ABSTRACT
Isaiah Leibowitz was the most radical of the intellectuals who warned against making the “Canaanite Messianism” the dominant political theology in Israel. The Leibowitzian radicalism was not “extremism,” as many have interpreted his opinions and insights, but fidelity to the original sense of the word “radical” – i.e. searching out the roots of things. Throughout his intellectual and public career, Leibowitz sought to expose the roots of the relationships between Judaism, Zionism, and Israelism, whether one was dealing with the affinities of religion and state or the conquest of the territories in the Six-Day War. This drive to expose roots led him to insist on the necessity of making a clear distinction between the sacred and the secular and not blurring the difference between the various categories. It was the supreme principle of his philosophical thought and the basis of his thinking on public affairs. His great fear was of idolatry: that is to say, ascribing sanctity or an absolute value to human affairs or to secular matters such as a territory or a flag. Leibowitz’s radicalism made him into a total intellectual whose philosophy
demanded a critical involvement in almost every aspect of society and politics. Comprehensive thinkers of this kind generally have an a priori ideological or practical meta-narrative that governs their approach to human existence. From another perspective, he was also a “specific” intellectual, to use Michel Foucault’s expression.1 An intellectual of this kind focuses on particular issues, exposes the discourse of power or of the will-to-power, and is an indefatigable subverter of basic assumptions, whether utopian, ideological, or scientific. In Foucault, the intellectual does not identify himself with reason or with Rousseau’s “general will.” His task is to uncover the relationship between power and truth, which he does mainly through genealogy: tracing the roots of ideas and the histories of concepts. Leibowitz did in fact draw up genealogies of concepts in order to ascertain their original significance and demonstrate the manipulative use that had been made of them. His knowledge of the Jewish sources and his command of general philosophy and modern science helped him in this project of “subversion.” In his discussion of the role of the intellectual, Foucault switches the
emphasis from a Promethean discourse on setting the world aright to an
analysis of the mechanisms of control which govern modern politics. The task of the intellectual, according to him, is not to advocate an ideological ethos but to dismantle mechanisms of power and step by step to build up a “strategic knowledge” which can serve as a means for subverting and opposing a hegemonic discourse. Instead of doing public relations for political ideologies, the intellectual has to suspect and subvert them. The intellectual’s indefatigable subversion of the illusions of humanism, utopian dreams, and ideological visions is achieved through the dismantling of the forms of hegemony.2 To the degree that Leibowitz can be classed with the postmodern breed that dismantles ideological and power structures, he can be considered a thinker and intellectual of the modern Enlightenment.
