Straussian Confessions and Jewishness in Paris

• In Event: Memoir, Biography, and Biographical Interpretations

Abstract

This paper reflects upon startling expressions by two junior scholars who each spent a decisive year in Paris, Stanly Rosen in 1960 -61 and Alan Bloom in 1964-65. Rosen was a recent PhD who wrote a set a memoir (published two decades later) about his experience in addition to having letters with his teacher Leo Strauss. Bloom exchanged a series of letters with Strauss during his year after Strauss had arranged for Bloom to translate into English Alexander Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT. In the case of Rosen, a remarkable set of confessions and assessments of this peculiar intellectual his scene and the ways in which he did not fit in as an American Jewish veteran abroad. In the case of Bloom, there is a stunning revelation of how Strauss forever changed his life. The erotic description of his coming to discipleship, to be “wedded” to the master for eternity, is couched with key Jewish reference points. This paper takes these two different cases of Jewish Straussians in Paris as starting points for exploring the homo-erotic dynamics and limits of such master-disciple relationships of two otherwise non-Jewish Jewish philosophers.

Author

• Eugene Sheppard, Brandeis University, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies