Graduate Workshop

New Research on Contemporary Jewish Thought in France and Germany

September 9, 2024, University of Lille
Campus Pont-de-Bois, Maison de la recherche, Salle F0.13
Rue du Barreau BP 60149, 59650 Villeneuve-d’Ascq

New Research on Contemporary Jewish Thought in France and Germany

Graduate Workshop

September 9, 2024, University of Lille
Campus Pont-de-Bois, Maison de la recherche, Salle F0.13
Rue du Barreau BP 60149, 59650 Villeneuve-d’Ascq

The University of Lille and the University of Frankfurt launched in 2022 a new international research program on “Jewish Thought between Germany and France”, led by Elad Lapidot and Christian Wiese. The project aims at developing research and exchange on transnational movements of ideas that have been constitutive for the continuity of Jewish thought in Europe before and after the Holocaust and for its development up to the present time. Examining the work and life of key figures in Jewish intellectual life in Germany and France, the project seeks to study how German-French intellectual exchanges shaped Jewish thought in Europe and beyond. More specifically, the project will examine the role of the multi-hyphenated German-French-Jewish thought in developing conceptions for interculturality, diversity and pluralism in view of challenges faced by Jewish as well as non-Jewish communities in Europe.

This one-day graduate workshop brings together a group of doctoral students that have been working on their respective research projects in association with the Lille-Frankfurt collaborative research program, together with senior scholars that are associated with the research program. In the course of this workshop, each student will present their work or a specific part of it, on which they are currently working. The presentations will be then discussed with the other students and with the senior scholars in attendance.

The goal of this workshop is to advance the individual projects and reinforce the collaboration within the research group, as well as to enhance the exchange between younger and senior researchers.

Organisation

Elad Lapidot (University of Lille) and
Christian Wiese (University of Frankfurt)

Cooperation

University of Lille, Goethe University Frankfu rt
and The Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora

Participants

Hanna Arnauve-Gershovitz est doctorante en études hébraïques et juives (CEAO) à la Sorbonne Paris III, sous la direction de Madame Michèle Tauber. Dans le cadre de mon mémoire de Master intitulé De l’illusion à la désillusion – Evolution idéologique du courant de la Haskalah à travers l’analyse de l’œuvre de Y. L. Gordon, j’avais étudié de près les revendications du courant de la Haskalah, mouvement des Lumières juives en Europe aux XVIIIème et XIXème siècles. Il en a résulté un vif intérêt pour la pluralité des formes de judaïsme et mes travaux de thèse examinent le rôle de l’oralité interprétative dans la formation des différents courants. Mes fonctions d’enseignante à l’Université de Lille au sein du parcours de la licence d’hébreu en tant que responsable des cours de traduction me permettent d’explorer des thématiques qui me sont chères telles la traductologie et la linguistique et de bénéficier d’un cadre particulièrement favorable à la recherche.

Yael Attia is a doctoral fellow at the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms. In her current project, The (post)colonial Other of Modern Jewish Thought, she seeks to trace the constitutive role of Jewish colonial experiences in North Africa as formative to modern Jewish political thinking, as it emerged in a series of Francophone intellectuals: Hélène Cixous, Albert Memmi and Jacques Derrida. She also hosts the official podcast of her program. An edited volume she co-edited, titled: Minor Perspectives on Modernity: Jewish Studies and Decolonial Thought is forthcoming from Nomos Verlag.

Agata Bielik-Robson is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and a Professor of Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She published articles in Polish, English, German, French and Russian on philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis, romantic subjectivity, and the philosophy of religion (especially Judaism and its crossings with modern philosophical thought). Her publications include books: The Saving Lie. Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (Northwestern University Press, May 2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought. Traces and Influence (coedited with Adam Lipszyc, Routledge 2014), Philosophical Marranos. Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (Routledge 2014) and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Ilanit Ben-Dor Derimian is lecturer at the Israel and Jewish Studies Department and member of the Research Center of Foreign Cultures, Languages and Literatures, at the University of Lille. She specializes in Israel and Jewish culture and history, particularly in Center-Periphery relations, desert representation, spatial identity reconstruction, ecocriticism, discourse analysis and social activism. Her forthcoming book deals with “The Representation of the Negev in the Public Discourse in Israel: From the Conquest of the Desert to Sustainable Development”.

Among her publications: « Les femmes activistes et leur contribution à la reconstruction de l’identité spatiale de la périphérie », in Femmes engagées au cœur de l’action : Espace euro-méditerranéen : Mise en récit(s), mise en image(s) (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2021) and « Food activism dans la périphérie au sud d’Israël » (Arabia, janvier 2020).

Martine Benoit is Full professor for History of Ideas in German speaking areas at Lille University-SSH (Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures), her research focuses on German-Jewish Identities in the 18th-21th centuries.

Matan Gurevitz is pursuing his Ph.D. on the intersections of anticolonial motives in Weimar and post-war French Jewish thought. He is an ELES research fellow and a member of the research group Revisiting Shared Traditions: Judaism and Islam in a post-secular Perspective at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He studied music, musicology, and Jewish intellectual and cultural history at the Berlin University of the Arts (UDK), the Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Heidelberg, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris (EHESS).

Quentin Le Gurun is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Lille. His research, under the supervision of Prof Elad Lapidot, focuses on the postmodern Jewish question in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Benny Lévy, namely the epistemo-political stakes involved in the profound reconfiguration of the relation between philosophy and Judaism in French thought of the second half of the 20th-century. He previously studied at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, devoting his research to the meaning of prophecy in literature and philosophy in the context of Franco- Judaism, particularly in Charles Péguy, Bernard Lazare and James Darmesteter.

Elad Lapidot is professor for Culture Studies at the University of Lille, France. He specializes in philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud and was teaching at the University of Bern, Switzerland, the Humboldt Universität Berlin and the Freie Univeristät Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Resling, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Zeta Books, 2010).

Cassandre Lesnik is a doctoral student in the history of ideas and philosophy of law at the University of Lille and the University of Haifa. After studying law in Lille and Marburg, and completing a Master’s degree in Germanic Studies in Lille, her research focuses on the German-Jewish magistrate Fritz Bauer. Her research focuses on the legal-philosophical analysis of Bauer’s work, in order to study his response to Nazi law and the position he takes vis-à-vis post-1945 German legal thinkers. This research also aims to analyze the influence of Jewish philosophy on law as envisaged by Fritz Bauer. She also teaches the fundamentals of constitutional law at the University of Lille.

Alexia Levy-Chekroun is a PhD Candidate at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) and the University of Lille. Her research, under the supervision of Sébastien Tank and Elad Lapidot, focuses on the articulation between the different « epistemic cultures » contained within Jewish thought, and their influence on the production of « judeo-decolonial » discourses. Her thesis is based on a multi-disciplinary framework including: sociology of knowledge, sociology of science, sociology of absences, and Jewish thought. She has studied Political Science at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and New York University ; and has been involved in queer/decolonial-mizrahi community organizing since 2019.

Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher interested in modern German-Jewish thought between fiction and philosophy and interdisciplinary theories of mourning. Much of her work is based on collaboration across disciplines, including teaching, reading groups, and publication projects with artists, religious historians, philosophers, and game designers. She is the editor of three multidisciplinary collections of poetry, criticism, and fiction, Reading Scholem in Constellation (2021, Pseudo Press), Reading Taubes in Constellation (2022, Pseudo Press), and Reading Kofman in Constellation (2023, Pseudo Press) and currently a PhD candidate in modern Jewish philosophy at Goethe University of Frankfurt and University of Lille.

Julie Reich is a PhD candidate at the university of Lille under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Elad Lapidot. Her research focuses on the mutual influences of feminism and Jewish Thought and the way gender conceptions influenced political Jewish philosophy in the context of pre-war Germany and post-war France. She studied comparative literature and philosophy in Berlin, Madrid and Jerusalem.

Lucile Salou is a doctoral student at the University of Lille. Her research focuses on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. She focuses on how the Jewish thinker attempts to think history after the tragedies of the twentieth century seem to have broken its course. To this end, she is interested in the points of encounter between so-called “Greek” philosophy and Talmudic thought.

Bat Chen (Laila) Seri is a PhD candidate in in philosophy of religion at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University. Her doctoral thesis, titled “The Dynamics of Law and Narrative: Talmudic Hermeneutics in Benjamin’s Kafka”, explores Walter Benjamin’s reading of Kafka against the backdrop of rabbinic thought, focusing in particular on the categories of halakhah and haggadah.

Program

September 8, 2024
20:00	Dinner Brasserie La Chicorée, 15 Place Rihour, 59000 Lille
September 9, 2024	Campus Pont-de-Bois, Maison de la recherche, salle F0.13
09:00–09:30	Reception, Greetings and Opening
	Session I
09:30–10:30	Matan Gurevitz (University of Lille/University of Frankfurt) Between Zion and Zionism: Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber and the Hermeneutics of Messianism in German-Jewish Thought Julie Reich (University of Lille/ University of Frankfurt) Gender, Messianism and the Ideal Community in Margarete Susman and Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi
10:30–10:45	Coffee Break
	Session II
10:45–11:45	Laila Seri (University of Lund) Talmudic Hermeneutics in Benjamin’s Kafka: Halakhah and Haggadah Quentin Le Gurun (University of Lille) “Traces” of God in Levinas, Derrida and Benny Lévy
11:45–12:00	Coffee Break
	Session III
12:00–13:00	Lucile Salou (University of Lille/Paris 1) Levinas and the Philosophy of History Hannah Gershovitz (University of Lille/Paris 3) De l’«au-delà de la lettre» de Gordon à l’«Au-delà du verset» de Lévinas
13:00–14:30	Lunch Break – salle F0.43
	Session IV
14:30–15:30	Rachel Pafe (University of Lille/University of Frankfurt) Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, Judith Butler, and the role of mourning in the transformation of post-war ethics and critical thought Cassandre Lesnik (University of Lille/University of Haifa) Fritz Bauer (1903 – 1968) and the Schlegelberger case: The search for right in the face of the continuity of the Nazi elite compromised by Aktion T4
15:30–16:00	Coffee Break
	Session V
16:00-17:00	Yael Attia (University of Paderborn) Specters of Algeria: Decolonial perspectives in Cixous and Derrida Alexia Levy Chekroun (University of Lille/EHESS) Vers une “décolonisation” des modes d’existence juifs?
17:00–17:30	Coffee Break
	Keynote Lecture
17:30–19:00	Agata Bielik-Robson (University of Nottingham/Polish Academy of Sciences) *Derrida as Marrano Moses*
19:30	Dinner Brasserie de la Paix, 25 Place Rihour, 59000 Lille

Graduate Workshop