Jews Out of the Question

A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism

Elad Lapidot

• Editorial: SUNY Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438480466
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Politische Philosophie

In post-Holocaust philosophy, anti-Semitism has come to be seen as a paradigmatic political and ideological evil. Jews Out of the Question examines the role that opposition to anti-Semitism has played in shaping contemporary political philosophy. Elad Lapidot argues that post-Holocaust philosophy identifies the fundamental, epistemological evil of anti-Semitic thought not in thinking against Jews, but in thinking of Jews. In other words, what philosophy denounces as anti-Semitic is the figure of "the Jew" in thought. Lapidot reveals how, paradoxically, opposition to anti-Semitism has generated a rejection of Jewish thought in post-Holocaust philosophy. Through critical readings of political philosophers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Arendt, Badiou, and Nancy, the book contends that by rejecting Jewish thought, the opposition to anti-Semitism comes dangerously close to anti-Semitism itself, and at work in this rejection, is a problematic understanding of the relations between politics and thought—a troubling political epistemology. Lapidot's critique of this political epistemology is the book's ultimate aim.

Part I

ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM

1Anti-Heidegger

Anatomy of Anti-Anti-Semitism

FROM FEBRUARY 2014 TO MARCH 2015 the German Klostermann Verlag has published the first four volumes of what will come to be generally known as Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks.1 The Black Notebooks are a collection of notes written by Heidegger between the years 1931 to 1975, which he himself before his death prepared for posthumous publication, as the last volumes, 94–102, of the integral edition of his collected works, the Gesamtausgabe. The four published volumes contain the notes from 1931 to 1948. These notes could be generally characterized as philosophical fragments; however, their characterization has been controversial. Indeed, immediately upon publication, in fact even before they were published, the Black Notebooks sparked off a heated controversy. The debate started in the feuilleton sections of European press, followed by international media, then transported to academic venues, conferences, journals, and books, to take the shape of a scholarly and philosophical conversation, an extraordinary intellectual event.2 The entire controversy concerned a handful of notes, mostly from the years 1939–1941, covering together about three pages of text, out of about 1,800 pages of all so far published Black Notebooks. What is common to all the controversial notes is that they refer to Jews or “Jewish” things. All these references constitute negative statements and have been thus almost unanimously recognized as anti-Semitic.

In what follows, I will show how the controversy concerning Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, built up around and in opposition to anti-Semitism, unfolding, that is, as anti-anti-Semitic discourse, has been forming a contemporary site of non-encounter between the philosophical and the Jewish. I will in particular identify the underlying epistemo-political pre-conceptions of this anti-anti-Semitic operation, and indicate moments where it echoes or threatens to converge with tropes of a discourse that may be designated, by this very same anti-anti-Semitic discourse itself, as anti-Semitism. This will be just an initial indication, performed in the corpus of a still ongoing conversation. Key concepts, positions, and dynamics of this anti-anti-Semitic discourse will be examined more closely in the following chapters. The main topic here is the critique of anti-Semitism, i.e., anti-anti-Semitism. The focus for now is therefore the debate concerning Heidegger’s anti-Semitic fragments and not these fragments themselves, nor their anti-Semitism. I will come back to the question of anti-Semitism in the second part of this book, and to Heidegger’s anti-Semitism in the epilogue. Presently, as a passage to the controversy, I will simply quote the four most central notes that have been discussed in the current debate:

1“But the temporary increase in the power of Judaism [Judentum] is grounded in the fact that Western metaphysics, especially in its modern development, offered the point of attachment for the expansion of an otherwise empty rationality and calculative capacity, and these thereby created for themselves an abode in the ‘spirit’ without ever being able, on their own, to grasp the concealed domains of decision. The more originary and inceptual the future decisions and questions become, all the more inaccessible will they remain to this ‘race.’ (Thus Husserl’s step to the phenomenological attitude, taken in explicit opposition to psychological explanation and to the historical calculation of opinions, is of lasting importance—and yet this attitude never reaches into the domains of the essential decisions; instead, it entirely presupposes the historical tradition of philosophy. The necessary result shows itself at once in the turning toward a neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy, and this turn ultimately made inevitable a progression to Hegelianism in the formal sense. My ‘attack’ on Husserl is not directed to him alone and is not at all directed inessentially—the attack is directed against the neglect of the question of being, i.e., against the essence of metaphysics as such, the metaphysics on whose ground the machination of beings is able to determine history. The attack establishes a historical moment of the supreme decision between the primacy of beings and the grounding of the truth of beyng.)” (GA 96: 46; Rojcewicz, 37)

2“The Jews, with their accentuated talent for calculation, have for the longest time already been ‘living’ according to the principle of race, which is why they are also offering the most vehement resistance to its unrestricted application. The instituting of racial breeding stems not from ‘life’ itself, but from the overpowering of life by machination. What machination pursues with such planning is a complete deracializing of peoples through their being clamped into an equally built and equally tailored instituting of all beings. One with the deracializing is a self-alienation of the peoples—the loss of history, i.e., the loss of the domains of decision regarding beyng.” (GA 96: 56; Rojcewicz, 44)

3“The question of the role of world-Judaism [Weltjudentum] is not a racial question, but a metaphysical one, a question that concerns the kind of singular human existence [Menschentümlichkeit] which, being utterly unattached [schlechthin ungebunden; Rojcewicz translates “in an utterly unrestrained way”], can undertake as a world-historical ‘task’ the uprooting of all beings from being.” (GA 96:243; Rojcewicz, 191)

4“The anti-Christ must, like any ‘anti-’, originate from the same essential ground as that against which it is ‘anti-‘—namely like ‘the Christ’. He originates from the Jewish collective [Judenschaft]. The latter has been, in the era of the Christian Occident, i.e., of Metaphysics, the principle of destruction. The destructive element in the turning of the consummation of Metaphysics—i.e., of Hegel’s metaphysics through Marx. Spirit and culture become the superstructure of ‘life’—i.e., of economy, i.e., of organization—i.e., of the biological—i.e., of the ‘people’. When the essential ‘Jewish’ in the metaphysical sense begins to fight against the Jewish, the summit of self-annihilation was reached in history; provided that the ‘Jewish’ has everywhere completely seized control, such that also fighting ‘the Jewish’—and primarily it—comes under its dominion.” (GA 97; 20)

ANTI-SEMITISM, THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

The primary anti-anti-Semitic operation effected by the ongoing debate concerning the above passages has been hermeneutic, namely pertaining to the basic relation to the text as such or, more radically, an operation revealing the basic relation to thinking as a relation to text, as a relation of reading. Designating the controversial passages as “anti-Semitic” has led to questioning the essence of this text, of text in general, and more precisely the nature of the philosophical text, or, on the side of reception, of philosophical reading. Through a hermeneutic procedure, similar to earlier ones already performed in previous Heidegger controversies with respect to the question of National Socialism, the question of anti-Semitism triggered an operation of differentiation and separation, within the Heideggerian text, within the seeming consistency of its texture, between the philosophical and the non-philosophical. In this operation, it is by means of the category “anti-Semitism” that the Jews have come to signify the limit or end of philosophy.

What is meant by this is not the diverging appreciations of how central to Heidegger’s thought, in general or as expressed in the Black Notebooks, are his discussions of Jews, starting with the explicit passages and variously expanding the scope of this corpus through more or less far-reaching semantic extrapolations (whereby Jews are also intended or should be understood as signified by terms such as “calculation,” “machinations,” “uprootedness,” “groundlessness,” “enemy,” “beings” etc.). One easily joins, for instance, Karsten Harries’s rejection of Richard Wolin’s exaggerated assertion of Heidegger’s “obsession with World Jewry.”3

What I mean is rather the various conceptual devices deployed in order to trace within the Heideggerian text and Western corpus or thought in general a clear separation between anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism and philosophy—both in Heidegger’s defense or against him. Thus, on the apologetic side, Friedrich Wilhelm von Hermann considers all Heidegger’s texts pertaining to Jews to be “philosophically without import.”4 Rosa Maria Marafioti understands “the non-philosophical passages critical of Jews” as the “opinions of a private person.”5 Jeff Malpas uses the distinction between “philosophical” and “personal/political,” and Daniela Vallega-Neu finds the controversial passages not to represent “originary thinking.”6 In contrast and in breach of this original level of philosophy, the anti-Semitic text represents an external and alien element, which can only enter the philosophical text by the effect of “infection” or “contamination.”7 “A small, but highly poisonous dose,” Dieter Thomä called it.8 Stamped “anti-Semitic,” these texts are completely banished from the realm of thought, meaning, and intelligibility. Reading them, the hermeneutical expert Jean Grondin can do nothing more than “shake the head” and identify them as “Nazi war propaganda,” of which Heidegger was the “victim.”9 While the apologists use the separation of anti-Semitism and philosophy for surgically removing the malignant passages and thus salvaging the otherwise healthy corpus, the more prosecutorial voices use the exactly same separation for disqualifying the entire oeuvre. Thus, invoking Emmanuel Faye’s 2005 excommunication of Heidegger’s work from philosophy on the charge of National Socialism (“Such a work may not remain in philosophy libraries: it rather belongs to the historical archives of Nazism and Hitlerism”),10 Marion Heinz upholds the sentence by ruling that “there can be no ‘anti-Semitic philosophy.’”11

BAN OF THE COLLECTIVE

For such an operation as this, which determines the limits of philosophy, which thus in a way decides on the definition and essence of philosophy, either a very elaborate reasoning is required—or the certainty of self-evidence. The current debate most often seems to hold the mutual exclusion of philosophy and anti-Semitism as self-evident. In any case, no elaborate reasoning has been so far provided for this virtually universal gesture. The desire to distance oneself and one’s discourse from anti-Semitism, in particular in the historical context of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks entries, is no doubt self-evident. As I explained above, however, the way of anti-anti-Semitism is ambiguous, and may also lead to the opposite of the desired direction. For this reason I find it essential to insist on asking the explicit question: why is anti-Semitism excluded from philosophy? Or better: what in anti-Semitism excludes it from philosophy? Or yet better: what in anti-Semitism, as understood by the current discourse, excludes it from philosophy?

My basic argument, which I will quickly state at the outset, before demonstrating it in the texts, is that this crucial component is not the “anti-,” namely is not the negative attitude of anti-Semitism toward Jews, not what statements anti-Semitism makes about Jews, but rather that it makes any statements about Jews at all, whether negative or positive. In other words, I argue that the problematic component of anti-Semitism, which in the eyes of the current discourse excludes anti-Semitism from philosophy, is the Jews. This means that the current anti-anti-Semitism as it expresses itself in the current Heidegger controversy is grounded on “a certain perception of the Jews” as something, a collective being, with respect to which no philosophically relevant statements may be made, namely as something that lies outside of thought.

For demonstrating my claim, I start by referring to one of the most important and omnipresent voices in the current debate, to whom I will continue to refer often in this chapter. Indeed, the basic terms of this debate were set in advance, a few months before the actual publication of the Black Notebooks, through a chain of interactions triggered by their editor, Peter Trawny. Trawny’s essay on the Black Notebooks was published simultaneously with the Notebooks themselves, but pre-circulated as a draft a few months earlier, and is—as are his editor’s notes in the Gesamtausgabe volumes themselves—the most often explicitly and inexplicitly quoted authority and source on the matter.12 It was Trawny who opened and framed the discussion by initially introducing the accusation of “anti-Semitism” that had allegedly “contaminated” Heidegger’s thought. As far as I know, Trawny has been so far the only participant in the discussion who also offered an explicit definition of what he meant by “anti-Semitism,” which has not been contested or further discussed, and so seems to express a general consensus.13 I should emphasize that if my critique of the current discourse often refers to Trawny’s work, it is not because I find it to be more problematic that others, but, on the contrary, the best articulated and so the most interesting to engage with, the best Gegner, as Heidegger would have it.14

The first part of this definition focuses on the “anti-,” the negative component of “hate”: “Anti-Semitic—was and is anything affective or administrative directed against Jews based on rumors, prejud...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Anti-Anti-Semitism
• Part II Anti-Semitism
• Epilogue. The End of Anti-Anti-Semitism as Introduction to Talmud
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover