Sergey Dolgopolski

Sergey Dolgopolski came to the the Department of Comparative Literature and The Institute of Jewish Thought and Heritage in 2010. He holds a Joint Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from UC Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union, and the degree of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

His  general area of interest is the variety of ways in which philosophy and literature interact creating new philosophical concepts and new literary forms.  He specializes in the Talmud as body of text and thought seen from poetic, rhetoric, and philosophical perspectives, with a particular interest in mutual hermeneutics of philosophical, rhetorical, and talmudic traditions, and with an emphasis on mutually shaping engagements of poetic, talmudic, and philosophical thinking.

He authors a monograph Rhetoric of the Talmud in the View of Post-Structuralism (1998, St-Petersburg and Jerusalem, in Russian). One of his books is What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (Fordham U. Press, 2009). His new book The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud, with Fordham University Press, was published in the Fall 2012. 

 

Issue: 6:2 (The twenty second issue)

The paper explores the role of competing notions of what does it
mean to have a testament of the law of the past in Christian and Rabbinic
corpora of text and thought. The argument probes and renegotiates the complex
relationships of the Christian suspension of Old Testament by the New
Testament and the Rabbinic suspension of (any) new testament in the two
Talmudim. It consequently draws implications of that analysis for
understanding the relationships of the two Talmudim to the tradition of
hermeneutics of texts, as influenced as the latter has been by theological and
literary approaches of various Christian theologies of the two Testaments. As a
part of that analysis the articles justifies the task of advancing and providing a
critique of political theology and political philology as modes of thought and
investigation. That provides a way to ask anew the question about relationships
between theology, literary theory, and political thought.