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Zohar Atkins Profile picture
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19 Apr, 8 tweets, 2 min read
Another Derridean paradox I was reminded of, thinking about the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, is the idea that a perfect gift is unconditional; but an unconditional gift can't have a giver (subject) or gifted (object)...for then the gift would be an act of conditional communication
The giving of the Torah appears to be a conditional gift--but we generally don't call conditional bestowals gifts, we call them transactions, options, ploys, etc.
If you think of the mystical interpretation of Torah as form whose content is emptiness (the silent aleph), then Torah is the impossible gift, the unconditional which has no giver and gifted...
Derrida is practically wrong in his analysis, his "impossibilities" are purely theoretical. Still, fun to think of the giving of the Torah as an act caught between an exoteric and conditional search for relationship and an esoteric expression of ambivalence about it.
Tldr: gifts are paradoxical.
Derrida drew on Heidegger for this insight.
Heidegger notes in Being and Time that the German "es gibt" which idiomatically means "there is" literally means," it gives." Oh yeah? What gives? Who gives? Since when is presence a gift?
A: the gift is hidden in plain sight. Being gives, but what is Being? On this Heideggerians and Heidegger himself disagree. But whatever it is, it withdraws--so it's gift giving is also a retreat at the same time. Perhaps the only unconditional gift is what remains

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More from @ZoharAtkins

Zohar Atkins Profile picture
20 Apr
Let’s do a @threadapalooza on Nietzsche, an unavoidable force in our thought and culture, a brilliant polemicist whose work is both over-exposed and undervalued; he would have been off Twitter but would have written a Substack railing against everyone—including his fans.
“The only one who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man.” Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran minister. Although often seen as an enfant terrible by religious folk, Nietzsche was a soulful and sincere seeker who was equally critical of atheists as he was of believers
His much remarked upon phrase “God is dead” is spoken by his invented literary prophet Zarathustra to atheists! 3
Read 102 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
5 Apr
It’s time for a @threadapalooza about Jacques Derrida, a polarizing and influential thinker, who popularized the word “deconstruction” & wrote in a style that is at once brilliant, annoying, charming, and cringe. I can’t tell if he is deep or shallow. Perhaps that’s the point.
Derrida is the Bitcoin of philosophers; wildly beloved by devotees and particularly reviled by skeptics. His polarizing status also divides his fans—between those who think him a genuine philosopher and those who think him more of a literary figure, a prankster with panache. 2
When Derrida was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge, a handful of influential philosophers, including Quine, wrote a letter in protest. He's a sophist--not a philosopher--say critics. 3
Read 102 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
18 Mar
Time for a @threadapalooza on Hegel, the 19th c. thinker everyone loves to hate (and/or hates to love, hates to hate, loves to love). Hegel has been celebrated and accused of pretty much every political ideology, from National Socialism, Communism, and neoliberalism.
Depending on who you talk to, he's a rationalist or a mystic, a secularist who reduces religion to social psychology or a Christian triumphalist who thinks incarnation theology (God becoming Man, Man Becoming God) alone can bring about the resolution of our problems. 2
Hegel is charged with pantheism (everything is God), process theology (the notion that truth is revealed progressively throughout history). Its fashionable to think of Hegel as proto-woke (see here: persuasion.community/p/the-warped-v…) and/but Hegel is also hated for being a Eurocentrist. 3
Read 102 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
18 Mar
Parable: There is a story about a safe who was robbed. As the thief was running away with his wallet, the safe shouted out, “I want you to have it.” (The sage didn’t want the thief to have the sin of theft on his moral tab.)
So too, initially, we were forbidden to steal fire from the god(s), to eat from the tree of knowledge, to open Pandora’s box, etc. but as we were walking away, the divine said, “I want you to have it.”
This is why the Torah is called a “gift”—what began as rebellion (scaling heaven by means of the Tower of Babel)—was transmuted, as God said, “I want you to have it.”
Read 11 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
17 Mar
“The ultras can live happily with each other; they need each other; they thrive off each other. They share the revolutionary mentality, the excitement of apocalyptic feeling.”

Leon Wieseltier

whiterosemagazine.com/the-radical-li…
“The crowds and their leaders are seeking the re-enchantment of politics, but we long ago championed the disenchantment of politics“
“People who mock the idea of rights, and the “culture of rights,” have never been stripped of one. And nobody who has ever been deprived of a right has ever been troubled by its “individualism.“”
Read 6 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
4 Mar
Adorno would recoil at being subjected to a @threadapalooza as it turns him into a commodity, his thought into a kind of brand or currency. Still, his ideas are timely & influential; if you want to understand today's left, internecine conflicts & culture wars, he's a touchstone.
He would have hated being on social media for 1000 reasons, which we will get into, but the first is that limiting oneself to bite-size short form is not dialectical; it "reifies" (glamorizes, distills) the hot take, but leaves little room for the nuanced "yes, but also." 2
He would find followership to be not only a vain metric, but a distraction from "truth" which should be indifferent to popularity, and may more likely negatively correlate with it. 3
Read 101 tweets

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