Beyond Secularization: On the Political Theological difference as a temporal one from Moses Mendelssohn to Walter Benjamin

• In Event: Perceptions of Time in Modern Jewish Historiography and Literature

Abstract

The political-theological difference is understood in the Christian tradition on the model of the "two cities". This implies a division of jurisdictions, as if one was dealing with separate realms (or kingdoms), separate territories. Recent critiques of secularization theories have drawn attention to the distinctly christian model implied in the very separation between the secular and the religious “spheres”(Asad, Davis).

Interestingly, In his “Jerusalem’ Moses Mendelssohn offers a radical critique of this model of division, and offers an alternative: the separation, and bond, between the two should be thought in temporal terms, on the model of the separation and connection between present and future, forgoing the possibility of drawing a clear “boundary” between them.

Starting with a discussion of Mendelssohn's conception of the Political-theological division, and proceeding with a reading of Walter Benjamin’s Political-Theological fragment, this paper will show a consistent thread in modern German-Jewish thought, from Mendelssohn to Walter Benjamin, a thread that holds together the theological and the political in a temporal complex, that resists spatial categories and representations.

author

• Yuval Kremnitzer, Columbia University