No Logos: Exilic Theory of Talmud

W hat does it mean to be Jewish today? In current discourse, Jewish existence is defined primarily as endangered life rather than as a tradition of thought. This book challenges that reduction. It argues that the radical way to resist both antisemitism and its mirror image—Judaism defined only through its defense—is to return to Talmud as the site of Jewish thinking. Talmud, long dismissed in European philosophy as law without thought, becomes here the key to reclaiming Judaism as an intellectual practice. Instead of translating Judaism into the language of Western philosophy, No Logos insists on the opposite: the Talmud represents a mode of thinking that diverges from philosophy. Against the regime of logos, talmudic discourse unfolds in this book through different categories: hermeneutics, nomos, and polemos. Engaging figures such as Emmanuel Levinas and Daniel Boyarin, Lapidot develops a decolonial account of rabbinic thought in which talmudic thinking emerges as logoclasm—a discipline of thought organized around the disruption of unified reason and the productive plurality of voices.