My research is in 19th- and 20th-century European (“Continental”) philosophy, especially the traditions of existentialism (Kierkegaard, Chestov, Fondane) and post-structuralism (Deleuze et al.).

Within these traditions (and sometimes departing from them), I am primarily interested in questions about rationality—and especially about the normative political and ethical character of rationality as both a real and a conceptual object. I want to understand how concepts of rationality have functioned for the sake of political exclusion and—to whatever extent possible—how the concept of rationality can be appropriately modified to better capture its most desirable features.

Below are some of the projects that have developed in relation to this more generalized theme.

Deleuze and Kierkegaard: Against Rational Morality

My first book—on the relationship between Gilles Deleuze’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophies of ethics and personal identity—represented a sustained effort at understanding how two avowedly “irrationalist” philosophers approach the all-important questions of ethical value and existential identity. By comparing these two figures (and, on Deleuze’s side, by looking at how the latter takes up and uses Kierkegaardian ideas), I showed that it is these philosophers’ common rejection of a “rationalistic” tradition in ethics—specifically a Kantian tradition—that leads them both to revise their conceptions of personhood. In properly existential fashion, ethical behavior under these philosophers’ accounts means something more than mere conformity to a pre-set slate of moral rules; at the same time, acting in accordance with the more intensive standard of “authenticity” (a perennial existential principle) necessarily means something other than simply identifying and acting in accordance with our “pre-existing” sets of personal preferences and values. Instead, on these accounts, “authentic” ethical action entails an openness to the kinds of behaviors that will themselves shape or re-shape our sense of self, contributing to a perpetual dialectic between our attempts at acting in accordance with our “authentic” selves and our need to revise what is understood by the notion of authenticity.

Early Jewish Existentialism

Since completing work on the book, my interests have turned towards the tradition of early 20th-century Jewish existentialism represented by such figures as Benjamin Fondane (pictured above)(1898-1944), Lev Shestov (1866-1938), and Rachel Bespaloff (1895-1949). In these authors one finds a novel “irrationalist” strand of existentialism as compared to the more domesticated figures of the post-war period (particularly Sartre and de Beauvoir), as well as a complicated interweaving of concerns about religion, art, rationality and the political stakes of “rational” governance. I am particularly interested by these figures’ awareness—anticipating Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as well as Derrida’s more systematic, deconstructive account—of the authoritarian potentialities of Enlightenment modes of rationality; and I am curious to determine how this sort of account relates to anti-rationalist political frameworks discoverable in (nearly contemporaneous) de-colonial figures like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Recent publications related to Fondane’s interest in “primitivist” thought, and his own complex relationship to Judaism, both complicate and illuminate the historical and political stakes of these figures’ existential anti-rationalism.

The Middle Ages and the Birth of Rational Persecution

Seeking to link the “Jewish” character of the above figures’ critique of rationality to its historical context, I’ve also been pursuing research into one of the more fascinating moments in the development of European ideas about rationality, authority and political consensus, looking at the emergence—during the first few centuries of the second millennium CE—of a concept of universalism specifically linked to an intensified program of anti-Jewish violence in Christendom. Taking guidance from the historical accounts of Funkenstein (1993), Cohen (1982) and Fredrickson (2002) (among others), I am interested in the ways in which the expansion of a concept of rationality beyond the borders of European Christendom during the middle-to-late Medieval period facilitated the emergence of a novel (and exceptionally dangerous) polemic against the “recalcitrance” and “obduracy” of those Jews only newly included within the sphere of universal rationality. On this account, it is only within the development of a universalistic notion of human rationality that we find—for the first time—an elaboration of the supposed moral and intellectual vices compelling non-Christians to “refuse” the enticements of reason. This kind of account forces us to reconsider more conventional views of European rationality that tend to place non-Christian subjects straightforwardly “outside” the sphere of reasonableness, with all the consequent implications for our ideas about political consensus and universalism.