Specters of Heidegger

My first chapter is dedicated to post-Heideggerian thought, and to the unbearable legacy of Heidegger in France and beyond. The decentering of the subject, the recoding of Heideggerian ontology as an ethics of the other, the idealization of the Jews as diasporic beings and ontological strangers (grounded in an operation of Judaization of Dasein), the metaphysical reading of the Holocaust as an event outside of history, the celebration of nomadism and deterritorialization—all that have made it difficult if not downright impossible to think of Jewish national sovereignty and Jewish normalcy. Likewise, French postmodern thought has not been able or willing to engage with the resurgence of antisemitism—an antisemitism that does not fit its theoretical, ideological and metaphysical framework. Derrida's disciples continue to speak the language of existential ontology, albeit with a critical distance, or with serious distortions—a language that is no longer in use except in national literature and cultural studies departments in the U.S. and is now employed to nurture the new antisemitism.

Theory’s Operation Shylock

Chapter 4 comes as a critique of what I call, as a tribute to Philip Roth’s novel, “theory’s Operation Shylock,” i.e., recent celebrations of Diasporic Jewry, irrational demonization of Zionism and of the Jewish state, and, more seriously, ungrounded condemnation of a contemporary Jewry supposedly turned reactionary due to its support for the U.S. and Israel. Influenced by postcolonial studies and deconstruction, oblivious of the new modalities of antisemitism, theorists actively delegitimize Zionism as a mere product of the European colonial mindset and as a perversion of the Jewish spirit. I suggest that in recent publications, historian Enzo Traverso and philosopher Judith Butler resort to distortion of history and to a betrayal of the most basic principles of hermeneutics to justify their belief in the political and intellectual superiority of Diasporic Judaism (hypostatized as ethical) over Zionism (construed as particularist, imperialistic, and racist).

Dangerous Parallels

In Chapter 3, I probe the theory of multidirectional memory propounded by literary scholars in Europe and the U.S. The multidirectional-memory hypothesis was born from what those scholars call “the colonial turn” in literary and Holocaust studies. Scholars in postcolonial studies are increasingly turning to the Holocaust to approach the history and memory of colonialism, slavery, and more specifically, the events of the Algerian war. Their stated goal is to use the history and memory of the Holocaust to shed light on colonialism, especially in its French incarnation, or rather, to trigger a dialogue among collective memories. I argue that despite a praiseworthy attempt at rejecting the paradigm of competition among victims, that paradigm returns to haunt multidirectional memory. In order to legitimate its effort at finding consensus by uniting collective memories of suffering and persecution, multidirectional memory tones down the specificity of the Holocaust, and ends up neutralizing complex aspects of the Algerian war (notably, conflicting narratives of victimized groups) and more recent manifestations of Islamic terrorism and Islamic antisemitism. Not only do those blind spots prevent vigorous confrontation with resurgent antisemitism, they utterly obliterate that resurgence.

Envoy: Adieu to France?

At the end of this journey into theory and the new antisemitism, as once again I stand glued to the news in the aftermath of the carnage perpetrated by the Islamic State on November 13, 2015, in the heart of Paris, I wish to add a few words on the most recent theory that has emerged on the new antisemitism and its relationship to Islamophobia....

The Moralistic Turn

Chapter 2 examines what I call the moralistic turn in French letters and social thought, and especially the inversions between victims and perpetrators that I attribute to the rise of radical social critique. French literary modernity extolled evil and anti-morality, and revered transgression and rebellion. By blurring the lines between victims and perpetrators, they awkwardly yet genuinely acknowledged our common inhumanity. By contrast, I argue that our own time has reinjected moralism into literature and social thought. French letters rehabilitate the transgressor in the name of a moralistic sociology that hides its fascination with evil behind a discourse of social justice and victimization. Recent years have seen the development of an ideology of outrage (or “indignation”). I argue that this ideology functions as a psychic shield meant to dispel the return of the repressed—namely, the human inclination to dehumanize the other, the herd mentality exemplified by the Nazi episode. Doomed to fail because it rests on a psychic structure of repetition instead of working through, the ideology of outrage not only hinders any analysis of current antisemitism; it has actually reignited that fading hatred.

Postscript: Theorizing Antisemitic Laughter

In her famous essay on antisemitism published in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt tells this sinister joke: “An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.”...

Introduction: Is Theory Good for the Jews?

This work is the result of a decade of researching and writing about the correlation between the postmodern approach to the Holocaust, the place of Jews in deconstruction and literary theory (the Jew as trope or figure), the fallout of the Arab-Israeli conflict in France, and the resurgence of antisemitism. So far, no book has aimed at tracing the metaphysical, literary, and esthetic roots of French responses to this new manifestation of antisemitism. I do not advocate a clear-cut division between “new” and “old” antisemitism, or even a radical paradigm shift. Instead, I wish to bring into focus the mutual shaping of past and present in our understanding of responses to the resurgence of antisemitism. My contention is that French reactions even to the most lethal incarnations of antisemitism can only be understood if we consider (a) the French construction of the “figural Jew” and the deconstruction of the empirical (political and historical) Jew; (b) the French way of memorializing, estheticizing, and idealizing the Holocaust within the last forty-five years; (c) France's vexed relation to its colonial past; and (d) the modernist French aesthetic grounded in the celebration of anomie and transgression.