I define the prophetic in my book, The Prophetic Law and elsewhere,* as "the recognition of the dramas in which human beings are engaged and the naming in advance of the end of those dramas in order that we might choose to go to those ends or not." As so defined, the prophetic is not about fortune-telling. Nor is it about retrospective confirmation. Rather it is about a method of thinking developed by the Hebrew prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekial, Jonah, and others) and developed further in recent decades among "structuralist" and "poststructuralist" philosophers in France (particularly Rene Girard and influential Jewish Philosopher Emmanual Levinas). I will talk about the ways in which Girard’s analyses of mimetic desire and "the scapegoat mechanism" and Levinas’s concept of my “infinite responsibility” for the other human being complement each other: Girard leads us to the door of what Levinas calls “the ethical” without ever passing through it; and Levinas, in a way entirely compatible with Girard's analysis of the Sacred, begins at the door of the ethical where Girard leaves off, examining the nature and limits—or lack of limits—of love and responsibility as a response to the other person. Together the two thinkers help and extend one another’s work, providing what is undeveloped in the other.

In the last 15-20 minutes of my presentation time, fellow Girardian and Theology and Peace Board Member Rebecca Adams will pose a few starting questions about how the prophetic can inform our understanding of history and the political upheavals of our own time. We may also touch upon another troubling phenomenon we often see nowadays: Girard's notion of "victimology" and the "other totalitarianism" (as expressed in his I See Satan Fall Like Lightning) in which, in the name of defending the "innocence of the victim," one identifies a new perpetrator and undertakes a new "sacrificial" scapegoat mechanism against that "perpetrator.”

The event will conclude with an additional 30 minutes or more of moderated Q & A from the audience.

Artwork above is from Samuel Bak's Memorial (Landscape of Jewish History), which is the cover art of Dr. Goodhart's 2014 book The Prophetic Law.

Contact the host of Understanding The Prophetic in Judaism, Girardian Thinking, and Levinasian Philosophy

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