assemblage of unrelated violent individualhotheads
*
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Jews
*~*
Sometimes
the reference
to the allegorized Jew
is implicit
or made in passing;
in other works
it is an implicit and
central
trope.
An
example
of the former
is contained in Jean-Luc Nancy's
The Inoperative Community.
*~*
*~*
As JB
has shown,
Lyotard's allegorizing move
on the signifier "Jew"
is repeated at other moments as well
in post-Nazi, post-structuralist appropriations
of the signifier
Jew.
Nancy's central problem
in that work is to formulate a notion of community
which will not violate the standard
of non-coercion.
That
standard holds
that community is
"the com-pearance [comparution]
of singular beings."
For Nancy,
such singularity
and the simultaneity which is a condition of it
appear to imply an evacuation of history
and memory.
So many brutalities,
so many violations of any notion
of humanly responsible community
have been carried out in the name of solidarity collectives
supposed to have obtained in the past,
that Nancy seems to have renounced
any possible recourse to memory
in his attempt to think through the possibility
of there ever being
community without
coercion.
Of there ever being:
the only community which does not betray the hope
invested in that word,
Nancy argues, is one that resists
any kind of stable
existence.
*~*
The problem is
that Nancy has in fact attempted
a generalized model of community
as non-being.
Hence
any already existing "community"
is out of consideration by its very existence,
relegated through philosophical necessity
to a world we have lost
or which never
existed.
Following
Nancy's rhetoric,
the only possible residues
of that lost world are false community
appearing as either a serial, undifferentiated collective
in the same analytic category as the Fascist mass or,
alternatively, as assemblage of unrelated
individuals.
The individual in turn
"is merely the residue
of the experience of the dissolution of community,"
and furthermore,
"the true consciousness of the loss of community
is Christian."
*~*
Although
Nancy is silent
on the relations among history, memory, and community,
he considers at some length the apparently tortured relation between "myth" and
community.
For Nancy myth
- that necessary fiction which grounds the insistent specialness
of the existent communal group - is an irreducible component of community and at the same time necessarily pernicious
in its effects.
Therefore
Nancy asserts a search,
not for the eradication of myth but rather for its "interruption":
"interruption of myth is therefore also, necessarily,
the interruption of
community."
In a
footnote
Nancy elaborates on an earlier comment
by Maurice Blanchot:
Blanchot ... writes: "The Jews incarnate ... the refusal of myths,
the abandonment of idols, the recognition of an ethical order that manifests itself in respect for the law.
What Hitler wants to annihilate in the Jew,
in the 'myth of the Jew,' is precisely freed from myth."
This is another way of showing
where and when myth was definitively interrupted.
I would add this: "man freed from myth"
belongs henceforth to a community
that it is incumbent
upon us
to let come,
to let write
itself.
*~*
I want
to press,
in a sense by literalizing,
the opening offered here.
The quote from Blanchot seems ambiguous if not contradictory:
Do the Jews literally "incarnate ... the refusal of myths,"
or is that one of Hitler's
myths?
Let me
first pursue
the first reading, which is both the more flattering and the more
dangerous.
This reading
would tell us that community without myth was once
the special possession of the
Jews.
Nancy's
"addition"
would
then explore
the consequences
of the release of that secret to "us,"
as a result of the
genocide.
What
else, after all,
can "henceforth"
mean?
Now
I deeply respect this
and other work of Nancy's
is explicitly motivated by the desire to understand
and unwork the complicity between philosophy and twentieth-century
violence.
Nancy
would doubtless be horrified at the suggestion
that his rhetoric is complicit in perpetuating the annihilation of the Jew,
yet it seems clear that this is one potential accomplishment
of his further allegorization of
Blanchot.
That
which the Jew represented
before "he" was annihilated is that which "we" must let come,
must write
itself.
The word
"henceforth"
indeed implies that the secret of freedom from myth
has passed from the Jews to a community which does not exist,
which is only imaginable in and
by theory.
The
secret
becomes potentially available to all
who await a second coming
of this sacrificed
Jew.
I insist:
This plausible yet "uncharitable" reading
cannot be stretched to an accusation
of anti-Judaism.
On the contrary,
it is clear that Nancy
and thinkers like him
are committed to a sympathetic philosophical comprehension
of the existence and annihilation
of the Jews.
My claim is rather
that within the thought
of philosophers such as Nancy
lies a blindness to the particularity of Jewish difference
which is itself part of a relentless penchant
for allegorizing all "difference"
into a monovocal
discourse.
~
~
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Jews
*~*
Sometimes
the reference
to the allegorized Jew
is implicit
or made in passing;
in other works
it is an implicit and
central
trope.
An
example
of the former
is contained in Jean-Luc Nancy's
The Inoperative Community.
*~*
*~*
As JB
has shown,
Lyotard's allegorizing move
on the signifier "Jew"
is repeated at other moments as well
in post-Nazi, post-structuralist appropriations
of the signifier
Jew.
Nancy's central problem
in that work is to formulate a notion of community
which will not violate the standard
of non-coercion.
That
standard holds
that community is
"the com-pearance [comparution]
of singular beings."
For Nancy,
such singularity
and the simultaneity which is a condition of it
appear to imply an evacuation of history
and memory.
So many brutalities,
so many violations of any notion
of humanly responsible community
have been carried out in the name of solidarity collectives
supposed to have obtained in the past,
that Nancy seems to have renounced
any possible recourse to memory
in his attempt to think through the possibility
of there ever being
community without
coercion.
Of there ever being:
the only community which does not betray the hope
invested in that word,
Nancy argues, is one that resists
any kind of stable
existence.
*~*
The problem is
that Nancy has in fact attempted
a generalized model of community
as non-being.
Hence
any already existing "community"
is out of consideration by its very existence,
relegated through philosophical necessity
to a world we have lost
or which never
existed.
Following
Nancy's rhetoric,
the only possible residues
of that lost world are false community
appearing as either a serial, undifferentiated collective
in the same analytic category as the Fascist mass or,
alternatively, as assemblage of unrelated
individuals.
The individual in turn
"is merely the residue
of the experience of the dissolution of community,"
and furthermore,
"the true consciousness of the loss of community
is Christian."
*~*
Although
Nancy is silent
on the relations among history, memory, and community,
he considers at some length the apparently tortured relation between "myth" and
community.
For Nancy myth
- that necessary fiction which grounds the insistent specialness
of the existent communal group - is an irreducible component of community and at the same time necessarily pernicious
in its effects.
Therefore
Nancy asserts a search,
not for the eradication of myth but rather for its "interruption":
"interruption of myth is therefore also, necessarily,
the interruption of
community."
In a
footnote
Nancy elaborates on an earlier comment
by Maurice Blanchot:
Blanchot ... writes: "The Jews incarnate ... the refusal of myths,
the abandonment of idols, the recognition of an ethical order that manifests itself in respect for the law.
What Hitler wants to annihilate in the Jew,
in the 'myth of the Jew,' is precisely freed from myth."
This is another way of showing
where and when myth was definitively interrupted.
I would add this: "man freed from myth"
belongs henceforth to a community
that it is incumbent
upon us
to let come,
to let write
itself.
*~*
I want
to press,
in a sense by literalizing,
the opening offered here.
The quote from Blanchot seems ambiguous if not contradictory:
Do the Jews literally "incarnate ... the refusal of myths,"
or is that one of Hitler's
myths?
Let me
first pursue
the first reading, which is both the more flattering and the more
dangerous.
This reading
would tell us that community without myth was once
the special possession of the
Jews.
Nancy's
"addition"
would
then explore
the consequences
of the release of that secret to "us,"
as a result of the
genocide.
What
else, after all,
can "henceforth"
mean?
Now
I deeply respect this
and other work of Nancy's
is explicitly motivated by the desire to understand
and unwork the complicity between philosophy and twentieth-century
violence.
Nancy
would doubtless be horrified at the suggestion
that his rhetoric is complicit in perpetuating the annihilation of the Jew,
yet it seems clear that this is one potential accomplishment
of his further allegorization of
Blanchot.
That
which the Jew represented
before "he" was annihilated is that which "we" must let come,
must write
itself.
The word
"henceforth"
indeed implies that the secret of freedom from myth
has passed from the Jews to a community which does not exist,
which is only imaginable in and
by theory.
The
secret
becomes potentially available to all
who await a second coming
of this sacrificed
Jew.
I insist:
This plausible yet "uncharitable" reading
cannot be stretched to an accusation
of anti-Judaism.
On the contrary,
it is clear that Nancy
and thinkers like him
are committed to a sympathetic philosophical comprehension
of the existence and annihilation
of the Jews.
My claim is rather
that within the thought
of philosophers such as Nancy
lies a blindness to the particularity of Jewish difference
which is itself part of a relentless penchant
for allegorizing all "difference"
into a monovocal
discourse.
~
~
24 aug 2005 - bewerkt op 21 mrt 2008
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