Radical French Thought and the Return of the -Jewish Question

R A DIC A L F R E NC H T HOUGH T a n d t h e R E T U R N of t h e “J E W I SH QU E S T ION ”

S T U DI E S I N A N T I S E M I T I S M Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor

R A DIC A L F R E NC H T HOUGH T a n d th e R ET U R N of th e “J E W ISH QU E S T ION ” Éric Marty Translated by Alan Astro

Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 E. 10th Street Bloomington, IN 47405-3907 iupress.indiana.edu Telephone  800-842-6796 Fax  812-855-7931 Sources of the translated texts: Chapter 1: Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good: “Jean Genet à Chatila” in Bref séjour à Jérusalem (© 2003 Gallimard), pp. 89–193. Chapter 2: Alain Badiou: The Future of a Denial: “Alain Badiou: L’avenir d’une négation” in Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe (© 2007 Gallimard), pp. 41–94. Chapter 3: Saint Paul among the Moderns: Symbolic Universal or Mimetic Universal? History and Metahistory: “Saint Paul et les modernes: universel symbolique, universel mimétique,” Cités, vol. 1, no. 53 (2013), pp. 167–86. Chapter 4: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception: “À propos d’État d’exception de Giorgio Agamben” in Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe (© 2007 Gallimard), pp. 131–55. Chapter 5: Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel: “Foucault, Deleuze, les juifs et Israël” in Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe (© 2007 Gallimard), pp. 156–84. Used with permission of the copyright holders. Compilation and translation © 2015 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-253-01672-0 (cloth) isbn 978-0-253-01678-2 (paperback) isbn 978-0-253-01684-3 (ebook) 1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15

À mes amis américains

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J’avais trouvé dans le Traité théologico-politique [de Spinoza] l’exemple le plus éclatant mais aussi le plus méconnu de la connaissance du “troisième genre”, la plus haute, qui fournit l’intelligence d’un objet à la fois singulier et universel: celle de l’individualité historique et singulière d’un peuple (je pense que Spinoza visait dans le “troisième genre” la connaissance de toute individualité singulière et en son genre universelle), celle du peuple juif. [Above all, what I found in the Tractatus Theologico-politicus was the most striking and, at the same time, the least known example of knowledge of the “third order.” . . . The understanding achieved was that of the unique historical individuality of a people, that of the Jewish people (I believe that in his “third order” Spinoza was aiming at knowledge of all unique and, in its way, universal individuality).] Louis Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps (The Future Lasts Forever)

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Contents

Foreword by Bruno Chaouat To My American Readers 1 Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good

xi xxi 1

2 Alain Badiou: The Future of a Denial

53

3 Saint Paul among the Moderns: Symbolic Universal or Mimetic Universal? History and Metahistory

80

4 On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception: Guantánamo and Auschwitz

96

5 Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel

112

Index

125

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Foreword

I

t was in 1986 that I first heard of Éric Marty. I was a young student at the Université de Lille in search of a good introduction to the works of André Gide. My mentor, the late Philippe Bonnefis, suggested Éric Marty’s recently published book, L’écriture du jour (The day’s writing) on Gide’s journals,1 which proved to be less an introduction to Gide’s life and work than an empathic and elegant meditation on writing, death, and the fleetingness of time. I realized I had just been exposed to one of the most talented voices in French literary scholarship of that generation. As the author of sixteen well-regarded books, critical editions, and innumerable essays, Marty has since become an internationally renowned literary scholar, a public intellectual, and novelist. He is also a friend, and I am grateful for the privilege of introducing him to an English-speaking audience. Before proceeding, however, I wish to thank Alan Astro for an accomplishment that goes far beyond the task of the translator. A rare connoisseur of French style, an expert on Samuel Beckett and French literary modernity, as well as an accomplished scholar of Yiddish literature, Astro has truly turned Marty’s superb, yet so French, prose, into a book easily accessible to the American readership. * * * In the mid-1970s, a then young student of literature in Paris, Éric Marty was riveted by the teaching of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Faithful to his first youthful passion, he would dedicate a book to Althusser in the late 1990s. Marty then turned away from formalist dogmatism and encountered other postwar theoreticians and writers who shook up the French academic establishment, especially the humanities or what came to be known as sciences humaines. Those writers, among whom American readers will readily recognize the names of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes, embodied the cultural shocks known as structuralism and deconstruction. Waves of these shocks reached this side of the Atlantic as early as the 1960s and, in various forms, came to be known as “French thought” or “literary theory.” To Barthes, who became a mentor and friend in the mid- to late-1970s, Marty devoted a poignant homage, a book that is both a synthesis of his thought and a literary memoir.2 Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Barthes, and, before them, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski—those are the thinkers and writers who have shaped Marty’s mind and whom he calls, with a

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xii | Foreword touch of deference, “the Moderns.” Marty ascribes chronological bookends to this moment in French intellectual history, a period of extreme adventurousness in the realm of thought. He sees this moment as spreading over three decades, from 1950 to 1980. That historical sequence, as he masterfully shows in his recent book on the legacy of the Marquis de Sade in twentieth-century thought, is the French intellectual and literary response to World War II, fascism, collaboration with the Nazi regime, and the unassimilable event of the Holocaust.3 The present volume presents to English readers translations of five of Marty’s seminal essays on contemporary antisemitism and its connections to radical thought, especially as it has developed in recent decades in France and, from there, has had a sizable impact abroad. Informed people in the United States are aware of the rise of anti-Jewish hostility at the street level, within France and other European countries today. They may be less aware of the presence of such animosity on the intellectual level, where, as this book demonstrates, it has penetrated the thinking of some major literary figures, philosophers, and theoreticians. Marty’s revealing essays, here collected and translated for the first time, clarify just how pervasive and corrosive antisemitic bias has been in the work of some of the most prominent and influential practitioners of radical European thought. In some of their key texts, as readers of this volume will learn, antisemitism takes on a metaphysical dimension. * * * How, some may ask, can the study of literature prepare anyone for a political and philosophical analysis of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the Middle East conflict? Can one justify the foray of literary scholarship into the study of antisemitism, a field once dominated by historians and social scientists? To these queries and possible objections, I remind readers that genuine literary scholarship demands that one pay heed to the signifier, that is, to the materiality and the ambiguity of language and the figurative nature of words. Careful consideration of language is key to the understanding of antisemitism. As Marty’s work shows, a genuine literary scholar attends to the singularity of a text and is attuned to listening, as Barthes would have it, to the very grain of the voice—the different levels of meaning, which contribute to defining the ethos of writing. The best scholars of literature are more concerned with differences, otherness, strangeness, than with sameness and familiarity. They are exquisitely attentive to the particular, from which arises the universal—a shared, human experience. Such is what happens when we encounter great literary works. Moreover, writers are not interchangeable, and styles are irreducible. As a result, the advantage that the literary scholar enjoys over the philosopher is that he or she does not subsume the materiality of the signifier under the abstraction of the general concept. Emmanuel Levinas, in his critique of Hegelian totality, expressed this notion by

Foreword | xiii making a distinction between the Saying and the Said. The former opens onto singularity—the infinite singularity of the other—while the latter concerns concepts and totality. This insight is what Marty has learned from the Moderns, and also from his profound acquaintance with such poets and writers as René Char, André Gide, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Genet, and the Marquis de Sade. It is what differentiates Marty from practitioners of what I would call, for lack of a better word, “the new radical thought.” That new radical philosophy, represented in Marty’s book by philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, has created a secular, simplified version of the universalism preached by Saint Paul. That universalism, Marty shows, neglects the singularity and the exceptionality of language. Thus the new radical philosophy’s tone deafness to what Marty calls “the name Jew” needs to be explained for a reason beyond some ingrained, left-wing antisemitism—although there is some of that too, given the legacy of Marx’s invidious essay on the Jewish Question. More importantly, however, the Jewish signifier remains unheard because radical thought is based on an abstract universalism. Contrarily, the name “Jew,” as Marty shows in his essay on Paul, designates a specific and concrete universalism. In the context of French intellectual, ideological, and political history, this abstract universalism echoes the ideology of the French Republic and its relation to its Jewish minority. Recall Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre’s famous declaration, at the time of the revolution’s emancipation of the Jews (1791): “To the Jews as individuals, everything. To the Jews as a nation, nothing.”4 This idea of the universal is what Jean-Paul Sartre criticized in Anti-Semite and Jew,5 where he excoriated the “democrat” as the man who recognized only the human in the Jew, but not the Jew in the human. Thus, Sartre argued, Jews were left without their singular and embodied experience. * * * The famous thief-poet Jean Genet was analyzed in depth by Jean-Paul Sartre who, in 1952, devoted a 700-page “foreword” to his early writings. A few years later, in 1957, Georges Bataille, the founder of the Collège de Sociologie in the 1930s, would include Genet in a study of the complicity between literature and evil.6 Genet, it was commonly argued, was the poet of natural and moral inversion. Some have identified in him a new Gnostic, who rebelled against the cosmos and the law. Had Albert Camus written The Rebel a few years later, no doubt he would have included Genet in his genealogy of literary rebels from Sade to the Surrealists.7 In his chapter on Genet, Marty also invokes the Gnostic tradition of rebellion against natural and human law. But Genet was also the advocate of those whom Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” a staunch anticolonialist, anti-American, and anti-imperialist. Drawn by his passion for outcasts,

xiv | Foreword and seemingly the voice of the underdogs, Genet spent time with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians in the 1970s. He would freely recount these experiences in his last book, Prisoner of Love,8 the subject of Marty’s analysis. By an ironic reversal, some critics wish to see in Genet’s siding with the underdog a sign that he was the poet of social justice and the good. Marty, however, tells quite a different story. For him, the writer remained faithful to his calling—namely, the voice of transgression and symbolic inversion. If, as Marty shows, Genet stood by the most radical actions of Palestinians and the Black Panthers, it is precisely because he remained on the side of evil and terror, out of “an anxiety in the face of the good” and of the Law that the Jews and their State represented for him. Such a conclusion can be reached only after having followed the complex meanderings of Genet’s poetics and metaphysics, after having unpacked his idiom, a language at once classical and revolutionary that Genet raised as a rampart against the common language of morals, against the world order. An unworldly language, as it were, it was language as an act of violence and betrayal. And thus, contrary to Sartre, who famously declared that Genet played at being an antisemite, Marty takes Genet’s antisemitism seriously, as the metaphysical core of his esthetics of transgression. Marty’s portrait of Genet is very different from Derrida’s, which appears in Glas,9 an experimental book split into two columns, with a quasi-associative, almost surrealistic logic, which gets expressed in an ecstatic, apocalyptic tone. Marty’s analysis of Genet, by contrast, follows a rigorous logic and engages with real questions of history and politics, which were avoided by Derrida. Marty’s reading of Genet is metaphysical, but his is a metaphysics rooted in concrete historical and political experience. In Marty’s Genet we see thought “thinking against itself,” as Adorno would have it, and witness a great mind struggling against its own penchants. Enthralled by the poet of evil, faithful to Bataille’s definition of literature as transgression and to the Moderns’ fascination with evil in the wake of the revival of Sade in the postwar period, Marty takes a stand against the demonization of the Jewish state, a demonization expressed in the most violent rhetoric. Marty is one of the few French intellectuals to be aware of the poison of that rhetoric and knows that under the cover of anticolonialism, such rhetoric perpetuates metaphysical antisemitism. * * * Marty does not display as much patience for contemporary radical philosophers as he does, understandably, for the somber sumptuousness of Genet. If, then, the first section of the book, focusing on Genet, is empathic, the subsequent chapters, devoted to Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze, are polemical. A lover of literature and poetry can relish Genet’s prose, even when that

Foreword | xv prose offers apologetics for the worst historical evils, that is, Nazism, antisemitism, and terroristic nihilism, because that prose “pleads guilty” (Bataille’s 1957 phrase about modern literature) and embraces evil and transgression without claiming to speak for justice and for the good. With the new radical philosophy, on the other hand, one is confronted with an erasure of “the name Jew” that is grounded in a­ ttitudes of moral superiority instead of antinomianism and transgression. Moreover, this erasure is enacted in the name of progress, equality, and the ­revolution. Marty’s first major quarrel (querelle is what he called this polemic in the original French—perhaps an ironic reminiscence of Genet’s famous character, Querelle) is with Alain Badiou, the philosopher of revolution who claims to subsume reality under the laws of mathematics, the theorist of the “event” conceived as a break within history, a historical revelation that allegedly opens up collective subjectivity and that Badiou opposes to “being.” Badiou is also the theorist who has restored the theological, Pauline paradigm on behalf of universalism. Indeed, he has authored a book on Paul, whom he sees as the founder of universalism.10 For him, Paul—albeit a reductive and secularized version of the apostle—carries the potential for overcoming particularisms and differences and for subsuming the multiple under the one. Marty’s chapter on the two universalisms (symbolic vs. mimetic) is a critique of this simplification of Paul since the beginning of the millennium. Marty contrasts this pared-down Paul with Lacan’s and Barthes’s engagement with the apostle. The question of language is crucial to understanding Badiou’s “Jewish problem.” For Badiou, there is no Jewish “event” as such. Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son Isaac, an important event of Judaism and of Jewish identity, is irrelevant to his conception of a subject-founding event. The “Jewish predicate” is, for Badiou, but a creation of what he calls “Nazi simulacrum.” Hence his outlandish invitation to the Jewish people to overcome this Jewish predication and to “forget” the Holocaust. Overcoming the predicate “Jew” would be, for Badiou, the only way for Jews to be faithful to the universality of their name. Badiou, Marty writes, cannot relate to the “Jewish event of naming, and of transmission of the name.” From such (Marxist? French Republican?) inability of acknowledging the name Jew as a singular, yet universal, event emerge all the perversions with which the scholar of the new antisemitism is all too familiar—the most common one being that the state of Israel is denounced as antisemitic and allegedly behaves toward Palestinian Arabs as the Third Reich did toward the Jews. Badiou, like all proponents of a dogmatic conception of universalism, is trapped in the logic of denial—denial of Jewish reality, denial of the eventfulness of the name Jew, denial that the universal always takes a particular and singular form. All things being equal, he is not unlike Sartre’s democrat, who could only salvage the Jew as a worthy subject by denying Jewish subjectivity.

xvi | Foreword Merciless attention to propositional logic, worthy of an analytic philosopher, allows Marty to take apart Badiou’s odd thesis: that “Jew” is an empty signifier, the name of a void, which would be the name of the universal. Badiou claims that as soon as this name is particularized, embodied in a community, a nation, and the like, it is betrayed, and thus it becomes “antisemitic.” As soon as “Jew” stops functioning as a synonym for “communist” or for “Palestinian,” then it is an antisemitic or racist signifier. Quite to the contrary is Marty’s fundamental a­ xiom—one in which the reader will recognize the scholar of literature and poetry, the disciple of Barthes and of all the poets and writers of French modernity, and the Moderns and their passion for singularities and for irreducible differences. Marty holds that a signifier does not admit synonyms. * * * In 1975, novelist Romain Gary, using the pen name Émile Ajar, received the prestigious Prix Goncourt—a prize he had already received under his own name— for a novel that presents the character of Madame Rosa, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, a former prostitute, and a foster parent of children of prostitutes.11 Madame Rosa is haunted by the ghosts of the past. In her worst moments of delusional senility, she imagines that “the welfare-medical establishment which seems intent on using inhuman means to extend a life she no longer thinks worth living”12 is out to get her. In a tragicomic episode Madame Rosa compares this bio-political apparatus of the modern state to Auschwitz, thus inverting the core feature of Nazi eugenics. If the welfare-medical establishment of the French democratic state artificially extends the life of the weakest (the elderly and the sick), Nazi eugenics, by contrast, shortened lives “not worth living.” Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has a literary precursor in none other than the tragicomical and endearing Madame Rosa. Yet Agamben has the excuse neither of having survived Auschwitz nor of being a fictional character. (Of course, Agamben is Italian, but French theory is not only eminently exportable; major components can be outsourced. In fact, its branding as “French theory” is an Anglo-Saxon accretion.) In his critique of Agamben, Marty shows how a misreading of Walter Benjamin triggers a comparison between democratic and totalitarian states. Here are some egregious examples of Agamben’s analogizing: he asserts that “the concentration camp is the nomos of modernity”; he likens the fate of Guantánamo Bay detainees (post-9/11) to the treatment of Jews in Auschwitz; and he draws a seemingly unquestionable parallel between the “bio-political” fingerprinting of foreigners who enter the United States and the Nazi tattooing of inmates as they arrived at concentration camps. Agamben’s epistemological specialty consists in his focusing on extreme cases or situations and inferring from them a

Foreword | xvii general theory. But this way of thinking, or rather of betraying the basic demand of thinking, had characterized the work of one of Agamben’s influences, Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political philosopher, who believed the only way to grasp the essence of politics was to scrutinize states of exception (war and dictatorship). The result of such epistemological radicalness was the notorious definition of politics as the distinction between friend and enemy that arguably provided a rationale for the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Agamben’s misreading of Benjamin is characterized by neglecting the Jewish metaphysics that underlies Benjamin’s critique of violence, and especially his famous distinction between mythical and divine violence. To this misreading Agamben adds a hijacking of Michel Foucault’s concept of “bio-politics,” misused to prove the alleged continuity between democracy and the totalitarian state. Foucault had warned against that risk and had “ironically imagined a theoretician who would put social security and concentration camps on the same plane.” And thus Agamben, the theoretician ironically imagined by Foucault, who blurs the borders between the rule of law and the totalitarian state, betrays his involuntary resemblance with Madame Rosa. Marty’s resorting to Foucault to disqualify Agamben’s radical politics is wellfounded, and it confirms a theme that Marty develops in the chapter on the return of Paul in the twenty-first century—a return that amounts to a betrayal of the Moderns (the 1950–1980 sequence) by the new radical thought. More gravely, beneath Agamben’s dandyesque phraseology Marty unravels an odd inclination toward a politics unbound by law, an anomic politics—that is, terror. Finally, this prominent strain of radical thought, bereft of its communist fantasy in the aftermath of the Cold War, has pursued its dream of terror by making excuses for some of the worst excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. By the same token, such radical thought tends to dilute the Holocaust by drawing outrageous parallels with the familiar realities that accompany bureaucracy, border control, and the like. * * * The last section of this book is devoted to Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher whom Éric Marty avows admiring to the extent that he belongs to the generation of the Moderns, that game-changing generation in French intellectual history. His appreciation of Deleuze, however, does not blind Marty to the latter’s “Jewish problem” (I use this euphemism to avoid the at-times reductive term “antisemitism”) expressed especially in pièces de circonstance and newspaper articles. For Marty, Deleuze’s refusal to engage with the idea of Jewish exception, his deafness to the name Jew, partakes of the universalism preached by the French Republic. However, one could argue that Deleuze’s violent destruction of psychoanalysis (Anti-Oedipus),13 his celebration of schizophrenia, “deterritorialization,” and

xviii | Foreword transgression, were also major elements in his Jewish problem. In fact, Deleuze’s Jewish problem shared some characteristics with Genet’s, especially antinomianism. Yet in contrast to Genet, Deleuze hypostatized ideal Jews whom he imagined as exemplary subversives of the dominant culture, literature, and language— anomic and nomadic figures.14 Moreover, Marty shows that for Deleuze antisemitism had disappeared and been replaced with the purported threat of “American fascism.” The equation between fascism and capitalism is a commonplace feature of left-wing anti-­ Americanism and has, in the past, led to Holocaust minimization or denial. It was common during the Cold War in the Soviet Union to blur distinctions among Nazism, fascism, and capitalism and to rewrite the history of the Holocaust in terms of class struggle and the struggle against Western capitalism. The same brand of denial of antisemitism is resurfacing today, in the post-9/11 world. Mutatis mutandis, such is what we encounter in recent books by historian Enzo Traverso or Alain Badiou and Éric Hazan, that is, the alleged irrelevance of classic antisemitism and its replacement not with a new form of Jew-hatred, but with another threat, identified as “Islamophobia,” “fascist capitalism,” the AmericanZionist axis, racist colonialism, and the like.15 And the same denial can be seen in the idealized figure of the Diasporic Jew, betrayed since the establishment of the state of Israel and supplanted as a model by repulsive stereotypes such as the Arab-hating Zionist or the wealthy American Jew. * * * To conclude, the main cause for the failed engagement of radical thought with the Jewish question is what Marty diagnoses as the misuse of synonymy. To give simple examples of this play of synonyms, suffice it to consider the way in which Badiou and others have been using the name “Jew” as an equivalent for “worker,” “immigrant,” or “Palestinian,” thus dissolving the singularity and the exceptionality of the name in an abstract universalism—a universalism that subsumes each particular in the name of the struggle against oppression, in the name of the revolution. While Foucault, following the poet René Char, rejects synonymy and attends to the specificity of names, to the singularity of the real, radical thought indulges in a synonymy that disavows singularities. To wit, the disease of radical thought (Badiou, a certain version of Deleuze, and Agamben) is sameness, a sameness that de-singularizes universalism. Marty states what may be the essence of his teaching as a paradox that sums up the enigmatic and irreducible nature of Jewish identity: “Exception constitutes what is authentically universal.” This insight is precisely what enables this accomplished literary critic to grasp what the new antisemitism is all about. By attending to the singularity of the signifier, the specificity of words, the idiom of the poet or the writer, a gifted literary scholar is at an advantage over the philosopher when it comes to understanding

Foreword | xix the ultimate exception that can never be reduced to the same, the exception that escapes the deleterious logic of synonymy—namely, the proper name, in this case: “Jew.” Bruno Chaouat

Notes 1. André Gide, L’écriture du jour: Le journal d’André Gide (Paris: Seuil, 1985). 2. Éric Marty, Roland Barthes, le métier d’écrire (Paris: Seuil, 2006). 3. Éric Marty, Pourquoi le vingtième siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux? (Paris: Seuil, 2011). 4. Clermont-Tonnerre, “Speech on Religious Minorities and Questionable Professions,” December 23, 1789. 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken/ Grove, 1948). 6. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Marion Boyars, 1997). 7. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Knopf, 1956). 8. Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992). 9. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 10. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). 11. Émile Ajar, La vie devant soi (Paris: Mercure de France, 1975). The novel appeared under the title Momo (trans. Ralph Manheim [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978]), and the film based on the book was released in the United States as Madame Rosa (dir. Moshé Mizrahi, 1977). 12. See Jeffrey Mehlman’s superb essay, “French Literature and the Holocaust,” in Literature of the Holocaust, ed. Alan Rosen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 174–90. 13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977). 14. See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: For a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 15. See Alain Badiou and Éric Hazan, L’antisémitisme partout (Paris: Fabrique, 2011), and Enzo Traverso, La fin de la modernité juive (Paris: Découverte, 2013).

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To My American Readers

T

he articles that make up this book were written between 2003 and 2013. They appeared at the dawn of the twenty-first century, which has doubtless marked a new, or at least crucial, stage for the West and its discursive practices. We are witnessing a crisis of thought of a kind hitherto unknown. In France, as elsewhere, certain words have suddenly stopped being acceptable or even comprehensible; they no longer circulate naturally in social situations. Anyone still employing them has to justify doing so and place them between quotation marks. Among these taboo words, two stand out: the proper nouns “Israel” and “Jew.” Such phenomena underlie my certainty of living in a new historical era, of having gone through a break in the chronological continuum as collectively experienced. Something in the discourse has changed. These two words no longer sound as they did before; their familiar meaning seems to have deserted them. But something even graver has occurred. “Israel” and “Jew” mark a radical division on a global scale—global, but not only as regards conflicts among major geopolitical blocs, but also on the level of public opinion, within cultural institutions, the academy, the media. The fault line may run through a family, a circle of friends, an intellectual or professional community, a clique—or even a single individual. These words that have lost their meaning have turned into a source of confusion, of anxiety, of terror. Though designations for states and ethnic groups have often been subjects of controversy and are rarely neutral, “Israel” and “Jew” are not even granted the conventional honorability bestowed more or less generously on labels for nations and peoples. The rekindling of antisemitism at this beginning of the twenty-first century has assumed a new, specific form. The question of whether Jews form a people or whether their state has a right to exist no longer finds its source in mere hatred, blood thirst, the will to destroy, or the deliria of fringe groups that call for an apocalyptic end to all states and all history. Nowadays, such questioning of Israel and the Jews cloaks itself in the mantle of Good as opposed to Evil. It speaks the language of human rights, of antiracism, because the words “Jew” and “Israel” have emerged as synonyms of “racist” and “exclusion.” Instead of emanating from obscure zones of hatred, this questioning operates in the light of day, but also virtually, in a great space of mimetic unanimity that we know to be pregnant with catastrophic possibilities. When the second intifada began in September 2000, my reaction was twofold. First of all, I strove to defend as much as I could simple truths, facts that the

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xxii  |  To My American Readers media and opinion-makers of all stripes left out of their narrative of “Palestinian resistance.” Then I started a long-term examination of the radical reversal taking place among my intellectual cohorts, all of whom drew nourishment from the teachings of Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes. I had to re-focus on an area, summarily called “French theory,” which I thought I knew well. That was the world from which emerged this new misunderstanding and rejection of Jewish identity—the very identity I saw as intimately linked to the innovations, indeed the revolutions that the theoreticians I mention brought about during the second half of the twentieth century. That is not to say French theory is in any way “Jewish”! But its emergence was deeply related not only to Jewish thought but also to the notion of a specifically Jewish condition. The intellectual consciousness of that period was chock full of elements that could be traced back to Jewish textual tradition. So how could an entire school of thought whose bywords were “writing,” “the symbolic,” “differ(a)nce,” “minor literature,” “the Law,” “the Book,” “critique of mimesis,” “transmission,” and “transgression” suddenly declare itself alien to what in large measure had dictated the preference for these terms? Alas, the luminaries of the inaugural period had died out, and figures who until then had remained in the shadows came to the fore. In this regard, Alain Badiou has played an important role in this sea-change affecting the intellectual arena since the 1980s. Before then Badiou had been a Maoist militant, hostile as a matter of principle to the intelligentsia and all its works. But leaving behind his earlier taste for violence, intellectual terrorism, and sectarian divisiveness, he has assumed a certain importance in intellectual and respectable political milieus. Badiou has managed to realize the worst fear of the inventors of French theory: that their materialist and structuralist concepts would give way to a hermetic positivism. Wariness of recuperation by positivism is a constant in works such as Foucault’s Order of Things, Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text, Lacan’s Écrits, and Althusser’s For Marx. In fact, the greatest adversary of the Jewish condition, of the very notion of such difference, may well be positivistic rationalism, insofar as it is a system seeking invariables, the Same. We thus see in Badiou’s philosophy a new form of positivism that does not shy away from reducing thought itself to mathematics, thus ignoring the differential function proper to language and to the signifier. His critique of Jewish identity and of the very term “Jew” owes much to the close-minded rationalism of the nineteenth century—a worldview Flaubert ironically immortalized in the figure of Homais the pharmacist in Madame Bovary. We see this in Badiou’s sarcasm regarding the mythical dimension of religion, his scorn of exceptions to what he sees as substantial (he claims that simply to use the word “Jew” to describe someone is no less than a Nazi gesture destructive of a person’s substance). All of this bespeaks a limited universalism that is so French, redolent of the Third Republic.

To My American Readers  |  xxiii French theoreticians feared—rightfully, given their formalistic bent—that their thought could be commandeered by positivism. But they were not alone. In a context other than the French one, a thinker like Adorno beheld the catastrophe wrought by the Nazis. He uncovered within Enlightenment rationalism reinforced by Kantian formalism the same danger of a positivistic takeover hostile by nature to Jewish thought, the Jewish condition, and to Jews themselves. That is why, in order to understand something taking place throughout the entire world, it seemed crucial for me to investigate the writings, the spoken words, the thought patterns of the miniscule universe—the French intelligentsia—of which I was a part. It seemed probable that what was happening in that microcosm spurred a process unfolding globally. Thus I carefully researched books, articles, lectures, pronouncements by Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou, and (a little further back in time) Gilles Deleuze, as well as the Italian Giorgio Agamben. I found it interesting to compare their ideas with those—totally opposite, as it turns out—of a thinker like Michel Foucault. There is no poor philosophy that does not feed on myths; nor is there a theoretical positivism that is not ultimately fantasy fulfillment. The so-called “Jewish question” has been around long enough; it has left us countless manifestations in the sensory, esthetic, and imaginary realms. But who might be the primary French modern, or post-modern, master in that regard? There is one writer whose genius allowed him to plumb the mythical underpinnings of much twentiethcentury French history: Jean Genet. In dazzling prose, and with greater subtlety than Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Genet painted the portrait of the Jew as enemy. By so doing, he closed a circle beginning in the 1940s with his fascination for the white skin, blue eyes, and blond hair of the Nazi or fascist, and ending in the 1970s and 1980s with carnal figures who once again enthralled him by combining erotics and radical politics: the Black Panthers and the Palestinian militia. Genet may well be the writer whose work best typifies the inversion or destruction of the meanings given to the words “Israel” and “Jew.” Perversely, Genet could see himself as a rival to the Jewish inmate of a concentration camp. He provided excellent fodder for a far-left Holocaust relativism that, unlike the far-right denial of the gassing of Jews, could now appoint a new figure to the status of the “perfect” victim: the marginalized homosexual writer, the “pervert” who allies himself with the “wretched of the earth.” Genet is the first object of my study. Analyzing most of all his Funeral Rites and Prisoner of Love, I strive to show that a singular, irreducible form of Jewish subjectivity re-emerges as problematic in these paradigmatic works for postmodern culture. Genet was an artist invigorated by the tension and complicity between the death drive and eroticism. If rampant hostility toward Jews could appear in his writings, and then in works by intellectuals less driven by emotion than Genet, it could manifest itself in forms supposedly free of affect—but no less

xxiv  |  To My American Readers ferocious in terms of accusations, criticisms, and betrayals. This is especially the case when they question the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy. Genet, Badiou, Agamben, Deleuze, and others represent one reaction of Europe to the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Their writings are symptomatic on a local level as well as on a global one. That is why I take the risk of sharing my analyses with American readers. Unfortunately, I believe that certain phenomena I explore in the French context will ring all too familiar to them. Éric Marty August 2013

R A DIC A L F R E NC H T HOUGH T a n d t h e R E T U R N of t h e “J E W I SH QU E S T ION ”

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Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good

I. Funeral Rites Anxiety in the Face of the Good Genet is anti-Semitic. Or rather he plays at being so. As one can imagine, it is hard for him to support most of the theses of anti-Semitism. Deny the Jews political rights? But he doesn’t give a rap about politics. Exclude them from the professions, forbid them to engage in business? That would amount to saying that he is unwilling to rob them, since businessmen are his victims. An antiSemite who was defined by his unwillingness to rob Jews would be a curious anti-Semite indeed. Does he therefore want to kill them by the million? But massacres don’t interest Genet; the murders of which he dreams are individual ones. What then? When cornered, he declares that he “couldn’t go to bed with a Jew.” Israel can sleep in peace. I see only the following in his repugnance: as a victim of pogroms and age-old persecutions, the Jew appears as a martyr. His gentleness, humanism, endurance and sharp intelligence command our respect but cannot give him prestige in the eyes of Genet who, since he wants his lovers to be bullies, cannot be buggered by a victim. Genet is repelled by the Jews because he recognizes that he and they are both in the same situation.1

To my mind, the first sentence of this long passage—“Genet is antiSemitic”—is the most profound and remarkable statement in the entirety of Sartre’s unwieldy masterpiece, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr.2 Generally, assertions of this sort are not courageous or profound; rather, they are simply meant to accuse their targets, to “out” or stigmatize them. Here, something quite different occurs. What is paradoxical about the statement “Genet is anti-Semitic” is that the predicate appears as something neutral, almost indulgent or at least respectful and objective—though it was made by someone who could not be suspected of harboring or tolerating antisemitism in any form. In 1946, a mere six years before, Sartre had published Anti-Semite and Jew,3 a work that, while hardly flawless, offered a phenomenology of antisemitism of such rigor and depth that it precludes our considering lightly or disdainfully his statement about Genet.

2  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Instead, we must view the pronouncement with due seriousness. Does it tell us more about Sartre or Genet? To provide an answer, it is necessary, this one time at least, to take antisemitism on its own terms. The better to grasp the audacity and significance of this statement—though we shall never be able to understand it fully—our best bet is to sympathize with Sartre here, including his apparent respect or neutrality regarding antisemitism. Adopting this viewpoint momentarily, we see that Sartre is hardly suggesting that Genet’s antisemitism may be excused for reasons external to it, that it can be pardoned because of Genet’s “genius,” for example. Indeed, we sometimes hear it said that a particular individual’s talent should allow us to see his antisemitism as an excusable defect, insofar as he is the greatest writer of his generation.4 What is childish and illusory about such a mythic conception of literature is immediately clear. If we wish to appreciate Sartre’s statement in all its profundity, if we wish to behold its significance as amply as possible, we have to get beyond such feeble arguments. We reason thus: If we can view the statement “Genet is anti-Semitic” as something neutral, Genet’s antisemitism must have its origin in some ontological fatality. It becomes, therefore, paradoxical that Sartre waters down this primal, powerful insight with the words, “Or rather, he plays at being so.” For what difference can there be, for Genet, between being and playing at being? Sartre then wastes some time on proving something perfectly obvious: that Genet’s antisemitism is dissimilar in nature to that motivating Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws or the actual process of mass extermination undertaken by the Nazis—two extreme cases of persecution, one bourgeois, the other barbaric. Genet’s attitude would be different from such manifestations of antisemitism, even though—as Sartre fails to mention—Genet was completely fascinated by Pétain’s militiamen, as well as by Hitler personally.5 Sartre then goes even further afield of his original insight by attributing Genet’s explicit repugnance for Jews to the fact that both he and they are “victims.” Sartre’s error is dual. He is wrong about Genet when he writes: “Genet is repelled by the Jews because he recognizes that he and they are both in the same situation,” for Genet is not a victim, as Sartre well knows, since the 690 pages of his Saint Genet serve precisely to demonstrate this non-victimhood. And if for the well-intentioned soul the Jew can appear to be a victim, if Sartre perceives in the Jew “gentleness, humanism, endurance and sharp intelligence,” he simply cannot believe that Genet, whom he just called an antisemite, would also view a Jew that way. If Genet is an antisemite, if such a statement can be value free, if Genet can say—untroublingly—that he could not sleep with a Jew, these facts obtain simply because in Genet’s eyes the Jew embodies goodness; he represents absolute Good. Genet’s antisemitism is thus anxiety provoked by goodness, anxiety felt in the presence of the Good. I refer here not only to the dread of the Good of which Kierkegaard proposes a theological interpretation in

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  3 The Concept of Anxiety but also to statements made by Sartre himself throughout Saint Genet, when he uses Kierkegaard’s conception of Evil to elaborate on Genet’s three metamorphoses, going from the essential question of sacrifice to the re-inscription of the ethical onto the esthetic.6 Genet’s antisemitism is not erotic repugnance rooted in narcissistic disgust for the Jew in whom he sees his own masochism. We repeat: this antisemitism is anxiety in the face of the Good, which is why we speak of an ontological fatality. What led Sartre astray is the sentence in which Genet, driven into a corner by the infernal dialectics Sartre has subjected him to in the course of their interminable conversations, avers that he “couldn’t go to bed with a Jew.” Sartre surely misunderstood those words. He believed Genet was confiding something sensual, that he found Jews lacked the necessary sex appeal. However, Genet was making a metaphysical confession in which the words “could never sleep with” have nothing to do with the Jew’s degree of virility, or his inability to play the dominant role or the executioner during the sexual act. Rather, this is a kind of impossibility that is a matter of life or death. Sartre ought to have recognized that fact, insofar as Genet had taken the trouble of writing him a lengthy letter in which he developed a “theory” of homosexuality (or as he called it “pederasty”), a metaphysics whose fundamental axiom was “a refusal to continue the world.”7 He wrote: “You see, it’s not so much in terms of sexuality that I explain the faggot, but in direct terms of death.”8

The Metaphysics of Sodom Sallying forth onto theological terrain, we shall dub this aspect of Genet’s world the metaphysics of Sodom. Though homosexuality is part of this metaphysics, it need not be. Obviously, there are diverse homosexual lifestyles and other mythical places with which these may be associated, not to mention all kinds of homosexuality devoid of metaphysics, which are assuredly lived all the more comfortably. The metaphysics of Sodom does not have a clearly defined tractatus. Like all metaphysics that derive from a primal human experience, it varies in its configurations, its forms, and its multifold interactions with Western thought and art. Thus Proust, who ceaselessly links and re-links homosexuality to Jewish identity, elaborates a vision in which being Jewish and belonging to Sodom are two manifestations of a single curse afflicting one sole race. Proust judaizes homosexuality, since for him the homosexual can only be the survivor of the exterminatory enterprise undertaken by the God of Israel, as related in Genesis, chapters 18 and 19. This Judaization is diametrically opposed, for example, to Gide’s antimetaphysical homosexuality that is heir to Greek joyfulness and pastoral idylls. There is a metaphysics of Sodom, insofar as Sodom

4  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” is the hidden essence beyond the phenomenal world of things and beings. In Proust’s work, this complex metaphysics first unfolds piecemeal, in enigmatic scenes, through vague allusions; then suddenly, in Sodom and Gomorrah, we are treated to infinite complex developments concerning “men-women”9 or (as Proust called them in an earlier draft) “the race of aunts.”10 A key element of this metaphysics is the repeated fascination with sacrifice, as in the sadomasochistic rituals performed by Charlus and Mademoiselle Vinteuil. These sacrificial acts stand in contrast to the binding of Isaac—the ultimate ruination of all such offerings, but one that Proust truncates, falsifies, or erases.11 Thus the young hero of Swann’s Way recalls from the biblical episode nothing more than Abraham’s announcing to Sarah that she will have to separate from Isaac; this, after having ironically commented, a few pages before, on Jewish law, referred by him as “those ancient laws which, alongside such fierce prescriptions as the massacre of children at the breast, forbid one with an exaggerated delicacy to boil a kid in its mother’s milk, or to eat the sinew from an animal’s thigh.”12 Proust’s metaphysics are conservative and reactionary, but that is precisely part of their charm. As survivors of annihilation, homosexuals are ontologically shameful (ontologiquement honteux)—hence Lacan’s witty spelling of the word hontology (shame-ology):13 in order to survive they passed themselves off as heterosexual, thereby deceiving the angels who stood watch over the massacre. This primal, eternal shame could not fail to make homosexuality into a secret sect, with little bearing on the world at large, even if Proust progressively leads the reader to see Sodom and Gomorrah as the ultimate truth behind all society. In practical terms we are all survivors of a failed extermination. The logic inherent in any great metaphysical vision implies that it internalizes the historical moment in which it was born. While Proust personally defended Dreyfus, his grand oeuvre takes a distance from such political involvement. There, alarmed by the emergence of Zionism as a response to the Dreyfus affair, Proust pens a surprisingly daring sentence that places an equal sign between the Jew and the Sodomite, as well as between Zion and Sodom: “I have wanted provisionally to forestall the fatal error that would consist, just as a Zionist movement has been encouraged, in creating a sodomist movement and in rebuilding Sodom.”14 For Proust, Jews, like Sodomites, were condemned to cosmopolitanism and eternal exile.

Cain Genet adopted the opinion Proust would doubtless have entertained on the creation of the state of Israel, as well as a subversive metaphysics that, following Sartre, we shall call Cainian. Cainianism is a Romantic myth, elaborated by writers including Hugo, as well as Baudelaire in his Flowers of Evil (explicitly in the poem “Cain and Abel”). It is most powerfully embodied in Balzac’s character Vautrin,

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  5 the homosexual convict whose membership in “the posterity of Cain” is revealed to us in a letter written by his young protégé, Lucien de Rubempré, just before the latter’s suicide.15 Sartre devotes an entire section of Saint Genet to the figure of Cain, which he sees as key to understanding Genet’s “morality” of trickery, lies, mythification, forgery, inversion (whereby the “loser takes all”), violence, thievery, and annihilation. These elements may be forged into one concept transcending them all and summed up in a single word: betrayal.16 Though we concur with most of Sartre’s brilliant analysis, we shall define Cain as the subject incapable of conceiving sacrifice except as murder and who, for that reason, unlike Abraham, does not come to know anxiety in the face of Evil, but is tormented by anxiety provoked by the Good.17 Therein lies the nodal point, the explanation, of Genet’s antisemitism. Let us push things a little further. Like Vautrin, in whom the morality of Cain and the fatality afflicting Sodom are linked, Genet sees society as his enemy. The struggle against it, however, is ambiguous, for it is a negative revolt that must betray itself in order to be authentic. Thus Vautrin ends up as chief of police. Such a revolt is thus caught up in the infernal dialectic reversals that Sartre so adored. Cain’s universe is inhabited by false enemies. One steals from everyone, betrays everyone; one steals from oneself and, to top things off, one betrays oneself even as one steals. One is “actor and martyr,” to quote the subtitle of Saint Genet.18 It is at this metaphysical juncture that the figure of the Jew emerges. He has changed in nature as he passes from Balzac through Proust and arrives at Genet. Let us recall how Vautrin manipulates the young Jewish prostitute Esther in order to swindle the Jewish banker Nucingen. The latter’s Yiddish accent as recorded by Balzac no doubt amused Proust, who enjoyed parodying his character Bloch’s speech. Esther, by sacrificing to Lucien her body and soul, is rehabilitated doubly: she is made a saint through her prostitution and Christian by her death.19 The worlds of Sodom and the Jews meet up, in recognition of their shared hiddenness, marginality, and eternal parasitism.

Hitler Genet never came across a Nucingen, he never stole from an “Israelite,” to use Sartre’s dated term.20 His relationship to the Jewish world is constructed in another historical epoch than that of the restored French monarchy and the rise of industrial and financial capitalism portrayed by Balzac. Genet’s connection to the Jews occurs at an even more wrenching time in history, during a metaphysical conflict that reshapes it through the instauration of Nazism, which for Genet means most of all the figure of Hitler. There is no reason to disbelieve that the Jews emerge in Genet’s imagination solely as mediated by Nazism, by Evil; that is no doubt why they are identified as the Good.

6  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Thus, when we define Genet’s antisemitism as anxiety in the face of the Good, we certainly do not mean that for him Jews would be ordinary or stereotypical figures of goodness, as they are for Sartre, who sees them as gentle, humanistic, long-suffering, and acutely intelligent. Genet’s imaginary universe deals in archetypes, abstractions. He who experiences anxiety in the face of the Good does not concretely picture wherein consists that goodness, which is strictly of no interest to him; he feels goodness as something purely negative, as that which Evil—to which he is so attached—cannot absorb or even come into contact with. Let us recall Genet’s assertion that he “could not sleep with a Jew.” If Hitler is Evil itself, then Jews are the Good. That syllogism is enough for Genet, who sees no need to analyze further. In that sense, Genet is not Hitlerian, not only because for Hitler Jews were not the Good21 but most of all because politics is an unreal category for Genet. In his system, Hitler is not Hitlerian but Luciferian: “I would give all the wealth of this world—indeed, it must be given— to experience the desperate—and secret—state which no one knows I know. Hitler, alone, in the cellar of his palace, during the last minutes of the defeat of Germany, surely experienced that moment of pure light—fragile and solid lucidity—the awareness of his fall.”22 Genet’s writings no doubt contain expressions of everyday antisemitism, but they are not essential. What is essential is his extraordinary Cainianism; in Romantic terms, we could say he is satanic. His Funeral Rites, a book that defies description, is one of Genet’s most significant and most troubling works. Written during and just after World War II, it depicts even more acutely than, for example, Pasolini’s Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom,23 the unspeakable encounter between the worlds of Sodom and of Hitler—unspeakable in the literal sense of defying all efforts to verbalize it. For that reason, it is a far more important book than The Thief ’s Journal, where one feels all too plainly Sartre’s influence and a kind of braggadocio in sentences like this one: “The French Gestapo contained two fascinating elements: treason and theft. With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassailable.”24 Hitler is the main character of Funeral Rites in which he figures both as himself and, in a kind of equivocal ubiquity, as the double of everyone else. Genet’s fascination with Hitler derives from his being the ultimate murderer, an extreme Cain, the sole individual one cannot betray.25 Hitler, in Genet’s universe, belongs both to the worlds of Sodom and of Cain, as attested to by the scene in which Hitler copulates with the young French militiaman Paulo; there, as it would be in primitive, sacrificial theater, Hitler is simply a mask, a persona representing all bodies and all desires. The identification of Hitler with Evil—meaning sex and erotic enjoyment, humiliating passivity, and sadistic domination—takes place not only in a kind of hallucinatory theatralization of the body but as an incessant and perpetually trivial metaphorization of sex: “That prick was also the angel’s

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  7 weapon, his dart, a part of those terrible devices with which he is armed. It was his secret weapon, the V-1 on which the Führer relies.”26 This goes beyond Baudelairean satanism; not only is the finite sullied, the infinite is suspect, which confirms Blanchot’s insight into the “denial” of the antisemite as being so absolute that it “does not cease to reaffirm the relation with the infinite that being-Jewish implies, and that no form of force can have done with. . . .”27 This phenomenon is illustrated by an anecdote Edmund White cites in his biography of Genet. When the latter’s American translator and agent, John Frechtman, asked Genet what he meant by saying “the Jews are filthy [immondes],” he replied, “That means they are not of this world [monde].”28 An exquisite, profound statement that supports our argument by making explicit, in Christian terms, that for Genet Jews were on the side of the Good. Genet was all the less Hitlerian as he neither directly nor indirectly took part in the Nazi enterprise that he applauded—even though he may well have taken sheer delight in the presence of collaborators and the figure of the Vichy militiaman. Genet experienced the massacre of the Jews in a purely vicarious mode.

II. The Witness Palestine As we have pointed out, Genet’s antisemitism is not everyday in kind but rather feeds on a break in historical continuity, the terrible saga of Nazism. And in logical harmony with Genet’s very particular genius, the second time he comes across Jews occurs at another historical disjuncture, which has been called Sabra and Shatila and obviously is tied up with Palestinian identity. To avoid ambiguity at all costs, it is necessary to say at the onset that in no way do we equate the Palestinians and the Nazis, even if the figure of Hitler and his minions haunt the pages of Prisoner of Love. We shall demonstrate that linking these two events makes sense only within Genet’s metaphysics, which is not subject to the rules that usually govern analogies, ideological critique, or the writing of history. His metaphysics is perpetual hallucination, discordant association of ideas, a hellish jumble. Genet’s universe is not meant to be fully identified with, and this unshareability makes it impossible to transfer onto the realm of real politics the historical and ideological constructions he elaborates. The nature of Genet’s antisemitism and the link it supplies between Palestinians and Hitler become clear only in retrospect. His wartime works and those in the first decades thereafter do not often mention Jews; his antisemitism, its violence, were expressed mainly in quotations attributed to him. Only after his engagement with the Palestinian cause does the Jewish question fully emerge; solely then does his figure of Hitler show its specifically antisemitic face. In other words, it is through his portrayal of the

8  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Palestinians that Nazi antisemitism appears as such in writings Genet claims as his own. The paradox is so flagrant that it would be unfair to Palestinians not to exercise extreme caution in dealing with his works on them.29 However, it would be even more unjustified to see Genet’s writing on Sabra and Shatila as something of purely esthetic or imaginary import. Whatever the degree of fantasy in Genet’s universe, whatever its distance from occurrences on the mundane historical plane, it is obvious that his words address something real and therefore deserve attention. His baroque logic may itself make his writing essential to understanding events. Before shedding light on the content of what happens, he makes the events themselves luminous; he allows us to understand what turns an occurrence into an event. Our discussion of Genet will therefore not be literary in nature. Ambiguously enough, it will be torn between an assessment of Genet’s complex symbolic elaborations and an attempt to comprehend the enigmatic event that took place at Sabra and Shatila.

Guernica Genet wrote two kinds of works on Sabra and Shatila and, more generally, on the question of Israel. On the one hand, there are immediate reactions, apparently written right after the 1982 events themselves: “Four Hours in Shatila,” “The Palestinians,” and other pieces subsequently reprinted in The Declared Enemy, which figured as volume six of the edition of his complete works in the original French. But after the original publication of these short pieces, 1986 saw the appearance of a major book, Un captif amoureux (translated as Prisoner of Love), which he finished proofreading shortly before his death. “Four Hours in Shatila” and Prisoner of Love proceed from very different, almost contradictory, intentions. “Four Hours in Shatila” moves toward three goals that I shall describe in the order in which they are presented. The first concerns the sort of testimony given, which partakes of what I shall call the Guernica program; the second is metaphysical, where the witness’s position is characterized by an amorous link between him and the victims; and the third concerns the production of testimony itself, which I see as an aspiration to the Good. Finally I shall discuss a fourth aim, which almost undoes the others: that of elaborating a moral ontology of the Jewish condition, an aim that in its very excess I see as the ultimate meaning, the eternal truth, to be conveyed by this instance of testimony. Genet’s first aim concerns the possibility of representing horror and death. At the intense moment he began to write, the day after he entered Shatila, two days after the massacre occurred, the atrocity whose results he observed and the need he felt to bear witness led him to attempt to produce the Palestinian equivalent of Guernica. I make out the link to Picasso in the first lines where he contrasts photographic or television images with the cubism he sees in the piles

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  9 of deformed corpses with dislocated limbs. Hence the insistence with which he depicts the obscenity of the rotting dead bodies, swelling up in the heat of the sun, “stretching the fabric on the pants which were about to burst open at the buttocks and the thighs.”30 The bodies, like those in Picasso’s painting, are presented vertically or horizontally,31 crammed into the space they occupy; in the very absence of the torturer, they command one’s gaze, forcing one to penetrate the unseen: “The torturer, what was he like? Who was he? I see him and I do not see him. He is everywhere I look and the only form he will ever have is the one outlined by the grotesque poses, positions, and gestures of the dead, attended by clouds of flies in the sun.”32 Genet is not engaging in reportage; instead, he is ubiquitous in what he describes, taking care to write something Genetian, just as Picasso painted something Picassian in the face of the tragedy of Guernica. He brings onto the surface his fascination with the fedayeen’s “triumphant virility” and with the heaps of bodies “gripped by some erotic lust now in a state of decomposition.”33 He recalls his September 1971 stay in the Palestinian camps and breathes renewed life into the image of handsome revolutionaries whose sensuality he celebrates ever and again. What defines Shatila is the obscenity of death wherein corpses simulate the twisting and writhing positions assumed in sex. The description thereupon takes off on its own into a fictional structure. Thus Genet, who knows well that not a single Israeli soldier took part in these murders, goes so far as to fantasize one slaughtering old Palestinian women whom he adulates in the extreme. The slaughterer obeys a kind of irrepressible drive: “Without any words at all, an Israeli soldier, if he saw these goddesses, would unload his automatic rifle into their skulls.”34 Genet assumes Picasso’s manner in order to produce something in his own style because he has understood the message of Guernica: for testimony to be effective, it cannot be angelic in form and take on a devotional kitsch. Testimony must extricate itself from the poison of goodness, of nonviolence, where it usually situates itself—even though this be achieved at the cost of shocking those who receive it. On the contrary, it has to dirty its hands. Testimony cannot idealize victims; to do so would efface the horrors that have been wrought upon them. The highest form of respect due to them demands depicting the formless, giving form to the amorphousness to which terror has reduced them. The horror that testimony attests to is so true, its truth is so powerful, that it risks violating the moral pact that usually defines testimony in its outlived mode characterized by moderation, neutrality, and restraint. The esthetic dimension, so important in this text, in conjunction with the brevity of incidents witnessed, makes their depiction all the more intense. Genet renders in an extremely painterly manner summary portraits of faceless bodies, where color—unlike its function in Picasso’s work—becomes the very matter of death: “Her stockings were black wool,

10  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” her dress with pink and gray flowers was slightly hitched up or too short. I don’t know which, showing the upper part of the calves, black and swollen, again with delicate shades of mauve matched by a similar purple and mauve in the cheeks.”35 Even clearer in Genet’s politically motivated decision to produce a Guernica is his choice not to suppress his desire, his drives, his fascination with the sexual organs of the dead, with the obscene spectacle offered by the corpses—in keeping with his generally sexualized gaze on the fedayeen. Genet’s strategy, even more so than Picasso’s, inscribes itself within an ethical ambiguity regarding not only the very nature of testimony but also the imperative of self-effacement incumbent upon the witness. His refusal, at this very particular moment, to give up any element of his habitual gaze, of its configuration as desire, violates traditional testimony through its intrinsically ambiguous and irresolute character. For if Genet in fact shows respect for the dead against an obscene, Baudelairean backdrop of corpses and carrion, he leaves open the question of the massacre as spectacle, of his own desire at Shatila. In turn, Prisoner of Love will take up that question, when Genet, describing his return to Beirut, commits what he calls “blasphemy,”36 as he expresses nostalgia for the deathly silence that enveloped him on September 19, 1982, in the narrow streets of Shatila. This very ambivalence, however, is by no means a betrayal of the victims. It is more a function of the impossible situation in which the modern witness is placed, a situation whose emergence was definitively portrayed by Picasso in Guernica. In Prisoner of Love, Genet leaves behind the negative jubilation that wrapped Shatila in fantasies against a morbid, painterly backdrop; Shatila’s status undergoes a sudden change. But before proceeding there, I should like to remark that if the impossible position of the witness leads Genet to transgress the imperative of neutrality and self-effacement, this is not solely due to something intrinsic in the act of bearing testimony or to the shortcomings of language; nor is it even an effect of avant-garde estheticism. If the witness transgresses, it is because it is by no mere chance that he found himself seeing what he saw.

Genet’s Tragic Vision At the heart of this strange text, so often impressive thanks to the dizzying tightrope-walker’s mastery exercised by Genet, place is made—next to the painterly elements—for declarations of quite another kind. We shall call them declarations of authenticity, even as they attempt to displace the very linguistic field on which testimony plays out. After bearing testimony, this witness authenticates his own discourse, justifies his moments of excess, precisely by undermining the criteria that traditionally serve to authenticate. There is, for example, this stunning pronouncement regarding the Palestinians: “They are in the right because I love them,” to which Genet adds, in a dialectical overturning of a most Pascalian cut: “But would I love them if injustice had not made them a wandering people?”37

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  11 This declaration is of prime importance in its circular logic, which contradicts the provocative statement he made, ten years earlier, regarding the Algerian National Liberation Front. Interviewed by Madeleine Gobeil, Genet had said: “Perhaps if I hadn’t made love with Algerians I wouldn’t have been on the side of the FLN [National Liberation Front].”38 The adverb “perhaps” in that sentence is less the mark of some intellectual scruple than a strategy to dissolve, by inviting suspicion, the political relevance of his commitment and to sidetrack as effectively as possible an extreme left or Third Worldist recuperation of his discourse.39 We are left to wonder whether at the heart of Genet’s political engagement lies the notion of submissiveness common to Islam and to his own sexuality. In any case, the point he makes in “Four Hours in Shatila” is different. There he superimposes a subjective level (“because I love them”) on an objective one (“would I love them if injustice had not made them a wandering people?”), which in turn motivates the subjective level. The circular logic here restores the negative metaphysics described by Sartre, for injustice becomes a positive and necessary factor in maintaining the Palestinian people in a state of permanent wandering. Here we have gone beyond Guernica. This circular logic is at the heart of the Palestinian issue for Genet. Throughout Prisoner of Love, Genet denies the existence of a territorial demand on the part of the Palestinians, as in this radical assertion: “The Palestinian revolution  .  .  . was never a desire for territory . . . but a great movement of revolt, a challenge over rights which reached to the limits of Islam, not only involving territorial boundaries but also calling for a revision, probably even a rejection, of a theology as soporific as a Breton cradle.”40 We shall return to that question. In the meantime, it is important to set out that at the heart of the dialectics operating in Genet’s support of the Palestinian cause and in his discourse on Shatila there is a radical inversion of language whereby injustice cannot demand reparation since, as in a tragic universe, this justice must be irreversible and absolute in order to produce truth. This is a truth of a completely other sort and on a completely other level than what motivates it, a truth that forever prohibits negotiations or compromise. Everything is upsidedown. Thus the eternal wandering he ascribes to the Palestinians, while never ceasing to be a misfortune due to a historical injustice, is simultaneously a truth and a great fortune wrested from the hands of injustice itself. Thereby the meaning of injustice no longer simply derives from the events that produced it. Instead, it visits fatal, eternal misfortune on peoples who have apparently benefited from it but who actually have no access to the truth conferred by exile, a truth that their victims alone possess. Thus the notion of victim is displaced, if not to say abolished. If the victims possess a truth, they are no longer victims: their suffering—exile or death—grants them a benefit. The tragic hero is never purely a victim.

12  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” The tragic mode of thought refuses to renounce the prerogatives conferred by injustice because it hopes to wrest from the inescapability of this injustice, now made radical, the sole revolution that could restore justice; but we must understand the term “revolution” more in its astronomical than its political sense. Since justice and injustice have nothing in common, injustice cannot be repaired but rather must be maintained in its negativity and dialectically exhaust its historical meaning before any overturning may occur. The necessity of pushing the negativity at the origin of the injustice to its ultimate form is the very axiom underlying a tragic vision of politics. The link that binds Genet to the Palestinian people, we see, is not simply of a sexual nature, despite the provocative comments he slips in here and there—even if that element is an integral part of what appears as tragic thought, which assigns to a dialectics of radical inescapability (irreversibility) the mission of bringing about the kind of human community rendered impossible by any concession to present realities. Genet’s tragic vision is one of Evil, a form of thought purely Manicheanistic in the original sense of the term, for it makes salvation dependent on the persistence and radicality of Evil. The tragic vision of deprivation is self-contained and ambivalent. In Genet’s question regarding the Palestinians—“would I love them if injustice had not made them a wandering people?”—we glimpse unconditional love of primordial injustice. Thus Genet’s tragic thought accentuates the ambivalence in what we saw as the Guernica program, insofar as tragic thought internalizes Evil as something necessary for truth to emerge. In tragic thought, Evil serves an eschatological purpose that goes beyond obvious forms of evil and gives it positive functions. Moreover, not only does Genet’s tragic thought incorporate the givenness of exile as something positive; death as well is part of that same inescapability. Thus in the very text that supposedly bears witness to Sabra and Shatila, we read: “At the Damascus airport on the way back from Beirut I met some young fedayeen who had escaped from the Israeli hell. They were sixteen or seventeen years old: they were laughing; they were a lot like the ones in Ajloun. They will die like them.”41 Genet then estheticizes the death he predicts for them by identifying it with that of Achilles in the Iliad. To what is Genet bearing witness? To what kind of death? Surely, it is not a death inflicted from the outside, by the enemy, but a death always already there, ubiquitous and necessary.

Testimony and the Question of the Good Nonetheless, there is something objective in current history that—at least apparently—precludes Genet’s making the “Palestinian revolution” into his own plaything. The Palestinian cause possesses a political reality and a historical ­dimension so strong, so tangible, that it opens up a place for itself within Genet’s

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  13 discourse. Most of all, there is, at the very moment Genet composes “Four Hours in Shatila,” a presence of facts, of blood, of fleshily material corpses that keeps Genet from entirely giving himself over to the two visions just described, that is, the Guernica program (which bears the ambivalent weight of sexual pleasure) and the tragic metaphysics (which incorporates the necessity of Evil and injustice, without trying to contest it rationally). From this apparent inability to saturate his text with his own gaze—his Guernica and tragic visions—emerges a third intentionality, that of the witness as someone who does not know, a stance that, as we shall see, is in entire contradiction with the preceding ones. I shall define this function of the witness-assomeone-who-does-not-know through its aspiration to the very stance—that of the Good—rejected in the two others. For it is only through ignorance that Genet can claim innocence. Genet occupies that position in the last part of his text, which takes the form of a series of questions: If the Israelis did nothing but light up the camps, listen to it, hear the shots fired from so many shells—I stepped on tens of thousands of them—who was actually shooting? Who was risking their skin by killing? The Phalangists? The Haddadists? Who? And how many? What happened to the weapons that left all these dead bodies behind? And where are the weapons of those who defended themselves? In the part of the camp I visited, I only saw two unused antitank weapons. How did the murderers get into the camps? Were the Israelis at all the exits controlling Shatila? In any case, on Thursday they were already at the Akka hospital, across from one entrance to the camp. The newspapers reported that the Israelis entered the camp of Shatila as soon as they knew about the massacres and that they stopped them right then, that is, on Saturday. But what did they do with the killers? And when the latter left, where did they go?42

The testimony may finally claim authenticity insofar as it does not presume to know but simply to have seen. To have seen the bullet cartridges,43 the antitank weapons, the Israelis. Obviously, all Genet’s questions are rhetorical, for he knows the answers to them. He knows, but he will not admit he knows. He wants to reduce the omnipotence knowledge confers; he wishes to produce a pure form of speech, letting facts speak for themselves, by themselves. Facts such as bullet cartridges and antitank weapons themselves testify and accuse. Thus there is an aspiration on Genet’s part to give testimony of a pure witness, to produce words that speak for themselves and that omit as something deleterious any subjective traces. Genet abandons the Guernica and tragic visions in favor of another stance that radically lifts all the ambivalence intrinsic to the two previous ones, both of which are now suspect for having internalized, respectively, an esthetic and a moral necessity of Evil. Thus, Genet does not simply incorporate criteria of

14  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” truth that are no longer transgressive (leaving behind the equation of death and desire, the idea that the Palestinians “are in the right because I love them”); he goes so far as to appeal to the most traditional criterion of truth: that it speaks for itself. Thus Genet assumes a position we defined as being most ontologically foreign to him: that of the Good. Suddenly speaking the innocent language of transparently factual accuracy, Genet reveals his aspiration to transform himself into a witness who in no way betrays what he has seen, which means temporarily suspending his metaphysics of betrayal. Here we view the witness as the one who, through words, aspires to the Good; thus we assert that in the complex spot where Genet finds himself in Shatila, the very act of bearing witness places into abeyance that which we have seen as defining him ontologically: anxiety in the face of the Good. Suddenly in the universe that Genet constructs before our eyes, there is a place for goodness to emerge. In Funeral Rites, Genet had brought tragic Manichaeism to its purest form, to the point of becoming a kind of gnosis. There one can find a universe, similar to that of a Cathar poem, where an erect sexual organ, blooming roses, and putrefying corpses call forth in unison a three-way symbolic correlation to which absolute Evil provides the key.44 With his commitment to the Palestinian cause, and especially in the historical circumstances that assigned Genet the responsibility of being one of the first witnesses to Sabra and Shatila, there appears in his metaphysical stance a clearing that can accommodate the Good. What distinguishes and links Funeral Rites and “Four Hours in Shatila,” what makes them opposite and one, is that in the first Genet celebrates the carnage at Oradour-sur-Glane45 whereas in the second he deplores a massacre.46 We claim that they are opposite and one because we cannot help thinking that such a reversal of attitude does not occur just like that. There is something terrifying in the symmetry between Oradour and Shatila; it cannot be a matter of chance that Genet’s name is associated with those two events, between which a well-known mythical link has been established in pro-Palestinian discourse. The stance of positive witness to which Genet accedes does not efface the other two stances but strangely co-exists with them. At the very moment benevolent speech is proffered to the disinherited, space for inversion of the terms is left open. Such inversion takes place in the fourth intentionality structuring Genet’s testimony: the elaboration of a moral ontology of the Jewish condition. But before analyzing it, we must explore all facets of positivity in Genet’s discourse. The Good, with which Genet trifled wantonly in Funeral Rites, is not limited here to his giving compassionate testimony. It takes on bodily form in Prisoner of Love. Its contents are the idealized community of Palestinian vagabonds: the fedayeen (a word that means “the sacrificed,” as Genet hardly misses a chance to remind us), groups of young men in whom he (along with his friend Layla Shahid) admires an ability to march toward death, to execute a ceremony that

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  15 transcends them;47 groups of women, mothers, so-called goddesses;48 and, of course, the fleeting pair that haunts the pages of Prisoner of Love, the Christic couple made up of a mother and son, the object of a quest all the more troubling as it involves Genet’s own person, so evident is it that toward the end of his life he is projecting onto these two characters the tragedy he himself experienced as a child, the tragedy of loss of self. Apparently, there are elements here in Genet’s work that are new for him as well as us: the notion of a positive political community on the one hand and on the other the embodiment of amorous relationship in the figure of a couple.

Genet’s Political Irony Prisoner in Love is where such positivity emerges and deploys itself. For that reason—and not just because it is his last work—it is one of Genet’s most important books. In it, he shows the lyrical and epic aspects of his genius, the models for which are Homer and Rimbaud. He succeeds in presenting a broad oratorio wherein amorous male choruses coming from the hills occupied by the young fedayeen present voices of diverse violent, warlike tonalities celebrating sexuality and glorifying heroism. The reader, of whatever political stripe, listens in fascination to stories of a black giant in whose bosom resides a nest full of hummingbirds49 or to the words punctuated by silence spoken by Hamza’s mother, one of the book’s heroines. Doubtless, one deplores in this work as in others by Genet rare passages that remind one all too well of Francis Carco’s depictions of Montmartre thugs50 and that mar his inimitably fanciful style.51 However, anyone who has spent time in Jordan, Syria, or even Israel, which share landscapes with the “Palestinian territories” of Judea and Samaria, can find in Genet’s evocations of them sensations harking back to time immemorial, associated with deeply entrenched archetypes from our remotest cultural legacy, whose loss we ever mourn. What distinguishes this book from others by Genet is its breadth, its generosity, its sensuality, the depth of cultural allusion in each line. Prisoner of Love is so little a combative or militant work that alongside the amorous enchantment that makes Genet an ardent witness to the Palestinian cause one finds a certain irony targeting this very cause. Genet throws a sometimes sly or even cruel gaze that far from discrediting those he loves confers upon them a vulnerability in harmony with the contingencies and even purely random events that have shaped their struggle. Genet seems to have so easily adopted the stance of the Good, the political discourse of defense of the underdog, that he does not shy away from relativizing his commitment and distancing himself from the historically determined forms assumed by the Palestinian cause. Genet enjoys making fun of young fedayeen who pose like minor film stars for Western magazine photographers. He derides their poems of combat chock full of doves, honey, sweethearts, and weapons. He takes pleasure in demystifying

16  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” the militants’ revolutionary kitsch and the Third Worldism that is their major point of reference, though it has already found a strong rival in Islamic fundamentalism.52 He jokes about the overuse of the word “martyr.”53 He points out the naïve, archaic machismo rampant among Arabs.54 He observes the racism targeting the black fedayee, Moubarak.55 He notes the corruption among them.56 He makes fun of the vulgarity and stupidity of French political activists, such as ecologist José Bové, who have come to help the Palestinians.57 However, there is something in addition to this superficial playfulness whereby Genet allows himself to transgress the seriousness owed to The Cause. More surprisingly and tellingly—and this takes place on a profoundly political level—he offers severe, lucid analysis of the Palestinians’ presence in Jordan (from 1967 to 1971, date of the Black September massacres by the Jordanian army). He records the arrogance and violence of the fedayeen. Unlike other fellow travelers of the Palestinian cause, he does not hide the terror they inflict on the Jordanians. He thus counterbalances the official explanation of their expulsion by the Jordanian army in September 1971, which has it that King Hussein simply followed the orders “of the American imperialists and the Zionist entity” and makes the Jews, as always, responsible for Palestinian deaths, whoever actually murdered them. He will also go along with that explanation, but here he writes: “The Palestinians in the camps and the soldiers on the bases behaved like an occupying power. In the Ajloun sector, where I lived, I saw harassed peasants unable to conceal the hatred in their eyes. . . . So in July 1971 the Palestinians, cut off both from [officials] and from the peasant population, were alone and surrounded by enemies.”58 Genet can be very hard on his subjects, when he portrays the command center of Fatah as captives or accomplices of the “wheeling and dealing riffraff.”59 Genet loves the Palestinians, but for him, unlike for finer souls, they are no babes in the woods. This criticism or irony brought to bear on those he loves is in no way a betrayal, contrary to what a purely Sartrean reading could lead one to believe, even if suspicion is the sole thing to which Genet remained faithful. These comments recede behind an infatuation with the Palestinian people and a fidelity that now delimits a place for the Good within Genet’s metaphysics of Evil, within what we have called his tragic Manichaeism. This fidelity is now given a face: that of the couple made up by the young fedayee Hamza and his mother. Genet met Hamza during his first stay in Jordan; the search for Hamza, during his third stay, will furnish the properly novelistic matter of the book. What in Genet’s eyes defines the Palestinians, beyond their errors, their crimes, or their stupidity, is their naïve authenticity: “The fedayeen had no tradition of fake—of imitation marble passed off as real, of sham pathos mimicking pain, or any kind of play-acting.”60 His criticism and mockery in no way detract from his commitment to the Palestinians. Those elements could hardly make his

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  17 book more acceptable to a reader hostile to the Arab cause, nor do they indicate any concession on his part. He simply is showing great political insight; profound concern for truth; respect for beauty; preference for realism and reality; scorn for artistic, sophisticated mystification. This scorn is inherited from Rimbaud, whose fortunate but all too rare influence on Genet’s work counterbalances the somewhat dubious Baudelairean satanism in which he excessively engages.61 Not only is Prisoner of Love in no way blind to certain flaws of the Palestinian camp, it also gives proof of real lucidity concerning a particular historical and political conjuncture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such lucidity is not traceable to any supposed objectivity. Like many before him, Genet knows that a claim of objectivity in this case can only be a lie, the bourgeois lie par excellence and the point of departure for all kinds of falsehood and cowardice. The situation Genet describes is in no way a factual given; it is a pure construction. Starting from this pure construction, Genet is able to manifest his lucidity. Insofar as he has constituted the Palestinian people as a pure political subject, a pure revolutionary subject, he can—while maintaining this situation entirely reliant on his dialogue with the fedayeen—throw an extremely harsh gaze on everything in the Arab and Palestinian political and historical reality that is not part of that conversation.

The Conversation What is the nature of this conversation and this lucidity? Genet’s dialogue with the fedayeen is intimate and metaphysical, reposing on an inherent brotherhood and an eschatology common to both parties, clearly stated in Prisoner of Love by the giant fedayee Moubarak, in whose bass laughter “a hummingbird was nesting.”62 “A revolutionary movement is eternal, and we have to believe in eternal recurrence. To be part of the Palestinian movement is to belong to the immortal Satan, who from all eternity has made and will make war on God. Although, as a movement, it’s linked to time, the Palestinian movement mustn’t be content with conquering a ridiculous morsel of space.”63 Eschatology comes into play insofar as the Palestinian struggle has a meaning that goes beyond itself, an immortal meaning rooted in the curse of Cain. There logically follows from that malediction one of the obsessive themes of the book, a metaphysical prohibition on possessing land.64 The Palestinian struggle must ever reject any acquisition of land: The idea of accepting some territory, however small, where the Palestinians would have a government, a capital, mosques, churches, cemeteries, town halls, war memorials, racecourses, and airfields where soldiers would present arms twice a day to foreign heads of state—the idea was such heresy that even to entertain it as a hypothesis was a mortal sin, a betrayal of the revolution.

18  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Ali—and all the other fedayeen were the same—would accept nothing but a great firework display of revolution, a conflagration leaping from bank to bank, opera house to opera house, prison to lawcourt, sparing only the oil wells. They belonged to the Arab people.65

The positive demonic nature of the Palestinians is thus reaffirmed with ­ ietzschean irony: “Once they were driven from their homes, their gardens, their N sheep, their leeks and roses and kohlrabis by the Israelis they turned into fighting demons—demons dealing and accepting death to destroy not only the people who ousted them but also all other races.”66 Here, Genet radically inverts the messianic mission Marxists assigned to peoples, replacing it with a demonic one. Within this metaphysical complex re-emerges the gnostic language characterizing Funeral Rites; Genet thus describes the Palestinian revolt as “eternal, uncreated.”67 We also re-encounter here another idea we have glimpsed, that of the Palestinians as fighting not for territory but to “save what makes them unique, different from all the other Arab peoples.”68 Genet intermittently reminds us that this hallucinatory dialogue with the Palestinians partakes of falsehood, a betrayal of truth, as does all literature.69 Yet it is from within this dialogue that he manages to deploy his political insight. Or to put it another way: it is precisely because Genet structures the Palestinian people as an extreme metaphysical fiction, an almost alchemistically pure substance, that he may—in an unavoidable self-doubling—display radical lucidity regarding the historical and political realities in which they are enmeshed. By casting the Palestinians as the very quintessence of the “unique, different,” Genet may, contrary to all the pro-Palestinian Third Worldists, destroy the myths of Arab identity and pan-Arabism that are an intrinsic part of the political struggle against Israel. Here it is not only a question of the purely political lucidity whereby Genet understands that the primary enemies of the Palestinians are other Arabs.70 Rather, throughout his book, even as he manifests his love for Arabs, he obstinately undermines the notion of Arab identity. Likewise, insofar as Palestinians are a vanquished people made demonic by their defeat, he may commit great sacrilege against progressivist mythology by writing that the families of the Palestinian elite were, from 1933 on, “Hitler’s lackeys in the Middle East.”71 He also allows himself to endanger his Palestinian fictional narrative by imagining that their struggle could end up no less miserably than the Algerian national revolution.72 This book derives its force and density from an extreme paradox, an intense dialectic between an ever-greater internalization of The Cause and a similarly exponential rejection of concrete historical and political conditions. Thus as Genet ceaselessly engages in satanic and liberatory mystification of what he sees as essential to the Palestinians’ struggle, it would not occur to him to lie

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  19 about the “inessential,” that is, historical and political reality, which allows him at times to be quite cruel. Thus it appears that the space we saw as accommodating the Good is in constant peril, menaced by ambiguity, in the grip of dizzying ambivalence. The Good is permanently caught between Genet’s critical realism regarding the political movement as such and a demonic mysticism whence he derives the essence of the movement. Such is Genet’s quite Pascalian dialectics, wherein political truth is played out through sharp perception of the heterogeneous levels on which reality may be represented. As in Pascal’s thought, there are two dialectics at work here. One is a contingent dialectics, between radicality and lucidity—a politically committed realism, played out on the immanent plane. The other is a dialectics that makes History with its unexpected turns of events into a personal religious mystery play, a sacred rite of redemption, whose inversion at Genet’s hands brings about damnation. What mystery play is being performed? What sacred, personal ceremony constitutes the unseen side of the historical-political situation? This is a unique mystery play, an untainted ceremony founded on a trinity whose elements will progressively merge or differentiate. First of all, there will be the arduous onand-off search for the couple made up of young Hamza and his mother; second, the depiction of Shatila; and third, the confrontation with the Jewish world, a confrontation Genet suspects, nay knows, will be the ultimate one. He formulates it in these strong terms: “Would the Palestinian revolution have exercised such a strong fascination on me if it hadn’t been fought against what seemed to me the darkest of peoples?—a people whose beginning claimed to be the Beginning, who claimed they were, and meant to remain, the Beginning, who said they belonged to the Dawn of Time?”73

Hamza The search for Hamza and his mother apparently partakes of the Good. It bespeaks a faithfulness contradicting the “irregularity” that Bataille correctly saw as one of the principles of Evil.74 Genet portrays scenes with Hamza and his mother, from his first stay in Jordan in 1971, when he met them. At the first meal they shared, Hamza says to his mother that Genet is “a friend. A Christian. But he doesn’t believe in God,” and she responds, “Well, if he doesn’t believe in God I’d better give him something to eat.”75 Then there is the beautiful scene, nocturnal and Proustian, when Genet, alone in his room, feigns sleep while the mother delicately places a cup of coffee and a glass of water on the blue nightstand adorned “with yellow and black flowers.”76 Hamza and his mother embody the Good insofar as they evoke the couple made up of Christ and the Virgin. Genet emphasizes this with the words “mater

20  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” dolorosa” and “pietà.”77 That image predisposes the couple to remain fixedly in Genet’s memory—a memory that allows him to return to the internal dialectic we referred to earlier, where the transcendental self, in a logical and baroque aftereffect, authenticates reality: “But why had this oft-repeated, profoundly Christian couple, symbolizing the inconsolable grief of a mother whose son was God, appeared to me like a bolt from the blue as a symbol of the Palestinian resistance? And not only that. That was understandable enough. But why did it strike me that the Revolution took place in order that this couple should haunt me?”78 The archetypal mother-son dyad is explored so obsessively and in such highly charged fragments that one comes to suspect—wrongly—that Genet wishes it to be the sole subject of the book, despite the intense polyphony of the writing. The relationship between Hamza and his mother, which Genet associates with an incestuous longing he carries in his body and soul, obviously touches on a question that we may say is essential to his fate: his background as abandoned minor, child thief, homosexual, and traitor.79 It is no sham halo that the Good bestows on this pair; Genet’s obsessively faithful remembrance dictates his search for them during his third visit, in 1984. This quest, whose outcome is greatly delayed, takes the form of a series of Proustian disillusionments. Finally, he encounters the mother alone. A dialogue between her and the motherless Genet ensues throughout an evocation of son Hamza—a decisive, revelatory dialogue, opening onto a hellish association of ideas.80 We learn from the mother that Hamza has left for Germany, where he has married a German woman and where he now works. Around the word “Germany,” issuing forth from that word as in a bolt of lightning, is played out the internal secret ceremony of which we have spoken. In a short passage, in Genet’s peculiar, truly mad (folle) manner—the word “mad” here refers to how Proust describes the brusk discontinuities in SaintSimon’s style81—Genet suddenly evokes a stunning transcendental complicity between two worlds, Germany and Palestine, that we can quickly guess will harmonize under the sign of Evil: I didn’t reason about this. I experienced it directly, as you know an apple is unripe before you pick it up, just from its colour; or even without looking at it. [Hamza’s] house wasn’t built with materials from the Black Forest. But between it—the sight of it—and the sound of the word Germany, I felt a foreshadowing of the harmony that went, more deeply than I have said; perhaps I even had a presentiment of the association that now occurs whenever one speaks of Germany and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.82

In Proust’s Combray, innocent Roussainville becomes a replica of Sodom. Here, the maternal home, the setting of a dialogue with the mother, which we saw as an episode of goodness and faithfulness, is transformed, through a hallucination heavy with consequences, into a Nazi space containing a series of

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  21 figures nesting in each other. Genet’s twisted syntax leads to a phrase that stops, dazzlingly, in midstream (“that went, more deeply”). The reference to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem evokes the latter’s encounters with Hitler and his stay in Berlin, as well as the wartime collaboration of Palestinians with Nazism. Let us not forget: Hamza, his house, his mother, are being spoken about here. Through a subterranean contamination, this friend of Genet’s, this young fedayee, turns into one of the Nazi puppets portrayed in Funeral Rites. This is the first moment in Genet’s secret ceremony, a fleeting but essential moment whereby the Palestinian cause is infected from within, as it were, through one of its fighters Genet loves the most. Their combat is contaminated by a sensually charged hallucination replete with Nazi elements—a hallucination that the mere mention of the word Germany provokes in Genet. This projection of the Nazi heartland onto a Palestinian household obviously undermines his presentation of the Palestinian struggle. Let us then suppose this: Genet’s earlier antisemitism, accompanying his metaphysics of Evil and his exalted fascination with Hitler and the Oradour massacre, has not been abolished, has not turned into a political anti-Zionism nourished by something positive, a cause linked to the metaphysics of the Good. The superimposition of Nazism on the Palestinian space, the involuntary recall of the Nazi past repressed up to this point, have come to haunt an involvement apparently based on a discourse of solidarity with the Palestinian community. Good has been doubly betrayed. First, such a lurid remembrance would betray any discourse by providing the impression that the discourse of Good was but a refuge, a mask for an obsession that could not be contained. Second, this betrayal does not have consequences for Genet alone. It does not partake solely of his fantasy world. This involuntary memory is a denunciation. It compromises the Palestinian cause by reminding us of the historical link between Nazism and the Palestinian fight for independence.83 Of course, there are other instances of betrayed goodness in which we have seen a betrayal of any discourse insofar as it weaves—into the interstices of an apparently self-controlled and purposeful speech addressed to others—monstrous, libidinally charged, random fragments of hallucinatory antisemitism. Any betrayal is betrayal of language itself. In this book, as elsewhere, there is a surface layer of banal antisemitism whereby Israel is endowed with rational, manipulative omnipotence. According to Prisoner of Love, reprobation of the Lebanon war by part of the Israeli population, Bashir Gemayel’s assassination, the Shatila massacre itself—all were foreseen even before the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) crossed its northern border.84 Israel is presented as an implacable master whose clutches one cannot escape, acting through the Mossad, Jewish bankers, and the press. “Israel . . . saw itself as identical with Power. It was Power.”85

22  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Genet is never on the side of Power, he is always against it—not because he makes common cause with the poor but rather because he takes the side of an even greater power: absolute domination. He joins up with brute force, weapons, grenades Arab kids exhibit like “double or quadruple monstrous testicles,”86 Palestinian soldiers “decked with guns, in leopard-spotted uniforms and red berets tilted over their eyes, each not merely a transfiguration but also a materialization of my fantasies. And apparently at my disposal.”87 This hatred of Power, this hatred of Israel as the pure embodiment of rational power, places Genet on the side of a monstrous form of domination. It manifests itself in images, left “at the disposal” of his gaze, such as this vision of adolescents endowed with deadly organs that combine sex and street warfare in a whirling dance. Such domination may well have its hidden source in a power far superior to that wielded by the Palestinians. This power is revealed in a terrifying passage of Prisoner of Love, where suddenly Genet sees “images of emaciated Jews, naked or almost naked in the concentration camps where their weakness was a provocation.”88 The violent hallucination of naked Jews, and earlier visions such as that blending Hamza’s house with Nazi Germany, are metaphysical apparitions of the kind that form the hidden ceremonial underlying the work. Thus Genet experiences, in an airplane, a receding of the Law, a progressive disappearance of Judeo-Christian morality, which he describes with an energy coming from deep within his viscera, deploying all his anal instincts: “I got up to go and have a crap in the rear of the plane, hoping to get rid of a tapeworm three thousand years long.”89 Genet’s labor of moral and psychic purification is metaphysical in nature, but as is always the case in his universe, it is concretely associated with desire, in this case in the contrast formed by the frail body of a diminutive Japanese passenger, a mere girl, and the muscular booted bodies of the German crew: “Such fragility is a kind of aggression begging to be crushed.”90 From this ever-present, always-offered image of German hyper-virility emerges the vision of the naked Jews. In turn, the concentration camp Jews became the hellish manifestation, the ghostly image of absolute domination, the result of the sole form of submission— grand submission—that Genet recognizes. Genet is against Power, thus against Israel. But he is in favor of force, such as the force of the sun embodied by the battalions of “handsome blond warriors” of the Nazi army.91 In Prisoner of Love, the fascination hasn’t ceased; Genet continues to sing the praises of those who made the French take to their heels in the so-called exodus of 1940, when refugees fled west and south in advance of the German armies: “I saw a whole nation from behind, saw their backs running away, caught between the sun of June, of the south, of the German star.”92 We come to realize that the sole Palestine for Genet is a German Palestine, a

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  23 Nazi Palestine. What we took to be the Good—solidarity with the underdog—is, within the metaphysical structure that has so pleasurable a hold on Genet’s imagination, no more than an appearance his writing dissolves with great abandon. The betrayal here is like the one befalling Hamza. It emanates from the depths of language itself. It is not expressed in rational, purposeful terms but through the warped violence of a vision that permanently installs within Genet’s language the ever imminent possibility of betrayal, inversions, madness. All trust in language is thereby abolished, as is any possibility of truth, of relationships that depend upon the exchange of words. That is what we suggested as we began our analysis, by defining anxiety in the face of the Good as an immutable mistrust of language, and anxiety in the face of Evil as positing, contrarily, promise as the ontological basis of language.

The Requiem Genet had already published “Four Hours in Shatila” when he wrote Prisoner of Love. His perspective in the latter work is quite different; most notably, he shows little concern for the political mileage the Palestinians wish to gain from his testimony. With time, Shatila has become more complex and opaque. True, coming back to Jordan and Lebanon, Genet searches for Hamza and his mother. Despite the eleven years that have passed (1971–1982) he recognizes her and leads her to recognize him. However, his return to Shatila is accompanied by an unconsciousness or forgetfulness, though only two years have transpired since the massacre of 1982: “In September 1984 I didn’t recognize anything. The main street was much narrower than before. Cars moved along slowly and with difficulty. The noise of horns and engines and shouting made me think of the silence in a morgue or a cemetery, and I committed the blasphemy of longing for it.”93 What has happened? A few paragraphs are devoted to the Shatila episode, but its position in the process of writing and bearing testimony has become difficult to define: “Perhaps the massacres at Shatila in September 1982 were not a turning-point,” Genet writes toward the end of the book.94 How can we understand this statement that effects closure on Shatila—a closure, as it were, so hypothetical and vague? To write about Shatila has become problematic. The event, which had been the subject of the earlier text, brief and to the point, has receded and disassociated into a work that has distended the deaths there into something incommensurable, something that cannot be accommodated by finite testimony. The disproportion is that of a requiem, more precisely Mozart’s Requiem, which as in Pasolini’s film Teorema accompanies the metamorphoses of Prisoner in Love whereby a metaphysical sexuality takes the place of political discourse, erasing it.95 The victims of Shatila cannot join in that requiem either to rejoice in death or deplore it. How could Genet compose a requiem for those who died at

24  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Shatila without providing a part for death, without deploying the sensual gamut that would be even more disharmonious here than in “Four Hours in Shatila”? Thus Genet encounters a contradiction inherent in his enterprise. In fleeting passages dispersed throughout the book, by means of dubious wordplay and sadistic coquetry, he records the rush experienced in seeing Phalangists lop off the joints—phalanges in French—of women’s fingers in order to steal their rings.96 These are the same Phalangists who modeled themselves, as he smugly notes a few pages before, on “Hitler’s SA”:97 “They charmed me. I could calculate their cruelty from their stupidity. . . . From their full, slightly negroid lips issued forth delicately foolish songs. The Virgin Mary must have trembled at the thought of all those adolescent dead about to land in Heaven at any moment.”98 Doubtless Genet perceived just how unseemly were these comments about mass murderers, what “blasphemy” characterized this brief but irrepressible desire to provoke. More problematic, however, is the impossibility of wedding these images of virile, robust young men to the events of Shatila, because Shatila was, for Genet, a Jewish event where death could not be sexualized; though carried out by the Phalangists, the Shatila massacre qua political event was Jewish and thus foreign to the positivity with which Genet endows Evil. The shadow that Jewishness casts on Shatila weighs upon his metaphysics of death, leading him to dissociate Shatila from his requiem and to offer no more than a brief eulogy in imitation of Bossuet’s classic funeral oration: “Dying with their eyes wide open, they knew the terror of seeing every created thing—man, chairs, stars, suns, Phalangists— tremble, convulse and blur, knowing they were going to vanish because those who would be their victims were driving them to nothingness.”99 The death meted out at Shatila cannot be the subject of a requiem, for nothing comes after such a death. “Understood in this sense, death is a phenomenon that destroys the world.”100 In a certain way, death at Shatila is the sole true death, which in its flatness cannot nourish any fantasies; it is death inflicted by Power. Thus Genet writes the following, as though he had been faced with death so true: “What I felt in the main street of Shatila two years after the massacres was an urgent desire to live, to grow, to consume as fast as possible so as first to swallow the world and then become impervious to it.”101 So real is this death that he says there: “The stench of death was coming not from a house or a tortured victim: my body, my being seemed to emit it.”102 That is why the requiem Genet wishes to write—a form he borrows from Mozart, as Pasolini before him—concerns death of another kind. Thus he puts Shatila aside, minimizing its significance. This real death, this death without aftermath, this death at the oppressors’ hands, is placed by Genet in contrast to the phantasmagorical death inflicted by those he loves, a factitious, unreal death: “I saw and still see the fedayeen as capable of being angry with the Israeli dead for not wanting to wake up; for not being able to understand that death should last

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  25 only a night at the most, lest it turn fighters into murderers.”103 This phantasmagorical death is a titillating death, death that’s fun, irresponsible death, death as the locus of metamorphoses. Mozart’s composition appears for the first time when Genet finds himself in a hotel room in Beirut. Genet listens to it as he lies in bed, imagining himself before a coffin adorned with flowers, in a church—the exact setting of Funeral Rites. The Requiem is thus heard as a pagan work whereby, contrarily to what happened at Shatila, something beyond death is suddenly possible. This pagan beyond is located in a chthonian, troglodyte universe of grottos and caves. Mozart’s piece culminates there, in “liberty that dared all.”104 Mozart’s Requiem performs the essential function of expressing this nonJewish death, this phantasmagorical death that, despite all the freedom it offers, is by no means less violent. The Requiem weaves several metamorphoses in which death is one of the main players: the lovingly described change of a boy into a woman; the turning of a monstrous transsexual into a hero; the identical, simultaneous transformation of Palestinians into warriors, religious fanatics merging into graceful male bodies (“with a joy close to madness”105). For Mozart’s Requiem is precisely “joy in death”: “joy of the transsexual, of the Requiem, of the kamikaze. Of the hero.”106 There is an aftermath to death, provided death take place in joy, “joy and fear,”107 provided that it be a pagan death, allowing sexual, bodily, existential metamorphoses. Thus before the Requiem is heard, Genet describes at length the funereal grooming of the fedayee who shaves his pubic area and of the sixteen-year-old virgin “blowing herself up in the middle of a group of Israeli soldiers.”108 Such is the true requiem Genet wishes to compose, a requiem that cannot be for Shatila since death was meted out there by Power to autonomous subjects. Thus it was a death without joy or aftermath since Jews are situated for him outside phantasmagorical death and metamorphoses. This is because he sees Jews as ontologically incapable of the most basic metamorphosis, that of one sex into the other. This impossibility excludes them from the rest of the world (monde) and makes them into a filthy (immonde) people.109 Genet offers us an allegory illustrating the archetype of the Jew separated from the general human condition by the Jewish relationship to death. In his fictitious portrayal of the elite commando who dressed as women in order to execute three Fatah leaders,110 he notes that despite their costumes they continued to be men: “Unlike [real transvestites], the six Israelis in their curly blond wigs could not forget they were men, with muscles meant for fighting, and trained to kill.”111 In these strange pages, Genet describes the training (with its sexual implications) he imagines the commando underwent and the acts they performed. He envisions them caressing and kissing each other in order to “shock the body

26  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” guards into thinking they were just shameless, giggling Arab pansies,” and thereby approach and kill the Fatah leaders all the more easily.112 In this simulation of cross-dressing, in this incomplete but fully mastered transsexualization, in this non-metamorphosis Genet sees no element of the death that he forges as a link between the true transsexual and the Palestinian suicide bomber. He wonders: “Was theirs the crystalline pride of being Jewish—pride not being as other men are?”113 Genet’s requiem cannot accommodate Shatila, cannot deplore it, since a requiem for him must celebrate death. That is why Genet sees Shatila as a scandal. The sole death he can celebrate is suicide, the pagan suicide shared by the transsexual114 and the Palestinian suicide bomber. Non-pagan death, death without metamorphoses or betrayal, pure arid annihilation of everything, death untainted by sexuality and thus non-transcendent—death of that kind cannot be celebrated, and such were the deaths that took place at Shatila. What distinguishes Shatila from Oradour-sur-Glane is the difference between Jewish crime and Nazi crime. That is why unlike Oradour, Genet sees no poetry in Shatila. There, no possibility emerges for fantasies of sex and blood, for metamorphoses of sex and identity—despite what certain pages of “Four Hours in Shatila” might have led one to believe. Genet moved from glorifying Oradour to denouncing Shatila not because he discovered the Good but because the crime of Oradour accommodated Sodom, whereas Shatila was a crime void of phantasmagoria because it belonged to the Jewish world.

Israel’s Power We are now squarely within the last of the four intentionalities we enumerated as underlying “Four Hours in Shatila”: the elaboration of a moral ontology of Israel. Indeed, a tragedy characterized by Manichaeism, such as that Genet sees as afflicting his protagonist, the Palestinian people, demands an antagonist. That antagonist is Israel: not just the country Israel, apparently never visited by Genet, but most of all Israel as the metaphysical entity embodied in that name. As in any tragedy, the negative character is ontologically essential because without him, the positive figure would exist solely as consciousness asleep, a subject suspended in limbo. Israel stands in some way at the very awakening of Palestinian identity, the re-awakening of the name Palestine itself.115 But Israel’s central, primeval role—which, as we shall see, makes it into the sole character in the story— exists for Genet only within a far more extreme metaphysical pathos wherein the tragedy unfolds in a fight to the death between Good and Evil. This combat takes place at the very core of language. The complex nature of the role conferred on Israel did not suddenly appear at Shatila. It took a long time for it to emerge into Genet’s consciousness, as we see in a piece, originally published in 1972 and titled “The Palestinians,” on the

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  27 murder at the Munich Olympics of Jewish athletes by Palestinian Black September militants. Obviously, Genet supported the massacre. It would make no sense to seek to refute his position by pointing to the horror committed, for the level on which he places events is far from the one on which political debate among progressive-minded individuals occurs. Likewise, it would be ridiculous to wax indignant over Genet’s antisemitic clichés about the control of the Western press by the Jewish lobby.116 Rather, what merits our attention in Genet’s narrative concerns the inversion in the meanings of words and the question of who controls language, for that is where the issue of Good and Evil emerges. This time it is explicit and linked to Jewish metaphysics. In his defense of the Jewish athletes’ murderers, Genet writes: “When the papers, which form opinion, ought to write ‘commando’ [fida’i], which means one who sacrifices himself, they write ‘assassin.’ They seem to be hypnotized by the Hebrew eye in the sacred triangle, or by the one eye of Dayan.”117 What produces the journalists’ inversion (whereby “fedayee” becomes “assassin”) is not an ordinary, profane manipulation. Rather, their misprision is traceable to the dual presence of “the Hebrew eye,” “the one eye,” that eye so essential in the tragedy of Cain, a divine and human eye, as though the Jew really did embody God’s presence on earth. Moshe Dayan and the Hebrew eye are invoked insofar as they are the masters of language, a language that prescribes a distinction between assassin and “the one who sacrifices himself.” This stipulation makes murder the opposite of sacrifice—and that is insupportable to Cain and to Genet. Through the image of the one eye, the all-seeing eye, Genet invokes Israel— ancient as well as contemporary Israel—as a metaphysical entity. This is not simply the banal antisemitism that has it that Jews are all-powerful, but something more profound, since he wishes language to yield to his desire, that the word “assassin” should fade into its opposite and disappear from language. This is not the sole disturbing element here. For example, he associates this language of the masters—of Israel from its origins to its contemporary resurrection—with the antisemitism of the past, in which surviving Jews, “proud of their past humiliation,” have merged into eternal Shylocks.118 And there is another inversion whereby Genet has it that those truly guilty of the murder of the Jewish athletes are the Jews themselves, who desired it in order that the “Israelis should cry vengeance.”119 Thus Genet places his theater of war and death, in its general outlines as well as its specifics, into a Cainian mental universe.

Origin and Death It is time for us to return to that primordial sentence, quoted earlier, which illuminates the deepest meaning of the book: “Would the Palestinian revolution have exercised such a strong fascination on me if it hadn’t been fought against what seemed to me the darkest of peoples?—a people whose beginning claimed

28  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” to be the Beginning, who claimed they were, and meant to remain, the Beginning, who said they belonged to the Dawn of Time?”120 The people in question is the Jewish people, who—if we give this sentence its full weight—becomes the main, or sole, character of Prisoner of Love. It does not matter whether this is antisemitism or not. Genet’s work is far removed from the vulgar antisemitism of a Drumont.121 Genet could not agree with Bernanos, who wrote in the 1940s that Hitler had permanently dishonored antisemitism, because antisemitism is dishonor, and Nazism was consummate dishonor.122 Thus Genet writes in Prisoner of Love: “Hitler is salvaged [sauf] for having burned Jews or caused them to be burned, and for having stroked a wolfhound.”123 In this frightening passage, where he associates under the sign of glory Hitler’s petting a dog with the piles of Palestinian bodies at Shatila, Genet repeats what he did regarding Hamza in Germany or Jews in the camps: he posits the harmony between Nazism and the Palestinian struggle, and assigns the Jews the permanent role of target. This pre-eminent target is thus the “darkest” of peoples, the Jewish people, whose fault for Genet is different from what it is in Bloy’s or Céline’s antisemitism.124 It does not lie in some supposed racial flaw of the Jews (their stink, their ugliness, their mongrelized Asiatic ancestry), but in their calling: “A people whose beginning claimed to be the Beginning, who claimed they were, and meant to remain, the Beginning, who said they belonged to the Dawn of Time.”125 This marginalization of the Palestinian people is what undermines any attempt to read Genet politically, as supporting Third World movements. It transfers the issue onto a level other than that of far-left populism (which Genet scorned in any event), onto the only plane that mattered for him: that of metaphysics. And insofar as metaphysics is the assertion of metaphysics, Genet correctly saw it as playing out in the arena of language. Genet thus confronts Israel on Israel’s terrain, its calling, something verbal, since Israel has answered the call. It is Israel’s self-proclamation, the proclamation of its name, its name itself, that Genet wishes to annihilate. And it would be tautologous to explain this rejection of the Beginning—of origin itself, the proclamation of the Beginning—by recourse to the biography Genet devised for himself, by his incapacity to claim any origin for himself. The very idea of such a proclamation would trouble Genet because it affirms an element of life, which is created—not “uncreated” as his morbid gnosis would have it.126 Life is positivity and pact, not murder and betrayal; it is dialogue with the One and not endless metamorphoses of bodies from one sex to the other; it is past, present, future, and not the collapse of temporal categories. Within this phobia of Israel, the Origin is as hated for itself and for proclaiming itself as the Origin. For the very act of proclamation reflects an ethics: the imperative not to abjure that act as Origin, but rather to make of it the object of eternal repetition. Genet is repelled by Israel because its proclamation of Origin contradicts his own

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  29 metaphysics, which is bound up with Evil through the axiom he stated in his letter to Sartre: “a refusal to continue the world.”127 It was a desire for death that the Nazis satisfied and that the Palestinians, despite the suicide bombers, satisfy somewhat less; in fact, to Genet they seemed with time to be losing their taste for death: The act of killing had become distant, shrouded in complex ritual . . . ceremonies that seemed to me to rob the act of murder of its substance. . . . The Palestinians seemed to me to have lost direct contact—atrocious perhaps, but necessary when life is at stake—with the death of the victim. This aversion to murder in the midst of a brutal war was like an extension of the forgetfulness or aversion reflected in the chaste traditional dances. . . .128

Death and the Beginning Genet’s negative fascination with Israel is affirmed with particular intensity in another major passage of Prisoner of Love, when he ponders festivity, in which he sees the possibility of liberation from the Jew, from Jewish being, and from Jewish death. As so often, Genet here uses symbolism and language to contradict and to deceive, so deftly that any challenge to what he says becomes impossible and any apparent adherence to the Good is almost immediately undone or betrayed. The liberation from Jewish metaphysics takes the form of dual hypotheses concerning festivity (la fête). According to the first hypothesis, festivity is the “fire that warmed our cheeks at being together despite the laws that hoped we’d have deserted one another.”129 Being together is what allows the members of a community to overcome solitary anxiety, or conscience born of prohibitions and laws. In the second hypothesis, which is nonetheless presented as continuing the first, festivity consists of “escape from society into a place where people were ready to fight with us against that society.”130 One can see the contradiction, or at least the division and betrayal: the individual participates by attending or escaping the festivity, and festivity is either communion or betrayal. Genet then defines festivity—an Arab festivity—as simultaneously “jubilation and despair.”131 Thereupon he offers a strange fable: Think of the death of a Jew in France under the Occupation: he’s buried in a country graveyard, and seven of the worst Jewish musicians come from seven different directions carrying seven black boxes. Badly but superbly the clandestine septet plays an air by Offenbach beside the grave, then each goes off on his own without a word being said. For the God of Isaiah, who is only a breath of wind on a blade of grass, that night was a fête.132

For Genet, what distinguishes Jewish festivity from other festivities is that it is impossible. It offers neither communion in joy nor betrayal of that joy. It is celebration of nothingness, of death, solitude, abandonment; it is the absence of

30  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” “funeral rites.” It is an esoteric festivity wherein a burial ceremony is the mystery housing the God of Israel. That festivity, without ambiguity or aftermath, takes place during the only time Genet grants the Jewish people for all eternity. That sole and terminal period is the German occupation.

The Rabbi’s Side Curls Genet imagines himself as Jewish, in a passage from Prisoner of Love: “If I’d been brought up in the Talmudic faith I’d be an elderly rabbi now, all prayers and tears, slipping damp notes between the stones of the Wailing Wall.”133 He gives himself a Mossad spy for a son, a fighter pilot for a grandson, and then stops this reverie and concludes: “I’d be someone else, with different thoughts and a different religion, and I’d look for my ancestors among the furriers. I’d have curls down to my chest. I’m sorry to have missed that.”134 Make no mistake: the curls Genet misses are nothing rabbinic, nor do they resemble those Sartre had as a child and whose loss made him as ugly as a “toad.” Rather, these are curls that could make Genet into a transvestite, one of those men-women who are the antithesis of the Jew throughout the book. Their transgressions in the small hours in the Bois de Boulogne, when they count the money they have made, close the sole celebration, the sole mystery, the sole real transubstantiation of which Genet takes part: transgendering.

III. The Event Shatila Genet arrived in Beirut with Layla Shahid on September 12, 1982. The massacre began on Thursday, September 16, and ended Saturday, September 18, with the intervention of the Israeli army under General Yaron. On Sunday the 19th, Genet entered Shatila and spent four hours there. What happened at Sabra and Shatila? We know and we don’t know. In order to understand Genet’s message, we have to get the facts, to want to find out. It will also be necessary to consider the meaning of Sabra and Shatila and the reasons it has been seen as symbolizing Israeli criminality. For a long time, I have pondered those questions, asking myself how it is that Sabra and Shatila—two names that like Sodom and Gomorrah have become one—have come to constitute so alleclipsing an event that it is the sole one referred to when somebody wants to say something significant about the Lebanese war. Sabra and Shatila never appear as an event in the purely historical sense of the term, like Napoleon’s battle at Austerlitz, which did not erase the one at Wagram and which Waterloo in turn did not erase. They have emerged as a superevent that drowns out all others, insofar as the three days it lasted135 consigned to oblivion the seven or eight years of civil war and massacres that preceded

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  31 them and the eight years of killing that went on after. It has become the sole event by which one remembers a very long episode in history. It seems to me that Sabra and Shatila essentially serve as a screen event for a multitude of other occurrences. The Lebanese war began in April 1975. Resulting in nearly 150,000 deaths (the official figure is 144,000), it involved a series of belligerents knotting and undoing diverse alliances of the strangest kinds: Lebanese Christians (divided into followers of Gemayel against those of Chamoun; those of Frangieh against yet another leader, etc.); Shiites; Sunnis; Druze; Palestinians residing on Lebanese soil after their bloody expulsion from Jordan in September 1970;136 and Syrians who came in as of 1976. Finally, there was the Israeli army, which arrived in 1982, seven years after the start of the conflict.137 The Lebanese civil war was one of the most savage of the end of the twentieth century, resembling the long years of war in the former Yugoslavia, political aspects of which it strikingly foreshadowed: the Palestinians perpetrated massacres (the best known of which was their killings of Christians in Damour in January 1976138), rapes, and torture; and they were themselves the target of murders, assassinations, and wholesale destruction, most notably by Shiites,139 but also by Christians and all the other parties who for years waged war on each other and razed Beirut. Among all these massacres, we can mention the terrible one perpetrated in August 1976, after a siege of fifty-four days, in the Palestinian refugee camp at Tal-el-Zaatar in East Beirut (Sabra and Shatila are in West Beirut) by Christians from Camille Chamoun’s militia, under the obvious control of the Syrian army that had invaded Lebanon. Yet Genet gets it wrong, attributing the hundreds of Palestinian deaths to the Saika, a Palestinian movement controlled by Syria.140 Indeed, the invasion of Lebanon by the Syrians in May 1976 was first targeted against the Palestinians, as evidenced by the very harsh fighting in ­Beirut and Saida, that same year. Even from a purely chronological perspective, Sabra and Shatila were not the kind of definitive event that could serve to symbolize the fate of the Palestinians in that war since Arafat’s and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s final departure from Beirut did not take place in September 1982, when the massacres were committed, but on December 19, 1983, when Arafat and his troops had to leave Tripoli following murderous attacks by Palestinian dissidents led by Abou Moussa, under direct Syrian control. Only then was the PLO exiled to Tunisia, where Arafat and his followers remained until the Oslo accords with Israel allowed their return to the Territories. We must stop here, since recounting the Lebanon war would require an interminable digression—even if few French books have devoted the necessary attention to that conflict. Something indeed happened at Sabra and Shatila. On Thursday, September 16, 1982, the Phalangist militia led by Élie Hobeika entered the camps and

32  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” massacred with bladed weapons a great number of women and old men, as well as children who were so unlucky as to find themselves there. The motive behind the massacre was no doubt revenge for the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel, which had just occurred on September 14, as well as for the killings perpetrated by the Palestinians at Damour. The fact that firearms were not used explains why the massacre was discovered so late (not until the morning of Saturday, September 18) and why a Lebanese army unit stationed nearby remained completely unaware of it. This corroborates the version of the Israeli army, which was also present and proclaimed its ignorance of what had transpired—but it was accused of knowingly allowing the massacre and even of complicity in it by sending up flares to illuminate the camps during the two nights it lasted. The complicity is open to question, as Genet himself admits, but only in an interview—a non-metaphysical genre, as it were: “It is difficult to say that the Israelis wanted this massacre. Indeed, I’m not sure of this myself.”141 We know what happened afterward. The Kahane Commission, put into place by Israel itself, judged Sharon responsible for not having foreseen the criminal actions of the Christian militias, and he was relieved of his cabinet post. What makes Sabra and Shatila into an exception, the sole event remembered out of so many others? More than a memorable event, it provokes nearly absolute amnesia regarding all the other events, even among the victims of the torrent of atrocities that drowned Lebanon in blood for so many years. I am not aware, for example, that Palestinians have sued the Syrian leaders responsible for Tal-elZaatar, or that Lebanese Christians have brought charges against the PLO for the Damour massacre. Not only have Sabra and Shatila had the power to make events outside of them forgotten. Something far more troubling: the systematic association of ­Sabra and Shatila with the name Sharon has brought about the erasing of something internal to the event: the name of the perpetrator, Élie Hobeika, the sole name that should have been etched in memory. Then there is a third instance of oblivion as fascinating as the other two. It seems largely to have been forgotten that the Lebanon war continued long after the Israelis left Beirut, and that three years later five hundred Palestinian civilians were massacred in the same Sabra and Shatila camps. This time the acts of savagery were perpetrated by the Shiites of the Lebanese Amal militia, and their destructiveness and criminality had no reason to envy the deeds of September 1982. Their reign of terror lasted there from May until the beginning of August 1985; the Israeli army was no longer there to stop the massacre, as in 1982. How can one explain that Sabra and Shatila of 1982 are so memorable that they produce such forgetfulness of everything else near and far that had occurred over so many years? Just sticking to the facts, one has to say that the difference between this and other massacres is that it is the sole one in which Jews were

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  33 involved. And there is another way in which this case is exceptional: it is the only massacre that provoked a mass demonstration among those who, without being responsible for it, were involved in it—the Jews. On September 25, 1982, more than three hundred thousand assembled in Tel Aviv to express, vociferously, their disgust at what had transpired.142 Lebanese Christians, Palestinians, Syrians, Druze, Shiites, Sunnis: none of these groups has ever expressed, in any way whatsoever, disapproval of killings in which they were more or less involved, just as none has ever shown the least remorse for mass murders perpetrated by them directly. Sabra and Shatila make all the other killings fade from memory not because it was a crueler massacre than others. Rather it is because Jews had gotten mixed up in it and because, in the aftermath, hundreds of thousands of other Jews demonstrated their indignation loud and clear. The reader may well foresee my conclusion: Sabra and Shatila constitute an exception, a scandal, because it is a crime that has some relationship to the Good. I understand what is shocking about such a statement because Sabra and Shatila constitute first and foremost a crime wherein hundreds of women, men, the elderly, and children were killed and flayed, had their stomachs or throats slit.

The Scapegoat What kind of crime is it that may have some relationship to the Good? The only such crime is one for which blame is assigned to the scapegoat. What defines the scapegoat’s sin is its relationship with the Good, constituting a paradox within ethics itself. The scapegoat’s sin produces forgetfulness by being invested with a surfeit of memory, remembrance so intense that it obliterates all other reminiscence. And what can be the result of such highly charged memory and forgetfulness if not the production of innocence? The crime attributed to Israel spreads innocence all around. It does not only wash away all earlier crimes, memory of which is obliterated in this case by the names Sabra and Shatila. It erases even the name of the perpetrator, calls for whose death were never intoned by any crowd. The innocence touches even upon the nature of the crime itself, for if the Jews were guilty, it ceases to be fratricide and becomes a crime perpetrated by outsiders. Sabra and Shatila have a relationship with the Good because the meaning of the event revolves around the question of innocence. To explore this further, we shall follow here René Girard’s analysis of the scapegoat mechanism, of which the crime of Sabra and Shatila constitutes a particular case. On the one hand, the scapegoating has moved quite a distance from the Judaic or Christian model wherein the victim is innocent (like Joseph at the hands of his brothers, or Jesus on the cross) to a pagan model wherein the scapegoat is partially guilty (as in the case of Oedipus).143 But from another point of view, we are also removed from

34  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” paganism. In the pagan world, condemning the scapegoat produces, immediately and miraculously, a catharsis. A hysteria is triggered whereby the multitude of the faithful is reconciled with itself and the “guilty” scapegoat is made divine. Obviously, this is not what happened to Sharon. In fact, regarding Sabra and Shatila, the Arab masses could not experience definitive relief by the proclamation of Israeli guilt. On the one hand, the scapegoat process had not run its course; the scapegoat was not put to death. On the other hand, the masses had to keep up the mimetic excitement of the accusation because to let it fall would have meant risking a return to the crisis at its origin: the civil war. The mimetic crisis, the hysterical process has had to be interminably maintained and remembered, because such was, and still is, the condition required in order that the Arab community of Lebanon forget its 150,000 deaths, thousands of rapes, and endless destruction of property. It was, and still is, the condition required to ignore the fratricidal nature of all that violence. The permanent mimetic crisis brought about by the accusatory process has not resulted in the immediate relief experienced by the Theban multitudes upon the banishment of Oedipus, but it has provided a significant if fragile cathartic effect: the reconciliation of all Lebanese thanks to a mimetic falsehood whereby Israel is the sole enemy, the sole guilty party. This lie constantly betrays itself as such for it not only represses consciousness of the division of the Arab brotherhood into camps of mortal enemies, but it rests on their subjugation to the Syrian master. In the case of Sabra and Shatila, the mimetic process is essential insofar as it affects the essence of the crime. While the crime was being committed, the actors were foreign to one another: the Christians, the Shiites, the Druze, the Sunnis, and especially the Palestinians were all identified in some way as the Other, as rivals. The designation of Israel as the sole guilty party, and of Sabra and Shatila as the sole crime, has permitted those extraordinarily violent perceptions of other­ness to become mimeticism and unanimity: the nation that had been made up until then of enemies to the death is brought together into a brotherhood, the grand Arab brotherhood. The unexpected facets of this process are fascinating but also terrifying. The reuniting of factions through a fraternal bond paradoxically entails the neutralizing of Lebanon as a country or at least its gradual fading away. All Lebanese have become Arab brothers thanks to what Girard called the mimetic miracle. However, this reuniting has redrawn Lebanon onto an outmoded map of the Middle East and made it a natural part of Greater Syria, the major beneficiary of the operation—to the notorious detriment of the Christians.144 The latter, at the time of Bashir Gemayel’s assassination, manifested their inability to finish retaking control of the country. The mimetic process simply allowed them to play out, in a hysterical mode, their stunning loss. Some pathetic fits and starts on their

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  35 part, such as General Aoun’s rise in 1990, have not kept their defeat from being a humiliating and perhaps definitive form of submission. The second stage of the process initiated by Sabra and Shatila is more complex, and it explains the interminability of what is usually a brief ritual. As we have said, the designation of the scapegoat allows the masses bent on killing one another to discover that they constitute a community of brothers. However, this discovery turns out to be double-edged. If, on the one hand, it is reconciliatory, on the other it reveals that the previously committed crimes were fratricides. For that reason, accusal of the scapegoat must be repeated over and again. It must stir the masses, get them to cry out for revenge—a revenge that can never be wrought because to do so would renew internal strife. Thus we are in a vicious circle, a logical conundrum. The scapegoat is what permits forgetting of prior fratricides. But also, because of the scapegoat’s otherness, its status as outsider—especially in the case of a Jew—it retroactively converts earlier conflicts into fratricides. Girard maintains that the scapegoat mechanism, and the mimetic crisis from which it derived, were surmounted by Judaic and Christian monotheism. This happened through a break from mythology effected both by the Old Testament (in the episodes of Joseph and Job) and by the New (with the Passion of Jesus). The scapegoat is now innocent; the mimetic process has been undone. The masses are wrong; they are dispersed, divided. I do not know whether the Koran offers a similar symbolic configuration that brings the mimetic process to a halt, but it is clear that Arab policy has rested on reactivation of the mimetic process. The sympathy so many in the West show for that reactivation is no doubt due to the resurrection, especially in Europe, of a hoary fascination for mass reactions anchored in paganism and gregariousness, where the crowd is a major actor.

The Ethical Question Sabra and Shatila constitute an exception: despite the criminal nature of the event, it is tied up with the question of the Good and innocence. The connection is so strong that it cannot be fully defined in terms of the scapegoat mechanism; there are other implications. Sabra and Shatila, despite or because of the horror, not only permitted the Arab masses to reunite into the Ummah, an imaginary Arab identity, to reconcile by screaming out for revenge. The event is also tied up with the Good because it brought forth an opposite reaction from the other side, Israel, thereby verifying the relevance of the notion of mimetic crisis. Sabra and Shatila produced unanimity, mimeticism, innocence, forgetfulness among Arabs, while producing among Israelis division, differentiation, a sense of guilt, a fixation on memory. We shall go so far as to say that Sabra and Shatila could be perceived in Israel solely as an ethical question. It resonates even further than the question God elicits from Cain, by suggesting that Israel is also its enemies’ keeper. This

36  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” question was not asked by some Israeli editorialists paying lip service to humanistic conventions but by a Jewish multitude displaying all the traits opposite to those of the mimetic mass. Even as it marred the name of Israel with divisiveness, it constituted each demonstrator as an autonomous subject and united him or her with others within this differentiation, in a singular demand for truth. “Is Israel its enemies’ keeper?” is a brutal question, but it is in keeping with the role played by Israel, by Job, Joseph, or Moses himself. This is the scapegoat’s role, not in its pagan version, but in the only version Israel can write or understand it: a Judaic version. Troublingly, Genet conceives of the question posed by Sabra and Shatila in a similar way but perforce inverts or perverts the terms. So little does the cruel, implicit presence of the post-Cainian question “Am I my enemies’ keeper?” escape Genet that he makes it all the more striking by using a falsified form of it as the epigraph to his “Four Hours in Shatila”: “In Shatila, in Sabra, goyim massacred goyim—what does that have to do with us?”145 This is the way he quotes Menachem Begin speaking before the Knesset. Thus he has Begin answering the question posed by the crimes of Sabra and Shatila with the words, “What does that have to do with us?” just as Cain answered God regarding his murder of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The only problem is that this is not what Begin said. The exact quotation is: “Goyim kill goyim, and here they are accusing us,”146 which has an entirely different meaning. The essential point is the sense of authenticity Genet achieves through this falsification. He wishes to transform the mimetic accusation emanating from the Arab world into guilt immanent to the Jewish world. This guilt would supposedly be inscribed within the Jews’ own Book, opened to a page that inverts them into a Cainian people. By doing this, Genet makes fully clear the status of Sabra and Shatila. Thanks to him, we can understand the exceptionality of this massacre as event; we have seen that an event can be something quite opposite to facts, provided that it convey a metaphysical dimension that affects the essence of what is being represented. Sabra and Shatila achieve their status as event of events, as pure exception, insofar as they tell us little about the suffering and horrors undergone by the victims but are deeply tied up with the Jewish question where since time immemorial anxiety in the face of the Good confronts the dread of Evil. In this sense, Sabra and Shatila are a metaphysical event on which the scapegoat scenario confers a universalism writ large, which could not fail to appeal to a global audience.

The Question of Judgment Genet did not falsify Begin’s words out of petty spite. Nor in the manner of antisemitic cartoonists did he portray the Israeli prime minister—who achieved

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  37 more for peace than any other—as an ugly Cain perplexed by a new moral issue (“In what way does the murder of a non-Jew by a non-Jew concern me?”). Rather, the skewing of Begin’s question partakes of Genet’s deepest metaphysics, his attempt to elaborate a moral ontology of Israel, his metaphysical antisemitism that we have taken pains to define as anxiety in the face of the Good. Indeed, the text titled “Four Hours in Shatila” includes a sentence that, with the crystalline clarity of an axiomatic statement, touches on the very essence of Israel. Regarding Shatila, Genet writes: “Everything seems to happen as if, weary and overwhelmed with being an example, being untouchable, exploiting what it thinks it has become—the inquisitorial and vengeful saint—Israel had decided itself to be judged coldly.”147 Here we have a description of the lassitude attendant upon the Good, fatigue resulting from setting an example, exhaustion afflicting Abraham, who— in Genet’s eyes—yields to his basic humanity by committing a crime that he has heretofore forbidden himself. Genet shows us Abraham merging with Cain. What fascinates is the subjective position Genet assumes in portraying Israel as embodying the Good, or at least as claiming to embody it. Genet places himself here at the heart of the signifier Israel, which he no longer judges from the outside but from within it. In some way, he now identifies with a metaphysical Jewishness, the feeling of which he depicts in a pure existential mode as taking the form of anxiety, oppressiveness, fatigue. The terms “weary and overwhelmed” that he uses result in something akin to a phenomenology of the Jewish soul. That soul is no longer viewed from the outside as in a caricature of Shylock but is described from within, as a Jacob or a Joseph, suddenly tempted to transgress against the Good, of which they have grown tired. Israel, in turn, may be said to have derived a moral thrill from this crime: the pleasure of being judged. In the imaginary scenario Genet constructs—all the more imaginary as not a single Israeli soldier had blood on his hands—crime is not a profane act from which material or tangible profit may be gained. What characterizes criminal intentionality for Genet—what makes it something pure— is the desire to be judged. The murderer, in his view, is someone who wishes to be guilty. One thus sees how Shatila—as defined by Genet, and I see his definition as quite apt—bears upon the question of the Good. In the eyes of the specific sort of antisemite Genet is, the massacre at Shatila was perpetrated by Jews for the purpose of distancing themselves from the Good and yielding to the temptation to be as guilty as Cain. Thus Genet proceeded in a manner totally opposite to how the Arab multitudes acted. For him the mimetic scapegoat strategy was not aimed at proving innocence. Instead, its purpose was to show that no longer could anyone claim innocence now that Israel resembled humanity in general, insofar as humanity is criminal. The desire that Israel cease setting an example and allow itself to be

38  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” judged entails Israel’s renunciation of what we have seen Genet call “pride in not being as other men are.”148 What is wished for is a kind of negative, criminal, mimetics—a mimetics of Evil that once again betrays anxiety in the face of the Good.

Genet at Shatila What sets Genet apart from the Arab world is clear from something he wrote in the first version of “Four Hours in Shatila.” Unlike Arabs, he wishes for that crime to produce just one result: that Israel should reassume its role “as a wandering, humbled people whose power remains underground”—that is to say, Cain’s destiny.149 What the Arab world hoped for was the everlasting benefit derived from the scapegoat process we discussed: reconciliation among the murderers (Christians, Shiites, Palestinians, Druze, and others) at the expense of the sole guilty party, Ariel Sharon. Sharon alone was guilty, insofar as he was the only one who faced justice, which resulted in dismissal from his post as minister of defense.150 And since everything transpiring in the land of the Bible is destined to be recorded in writing, let us recall the fate of Élie Hobeika, the sole man clearly responsible for the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, insofar as he ordered the hundred or so men under his command to subject Palestinian men, women, and children to mutilation, stabbing, throat-slitting, or decapitation by ax or knife. Hobeika was lovingly taken up within the intense magnetism of the Arab mimetic embrace. Shortly after the events of 1982, he was elected to the Lebanese parliament. Between 1991 and 1998, he served as cabinet minister in several proSyrian governments. He spent years living happily in opulence and was never targeted, much less sentenced, by any tribunal or commission; nor was he even subjected to invective. He met his death on January 24, 2002, in a central Beirut car-bombing (of a Mercedes), in the grandiose kitsch style of the Syrian secret services. At the same time, in Belgium—a kingdom ever deserving of the ridicule Baudelaire lavished on it—Palestinian victims brought charges against Sharon for crimes against humanity.151 The epilogue to Sabra and Shatila is thus a complaint first lodged in a Belgian court and then dismissed on June 26, 2002, on legal grounds as farcical as the filing of the complaint itself: the absence of Sharon on Belgian territory.152 But what is the epilogue to them specifically for Genet, who in no way believed in courts of justice and for whom a crime against humanity was the very essence of humanity? The reader has no doubt understood that Shatila represented an ambiguous event for him. In the space of a moment he could take on the position of a witness denouncing Evil, of Picasso painting Guernica, but it was a brief moment indeed. In “Four Hours in Shatila,” he returned to depicting the great metaphysical scenario that was his sole preoccupation as a writer,

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  39 that of anxiety in the face of the Good. Genet wagered that Shatila should prove Israel’s betrayal of its calling to embody the Good; he hoped that, through Shatila, Israel—a term for “Origin”—would show itself definitively lured into the temptation of man’s Fall; perhaps he even wished that Origin itself would thereby be annihilated, in accordance with what he defined in his letter to Sartre as the metaphysics of Sodom: “a refusal to continue the world.” Beyond this apocalyptic scenario, Genet used Shatila to sketch Israel’s metamorphosis into Cain. He assigned to Israel Cain’s role, which entails not only murder but in more absolute terms betrayal and the rejection of Time itself and the everlastingness of pledges. Such hopes are doomed from the outset, for if their unrealizability were not inscribed within them, there could be no antisemitism. We have seen that for Genet, Jewishness is what cannot metamorphose. Jewishness is Being insofar as Being rejects inversion; it is Being for which masculinity is not a scandalously parodic femininity that stands in closest contact with voluptuous death. Genet’s hopes are doomed to failure because in his eyes Jewishness is the Good.

IV. Genet and Morality Reading Genet Have we read Genet properly? Do we have the right to read him as we have, pushing him up to the wall, interpreting him from the perspective of his antisemitism, something absolutely negative? Have we been unfair to him, producing effects he would be reluctant to assume? It has been our intention to set forth an interpretation diametrically opposed to what could be called a politically progressive reading, a reading that is credulous but by no means innocent. We are obviously referring to pro-Palestinian interpretations of Genet. Such credulous readings stand in contrast to interpretations by Bataille or Sartre. Different as they are from each other, the last two share the advantage of not shrinking from Genet’s words, of hiding nothing of what he wrote, of getting at him from the inside starting from his own negativity. Consider on the other hand the ecstatic readings that bloom like flowers these days, transforming Genet into a spokesman for the wretched of the earth, a kind of eternal revolutionary.153 And then there are readings of Genet, far more enigmatic and difficult to judge. One example offered by Derrida in Glas, a work partially devoted to Genet. How are we to read the passage where Derrida acts like a little boy in the presence of Genet? For the first time I am afraid, while writing, as they say, “on” someone, of being read by him. Not to arrest him, not to draw him back, not to bridle him. Yesterday he let me know that he was in Beirut, among the Palestinians at war, encircled outcasts. I know that what interests me always takes (its/his) place over there, but how to show that? He almost never writes anymore, he

40  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” has interred [enterré] literature like no one, he leaps wherever that explodes [ça saute] in the world, wherever the absolute knowledge of Europe takes a blow [coup], and these (hi)stories of glas, seing, flower, horse ought to make him shit.154

This book has become generally unreadable due to its already quite dated digressions on signatures, signs, seals,155 symbols, and Saussure. The criticisms Derrida levels at Sartre and Bataille are all too foreseeable. But it certainly is surprising to find Derrida so fascinated by Genet’s transgressions. Like a child smelling his own bodily effluvia, Derrida comes to question the relevance of an area of philosophy: “How could ontology lay hold of a fart?”156 With its many infantile moments Glas often tries the reader’s patience, but Derrida is not playing the child without rhyme or reason. A philosopher never acts like a child purposelessly. Derrida is not a credulous reader. The suspicion arises that he is up to something and that we ought not dismiss the message too summarily. Derrida’s childishness might well be traceable to a secret he shares with Genet, which he wishes to reveal. The secret has to do with Jewish identity. Derrida acts childlike in order to slip a remembrance of his own—his getting lost in an Algiers synagogue157—into Genet’s autobiographical fiction. Thereby inhabitants of Algeria are identified with interns of the children’s prison in Our Lady of the Flowers, and Jewish ceremonies are superimposed on the prisoners’ secret rituals. Derrida’s interest is captivated by the strange scene where Genet merges the Hebrew letters of the Torah with the tattoos the young prisoners make on their bodies at night, under their covers: The great nocturnal occupation, admirable suited for enchanting the darkness, is tattooing. Thousands and thousands of little jabs with a fine needle prick the skin and draw blood, and figures that you would regard as most extravagant are flaunted in the most unexpected places. When the rabbi suddenly unrolls the Torah, a mystery sends a shudder through the whole epidermis, as when one sees a colonist undressing. The grimacing of all that blue on a white skin imparts an obscure but potent glamor to the child who is covered with it, as a neutral, pure column becomes sacred under the notches of the hieroglyphs.158

In this superimposition whereby Derrida pursues the identification of the homosexual with the Jew that we have already seen operating in Balzac, Proust, and Genet, he reveals the secret through which male eroticism becomes a surface that can reflect Jewish childhood memories. In a certain sense, Derrida acknowledges his relationship to the authors mentioned by writing, “What am I doing here? Let’s put it that I am working on the origin of literature by miming it.”159 But there is more here than literary playfulness or mimetic posturing. We do not find ourselves solely at the dawn of literature, even if the Torah and tattoos do bring us back to archaic forms of writing. Derrida wants us to know that

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  41 there is something more. He may well be afraid, and with reason, lest we not have grasped that betrayal has taken place, that Jewishness has been betrayed. As though to illuminate us, Derrida makes a new excursus through a work by the German Romantic writer Jean Paul, which recounts the tale of a Jew named Judas who has converted to Christianity. Judas takes on the new name Jude, and loses himself between the Old and New Testaments, so that he never ceases to convert. Derrida thus gives a more definitive but equally allegorical form to his identification with Genet: “That is perhaps what I’m doing with you here.”160 How strange this conversion is, this incessant back-and-forth between Judas and Genet, between two major figures of betrayal! But does one have to read Genet for the sake of betraying oneself? The fact that his work asks that major question redounds to its credit. The answer we provide will differ from Derrida’s. However, we too find ourselves in a dilemma. To be fair to Genet, we cannot read him at a distance and deploy his own negativity against him. That would be too easy. We have to give his text some breathing space and let it speak for itself. For example, we must avoid reducing Genet’s antisemitism to the simple abjection his work displays, as in the voluptuous and hallucinatory depiction of tortured Jewish bodies. We cannot let his text sink into its own negativity. In fact, if we had the stomach for it, we should treat all antisemitic literature with such indulgence, for even the most sordid or neurotic examples of the genre convey something universal, insofar as the hateful madness inhabiting it tells us something about the metaphysical structure of the world. There is no reason to be astonished by the success enjoyed by such outlandish, specious, perverse books as La grande peur des bien-pensants by Bernanos,161 also author of the brilliant Monsieur Ouine,162 or Bagatelles pour un massacre163 by Céline. All those books are about gold, excrement, race, blood, sperm, engulfment, bastardry, origin, orality. These themes whirl around the signifier Jew, the major focus for their pathological excitement, that word of words so powerful that Bernanos claimed Drumont could not say the French term Juif but instead pronounced Juëf.164 To that signifier Genet’s work owes much. In addition to the radicality the word “Jew” conveys through associations with Cain and Sodom, there are the ideations brought into play by Nazism, which Genet’s writings neither abjure nor even pretend to do so.

Reading Genet as an Enemy Does one have to read Genet for the sake of betraying oneself? Such is the question we have posed in regard to Genet’s work. Sartre argued, paradoxically enough, that the sole loyal attitude to assume in reading Genet entails acknowledging that “this poet ‘speaks to us as an enemy.’”165 If there is, as we believe, a positivity in Genet, it has to be a hostile positivity. As Bataille, in turn, writes,

42  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” “Genet himself would reject agreement if, by some indefensible error, we wanted to agree with him.”166 For that reason, we have refused to take seriously the notion of a “pro-Palestinian” or “Third Worldist” Genet, such as one sees, for example in the tributes by intellectuals collected in the volume Genet à Chatila (Genet at Shatila).167 It goes without saying that Genet had “no opinion” (to use the pollster’s terminology) on this or other matters because what he had to say could not be understood within some doxa, as partaking of opinions bandied about.168 Genet is purely metaphysical. His categories cannot be made to coincide with the propaganda of any movement. It would thus be absurd to defend or refute Genet’s statements within the confines of a political discussion. That is why, though we agree with Sartre’s first postulate, we refrain from following him in his second: “He plays loser wins with his work and you are his partner: thus, you will win only by being ready to lose.”169 Sartre enjoins us to assume the role of the conventional bourgeois, to play the fool and agree to be “shocked” by Genet’s words because they are expressly meant to be shocking. “You will appreciate this sophist’s trap only if you fall into it,” Sartre informs us.170 But I do not find Genet’s antisemitism shocking. Unlike the example Sartre gives, a particularly obscene passage taken from one of Genet’s novels, the antisemitic statements are not meant to shock but to convey truth. We have already conceived of the truthful import of Genet’s antisemitism as anxiety in the face of the Good. Starting from this truth of Genet’s, we have allowed ourselves to interpret his antisemitism as sincerity on the part of an enemy who reveals to us something essential. Falsehood, ignominy, horror, falsification, and obscene beauty play themselves out in a theater other than that of natural discourse. They displace and metamorphose themselves endlessly, like the fragments of speech that reach us from the dead, the damned, the condemned. One can thus say that the truth of antisemitism is that it is a failure, not only because, as Blanchot puts it, “no form of force can have done with”171 the positivity deployed by Jewishness. Rather, it is as Lacan points out regarding Sade: Evil is itself a failure. Lacan thereby gives us the best context for our understanding of Genet and confers upon Sartre’s and Bataille’s readings their deepest ­implications: But what must be kept in mind is that Sade himself refuses to be my neighbor, not so that I can refuse to be his neighbor in turn but so as to recognize the meaning of his refusal here. In my view, Sade does not have neighborly enough relations with his own malice [méchanceté] to encounter his neighbor in it. . . .172

If Genet refuses to be one’s neighbor, or even to have a neighbor, it is paradoxically because he is not antisemitic enough to form any sort of bond with

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  43 another antisemite or even acknowledge him. It is as if, as Lacan puts it, whosoever aspires to Evil—such as Genet does in his entire oeuvre—must retain something of the Law “in order to take the opportunity, mentioned by Saint Paul, to become inordinately sinful.”173 But Genet goes no further than that. The attachment he keeps to the Law is what can be termed his antisemitism, which we have defined as anxiety in the face of the Good. It would be excessive to try to save Genet from himself, from his antisemitism, and that is certainly not our goal: we are not the antisemites’ keepers. But anxiety in the face of the Good is first and foremost anxiety. Is it not troubling that Genet’s antisemitism always expresses itself painfully, in a hallucination, a fleeting remembrance, an avowal, an involuntary fantasy, a feverish near-malediction? The superimposition of Nazism on Hamza’s mother’s face, the delirious impingement of Jews in a concentration camp on a scene with a Japanese girl and German brutes, the sudden appearance of Hitler as dog-loving Jew-murderer: would not all of these scenes have been censored by a professional antisemite? Ultimately, Genet does not have vileness of a Céline seeking the complicity of his reader. Never for a second, whether it be out of a sense of humor or esthetics, does he ask us to share his world. However, we may think the contrary in attempting to enter into a human relationship with his work, to bridge the ethical abyss of Jew hatred—even if we do not go so far as to follow the gesture Klossowski performs with Sade by claiming Genet as our fellow or neighbor.174 Despite our attempts, Genet’s work effects, nay demands, closure on itself, as it denies the passage of time. So we may find ourselves believing that there could be no such thing as a professional antisemite and that all antisemites just seek self-destruction. Lacan, savoring paradox, claimed that in Sade virtue always triumphs.175 Provided we preserve Lacan’s wit, we may argue the same for Genet’s work. There, the Jews, and Israel, always triumph.

A Reader’s Experience Today, Genet elicits extreme excitement, both negative and positive. He exemplifies uncommon subjectivity in the Pascalian sense; he is a predestined, excessive, enigmatic subject that defies synthesis. Though we may grasp his thought, there always remains the question of our relationship to it. Despite Sartre’s plea, there is no way to “use Genet properly.”176 For once we have explored, thanks to Lacan, the aporias involved in the notion of one’s fellow, we face what remains irreducible for us as readers of Genet: our experience of his temporality, of his style, of the moments we have spent with him. No doubt, nowadays, we all experience some degree of anxiety in the face of the Good. We are more uncertain than ever of our relationship to the Good, and more open to narratives that suspend ethical distinctions. Genet’s demonic

44  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” genius makes us undergo something so radical, palpable, crucial that we may well feel as we do after any indelible experience: that we should make unlimited use of it. Whatever divine genius we possess as readers demands that we break away from the mimetic fascination exerted by his powerful writing, that we extract ourselves from it and not fear doing violence to it and raining blows upon it, lest it remain with us intact once we have closed the book. This idea, in some way, is contained in the strange phrase by Sartre that started off our reflection: “Genet is anti-Semitic.” That affirmation seemed neutral, almost well-meaning; its anodyne appearance was meant, no doubt, to keep the reader from rejecting Genet outright. However, once Genet has been read, that assertion looms terrible and definitive. It illuminates his writings, making explicit what lies there under wraps.

Notes 1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Mentor, 1963), 225n. 2. This chapter began as a paper read at the colloquium on testimony held at the Sorbonne September 16–18, 2002, under the directorship of Catherine Coquio. It first appeared in print in Les Temps Modernes 622 (December 2002–January 2003), thanks to the good offices of Claude Lanzmann. 3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken/ Grove, 1948). 4. No doubt Marty is alluding here to Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961), best remembered as author of the grittily realistic novel Voyage to the End of Night (1932). He later penned some exuberantly baroque reworkings of basic racialist antisemitism.—Trans. 5. Asked by Hubert Fichte, in 1975, whether his admiration for Hitler had “drained away,” Genet responded, “Yes and no. It has drained away, but the space has not been occupied by anything else, it’s a void” (Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Literary Interviews, ed. Albert Dichy, trans. Jeff Fort [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004], 125). 6. Sartre bases himself on these dialectical metamorphoses, as he defines the third one as authorizing Genet to become a writer. To this metamorphosis he devotes the final chapter, “Please Use Genet Properly,” which returns to Pascalian dialectics itself as the ultimate development of his analysis (Sartre, Saint Genet, 628–44). 7. Jean Genet, undated letter, probably from 1952, translated in its entirety in Edmund White, Jean Genet: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1993), 384. 8. Quoted in White, Jean Genet, 385. 9. Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 3. 10. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 3:919. 11. Let us not forget how Abraham attempts to save Sodom from God’s wrath, only later to witness the city’s destruction. 12. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), 32. The last two prescriptions are, of course, aspects of Jewish dietary laws.

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  45 13. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 209. 14. Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 35. 15. Honoré de Balzac, Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life, trans. James Waring, in Balzac, Works (Saint Louis, Mo.: Thompson, 1901), 12 (1): 403. 16. Sartre’s entire book turns on the question of betrayal. He writes, “Ivan the Terrible has been rehabilitated; before long Hitler may be rehabilitated . . . Genet has had the courage to choose the worst” (Sartre, Saint Genet, 256). 17. By internalizing as fully as possible anxiety in the face of Evil, by going through the motions—up to the final moment—of sacrificing Isaac, Abraham delivers himself and all humankind from human sacrifice, from indebtedness to sacrifice, and inscribes in its place worry and anxiety as our profoundest sense of self. This internalization, which carries Abraham to the depths of a total silence—he will utter nothing more—is the fullest verbal experience, the model for all metaphysical tests undergone by figures in the Hebrew Bible, from Jacob to Job. Abraham’s attitude, like theirs, simply reflects absolute confidence in the promise that has been made to them that they will father many descendants; in that sense, he shows complete trust in language. Contrarily, Genet’s metaphysics implies suspicion regarding words uttered, appeals proffered; it is betrayal that is perpetuated: “betraying means breaking the laws of love” (Jean Genet, The Thief ’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman [New York: Bantam, 1964], 149). 18. See “Vautrin’s Last Avatar,” in Balzac, Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life, 1–146. In this sense, the universe of the homosexual convict is perfectly superimposable on that of Nazism as imagined by Genet: “Only the German police, in Hitler’s time, succeeded in being both Police and Crime. This masterly synthesis of opposites, this block of truth, was frightful, charged with a magnetism that will continue to perturb us for a long, long time” (Genet, Thief ’s Journal, 189). 19. Balzac, Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life, 295. 20. Sartre alternates between the terms Juif and Israélite in the original French Saint Genet (such as in the long passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter). Frechtman renders both as “Jew.”—Trans. 21. This statement is obviously contestable. It is probable that for Hitler, as for any antisemite, Jews do constitute the Good, but only up to a certain point. 22. Genet, Thief ’s Journal, 208. 23. It would be pointless to cite the clownish vaudevillian version of the encounter between Sodom and Nazism painted by Jouhandeau in his antisemitic brochures as well as in his war and Liberation diaries. The part his wife, Élise, plays is so facile and ludicrous that all of it reflects nothing other than Vichy ideology. (Marcel Jouhandeau [1888–1979], French writer.— Trans.) 24. Genet, Thief ’s Journal, 149. 25. “It is natural for the piracy, the ultra-mad banditry of Hitler’s adventure, to arouse hatred in decent people but deep admiration and sympathy in me” (Jean Genet, Funeral Rites, trans. Bernard Frechtman [New York: Grove, 1969], 116). “He [Erik, a soldier in Hitler’s army] got it into his head to desert. The cause was fatigue, and in order to be in harmony with himself, he thought he had to betray Hitler, but he felt that one owed the devil a kind of faithfulness that no longer has anything to do with morality” (Jean Genet, Pompes funèbres [Paris: Gallimard, collection L’imaginaire, 1953], 135. [This passage does not occur in all French editions of the work, and not in the English translation.—Trans.]). It would be absurd to exonerate Genet of responsibility for such ideas by claiming they belong to his characters but not necessarily to him since this book has no characters in the strict sense of the term; it would be equally

46  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” pointless to try to convict Genet on the basis of such assertions because it can always be argued that selfhood is always contradictory, an insight contained in Rimbaud’s famous dictum, “Je est un autre” (“I is someone else”). 26. Genet, Funeral Rites, 156. Though Genet has Hitler appear in burlesque configurations, that should certainly not be construed as a condemnatory attitude. For Genet, ridiculization is never fatal. 27. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 129. 28. White, Jean Genet, 348–49. 29. As far as I know, Palestinian officials have never expressed any reservation about ­Genet’s writings; they have certainly been unabashed in exploiting them. 30. Genet, Declared Enemy, 210. 31. “The Palestinians lying there, black and swollen” (Genet, Declared Enemy, 227). 32. Genet, Declared Enemy, 211. 33. Genet, Declared Enemy, 209, 214. 34. Genet, Declared Enemy, 218. 35. Genet, Declared Enemy, 213. 36. Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), 338. 37. Genet, Declared Enemy, 218. 38. Genet, Declared Enemy, 214. Consider as well what he says in a 1975 interview about the Palestinians: “but isn’t this adherence, this sympathy, also driven by the erotic charge that the whole Arab world or the Black American world represents for me, for my own sexuality?” (Genet, Declared Enemy, 132–33). 39. “But let no run-of-the-mill murderer, thief or traitor take advantage of my reasons. I have gone to too great pains to win them. They are valid only for me. That justification cannot be used by every Tom, Dick and Harry” (Genet, Funeral Rites, 157). 40. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 88. 41. Genet, Declared Enemy, 228. 42. Genet, Declared Enemy, 221. See also 222–23. 43. These bullet cartridges certainly came from the weapon stores the Palestinians blew up before the Christian militia entered. Moreover, all the killings at Sabra and Shatila were done with bladed weapons, according to all witnesses, including Genet. 44. “Killing a man is the symbol of Evil. Killing without anything’s compensating for that loss of life is Evil, absolute Evil. I rarely use the word absolute because it frightens me, but it seems imperative here. Now, as metaphysicians will tell you, absolutes cannot be added to each other” (Genet, Funeral Rites, 222). 45. On June 10, 1944, an SS division murdered 642 inhabitants—men, women, and children—of Oradour-sur-Glane, a town in west-central France.—Trans. 46. “I am told that the German officer that was in charge of the Oradour butchery had a mild, rather likeable face. He did what he could—a great deal—for poetry. He deserved well of it. My deaths rarely dare express my cruelty. I love and respect that officer” (Genet, Funeral Rites, 215). 47. In Genet’s conversation with Rüdiger Wischenbart and Layla Shahid, the latter says: “I myself am fascinated by this ability that fighters have to face death . . . I remember—and this is also something that fascinated me during the war in Lebanon and now in Tripoli, when I look at the faces of the fighters who are fighting—there is always a kind of smile, a light that you can see among the young people, thirty-five years old at most, who are going out to meet almost certain death” (Genet, Declared Enemy, 248).

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  47 48. Genet, Declared Enemy, 218. 49. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 295. 50. Francis Carco (1886–1958) depicted in his writings the street life and speech of the denizens of the Montmartre district of Paris.—Trans. 51. It is especially The Thief ’s Journal, Genet most contrived book, that is tarnished by a facile recourse to “gangster fiction,” recalling sometimes the mediocre works of Auguste Le Breton (see, e.g., Thief ’s Journal, 219–20). (Le Breton [1913–1999] was a French author of crime fiction.—Trans.) 52. Prisoner of Love combines three visits by Genet to the Mideast. The first was to Jordan in 1970 and 1971; the second, the Shatila episode, took place in 1982; and in the third, in 1984, he tries to find young Hamza, whom he had met in 1970. 53. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 92. 54. “‘So my wife’s not going to be a nurse.’ ‘So you’re against nurses.’ ‘Not if they’re foreign. But my wife’s a Muslim’” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 127). 55. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 194. 56. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 121, 227–28. 57. “‘You came through Istanbul. Didn’t any of you go to see Santa Sophia?’ ‘The girls did’” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 140). 58. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 340. See also the paragraph on the Jordanians’ hatred of the Palestinians (187). Genet gives the same explanation in his text from 1972, titled “The Palestinians”: “Instead of this, what do we find? On the one hand the commandos, armed, arrogant in their camouflage, haughtily ignoring the Jordanian peasants, and on the other hand these peasants or merchants, somewhat scared and exasperated by the film star behaviour of the commandos” (Genet, “The Palestinians,” trans. Meric Dobson, Journal of Palestine Studies 3, no. 1 [1973]: 15). 59. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 342. 60. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 126. 61. The major significance assigned to Rimbaud is implicit in a passage where Genet renders the poet a sort of anonymous homage: “In order to breathe more freely, it is possible that the world—like France between 1852 and 1872, producing a man who brought French prose to white-heat—willed the youthful revolts of the Palestinians (like what he had called ‘natural revolts’) defying whatever tried to hold back their poetry” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 271 [modified as per Jean Genet, Un captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard, collection Folio, 1986), 444]). The “man” Genet refers to here is obviously himself as well as Rimbaud. 62. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 295. 63. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 296. 64. Let us recall the punishment God metes out to Cain: “When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:12). The enmity between the Palestinians and land also appears in “Four Hours in Shatila.” Land is defined as that which shrinks away from them: “As time passed the earth seemed to experience this: the Palestinians were less and less bearable even as these Palestinians, these peasants, were discovering mobility, quick steps, running” (Genet, Declared Enemy, 218). 65. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 266. 66. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 368. 67. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 211. The term “uncreated” comes from the Islamic context since it is one of the attributes of the Koran. Genet makes it resonate here within the Western tradition. 68. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 309. 69. Regarding the question of writing as betrayal of truth, see the exquisite passage starting with “But what if it were true that writing is a lie?” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 27) and another

48  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” one almost immediately (28–29) on his reconstruction of his conversations, as well as his reflections on the strange pact between him and the Palestinians: “And when the Palestinians invited me to go and stay in Palestine, in other words in a fiction, weren’t they too more or less openly recognizing me as a natural sham?” (149). 70. “These were the Palestinians’ enemies, in order of importance: the Bedouin, the Circassians, King Hussein, the feudal Arabs, the Muslim religion, Israel, Europe, America, the Big Banks” (Prisoner of Love, 103–4). 71. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 93. 72. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 369. 73. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 143–44. 74. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Marion Boyars, 1997), 186. 75. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 162. 76. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 167. 77. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 175, 176. 78. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 177. 79. Regarding his exaltation of déchéance (decline, fall, degeneration), Genet writes in The Thief ’s Journal: “It was then perhaps that, had I met my mother and had she been humbler than I, we would have pursued together the ascension—though language seems to call for the word ‘fall’ [déchéance] or any other that indicates a downward movement—the difficult, painful ascension which leads to humiliation. I would have carried out that adventure with her, I would have written of it so as to magnify, thanks to love, the terms—whether gestures or vocables—which were the most abject” (91). 80. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 349–56. 81. “A memoirist trying unobtrusively to write like Saint-Simon nowadays may well hit on a line like the opening one in the portrait of the Duc de Villars—‘Quite a tall man, dark of complexion, with a physiognomy that was bright, open, outgoing’—but no determinism could possibly make him say in the next line, of this same physiognomy, ‘and in truth a trifle mad’” (Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve [New York: Penguin, 2005], 125–26). (Besides “mad,” folle also may mean “fairy” or “queer.”—Trans.) 82. We have already quoted the unambiguous passage from Prisoner of Love, where Genet writes that Palestinian élite families were “after 1933 . . . Hitler’s lackeys in the Middle East”; it is followed by the words, “The Palestinian resistance was beginning” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 349 [modified as per Un captif amoureux, 571]). 83. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 93. 84. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 112–13. 85. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 144. 86. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 274. I have always been troubled by this declaration by Genet: “Why was I on the side of the FLN? The answer is simple: I’m always on the side of the victor. Haven’t you noticed that since there’s a new joy in the world since that revolution has broken out, since the terrorist attacks have taken place?” (From a 1960 letter to Jacques Vergès, published in Libération [April 7, 1988] and quoted in Hadrien Laroche, Le dernier Genet [Paris: Seuil, 1997], 68). 87. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 178; see also Genet’s meditations on the Palestinians’ weapons (223). 88. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 45 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 79). 89. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 45. 90. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 45 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 79).

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  49 91. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 337 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 551). 92. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 337 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 551). 93. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 338. 94. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 373. 95. Genet is clearest in this regard in discussing the Black Panthers. See the passage starting with this sentence: “Revolutionaries are in danger of getting lost in a hall of mirrors. But they are necessary, those intervals of sacking and looting that skirt and sometimes briefly fall into fascism, that break free of it only to return with even more abandon” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 259). 96. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 35. 97. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 32. 98. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 32 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 58). 99. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 328. 100. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 329. 101. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 338. 102. Genet, Declared Enemy, 223. 103. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 339 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 555). 104. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 52 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 90). 105. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 52. 106. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 53. Sartre had, thirty years earlier, foreshadowed Genet’s fascination with the kamikaze: “And since it is in the most perverse acts that the evildoer will coincide most perfectly with his essence, it is at the moment when he will blow up the world and himself that Genet will attain, in absolute annihilation, fullness of being” (Sartre, Saint Genet, 373–74). 107. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 53. 108. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 51. 109. See our earlier discussion of Genet’s letter to Sartre, quoted in extenso by Edmund White. 110. Ehud Barak was a member of that command. He recounts their mission in Claude Lanzmann’s film Tsahal. 111. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 160 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 266). The three leaders executed were Kamal Adouan, Kamal Nasser, and Abou Youssef Al Nedjar, who had planned the Munich terrorist murders of 1972. 112. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 159. 113. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 159 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 265). 114. “To leave behind the hated but familiar masculine ways is like forsaking the world and going into a monastery or leper-house. To quit the world of trousers for the world of the brassière is a kind of death, expected but feared. And isn’t it also comparable to suicide, with choirs singing the ‘Tuba Mirum’?” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 53). (The Tuba Mirum is the third part of the requiem mass: “Tuba mirum spargens sonum, per sepulchra regionum, coget omnes ante thronum” [“Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth; through earth’s sepulchers it ringeth; all before the throne it bringeth,” trans. from the 1962 Roman missal].—Trans.) 115. A fedayee says to Genet: “When we’re babies we make use of her [i.e., Palestine’s] milk, we love her the way you people love a Dutch cow, and we’re quite capable of selling her or hiring her out. But if someone steals her we forget about the milk and remember her name, the black patches on her hide, her horns” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 280–81). 116. “The Western press, which is directly or indirectly linked to Tel Aviv by a complex system of newspaper directors, editors and columnists” (Genet, “Palestinians,” 25).

50  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” 117. Genet, “Palestinians,” 26. 118. Genet, “Palestinians,” 26. 119. Genet, “Palestinians,” 26 (modified as per Genet à Chatila, ed. Jérome Hankins [Arles: Solin/Babel, 1992], 150). 120. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 143–44 (emphasis in the published translation). 121. Édouard Drumont (1844–1917) was the author of the 1886 antisemitic classic, La France juive (Jewish France).—Trans. 122. The statement by French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), to the effect that “Hitler has discredited antisemitism,” has generated much debate because of its obvious ambiguity.—Trans. 123. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 235 (modified as per Un captif amoureux, 386). The sentence from which this phrase is taken is quite complex and elliptical. It speaks of “what remains in men’s minds”; “glory” as the unsettling of memory since everything vanishes in the hero’s presence; the “leper” in the Cid’s presence; a dead man standing before Antigone; a wounded man in the presence of his rescuer; the “wolfhound” next to Hitler, or Hitler’s hand, or little finger “stroking it. But the dog has vanished, and all that’s left suspended in mid-air is the caress, the eternal caress that is at once a proof of the magnanimity and the means by which it will go on existing forever.” There follows an evocation of “a few winged details, absurd but heroic” that erase piles of Palestinian corpses—another proof of glory. 124. Léon Bloy, Le salut par les Juifs [Salvation through the Jews] (1892), argued that Jesus had to be born among the most abject of peoples in order that Christian redemption should be all the more complete.—Trans. 125. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 143–44 (emphasis in the published translation). 126. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 211. 127. Quoted in White, Jean Genet, 384. 128. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 371. 129. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 367. 130. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 367. 131. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 367. 132. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 367. 133. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 159–60. 134. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 160. 135. The Red Cross estimated seven to eight hundred deaths during the massacre that took place from September 16 to 18. 136. The Palestinians were expelled after massacres by the Jordanian army that resulted in more than three thousand victims over a few days. 137. There had been a limited incursion of the IDF into South Lebanon in March 1978, followed by a withdrawal in June of the same year. 138. There were other killings by Palestinians as early as April 1975 (Aun-el-Assad, El Qar, Jiye, etc.). 139. Genet mentions—and this is just one example—a Palestinian woman suicide-bomber who attacked Shiites of the Amal group in revenge for the latter’s actions against the Palestinians: “She approached a group of Amal fighters who were laughing as they rested from shooting Palestinians” (Genet, Prisoner of Love, 51). 140. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 157. 141. Genet, Declared Enemy, 233. 142. Numerical comparisons in terms of population are always problematic, but to give an idea of the significance of that political event, it would be as if three million people attended one demonstration in France.

Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good  |  51 143. Indeed, Sharon was not guilty, but he can be suspected of complicity; there is some ambiguity. We shall not consider the hypothesis that Sharon may have been totally innocent, even though that possibility is not nil. 144. Syria’s mythical self-conception has it that there is a Greater Syria, including not only Lebanon but also Palestine and Israel. 145. Genet, Declared Enemy, 208. 146. Albert Dichy, editor of The Declared Enemy, relegates the exact quotation to a footnote (371n1). 147. Genet, Declared Enemy, 221. 148. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 159. 149. This is a passage that Genet agreed to remove from his text, apparently at the request of the Revue d’Études Palestiniennes. It is reproduced in a note to the edition we cite (Genet, Declared Enemy, 372n29, 370–71). 150. More generally, the tactic is part of the global campaign by the Arab world and by Palestinians in particular to present Israel as a Nazi state for whom the Arabs would somehow be the Jews. This strategy of mimetic inversion, which sought to make Sabra and Shatila into the Israeli Oradour, was once again implemented following the IDF’s incursion into Jenin. The attempt to portray it as a massacre of thousands was an apparent failure, at least as far as the Western audience was concerned. 151. On January 2, 2002, Le Monde published the unspeakable portrayal by Mouna Naïm of the “learned and scrupulous jurist” Chebli Mallat, a Maronite Christian representing Palestinian survivors of the massacres in the complaint filed in a Belgian court. In a letter to the editor appearing on January 17, a well-informed reader expressed astonishment that blaming Sharon specifically for “acts of passivity in the face of crimes committed by Lebanese Christians . . . neglected to target the perpetrator of the crime, namely the Lebanese Christian militia chief, Élie Hobeika,” who was still alive at the time. Even more harshly, the reader suggested that “the ‘learned and scrupulous jurist’ take perhaps just a fleeting look at the political and constitutional state of his own country.” There was, indeed, something pathetic about this juridical pseudo-integrity that simply masked servility toward the Syrian master as well as payment of the price demanded to wipe the blood off Christian hands. Such submissiveness has weakened that sector’s influence in Lebanon and made its present suffering all the more severe. 152. Subsequently, it appears that members of a parliamentary “rainbow majority” (sic) attempted to modify the law so as to permit reinstatement of the complaint. 153. The height of ridicule was no doubt achieved by Jérôme Neutres, in his book Genet sur les routes du sud (Paris: Fayard, 2002). We read there that for Genet, when betrayal comes to characterize the “social body,” “the glory of the individual subject consists in being ‘righteous’ [juste]” (59). The term juste that Neutres puts into Genet’s mouth as he refers back to Funeral Rites is actually part of the parodic internal dialogue of the judge who hears the confession made by the Vichy militia-man Paulo and falsifies the criminal record: “But one must be just. I must render justice” (Genet, Pompes funèbres, 207). We thus see how through a kind of hallucinatory projection of good intentions Genet’s work is voided of its substance and transformed into gooey sentimentality. 154. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 36–37. 155. These three words are possible renderings into English of the French term seing used polyvocally by Derrida.—Trans. 156. Derrida, Glas, 58. 157. Derrida, Glas, 240.

52  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” 158. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Bantam, 1963), 213 (emphasis in the published translation). Derrida reveals to us that the layout of his book Glas, with its two columns (one devoted to Hegel, the other to Genet), was inspired by this page of Our Lady of the Flowers where Genet identifies the metamorphoses undergone by the tattooed body to that of the column “sacred under the notches” of the biblical text (Derrida, Glas, 240). 159. Derrida, Glas, 241. 160. Derrida, Glas, 242. It is surely no accident that the other part of the book, devoted to Hegel, touches on the latter’s relationship to the Jews. 161. Georges Bernanos, La grande peur des bien-pensants [The conformist thinkers’ great fear] (Paris: Grasset, 1931). 162. Georges Bernanos, Monsieur Ouine (Paris: Plon, 1946). 163. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre [Trifles for a massacre] (Paris: Denoël, 1937) is one of his antisemitic texts alluded to earlier.—Trans. 164. Thus Bernanos quotes Drumont, “Why do the Juifs [Jews]—he pronounced Juëfs, pushing his lips forward—refuse to leave me alone?” (La grande peur des bien-pensants [Paris: Livre de Poche, 1998], 26). The central functioning of the very word “Jew” in the antisemitic imagination is clearest in a remark made by Goebbels in the 1930s: “You could describe the Jew as a repressed inferiority complex made flesh. That is why the best possible way to sting him is to refer to him by his real name. Call him a wretch, rogue, liar, criminal, murderer or killer. Beneath the surface he will barely be affected. But look him straight into the eye long and hard and then say: you’re a Jew aren’t you! And you will be amazed to discover that he immediately looks insecure, embarrassed and guilty” (quoted in Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady [London: Athlone, 2000], 177). 165. Sartre, Saint Genet, 629. 166. Bataille, Literature and Evil, 198. 167. Hankins, Genet à Chatila. 168. See in this regard the various pieces on Genet in Hankins, Genet à Chatila. Consider, notably, this comment by François Régnault: “There can be no doubt that Genet was proPalestinian and anti-Israeli. Take what he says just like that, at face value; that level always conveys the truth” (194). 169. Sartre, Saint Genet, 629. 170. Sartre, Saint Genet, 630. 171. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 129. We have mentioned this passage earlier. 172. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 666. 173. Lacan, Écrits, 667. 174. Marty refers here to Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991).—Trans. 175. Lacan, Écrits, 665. 176. Sartre, Saint Genet, 628.

2

Alain Badiou The Future of a Denial

What exactly has a philosopher of Alain Badiou’s stature to tell us philosophically regarding the Jews? In that regard, the introduction to his work Uses of the Word “Jew”1 may be lauded for its rigor and explicitness. Let us summarize a number of his theses or opinions, some of which are banal and others, odd: 1. The supposed return of antisemitism simply reflects greater sensitivity to the issue. 2. There is today a significant intellectual trend to render the signifier “Jew” sacred and confer upon it a kind of “nominal or communitarian transcendence.”2 3. This sacralization of the signifier “Jew” partakes of an ideological promotion of the status of victim that is directly linked to Nazi extermination. Consequently, it bestows upon Jews a privileged position outside international law and allows them to oppress others without being sanctioned. 4. The ideological promotion of the status of victim, through which the signifier “Jew” becomes sacred, is but the corollary of the idea that the Jews are the chosen people. According to Badiou, those who thus sacralize this signifier see Nazi atrocities as confirming chosenness. Thus the ideological promotion of the status of victim is part and parcel of a religious fiction. 5. Compassion for the victims of extermination need not take into account “the predicates in the name of which the atrocity was committed.”3 We may translate that assertion as follows: the compassion for exterminated Jews need not be directed toward Jews as Jews. Thus the atrocity may in no way confers an advantage upon that predicate; that is, the signifier “Jew” cannot benefit from misfortune; Jews may not use that predicate as a symbolic alibi or warrant permitting them to dominate, exploit, or massacre. Moreover, a footnote to Cécile Winter’s piece included in Badiou’s book, a piece we shall consider at length, makes it explicit that the profit derived from the predicate is not strictly symbolic but, needless to say, financial.4 (But for Shylock is not gold the symbol of utmost value?) We may deduce that any reference to

54  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” that predicate, whether it serves to sacralize or incriminate (but they are the same for Badiou), leads to the worst perils. The conclusion is that we must silence the predicate, which in any case is imaginary (as part of religious fiction, ideological promotion of the status of victim, antisemitic rhetoric) and therefore nonexistent. 6. The Nazi gas chambers do not bestow upon “the colonial State of Israel—set up in the Middle East (and not in Bavaria . . .)—some special status” with respect to other colonial states.5 The latter—the French colonial state in Algeria, the colonial state in South Africa—have disappeared. Since Israel cannot derive a privilege from the gas chambers, the conclusion to be drawn is that Israel must vanish. With the cold cynicism of a philosopher in bedroom slippers, Badiou adds that he cannot presume what form that disappearance will assume, but points out (in case we have not understood) that this case might well be less dramatic than that of the French in Algeria or the Afrikaners in South Africa, since Israel constitutes a “situation of more recent date than the other two.”6 7. Universalism on this planet has always entailed a break with “Jewish communitarianism,” and the Jews who have contributed to universalism did so only by removing themselves from the community. Saint Paul, Spinoza, Marx, Trotsky, Freud: such are the good Jews mentioned by Badiou.7 In homage to Steven Spielberg, we may call this enumeration “Badiou’s list,” that is, those “Jews” who may be saved.8 8. Israel as a “Jewish state,” which draws from this “racialist” (sic) identity “incessant privileges” including that of “trampling underfoot what serves us as international law,” cannot be counted among “truly contemporary states or countries,” which are—Badiou assures us—“always cosmopolitan.” It is an “archaic” state, exactly like France “under Pétain and the German occupation.” (Had Badiou directly compared Israel to Nazi Germany, he could have spared himself this sham avoidance of indecency.) Not only is Israel not a “contemporary state,” not only is it anachronistic, but it is not even a “modern democracy.”9 That latter assertion, flowing from his pen, causes one to blink. The entirety of Badiou’s political ideology has been one long condemnation of modern democracy, to which he applies, in his work Conditions, such labels drawn from the fascist lexicon of the 1930s as “capitalo-­parliamentarism” with its “commercial freedoms.”10 Here, capitalist democracy takes on a positive meaning in order to stigmatize Israel all the better: democracy must “count everyone, without factoring in ­predicates.”11—But there is no reason to be surprised here. Badiou defends “international law” when Israel allegedly thwarts it, though in previous works he reduces such a notion of “law” to smithereens.12 9. The true lesson of Nazism is that one must not accord a privileged place to “identity predicates.”13 Therefore, the signifier “Jew,” with its exceptional

Alain Badiou | 55 status, must be erased. Likewise, notes Badiou wisely (perhaps too wisely), one should not sacralize the signifier Palestinian or “Arab.”14 10. Conclusion: what is needed is a “secular and democratic Palestine” governed by a “regional Mandela” capable of realizing Pauline universalism, where there would be neither “Jew nor Greek.”15 Nor Palestinian—or so one imagines. But in that case, why call the country “Palestine”? 11. There should be no quarter given to the “open and frank” antisemitism developing within Arab organizations, which is minimized by progressive movements.16 12. The best way to abolish antisemitism would be for Israel to stop calling itself a “Jewish state.”17

Such are the twelve basic theses expressed in Badiou’s introduction to the volume compiling articles by him, which present more or less equivalent arguments. Badiou’s main point, however, is to get rid of predicates, especially the predicate “Jew.” The latter must be erased, for two reasons. First of all, its particularism contradicts the principle of universalism; second, it metaphysically legitimates the extermination targeting the Jews since it was by virtue of that predicate that they were exterminated. That predicate is itself a threat to Jews since it calls for their extermination. * * * We really could stop here to appreciate Badiou. However, he is a philosopher in the most ordinary sense of the term, which means he is completely insensitive to the enormous irony of his own assertions. Therefore, we have to consider the logic underlying what he says rather than the holes in his argumentation. We have stated that among the twelve theses introducing his work, some are banal and others odd. Let us consider the banality of the first thesis, according to which the recrudescence of antisemitism exists only in the minds of those who are overly sensitive to it. That assertion is contradicted by thesis 11, which says that progressives minimize the extent of explicit antisemitism in the Arab camp. Likewise, thesis 3—which says that the ideological status of the victim allows Israel to repress with impunity the Palestinian people and flout international law—stands in opposition to the philosophical and political critique of law elsewhere in Badiou’s work. Finally, thesis 8, to the effect that Israel is not a modern democracy because it is not cosmopolitan but rather tied to an identity, contradicts Badiou’s frequent critique of modern democracy. Such assertions regarding Israel reflect majority opinion in France, but it is odd that Badiou should make them when he contradicts them elsewhere in this text or in his work in general. We must draw the conclusion that these theses are ultimately unimportant for him and in no way partake of the philosophical

56  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” kernel of his thought. Moreover, Badiou never bothers subjecting the theses he borrows from public opinion to verification through research—unlike what Marx does in analyzing the French revolutions of 1830 or 1848 and Russia in the nineteenth century. The assertion of whether there is a recrudescence of antisemitism is completely refutable as long as it is couched in such general terms. It needs to be checked against how Jews appear in everyday political and cultural discourse in the Arab, Muslim, and European worlds; correlation is required concerning precise occurrences, practices, empirical, statistical, and systematic observations; the durable, repetitive, or incidental character of these phenomena has to be considered, as well as whether they derive from traditional religious antisemitism or from the biological racism developed in the West from Gobineau to Hitler. The same is true concerning the oppression of Palestinians and breaches of international law of which Israel is held to be guilty. Once again, Badiou contents himself with generalities, perhaps because analysis of concrete situations would throw into doubt the accuracy of such allegations. Elsewhere, I have shown the great role mythologizing plays in the perception of Sabra and Shatila as the emblematic example of Israeli “criminality.”18 In a somewhat different manner, it would be necessary to study carefully the supposed massacres at Jenin. Also worthy of examination would be the very severe policies toward Palestinians in light of their use of terrorism and their strategy of pushing things to the limit, which until recently the Palestinian Authority implemented with the aid of fundamentalistic paramilitary groups. Such was the only way Arafat could compensate for his failure, after the Oslo Accords, to offer democracy and benefits to the Palestinian people. Thus an easily identifiable, foreign enemy allowed him to deflect both his people’s anger at having reached a dead end and their frustration with generalized corruption and an economy dominated by organized crime. Though one may not deny the brutality of the Israeli army and the violence inherent in any state, police, or military force, minimal observation of facts does not only nullify easy generalizations like those Badiou favors but also mitigates the accusation that Israel systematically flouts the law. Rather, the rule of law characterizes this democratic state, the only modern democracy in the region, and invalidates Badiou’s throwaway assertions. Proof would be the numerous appeals Palestinian villagers and Israeli peace organizations have brought before the Supreme Court of Israel, which has several times forced the government to change the planned location of sections of the security wall or to move portions already built. This example alone, small though very significant, challenges the depth of Badiou’s understanding of the situation. The question of international law and especially the multiple UN resolutions stipulating Israel withdrawal from Palestinian territories are meaningful only regarding military reality on the ground. When Israel was able to make peace with an Arab partner, it withdrew from land and without compunction dislodged

Alain Badiou | 57 Israeli settlers. Such occurred in the Sinai after the accord between Israel and Egypt. The unilateral disengagement from Gaza orchestrated by Ariel Sharon shows how much Israel will concede and flies in the face of Badiou’s assertions concerning the colonialist nature of the State of Israel. This region has known but one colonialist power, Great Britain, against which Israel waged an authentically anticolonialist struggle to achieve its independence. For reasons that a subtler Marxist than Badiou could easily establish, the Ottoman Empire could hardly be considered colonialist. Israeli occupation of Sinai, Gaza, the Golan, and the West Bank was always in fact provisional; in the last two cases it remains so. Whatever the demands, moreover justified, of religious Jews to be able to live in Gaza or Hebron, there has never been an Israeli colonial project comparable to the French one in Algeria. Moreover, the only fully realized ethnic cleansing there has been done by Arabs; a Jew simply cannot reside, without endangering his life, in territory controlled by the Palestinians; his very treading on the Temple Mount, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, is a desecration in the eyes of the Muslims. I shall not delve further here into the Palestinian national claim on Jerusalem, which denies Jews the slightest historical link to the city and refutes the very notion that the two biblical Temples were built there. Anyone who has stepped foot into Israel immediately perceives the deeply rooted cosmopolitanism intrinsic to the Jewish people, as well as an even greater presence of modern democracy than in France—not to mention the existence of masses of Israelis of Bedouin, Druze, Palestinian (both Christian and Muslim) origin, whose political rights are the same as those extended to Jewish citizens. It suffices to have seen Arab members of the Knesset insult a Jewish cabinet minister or joke with him in order to understand that no Arab MP enjoys similar rights in any other country of the region. The purpose here is not to contradict exhaustively Badiou’s assertions, which we have seen refute themselves, but to emphasize his tendency to content himself with the lowest common discursive denominator, taking the form of generalizations or restatements of public opinion. One need not bother contradicting such banal arguments, for as we have suggested they matter little to Badiou. They simply serve to give a real-world varnish to his assertions, to hide their crudeness. Still, it is not entirely pointless to note Badiou’s thoroughgoing scorn for a category always absent from his work: that of factuality. Whenever a historical reference appears in what he says, it is purely as something mythical, repeated as an incantation from one work to another, a dark blob to which he, as a believer, swears to be ever faithful. His is a surprisingly angelic fidelity to an “event,” which can be something global and bloody (like the Chinese Cultural Revolution) or local and disastrous (like the strike at the Talbot factory,19 elevated to the status of a primal scene). The event emerges as a kind of hallucinatory leitmotiv within his philosophical discourse, the seriousness of which it would be fair to question.

58  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” The temptation must be avoided to accept Badiou’s claim to an exceptional position allowing him to make statements regarding history without having to invoke anything real, whether it be as a category of analysis or empirical proof. Badiou wagers that our astonishment at his juggling acts as pure logician and capable metaphysician will lead us to excuse his failings. This is comparable to our forgetting at the theater that Macbeth’s sword is made of cardboard, the only difference being that here sometimes Satan directs the performance. That is why we have to move from the banal theses to the odder ones, those Badiou excels at producing. * * * The first truly odd thesis of Badiou’s is number 4, which claims that among those who sacralize the word “Jew,” there is a correlation at work between chosenness and extermination. This thesis is formulated as follows: “Of course, for those who, generally for religious reasons, have maintained that this predicate [‘Jew’] registers a communitarian alliance with the archetypical transcendence of the Other, it is natural to think that Nazi atrocities work in some way to validate—in a terrible and striking paradox—the election of the ‘people’ that this predicate, so they say, gathers together.”20 This thesis is one of a kind. Beyond an intentionally vague general metonymy (“glorifiers”—i.e., “sacralizers”—of the name “Jew”21) by which Badiou designates his adversaries, whom is he targeting here? Who nowadays would link modern extermination and hoary Jewish chosenness through the atrocious verb “to validate”? For those, quite rare nowadays, who fight to defend the full historical and metaphysical meaning of the word “Jew,” the aim of Nazi extermination could only be the destruction of that original chosenness. To find a linguistic field where the word “Jew” is invested with sacred character and where the extermination program is seen as validating chosenness, one would have to look toward the extreme and relatively outmoded discourse among a minority of Catholics. Such positions were adopted by a rare few who, out of their extreme sensitivity to evil, turned their inherent antisemitism into a kind of compassionate Judeophilia. The best example is that of Paul Claudel,22 who wrote: “The horrible sufferings that the Jews have undergone throughout history are themselves linked to the atrocious exhortations found especially in Deuteronomy. Every soul must feel overwhelmed in the face of the horror of the holocaust of millions of victims in the camps and crematory ovens during the war.”23 Claudel, probably inspired by Léon Bloy’s Salut par les Juifs (Salvation through the Jews),24 long reflected on the role of Israel in the economy of salvation. He profoundly admired the obstinacy of the Jews, finding in it a meaning that correlated Jewish martyrdom with chosenness. Hence his very intentional use of the word “holocaust.”25 A second, somewhat different, example is offered by François Mauriac in his preface to Elie Wiesel’s Night. There, he recounts his

Alain Badiou | 59 reaction to the youthful concentration camp survivor. He wished to explain to Wiesel “the connection between the cross and human suffering.”26 Indeed, for Claudel and Mauriac, the Cross represents the very validation of chosenness through extermination. The Jewish perspective on extermination is one of reversal but never one of validation. Jews propose two answers to the question of Auschwitz as the locus of absolute evil, of denial of God, of His silence, of the Devil. One response consists simply in rejecting that evil. The other answer, on the contrary, consists in a kind of extreme stoicism whereby it is declared that the perpetrators could not themselves be the cause of evil or destruction; the categories of good and evil escape them; no absoluteness is conferred upon evil. Thus once again a kind of hermetic wall is constructed between Jewish chosenness and the process of extermination put into place by the Nazis.27 How does Badiou identify the “strong intellectual current” that today sees a “transcendence” of “fate” borne by the word “Jew”?28 By attributing to it the Catholic ideology of a Claudel or a Bloy, a theological, ideological strain that, suddenly overtaken by philosemitism, posed what is to my mind an indefensible equivalence between chosenness and extermination. An interesting confusion, whose significance is even more fascinating. What matters to Badiou is that his equivalence between chosenness and extermination not be a hostile act toward the Jews, that it not be a point of view imposed upon them from a foreign, outside source. The equivalence has to be attributed to the supposed sacralizers, those who defend the predicate “Jew.” Thus the annihilation of the basic positivity of the predicate “Jew” is the responsibility of those who claim to vouch for it. The predicate “Jew,” as its protectors themselves admit in their very metaphysics, becomes a dual predicate, the bearer of a terrible equivalence between the chosen and the exterminated. It is essential not only to consider carefully how this sleight-of-hand functions, but also to note that this rhetorical strategy puts into Badiou’s adversary’s mouth the obfuscating things he wishes to say.29 This strategy is important, because it makes the predicate “Jew” into a simultaneously sacralizing and exterminatory predicate, wherein assertion of the sacred entails exterminatory negation. To be proud of being Jewish partakes of the same predicative process as antisemitic discrimination. Calling oneself a Jew is logically the same as obeying an antisemitic injunction. We may conclude that declaring oneself Jewish (assuming the predicate “Jew”) is the same whether one does so while praying in a synagogue or upon answering a summons from the Gestapo. Both cases involve obeying the same injunction; they both follow the same logic of predication. Badiou’s entire thesis consists in positing this indifferentiation, this virtual equivalence between the label “kike” as could be used by Nazis and the words

60  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” “I am a Jew” uttered by individual subjects. Remember that this thesis, literally insane, follows from the alleged discourse Badiou ascribes to the sacralizers, in whose eyes, he claims, extermination validates chosenness. The synonymy of “kike” and “Jew” is clearly stated by Badiou when he discourages us from addressing our compassion to Jews as Jews since the Nazis exterminated them by virtue of that predicate.30 It suffices for us to say to Badiou that they were not exterminated as Jews but as “kikes.” Synonymy, as always, proves wanting. “Jew” is the antonym of “kike.” Or rather, and this is the important point, the predicate “kike” is only a predicate and does not accede to the status of proper noun. The predicate of kikedom, while it can soil the Jewish name, cannot merge into it. Confusion between noun and predicate is astonishing on the part of a logician such as Badiou, but we shall see that it is at the heart of his argumentation. Thus Badiou proposes the erasure of the predicate as something positive; eschewing synonymy means avoiding disaster for the Jews since the predicate of chosenness calls for extermination. Thus with the blindness of those Jupiter would destroy,31 Badiou writes: “It was above all the Nazis who, before anyone else, and with a rare zeal for following through, drew all the consequences from making the signifier ‘Jewish’ into a radical exception.”32 The Nazis did this before anyone else, says Badiou. How could Badiou forget Nebuchadnezzar? Doesn’t he know about Titus? And what about their opposite, Cyrus? Has he even read Pascal or Racine?33 But let’s stop kidding around and ask how to interpret what Badiou calls the Nazis’ “rare zeal for following through.” We would like to question him regarding what value he accords to rarity. We must not forget Badiou’s insistence, in his previous book, on endowing the Nazis with “thought.” Insofar as they had a project and a worldview, no one has ever contested the existence of Nazi thought. So it is surprising that Badiou sees himself as posing a “provocative, or even forbidden question.”34 Doubtless Badiou means that the Nazis did the best job—since they did so “before anyone else, and with a rare zeal for following through”—of thinking about Jewish exceptionality. They did so in accordance with strict logic, of course. We shall see to what extent the word “Jew” is, for Badiou, a Nazi “idea.” Thus for Badiou the self-proclaimed Jew and the rigorous antisemite share a complicity articulated around predication. This complicity is made doubly strong by the fact that antisemites (and the more radical they are, the truer this becomes) are the guardians of the predicate “Jew” because they “draw all the consequences” of the exceptional status of that name.35 * * * The same view is expressed in the piece titled “The Master-Signifier of the New Aryans” (the new Aryans are the “Jews”).36 Though included in Badiou’s volume,

Alain Badiou | 61 it was penned by one Cécile Winter, whom Badiou presents as a “negative Jew.”37 We shall return to this label and the rhetorical mode whereby this description, this predicate, appears in the book. A disciple always pushes the envelope a bit further than the master, and being a little less clever, speaks nonsense and irrelevancies. Badiou warns us that he made “cuts” in her text “for strict reasons of the general economy of this book.”38 Nonetheless, the volume is not very thick, and one suspects that certain passages were omitted due to whatever lucidity the old philosopher still possesses. We need do no more than summarize Winter’s first thesis, in its rawest form: Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah expresses the Nazi point of view since he proposed (she quotes) “to show that the European jews [sic] were exterminated as jews.”39 Here is how this “negative Jew” formulates her argument: “The jews were exterminated as jews! Could the Nazi point of view have been put any better?”40 Winter goes even further than her Svengali of a teacher. Not only are “Jew” and “kike” made synonymous, as are chosenness and extermination. Something is added. The person who presents the Nazi project clearly, who unveils its essence, adopts the point of view he is denouncing and becomes its spokesman, renews it and perpetuates it. Her words derive from the thesis that the “Jew” is nothing other than the Nazis’ “Idea” (sic), their “oeuvre.”41 One comes to understand the meaning Winter gives to the word “oeuvre.” For her, creation and destruction are synonymous. The identification of the Jew as a Jew has been nothing other than the “Idea” and the “oeuvre” of the Nazis. “It is Hitler who made the name ‘Jew’ into an Idea, his great Idea, and so into a signifying totality.”42 The name “Israel” was not given by God Himself to Jacob, in a combat with externality, language, darkness, void. The name “Jew” did not have its entire origin in the name of Judah, Jacob’s son. No, the name “Jew” is the Idea of the Nazis themselves. Thus Hitler brought the name “Jew” to its highest point because he made it into an Idea. Of course, due attention must be paid to the Platonic dimension that Winter ascribes to the Führer’s “rare zeal for following through.” It would be an understatement to say we are flabbergasted since Hitler never called the Jews other names than such as are referred to in the expression “to call someone names.” The names he called the Jews were of the lowest order: insults, screams, obscenities, abject formulations, which were so many calls to murder them. Unlike her Tartuffe of a teacher, who in his brief presentation to her chapter dubs Lanzmann’s production “a great film,”43 she claims that Shoah speaks like Hitler. In turn, we would argue that Shoah saves the name “Jew” from destruction by the Nazis. It is poetic work like the great texts of Judaism. Like a Jewish Orpheus, Lanzmann descends to the depths of Hell, accompanied by the voices of those tortured, in order to wrest from the ashes the murmurs and names of those who died. He comes to restore them, living, to our world.

62  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” In explaining that the “Jews of Europe were exterminated as Jews,” Lanz­ mann makes a certain synonymy impossible. His phrase “as Jews” neither validates nor perpetuates the Nazi predicate. On the contrary, Lanzmann deconstructs the latter, reducing it to smithereens. He turns the Nazi insult “Jud,” a shortened form of “Jude,” back into a full name, an integral name: “Jew.” The phrase “as Jews,” which could be that of an executioner, a pretense for annihilation, becomes an utterance that precisely escapes antisemitic appropriation. Thus “as Jews” stops being the phrase used by the phrenologist measuring skulls, the bureaucrat poring over lists of names and ancestries, the SS man checking to see if a penis is circumcised, or Dr. Mengele performing a selection. Lanzmann’s words “as Jews” shares nothing with the same phrase used by those monsters. With all possible violence and brutality, he rips the name from its ignoble appropriation at the hands of the predicate. The truly poetic accomplishment of Shoah resides precisely in undoing the stitches tying the Jewish name to the Nazi predicate. Perhaps it goes so far as to purge the Jewish name of any predicate by restoring it to its bearers—a process attested to by every overwhelming frame of the film. * * * The signifier as such is always ruthless, and thus it is the target of Winter’s and Badiou’s rage. The signifier “Shoah” must be erased. On this point they are in complete agreement. Both see in this term a problematic word. It represents “the verbal stage of this sacralizing of victims” for Badiou,44 and for Winter it is the mediation that permits the synonymy between chosenness and extermination. With twinlike mimicry they contrast it with the title of Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews.45 But if the word “Shoah” poses so many problems, it is precisely because of its force as signifier. The signifier is what puts a stop to infinite playing around with names and predicates, it makes it impossible to engage in the sophistry relying on the gap between name and predicate. The signifier prohibits the sophistry of synonymy. It is indivisible. Lanzmann has explained his choice of the term “Shoah” this way: “If it had been possible not to give the film a title, I would have done so. The word ‘Shoah’ occurred to me one night as self-evident because, not speaking Hebrew, I did not understand its meaning, which was another way of not naming it. . . . For me, ‘Shoah’ was a signifier with no signified, a brief, opaque utterance, an impenetrable unbreakable word.”46 Shoah gradually became the obvious title because of its nature as a signifier, regrettably for Badiou. Strangely, Winter confers upon the word a signified, a “divine work” in which “victims [are] offered up in sacrifice to the signifier transcending them.”47 However, that is the meaning of the word “Holocaust,”

Alain Badiou | 63 now obsolete in French due to the use of the term “Shoah,” which removes any notion of sacrifice. Winter’s argument is all the more obtuse as “Holocaust” is the word Badiou employs in his writings. And he uses it simply to state the imperative to forget the Holocaust: “If we are to come to a resolution of the Middle East problem, we must manage—and I know it’s a difficult thing—to forget the Holocaust.”48 Badiou’s use of the word “Holocaust” primarily conveys the identification of chosenness with extermination and the validation of the latter by the former. This idea provides the dark background to his thought, for Holocaust is precisely the word that validates that identification. This is all the truer nowadays than before, when one could be a little naïve, precisely because Shoah has once and for all restored the ambiguity of the previously used term. The above-quoted injunction by Badiou contains yet another element that partakes of the logic under discussion. The project to erase the predicate “Jew” and the name “Jew” achieves its full force only insofar as it is based on the far more pragmatic imperative “to forget the Holocaust.” It must be noted that the discourse turns more precise. Erasure becomes forgetting. The predicate “Jew” is no longer a vague notion but an event, one that is ill-named the “Holocaust,” but an event all the same. This imperative (“we must”) that Badiou places upon the Jews (“manage . . . to forget the Holocaust”) is no small affair. Badiou admits, with a certain humor, that “it’s a difficult thing.” But is it really that hard? Badiou formulates his imperative with the same succinctness with which young Didi, stricken by madness in The Blue Lotus, announces his plan to behead Tintin and his dog Snowy: “Lao-Tzu said: ‘You must find the way!’ I’ve found it. You must find it too. . . . So I’m going to cut off your head. Then you’ll know the truth!”49 Getting one’s head lopped off to find a way to the truth, forgetting the Holocaust to achieve peace—quite easy. It’s not so hard to forget the extermination of the Jews (Didi says, “It won’t take a minute, you’ll see . . .”50), simply because it was not an event but a simulacrum. How does Badiou arrive at that point—the same Badiou who elsewhere, contradicting his vow never to contaminate a noun with a predicate, calls Nazi crimes “absolute atrocities”?51 The term “simulacrum” must be understood here in its Platonic meaning of inauthentic copy or imitation. The first simulacrum here is the “National Socialist Revolution.” It is a simulacrum according to Badiou insofar as it contains no universalism and “is actually addressed only to those that it itself deems ‘Germans.’”52 Thus the extermination of the Jews is a simulacrum because it is the product of the Nazi simulacrum and entirely determined by it under the weight of all its horror: “Inasmuch as it served to organize the extermination, the name ‘Jew’ was a political creation of the Nazis, without any pre-existing referent. It is a name whose meaning no one can share with the Nazis, a meaning that presumes

64  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” the simulacrum and fidelity to the simulacrum—and hence the absolute singularity of Nazism as a political sequence.”53 Memory of extermination and faithfulness to the dead cannot fail to be absorbed into the simulacrum of Nazism. They travel through it, repeat it, bring it back to power. This is once again Winter’s thesis regarding Shoah. Since the name “Jew” is only the product of the “Holocaust,” the “Holocaust” itself partakes of the fundamental simulacrum. The “Holocaust” is an event that belongs to the Nazis. It is entirely a result of the simulacrum; no one can take hold of it without taking part in the simulacrum at its base. Nonetheless, if Nazism as event is but a simulacrum, how can it affect the ontological being of the name “Jew” to the point of providing its foundation? The status of Nazism as simulacrum should rather result in its complete harmfulness toward the word “Jew.” * * * To grasp Badiou’s thought completely, one has to bring together two ideas: first, that the name “Jew,” insofar as it was the organizing principle of extermination, is “a political creation of the Nazis”; second, the notion that “it was above all the Nazis who, before anyone else, and with a rare zeal for following through, drew all the consequences from making the signifier ‘Jewish’ into a radical exception.”54 Thus we understand that the exterminatory name “Jew” is but a logical consequence of its exceptionality as a signifier. Simply bringing these two ideas together, we have another proof that for Badiou extermination validates exceptionality. This validation is not tragic, as it was in Claudel’s or Mauriac’s eyes, but simply logical, inscribed in the logic of a predicative chain. Because synonymy is logical, it makes the Nazi not only the “masters” of the name “Jew,” but also demands that a coherent anti-Nazi renounce the name “Jew” that they created. But why this insistence on linking the signifier “Jew” solely with Hitler’s name, with the only event that is not one, something which Badiou himself, with the purpose of abolishing it, calls the “Holocaust”? For Badiou, an “event” is uniquely defined as that which “relates to the particularity of a situation from the bias of its void,” that is to say, “the absolute neutrality of being.”55 An event is an immanent break in a particular situation that nonetheless is addressed to the universe. Examples Badiou gives include the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror56 or the Cultural or Russian Revolutions. The question naturally arises as to whether the examples proposed conform to Badiou’s own definition of “event.” Was the Bolshevik Revolution an event or a simulacrum? Is it necessarily true that this revolution, which we would prefer to call a coup d’état, was “universally addressed”?57 Insofar as nowadays Marxists agree that the failure of Bolshevism was due to specifically Russian dimensions of

Alain Badiou | 65 the event, it becomes extremely difficult to accept the idea that this revolution was anything but a simulacrum bestowing sham universality. Beyond the question of the facticity of the event that prevented its emergence as a universal, we have to consider the analysis Marx borrowed from Hegel of the event that occurs the first time as tragedy and repeats itself as farce. The Russian Revolution thereby looms as a copy of a copy in the Platonic sense, a copy of the French Revolution, which is a copy of the Idea of revolution. As a copy of a copy, the Russian Revolution appears indeed as a simulacrum. Moreover, we should point out to Badiou that the same Revolution created in 1928 a territory, Birobidzhan, that was to serve as a “home” to the Jews and thereby prevent their emigration to Palestine. The attention lavished upon the predicate “Jew” in the course of a historical sequence that Badiou defines as linked to the universal should lead him to reconsider his rejection of the predicate “Jew,” his validation of the Bolshevik sequence as partaking of the universal, and most of the relationship (or lack thereof) between his definition of event and the “singular events” he offers as historical realizations of that category. Nonetheless, does not the definition Badiou proposes of “event” apply to the historical rift instituted by Abraham during the binding of Isaac? By facing the dread provoked by the archaic tribal imperative of sacrificing one’s son, Abraham—guided by God, safeguarded by language—undergoes the ultimate experience of negation. In void and silence, he shows absolute trust in God and language, and thereby delivers himself and all humanity from the sacrificial imperative. An event has taken place because a rift has come to pass, because there was a void (an absence of substance), because there is pure singularity (Abraham is Abraham). But the event is due to the presence of the Other, the Other without whom (without trust in whom) Abraham’s arm, like the arms of all fathers in those days, would have fallen upon his son’s neck. So we understand that the event is indeed a rift within a singular situation that is nonetheless neither purely immanent nor purely transcendent since language is precisely the place where immanence and transcendence are one. Likewise, we come to see that the event as rupture within a singular situation is not “universally addressed” since before the event there was no universal; rather the event produces the universal. Abraham is thus the one through whom the event comes to pass and the universal becomes possible. He causes the Jewish people, insofar as it remains faithful to that event, to become through that event the producer of the universal. Contrarily to Badiou’s natural theology that assumes from the outset an immanence to be reached, the universal is therefore entirely wedded to the event and inseparable from it, as a product of an operation wherein immanence and transcendence, inside and outside, silence and language, void and event are indissoluble from one another. I speak of a natural theology at work in Badiou’s thought because his theory of the event, according to which the extermination of the Jews turns out to be

66  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” but a simulacrum, is coupled with an assumption of Immortality. With all the pomp of a Gallican priest, he decrees that fidelity to the event, or the event itself, produces Immortality. He speaks so without any awareness of a comical parallel with the so-called Immortals, the “immortal” members of the French Academy or of the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror. In addition, he says that faithfulness to the event permits the advent of the Immortal (his capitalization).58 The fact that Badiou’s philosophy posits a thesis regarding Immortality has, as we shall see, weighty consequences. Thus at no time does Badiou, philosopher of the event, imagine that the signifier “Jew” could be founded upon a properly Jewish event. I have cited Abraham as an example, but how can we not consider Moses and the historical emancipation of his people he strives for through the same recourse to language? And what about Joseph, or Jacob, or Noah—admirable Noah, builder of the Ark? And what of the survival of the dispersed Jewish people effected through the absolute link between the singular and the universal, as Spinoza analyzes it in his conceptualization of “the third kind of knowledge”?59 We understand why Badiou never alludes to the Jewish event entailed in the name “Jew,” to the properly Jewish event of naming, and of transmission of the naming and of the name. For if Badiou were to do so, he would have to move beyond the content he grants the name “Jew” when he reduces it to a trivial “communitarian” predicate, to something as insignificant and simple as a purely imagined particularism. If he were really to consider the name “Jew” according to its own extremely complex and foundational genealogy, he would run up against the experience of the name “Jew” as a signifier beyond any predicate; he would approach the name as event, as transcendence. By never making the slightest allusion to the Jewish history of the name “Jew,” Badiou limits the Jewish meaning of the name to an ordinary communitarian predicate that can indeed merge into a discriminatory predicate, wherein the identification as community is either the face or flip side of persecution. Thus it has been sometimes claimed that the ghetto is a Jewish invention; the ghetto into which Jews are forced is the same as the ghetto into which they close themselves off. As a deficient, merely communitarian predicate, the name “Jew” is defined quite well, indeed much better by antisemitic predication, by the coherent logic of the antisemite, than it is by Jewish predication. Thus the Jewish people, by claiming exceptionality through the wretched stubbornness of particularism, has just one single validating event: the Holocaust. * * * We have noted in Badiou the existence of a natural, or immanent, theology wherein the essential categories of religion were taken up in a secularized form, including notably a supposition of Immortality. For example, in the excerpt from

Alain Badiou | 67 his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism that is included in this book,60 Badiou (with the simpleminded good faith of an anticlerical French Third Republic schoolteacher) utters the well-known verse by Paul, founder of a new universalism he makes his own: “There is neither Greek nor Jew,” to which are added other universalizing abolitions: neither man nor woman, slave nor free.61 But what Badiou leaves out—and this is the essential part of Paul’s Jewish message—is that this universalism is possible only in and through the sacrifice of Christ, the event of this sacrifice being the repetition—failed for some, successful for others—of Abraham’s, which is the abolition of the sacrificial: “for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”62 Without Christ, without Abraham, there is no universal. The universal declared here by Paul is in no way the bourgeois Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is by no means a formal decision and declaration whereby the abstract individual, a purely general category, constitutes the yardstick whereby the universal could be measured—a false measurement that is a simulacrum of the singularity of the subject. The distinction underscored here between “individual” and “subject” is well known. It is not only at the heart of the Jewish or Christian tradition but runs through all philosophy up to Sartre, for example, who critiques the bourgeois analytical conception of the “person” or “individual” as a touchstone for the universal. Pauline universalism is inscribed within an understanding of what constitutes an event—an understanding inherited from Judaism, borne by each subject who faithfully submits himself to it. Such fidelity can be nothing but heroic. In this respect, Israel’s Abrahamic ethics of life and of the living stands in contrast to the action of the “martyr,” the shahid, the fedayee, wherein the figure of the suicide bomber, as the sacrificial subject, most clearly expresses the adoration of pure simulacrum and death. Moreover, Saint Paul asserts, as often as he can, his Jewishness and, specifically, his belonging to the tribe of Benjamin. For example: “I am an Israelite too, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God did not reject his people, whom He knew in advance.”63 But one has to delve a bit further to understand Badiou’s theology. While Badiou’s principal thesis is that the predicate “Jew” must be erased, he nonetheless himself posits predicates here and there. This occurs, for example, when he declares the State of Israel to be antisemitic and feels the strange need to say he makes this declaration as a “goy” (sic)!64 Perhaps this is a way to mention a predicate solely in the language of the other, a language and a discourse attributed to the other. It is a predicate conveyed through a detour that dodges any responsibility; the speaker remains completely innocent. The State of Israel is antisemitic since it behaves like Nazis toward Palestinians, thus besmirching the name of the Jews. It is hardly worth the trouble to seek

68  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” in Badiou’s text the slightest justification for imputing to Israel the “project of a genocide of the Palestinians.”65 As we have seen, it is never a question for him of proving his assertions; facts are of no importance. What matters is to grasp Badiou’s logic in affirming that Israel is antisemitic in besmirching “the name of the Jews.”66 Please note that this is not expressed in the singular, “the name ‘Jew,’” but as a plural, “the name of the Jews.” Thus the title Badiou chooses for his book, Uses of the Word “Jew,” is misleading.67 This alleged imperilment of the Jews will allow us to understand what Badiou predicates within the name “Jew,” a task that seemed impossible up to now insofar as “the name ‘Jew’ was a political creation of the Nazis, without any preexisting referent.”68 Or, rather, it does have one: “‘Jews’ is the name of our real, a glorious name of our history—especially of our philosophical, scientific, artistic and our revolutionary history.”69 We thus understand that for Badiou the predicate of the name “Jew” is that there are excellent Jewish musicians, philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, and revolutionaries. We might want to add to this list ingenious Jewish bankers, extraordinary jewelers and diamond traders, masterful dentists, and also very good kosher butchers, not to mention underworld figures (there are some fascinating Jewish gangsters). This reminds us of Le Pen who said a few years back that the “black race” excelled at sports and provided some very good sprinters. This is what Badiou comes up with, when he predicates something about the Jews! After all, he takes for granted that the name “Jew” achieves completeness of meaning only with the advent of Nazism. But let us not simplify. We have ignored the first part of the sentence, “‘Jews’ is the name of our real.” What could that possibly mean? It brings to light a major contradiction in Badiou’s reasoning since the name “Jew” would thus have a referent that pre-existed Nazism. As to the question of what is the nature of that referent, one would have to respond: a void. The good signifier “Jew” refers to a break away from the Jewish community, a break that produces an empty signifier, ready to serve as a name for the universal. That is shown by what we have called “Badiou’s list,” the list of those Jews who convey the universal by breaking away—supposedly—from Judaism. This is the “negative Jew” whose best proper name is none other than Cécile Winter. It is important to note Badiou’s natural theology founded on the attribution of Immortality because his profound hostility toward the predicate “Jew,” his program to obliterate the Shoah from memory, his reduction of the historical and metaphysical history of the Jews to a fable are not at all neutral. The word “Jew” is constituted as a rival, as always is the case of hostility. Among other things, this rivalry explains the proliferation of synonyms. The word “Jew” is thus so empty as to become, in turn, a synonym. But unlike the bad signifier “Jew,” synonymous with the Jew for the antisemite whereby sacralization is the exact clone of gassing,

Alain Badiou | 69 the other signifier is synonymous with positive signifiers. Thus the word “Jew” emerges as a synonym for “communist,” and Israel would be antisemitic the same way the French Communist Party is anticommunist, as Badiou claims; the two names are analogous as far as their ontological status is concerned. Or even better, “Jew” is synonymous with “Palestinian”: “Ought ‘Palestinian’ become the new name of the true Jews?”70 But now he has really lost us: if the Palestinians become “true Jews” on the basis of the oppression of which they are allegedly the victims, then just as the name “Jew” was the grand Idea of the Nazis, so the name “Palestinian” risks becoming in turn no more than the Idea of the Israelis. Their destiny then in no way is to become “true Jews” but only “false Jews” whose predicate entirely resides within their adversary, the exterminator. In the series of possible positive synonyms for the word “Jew,” we find Saint Paul whom Badiou declares at the end of this fantastical narrative to be “a Jew among Jews, and proud of it.”71 Or “Jew” is synonymous with Mao as “indifference that tolerates differences”!72 Badiou’s daring is quite impressive. But in our eyes, as we have said, what defines the signifier is precisely the fact that it does not admit synonyms. Thus Shoah is a signifier. * * * Like all ordinary philosophers, Badiou has no feeling for the signifier. While such an assertion cannot be proven, we believe we have shown it to be cogent. This insensitivity of his is pregnant with consequences. It bears not only upon “foreign” signifiers such as Shoah, but the signifier as such, including those that define Badiou, those Badiou uses to portray or present himself to us. Setting out from this hypothesis, I ask of Badiou a simple question, at once serious and ironic. Does his argument that the predicate “Jew” must be erased explain the absence of Winter’s name from the cover of this collection of essays, even though the final one is actually a text authored by her? Does the imperative of erasing the Jewish predicate require omission of her name? I shall put this very concretely so Badiou can grasp my point. When a book includes two authors’ texts, both names appear on the title page. If one of the writers contributes a shorter piece that concludes the work, the title page reads “with an afterword by” and then mentions his or her name. Indeed, that is what occurs here. On the title page both authors’ names appear, followed by the titles of their pieces.73 Thus there is no actual editorial explanation for the fact that both names do not appear on the cover. The reason for that absence must be meaningful. Why isn’t Cécile Winter’s name there? Does it pose a problem? Of course, that error can be explained away by banal or even abject reasons: forgetfulness or boorishness (goujaterie) on Badiou’s part. But let us remind ourselves: the Littré dictionary tells us that goujaterie is derived from the word goy. Thus it becomes necessary to examine the question in a somewhat harsher light.

70  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” At the end of his introduction, with a certain awkwardness typical of the roundabout style of writing behind which he hides, Badiou presents Cécile Winter as someone who “engages in an intimate wrangle of a rare violence with the word ‘Jew.’”74 This is quite intriguing. Up to this point, we have been led to understand that the sole issue was the predicate “Jew”; now the name “Jew” itself poses a problem. We thought that the name “Jew,” insofar as it was detached from the communitarian predicate “Jew,” was an entirely positive signifier, that it was “the name of our real.” Gravely we are informed that this person “engages in an intimate wrangle of a rare violence” with that name. We are tempted to run for cover, or at least hold our noses, but the next sentence pulls us back by our shirttails: “In the eyes of certain sacralizers [sacralisateurs] of this name, no doubt that she would constitute what they call a ‘negative Jew.’”75 We gasp at the perverse manner whereby the philosopher foists the predicate “Jew” onto Cécile Winter’s person, all the while feigning to be completely foreign to it! Badiou wants to whisper into our ears that the lady is Jewish, but since his thesis prohibits predicating Jewishness, he palms off the predication, he shunts responsibility for the act of predicating, onto the sacralizers, that is, those who believe in predicates. So much do they believe in them that they would impose on this particular person a double predicate: “negative” and “Jew.” She is what is often called, abjectly enough, a “self-hating Jew.” Let us grasp what is happening here, what is at stake at the sole really significant level, that on which occurs what we used to call the locutionary act (énonciation), where the potency and the truth of an idea either attest or annul each other. We have already noted several instances of the rhetorical strategy whereby Badiou puts his own thoughts into the mouths of others. Thus the synonymy of chosenness and extermination was attributed to the sacralizers, and the predicate “goy” was expressed in the language of the other.76 Finally, we recall that Badiou had characterized Lanzmann’s film as a “great work,” even while declaring he shared Cécile Winter’s conclusion that Shoah effected something abominable, the destruction and annihilation of the Jewish people. Once again he shifts the burden onto the other. In a manner perverse in the proper sense of the term, he deploys this stratagem to identify Cécile Winter as Jewish, to predicate her Jewishness. Badiou often recoils, as we have seen, before the need to speak in his own name. He derives a thrill (jouissance) from the infinitesimal gap he places between himself and the litigious act, blame for which falls upon the other party who bears the shame. The accomplice, or victim, is responsible for the crime. The thrill is thus never complete, for he needs an acolyte, a subaltern, who is tainted. Insofar as the thrill is incomplete, pursuing it becomes maniacal. Whether one calls this strategy of Badiou’s preterition or denial,77 the wording he uses to state the identity of the person whose text he incorporates is not

Alain Badiou | 71 only a question of rhetoric or perversion. It concerns quite simply the possibility or impossibility of erasing the predicate “Jew” and, consequently, the name “Jew.” One grasps quickly the immediate benefit Badiou derives from the twist he applies to his own discourse. He needs to tell us that this lady is Jewish for a very simple reason: her contesting the name “Jew” receives added value from the fact that it is done by a Jew. Otherwise, why do we need to know? His prohibition on mourning the victims of extermination as Jews, lest the predicate “Jew” profit by it, has turned upside down. His criticism of the name “Jew” benefits from the fact that it can be predicated by the predicate “Jew.” Winter thus figures on Badiou’s list of those whose Jewish identity may be brandished to question all the more thoroughly the predicate “Jew.” Of course, Badiou is too much of a logician not to be inchoately conscious of the dilemma he solves, as we have seen, by simply placing the act of predication into the mouth of the sacralizer. Strangely or logically, it is not enough for Badiou to put in his enemy’s mouth what he cannot help saying (i.e., revealing clearly Winter’s Jewishness). He does so by making the predication ascribed to the other—the sacralizer—the vilest act of predication, the stigmatization of someone as a “negative Jew.” He thus causes the sacralizer to reveal his true face, to emerge as a sycophant and informer;78 ultimately, he brings about synonymy between sacralization and stigmatization. Such synonymy is hardly surprising since it falls in line with several other instances of it, such as the superimposition of chosenness and extermination, whereby one term legitimates or validates the other. Even better, the greatest profit derived by Badiou is to cause the predicate “Jew” to be uttered in such a way as to annul and dissolve itself into a “negative Jew.” Here we have a Jew identifying herself through the mouthpiece of her sisters and brothers by means of a predicative erasure: negative Jew. One sees how the logic of predicate hatred leads Badiou to invent an insane rhetoric whereby he ascribes his own wish (that the Jew erase himself as a Jew) to his enemy (whoever believes that a Jew is a Jew) in order to identify as a “Jew” a woman who denies being one, in order that reciprocally this act of naming itself should be a pure denial. * * * At some point, Badiou had to end up speaking about the Jews, a topic that was conspicuously absent from his previous book, The Century.79 In the introduction to that book, he dismisses the “Crime” (the extermination of the Jews) as an obsession of some maniacs of memory, never to return to it in the thirteen chapters meant to present a tableau of the twentieth century. The Century is a totally Althusserian book, not only because it presents the passion for the real as the keystone of the last one hundred years,80 but especially due to its tendency to run amok. In the manner of his melancholic master who

72  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” delighted in delightful bouts of “transcendental buffoonery,”81 Badiou rehearsed there his first histrionic performances, such as conflating a poem by Paul Celan with the prosaic slogan “Together!” chanted by railway workers demonstrating in the winter of 1995 against raising their retirement age from 50 to 52.82 To make a parallel between a slogan and a verse by Celan is at once more audacious and viler than posing an equivalence between Mallarmé’s work and the fascist parades in Tiananmen Square at the height of the Cultural Revolution.83 The persistent bad taste is certainly evident, but so are, disturbingly enough, maniacal tendencies. There are other bizarre elements in the book, such as the recurrent mentioning of the so very French Organisation Politique, of which Badiou is “proud to be a militant.”84 The Organisation Politique enrolled as its brilliant political strategist the notorious Sylvain Lazarus.85 Its muse was no other than Natacha Michel, whose novel, Circulaire à toute ma vie humaine,86 portrays the gang in a way that could most charitably be labeled as sinister. I doubt that the Organisation Politique was any more extensively involved in the real than were the gnostic sects of the Late Roman Empire or the millenarians of the nineteenth century. It was quite far from possessing the profundity or political and philosophical importance of a group like Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose members included Claude Lefort, Jean-François Lyotard, and Cornelius Castoriadis.87 There is neither time nor place here to enumerate all the pages where Badiou goes off the deep end. We may content ourselves with identifying him as the very epitome of a manic depressive, whose wild revolutionary ideations keep him from having to undergo electroconvulsive therapy. We have to acknowledge his lucidity in offering us a phrase that sums up his disorder, wherein jubilatory panic provoked by the perspective of final apocalypse alternates with anxiety caused by the nothingness of human existence. “A disaster is better than a lack of being [mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre],” says Badiou in an untranslatable play on words.88 At least he has coined a proverb. Wouldn’t Nero be able to adopt it as a motto, Nero whom Kierkegaard saw as the most ruthless melancholic of all? Manic depressives can be highly intelligent, and Badiou’s histrionics remain commensurate with his wide-ranging and deep intellect, his erudition, and his brio. This Platonist is a melancholic like all Platonists, as Gilles Deleuze accurately states in The Logic of Sense: like the other Platonists, he simply suffers from dizziness caused by the heights to which they climb.89 In The Century Badiou had put the “Jewish question” aside. We should have been somewhat grateful. However, the question gnawed at him and demanded attention. We really cannot say that the answer he has provided to it redounds to his credit. What may we conclude from reading the collection of Badiou’s essays on the Jews? First of all, we have reason to be disappointed. Badiou was a Sartrean. He has been and still is an important actor in French intellectual life, which has

Alain Badiou | 73 become much less extensive today than in the past. In some of his earlier works, he had demonstrated intelligence, philosophical sensibility, and even a gift for writing. One can almost say about Badiou what Gide wrote about Théophile Gautier: he “occupies a major position; too bad he fills it so badly.”90 The reader has probably grasped why I have mentioned Sartre. In 1946, when the name “Jew” was still bloodied and deformed, Sartre rendered any synonymy between “Jew” and “kike” impossible. He unscrewed the vise of antisemitic predication and did so in the midst of a particularly bewildered historical period. His famous assertion to the effect that it is “the antisemite who creates the Jew” is no more than one of the dialectical moments of an analysis whose complexity is on a par with the power of the name, of the signifier, something that had not yet been theorized but that Sartre sensed. The entire second chapter of Anti-Semite and Jew is a savage critique of the “democrat” who adumbrates Badiou’s denying the exceptionality of the name “Jew”: To him [the democrat] the individual is only an ensemble of universal traits. It follows that his defense of the Jew saves the latter as man and annihilates him as Jew. . . . Taking this point of view, he fears the awakening of a “Jewish consciousness” in the Jew; that is, he fears the Jew will acquire a consciousness of the Jewish collectivity. . . . “There are no Jews,” he says, “There is no Jewish question.” This means that he wants to separate the Jew from his religion, from his family, from his ethnic community, in order to plunge him into the democratic crucible whence he will emerge naked and alone, an individual and solitary particle like all the other particles.91

And Sartre adds, ruthlessly: “There may not be so much difference between the anti-Semite and the democrat. The former wishes to destroy him [the Jew] as a man and leave nothing in him but the Jew, the pariah, the untouchable; the latter wishes to destroy him as a Jew and leave nothing in him but the man, the abstract and universal subject of the rights of man and the rights of the citizen.”92 The very portrait of whom Sartre calls the “authentic Jew” shows what is required philosophically to restore autonomy to the signifier “Jew” and free it from the antisemitic predicate. The Jew undergoes a radical experience of liberty, founded on a historical hyper-factuality: “To be a Jew is to be thrown into—to be abandoned to—the situation of a Jew; and at the same time it is to be responsible in and through one’s own person for the destiny and the very nature of the Jewish people.”93 The possibility of autonomy for the Jewish signifier, as far as Sartre was concerned, provided the justification for creating a Jewish state. In lines written before the State of Israel was declared, the existentialist philosopher held that the authentic Jew “may also be led by his choice of authenticity to seek the creation of a Jewish nation possessing its own soil and autonomy; he may persuade himself

74  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” that Jewish authenticity demands that the Jew be sustained by a Jewish national community.”94 But that is not the essential point of Anti-Semite and Jew, a book that bears troubling marks of the isolation in which Sartre wrote it, armed with his intelligence and generosity alone, in the absence of any prior philosophical elaboration of the matter. What is essential is Sartre’s ability, indubitably inherited from Kierkegaard, to see the total insufficiency of concepts, to leave them behind, and to point like a poet toward the signifier in all its beneficent opacity: “the Jew is free: he can choose to be authentic. That is true, but we must understand first of all that that does not concern us.”95 Thus we see that Sartre grasped the extent of violence that antisemitic predication had inflicted on the Jewish signifier, the terrible dialectical effects that the exterminator’s predicate had wrought upon the word “Jew.” But contrarily to what Badiou would do, he dared to go beyond determinations to conceptualize situations in terms of exceptionality, singularity, and signifiers. He credited the subject with the ability to write the story of his identity—an identity that could hardly be defined by a banal communitarian predicate but was completely tied up with the name itself, with naming as an event. * * * We recall that Pascal, in the text he had sewn into his coat, affirmed his faith in “the God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob/ not of the philosophers and of the learned.”96 Moreover, he quoted, “Your God will be my God,” basing himself on Ruth (1:16): “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” Thus he alluded to the irreducible importance of the name of Israel and of Jewish experience. What may be said of this slit within the very heart of Western thought, this rip that cannot be sutured? No trace of it is to be found in the collection of essays by Badiou, benumbed as he is by the will to deny, the perverse effects of which we have brought into the open. The delirious logic motivating these effects is one of denial. The signifier “Jew” has to be denied over and again: by identifying it with the Hitlerian Idea; by characterizing as fable the foundational narrative whereby it came into the world; by stating the imperative to forget that this signifier, in the twentieth century, was the target of a plan and process of destruction theretofore unknown. What is this denial, a denial so often asserted that it tips into delirium? What is this denial that aspires to promote a human immortality whose sole origin and aim are a void? What is this denial that goes so far as to erase from the cover of a book the name of one’s Jewish partner and co-author? What is this denial that makes terror into a virtue? What is this denial that takes as its only true form denial of the Jew? What is this denial that can be uttered only within the slit left by denial? What is this denial that ignores the principle of logical non-­contradiction to the point of making antonyms into synonyms? What is this

Alain Badiou | 75 denial that abolishes the rules of language, melting them down into a regime of nothingness, of the Same repeated endlessly? What is this denial that makes Hitler into the thinker or very conceiver of the Idea governing the word “Jew”? What is this denial that calls upon Jews to forget the event that prescribed their annihilation? What is this denial that is erasure, oblivion? We shall answer quite coolly this litany of questions. There are at least two modes of denial. One is dialectical negation, which ultimately overcomes itself as denial, which allows one not only to acknowledge the existence of the nonexistent, but also to bring nothingness into full light. Althusser, as we recall, threw such negation out of Marxism, out of Marx’s system, for he perceived within dialectics a vestige of bourgeois metaphysics, an alibi permitting one in advance to dodge confrontation with the only thing worth confronting: the real. At the fatal moment, in the final instance, Althusser had no alibi. Sincerely and impersonally, in a void of consciousness, he strangled his wife Hélène, née Rytmann. He wrote, without an ounce of antisemitism, that she was “a frizzy-haired little Jewess, whose Jewish nose was recognisable at a hundred yards.”97 Thus she too, in the other’s gaze, was incapable of escaping the well-known predicate. Badiou’s story is different. He has an alibi. Or rather, like a vulgar Turelure, he has a hostage in the Claudelian sense:98 Cécile Winter. She is a Jewish puppet or fetish in whom are concentrated, crisscrossed, the only true alibis: those offered by the liar or the perverse subject. Here is where the second mode of denial is deployed—a denial whose verbal form, as we have seen, is quite complicated. This is because Badiou, at his most profound, has nothing intelligible to say about reciprocity among individuals. He presents Being, speech, and thought as true only through the suspension of Being, speech, and thought—only through suspension of the Other. Being, speech, and thought are affirmed only by destroying the very conditions that make them possible, causing their cessation in such a way that the void becomes the very foundation of Immortality. Denial thus is no more than the act whereby the subject consecrates what he puts to death. Badiou would allow me, I am sure, to call that denial a “villainous negation” and to christen him with the predicate devised for Sade years ago by Pierre Klossowski: a “philosopher-villain.”99

Notes 1. Alain Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” in Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 155–254. 2. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 159. 3. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 161. 4. Winter, arguing that “the Zionist leaders were, from the outset, clearly conscious of the great moral advantage the destruction of the European Jews could bequeath,” adds in a footnote, “This does not mean they neglected the other benefits,” and continues with a quotation

76  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” from Tom Segev on financial reparations (Cécile Winter, “The Master-Signifier of the New Aryans,” in Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 222, 250n15). 5. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 162 (ellipsis in the original). 6. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 162. 7. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 162. 8. It is immediately apparent that Badiou compiled his list far less attentively than did Schindler. For example, Trotsky did not have to detach himself from the predicate “Jew” since religious practice had already significantly waned in his family (Leon Trotsky, My Life [New York: Pathfinder, 1970; 2nd printing, 1971], 84–85). Trotsky was reminded of the predicate “Jew” in 1881, with the promulgation of antisemitic laws that prevented his father, a farmer, from purchasing land (86). He became more personally acquainted with the predicate “Jew” in 1887 when quotas on Jewish students kept him from state employment as a teacher (45). 9. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 163. 10. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 174, 173. 11. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 163. Badiou’s argumentation is so imprecise and general that his statement here can also apply to the totalitarian community to which emancipatory politics must lead—or so he maintains in Conditions: “Philosophically named, an emancipatory politics comes within an antihumanism of the same” (Conditions, 175). This “same” thus furnishes us the exhilarating perspective of enjoying the status of a thing, that is to say, something “subject to no interpretation” (Fernando Pessoa, quoted in Badiou, Conditions, 176). 12. See, notably, Badiou, Conditions, 166–68. 13. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 159. 14. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 164. 15. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 164. 16. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 165. 17. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 165. 18. See chapter 1 in this volume. 19. The 1983 strike at the Talbot automotive plant at Poissy, near Paris, is seen by Badiou as a watershed event highlighting the importance of immigrant workers in France (Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? [Paris: Seuil, 1985], 69ff.).—Trans. 20. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 161. 21. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 166. (“Glorifiers” here translates Badiou’s sacralisateurs [Circonstances 3: Portées du mot “ juif ” (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2005), 18]. We shall replace it throughout with “sacralizers.”—Trans.) 22. Paul Claudel (1868–1955), devoutly Catholic French diplomat and writer.—Trans. 23. Paul Claudel, “Le mystère d’Israël,” Cahiers Paul Claudel 7 (1968): 30. 24. Léon Bloy, Le salut par les Juifs (1892). 25. We shall discuss why Badiou also uses the term “Holocaust” in a frightful passage in his book (Uses of the Word “Jew,” 214). (In France, the word “Holocauste” to designate the Nazi extermination of the Jews has never been favored, precisely because it was felt to confer a questionable religious meaning on the event. At first, the term “génocide” was preferred, and then “Shoah,” as a result of the wide audience reached by Claude Lanzmann’s film of that name.—Trans.) 26. François Mauriac, foreword, in Élie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), xxi. 27. See the special issue of the Cahiers d’Études Lévinassiennes (September 2005) devoted to Benny Lévy, especially the article by Jean-Claude Milner, “Réflexions sur Primo Levi et Benny Lévy,” which compares Benny Lévy’s and Primo Levi’s approaches to God’s silence. For

Alain Badiou | 77 an understanding of Benny Lévy’s position in his dialogue on this question with Emmanuel Levinas, see my article in the same issue, “Benny Lévy: Le dialogue à l’abri de l’Un.” 28. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 159. 29. To be more precise, we shall say that Badiou uses the ambiguous and ambivalent Catholic viewpoint to provide the basis of his own, which he attributes globally and vaguely to defenders of Israel. We shall add that our distance from Claudel does not keep us from profoundly admiring a man who despite his errors wrote two remarkable letters. The first showed solidarity with the World Jewish Congress held in 1936. An even more stunning epistle, addressed on Christmas 1941 to the chief rabbi of France, protested the persecution targeting the Jews. Finally, how can one not be moved by Claudel’s words in 1952 regarding the creation and existence of the State of Israel: “Only a blind man could fail to see in this phenomenon the workings of God. What is His intention? To assert once again Israel’s ecumenical calling and to fulfill it” (“Le mystère d’Israël,” 31). 30. The wording is as follows: “I submit that veritable compassion does not concern itself in the slightest with the predicates in the name of which the atrocity was committed” (Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 161). 31. A reference to the Latin proverb, Quos vult perdere, Jupiter dementat.—Trans. 32. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 163–64. 33. Blaise Pascal devoted sections of his Thoughts to the meaning of Jewish rejection of Jesus in the light of Hebrew scripture. Esther and Athalie, the last two plays by French classical tragedian Jean Racine, are glorious renditions of two biblical Jewish queens.—Trans. 34. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2007), 3. 35. Let us note in passing the solecism Badiou commits here, for one does not draw “consequences” but rather conclusions. Consequences are part of an objective process, of the real about which Badiou is known to be so passionate. I would urge Badiou to consider the great rigor that characterizes the French language and to draw all the possible conclusions regarding implications of the lapsus calami—“to draw consequences”—whereby he ascribes so much to Nazism. 36. Winter, “Master-Signifier,” 217–29. 37. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 166. 38. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 217. 39. Claude Lanzmann, quoted in Winter, “Master-Signifier,” 217. (The choice not to capitalize “Jews” in this passage is made by the translator of the published version of Badiou’s volume, and not by Lanzmann, who certainly would respect proper English usage in this matter.—Trans.) 40. Winter, “Master-Signifier,” 218. 41. Winter, “Master-Signifier,” 218, 219. 42. Winter, “Master-Signifier,” 218. 43. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 217. 44. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 160. 45. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 160; Winter, “Master-Signifier,” 219. 46. Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, trans. Frank Wynn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 506. 47. Winter, “Master-Signifier,” 219. 48. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 214. 49. Hergé, The Blue Lotus, trans. Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 13, 18. 50. Hergé, Blue Lotus, 14. 51. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 167.

78  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” 52. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 176, 177. 53. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 179. 54. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 163–64, 179. 55. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 177. 56. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 180. 57. Badiou Uses of the Word “Jew,” 177. 58. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 178. 59. See in this regard Louis Althusser’s “Spinoza,” published as an appendix to his L’avenir dure longtemps, suivi de Les faits (Paris: Stock, 1992). (The English translation leaves out this section: Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, trans. Richard Veasey [New York: New Press, 1993], 6.) 60. Badiou, “Saint Paul and the Jews,” trans. Ray Brassier, in Uses of the Word “Jew,” 188–94. 61. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 188; Galatians 3:28. 62. Galatians 3:29. 63. Romans 11:1–2. 64. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 170. 65. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 169–70. 66. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 170. 67. In the original publication of this chapter as an article, I mistakenly wrote Uses of the Name (sic) “Jew” instead of Uses of the Word “Jew.” (See Badiou’s reaction, “The Word ‘Jew’ and the Sycophant” in Uses of the Word “Jew,” 230–47, and particularly 235.—Trans.) 68. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 179. 69. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 167. 70. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 170. 71. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 194. 72. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 189–90. 73. The published translations features on the title page “Part Two, Chapter 8 by Cécile Winter.” Her name does not appear on the hardcover.—Trans. 74. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 165–66. 75. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 166 (modified as per Circonstances 3: Portées du mot “ juif,” 18). 76. Badiou, Uses of the Word “Jew,” 170. 77. The terms “preterition” and “denial” are insufficient, but they correspond at least minimally to what Badiou is doing here: he does not say what he says and he says that he does not say it. This strategy finds an example, or perhaps its very model in the well-worn rhetorical device, “It is not I who say so.” 78. Marty refers here to Badiou’s response to his criticisms (“The Word ‘Jew’ and the Sycophant,” Uses of the Word “Jew,” 230–47).—Trans. 79. Badiou, Century, 2. 80. On the question of the real in Althusser, see my article “Les derniers des intellectuels,” Esprit (March–April 2000): 137–55. (Louis Althusser [1918–1990] was a French Marxist philosopher.—Trans.) 81. The falsifications Althusser enjoyed went from claiming to have met with de Gaulle to writing “farcical” texts such as “Une question posée par Louis Althusser (1972)” and truly delirious pieces such as the famous “Thèses de juin 1986.” See my Louis Althusser, un sujet sans procès (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 82. “In 1995, in France, millions of demonstrators rallied behind one slogan: ‘Together!’— Celan’s own tent-word; propaganda responds with the ‘evidence’ of the individual in the

Alain Badiou | 79 competitive search for success and happiness” (Badiou, Century, 98). Apparently, the verses by Paul Celan to which Badiou alludes are from the collection The No-One’s Rose, where the very end of the poem “Anabasis” reads “Visible, audible thing, the / tent- / word growing free: / Together” (trans. Michael Hamburger, quoted in Badiou, Century, 89). 83. Alain Badiou, The Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 67. 84. Badiou, Century, 208n17. 85. The Organisation Politique was a miniscule far-left political formation; Sylvain Lazarus (b. 1943) is an anthropologist at the University of Paris VIII.—Trans. 86. Natacha Michel, Circulaire à toute ma vie humaine (Paris: Seuil, 2005). 87. Of these three French philosophers, the best known is certainly Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), author of The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Regarding Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), see The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); and for Claude Lefort (1924–2010), see his Writing: The Political Test, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).—Trans. 88. Badiou, Conditions, 159. Badiou makes that proverb into the byword of the “philosopher” and calls for an indispensable unsuturing between philosophy and politics. That demand is, I believe, no more than lip service on Badiou’s part, for nowhere does such a separation appear in his work. Note as well the excessive fantasy that causes him to add that “a disaster is better than a lack of being” is not only the philosopher’s axiom but that of “all of humanity,” “in the élan of the centuries” (Badiou, Conditions, 159, emphasis in the published translation). 89. See especially the section titled “Eighteenth Series of the Three Images of Philosophers” where we read, “Idealism is the illness congenital to the Platonic philosophy and, with its litany of ascents and downfalls, it is even philosophy’s manic-depressive form. Mania inspires and guides Plato. Dialectics is the flight of ideas” (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990], 128). Badiou is incontestably an idealist of the most platonic strain since, as we have seen, he follows the Phaedo and believes in Immortality. 90. André Gide, quoted in Gide and Albert Mockel, Correspondance (1891–1938), ed. Gustave Vanwelkenhuyzen (Geneva: Droz, 1975), 282. 91. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken/ Grove, 1948), 56–57. 92. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 57. 93. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 89 (emphasis in the published translation). 94. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 139. 95. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 136 (emphasis in the original). 96. Le mémorial, in Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes III, ed. Jean Mesnard (Paris: Desclée de Brower, 1991), 50–51. 97. Althusser, Future Lasts Forever, 131. Hélène “hated her family name [Rytmann] and had adopted that of one of the first Jesuits to visit China” (201). 98. It seems to us that in Claudel’s Hostage (trans. Pierre Chavannes [Kila, Mont.: Kessinger, 2009]), the sole true hostage is not the pope but Sygne de Coûfontaine. Cécile Winter would thus be a willing hostage who has renounced her aristocratic heritage for Turelure’s sake. (Claudel’s play recounts how the highborn Sygne marries the lesser Turelure in order to assure the latter’s cooperation in releasing the pope, held hostage during the Napoleonic wars.—Trans.) 99. Pierre Klossowski, “The Philosopher-Villain,” in Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 11–44.

3

Saint Paul among the Moderns Symbolic Universal or Mimetic Universal? History and Metahistory

Who is competent to speak of Paul of Tarsus nowadays? This question is all

the more crucial as Paul elicits ever greater interest in the largely secular field of philosophy, among such writers as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Michel Rey,1 and Alain Badiou.2 Saint Paul was a wily fellow, who combined anxiety and authoritarianism, fear and trembling. He was enigmatic, as was the century he lived in, a century that could well be called Paul’s century. At once destructive and foundational, it was the century that produced a divide, thereby becoming retroactively the first century of our era. Paul’s century, the epitome of a century, thus claims to be fully historical. It follows that the Christian universal is part and parcel of that historicity, so much so that it arrogates to itself the very concept of history. Nothing surprising here, since the first century proposes itself as universal in the Christian sense. It effects a sleight of hand, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a kind of performative—as though it were a question of saying, “I declare myself the first century.” Yet the marks left by historicity are as ambiguous as they are numerous. One ambiguity concerns the claim to have interrupted the Jewish eschatological time of redemptive promise. The Messiah has come. Humanity may cease awaiting him and enter fully into history. However, the interruption is incomplete because the arrival of the Messiah does not resolve the eschatological question but simply lessens its acuity by projecting its violence into the future. The violence is relegated to “the final days,” no longer associated with the coming of the Messiah but with his return, referred to as the parousia or Second Coming. To claim historicity and manage its effects for all humanity is not simple. Time does not allow itself to be so easily manipulated. The first Christians got tangled up in contradictions as they hesitated between their undoubting belief in imminent apocalypse and the politically practical necessity of founding a church. We must bring to bear sophistication and deftness in order to sort out their trajectories, which were to be of such great historical consequence. To transform ecstasy preceding the end of days into the tireless patience demanded of the convert and builder is something that has become a familiar component of our political

Saint Paul among the Moderns  |  81 praxis ever since Paul. The synonymy or alternation between the end of history and its beginning partakes of a spontaneous dialectic that has possibly become intrinsic to the West and its political thought, most of all for revolutionaries. For that reason, it is fascinating to study the rapidity with which Paul alternates between proclaiming and neutralizing the end of the world.3 The latter notion comes to mean the end of the Jewish world, in order to provide an official, plausible explanation for announcing an apocalypse that failed to take place. After the messianic turbulence, there was a return to business as usual: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1). If John’s statement of the divine origin of earthly power (John 19:11) serves to diminish its social and political prestige, for Paul the same source of authority results in an archconservative politics that endows current institutions with a sacred aura. Thus, contrary to Badiou’s naïve assertion, Paul does not provide us with a theory of what that philosopher calls an “event”; or else, it is a false, inauthentic vision of the event. The order of things is not only maintained in its entirety but actually reinforced. Starting with Paul, Christianity claims to have disrupted what occurred before and to offer humanity a gateway into history, a transition from ritual circular time to linear chronological time. However, the change is less impressive than may appear. Entry into history has its source in a radical, violent hesitation in the face of historicity itself. Such vacillation was inevitable because the disruption was immersed in a messianism perturbed by absolute uncertainty. Going against Christian doxa, it can be cogently asserted that consciousness of historical time was not born with Paul and Jesus. Such awareness runs throughout the entire Bible, with its individual and familial genealogies and its properly historical narratives of the lives of Abraham, Noah, Joseph, and David. The Jewish universal does not disregard history. How could it do so, qua universal? However, what characterizes the Christian universal as historical is that through Paul and his legacy it historicizes itself. It proclaims its eruption onto the historical scene, into history and as history, as that which assigns itself the task of fulfilling a universal that preceded it. The Christian universal and historicity are historical because they are metahistorical. They are meant to fulfill the Jewish universal by ridding it of its archaic contents (such as Sabbath observance, death by stoning, the commandment of circumcision) and permitting it to accede to a universal that is de‑singularized and thus total. Thus the pre-existing Jewish universal becomes problematic. Is it even a universal? Its oneness—the monotheism it reveals to the world—predisposes it to be the metaphysical infrastructure of any possible universal. Yet, for historical reasons precisely, it cannot claim to realize itself as a full universal. That is to say, quite simply, it cannot pretend to speak to all.

82  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” The metahistorical dimension of the Christian universal, whose authorship goes back to Paul, entails a dual metadiscursive operation. On the one hand, the Law is stripped of multiple strange archaic practices, identified as vestiges of premonotheistic culture; these include the innumerable Levitican prohibitions that appear laughable or incomprehensible to non-Jews and lapsed Jews. Only the Ten Commandments are kept. On the other hand, these are violently pared down. Nine are superfluous. Just the first one is retained—“I am the Lord thy God,” and even it is associated with another not even in the Decalogue but in Leviticus: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (19:18). The Judeo-Christian Matthew records Jesus as saying, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (22:40). However, Paul is of major import because he pushes things even further, moving from two commandments to one: “If there be any other commandment, all are briefly comprehended in this saying, namely: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’” (Romans 23:9). Jacob Taubes does well to insist on Paul’s casting aside the first commandment, piously maintained by Jesus according to Matthew. Taubes goes so far as seeing this modification as a “polemical text”4 against Jesus, which is probably excessive. But he may well have been right to interpret Paul’s reduction of Jesus’ teaching as “an absolutely revolutionary act”: “I almost want to say, following Kojève, that he pulls a Feuerbach here.”5 That is, Paul performs a metadiscursive operation whereby what belonged to Heaven has now irreversibly fallen into the hands of men. Going from the dual to the single commandment, Paul radicalizes the Christic act and scores the unprecedented coup of erasing reference to the Father. Thus he confers upon the history being played out a metahistorical dimension, a disruption of history through commentary. The break between the biblical universal and the Christian universal is thus dual in nature. First of all, there was a split we can plot linearly. The Christian universal purified the Jewish universal of all local, pre-biblical customs; monotheism had made them archaic, and their local character showed them as other than universal. To that category belonged retrograde sexual and alimentary taboos. However, another break was not linear but structural and fell into the realm of metadiscourse. If the first split linked the universal to the idea of oneness, totality, unanimity, the second break fulfilled a strictly historical function. Christian discourse dates and historicizes itself metadiscursively. It results not in progress but in a “break” in the Althusserian sense of the word.6 It is a break that simultaneously links and disassociates the Jewish and Christian universals through the terms “old” and “new”: the Old Covenant versus the New Covenant; the Old and New Testaments. From the dialectic between the two emerges the possibility for the Christian universal to aspire to the global unity of humanity, to be that which realizes that unity and masters human time.

Saint Paul among the Moderns  |  83 Paul’s metadiscursive operation was of no small consequence for Judaism, which Paul indeed called yudaismos (Galatians 1:13). Never had Judaism been viewed as such a synthesis, standing in opposition to another system of beliefs. Judaism had not been so clearly defined from an external perspective. This discursive change has so affected Jews that they are now partially dependent on it. However one comes to grips with the question of the universal, there is an obligatory passage through the Christian idea according to which there are two rival conceptions. One holds that the true universal entails some form of worldwide unanimity. The other vision is that the true universal does not demand such univocality.

The Crisis of the Christian Universal The conflict between the Jewish and Christian understanding of the universal has not been resolved by dividing the world between the old and the new. Confrontation goes on: on the one hand, within the Jewish world, which has questioned itself constantly after having been inoculated with Christianity; and on the other hand, within the Christian world, not because of contagion but through dissidence within its ranks, opposition from minorities influenced by Jewish thought. An excellent example is offered by the teaching of Jacques Lacan, who expressed the Jewish viewpoint when he said, “There’s absolutely no need for the symbolic universal to be spread over the entire surface of the world for it to be universal.”7 This sentence is extraordinary, for universal etymologically means that which is spread over the face of the earth. Would it not then be a question of wresting the universal from the universal and containing it within the symbolic realm, in symbolic activity? The synonymy Lacan thus institutes between the symbolic and the universal allowed him in one fell swoop to Judaize the universal. He translated, or re-translated, the word “universal” into Hebrew. Following Lacan, we can see the Jewish universal as strictly defined by symbolic activity from one end to the other.8 Thus we perceive that modern thought as it developed in France from 1950 to 1980 involved a process of extreme destruction of the Christian universal in the name of paradigms that owed much to the Jewish universal. In numerous works, these modern thinkers—especially those who took part in the structuralist and post-structuralist enterprises—subjected Christian universal values to a rigorous, systematic, and fierce labor of deconstruction. Christian values were defined as typically ideological and profoundly mystifying categories. Althusser, for example, analyzed in radical terms the weighty challenge posed to Marxism by the persistence of a category of universal inherited from Christian idealism. He critiqued that category as an ideological as opposed to a materialist conception of the universal. In the materialist conception, the

84  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” universal exists only within a specificity. He argued that contradiction, which is the primary motor of Marxist thought, is always specific. Specificity belongs to its essence.9 According to Althusser, “Marx substituted for the ‘ideological’ and universal concept of Feuerbachian ‘practice’ a concrete conception of the specific differences that enables us to situate each particular practice in the specific differences of the social structure.”10 It is important to note that structuralism, unlike other currents of modernity that have turned toward cultural relativism, never rejected the universal as a theoretical hypothesis but always subjected it to a severe condition: that it avoid drifting into ideology and be brought “back to its condition by force; to the condition of a scientifically specified universality.”11 Althusser adds, “If the universal has to be this specificity, we have no right to invoke a universal which is not the universal of this specificity.”12 Despite Althusser’s claims, his remarks here do not stem from materialist tradition but are fully in line with structuralist teaching, as attested to by several passages in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings. Analyzing the Oedipus and Perceval myths, Lévi-Strauss shows that their universality does not lie in their massive presence throughout the world but in the specific contradictions that paradigmatic oppositions bring to light: muteness in the case of Perceval against excess of speech in that of Oedipus; chastity for Perceval versus sexual excess (incest) for Oedipus; the barrenness of the earth in the Perceval saga as opposed to pathological proliferation of the plague in the Oedipus myth.13 In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss exposes the contradictory logical processes whose waves are felt throughout the universal and which preclude Christian univocality, centrality, and monopoly. On the one hand, “primitive” cultures and non-Western civilizations reject other groups as non-human and seem hermetic to any possible universal. Simultaneously, however, totemic classification—a purely symbolic activity—makes the group’s closedness implode upon itself and assures a borderless humanity, because all individuals, including foreigners, named for the same totem belong to one and the same family.14 From this notion Lévi-Strauss draws a radical conclusion, expressed in the scandalous lecture, “Race and Culture,” which he gave in 1971 at UNESCO, a veritable shrine to the Christian universal. There he maintained that wars of annihilation are impossible precisely among so-called primitive peoples who consider others to be non-human.15 Rather, held Lévi-Strauss, universalization moving toward maximum extension of the Same produces maximum conflict and ­intolerance.16 If one deems it preferable to save the universal and not to abandon it in favor of the ease of cultural relativism, it has to be freed from that which has defined it since the birth of Christianity: the immediate identification of the universal with the Same, the center, totality, world unification. Anchoring the universal in the

Saint Paul among the Moderns  |  85 numerous is no more than an act of domination, wrote Jean-Claude Milner.17 The Western universal is the very expression of power, radically present in the confusion Christianity introduces between the universal and the global, between universality and totality. Thus it is not surprising to find in Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology what I make so bold as to call the Judeo-Lacanian or Judeo-structural perspective, according to which the “symbolic function” is the sole universal.18 Modernity’s emphasis on symbolic activity does not aim only to show the dominant universal, the Christian universal, as ideological. It also seeks to distance itself from the positivism to which the structural enterprise can be assimilated, a positivism that leaves the door open to a form of naturalism. That is why Lacan, following Lévi-Strauss, insists upon the distinction between the universal and the generic: “The fact that men have, with some exceptions, two arms, two legs and a pair of eyes—which in any case they have in common with animals—the fact that they are, as someone once put it, featherless bipeds, plucked chickens, all of that is generic, categorically not universal.”19 One could go further than Lacan and Lévi-Strauss and avoid placing the opposition universal/generic under the opposition culture/nature of which it is an iteration. We could, for example, say that while murder may be defined as a generic behavior, the prohibition on murder pertains to the universal, insofar as prohibition is a symbolic activity. We should note in this regard that Lacanian discourse, while staying within a Jewish field of thought, avoids rejecting Paul. Lacan’s thesis is that Paul does not pursue a break with Judaism but remains Jewish and even a Pharisee—a label Lacan applies to Paul in “Kant with Sade.” Lacan goes on to define Pauline discourse as “the universal triumph of Pharisaic virtues.”20 Lacan keeps his trust in Paul because he sees just one thing in him: a very precise formulation of the knot tying together Law and desire:21 “I would not have known sin, but through the law; for I would not have known lust, except that the law had said, ‘Thou shalt not covet’” (Romans 7:7; cf. Exodus 20:17 and Deuteronomy 5:21). No doubt Lacan was impressed by that glorious chapter 7 of Romans, the epistle where Paul speaks in the first person, a first person that is a pure allegory of language: “For I was alive apart from the law once, but when the commandment came, sin revived” (7:9). Nonetheless, by seeing Paul only in terms of this message, by repeatedly calling him a Pharisee, Lacan is clearly condemning Paul as seen by Christians within Western doxa, which disdains the Letter and would abolish circumcision.

Adorno Adorno, too, emphasizes the tension inherent in the Christian universal, which claims both to go beyond the Jewish universal and realize it wholly. This

86  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” problematic proclamation of transcendence and fulfillment leads Adorno to critique fiercely the Christian universal, which he sees as the bourgeois universal, something purely ideological that stands in opposition to the symbolic. This question is treated by Adorno time and again, but particularly in Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-authored by Max Horkheimer) and Minima Moralia. He sees in the dominant universal an epitome of falsehood whereby the pretense of fostering human totality is used to justify particular interests and to dominate. Like Althusser, Adorno places this dominant universal into opposition with contradiction as a liberating, emancipatory process insofar as it is never total. In the chapter on antisemitism included in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno analyze from a specifically Jewish point of view the Christian universal and emphasize the “regression”22 involved in passing from a henotheistic or henological form of God—of oneness—to the idea of a universal that moves toward totality. For them this passage from one to all necessitates a concession to myth. To a certain extent, myths, similar over the face of the earth, can claim to be a form of the universal, as many anthropologists have asserted. But the universal conveyed by myth in fabulous narratives does not embody symbolic activity at its fullest. This is because their universal is of a mimetic type, as we shall later see. For Horkheimer and Adorno, what distinguishes the symbolic activity of the Jewish universal from the ideological activity of the Christian universal is the movement away from an economy of signs to one of representation: a transition from semiosis to mimesis. What characterizes mimesis most of all is the mystification of the “already realized,”23 the very principle of ideology, the fable that recounts that it’s happened, that people are equal at least in principle. Representation, in the form of image and narrative, supposes that what is represented has already taken place. The idea of the already realized stands on the optimism of mimesis, of representation inherent in the illusory nature of the ideological. It posits the universal as already there.24 Thus from an Adornian point of view, Badiou promotes pure mimesis in asserting, absurdly enough, that Paul’s sole message is the proclamation of resurrection as event.25 Resurrection manifestly partakes of image, a visibility so great that it blinds Paul on the road to Damascus. It also partakes of mimesis because it tends toward myth and mythical repetition and allows a mimetic identification between the human and the divine. In contrast to symbolic activity, which is always a labor of association and disassociation (as in circumcision), resurrection, through mimesis, opens only onto what can be called, following Girard, mimetic contagion—a process of pure merging. Indeed, the analysis of mimetic facticity allows us to grasp the strictly ideological character of the Pauline enterprise, for example, in the well-known verse in Galatians that Badiou takes as a model for his own conception of the political,

Saint Paul among the Moderns  |  87 of the event, and even of the universal: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). How can one fail to see how these words foreshadow the bourgeois universal, a purely ideological structure, mimetic and mystificatory insofar as the discursive structure smoothes over and dissimulates reality by turning it into its opposite?26 Indeed, Paul says here that through Jesus Christ’s resurrection there is no longer slave nor free, that is, neither slave nor master. But does that mean slavery and property are abolished? No, rather the opposite. The phrase “neither slave nor master” is meant to keep the master-slave opposition effective in reality—through the alibi of its imaginary abolition strictly limited to the religious sphere. Likewise, the supposed universal constituted by undoing the difference male/female is similarly deceptive and purely mimetic: Paul stipulates that men should pray bareheaded while woman should do so veiled, because man “is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man” (1 Corinthians 11:7). Finally, by virtue of Pauline universalism, Jews could call up no defense in the face of antisemitic and particularly Nazi furor, their name having been abandoned to a mimetic universal that held there was “neither Jew nor Greek.”27 Mimetic contagion imaginarily abolishes sexual and class differences as well as distinction of origin and identities; it is a mirage wherein society no longer reproduces division. This illusion offers to the present state of the world the apologetics we have seen functioning at the base of Pauline politics. Mimetic merging—“ye are all one in Christ Jesus”—is the form typically assumed by that universal in order to function and propagate itself. Thus we may say that the opposition between the Christian universal and the Jewish one is that between a mimetic (ideological, mythological) universal and a symbolic one.

Circumcision and the Foreskin Paul matters because of his coherence, or the coherence that has been ascribed to him by the focus on two essential elements of his teaching. One concerns the already quoted verse from Galatians (“neither Jew nor Greek,” etc.), and the other bears upon the “circumcision of the heart” (Romans 2:29), rendering purposeless that of the foreskin: if anyone transgresses the law, his “circumcision has become uncircumcision,” and inversely, “if those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised?” (2:25–26). The Jew must abandon the sign, for “circumcision is of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter” (2:29). Circumcision of the heart has become a central tenet of Western doxa, illustrating how Christian spirituality transcends Jewish literalism. This can be seen, for example, in Pascal’s Thoughts.28 Circumcision is of fundamental importance as a cause of divisiveness among the first Christians and especially Christianized Pharisees (Acts 15:5). It is central

88  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” to the question of the universal. Freud sees abandonment of the practice as allowing Christianity to become a universal religion;29 it will enable us to understand the very structure of the opposition we note between the symbolic function and mimetic practices, or (to use Paul’s terms) between the letter and the heart. Paul considers here the sign and its function. Circumcision becomes a useless signifier if the signified (respect for the Law) is lacking. Indeed, it cannot be certain that this signified will obtain. The signifier, therefore, is so purposeless that its opposite—uncircumcision, the foreskin—can substitute for it. Let us now turn to some statements in Lacan’s seminar on anxiety. Lacan claims he finds Ecclesiastes more illuminating than Heidegger on the question of care (Sorge),30 and defines the Christian God as a “slight psychotic evasion” through the Platonic god of sovereign good, the god of mimesis, “a delirious conception of Plato’s.”31 Unlike what happens with this delirious god, one can speak with the Jewish God. He commands we do things, and one of the demands he makes of his “chosen people” is circumcision: “Not only does He order us to have pleasure [jouir], but in addition he provides some user’s instructions.”32 Circumcision constitutes a user’s manual for pleasure. Unlike Freud, who interprets circumcision as castration, Lacan asserts that there is “nothing less castrating than circumcision.”33 Here Lacan contradicts not only Freud’s interpretation but also Freudian epistemology, which has it that all signs find their origin in repression. For Lacan, an absolute positivity inheres in circumcision, so much so that he even praises it in an artistic sense. He finds circumcision “elegant” and “esthetic,” contrasting it with what he calls, curiously enough, not the foreskin but “phimosis”—which in Greek statuary he finds “emphasized in a particularly gross manner.”34 However, the positivity Lacan sees in circumcision is not solely esthetic. It engenders a salubrious division of roles between the dagger and the sheath. Circumcision rids the man’s dagger of its sheath (the foreskin)—and a sheath can only be feminine. A felicitous division of the sexes and of sexual positioning thus undergoes a refoundation in the symbolic sphere.35 Thus for Lacan circumcision would not be some archaic rite or vestigial tribalism attaching to and detracting from monotheism. It is no “whim of ritual,”36 he argues, contrary to what the wannabe ethnologist Paul of Tarsus seems to insinuate when he allusively compares circumcision to pagan mutilations (Galatians 5:12). Paul, then, may be seen as the man—a Jew—who suddenly ceased to understand both the symbolic function and Judaism itself. His comprehension failed, perhaps because Judaism was undergoing a profound crisis.37 For Paul, the letter of the Law had died; it turned senseless, infinitely suspect, anxiety-provoking. Circumcision, as sign or letter, is for him not potentially but ontologically false. The crisis of the symbolic is clear when Paul says, “The letter kills but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Saint Paul among the Moderns  |  89 The anxiety-producing signifier is thus erased and replaced by a logic of the heart, without marks or letters, fostering a mirage of mimetic universality undeceptive in its transparency. Lacking symbolic space, it offers no possibility of a gap between signifier and signified, letter and spirit; but the rift is unavoidable, inherent in the letter. This transparency allows Paul to preach to an ever greater number a universality without defect or lack, thus neutralizing the anxiety that human subjectivity cannot fail to produce through its intrinsic rifts. The universality Paul dreams of is unanimous and knows no such gaps.38 The suppression of circumcision coincides with a vision of the universal as numerous and oceanic. The tide of hearts can drown all suspicions and doubts caused by subjective rifts. It ushers in a world free of the anxiety caused by the signifier, for the signifier tosses the subject between doubt and certitude. What motivates the suppression of circumcision is the desire to abolish such hesitation, to dilute subjectivity— and specifically Jewish subjectivity—with a universal that no signifier, no mark of difference, will mar any longer.39

Modernity and the Letter Lacan is not alone in helping us move beyond the anxiety that the West promotes with respect to circumcision.40 All modernity, up to Derrida’s notion of grammatology, has been characterized by a focus on the letter, the promptings of the letter against those of the heart, signifiers versus mimesis. As Lacan says, “But how are we to take the letter here? Quite simply, literally.”41 Beyond Lacan, the entire twentieth century has seen a prodigious insurrection against mimesis, not only among the professional corps of philosophers and intellectuals, but also in music, literature, plastic arts—from abstract art to serial music. It would be useful to examine the history of all those movements from the viewpoint of the agency of the letter, but we have to limit ourselves to one observation: French intellectual modernity is explicitly conscious of this development. In the 1970s, for example, Roland Barthes had recourse to the Pauline dichotomy of spirit and letter to illustrate the idea—intolerable to a Christian or a humanist—of a dialectic of the letter in harmony with the dialectic governing the category of Law according to Lacan. Barthes explained: “On the one hand, the Letter decrees that Law in whose name every extravagance can be reduced . . . but on the other, for centuries . . . it tirelessly releases a profusion of symbols. . . . On the one hand, it signifies the most extreme censorship, and on the other, the most extreme pleasure (all poetry—the whole of the unconscious—is a return to the letter).”42 This dialectic of law and pleasure is the same dialectic Lacan saw operating in circumcision. For Lacan, the letter and the law are what constitute the subject as a subject.43 The letter does not derive simplistically from ritual or the superego. Barthes

90  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” locates it as an “irreducible ideality,” inalienable, among the profoundest experiences of humankind.44 Barthes’s Empire of Signs, an empire that is not Japan but designates the homeland of the letter, wages war against the spirit and the heart, the myth of interiority: “The West moistens everything with meaning, like an authoritarian religion which imposes baptism on entire peoples. . . .”45 This sentence contradicts Paul on three grounds: it rejects the shapeless (water that moistens), spirit (meaning), and the numerous (entire peoples). This book by Barthes professes the morality of the letter against the expressivity of mimesis. The opposition between heart and letter is projected onto the body itself. What the French call, with “obvious ethnocentrism,” the “bridled, constrained” eye of Asians may be likened to circumcision in that it represents the “barred” eye, which stands in opposition to the Pauline myth of the heart and of interiority.46 It is the eye of the letter, a literalized or “calligraphed”47 eye: “The eyes, and not the gaze; the slit, and not the soul.”48 Is it possible to be more anti-Pauline than Barthes was in penning these words?

The Symbolic and the Mimetic The Old Testament accounts that seem to go the way of mimesis are, as René Girard understood, metacritical texts whose symbolic functioning aims at breaking the mimetic merging that is inherent in all myths. For Girard, what distinguishes Jewish from mythic thought is that in the latter, the sacrificial victim is always partly guilty and deserving of the punishment meted out by mimetic frenzy. The mythic subject, of whom Oedipus is the perfect illustration, stands in opposition to Jewish subjects such as Abraham, Joseph, or Job. The Hebrew Bible never gives us the double mimetic figure of God made victim or of the victim made divine. Myth is incapable of producing the discriminating violence of the symbolic, which explains why Jewish symbolic violence is, as we have said, metacritical. It places myth in a symbolic crisis and criticizes most of all the mimetic will to unanimity intrinsic to myth. In the mythic universal—universal in the false sense of being present over the face of the globe—the divine and the multitudinous are made one. The permanent interconvertibility it posits between executioner and victim is that against which Jewish discourse realized itself as Scripture. Whereas the mythic universe ceaselessly merges the human and the godly through the divinization of the victim and the victimization of the divine—thereby making the mimetic order into the infrastructure of the universal—Jewish discourse continues to perform the symbolic act of separating the divine and the human.49 *

*

*

To me it seems that Paul was that Christian who took it upon himself to accomplish an impossible task: to erase the all too obvious resemblance between

Saint Paul among the Moderns  |  91 the Christic and mythic universes through a permanent labor of translation of Jewish symbolism into the Christian mimetic space and vice versa. Translation functions through metaphoric condensation, an example of which occurs when circumcision becomes circumcision of the heart. This point may well allow us to incorporate Freud—critically—into our analysis. From a Freudian perspective, what ultimately may permit us to distinguish between the Jewish and Christian universal is that the latter is a mimetic universal of avowal: “It was, nevertheless, in the mind of a Jew, Saul of Tarsus, who as a Roman citizen was called Paul, that the perception dawned: ‘It is because we killed God the Father that we are so unhappy.’”50 Such is Paul’s Freudian discourse: we have put God to death, but by confessing the crime we have been cleansed of it. This avowal that is also a redemption offers deliverance from all the inhibitory rites, structures that paradoxically enough (as for the obsessive-compulsive who multiplies symbolic rituals and tricks in order to avoid acting) protect from avowal and make it impossible. Thus Jewish rites would be symptoms of denial and resistance in the Freudian sense of the terms.51 Circumcision would be the act of separation that fundamentally excludes the Jewish people from the universalization enabled by avowal, a universality of mimetic representation consecrated through the Christic epiphany that universal avowal brings about. Thus in his interpretation of Paul in Moses and Monotheism, Freud is Pauline insofar as he sees being Jewish as a resistance to the universal construed as resistance to mimetic avowal: In its full form, this reproach would run: “they will not admit that they killed God, whereas we do and are cleansed from the guilt of it.” Then it is easy to understand what truth lies behind this reproach. Why the Jews were unable to participate in the progress which this confession to the murder of God betokened (in spite of all its distortion) might well be the subject of a special investigation. Through this they have, so to speak, shouldered a tragic guilt. They have been made to suffer severely for it.52

It is in this context that we may understand Freud’s thoroughly abominable stigmatization of the Jewish religion as a “fossil.”53 The cult of confession is homogenous with the mimetic universe, the universal as the universe of the Same, the flight from the symbolic marking of difference, the abandonment of the letter, the merging into oneness, and the pronouncement that there is “neither Jew nor Greek.” This cult is problematic. While it offers the promise of a unanimous universal, Paul has to assign it a place with respect to the letter of the Jewish universe and to the wisdom of the Greek world. “Madness” then becomes the sole word that can name the space of unanimous delirium (what Lacan calls a “slight psychotic evasion”54) around the sole remaining sign, the cross, which becomes a sign of madness.55 What distinguishes

92  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” the cross as sign from the Jewish sign is its absolute ambivalence. Before being a Christic sign it was a Roman sign, a sign of world domination. It is made to signify its contrary as happens in a perverse universe or at least at the juncture between perversion and sublimation. This perspective may allow us to appreciate the gnostic escape routes that have been traditionally seen as running through Paul. Lacan, who lauded circumcision, characterized the Christic cross as the “apotheosis of sadism.”56 It seems to me that Jewish thought has been permanently affected by the selfassurance with which the Christianity has presented the universal as the expression of its world. Modern European and especially French philosophy has taken from the Jewish world teachings capable of maintaining another notion of the universal, an alternative to the one propagated by the West. Thus it has avoided regression to the skeptical or nihilistic position offered by cultural relativism as a doctrine. But the imperative of the universal has not always generated as much interest in the Jewish intellectual world or at its periphery. Thus for Adorno the transition from the Jewish henotheistic form of God to a universal form is a fundamental regression. Adorno thereby opposes the One of henotheism to the universal in the following meanings: extends to the entire earth, applies to the whole universe, is translatable as “entire.” What Adorno does here is problematic insofar as he permits construing the idea of the universal as something incompatible with Jewish thought. Compare Levinas, who sees universality, a figure for totality and impersonality, as a form of “inhumanity”57 and who seeks out in Judaism whatever can transgress impersonal universality. Woman is thus one example that goes against it. Pointing out the tyrannical character of the universal is practically an obsession for Levinas. He returns to it at the end of Totality and Infinity, where he situates the “I,” subjectivity, as a “useless” agency in opposition to the universal.58 Subjectivity is defined as that which is “added” to the universal, which in principle tolerates no admixture59 and therefore makes subjectivity into its first victim. Levinas, construing the invisible as “the offense universal history inflicts on the particulars”60 here encounters Kierkegaard, for whom the universal is humanity’s smile concealing the individual subject’s despair.61 We have to choose between Adorno and Levinas here. Is the universal a concept that the West has corrupted so thoroughly—metaphysically, politically, and ethically—that it need be abandoned? To say so might well amount to an admission of defeat, a refusal to engage in confrontation, a retreat marked by bitterness. It could be better to think along the lines Jean-Claude Milner has developed, especially in Le Juif de savoir (The knowledge-driven Jew).62 There Milner rejects the Western monopoly on the universal and reclaims it for Jewish thought, offering the idea of a difficult universal that stands in opposition to the easy universal of post-Pauline thought. The status of Paul thus changes, becoming more

Saint Paul among the Moderns  |  93 a point of contradiction between Jewish and European thought than a founder of the latter. Freud, in turn, far from appearing as a victim of Christian contagion, becomes the author of a “Jewish book at a singular moment of Jewish history.”63 Everything is overturned. This may well be what Paul urges us to do: contradict our ways of thinking, question ourselves ceaselessly, remain restless. That is why I began this essay with a question: “Who is competent to speak of Paul of Tarsus nowadays?”

Notes 1. Jean-Michel Rey, Paul ou les ambiguïtés (Paris: Olivier, 2008). 2. It would be worthwhile to trace this recent emergence of Paul onto the European intellectual scene. Reconsideration of the links between Althusser and Father Stanislas Breton would be a necessary part of that enterprise. (Stanislas Breton [1912–2005] was a Christian philosopher who taught at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.—Trans.) 3. According to the first epistle to the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18), the Second Coming was to take place during Paul’s lifetime. Elsewhere, as in Romans 13:1, which we shall soon consider, there is no question of its imminent occurrence. 4. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 52. 5. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 53. (Alexandre Kojève [1902–1968], Franco-Russian exegete of Hegel.—Trans.) 6. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 13. 7. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 33. 8. “As soon as any symbolic system is formed, straightaway it is, de jure, a universal as such” (Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 33). 9. Althusser, For Marx, 183, 188. 10. Althusser, For Marx, 229. 11. Althusser, For Marx, 183. 12. Althusser, For Marx, 183. 13. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 219–34. 14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 166–67. 15. Lévi-Strauss, View from Afar, 7. 16. Lévi-Strauss, View from Afar, 23–24. 17. Jean-Claude Milner, “Une conversation sur l’universel,” Cahiers d’Études Lévinassiennes 6 (2007): 83. 18. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 21. Nonetheless, Lévi-Strauss does not always remain so daring. As Lacan notes, Lévi-Strauss, sensing that the symbolic always implies a form of transcendence, pulls away from the structural oppositions that he himself uncovered. In a certain sense, Lévi-Strauss became a positivist, indubitably out of fear lest the structural endeavor lead to a reactivation of Jewish thought. On this question, see Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 33–34, and my Louis Althusser, un sujet sans procès (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 112n2.

94  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” 19. Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 33–34. 20. Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 666. 21. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 2008), 209. 22. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 145. 23. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 138. 24. Levinas expresses the same idea: “To proclaim the universality of God in consciousness, to think that everything is consummated while the peoples that tear one another to pieces belie this universality in fact, is not only to prepare the irreligion of a Voltaire, but is to shock reason itself. Interiority cannot replace universality” (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969], 241). 25. The importance of resurrection for Paul does not erase what he calls the “stumbling block of the cross” (Galatians 5:11)—an obstacle to which Badiou seems quite unaware. Thus he is unlike Pascal, who is truly Pauline in this regard. A source of wonderment remains regarding how and why Badiou’s numerous disciples have not questioned their master’s cognitive investment in the “fable” (his word) of resurrection (Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003], 4–6). 26. I allude here to the well-known Marxian analogy which likens ideology to what happens in a pinhole camera: “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology [Moscow: Progress, 1976], 42). 27. In this regard, see my article “L’usage des noms: Shoah de Claude Lanzmann,” Le Débat 162 (2010): 152–61. 28. See, for example, the many fragments of Pascal’s Thoughts (such as those numbered 670 and 683 in Léon Brunschvicg’s reckoning) where the opposition between letter and spirit is articulated with that between flesh and spirit. I speak of “doxa” because Pascal (obviously unlike Paul) does not seem to know that Hebrew scripture already preached “circumcision of the heart”: Moses relates God’s words as follows: “Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer” (Deuteronomy 10:16). 29. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (Letchworth, U.K.: Hogarth, 1939), 141. 30. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 95. 31. Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, 96. 32. Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, 96. 33. Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, 96. Contrarily, Freud wrote that castration “reminds [others] of the dreaded castration idea”: “Circumcision is the symbolical substitute of castration, a punishment which the primaeval father dealt his sons long ago out of the fulness of his power” (Moses and Monotheism, 147, 192). 34. Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, 96, 97. 35. Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, 97. 36. Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, 97. 37. In this regard, see René Lévy, “Paul de Tarse: Le Reste, figure de l’universel,” Cahiers d’Études Lévinassiennes 6 (2007): 277–92; and Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 138–39. 38. As biblical exegete Michel Léturmy has noted with respect to Romans, “Paul’s Christian is assured of salvation only by merging body and soul into the unanimity of the group” (La Bible: Nouveau Testament, trans. Jean Grosjean and Michel Léturmy [Paris: Pléiade, 1971], 452).

Saint Paul among the Moderns  |  95 39. Nonetheless, anxiety torments Paul in his innermost being: “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart” (Romans 9:2). We note in passing that several campaigns against circumcision have emerged in the United States. Likewise, the question cropped up in the violent conflict I had with Badiou regarding Israel. At a talk I gave at the École des Hautes Études in Paris, on Badiou and the Jewish question, his friend and co-author Cécile Winter passed out a tract titled “The Banner of the West,” where the promotion of circumcision in Africa as a measure against AIDS was denounced as a “campaign in the interest of the West”— and by the West, of course, the Jews were clearly meant. 40. Freud associates circumcision with the uncanny (Moses and Monotheism, 147). 41. Lacan, Écrits, 413. 42. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 98–99. 43. Consider, for example, Lacan’s notion that the prohibition on lying includes lying as the very condition of subjectivity. The passage from animal concealment to lying entails another locus: that of the Other (Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 100–101). Levinas develops the same idea when he writes, “The condition for theoretical truth and error is the word of the other, his expression, which every lie already presupposes” (Totality and Infinity, 51). See my Pourquoi le vingtième siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux? (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 197–98. 44. Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 116. 45. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 70. 46. Barthes, Empire of Signs, 102, 99. 47. Barthes, Empire of Signs, 102. 48. Roland Barthes, Oeuvres complètes III, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 435. 49. On these points, see René Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001). 50. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 213. This passage is strange in that Freud writes, “it was, nevertheless, in the mind of a Jew . . . ,” as though he could transfer onto the Jews what he defines as a break from Judaism, as though Freud were giving to Paul the Jewishness he denied Moses. 51. Freud speaks of the Jews as “denying their act,” and adds this strange phrase: “The poor Jewish people, who with its usual stiff-necked obduracy continued to deny the murder of their ‘father’” (Moses and Monotheism, 143, 145). 52. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 215. 53. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 143. 54. Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, 96. 55. 1 Corinthians 1:18–25. 56. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 322. 57. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 46. 58. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 242. 59. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 242. 60. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 247. 61. Thus we elaborate Kierkegaard’s idea, quoted by Taubes, according to which universal history that celebrates the present hides individual despair. Kierkegaard goes on to say: “They fear if they were to become individually existing persons, they would disappear without a trace, so that even the daily paper would [not] give them a second look, let alone literary reviews and the speculative thinkers of world history” (quoted in Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009], 174–75). 62. Jean-Claude Milner, Le Juif de savoir (Paris: Grasset, 2006). 63. Milner, Le Juif de savoir, 137.

4

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception Guantánamo and Auschwitz

G

iorgio Agamben’s book State of Exception—whose title is almost identical with François Saint-Bonnet’s book L’état d’exception (The state of exception),1 from which he borrows much information on various bygone juridico-political theories—may be read as a long exposition of different ways the law has avoided facing the question of its own suspension or even annulment in the name of political expediency. Nonetheless, deploying his erudition, Agamben sets himself a specific “aim,”2 which is to consider the “exception,” the “state of exception,” as the global norm, the planetary regime, the permanent rule governing Western political reality. Agamben’s exposition of myriad theories of the state of exception is long and meandering. In this regard, one might simply be tempted to refer the reader to his article with the same title, published in Le Monde on December 12, 2002.3 It presents the substance of his argument, expressed in more cautious terms, and does not run so far afield as the book. However, the article alone would fail to let us in on what is truly at stake in the book, philosophically and politically. Thus one has to wade through pages recounting legal and political debates among German, French, and Italian jurists to get to Agamben’s main point, which could be expressed in a mere article or a very slender volume. The length and tortuousness of the book are due not only to its reviewing multiple theories that differ little one from the other. Its construction is odd as well. Expositions of material often stop midstream to wander back and forth between references to Carl Schmitt and Roman law. At no moment do these circumvolutions seem part of an interpretive methodology. Thus not only are we exasperated by the numerous synopses of legal theories; we are mystified by his need to go to and fro in time, to take two steps forward and one back. The book’s expanse and indirectness are ultimately traceable to two shortcomings on Agamben’s part. He cannot get beyond his initial thesis, which is that no satisfactory theory accounts for the state of exception because that state is located at the border between law and politics. Further, he is unable to move beyond an obsessive question: “If the state of exception’s characteristic property

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception | 97 is a (total or partial) suspension of the juridical order, how can such a suspension still be contained within it?”4 The question is obviously sophistic in that it assumes a rule is logically incapable of accounting for exceptions, but it is essential to Agamben’s demonstrating over and again, ad nauseam, that the exception dominates law and not vice versa; the exception is supposedly the unacknowledged reality on which law is based, so that law actually has no basis. However, the state of exception is by no means a logical contradiction within law itself, but attests simply to an objective contradiction regarding the circumstances into which the law may be placed— which is not the same thing. To critique this book properly, there is no need to belabor pointless discussions, apparently scholarly in nature, of various Greek and Roman laws, which give Agamben a chance to take idle aim at “the usual philological myopia.”5 Neither would it be worth our while to determine with microscopic precision whether he accurately sets out theories devised by Santi Romano, Biscaretti, or Carré de Malberg. They are not very relevant and serve a purely decorative purpose. Rather, we shall discuss just two aspects of the book: the summary of a major essay by Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”;6 and the concrete examination of a contemporary case to which the state of exception applies: that of the prisoners at Guantánamo. * * * Walter Benjamin’s name emerges in chapter 4 of the book, which addresses two interpretations of the question of exception in ancient Rome. Agamben summarizes just one aspect of Benjamin’s text, which proposes a typology of violence that differentiates among violence that founds law, violence that maintains law, and violence beyond law—pure, revolutionary violence. The violence Benjamin wished to detach from law was seen as included by Schmitt within law precisely by virtue of its exclusion. The disagreement is clear between Benjamin, who wanted to free violence from law, and Schmitt, who strove to maintain its connection with law. Thus Schmitt could not accept that the suspension of the Weimar Constitution did not yield a new constitution, despite his efforts to produce the bases for it. Benjamin thus appears as the apologist of a pure violence, pure in the sense that it would never be the means to an end, but would be pure expression and manifestation, undoing the link between law and violence. It would be a violence that acts and manifests itself in a pure way.7 Such violence would bring about “a deactivation and inactivity” of law, and open a ludic, emancipatory era, a quasiutopian stage in which, as Agamben extrapolates from Benjamin’s thought, “one day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.”8

98  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Indeed, the book could have ended right there, since this neo-Benjaminian thesis is re‑announced triumphantly in its final paragraph. But the main verb there is in the conditional, probably because a utopian future tense would have seemed a bit ridiculous coming from Agamben: “To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end.”9 The adjective “pure” is indeed borrowed from Benjamin, but the hyperbolic abuse of it by Agamben leads us to suggest he consider the numerous ironic exegeses of the word that Althusser offers us in his posthumous autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever.10 Agamben’s reading of Benjamin’s essay is weak, very weak, for several reasons. First of all, it disregards a certain number of paradoxical passages that might cloud his thesis. Agamben’s unilateralism would have a hard time dealing with Benjamin’s assertion that the right to strike, insofar as it is acknowledged by the state and legalized, belongs to the realm of law: “Today organized labor is, apart from the state, probably the sole legal subject entitled to exercise violence.”11 Likewise, Agamben would find it difficult to account for Benjamin’s view of opposition to the death penalty: an attack on capital punishment is an attack on the very origin of law, since the death penalty does not punish transgression but bestows power on law.12 This last example is particularly instructive insofar as the death penalty has been abolished in Western Europe and many American states; indeed, its abrogation is a requisite for any country applying to join the European Union. This fact would obviously counter Agamben’s obsessive idea that the West lives under the reign of the state of exception. But there is more than this blindness regarding details at the seams of Benjamin’s thought. Agamben likewise ignores the importance of Benjamin’s references to the Nietzschean anarchist Georges Eugène Sorel (1847–1922), who distinguished between the general strike, social-democratic in nature, and the “proletarian general strike” of the revolutionary type.13 Only the social-­ democratic general strike is characterized as violent insofar as it maintains the violence of the state and law by simply substituting one set of masters (social democrats) for another (free-market capitalists). However, the second type, the proletarian general strike, is dubbed “a pure means,” “nonviolent” in the sense that work is not to be resumed after concessions are made; instead, work is to be completely transformed and not imposed by the state.14 Benjamin goes even further than Sorel, by asserting that any strike that provides the basis for rights is violent in its use of blackmail, blockades, and hostage-taking, and thus is distinguished from the nonviolence of the proletarian strike. The “violence” of the proletarian strike is nonviolent because it lies outside juridical violence, which either founds or preserves law and which is the sole violence in Benjamin’s eyes.

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception | 99 Agamben thus misses the essential point that something lies outside violence and law (insofar as they are identifiable), which Benjamin calls “pure means” and is precisely nonviolent. Only later in the essay does Benjamin speak of “pure violence,”15 but there too it is systematically described in terms of nonviolence. It is with regard to the idea of pure means that Benjamin then defines action as changing the relationship between ends and means and portrays it as pure “manifestation.”16 And in this way Benjamin is a metaphysician—a fact that Agamben never enables us to understand—for Benjamin defines a metaphysical essence of law that makes it the twin sister of violence, for which ends themselves, whatever they be, are intimately linked to violence in a necessary and internal manner. He is also a metaphysician in that for him law—and the original violence associated with it—are but the eternal form of the privileges enjoyed by the powerful. This metaphysical essence—and this is the main point—makes the violence of law the sole real violence. Agamben misses this essential point because this development through Sorel and the example of class struggle leads Benjamin to the acrobatics he performs so well, which are the secret behind all true dialectics but which Agamben does not let us see. Benjamin arrives at a purely Jewish definition of this something “outside the law,”17 this “outside” of violence. Agamben’s omission is all the more stupefying as he had previously called Benjamin a “Jewish philosopher,”18 despite the caution generally employed in making such a classification. What meaning could we give to that label in a commentary that spirits away all reference to the second buttressing point of Benjamin’s essay, the exegesis of a passage from the Old Testament (Numbers 16:1–25), the story of Korach, which will be erected as a paradigm of antilaw and antiviolence?19 This mythical violence on which the law is based, which posits fault, demands expiation, and is threatening and blood drenched, stands in opposition to God’s violence, pure and immediate, destructive of law, limitlessly destructive. It strikes and simultaneously washes fault away. On what does Benjamin base this notion of pure violence that is self-exclusionary and at the basis of violence? On its being “never absolutely [destructive] with regard to the soul of the living,” even as it may annihilate “goods, right, life.”20 Moreover, and perhaps most of all, Benjamin finds within the everlasting Mosaic prohibition on murder, and thus within Jewish Law, the very model of a righteous pronouncement21 that he situates in a paradigm totally opposite to that of natural law or positive law, which are believed to be heirs to it and therefore serve as the basis for the bad violence of law.22 Jewish Law (Loi) is not law (droit), for “Thou shalt not kill” is in no way a judgment or an article of law but rather a pronouncement: “a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it.”23 We

100  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” see here from what heights Benjamin speaks to us and from what place: the desert, as did Abraham or Moses, but also from the here and now of any human decision, and thus always in the solitude of a verbal exchange with the divine, that is to say, in the solitude of an exchange with language itself. To define the actual status of the “divine” in Benjamin’s works from 1920 and 1921, I would have to go far beyond my remarks here.24 It will suffice to recall how Benjamin inscribes verbal exchange together with an ethical decision linked to language, insofar as language is a space inaccessible to violence.25 This is a fundamental point because Benjamin, in the last paragraphs of his essay, returns precisely to the hic et nunc, the political situation of Germany in 1920–1921, which saw something Agamben fails to mention: the bloody putdown of the proletarian revolution by the social-democratic state. In terms that foreshadow those of Georges Bataille, Benjamin writes that divine violence, which is never a “means” but always a “sign and seal,” can be called “sovereign.”26 Yet he declares, with cautiousness Talmudic in nature, that it is “less possible and also less urgent for humankind . . . to decide when pure violence has been realized in particular cases . . . because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men.”27 Ultimately, through the very assumption of this “pure,” “divine,” and “revolutionary” violence,28 Benjamin seems to call for demolition of the hidden, mythical, and mystifying violence of law, and reliance upon pure violence to de‑activate and reveal the sole real violence, that of law, which is the violence of the established order. He appears to be silently demonstrating that the essence of Jewish Law qua pronouncement is the transgression of all order, that is to say, of all violence. We may well be astonished that Agamben fails to mention Benjamin’s Hebraic model for pure violence. Instead, he paints pure violence with utopic hues vaguely reminiscent of those we find in Deleuze, Foucault, or Althusser in his last period. It is well worth focusing on this inrush of Scripture into Benjamin’s writing. It behooves us to appreciate the hermeneutic, inspirational, and fundamentally eschatological potency of divine pronouncement within Jewish tradition. So why does Agamben call Benjamin a “Jewish philosopher”29 when alluding to his admiration for Schmitt, “the fascist public law theorist,”30 even as he silences the properly Jewish dimension of Benjamin’s thought? * * * Agamben’s concealment of any analysis inspired by Hebrew Scripture in Benjamin’s work can hardly be called insignificant. This absence is in consonance with the most memorable assertion in Agamben’s book. Regarding the status of 680 Taliban held prisoner on the U.S. base at Guantánamo, he writes: “The only thing to which it could possibly be compared is the legal situation of the Jews in

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception | 101 the Nazi Lager [camps], who, along with their citizenship, had lost every legal identity, but at least retained their identity as Jews.”31 The statement is strange in more ways than one, for we can hardly say whether it should be contested because of its naïveté or its obscenity. The oddness is immediately apparent in the last words, “at least retained their identity as Jews,” but one can barely begin to suspect how unfathomable this blunder of Agamben’s is. One’s first reaction simply concerns superficial aspects of the statement. For example, in what way have the imprisoned Taliban been deprived of their identity as Taliban, Afghans, Saudis, Australians, Muslims? Contrarily, one wonders by what means Jews in Auschwitz kept their identity and wherein consisted this rare privilege. However, re-reading the assertion allows us to sound the chasm into which absence of thought can hurl philosophical discourse: indeed, Jews in the Lager “retained their identity” since that was the very reason for which they were being exterminated. They were sent to gas chambers and reduced to ashes in ovens precisely insofar as their identity as Jews was vouchsafed in accordance with innumerable procedures (genealogical investigation, identificatory crosschecking, antisemitic insanity of all kinds that led to measuring skulls, noses, and feet, as well as pulling down men’s and boys’ pants to see if they were circumcised). Contrarily, it is to be noted—positively—that prisoners in Guantánamo are not so lucky as to savor the privilege whereby their identity would be defined by their jailors. This is because such a privilege can result only from its being the sole reason for their imprisonment. In fact, those detained at Guantánamo do not “retain their identity” as Agamben sees it, since it is not as Muslims or Arabs that they have been imprisoned. Rather, it is due to their having been caught weapons in hand in the course of a conflict, a violent military combat, a war ignited by the September 11 attacks. Thus one should be glad that unlike that of Jews at Auschwitz their identity is not vouchsafed by their status as prisoners. On the plane of law, this is exactly what distinguishes a democratic state from a totalitarian one: the fact that an exceptional measure such as the American government’s authorizing detention of prisoners without being charged in no way transgresses the metaphysical foundation of Western law. Rather, such a legal system differentiates between a person’s identity and the reasons for which he or she has been imprisoned. Thus Agamben shows beyond the shadow of a doubt his incomprehension of Auschwitz. Through this blunder32 of his he betrays his belief that Jews could keep their identity as Jews despite their incarceration, whereas it is because they kept their identity as Jews in Auschwitz itself that they were to be exterminated there. The impossibility of losing one’s identity as a Jew in Auschwitz is the very reason for one’s death, and that fact alone tells you everything essential about Auschwitz.

102  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Other oddities afflict Agamben’s prose. For example, what dictates his use of the term Lager, which means “camp” in German? It functions here as a euphemism, used instead of “extermination camp.” No doubt he employs the term lest otherwise the absurdity of comparing those detained at Guantánamo and the Jews at Auschwitz jump off the pages. Using the word Lager is a diversionary tactic. Indeed, one can say, literally speaking, that those at Guantánamo are in a camp—or Lager in German. Also quite surprising is the hyperbole that starts the sentence in question: “The only thing to which [Guantánamo] could possibly be compared.” Really? Is there no other example in human history of combatants imprisoned without being charged? Is Auschwitz the only imaginable simile? The situation of 680 prisoners at Guantánamo is incommensurable with that of millions of Jews in Nazi extermination camps. However, to become overly scandalized at the shocking comparison would simply play into its pure perversity. Shortly after the appearance of his book in France, Le Monde published on its first page an op‑ed by Agamben titled “No to Biopolitical Tattooing.”33 There he compared the fingerprinting of foreign visitors performed by U.S. immigration services to the tattooing of those arriving at Auschwitz. Agamben threatened to cancel the course he was to teach at New York University if such a measure continued to be enforced. No comment. * * * The legal standpoint Agamben exploits to outrageous ends in order to undermine it all the better allows him to characterize the Third Reich as “a state of exception that lasted twelve years.”34 He does so on the basis of a decree of February 28, 1933, which he scrupulously avoids analyzing in detail and which suspended the articles of the Weimar constitution relative to personal freedoms. Beyond the little import such a description possesses (since it defines totalitarianism in purely legal terms), this gesture allows Agamben to lump together all kinds of situations in order to draw parallels between Bush’s America and Hitler’s Germany. Insofar as he defines the Nazi state as one of exception solely because it suspended particular articles of its constitution, any such suspension of law by a democratic state—even if it not be technically declared in those terms—allows him, legally speaking, to consider it in the same light. Indeed, Agamben’s entire purpose is to posit structural similarities between democratic and totalitarian states that are no less disingenuous than his comparing Guantánamo and Auschwitz. This sleight of hand employs pseudo-historical genealogies that make the state of exception into a creation of the “democratic-revolutionary tradition,” a lexical hybrid all the stranger for its use to characterize both the Napoleonic Consulate (because of an article of the Constitution of Year VIII of the French Revolution) and Empire (as evidenced by a decree of 1811).35 Such sham genealogy—which

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception | 103 purports to trace as well the background of laws of exception enacted during World War I, article XVI of the French Fifth Republic’s constitution that gives full powers to the president in times of crisis,36 and the U.S. president’s status as commander-in-chief of the army37—allows Agamben to assert that the state of exception is the regime the West has lived under ever since absolute monarchy was abolished and republics and democracies were put into place.38 Identifying democracy with totalitarianism, Agamben can view as a sole legal sequence the period in France starting with the legislative granting of full powers to Pétain in 1940 through the Fifth Republic of today. Likewise, he can write that Hitler’s rise to power is “impossible to understand” unless one analyzes the way article 48 of the Weimar constitution was used and abused from 1919 to 1933.39 This equating of democracy and totalitarianism is possible only because it matters not to Agamben whether suspension of law is partial or total, temporary or permanent.40 If temporariness and permanence, the part and the whole, are all the same, one can see how the Nazi state and the United States should be analyzed together. Thus regarding the American combat against terrorism, Agamben is able to write: “At the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize it has entirely lost the principles that found it.”41 It would be intriguing to find out what political and cultural realities are concealed under the mellifluous label “different traditions and cultures” and surprising to find out that the West has lost its founding principles since Agamben has already proved to us that the rule of law is a myth.42 Pushing his arguments even further, Agamben writes that “in the urgency of the state of exception ‘in which we live’”43 the machinery at whose center is found the state of exception “has continued to function almost without interruption from World War One, through fascism and National Socialism, and up to our own time. Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment.”44 It is already apparent that the weapon Agamben uses to merge democratic and totalitarian states is the legal fiction to which he claims to confine himself in order the better to subvert it. But that self-limitation leads him to absurd positions such as defining totalitarianism as a state of exception, as the suspension of the rule of law, of which the best example is Nazi Germany. Agamben can hardly be unaware that the Soviet Union endowed itself with a meticulously formal constitution that most jurists saw as guaranteeing civil rights; it was ratified on November 26, 1936, at the precise moment when repression entered its most extreme phase.45 Nor could Agamben escape knowing that in order to implement mass terror, the Soviet Union felt no need to declare a state of exception. And even though Agamben may see exceptional laws as equivalent to the state of exception, it is possible to argue that decreeing or legislatively passing exceptional

104  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” laws—such as French antiriot laws of the 1970s, the French law against Holocaust denial, or Bush’s military order—proves their status as exceptions, as partial and temporary measures. It guarantees the maintenance of constitutional law, affirming once more the proverbial wisdom according to which the exception proves the rule.46 Thus prolongation of the Patriot Act issued after the September 11 attacks was confirmed by Senate vote on March 2, 2006. (The Patriot Act is an exceptional law in the sense that it is subject to periodic review by a democratically elected legislature in order to remain in force.) The Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, Albanian, Rumanian, North Korean examples that Agamben never seriously considers makes short order of a supposed continuity between democratic and totalitarian states.47 The Bolshevik coup d’état of October 1917—like the Nazi one several years later—shows that a totalitarian state cares not about the means granted to it by the rule of law and those who more or less lucidly would uphold it. Rather, it always operates in accordance with procedures deriving from the violence governing its onset and positing an absolute historical and legal break with prior rule of law. The legal fiction to which Agamben confines himself with such relish leads him to sweep away scornfully any arguments—such as the presence of a state of necessity or emergency—that democracy may use or abuse in order temporarily to suspend a particular constitutionally guaranteed right or authorize police actions contrary to its own laws (such as in the case of extrajudicial executions of terrorists by Israel). Thus Agamben can suggest an equivalence between 680 combatants seized in Afghanistan and six million unarmed children, women, and male civilians murdered during the Nazi campaign of extermination. In this case as well, Agamben neglects a fundamental aspect of the question revealed by the U.S. Congressional report on the September 11 attacks. We learn there that besides the lack of professionalism on the part of U.S. surveillance forces— something that shows how relative the American role may be in the global state of exception—part of the blame for allowing terrorists to escape the FBI’s radar and commit mass murder could be laid at the door of scrupulous application by the police of constitutional guarantees. Thus, among other examples, we may cite the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, detained because of visa irregularities on August 16. Though authorities had infinite reasons to suspect he was about to commit a largescale act of terror, the crime for which he was charged did not provide sufficient legal basis to have all his personal belongings searched.48 Thus, while American measures of surveillance, of detention of Taliban, of reinforced cross-checking may, of course, be criticized for dangers they may pose to citizens’ rights, they do not correspond to the picture Agamben paints of them with his broad brush. Moreover, it is astonishing that Agamben—who claims to be guided by Foucault’s reasoning on “biopolitics,” quotes generously from him and borrows so many of his concepts—neglects the fact that the latter had in his 1978–1979

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception | 105 lecture series titled The Birth of Biopolitics49 severely critiqued the idea of a continuity between the democratic state and the fascist state. His purpose was to dissipate misunderstanding of his celebrated 1975–1976 series of lectures, Society Must Be Defended, on the technologies of domination that indeed are present in the functioning of the modern state, especially concerning what he termed “biopower.”50 In 1980, Foucault went further to clear up confusion. While it is true, he said, that “concentration camps” were “a British invention,” that fact in no way “authorize[s] the notion that Britain was a totalitarian country,” for “there exists a relative, nonabsolute, autonomy of the techniques of power.”51 For Foucault, the very idea of a “continuity or genetic kinship” between different forms of the state leads to “an increasing interchangeability of analyses” and subsequently to a “loss of specificity.”52 Foreshadowing Agamben’s merging of categories, Foucault ironically imagined a theoretician who would put social security and concentration camps on the same plane.53 His work bespeaks prescient condemnation of Agamben’s enterprise and neo-far-left radicality in general. Such strategies, he wrote, end up leading to a “general disqualification by the worst,” and he denounces their “great fantasy of the paranoiac and devouring state.”54 More importantly still, Foucault demonstrated the profound gap separating authoritarian and democratic states, which have no common form, genealogy, or origin. Contrarily and paradoxically, the totalitarian state is not characterized by an endogenous intensification of state mechanisms but rather by their limitation and lessening to the benefit of a governing party.55 * * * It would be ignoble to continue here to use Foucault’s brilliant work simply to disqualify Agamben’s reasoning. Indeed, one could easily refute his quibbling arguments one by one, but there would be no purpose in launching into such discussion. It is clear that Agamben employs outrageous statements that convince no one, not even himself. His sole concern is to fit his ideas into the radical analytical grid that seems to have become indispensable to a European intellectual wishing to gain influence. Or actually, in Agamben’s case, it may be pure dandyism that dictates this proliferation of hyperbolic prophecies of “global civil war” to which the state of exception is leading us.56 He offers rudimentary, massive analogies superimposed on erudition worthy of a would-be authoritative thinker, a rhetoric displaying formal hallmarks of intellectual rigor, a style that with maniacal exactitude engages in all the instinctual reflexes of the latest theoretical hobbyhorses. Though a thorough critique of such radicality may no longer be necessary, Agamben’s book gives us the chance to bring two of its aspects into clear view. The first involves two steps. Step one is to admit the failure of the communist enterprise exemplified by the Soviet Union. Step two is to pay it no further heed,57

106  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” even though the concept of the totalitarian state would allow numerous instructive comparisons such as historians have been offering for a decade. Though nothing can be salvaged from the Soviet and communist Chinese experiments, Agamben fails to admit the consequences of such a catastrophe for a simple reason: he subscribes to the political model on which they were based, which is terror. “Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law. . . .”58 Such is what Agamben sees as the real catastrophe, which can only mean that he is in favor of a return to politics not restrained by law—which is terror. But does Agamben really want that? It is true, as we have noted, that Agamben speaks of action so pure that it would be “a pure means, which shows only itself”59—which is just a paraphrase of Benjamin’s discourse on pure violence. Nonetheless, one gets the impression that this vague phraseology, this purity Agamben so often calls for, are but clumsy masks for something quite different, saving him from having to acknowledge his nostalgia for an epically bloody reign of terror. Suspicion in this regard is aroused not only by the silence he keeps on the communist debacle that remains unanalyzed. There is also his indulgence of totalitarian terrorism that he smoothes over as just so many “different traditions and cultures,” apparently pure victims symbolized by 680 prisoners at Guantánamo. Finally, there is the fact that for him the West bears sole responsibility for the “global civil war” of which this terrorism is part. We cannot believe that Agamben is serious when he claims to envision pure action or pure violence as deliverance from order, law, and violence. Rather, such pure violence would simply mean the most terrible, archaic violence when—as Benjamin warns us—it is removed from the divine sphere and the Law as pronouncement. Indeed, in conceptualizing pure violence, Benjamin writes: “If taken to its logical conclusion, it confers on men even lethal power against one another. This, however, cannot be conceded. For the question ‘May I kill?’ meets its irreducible answer in the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”60 Benjamin follows by drawing a remarkable opposition between the Law and laws,61 but all that is missing from Agamben. While invoking and paraphrasing Benjamin, he envisions pure violence in itself, with a fascination for the “pure” and for “violence” that can only end up in terror. For terror is always pure, always archaic, always falls short of the Law. The maniacal enjoyment of violence has now as its emblem the apocalyptical destruction of the Twin Towers. The second aspect of radicality of the type Agamben embraces regards the term “Jews” or “Jewish,” whose occurrence we have noted twice in his book. The first time, “Jewish” qualifies Benjamin;62 the second time “Jews” are made to convey a metaphor for the fate to which are subjected the 680 Taliban at Guantánamo.63 In both cases, the rhetorical process involves denial. The word “Jew” is

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception | 107 used to empty it all the more thoroughly of that to which it refers. Benjamin is called a “Jewish philosopher” while effacing the specifically Jewish dimension of his thought. Yet the notion of pure violence that Agamben so grossly appropriates is incomprehensible when not referred back to Judaism. Likewise, the Jews in the Nazi Lager are brought in—the better to deny the reality of what they went through. This is done by reducing the exception that constituted the rule of their existence to a simple legal situation that would parallel that of the Taliban at Guantánamo. The fact that communism turned out to be catastrophic is paid lip service to and then spirited away. However, the reference to Judaism is invoked not to be ignored subsequently but to be distorted. Two crucial misconstruals characterize such radical philosophers. The first concerns the historical and metaphysical failure of communism, and the second bears upon the Jewish question that reverberated throughout the twentieth century. Short shrift is made of the communist debacle, which is never truly analyzed. The specter of worldwide class struggle that the existence of the Soviet Union infused with excitement for those obsessed with revolution has been replaced by struggles for rights of all sorts. None of these has profound historical meaning, and all serve as decoys deflecting attention from the ever growing appeal possessed by the sole truly global purveyor of terror: radical Islam, for which all kinds of excuses are made, especially whenever Israel is concerned. While not questioning actual extermination of Jews by Nazis, radical philosophy is obsessed with dissolving its uniqueness and secularizing it, in order to make it the equivalent of any other kind of repression. The exemplarity of the Shoah is no longer that of its exceptionality but rather of the banality of the political sphere. Thus in an op-ed he co-authored in Le Monde on December 9, 1997, Badiou compared the procedures for regularizing illegal immigrants, put into place by the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, with the requirement the Vichy government imposed upon Jews to register with the police. The reason? Both cases involved establishing files that could lead to deportation or loss of employment.64 Badiou’s analogizing is of a piece with Agamben’s. Each draws purely formal parallels, devoid of actual relationship to the world except insofar as they obscure the reality of the extermination of six million Jews.65 * * * If for Agamben the sole equivalent to Guantánamo is Auschwitz, how can we understand—other than as maximal irony, tragic and comic at once, of the kind that only reality can deploy—the fact that the Russian “Taliban” held there have appealed extradition to Moscow, citing the “respect” with which they are treated in the American Lager?66 Agamben’s theorization thus appears as a paragon

108  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” of thought chasing its own tail with senescent smugness, capable solely of pronouncements impermeable to anything real. It may well be time to ask: to what indigence of our era do such assertions bear obfuscating and pathetic testimony? The tasks incumbent on the European intellectual can be put very simply. They stand in diametrical opposition to everything a book like Agamben’s undertakes to show.

Notes 1. François Saint-Bonnet, L’état d’exception (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001). 2. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86. 3. This article, translated by Martin Rueff, is the text of a lecture held by Agamben on December 10, 2002, at the University of Paris VII–Diderot, in its Centre Roland-Barthes headed by Julia Kristeva. 4. Agamben, State of Exception, 23. 5. Agamben, State of Exception, 69. 6. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2002), 236–52. The essay originally appeared in 1921. 7. Agamben, State of Exception, 61. 8. Agamben, State of Exception, 64. 9. Agamben, State of Exception, 88. 10. Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, trans. Richard Veasey (New York: New Press, 1993), 170, 215. 11. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 239. 12. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 242. 13. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 246. 14. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 246. 15. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250, 252 (modified as per “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977], II:1: 200, 203). 16. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 246, 248. 17. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. 18. Agamben, State of Exception, 52. 19. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. 20. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. 21. “Righteous pronouncement” translates Marty’s “parole juste,” which designates the divine commandment.—Trans. 22. Though we speak here of Jewish law and Judaism, we acknowledge of course that the tradition was taken up by certain Christians, the most important of whom are Pascal and Péguy. It is necessary to understand in a purely Benjaminian sense Péguy’s well-known statement: “I have such a horror of judgment that I would prefer to condemn a man than to judge him” (Charles Péguy, “Victor-Marie, comte Hugo,” Oeuvres en prose complètes, ed. Robert

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception | 109 Burac [Paris: Pléiade, 1993], 3:325). (Charles Péguy [1873–1914], French Catholic writer and supporter of Dreyfus.—Trans.) 23. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. 24. For an introduction to this major complex question, we can do no better than refer the reader to the chapter on Benjamin in the remarkable book by Pierre Bouretz, Témoins du futur: Philosophie et messianisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 223–99. 25. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 244. 26. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 252. 27. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 252 (modified as per “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” 203). 28. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 252. 29. Agamben, State of Exception, 52. It is true that in a section no longer concerned with “Critique of Violence,” Agamben comments on a letter addressed to Scholem by Benjamin in 1934, as well as on the latter’s essay on Kafka from the same year. There, Agamben maintains that, through Kafka, Benjamin keeps the idea that “the law—no longer practiced, but studied” is the gate to justice because law would then have no force or application (Agamben, State of Exception, 64); see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 139. But the issues Kafka’s work raises regarding law and violence, eminently interpreted by Benjamin, demand their own analysis and cannot serve as an epilogue to questions posed ten years before in “Critique of Violence.” Moreover, they are in no way an “enigmatic image” (Agamben, State of Exception, 63) but are directly linked by Benjamin himself to Talmudic study of the Torah (Benjamin, Illuminations, 121–22, 139). 30. Tiedemann, quoted in Agamben, State of Exception, 52. 31. Agamben, State of Exception, 4. (The bracketed translation “camps” is by Agamben’s translator, not me.—Trans.) 32. I use the word “blunder” (bévue) in a strong sense, the one Lacan gives to the term by using it to designate contradictions—slips of the tongue or other such symptoms—that tragically reveal a kind of truth. 33. Giorgio Agamben, “No to Biopolitical Tattooing,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 201–2. This article originally appeared in Le Monde, January 11–12, 2004. 34. Agamben, State of Exception, 2. 35. Agamben, State of Exception, 4–5. 36. Let us recall that article XVI was invoked only once. (This was done by de Gaulle in 1961, in response to an attempted putsch by French army officers in Algiers.—Trans.) 37. Agamben, State of Exception, 20. 38. Though Agamben tells us that the state of exception “is a creation of the democratic-­ revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one,” he defines the state of exception as a “threshold of indeterminacy [sic]—between democracy and absolutism” (State of Exception, 5, 3). 39. Agamben, State of Exception, 14. Agamben had even gone a little further, writing that “when we study the birth of the s­ o-called dictatorial régimes in Italy and Germany, it is important not to forget this concurrent process that transformed the democratic constitutions between the two world wars” (State of Exception, 13, emphasis added). 40. “If the state of exception’s characteristic property is a (total or partial) suspension of the juridical order . . .” (Agamben, State of Exception, 23). Nonetheless, Agamben, no doubt aware that this assertion is problematic, has already declared the irrelevancy of the temporary character of a particular exceptional measure since “the state of exception has by now become the rule” (State of Exception, 9). Thus Agamben uses a de facto argument (one based on a fact that exists in his eyes alone) to undo a de jure consideration.

110  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” 41. Agamben, State of Exception, 18 (modified as per the French translation, État d’exception, trans. Joël Gayraud [Paris: Seuil, 2003], 35). (The English version [where the passage ends with the words “lost its canon”] follows the original Italian literally [Statto di eccezione (Turin: Bollati Borighieri, 2003), 28]. However, as the French translator shows, canone cannot be meaningfully translated by “canon” in this context.—Trans.) 42. “The idea of an originary indistinction and fullness of power must be considered a legal mythologeme analogous to the idea of a state of nature” (Agamben, State of Exception, 6). 43. Agamben, State of Exception, 86. 44. Agamben, State of Exception, 86–87. 45. Another Soviet constitution, just as liberal, was ratified on October 7, 1977, under Brezhnev. 46. The fragility of such “states of exception” is shown by several Supreme Court rulings, such as that of June 28, 2004, which acknowledged the right of those held to have their detention contested in U.S. courts. The pseudo-tribunals created by the Bush administration in response to this decision were in turn held to be unconstitutional by a federal judge in Washington. All of which shows that there has been no implosion of the law. 47. Agamben attempts to illustrate this thesis by arguing the Weimar Republic segued into the Nazi regime because article 48 of the Weimar constitution stipulated the president could “wholly or partially suspend the fundamental rights” guaranteed in other articles (quoted in Agamben, State of Exception, 14). 48. Part of the relevant report was translated and published by Le Monde, July 26, 2003. 49. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2008). 50. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 243, 253–63. 51. Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 293. 52. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 187–88. 53. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 187–88. 54. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 188. Foucault was well aware of this antiauthoritarian obsession and the puerile “phobia of the state” (Birth of Biopolitics, 187 [modified as per the original (Naissance de la biopolitique [Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004], 193)]). As early as 1977, he deplored such attitudes in an interview on state security (Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert and François Eward [Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001], 2:386–87). 55. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 190–91. Regarding differences among forms of governance, see Foucault, Power, especially 471–72. 56. Agamben, State of Exception, 87. 57. Thus Agamben applies historian Ernst Kantorowicz’s theory of the “king’s two bodies” to Hitler and Mussolini (State of Exception, 83–84), without any mention of Mao or Stalin. 58. Agamben, State of Exception, 88. 59. Agamben, State of Exception, 88. 60. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. 61. Following the terms used in the published English translation, one may say that the distinction is between Law as divine “commandment” and laws as “criteri[a] for judgment” (Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250).—Trans. 62. Agamben, State of Exception, 52. 63. Agamben, State of Exception, 4. 64. Alain Badiou, Sylvain Lazarus, and Natacha Michel, “Une France pour tous,” Le Monde, December 9, 1997.

On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception | 111 65. “How can we characterize these procedures the government has put into place? They are a combination of mendacity and of classification. And whatever may be the differences regarding the consequences, it cannot be denied that they follow the tradition established by the Vichy government, when it summoned Jews to register as such in police precincts” (Badiou et al., “Une France pour tous”; emphasis added). The differences between the registration of Jews demanded by the Vichy government and the procedures for legalizing illegal immigrants do not only concern the “consequences” of the two practices. Badiou, an accomplished logician fascinated by Lacan, has often enough demonstrated that the effects of an act constitute its very genesis. The differences here concern the practices themselves. Vichy summoned Jews to register themselves as Jews, that is to say, it identified them by race. The Jospin government procedure classified individuals according to the situation in which they found themselves by having infringed a law: illegal residency. From a legal viewpoint, what is scandalous about the first case is precisely what Badiou and his co-authors note without apparently understanding what they say: the fact that the Jews were summoned “to register as such.” Thus, like the discriminatory laws that were already in place, this new requirement was contrary to basic democratic principles. 66. “I am treated well, with respect.” Quoted by Sophie Shihab, “Des ‘talibans’ russes détenus à Guantanamo refusent d’être extradés vers Moscou,” Le Monde, August 14, 2003.

5

Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel

I

n a 1976 interview in Le Monde, Michel Foucault vehemently denounced “the shameful UN resolution” equating Zionism with racism, which the General Assembly passed on November 10, 1975.1 Foucault’s position stands out for several reasons, not least of all because such declarations by philosophers, made with respect to current events, are rare. But its particular significance poses a question as well. To what aspect of his teaching may we relate this very clear statement on his part? Perhaps we need look no further than Foucault’s experience teaching at the University of Tunis. There, during the Six-Day War, he witnessed pro-Palestinian demonstrations that generated into antisemitic riots. This is what he wrote to fellow philosopher Georges Canguilhem on June 7, 1967: Last Monday we had here a day (a half-day) of pogrom. It was far worse than reported in Le Monde—at least fifty fires. A hundred and fifty or two hundred shops—the poorest, of course—were ransacked, the age-old sight of a ransacked synagogue, carpets dragged into the streets, trampled, and burned, people running through the streets, taking refuge in a building the crowd wanted to set on fire. And since then—silence, the metal curtains down, no one, or almost no one, in the quarter, children playing with broken trinkets. The government’s reaction was quick and firm, apparently sincere. But it [the violence] was obviously organized. Everybody knows that for weeks, no doubt months, it was working underground, unbeknownst to the government and against it. In any case, nationalism plus racism adds up to something ghastly. And when one also adds to the fact that the students, because they are leftist, lent a hand (and more) to all that, well, it makes one deeply sad. And one wonders through what strange trick (or stupidity) of history Marxism could provide the occasion (and vocabulary) for that.2

This is an admirable analysis made in the heat of a concrete historical circumstance.3 The experience may well explain why Foucault did not allow himself to be duped eight years later by the perverse use Arab governments and political organizations made of the concept of Zionism. Alas, in Europe and elsewhere,

Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel  |  113 we see today the damage wrought by attaching stigma to the term itself, which leads in some quarters to referring to the Jewish state not as “Israel” but as “the Zionist entity.” However, Foucault’s lucidity is perhaps not only traceable to his having witnessed what he called a “pogrom” in an Arab land. In 1976, the same year as his rejection of the anti-Israel resolution by the UN, Foucault was teaching a course at the Collège de France titled, curiously enough, Society Must Be Defended. In the context of that course, his examination of racism as a concept disassociated it radically from any aspect of Jewish tradition. Contrarily, what he called “race war”4 was an important part of his teaching that year, and his positive interpretation of the concept was meant to provoke. In his lecture of January 28, he pointed to the subversive power of the biblical text, which he called “Hebraic” discourse.5 Foucault claimed that starting with the Middle Ages, Hebraic discourse displaced, reformed, and undermined the dominant model of sovereignty, the Indo-European model of the functioning of power. It did so through proposing a “counterhistory”6 of “servitudes and exiles”7 that offered the possibility of a prophetic break with the past, which became an arm in the hands of the wretched and the rebellious. Foucault thus defined the Bible on the theological-political plane as having offered a new form of discursivity to those who cried out “from the side that is in darkness, from within the shadows,”8 as they demanded previously unheard-of rights that would tear society asunder. The Bible inspired this counterhistory or race war as a prototype for class struggle, argued Foucault. This historical consciousness of a division of society, rooted in the Hebraic tradition, is in no way connected to the biological racism that originated in the nineteenth century and was adopted as policy by centralized states in the twentieth. Rather, that racism effaced any Judaic inspiration by inverting it, thus leading it back to the old system: the Indo-European system with its three orders, at whose highest rung is the sovereign. Based on Roman society, now inflected with the legend of the returning hero—the leader or Führer—the German Reich became its most radical expression. Eternal Rome, Caesar’s Rome, thus took revenge on Jerusalem, defined by Foucault as speaking an “oppositional discourse” that protested against “all the Babylons that had come back to life.”9 It is hard not to post a link between two developments that occurred the same year: on the one hand, Foucault’s meditation on racism and the Jewish question; and, on the other, his categorical rejection of the new dogma, almost universally accepted, which sees Zionism in its essence as a form of racism. Foucault’s position on this geopolitical matter cannot be simply viewed as the effect of emotion tied to some particular experience he had undergone. Beyond opinions and emotions, though no doubt influenced by them, is his careful examination of the concept of “race” and of the subversion of politics and sovereignty he sees in the “mythico-religious history of the Jews.”10

114  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” It is hazardous for anyone who is not a specialist on Foucault to venture into specific aspects of his thought. But in more general terms, one can wonder at the mysterious exception Foucault embodied within the French intellectual universe. His reflection on Jewish political thought deepened in his 1977–1978 course titled Security, Territory, Population. There he elaborated at length the theme of “pastoral power” in Hebrew society, subtly analyzing the exception it constitutes with regard to other forms of sovereignty. He declares: “through an essential paradox, it is a power that individualizes by according as much value to a single sheep as to the whole flock.”11 An “essential paradox,” writes Foucault. What is essential is to see the paradox and its essentiality. It is no question here of developing Foucault’s analysis further but rather of simply noting the fundamental point: Foucault’s intense gaze upon Jewish exceptionality, which is at the heart of the State of Israel, the sufficient reason for its existence. Around Foucault’s particular brand of subtlety that led him to decipher elements ignored or spurned by his contemporaries—such as Israel’s constituting an essential paradox—there are certain biographical facts that should not be given undue importance but may well deserve mentioning. Is it a coincidence that Foucault left the French Communist Party in winter 1952? It was at that precise moment that Stalin launched his first major and explicitly antisemitic campaign, on the pretense that Jewish doctors were plotting against him.12 Even more telling is Foucault’s attitude in autumn 1968, when he was invited to apply, along with psychoanalyst Pierre Kauffmann, for a position at the University of Paris X. In another letter to Canguilhem, Foucault recalled the Tunis anti-Jewish pogrom and renounced interest in the professorship, because he found it “physically unbearable . . . to oppose a Jew.”13 Perhaps these minor facts, bits of scholarly analysis, and political stances amount to little in the face of Foucault’s grand oeuvre. No doubt it is better to leave these fragments as such, just so many trivial elements dispersed throughout the career of a scholar who felt no need to elaborate on them. Indeed, Foucault said little about the Middle East conflict. Regarding the actors involved, he simply wrote, “Neither Begin nor Arafat are people to whom we refer in order to think.”14 About the killings at Sabra and Shatila, he did not let passions dominate: “On the part of the friends of Israel, but also on the part of the proPalestinians, there was a kind of symmetrical anguish and concern. There was no attempt to dodge the issues. . . . Generally speaking, there was a rather extraordinary moral reflection in the face of that intolerable core that the massacres constituted.”15 And in 1978, with respect to the civil war raging in Lebanon, he lucidly saw not Israel but the totalitarian hands of Syria and the Soviet Union.16 I have no knowledge of other stances taken by Foucault on these matters. It seems that he

Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel  |  115 kept a kind of calm, a willful silence, far from politics and well-disposed toward Israel. Foucault’s passionate support for the Iranian uprising in 1978 and 1979 has been treated with scorn and generally dismissed. I wonder why something that is widely considered misjudgment on his part has not been subjected to the kind of inquiry an error of such magnitude demands. Careful study of the relevant writings could well result less in a negative evaluation of Foucault’s political thought than in a call for philosophers to reconsider the conceptual and analytical frameworks into which they have imprisoned themselves. Let us note, however, one scourge to which Foucault did not remain blind. He was one of the rare commentators to denounce the “violent anti-Semitism” rampant among Iranian demonstrators and revolutionaries.17 * * * Foucault’s exception in this regard is all the more unusual precisely insofar as there is little to say about it except that it existed—and to add that this matter belonged to what Pascal called “counterthinking” (pensée de derrière),18 shades of thought, a silent but active dialectic that can be perceived only in moments of dazzlement, in the traces it leaves. Foucault’s counterthinking may well have been more hidden and complex than that at work among any of his contemporaries. This perhaps explains the conventional, even quaint, portrayals of the philosopher that accompanied commemorations marking the twentieth anniversary of his death.19 To what rule or norm does Foucault’s attitude constitute an exception? To the usual stance of the French intellectual, unfailingly supportive of France’s so-called Arab policy. The alliance between the country and its intellectuals no doubt harks back to the subtle pact de Gaulle managed to form with the Communist Party—the intellectuals’ party—at the end of the 1950s. It was then that he devised for France the role of a third force in the face of the two great powers. De Gaulle elaborated the fiction—not entirely unrelated to reality—of French influence in the world through a most Machiavellian use of the process of decolonization. Thereby, apparently at least, France placed itself in sync with the Third World’s historical aspiration to emancipation. De Gaulle embodied perfectly the role of the third force. With great virtuosity, and tactical aid from communist intellectuals, he succeeded in blending traditional French influence with liberationist or progressive policies, exploiting as much as possible the old universalist claim that France spreads enlightenment and its language throughout the world. If so many intellectuals, scholars, and teachers on the left always supported de Gaulle—and his geopolitical if not domestic policies were those of the left—it may well have been because this somewhat puerile mix of real and fictional elements allowed them to think they could

116  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” play the roles of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot before the entire universe, while waiting for their pensions from the Ministry of National Education to kick in. This holy alliance that functioned so well long survived not only de Gaulle’s death but even the end of the Cold War, which had been the pretext for its existence in the first place. This could be seen recently in the buildup to the second war in Iraq and in a somewhat different way at the time of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, when few significantly challenged Mitterrand’s pro-Serb policy or fully grasped the desire for freedom that inspired the Croats, the Bosnians, the Kosovars, and the Serbs themselves. French intellectuals on the left either stood by passively or, like Régis Debray20 and Alain Badiou, were not entirely illdisposed toward Serbian domination. The general indifference in France, on the right as on the left, to the tragedy suffered by the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe shows how far the consensus went. In this area, as well, Foucault constituted an exception.21 Even as recently as 2005, the scorn of French elites toward Poland could be detected prior to the referendum on ratifying the European Constitution. There were thus concrete instances when the French intelligentsia showed indifference, neglect, cowardice. Other examples concern the French military presence in sub-Saharan Africa, the semicolonial regime in the French Antilles, the post-Napoleonic fascination with or sympathy for “enlightened” tyrants such as Nasser or Castro. I often imagine such an intellectual and his two hands. With his right he jots down on a memo pad the number of acres on which a Jewish settler in Gaza, Judea, or Samaria grows lettuce or melons and prays. In his left hand he holds a soft, moist cloth with which he wipes gently from his mind Total’s oil fields in Gabon, a French logging concern’s forests in Cameroon, or a fruit company’s plantations in the Ivory Coast. It seems hard for contemporary intellectuals to imagine that these countries do not, despite everything, derive some small profit from the French neocolonialist presence. Otherwise, how is one to explain the thinkers’ silence, their disregard? Beyond all those considerations, France is united by anti-Americanism, the sole policy still available to it. However, while the anti-American fixation enjoyed hegemony for decades, it has been joined by a focus on Israel, something originally secondary but that is now a major factor. Thus a minuscule country is now the object of punctilious and smug vigilance on the part of intellectuals. Is it possible to date when Israel was assigned that role on the French intellectual and political stage? The movement was gradual. In 1967, after the Six-Day War, few significant intellectuals rallied in support of the hard-line policy de Gaulle adopted toward Israel, when he imposed an arms embargo and labeled the Jews (no doubt as a result of his French nationalist education of a Maurrassian stripe22) an “élite people, sure of itself and domineering.”23 French intellectuals, less quick-witted than de Gaulle, were still preoccupied with old tales of South

Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel  |  117 American guerillas and pronunciamientos, or the Vietnam war. Slowly, starting in the 1970s, as illusions gradually faded regarding the Soviet Union or a mythic Third World or global “south” (made up by Asia, Latin America, and Africa), the intellectuals’ newly vacant brain cavities turned toward the Middle East, dubbed part of the south lest years of symbolic investment be lost. To illustrate this phenomenon, this consensus among the French, I shall take the case of Gilles Deleuze. a thinker who should have been protected from such contagion by his intelligence and distance from the Communist Party, which was after all the indispensable crucible from which this symptom and its propagation emerged. * * * The titles of Deleuze’s articles on Israel speak for themselves: “The Indians of Palestine” or, even more imprudently, “The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat.”24 The comparison of Palestinians with Native Americans, the equation of Israel with the United States, are characteristic of the stereotypes and appeal to so-called common sense that are part of the French ideological fog. Deleuze is obsessed with these metaphors: “The history of Zionism, the history of Israel, and the history of the United States have all gone that route: how does one create a vacuum, how does one empty out a territory?”25 The image of “redskins”26 pops up continually. We can well wonder whether Deleuze, who certainly knows his movies,27 did not come up with his arguments in a dark theater during a retrospective festival of westerns, rather than bothering to study history or visit the actual places. He writes: “Pushing back limits is the act of American capitalism, of the American dream. Israel has acted in kind with its dream of a Greater Israel on Arab land, a dream built on the backs of the Arabs.”28 One is astounded by the naïveté with which Deleuze equates the winning of the American West with the three major wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, when Israel faced coalitions of four or five countries supported (in the two last cases) by the Soviet Union. No less surprising are the incredible violence and ignorance, usually in tandem, with which he denounces atrocities he attributes to Israel. He finds analogies first with massacres in westerns and then (more in accordance with French obsessions) with Nazi crimes: “Some say this is not genocide. And yet from its very beginning, this history bears a great resemblance to Oradour.29 Zionist terrorism was not only directed against the British, but against the Arab villages that had to be erased. The Irgun was very active in this regard (Deir Yassine).”30 Deleuze’s logic here becomes even more excessive and incomprehensible: “Physical extermination, be it entrusted to mercenaries, is perfectly present. But they say it is not genocide, since genocide is not their ‘final goal.’ Indeed, it is only one of the means.”31 It is quite probable that here Deleuze is just repeating what

118  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Palestinian militants have told him, which is what often happens in such cases. In this sense, he is neither more frivolous nor guiltier than those who swallowed and regurgitated propaganda from North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Libya, or China during the Cultural Revolution. However, things get a little dicier when Deleuze apparently speaks in his own voice, when he stops generating metaphors from his experience as a moviegoer or mouthing what he has heard from propagandists: “Responding to Israel’s boastful statement, ‘We are not a people like any other,’ the Palestinians have repeated their own cry . . . : we are a people like any other, that is all we want to be. . . .”32 It is stupefying to find a variant on de Gaulle’s describing the Jews as an “elite people” in a piece by the author of Anti-Oedipus, Difference and Repetition, and especially the magnificent Nietzsche and Philosophy.33 It is precisely because of its minority, exceptional status that Deleuze condemns Israel and calls for its destruction—in the name of the “we” of the Palestinian people and their “cry” to be “a people like any other.” The underlying leitmotiv is the French Republic’s notion of universality that posits axiomatically a uniform ontology of all peoples as empty abstractions. Deleuze’s naïveté here is dual. First of all, he finds it criminal to be “not a people like any other.” Second, he imagines the Palestinian people to be like the French—something of which, perhaps, French-speaking Palestinian intellectuals have persuaded him. Thereby he adopts the universalistic ideology that served as moral alibi to the French colonial enterprise. * * * All of this is compounded here, as is so often the case, by a strange indulgence toward European antisemitism. Such leniency is to be found in an earlier piece, titled “The Rich Jew,” wherein Deleuze defends Daniel Schmid’s Shadow of Angels.34 This 1976 Swiss–West German film, like the Fassbinder play Garbage, the City and Death of which it is an adaptation, had been roundly criticized for its equivocal nature. Suffice it to say that in Fassbinder’s play, the “rich Jew” is the sole character not to have a name and to be designated by a racially stereotypical label. A pimp keeping company with a former Nazi, he is also a real estate developer whose speculation wreaks havoc on the urban landscape. By the end of the play, the rich Jew has strangled a prostitute under his “protection” and pinned the crime on the old Nazi—who, for good measure, happens to be a homosexual. Deleuze defends the film by refuting heavy-handedly any suspicion of ambiguity. His main argument stands on a truism totally irrelevant to the play. He repeats, scandalized, that there is nothing wrong with using the word “Jew”; rather, it is precisely antisemites who avoid it, preferring the term “Israelite.”35 Triumphantly, he adds that it is fine to call Spinoza a Jew and feigns outrage in

Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel  |  119 claiming that an imaginary “League Against Anti-Semitism has declared that all those who use the word ‘Jew’ to be antisemites.”36 Thus the appellation “rich Jew” is not antisemitic. Case closed—as though the use of the word “Jew” were the bone of contention; as though Fassbinder could not have given his character a name rather than the predicates “Jew” and “rich,” and were only able to designate him in “ethnic” (one dare not say “racial”) terms. Even odder is the question Deleuze derives from the previous sophism: “And how do you describe a Jew who is not an Israelite, not an Israeli, not even a Zionist?”37 In other words, you have to call him a “Jew.” But why has Deleuze brought the terms “Zionist” and, a fortiori, “Israeli,” into a discussion of a European Jew portrayed in total conformity with Nazi propaganda that stigmatized Jews as necessarily rich? The hoary synonymy between the two words effectively deprives the character of the humanity conferred by having one’s own name. Deleuze’s piece ends on a note that shows in even rawer terms just how off kilter his reasoning is. The last paragraph contends that the fascism of the 1930s (of the kind we see behind the figure of the “rich Jew”) has no relevance to our political reality. It is no more than “old-style fascism,” a kind of historical folklore, something “almost quaint.”38 Now, the menace is a “new fascism,” which bears the hallmarks of the United States as typically caricatured: “The new fascism . . . is global agreement on security, of the maintenance of a ‘peace’ just as terrifying as war. All our petty fears will be organized in concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro-fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle every little thing, every suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our neighborhoods, in our local movie houses.”39 But how does this sendoff relate to Deleuze’s defense of the film? We can only understand it as follows: the harm done by this portrayal of the Jew, fascist though it may be, is nothing in comparison with the present-day fascism that the American empire imposes upon our bodies and souls. But here Deleuze contradicts himself. He is avowing, almost explicitly, that the portrayal of the “rich Jew” is fascist. Why, then, has he taken the pains to neutralize old-style fascism and invoke its irrelevance? Supposedly, he did so to advance the purpose of the article, which was to defend the film. Yet Deleuze devoted the first two thirds of his piece to deny by all means available (quite poor means, as we have seen) the slightest trace of antisemitism, of “old-style fascism,” in Fassbinder’s play and its cinematic adaptation! This parting shot was apparently cobbled onto the article, to whose thrust it remains quite foreign. It is an example of a figure of rhetoric (and resorting to rhetoric is pretty pitiable) called “parataxis,” wherein dissimilar elements are juxtaposed with no clear connection among them. This lack of any logical link between rebutting the charge of antisemitism in the film and consigning the harmfulness of old-style fascism to a realm outside our political reality leads to a

120  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” radically divided argumentation that can be charted as follows: (1) Schmid’s film is not antisemitic because using the word “Jew” is incontrovertibly not antisemitic. (2) Antisemitism (old-style fascism) is by no means a present-day problem; it is not even part of “reality,” for the sole relevant fascism is American fascism. We can only conclude that for Deleuze antisemitism simply does not exist, that it is not part of the real order of things. No more does he see it in the film than someone colorblind can see green in a prairie or red in a Communist Party procession. We need not have been surprised by the weakness of his reasoning. To view the systematic, exclusive use of the expression “rich Jew” as equivalent to the innocent application of the label “Jewish philosopher” to Baruch Spinoza40 (to use Deleuze’s falsely offhand comparison) is nothing other than asymbolia (the inability to perceive something symbolic) attendant upon the philosophical and political decision to exclude from reality the very existence of antisemitism (or old-style fascism). What Deleuze is getting at is blindingly obvious: Schmid’s film isn’t antisemitic because antisemitism doesn’t exist. We could go further in our exegesis of Deleuze’s logic and perhaps uncover a more or less clear linkage between the “rich Jew” and “new fascism.” New fascists, like the Jew, are rich; no less than the Jew as real estate developer, so new fascism destroys every single thing, every face, every word, every street, every neighborhood, every movie house. But we needn’t go on. * * * This article by Deleuze in no way lessens my admiration for his powerful books like The Logic of Sense and Proust and Signs.41 Any tenuous link between those great works and “The Rich Jew” would not be enough to discredit the author qua philosopher. Moreover, Deleuze penned atrocious articles on subjects other than Israel or the Jews, writings that would be equally unsuited to challenge either his philosophical work or him as a person.42 Rather, the link is between Deleuze’s two haughty, divine pronouncements, apparently brooking no refutation: condemnation of Israel’s essence in his pro-Palestinian pieces and denial of any antisemitism in “The Rich Jew.” Alas, such rhetoric is found just about everywhere. An even more wretched example is offered by Étienne Balibar, publishing vicious diatribes against Israel while dismissing Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt’s antisemitism as just so much “theological anti-Judaism inherent in the philosophy of history.”43 * * * Regarding Deleuze, I am tempted to propose no conclusion, as I came up with no definitive one for Foucault. Would not a conclusion fall short of what has been brought to light? However, in Deleuze’s case, the non-conclusion is diametrically opposite to that concerning Foucault.

Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel  |  121 One must always conclude, so I shall do so with a question. I take my inspiration from an aphorism by poet René Char,44 appearing on the back covers of the French editions of the last two volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure.45 Char’s words are from The Brittle Age: “The history of man is a long succession of synonyms for the same vocable. To contradict it is a duty.”46 I have commented directly upon the synonymy between “Jew” and “rich” at work in the subtext of Fassbinder’s play and treated anodynely by Deleuze. Likewise, I have alluded to the synonymy between “Zionism” and “racism”—an equivalence officially proclaimed one day and revoked a decade and a half later.47 Deleuze endorsed the first synonymy, which had led Fassbinder to deprive a Jew of a proper name. Foucault, following Char’s ethical precept, went contrary to the second synonymy that declared Zionism to be a form of racism. In an excellent article, Jean-Claude Milner grapples with Char’s positing a mysterious duty to contradict synonymy.48 But the enigma largely vanishes before the embodiment of the principle in the diametrical opposition of two stances: Deleuze’s blind appropriation of synonymy and Foucault’s rejection of it. What is this “same vocable” for which human history is a “long succession of synonyms” that Char would have us contradict? Let us assume it is the word “man.” In that case, Char’s apothegm sheds even more light. In Deleuze’s preference for the motto he attributes to the Palestinians (“We are a people like any other”) and, even more so, in his rejection of what he calls Israel’s “boastful statement” (“We are not a people like any other”), his bias is clearly in favor of a generalized synonymy bearing upon the word “man.” Inversely, Foucault’s taking into account what is exceptional about Jewishness shows how seriously he took Char’s call to contradict synonymy. That Israel is a sign of contradiction in the midst of nations and human history is asserted over and again in its writings. That Israel rejects synonymy is its message going back to Abraham. One may choose to disregard that notion, to disbelieve. However, one cannot fail to find a negative proof of it in antisemitism. That doctrine teaches passionate hatred for Israel’s contradiction of synonymy, according to which exception itself constitutes what is authentically universal. Standing against the “succession of synonyms,” Israel is no doubt one of the very names of opposition to synonymy’s reign. That is the inexhaustible source antisemitism has always drawn upon and will continue to do so. To contradict it is a duty.

Notes 1. Le Monde, October 17–18, 1976; republished in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert and François Eward (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001), 2:96.

122  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” 2. Quoted by Didier Éribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 192–93. 3. This painful experience did not lead Foucault to adopt any suspicious or disdainful attitude toward Arabs. Rather, his accounts of his stay in Tunisia emphasize the depth of spirit common to peoples of the Third World—something he would evoke again at the time of the Iranian Revolution. 4. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 66. 5. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 74. 6. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 72 and passim. 7. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 77. 8. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 70. 9. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 71. See the entire chapter 4 (65–85). 10. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 71 (modified as per Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société [Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997], 62). 11. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 364. See the “Course Summary” in that volume (363–67) as well as “Omnes et singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason” in Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: New Press, 2003), 180–201. 12. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext[e], 1991), 52. 13. Quoted in Éribon, Michel Foucault, 196. 14. Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 471. 15. Foucault, Power, 471. 16. Michel Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” trans. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, ed. Afary and Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 203. 17. Michel Foucault, “Iran: The Spirit of a World without Spirit,” trans. Afary and Anderson, in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 259. 18. An excellent translation of that expression, foreshadowing Leo Strauss’s thesis on writing between the lines, is offered by Terry Cochran, who renders thus Pascal’s thought (336 in Brunschvicg’s numbering): “One must have a counterthinking [pensée de derrière], and judge everything in that perspective, while speaking like the people” (Pascal, quoted in Terry Cochran, Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001], 254).—Trans. 19. Commentary in the press was no less appalling, with the exception of the lucid and courageous article that Sylvain Bourmeau devoted to Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 courses at the Collège de France on liberalism and neoliberalism. He writes: “The French left would do well to read these courses and pursue Foucault’s fascinating meditation on governability that gained nothing from the Socialist Party’s arrival to power in 1981. Foucault was more interested in the invention of a deuxième gauche [a left that abandoned ideological dogma—Trans.]. In a similar vein was his attraction to the well-known ‘social market economy’ called for by the German Social-Democratic Party at Bad Godesberg—and recently taken up again in the European Constitutional Treaty” (Les Inrockuptibles 471 [December 8–14, 2004]: 26). 20. Régis Debray (b. 1940) is a French philosopher whose more memorable moments include fighting alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia and advising President François Mitterrand on foreign affairs.—Trans.

Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel  |  123 21. See especially the extraordinary 1982 interview with Foucault, “Le premier pas de la colonisation de l’Occident,” Dits et écrits, 2:1080–88. 22. Charles Maurras (1868–1952), a French nationalist writer and politician.—Trans. 23. This is an oft-quoted remark from a press conference of November 27, 1967, in which de Gaulle sought to explain the French diplomatic turn away from Israel and support of Arab states.—Trans. 24. Gilles Deleuze, “The Indians of Palestine” (an interview with Elias Sanbar) and “The Importance of Being Arafat” in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2007), 194–200, 241–45. The original French title of the second article is “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat” (Gilles Deleuze, Deux régimes de fous [Paris: Minuit, 2003], 221–25). 25. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 196. 26. Deleuze does not use the term “redskins” (peaux-rouges) himself, or at least not in Two Regimes of Madness. However, Elias Sanbar, whom Deleuze interviews in the “The Indians of Palestine,” has had recourse to it in his autobiography (Le bien des absents [Arles: Actes Sud, 2001], 95) and in a 2012 interview (http://www.sinemensuel.com/grandes-interviews /elias-sanbar-les-palestiniens-n’en-peuvent-plus-d’attendre/, accessed June 18, 2013). Somewhat closer in time to Deleuze’s interview with Sanbar (1982), the term was attributed to the latter in an article in Libération of July 30, 1996 (Antoine de Gaudemar, “Elias Sanbar, intellectuel palestinien, est retourné pour les premières élections libres à Haïfa, sa ville natale, que sa famille avait fuie en 1948. Retour en Palestine.”).—Trans. 27. See in this regard Deleuze’s two considerable books, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 1989). The first volume includes two interesting chapters on westerns directed by Ford, Hawks, and Mann. However, Deleuze fails to see that the borrowings from the Bible in American mythology—especially as concerns the Law and space—do not make the Jewish national project into a spinoff of the “American dream.” Because of his excessive cinematographic culture and his lack of historical knowledge, Deleuze mixes up the source and the model. 28. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 243. 29. In chapter 1, Marty discusses Genet’s ambivalent evocation of Oradour, a site of grave Nazi atrocity in France.—Trans. 30. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 241. The fighting in Deir Yassine on April 9, 1948, resulted in 250 Palestinian victims, the large majority of whom were civilians. However, it cannot be compared to Oradour, for this was a military conflict in which numerous Iraqi and Syrian soldiers as well as other Arab combatants took part and inflicted casualties on the assailants from the Irgun and the Stern Group. It must be emphasized that the murder of civilians involved in the fighting, which then turned into a wholesale unconscionable massacre, was not carried out by the Haganah, the nascent Israeli army. Rather, the groups responsible were opposed to Ben Gurion and were dissolved later that year. 31. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 243. The comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany proceeds here, as in the case of the “redskins,” by aberrant leaps of logic. Thus Deleuze writes, regarding Israel’s operation in southern Lebanon: “This situation is analogous to the Spanish Civil War, when Spain served as an experimental laboratory for a far more terrible future” (Two Regimes of Madness, 162). Given the inanity of that assertion, nothing Deleuze wrote on Israel can be taken seriously. 32. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 244. (The second ellipsis is in the original.—Trans.) 33. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977); Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul

124  |  Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 34. Gilles Deleuze, “The Rich Jew” in Two Regimes of Madness, 135–38. The piece originally appeared in Le Monde, February 18, 1977. A few days later, Claude Lanzmann published a forceful response, titled “Nuit et brouillard” [Night and fog] (Le Monde, February 23, 1977). 35. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 137. Lanzmann notes that in Fassbinder’s original dialogues, the character is never called Jude (Jew) but always Jud (kike). 36. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 137 (translation modified as per Deux régimes de fous, 125). (Inexplicably, the “Ligue contre l’antisémitisme” [League against antisemitism] in the French original becomes the “Anti-Semitic League” in the published English version!—Trans.) 37. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 137. 38. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 137. 39. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 138 (translation modified as per Deux régimes de fous, 125). 40. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 137. 41. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 42. See Deleuze’s comments on psychoanalysis that pale in comparison to Anti-Oedipus in terms of insight but go far beyond it in their violence and vulgarity. One example: “Perhaps the most grotesque pages in all of Freud are those he wrote on fellatio: how in this instance a penis . . . stands for a cow udder . . . , and a cow udder for the maternal breast. In other words, fellatio means you can’t find a cow udder to pull, or that you want your mommy, or she has no more milk” (“Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis” in Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 80). One wonders why this piece by Deleuze did not make its way into the thick volume denouncing psychoanalysis, Le livre noir de la psychanalyse [The black book of psychoanalysis], ed. Catherine Meyer (Paris: Arènes, 2010). 43. “Une lettre de Étienne Balibar,” Le Monde, December 20, 2002. (Étienne Balibar [b. 1942] was one of the co-authors of Louis Althusser’s Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster [London: New Left Books, 1970].) 44. René Char (1907–1988) was a French poet who had taken part in the resistance against the Nazis.—Trans. 45. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, Tome 2: L’usage des plaisirs and L’histoire de la sexualité, Tome 3: Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure and History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985, 1986). 46. René Char, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland, trans. Gustaf Sobin (Denver: Counterpath, 2009), 45. 47. Marty refers again to the UN resolution equating Zionism and racism, which passed in 1975 and was revoked in 1991.—Trans. 48. Jean-Claude Milner, “Michel Foucault ou le devoir aux rives du temps” (La règle du jeu 28 [2005]).

Index

Adorno, Thedor, xiv, xxiii, 85–86, 92 Agamben, Giorgio, xiii, xiv, xvi–xvii, xviii, xxiii, xxiv, 80; State of Exception, 96–111 Ajar, Émile. See Gary, Romain Althusser, Louis, vii, xi, xxii, 71–72, 75, 78n59, 78nn80–81, 79n97, 82, 83–84, 86, 93n2, 93n18, 98, 100, 124n43 Arafat, Yasser, 31, 56, 114, 117 Badiou, Alain, xiii, xiv, xv–xvi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 80, 81, 86, 95n39, 107, 111n65, 116; The Century, 71–72; Conditions, 54, 72, 76n11; Peut-on penser la politique?, 76n19; Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, xv, 66–67, 94n25; The Theory of the Subject, 72; Uses of the Word “Jew,” 53–79 Balibar, Étienne, xxiii, 120, 124n43 Balzac, Honoré de, 4–5, 40, 45n18 Barthes, Roland, xi, xii, xv, xvi, xxii, 89–90 Bataille, Georges, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, 19, 39, 40, 41–42, 100 Baudelaire, Charles, 4, 7, 10, 17, 38 Begin, Menachem, 36–37, 114 Benjamin, Walter, xvi–xvii, 97–100, 106–7, 108n22, 109n24, 109n29 Bernanos, Georges, 28, 41, 50n122, 52n164 Blanchot, Maurice, xi, xxii, 7, 42 Bloy, Léon, 28, 50n124, 58, 59 Bonnefis, Philippe, xi Bouretz, Pierre, 109n24 Bourmeau, Sylvain, 122n19 Bové, José, 16 Breton, Stanislas, 93n2 Camus, Albert, xiii Canguilhem, Georges, 112, 114 Carco, Francis, 15, 47n50 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 72 Celan, Paul, 72, 78–79n82 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, xxiii, 28, 41, 43, 44n4, 52n163 Char, René, xiii, xviii, 121, 124n44 Claudel, Paul, 58–59, 64, 75, 76n22, 77n29, 79n98 Cochran, Terry, 122n18

Dayan, Moshe, 27 De Gaulle, Charles, 78n81, 109n36, 115–16, 118, 123n23 Debray, Régis, 116, 122n20 Deleuze, Gilles, xi, xiv, xvii–xviii, xxiii, xxiv, 100, 117–21, 123–24; The Logic of Sense, 72, 79n89, 120; Two Regimes of Madness, 117–21 Derrida, Jacques, xi, xiv, 39–41, 52n158, 89 Drumont, Édouard, 28, 41, 50n121, 52n164 Fanon, Frantz, xiii Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 118–21, 124n35 Fichte, Hubert, 44n5 Foucault, Michel, xi, xvii, xviii, xxii, xxiii, 100, 112–15, 120–23; The Birth of Biopolitics, 104–5, 110n54; The Order of Things, xxii; Power, 110n55; Security, Territory, Population, 114; Society Must Be Defended, 105, 113 Frechtman, John, 7, 45n20 Freud, Sigmund, 54, 88, 91, 93, 94n33, 95n40, 95nn50–51, 124n42 Gary, Romain, xvi Gautier, Théophile, 73 Gemayel, Bashir, 21, 31, 32, 34 Genet, Jean, xiii–xv, xvii, xxiii–xxiv, 1–52; “Four Hours in Shatila,” 8–15, 23–24, 26, 30, 36–38, 47n64, 51n149; Funeral Rites, xxiii, 6–7, 14, 18, 21, 45–46n25, 46n26, 46n39, 46n44, 46n46, 51n153; letter to Sartre on “pederasty,” 3, 25, 29, 49n109; Our Lady of the Flowers, 40, 52n158; “The Palestinians,” 8, 26–27, 47n58, 49n116; Prisoner of Love, xiv, xxiii, 7–8, 10–11, 14–30, 38, 47n52, 47n54, 47n61, 47n67, 47–48n69, 48n70, 48n82, 48n87, 49n95, 49nn114–15, 50n123, 50n139; The Thief ’s Journal, 6, 45nn17– 18, 47n51, 48n79 Gide, André, xi, xiii, 3, 73 Girard, René, 33–35, 86, 90, 95n49 Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, 20, 21 Hazan, Éric, xviii Hergé (Georges Remi), 63 Hilberg, Raul, 62

125

126 | Index Hobeika, Élie, 31–33, 38, 51n151 Horkheimer, Max, 86 Hugo, Victor, 4 Jouhandeau, Marcel, 45n23 Kafka, Franz, 109n29 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 110n57 Kauffmann, Pierre, 114 Kierkegaard, Søren, 2–3, 72, 74, 92, 95n61 Klemperer, Victor, 52n164 Klossowski, Pierre, xi, 43, 52n174, 75 Kojève, Alexandre, 82, 93n5 Lacan, Jacques, xi, xv, xxii, 4, 42–43, 83, 85, 88, 89, 91–92, 93n8, 93n18, 95n43, 109n32, 111n65 Lanzmann, Claude, 44n2, 49n110, 61–62, 70 76n25, 77n39, 94n27, 124n35 Lazarus, Sylvain, 72, 79n85 Le Breton, Auguste, 47n51 Lefort, Claude, 72, 79n87 Léturmy, Michel, 94n38 Levi, Primo, 76n27 Levinas, Emmanuel, xii, 76–77n27, 92, 94n24, 95n43 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 84–85, 93n18 Lévy, Benny, 76–77n27 Lévy, René, 94n37 Lyotard, Jean-François, 72, 79n87 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 72 Mauriac, François, 58–59, 64 Maurras, Charles, 116, 123n22 Mehlman, Jeffrey, xixn12 Michel, Natacha, 72, 110n64 Milner, Jean-Claude, 76n27, 85, 92–93, 121 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 23–25

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 6, 23, 24 Paul of Tarsus, xiii, xv, xvii, 43, 54, 55, 67, 69, 80–95 Péguy, Charles, 108–9n22 Pessoa, Fernando, 76n11 Picasso, Pablo, 8–12, 38 Proust, Marcel, 3–5, 19–20, 40, 48n81, 120 Racine, Jean, 60, 77n33 Régnault, François, 52n168 Rey, Jean-Michel, 80 Rimbaud, Arthur, xiii, 15, 17, 46n25, 47n61 Sade, Marquis de, xii, xiii, xiv, 42, 43, 75, 85, 95n43 Saint-Bonnet, François, 96 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de, 20, 48n81 Sanbar, Elias, 123n26 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 29, 30, 49n109, 67, 72, 73; Anti-Semite and Jew, xiii, xv, 1, 73–74; SaintGenet: Actor and Martyr, xiii, xiv, 1–3, 4–6, 11, 16, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 44n6, 45n16, 45n20, 49n106 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 40 Schmid, Daniel, 118–20 Schmitt, Carl, xvii, 96, 97, 100, 120 Scholem, Gershom, 109n29 Shahid, Layla, 14, 30, 46n47 Sharon, Ariel, 32, 34, 38, 51n143, 51n151, 57 Sorel, Georges Eugène, 98, 99 Spielberg, Steven, 54 Strauss, Leo, 122n18 Taubes, Jacob, 82, 95n61 Traverso, Enzo, xviii, xixn15 Trotsky, Leon, 54, 76n8

Neutres, Jérôme, 51n153

Vergès, Jacques, 48n86

Offenbach, Jacques, 29

White, Edmund, 7, 44n7, 49n109 Wiesel, Elie, 58–59 Winter, Cécile, 53, 60–64, 68–71, 74–75, 75–76n4, 78n73, 79n98, 95n39

Pascal, Blaise, 10, 19, 43, 44n6, 60, 74, 77n33, 87, 94n25, 94n28, 108n22, 115, 122n18

ÉRIC MARTY is Professor of Contemporary French Literature at the University of Paris VII‒Diderot. He is the author of many books, including Pourquoi le vingtième siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux? (Why did the twentieth century take Sade seriously?), Roland Barthes: La littérature et le droit à la mort (Roland Barthes: Literature and the right to death), Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe (A quarrel with Alain Badiou, philosopher), Bref séjour à Jérusalem (A short stay in Jerusalem), and most recently the novel Le coeur de la jeune Chinoise (The heart of the young Chinese woman). Marty has edited the complete works of Roland Barthes and the Journal of André Gide, 1887–1925.