11/10/2026
Welcome to an event organized by the Buber-Rosenzweig Institute and the LOEWE Center "Dynamics of Religion" at Goethe-University as well as the Frankfurt-Tel Aviv Center and the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences on Wednesday, 14 October 2026, at 7.30 pm in Frankfurt, Campus Westend, Room IG 311.
As part of a workshop devoted to the topic "Philosophical Crossroads in Jewish History", Prof. Agata Bielik-Robson (University of Nottingham) will deliver a public lecture on:
"The Universal Structure of Revelation: The 'Jewish Argument' in Cohen, Levinas, and Derrida".
What can Athens learn from Jerusalem? According to the Greek philosophical tradition, the Jewish mode of revelation is particularistic and cannot ever enter the realm of universal language, grounded in the oneness of reason. As Slavoj Žižek recently put it, “to stick to the uniqueness of the Jewish legacy, to its fidelity to the encounter with radical Otherness” is to defend particularism against the universal claims of both, philosophy and Christianity. I will challenge this claim, by arguing that the so called “Jewish argument” is not alien to the spirit of universalism, just negotiates it differently: instead of focusing on the universality of the Hegelian “absolute knowledge,” it focuses on the universality of revelation. My main question will be: Is it possible to think this fidelity to the Other in a different, not so ready-made particularistic manner? Could we have a universal based on revelation? The intuition behind my search is that universalism not only does not have to exclude particularity but can be rooted in it: directly in the particular and the unique. For Hermann Cohen, the fundamental rift between Plato and the Prophets consists not in universalism of reason versus the particularism of revelation, but in the choice of the two different forms of universalism: ontological universalism of oneness, on the one hand, versus ethical universalism of uniqueness, on the other. Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida follow in the footsteps of Cohen’s “Jewish argument” in order to champion universal ethics based on the concept of the “radical Otherness.” I will argue that it is precisely this argument that philosophy, so far convinced about its exclusive universality, must confront.
Agata Bielik-Robson works at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences and she is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has 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 most recent publication is Derrida’s Marrano Passover. Exile, Survival, Betrayal and the Metaphysics of Non-Identity (2023).
