Lecture: “No Logos: Exilic Theory of Talmud” by Elad Lapidot

What is Jewish? In contrast to common tendencies, this talk considers Jewishness not as endangered life, but as a tradition of thought. In contrast to apologetic attempts to identify in Jewish intellectual history forms of Western disciplines, such as philosophy or mysticism, this talk focuses on talmudic literature, traditionally dismissed by Europe as thoughtless legalism. Talmud is considered as a method of thinking that diverges from the philosophical polis of logos. Engaging thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Daniel Boyarin, and Sergey Dolgopolski, Lapidot argues that rabbinic thought operates as a logoclasm: the dispersion of logos through acts of hermeneutics, nomos, and polemics.

Elad Lapidot is Professor for Hebraic Studies at the University of Lille, France, and the director of the Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora. Among his publications: State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman &amp Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010).