No Borders Metaphysics

Been thinking about an expression I employed to describe what I am after in my forthcoming book in the preface (and was mentioned in Harman's preface to present the project): Jewish animism. My thoughts took me back to a text Levinas' wrote in the mid-1950s, "Le cas Spinoza", compiled in Difficile Liberté . There he makes clear, as elsewhere, the distinction between the Jewish and the Christian ways. Spinoza appears as someone who helped universalizing Christianity by placing it outside the strictly religious terms. Christianism became universal and ceased to need to be a religion - it became a rational religion. Greek reason becomes Christianized supposedly in the form of nihilism (a God that is assassinated), colonialism (there are news to be spread independently of who we meet) and self-salvation (the joy of being anonymous and self-sufficient, immune to the appeals of the others and having no debts). The lay counterpart of Christian thought spells universality ins...

It is as a Jew who grew up feeling the history of this people with all my capacities and even attending to the struggles around Zionism that I look at what is happening now and that I think that those who speak for the Jews and those who speak for Zionism did not understand anything. That is, they do not read the same history of the Jews; they do not read a story of survival in adversity that gives rise to unsuspected strengths and unsuspected forces to resist - as I do - but the non-history of a people waiting for their turn to act as they witness their executioners doing. The Jews that bomb Gaza and defend their supremacy in the occupied territories and in the cities where Palestinians reside make their history a variant of the stories of the European nations that colonized the world because they had the weapons and certainties to do so. The speech resembles that of the superiority of purity and the purity of superiority that the Germans pronouced in the third reich about Jews, Slavs...