joseph Cohen. I read Anders through his intimate, demanding and anxious debate with the overbearing eschatological and apocalyptic Heideggerian reading of the question of technique. For me, Anders represents a radically different approach to technique than Heidegger, which is still quite common and shared by so many in philosophy today. For Heidegger, technique carries within it the possibility of an exit from technique, its non-technical origin, while Anders, by focusing on the immense threat of nuclear catastrophe (in his own way), marks the impracticality and the restrictions of an apocalyptic unveiling discourse. Nuclear Catastrophe plainly exposes the limits of this Heideggerian discourse.  

 Indeed, for Anders the nuclear catastrophe and cataclysm stemming from the uncontrollable development of technology represents the emblem of the complete self-destruction of human life, whereas for Heidegger the planetary devastation of technology marks a form of occasion, or even opportunity, to engage in a turn (kehre) towards the essential clearing (Lichtung) of the truth of Being. Where Anders sees the menace of complete destruction of mankind by mankind, Heidegger perceives the apocalyptic occasion for yet a further possibility for mankind to re-engage with the meaning of Being itself. 

 Through an unrelenting engagement with the work of Gunther Anders I try to explore the possibility of thinking outside and beyond Heidegger’s binary dispositive and to suggest a critical analysis of technology where responsibility displaces and replaces in many ways the ontological determination of truth and meaning in order to render humankind wholly concerned and involved in both the perils and the opportunities offered by technology. This is a divergent reading from the idea of catastrophe as the revelation (the “eye-opener”, or God forbid the “miracle”)) of the truth of history towards novel beginning. However powerful the latter may be, however deeply anchored in the philosophical quest for meaning, it reduces and all too often annuls the singularity of the event in history and with it the possibility of activating a wholly different concept of human responsibility.  

Do you mean that technique in Heidegger’s onto-phenomenological reading of historicity necessarily allows for reconstruction after destruction, which is not possible in self-annihilation? 

Raphael Zagury-Orly: Technique in its nuclear development demands a rethinking of all our concepts outside the logic of apocalyptic destruction/construction, outside and beyond the meta-logic of apocalyptic revelation. It demands a radically different approach in our philosophical thinking of historical events. The singularity of nuclear catastrophe (just like the Shoah, in a different manner) compels us to re-evaluate the fundamental concepts of our philosophies of history from Kant and Hegel to Marx and Heidegger of course. From my point of view, the concepts emanating from the foundational apocalyptic logic incessantly conciliating the becoming of history with an original and determined truth, whereby every singular historical event is seen and understood as a moment of rebirth and re-beginning, and therefore as an event of salvation, are strictly unacceptable. I search for another formulation of the relationship between responsibility, memory and history. I could add that Anders – unlike Heidegger – never seeks to abandon our history in order to sojourn in a supposed history of Being, and expects humankind to respond to what we would call an idea of justice wholly detached from the ontological determinations of history and therefore entirely associated with a certain form of responsibility towards humankind itself, its sustainability and historical accountability. 

What is your view on the recent controversy in France about the distinction between structural and contextual antisemitism? 

Raphael Zagury-Orly: Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism, it is detrimental and sometimes, way too often, fatal to Jews. What exactly would “contextual anti-Semitism” be? This position is unjustifiable: we do not hierarchize types of racism, why should we invent “different types” of anti-Semitism? We may be radically critical of the current political government in Israel without multiplying the shortcuts, the amalgamations, the lies and the shameful omissions at work regarding the Jews and Israel. This has not been the line of La France Insoumise since October 7 and beyond. What is termed contextual anti-Semitism wants to pass itself as acceptable anti-Zionism. 

 We may criticize the Israeli government and current politics while defending Israel’s right not only to exist but to defend itself against a politically perverse and monstrous Hamas and political Islamism, which use all Western anti-Semitic resources to seduce the youth and a certain de-colonial left. As for the virulent anti-Zionism of certain Jews like Judith Butler or, in different ways, that of Daniel Boyarin, or Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, here is what I think: they refer to Judaism to express and defend their anti-Zionism. But they do not represent Jews that are mostly Zionist, which is a fact that needs to be taken into consideration when you think politically and historically. Zionism continues to make sense for most Jews beyond the forms of extremisms that claim it as their own and beyond the re-appropriations and diversions of a certain political radicalism manifested in the Israeli extreme right. Zionism is all about taking into account Jewish historical “lived” experience. 

Moreover, this argument is dishonest: there exists a fantasy of exile in the minds of certain anti-Zionist Jews which would in no way resolve Israel’s current difficulties. Israel exists and is destined to continue to be the home and refuge of millions of Jews around the world. We must take the political risk of thinking about Israel in all its complexity, including its exilic complexity, without dismissing the political existence of Jews in Israel. 

 The idea that Judaism is merely exilic is absurd. That it has a simple and homogeneous exilic “identity” is ludicrous. On my part, I think that the exilic experience of Jews is not only deep and real, it is necessary for Zionism itself, for its evolution and for its future formulation. I would also add that the Zionist political experience is necessary for the dis-identification and de-essentialisation of Judaism, which seems to be the most challenging thing to think and to affirm today. 

Furthermore, to the extent that Zionism also has links and ties with Judaism, the form of the Nationalist State is not its last word: by constituting one of the attempts – not always conscious – to think about politics as a risk of the infinite – anxiety of the not-yet, of the unaccomplished (“Messianicity without Messianism”) – my Zionism opens up to a Jewish thought of exile insufficiently affirmed in and by political and historical Zionism. From there, the Zionism that I am putting forward is one where everything still remains the task ahead of us.  

But does this relate to thinkers like Judith Butler? 

 Raphael Zagury-Orly:  Judith Butler cultivates her Anti-Zionism in the name of a certain attachment to exilic Judaism… She claims that Judaism is a but a product of exile, written and formulated in exile, and totally unrelated with any idea of return, national home and politics, any attachment to a place, to the land of Israel. My attempt is to think of a certain relationship to exile within a national home, exilic Zionist politics free of lyricism. 

 Is it still necessary to remind how catastrophic has been the exilic experience? 

 Again, the question for me is how to think a certain idea of exile, of estrangement within the place, a sort of exilic being alongside the Idea and reality of return. I do not want to think of exile outside Israel, abroad. This can very quickly become just another piece of coquetry. I’m looking to think of exile, of Judaism as having a relationship to exile, a profound relationship to exile right here, in the place of return. 

I am trying to reintroduce into Zionist discourse a certain exilic experience and the memory of a relationship with others which was not only catastrophic, not only one of suffering. To awaken the memory of a certain detachment from the place which also testifies to a certain Jewish experience of politics. To recall the dimension of questioning specific to Zionism generated by Jewish “estrangement”, prior to any fantasy and ideology of return to the origin. 

Despite its apparent hegemony, Zionism remains precarious and perfectible. It is in this direction that I orient my thought, albeit the enormous damage caused by almost fifteen years of Netanyahu’s governance, his support of the ultra-nationalists and the ultra-orthodox and the violent divisions that he has inscribed at the heart of the Israeli society to better dominate it. 

It must be said: Zionism does not put an end to the exilic sensitivity of the Jews – their exilic consciousness marked by the sense of strangeness, otherness – which means that it will probably never succeed in stripping the Jews off from their relationship to the oddness of the world, their non-adequacy with the world. And that’s not a bad thing. It might even be a “good thing” in many ways. But this does not mean that Judaism is condemned to wander without moorings and without links above ground, or that sooner or later it will have to return to the path of exile. It is more likely that they still have to think and work politically on their relationship of foreignness to the place – at the heart of the place which saw them emerging to and accessing their political space and to which they were and remain attached: Zion. 

Quite briefly, we may contend that what we call Israel, the political space inaugurated by Zionism, is not only the affirmation of a “thousand-year-old” “recognized” and theologically organized religion, an identifiable culture, a clearly established nation and a distinct and evident language which has come together into an ontologically determined identity. It is also and perhaps above all a path, a storm of infinite questions, a movement seeking to always go beyond, surpass the logics of self-affirmation, the pure, the logics of the proper and of property. It is the inauguration of a space of dilemmas, troubled areas and the awakening of aporias in the very good sense of the term. Politics also consists of acknowledging the aporias of politics, of identity, of religion, of sovereignty, of seeing in them places, potentials of invention.   

With Zionism, new socio-politico-economic and theological issues are emerging in Jewish history. In the years following the creation of the state, we were concerned with survival. Threatened again today, we must actively enter into the concrete of politics and expose ourselves to the issues that shape the Israeli public space. I am thinking of the role of national identity in democracy, of the definition of what constitutes a people in terms of the meeting of different national and religious communities, of the need for more or less active secularization in the construction of a just and egalitarian democracy, the status of women, non-citizens, minorities, gender, ecology, but also and today more than ever, to propose solutions to the dramatic situation of the Palestinians. Zionism provokes Jewish civilisation. Forces it to reformulate itself again. And again. Until now we have not been confronted in such a brutal and explicit way with the complicated relationships between Judaism (tradition, religious texts and historical experience) and Democracy, between so-called “original” or “fundamental” Judaism and Democracy, secularization, the world. 

To the extent that Judaism as such, in “itself”, as it would “always already be”, does not exist, it is indeed compatible with democracy, with certain modalities of secularization. This democratization is essential for any modern, heterogeneous, multiple society. Thus, it is obvious that it remains impossible to found a modern State without endorsing a form of secularization and therefore without an effective confrontation with the dilemmas of common life.  

Do you relate this to the thoughts of Benny Lévy who focuses on the notion of “return” ? 

Raphael Zagury-Orly: I definitely distance myself from any type of reference to Benny Lévy because I believe that reducing Judaism to the idea of return is absolutely ruinous and impoverishing regarding Jewish thought and historical experience. I think, like Levinas, that the path of return takes infinite detours, but not only that. This is something that also needs to be thought of politically. I believe we must think about the political and not think of Judaism as apolitical or outside of politics, which is a great temptation today. We cannot escape the political and the historical; this is what Zionism is all about, however painful, frustrating, or even exasperating it is in our Israeli context. But it’s crucial. I would add that the political and the historical can also provoke in their own way events of detachment, dis-identification. We cannot think of the return to Israel as the sole affirmation of a national culture and language. Israel, the political space inaugurated by Israel, has been creating events of difference, dis-identification, and criticism must be politically considered. During the past two years the Israeli extreme right has been exposed in the most flagrant way in its mediocrity, inanity, inabilities. That is also what Zionism in its emancipational virtue does and can do.  

 If you take Benny Lévy’s text, Being Jewish, you see the profound saturation of the imbrications between his idea of return and his apocalyptic messianic Judaism (in the Heideggerian sense of the word). “Our task” according to Benny Lévy would therefore be as follows: “not to ignore the apocalypse”, “to re-sensitize ourselves to the apocalyptic sensitivity” that the “modern Jew” “would have lost”, “to relearn how to decipher the signs”, “to start from the effect of apocalyptic unveiling”, “to make an apocalyptic/Jewish reading of reality”. He states that this is something he draws from Levinas. To begin with, this is not an appropriation of Levinas, it’s a diversion. Moreover, I don’t think that we (jews) were “once” something which we have lost “today”. That in that sense our task “today” is to find something we lost, “ourselves” again, our initial, primary identity. 

In addition, Levinas, who was and remained suspicious of the idea and the logic of origin and purity, is radically non-apocalyptic, in rupture with the apocalyptic structure of history. What has become impossible following the first World War, the second World War, the Shoah, and other disastrous events, is not only critical rationality (and the logic of always temporary crisis) but also the apocalyptic rationality, which is not a rationalist wisdom but an onto-phenomenological thought that necessarily looks to give meaning and to justify the catastrophic event. I seek to think from the nonsensical, another relationship to history and another responsibility toward history. Not seeing Levinas as rebelling against the very possibility of inscribing and appropriating the catastrophic and the suffering in history and in the self-justifying narratives of history is missing everything about his singular gesture. Everything would happen as if Levinas demanded from philosophy a face to face with the singularity of historical catastrophes by marking each time a certain halt, as soon as it is about appropriating them for the deployment of a generalized sense. 

 I would like to emphasize an additional point – which is important for the elaboration of a Judaic philosophical thought today (and probably just as much for Zionism that is yet to come) – namely my insistence in questioning all the different modalities of apocalyptic discourses – whether they are inspired by Greek rationality, Christian theology and up to and including those within Judaism itself. By questioning all the recourses to an apocalyptic structure of meaning both in the Greco-Christian philosophical tradition as well as within Judaism (clearly within messianic religious-Zionism), through the active questioning of the manner in which apocalyptic structures of meaning end up restraining what a ‘Jewish thought’ could bring to the philosophical concept, my reading radicalizes a certain oblique and yet implied possibility in ‘Jewish thought’ itself which would engage another relation to “temporality”, “alterity”, “universality”, “History”, the “ethico-political”, and the singularity of catastrophe (passed, present and future) in history. 

What can suspend the teleological movement of history? What makes the realization or completion of historical meaning impossible in the face of a singular historical event? It is the countless experiences of these exposed bodies to the singular historical event, upsetting, disturbing the order of history. To confront the irreducible nudity of the human body is first and foremost to learn how to express the “unbearability” of suffering, to mark the non-sensical “basis” of suffering, the impossibility to be signified according to the essence of the story. This is what Levinas terms the “uselessness of suffering”. 

 This is not the time to escape from history or politics, which is what Benny Lévy, a part of religious messianic Zionism and the anti-Zionist far left wish for. It’s time to get in there. To step inside, If I may say. It also means going into confrontation. The antagonisms within the Israeli political space occasioned by Zionism are infinite, in the process of multiplying, and yet to come: the questions regarding the necessity for a constitution, how and where to stabilize borders, the status of religion, minorities, non-Jews, women, what does it mean to be sovereign, autonomous, self-governing, continue to trouble its political and social spaces. Zionism has projected us into the political-historical space. Fantasies of regressing to a-historical (orthodox, messianic, anti-Zionist left) and exilic fantasies are becoming increasingly loud and authorized. If we follow nationalist-Zionist’s rationality we will be condemned to live alone and without any global support. If we follow Butler’s rationality, we would be saved and somehow protected by withdrawing from politics and by avoiding history, and mainly by eluding “getting our hands dirty”. But Zionism has never been that. It has always been about the risk of getting unclean, soiled even, about refusing to claim some sort of purity, of innocence. About refuting the moralistic posture devoid of politics. It was constituted around the need to think ethics and politics all together, one within the other. Never about imposing morality upon politics. We must have the audacity to re-enchant the Zionist political engagement against the populists and demagogues who would do anything to generate ever more chaos and disenchantment in the name of the fantasy of purity. 

Do you find an alternative perspective in Anders? 

 Raphael Zagury-Orly: I find it in Anders. I find it in Levinas and Derrida, in my way of combining their thought. For example, in Anders, I am intrigued by his explanation why he chooses to use the term apocalypse for the nuclear event or even for the catastrophic in history. He uses it because no one hears the fundamental, primary meaning of unveiling, of revelation anymore. We might not have a choice but to use this term. He understands all too well the limits of this onto-theological terminology and the parameters of this meta-rationality of the apocalyptic. He clearly says we cannot continue thinking about the catastrophic event, particularly the technical one in its nuclear deployment, as a possibility to open up to the deep meaning of things and history. We cannot persevere in the idea that where catastrophe is, where it grows or happens, so does the saving unveiling power. 

Is the cat on the Night of Philosophy poster a reference to Steinlen’s Montmartre cat and Hegel’s owl of Minerva? 

 Raphael Zagury-Orly: Steinlein is a painter who participated in the Montmartrian counter-culture movement, with a humbug (fumiste) spirit, in a sort of incoherent humour, which parodied conventional political practices. The cat is a nyctalope animal, namely, it sees very well at night. My conception of philosophy is part and parcel of a certain counterculture. The philosopher must be a witness of the unacknowledged, the un-admitted and must allow us to see despite and beyond the obscurity of common and dominant discourse. 

You’ve been combating Holderlin’s idea that the more the desert grows, the more what saves grows with the idea that there is “no truth without justice”? 

Raphael Zagury-Orly: I wouldn’t precisely say “No truth without justice”. I would positively reiterate the levinassian expression “truth supposes justice” facing the preponderance of a certain logic of truth. 

As we know, the history of philosophy is fully determined by the question, the pre-eminence and the unfolding of truth. Without exactly wanting to move away from this history, I would say that we have to confront, today more than ever, the task of thinking how philosophy could be oriented by an instance other than that of truth, other than that of the meaning and accomplishment of truth: that is to say by justice. It is through a close rereading of the history of philosophy and through extending the reflection initiated by Emmanuel Levinas and radicalized by Jacques Derrida, that we can re-question the history of truth in philosophy causing it to undergo a certain inflection, a shift and a displacement, in order to think this history, in the light of what could precede the predominance of justifying truth while remaining fundamentally irreducible: justice. Levinas and Derrida call to a hyperbolical responsibility and an idea of justice anterior to truth addressing precisely the exhaustion of values and norms typified by the still dominant apocalyptic justifying logos. In the chapter “Truth and Justice” of Totality and Infinity, Levinas audaciously offers a proposition highly singular with regard to the history of philosophy: “Truth presupposes justice”. Jacques Derrida makes this specific formulation his own, in Force of Law. By continuing with these two gestures of thought (of Levinas and Derrida) I am trying to rethink the philosophical concept of truth where it finds itself entirely overwhelmed and inspired by justice. 

Jacques Derrida, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Joseph Cohen @copyright authorized

You might honestly ask: why suggest that truth is supposed by something other than itself, and therefore that it cannot or can no longer be constituted and established as the first instance of philosophical thought? Is this speculative attempt not doomed to failure? This supposition of thought, drawing all its vigour from the revolt and the vertigo at work in justice, would it not be too fragile in the face of presumption and sovereign pretension of truth in the history of philosophy? Too delicate in the face of perseverance and assurance of the truth in History? Is this not acting against the coincidence between truth and philosophy as it is accomplished in its history? And by the way, why precede by justice the philosophies of essentiality, of presence, of foundation – all constituted under the value and the norm of truth? 

What could it mean to engage the philosophical, namely, the political and the historical otherwise than and beyond the history of the truth of being, bearing in mind that the political and the historical traditionally determine themselves within that very horizon? Furthermore, what type of questioning is at work when justice marks and affects the political and the historical outside the history of truth? To what extent can justice displace and reassign the political and the historical towards that which remains uncontained by the ontological horizon of political decision, action and judgment? 

Perhaps a way to approach this bond of questions would be to think towards an irreducible “idea of justice” which would, in some manner, stand at the limits of truth? 

Indeed, justice (just like art) can only entertain a complicated, complex, indirect relation to truth. Hence, this question rephrased: if justice is not thought as a constitutive foundation or ground for the truth, simple conditions of possibility or of actuality, in what way can justice be thought of as affecting truth? And conversely, how can the truth relate to that which remains irreducible to it – justice?  

My way of approaching the oblique alliance between justice and truth involves an expression used by Derrida in the opening passages of Aporias: “limits of truth”. This expression, taken from Diderot’s Life of Seneca, marks a certain relation to truth. It questions both the primacy of truth and the manner in which truth has not only constituted itself in and through the development of the history of philosophy, but also configured that very history. The expression “limits of truth” consequently introduces a certain distance, detachment and reserve, in regard to the supremacy and predominance of truth within the deployment and becoming of the history of being. I, nonetheless, take up the same expression, and indeed feel comfortable in transposing it, to approach the oblique relation between what is at play in Derridean justice in the face of the political and the historical traditionally bound and beholden to the horizon of ontology. What interests me in the alliance I imagine between Derrida and Levinas (a certain G. Anders and a certain W. Benjamin) is their incessant questioning of the conceptual “enframing” of justice under the command of the ontological determinations of the political and the historical. That is, they unceasingly question the manner in which the ontological imposes a determined enclosure of ethical responsibility and justice by grounding these in the dominance and predominance of ontological presuppositions of truth.  

Raphael Zagury-Orly, Jürgen Habermas, Joseph Cohen @copyright authorized

This in no way means – quite the contrary – that the “political” and the “historical” are not transformable or modifiable, that they cannot be reformed, converted, altered, even perfected, or that they cannot engage in a logic of emancipation.