Construction without theory
oblique reflections on Walter Benjamin's Goethe
pp. 114-123
in: David Rudrum (ed), Literature and philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2006Abstract
it [metaphysics] is a highly speculative philosophy of fundamental questions regarding politics and theology, drawing on a near scholastic aptitude for categorical analysis and Talmudic rigor within a conception of divine continuity of meaning. In this way it is in fact a philosophy of divine as well as profane questions. ‘Metaphysics,’ Scholem once remarks [sic] in his Swiss notebook, ‘is a legitimate theory in the subjunctive form’. (Jacobson, p. 5)
