For about a year now, I’ve been thinking this way and that about launching this blog. Maybe it’s a bad idea. Don’t I already spend way too much time online or punching buttons? Don’t I need more, not less quiet? Sometimes, though, quiet is not all it’s cracked up to be by people like, well, by people like me.
I have finally come to the certain conclusion that “you” don’t exist if you’re not online. By “you” I don’t mean you, a flesh and blood creature. What I mean here (and only here) by you is the concept you want to shape and to inhabit. Such concepts and their habitats are “fundamentally” mediated, which means that without a medium they cannot exist.
This is especially true of contemporary Jewish philosophy and thought. Inside and outside the university, the circle of Jewish thought and philosophy has always been a small one. For its part, academic Jewish philosophy has only exacerbated that insularity by entombing itself in the super close-reading of a narrow band of canonical figures, texts, and ideas. Over time, the practice of Jewish thought and philosophy compares more and more to a tree that keeps falling in a forest with no one to hear it.
I would like with this blog to make a place for a liberal and open form of contemporary Jewish thought and philosophy. Hannah Arendt would have called it a “space of appearance.” Today, I think it needs to appear online.
I was writing on Bishnupriya Ghosh’s book, “Global Icons” today and worked myself into the corner of asking myself if I really was arguing that “the public sphere,” whatever that else this phrase connotes, is fundamentally a media entity–not just something mediated through social relationships, but something mediatized through radio, TV, film (cell phone video), FB, Twitter, etc. Is there a “public” today that is not caught in media somehow? There are localities and events and bodies–certainly. But a “public”? I wasn’t brave enough to answer myself, but in my heart I was nodding. Yes: “‘You’ don’t exist if you’re not online,” or on Cable or Talk Radio.
Butler might call Arendt’s “space of appearance” a “framing.”
Ok, it is late and I am only just looking at this site but I was taken by those faces, those guys…. There is just something familiar about them and the voice who describes them. That in and of itself is reassuring. So when I am ready to more fully think through some of what is here and some of what will be here, I hope to rise to the occasion, but for now, I am just glad to know that there is this voice and those faces.