Radical French Thought and the Return of the "Jewish Question"
154
Radical French Thought and the Return of the "Jewish Question"
154eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
For English-speaking readers, this book serves as an introduction to an important French intellectual whose work, especially on the issues of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, runs counter to the hostility shown toward Jews by some representatives of contemporary critical theory. It presents for the first time in English five essays by Éric Marty, previously published in France, with a new preface by the author addressed to his American readers. The focus of these essays is the debate in France and elsewhere in Europe concerning the “Jew.” The first essay on Jean Genet, one of postwar France’s most important literary figures, investigates the nature of Genet’s virulent antisemitism and hatred of Israel and its significance for an understanding of contemporary phenomena. The curious reappearance of St. Paul in theological and political discourse is discussed in another essay, which describes and analyses the interest that secular writers of the far left have shown in Paul’s “universalism” placed over and against Jewish or Israeli particularism. The remaining essays are more polemical in nature and confront the anti-Israeli attacks by Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze.
“Both important and timely, it will be a notable contribution to the ongoing public and intellectual discussion . . . of contemporary antisemitism and [the animus of intellectuals] toward the state of Israel.” —Elhanan Yakira, author of Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust
“Represents a significant contribution to our understanding of both the phenomenon of the “new antisemitism” and a certain strain of French critical theory over the last several decades.” —Maurice Samuels, Yale University
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253016843 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Studies in Antisemitism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 154 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Éric Marty is Professor of Contemporary French Literature at the University of Paris VII - Diderot. He is author of many books including Pourquoi le XXe siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux? (Why did the 20th 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 Cœur de la jeune Chinoise (The heart of the young Chinese). Marty is the editor of the Œuvres Complètes of Roland Barthes and the Journal of André Gide, 1887-1925.
Alan Astro is Professor of Modern Languages at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He has translated from French (writers such as Henri Raczymow and Cyrille Fleischman) and Yiddish (in Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing).
Read an Excerpt
Radical French Thought and the Return of the "Jewish Question"
By Éric Marty, Alan Astro
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Éric MartyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01684-3
CHAPTER 1
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 anti-Semite 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.
To my mind, the first sentence of this long passage—"Genet is anti-Semitic"—is the most profound and remarkable statement in the entirety of Sartre's unwieldy masterpiece, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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 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.
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." He wrote: "You see, it's not so much in terms of sexuality that I explain the faggot, but in direct terms of death."
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 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" or (as Proust called them in an earlier draft) "the race of aunts." 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. 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."
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): 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." 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, 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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."
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, 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."
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. 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 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."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Radical French Thought and the Return of the "Jewish Question" by Éric Marty, Alan Astro. Copyright © 2013 Éric Marty. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Bruno Chaouat
To My American Readers
1. Jean Genet's Anxiety in the Face of the Good
2. Alain Badiou: The Future of a Denial
3. Saint Paul among the Moderns
4. On Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception
5. Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews and Israel
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Both important and timely, it will be a notable contribution to the ongoing public and intellectual discussion . . . of contemporary antisemitism and [the animus of intellectuals] toward the state of Israel."
Both important and timely, it will be a notable contribution to the ongoing public and intellectual discussion . . . of contemporary antisemitism and [the animus of intellectuals] toward the state of Israel.
Represents a significant contribution to our understanding of both the phenomenon of the 'new antisemitism' and a certain strain of French critical theory over the last several decades.
Both important and timely, it will be a notable contribution to the ongoing public and intellectual discussion . . . of contemporary antisemitism and [the animus of intellectuals] toward the state of Israel.