Excluding the Jew Within Us

Jean-Luc Nancy, Sarah Clift

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781509542734
  9781509542727
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509542741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Why does anti-Semitism seem to be so deeply engrained in our societies, our institutions and our attitudes?  To answer this question we need to look beyond our current practices and see that anti-Semitism has much deeper roots – that it is woven into the very structures of Western thought.

Jean-Luc Nancy argues that anti-Semitism emerged from the conflictual conjunction of two responses to the eclipse of archaic cultures.  The Greek and the Jewish responses both affirmed a humanity freed from myth but put forward two very different conceptions of autonomy: on the one hand, the infinite autonomy of knowledge, of logos, and on the other, the paradoxical autonomy of a heteronomy guided by a hidden god.  The first excluded the second while simultaneously absorbing and dominating it; the second withdrew into itself and its condition of exclusion and domination.  How could the long and terrible history of the hatred of the Jew, masking a self-loathing, be generated by these intrinsically contradictory beginnings?  That is the question to which this short book gives a compelling answer.

1
Banality

Antisemitism is constantly recurring. The extermination of Jews in Europe was enough to make one think that, seventy-five years later, “the belly from which it came out”—as Brecht once wrote—could not possibly still be fertile. But it is.

It is not recurring in the form of camps, or a “night of broken glass” [Kristallnacht], or anti-Jewish laws. Laws are even being passed in Europe that prohibit antisemitic language and acts. Nonetheless, what returns is doing so in a manner that made it possible, not so very long ago, for some twenty European countries to subject Jews to state persecution—namely in the mode of banality.

In recent years newspapers have taken to using sobriquets such as “commonplace,” “casual,” or “everyday” more and more frequently, as a way of decrying the recurrent antisemitism we are witnessing. The use of these terms is not meant to diminish it but rather to deplore its expansion, the (relative) tolerance that surrounds it, and especially its insidious penetration into the consciousness or the unconscious of many of our contemporaries. This fact of language is surprising, given how sharply it contrasts with the criticism Hannah Arendt received, not too long ago, for her use of the phrase “banality of evil,” which she most probably developed from Joseph Conrad’s preface to his novel Under Western Eyes.

At that time it was said that the phrase trivialized the exceptional horror of the genocide. It may be true that Arendt was misled by Eichmann’s defence, which rested on claims that he was just a simple bureaucrat carrying out orders. But she was certainly not mistaken about how utterly banal the vulgarity of antisemitism had become in Europe in those days. And, come to think of it, Eichmann’s defense was itself based on this terrible banality.

Even today, as is clear from the case of Heidegger, to speak of “banality” is to be immediately suspected of downplaying or, worse still, of celebrating antisemitism. However, the banality in question in no way makes it excusable; on the contrary, its existence attests to a process of banalization, that is, to a passive acceptance of stereotypes that emerge from the unfathomable depths of hatred.

The case of Heidegger is exemplary. The person capable of developing an idea of the “people” that is diametrically opposed to any biologism of race (and, in that sense, also opposed to Nazism) is the same person who, all the while, would resort to contemptible racial prejudices about Jews, such as their would-be gift for scheming, or their financial greed. It is certainly difficult to see how such characteristics, if they are going to be considered real, would not indeed be biological or instinctive. Otherwise they would have had to be manufactured for the purposes of condemnation—and this is precisely what they are.

In making such a move, Heidegger buoyed up an elevated and esoteric thinking by collecting what was drifting along on the streams of the most commonplace, widespread, vulgar, or ordinary antisemitism that infected public attitudes of the time . . . and that continues to infect our own.

Not only does antisemitism continue to infect public attitudes; it has even increased, or been intensified, through the introduction of a Muslim antisemitism, itself arising out of problems that surround the State of Israel—a state whose own founding was no stranger to antisemitism and to the European nationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike Christian countries, Islamic countries had not known virulent antisemitism until the end of the nineteenth century, when European premises and attitudes began to penetrate the “progressive” circles of the Ottoman Empire.

Today an antisemitism circulates all around the Mediterranean—and, more widely, throughout the world—that has become banal again; that is, it feeds on beliefs and images produced over the course of a very long history, in which modern forms have mostly taken over from ancient ones. The latter—often labeled “anti-Judaism”—emerged first and foremost out of religious condemnations and their consequences (exclusion from many sectors, social statutes, professions). Modern forms—bio-ethnological racism and global conspiracy theories—come together in what Hannah Arendt characterizes as the making of an abstract figure, “the Jew,” bearer of all flaws and perpetrator of all evils.

Among the many characteristics that clearly indicate continuity between the ancient and the modern, banality must be emphasized: at each stage, what is at stake is the banalization of motifs and motives of ecclesiastical, political, theological, or anthropological origin. It is truly remarkable that intellectual developments throughout history have been able to spread in such a way as to form a self-evident cluster of popular images, in the most banal and low-brow culture as well as in the most elevated (for example in Dante, Shakespeare, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Baudelaire, Heidegger).

Banalization presupposes an assimilation, an intimate incorporation, in the same way in which it has become banal, for instance, to operate a device as sophisticated as the telephone. It therefore presupposes a capacity for absorption that is itself fed by a powerful energy. Hatred for the Jews at first, then invention of a universal Jew who is at once conspiratorial and parasitic: both draw on a powerful resource. Its concealment in our culture is necessary for the latter to be able to produce such a far-reaching, incessant, and virtually intransigent phenomenon.

When we criticize the expression “banality of evil” for minimizing the evil, it is in order to assert the exceptionally monstrous nature of this evil. And this monstrosity is indisputable. At the same time, though, without seeking to relativize in any way the horror of the extermination of the Jews⁴ or ceasing to denounce it, we must ask ourselves whether a kind of inverted banality is not also taking place now, consciously or not: precisely the inverted banality of a denunciation that would serve as the last word, and so would be off limits for further research and exploration.

Indeed, the constant repetition of this kind of inverted banality, which consists of denouncing fascisms (most often along with other regimes designated as “totalitarian”) as absolute evils, also seems to guarantee a self-righteousness that does not need to search any further. “To search further” means here to focus on the conditions of possibility offered within democracies and within culture or civilization for this sudden occurrence. It means asking oneself whether this occurrence simply fell from heaven (or rather arose from hell), or whether it did not find certain resources in the fissures of democracy, humanism, technologism, and economism.

In this respect as well, the case of Heidegger is exemplary. We are very quick to point out that he was a Nazi, and therefore his entire oeuvre must be as well; but we read little or nothing of the work he wrote explicitly or implicitly against Nazism. To be sure, he wrote that work in the name of what Lacoue-Labarthe has called “archi-fascism.” But this archi-fascism was itself made possible at that time by the collapse of philosophy into the soft thinking of “values.” (Besides, most of the professional philosophers in Germany sided with the prevailing ideology, voluntarily or not, in a very banal way).

It is completely banal to repeat this anti-fascist refrain. But, to stick to the subject of this essay, one should at least ask oneself how it is that antisemitic banality persists so stubbornly in the middle of a world supposedly delivered from fascism. Which leads me back to the question, or the inkling, of how abhorrence for the Jews is implicated in the very genesis of the West.

Notes

1. 4. Or the horror of other (earlier, simultaneous, or subsequent) genocides, the nature of which and possible links to the genocide of the Jews I am not able to consider here.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Preface to the English edition
• Introduction
• 1 Banality
• 2 Historial and spiritual
• 3 Autoimmunity
• 4 Extermination
• 5 Omnipotence
• 6 Revelation
• 7 Incompatibility
• 8 Judeo-Christianity
• 9 Self-loathing
• 10 Mutation
• 11 Drives
• 12 Antisemitic God
• Additional notes
• End User License Agreement