Kavka, Martin. "Review of Dana Hollander's EXEMPLARITY AND CHOSENNESS." NDPR (October 2008).

Hollander, Dana. Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. There are approximately seven books wrapped up in Exemplarity and Chosenness, a book which treats the intellectual debt of Franz Rosenzweig to Hermann Cohen, of Jacques Derrida to Edmund Husserl, of Derrida to Emmanuel Levinas, of Derrida to Rosenzweig, of Continental philosophy to Jewish thought, of Jewish thought to Continental philosophy, and finally the equiprimordiality of life and thought. There will be readers who will feel as if reading this book will itself require teaching a graduate seminar that follows along, chapter by chapter. It is by no means a quick read, and so I err in this review on the side of giving an overly summary account. Still, the central two claims of Hollander's excellent book can be telegraphed quite briefly. First, there is no possibility of thinking the universality of philosophy without thinking the historically and culturally determined particularity of the philosopher who takes that particularity as an example from which universality is derived. In other words, universality is never given as such to thought; it is for this reason that philosophy is bound up with national affirmation (e.g. Greece, Germany, Jewishness). The second move points out that particularity, if it is to be given to thought, can no longer be given as the particularity that it is. For this reason, universalism can, and should be, expressed in terms of an exile from or desertification of the rootedness typically associated with nationalism. We see this move exemplified in Derrida's notion of the "messianic without messianism" in Specters of Marx as well as Rosenzweig's notion of the Jewish people as beyond time in The Star of Redemption. What we are left with is particular communities pointing beyond themselves, invoking the universal as a phantasmatic idea, both regulative and grounding, but all the while invoking it in their own idioms. The universal and particular, the infinite and finite, the nations and the elect nation, require each other to be thought at all. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14506.