anarchist artists black babies calvary crossroads

*
"jews":
Lyotard's diacritique of Jewishness
THE CRITICAL TEXT which has gone furthest in employing "the jew"
as an allegorical trope for otherness
is Lyotards Heidegger and "the jews".
I am going to propose in this mydistory
that Lyotard's essay om "the jews"
continues in highly significant fashion
the Pauline dualist allegory
of the Jews.
~*~

~*~
THE TITLE
tells the story:
Heidegger gets a capital "H,"
but "the jews" are in lower case.
THIS is done, as the back cover copy explains,
"to represent the outsiders,
the nonconformists:
the artists, anarchists, blacks, homeless, Arabs, etc. - and the Jews."
The Jews are doubtless chosen as exemplary both because the voices of some Jews are so prominent in European modernism
and because of the enormous challenge of Nazi genocide
to Enlightenment thought.
But the name as used here
is essentially a generic term standing for the other.
And indeed Lyotard's book is all about the danger
of forgetting that one ("one" in a position of relative power, that is)
has always already forgotten
the Other.

But why
does Lyotard feel free
to appropriate the name "the jews"?
What does it mean for David Carroll, the author of the introduction
to Lyotard's book, to write, in reference to Lyotard's citation
of "Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Celan,"
that "these are ultimately 'the jews' we all have to read
and even in some sense to become,
'the jews' we always already are
but have forgotten we are,
'the jews' that Heidegger forgets at great cost for his thinking
and writing"?

What
Lyotard refuses to forget,
remembering the negative example of Heidegger,
is not so much upper or lower-case Jews
as Christian European crimes
against humanity.
In other words,
Lyotard takes history seriously as an implication of philosophy,
doubtless a vital exercise.
This sketch of a critique, therefore,
is not intended as an expose of Lyotard but as a further implication
of the universalizing, allegorizing traditions of Hellenistic philosophy
as absorbed into Christian
culture.


Lyotard
basically repeats
Sartre's thesis about the production of the Jew by the anti-Semite:
"What is most real about real jews is that Europe,
in any case, does not know what to do with them:
Christians demand their conversion;
monarchs expel them;
republics assimilate them;
Nazis exterminate them.
'The jews' are the object of a dismissal with which Jews, in particular,
are afflicted in reality."
Let us stop a second on the first words here,
and try a paraphrase:
how would it work if a man or a woman said,
"What is most real about real women is that men continually try to dominate them."
The condescension of Lyotard's statement immediately
becomes evident.



It
would have been
quite different if lyotard had written rather,
"What matters most to me here about those usually called 'Jews' is
that Europe does not know what to do with them."
For there is no gainsaying the power of his insight:
Europe indeed does not know what to do with "real Jews."
But what of European philosophy?
Is Lyotard not Europe here?
Might we not fairly say, "Europe does not know what to do with them;
philosophers allegorize them," et cetera?
To which one might comment
that in doing so,
they continue another particularly Christian practice
with regard to upper-case Jews,
one which begins
with Paul.



And here
we can see more analytically
what is wrong with Carroll's rhetoric
about us all becoming once again
"the jews we always already are but have forgotten we are."
We must resist the seduction of these sentiments,
for they deny, they spiritualize
history.



For some
contemporary critics
- indeed, those most profoundly concerned with the lessons
of the encounter between Jewish identity
and European self-education -
it seems that the real Jew is
the non-Jewish
jew.



What
does this say
about the "reality" of those Jews
- most of those who call themselves Jews,
of course, are the untheorized,
unphilosophical, unspiritualized Jews -
who would think the phrase "non-Jewish Jew"
to be nonsense?



It is
politically correct
to "forget" them and to fashion
an imaginary dialogue with the Other who is, in fact, the already-sanctioned, official model of the "non-Jewish Jew,"
the Kafkas and
Benjamins?



For as we know,
the vast majority of the Nazis' Jewish victims were unredeemed
"real" Jews.


~*~


AGAINST THIS
incipient critique stands precisely the force implicit in Lyotard's act
of allegorizing the name
"jew."


Radiating out
from the sun of philosophy,
remembering the other by writing the "jew,"
Lyotard challenges all those
who would fetishize their particular difference,
insisting that we learn how to imagine ourselves as blacks,
as Arabs, as homeless,
as Indians.


THIS is
a political challenge,
but Lyotard does not suggest
how those who are themselves "real Jews"
could respond
to it.


Indeed,
he explains that one reason
for his avoidance of the proper noun,
of the uppercase "Jews," is to make clear that he is not discussing a particularly Jewish subject,
which he identifies
as Zionism.


I want to insist
in response to Lyotard that there is a loss and a danger either in allegorizing away real, upper-case Jews
or in regarding them primarily as a problem for
Europe.


My claim
entails in turn
a responsibility to help articulate a Jewish political subject "other" than Zionism. which in fundamental ways merely produces the exclusivist syndromes of European
nationalism.


Zionism itself is predicated on a myth of autochthony.


I will probably be suggesting
in the next mydistories that a Jewish subject position founded on memories of genealogy, not genealogy tout court
but that which has since antiquity been called "race,"
provides for a critical
Jewish identity.

~verliefdcool!verliefd~
engel
23 aug 2005 - bewerkt op 21 mrt 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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