The talion law, which stipulates an exact retribution of "eye for eye" in cases of injury or murder, is commonly associated with the Vengeful God of the New Testament and with the favoring of literality over spirituality. In opposition to such a view, this essay, based on a close reading of the Talmud and later Jewish commentators, and equipped with the insights of contemporary structuralist and post-structuralist theory, analyzes the modes that the Jewish tradition offers for the displacement of the literal. It attempts to show that a detour into a figurative reading of lex talionis is what effects, through subtle rhetoric, a restitution of its original sense, both ethical and ontological. March 2023: Betty Rojtman is Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been the Katherine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature. As the chair of the Department of French studies, she has founded the Desmarais Center for French Culture at the Hebrew University, and headed it for many years. Her current research deals with Transcendence and Negativity in traditional Jewish sources (Midrash, Hassidism, Kabbalah) and (post)modern texts (literature, philosophy). Professor Rojtman is the author of several books, including Feu noir sur Feu Blanc: Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (Verdier, 1986); English translation, by Steven Rendall, Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah, Prefaced by Moshe Idel, 1998), Une grave distraction. Preface by Paul Ricoeur (Balland, 1991), Une Rencontre improbable: Equivoques de la destinée (Gallimard, 2002). In parallel to her academic work, she writes meditative and poetical essays (Le Pardon à la lune: Essai sur le tragique biblique, Gallimard, 2001. trans. Hebrew by Nir Ratzkovski, Seli’hat halevana, Al hatragiut hatana’hit, Jerusalem, Carmel, 2008), Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (Gallimard, 2007). Her most recent essay (Une faim d’abîme. La fascination de la mort dans l’écriture contemporaine, Desclée de Brouwer, 2019), has come out in English as Longing for the Abyss: The fascination for death in Contemporary French Thought, trans. Bartholomew Begley (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020) and in Hebrew as Kemiha Latehom. Kessem Hamavet bahagut hatzarfatit shel hameah haesserim, trans. Itay Blumenzweig (Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2020). |
