Apodictic Irony and the Production of Well-Structured Uncertainty: Tosafot Gornish and the Talmud as the Political after Kant

Abstract

This chapter addresses an early modern instantiation of the effacement of the interpersonal political in the Talmud by conceptions of universal (inter)subjectivity and logical-apodictic reasoning. This process first tacitly erases the interpersonal political in the late ancient Talmud by reducing it to dialectical irony. In a second step, the erasure advances from irony, a Platonic concept, to logical-apodictic reading of it in the Aristotelian tradition. Only when viewed through a post-Kantian lens could it become clear that this was not merely a Platonic interpretation of the late ancient Talmud in early modernity, followed by an Aristotelian interpretation, but rather a complex and multistep process of the effacement of the interpersonal at the advent of intersubjective. The chapter arrives to that result through a case-study of staging and analyzing of a fourteenth century logical commentary on the thirteenth century rhetorical interpretation of a discussion in a late ancient text in the Talmud.