8 - Tanakh Epistemology and Postmodernism

Summary

Writing, reading, interpretation, image, madness, animals – these appear in Daniel 2–7, and in the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault, Bataille, and Nietzsche. This chapter juxtaposes the views of these exiles from modernity to accounts of Judeans in Babylon. Postmodern writers think differently about the Tanakh and non-Hellenic antiquity than their predecessors. Foucault, for example, treats biblical criticism not as the only way to read the Tanakh but as an index of modernity. “There are those who would say” to him, says Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge concerning Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things, “‘Why did you not speak of … Biblical exegesis?’” He replies by saying that his works are not meant “to describe the face of a culture in its totality,” and that if in The Order of Things he had applied his sociological analysis of Wittgensteinian language games to “Biblical criticism” instead of wealth and natural history, then “one would certainly see the emergence of a quite different system of relations.” But Foucault does not pursue this matter further and critics of modernity have not addressed an indispensable component of it: biblical criticism. Where in postmodernism is the Tanakh?