על סוס ועל נוצה: הקדמה לדיון ב"חריגה"

Recent years have witnessed growing public awareness to expressions of political, intellectual and educational protest against existing social conditions, combined with demands to change them radically. These contemporary forms of social resistance invite us to readdress the possibility of offering an alternative to any existing reality, which can transgress our very conditioning by this reality. Is such transgression possible? And if so, under which conditions? This paper aims to trace the modern concept of transgression which informs such ideas as 'freedom', 'autonomy', 'agency' or 'subjectivity'. It does so, however, by traversing the borders of modernity and returning to two ancient texts, representing 'Athens and Jerusalem', the foundations of modern Western thought. The first is the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, and the second is a Jewish Midrash which consists of a dialogue between two renowned rabbinic figures. In juxtaposing these two widely different and unrelated dialogues — demonstrating perhaps a kind of a dialogue between dialogues — the paper presents two types of transgression. It shows how both models of transgression begin with a concept of love, continue with the structuring of social order, and end with the ultimate reliance, albeit in dissimilar ways, upon the horizon of transcendence. The paper then concludes with noting the relevancy of these two forms of transgression not only to our understanding of modern social and political imagination, but more particularly to rethinking of any 'critical pedagogy', that endeavors to go beyond the impasses of what could be termed 'Educational Industry', which can only produce and reproduce its addressees. In doing so, the paper invites the reader to engage with a new 'critical theology' that challenges the old dichotomies between 'the secular' and 'the religious', philosophy and theology, critique and faith.