Jews Out of the Question

Elad Lapidot

Description

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.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Anti-Anti-Semitism

1. Anti-Heidegger: Anatomy of Anti-Anti-Semitism

2. Anti-Semitic Creation of Jews: Adorno & Horkheimer to Sartre

3. Jewish Creation of Anti-Semitism: Arendt and Badiou

4. The Anti-Anti-Semitic Jew: Jean-Luc Nancy

Part II: Anti-Semitism

5. Renan's Anti-Semitic Science

6. Aphenomenology of the Jewish Question: Bauer and Marx

7. Triumph of Judaism: From Marr to Hitler

Epilogue: The End of Anti-Anti-Semitism as Introduction to Talmud

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Judaism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438480466
• Langue: English

Extrait

Jews Out of the Question
SUNY SERIES, PHILOSOPHY AND RACE
Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, editors
JEWS OUT OF THE QUESTION
A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism
Elad Lapidot
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
©2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Lapidot, Elad, author.
Title: Jews out of the question : a critique of anti-anti-Semitism / Elad Lapidot.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2020. | Series: Suny series, philosophy and race | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020001221 (print) | LCCN 2020001222 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438480459 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438480466 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Antisemitism—Philosophy. | Philosophy—Political aspects. | Antisemitism—History. | Antisemitism—History—21st century.
Classification: LCC DS145 .L3225 2020 (print) | LCC DS145 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001221
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001222
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM
1. Anti-Heidegger: Anatomy of Anti-Anti-Semitism
2. Anti-Semitic Creation of Jews: Adorno Horkheimer to Sartre
3. Jewish Creation of Anti-Semitism: Arendt and Badiou
4. The Anti-Anti-Semitic Jew: Jean-Luc Nancy
PART II ANTI-SEMITISM
5. Renan’s Anti-Semitic Science
6. Aphenomenology of the Jewish Question: Bauer and Marx
7. Triumph of Judaism: From Marr to Hitler
Epilogue. The End of Anti-Anti-Semitism as Introduction to Talmud
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
KNOWING IS PLURAL; WRITING IS TOO. “ Seit ein Gespräch wir sind ,” since we are a conversation. I wish to express my deep gratitude to the colleagues who were the first to acknowledge this book, a fragile creature, by being its first readers, and with their comments, questions, suggestions, critiques, and encouragement helped me to give it its final form: Luca Di Blasi, Menachem Lorberbaum, Gil Anidjar, Elliot Wolfson, Michael Fagenblat, and Sarah Ross.
I further wish to acknowledge the friends who, in many conversations and exchanges, in different places, times, and settings, have discussed with me various aspects of this book, gave me their time, attention, support, and good advice, and have thus become those to whom I speak when I write: Jan Eike Dunkhase, Ron Naiweld, Oded Schechter, Hannah Tzuberi, Aviva Ronnefeld, Ivan Segré, Sergey Dolgopolski, Micha Brumlik, Hans Ruin, Itamar Ben-Ami, Karma Ben-Johanan, Frederic Brenner, Gabriel Levy, Yemima Hadad, Brian Crawford, Louis Blond, Roi Bar, and Amir Engel.
I am also grateful to Paul Mendes-Flohr, Phil Getz, and David Myers for their help in looking for a suitable venue for publishing this work, and to Robert Bernasconi and Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, who accepted it into their Philosophy and Race series at SUNY Press, as well as to Rafael Chaiken and Ryan Morris, my editors at SUNY Press, for making this publication happen.
Last but not least, thank you, Eva, my beloved partner, and you, Alma, my beloved daughter, for your love and support, in all weathers, every day.
Introduction
THIS BOOK INTERVENES NOT ONLY IN A DEBATE , but in a war, a real one, fierce and ongoing. In such conditions, claiming neutrality is—even unwittingly—an act of aggression. I therefore begin by declaring my position: the present critique of anti-anti-Semitism does not intend to defend anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it suggests a fundamental affinity, and so a certain complicity between a dominant critique of anti-Semitism and the criticized object, anti-Semitism itself, a complicity between these two wars. This book critiques a certain discourse that frames, organizes, and generates both anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism.
It offers a philosophical meditation on anti-Semitism, which counters what Alain David recently described as “the absence of anti-Semitism in philosophy and among philosophers—for whom anti-Semitism doesn’t seem to be a theme for reflection or discussion, but rather a pathology, a sort of pendant to Jewish particularism.” 1 Indeed, this relation—the actual, possible, and impossible relation—of philosophy, theory, or thought to anti-Semitism, and to the Jewish, is a fundamental question underlying the following reflections.
Indeed, even as the following pages not only acknowledge the topicality of the debate on anti-Semitism but explicitly take a position in the struggle against it, they nonetheless take a step back from the immediacy of current affairs and attempt a more systematic contemplation.
This book therefore does not directly (although indirectly it does nothing but this) deal with or try to answer questions such as whether or not specific statements, actions, or positions (the BDS movement, critiques of the State of Israel, anti-Zionism or pro-Zionism and more) are anti-Semitic, or whether there is or isn’t a rise of new or old anti-Semitism in Europe or in the United States or elsewhere and whether or not the government does enough to fight it. Rather, it examines the basic categories and notions that underlie and pre-configure this discourse, namely the way in which anti-Semitism is talked about, thought about, and fought against. It examines how these categories are interconnected to the basic categories that shape contemporary culture—first and foremost its politics and its knowledge. It is a basic critical observation of this book, concurring with Alain David, that discussions of anti-Semitism tend to avoid or even preclude this kind of examination. Engaging in such a questioning is thus in itself engaging in polemics.
POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY
The present inquiry suggests a defined conceptual framework for the critique of anti-anti-Semitism, so to speak, for its “anti-anti-anti-Semitic” thought. The critical effort of this book, its underlying anti-, is indeed situated within a concern that is designated throughout this book as “political epistemology” or “epistemo-politics.” As arises from its concept, political epistemology concerns the relations between the ways we understand and perform what was named in Greek episteme or logos , i.e., knowledge, science, philosophy, and so forth, and the ways we understand and perform—conceptually still Greek— polis , i.e., our political, communal existence.
The term “political epistemology” has been used over the preceding decades, with a noticeable increase in recent years, but without attaining any systematic or standard meaning. A common feature of current uses is that they presuppose the concept and thus the phenomenon or phenomenal complex, either of politics or of knowledge or of both, and engage in a more or less empirical observation of, say, the role of “political ideas and knowledge” in “political action.” 2 The present critique of political epistemology aims, in contrast, at problematizing the conceptual matrix regulating the interrelations of politics and knowledge. It is closer to how Bruno Latour used the term “political epistemology” to characterize the basic question of Science Studies as not extending “politics to science, nor science to politics,” but rather trying “to understand where the difference comes from and how the distribution of skills among the different domains has been adjudicated.” 3 Nonetheless, Latour seems to reduce both knowledge and politics to the categories of the social, which is perhaps the categorical difference between the sociology of science and the project envisioned here as “political epistemology.”
Political epistemology may be deemed as the philosophical pendant of political theology; the question of epistemo-politics or logo-politics is troubled by the same hyphen as theo-politics, which is perhaps also the same hyphen of bio-politics. Performed, however, within the realm of knowledge, within the institution or polis of knowledge, inside the university and academic discourse, the epistemo-political reflection is self-reflection, which experiences this troubled hyphen more readily as an internal split. In the present context, of particular interest for the following inquiry is a critical meditation on the modern and contemporary epistemo-political condition. In other words, it tries to observe and describe a certain difficulty, deficiency, or dislocation in the relation between knowledge and politics in modernity, a fundamental disconnection, disassociation, and dis-relation between episteme and polis . Similar or perhaps the identical disconnection has been already noticed and analyzed by Hannah Arendt, who traced the split back to the very origin of philosophy: “The gulf between philosophy and politics opened historically with the trial and condemnation” of Socrates. 4
The locus of the present critical reflection on modern political epistemology is the field of modern episteme that does explicitly concern the polis , namely political thought. Methodologically, its contemplation of contemporary political thought does not set out from the current doctrinal formulation of political science or political philosophy, nor does it attempt to offer such