Zizek on Jews and Love For the religious life of an orthodox Jew god is actually quite marginal. There were times when for a member of the orthodox intellectual elite it was in a way “uncool” to refer too much to god: a sign that he is not devoted enough to the real noble cause of the polemical study of Talmud (the continual movement of expansion of the law and evasion from it). It was only the crude secular Zionist gaze that took god, which was a sort of alibi, so seriously. The sad thing is that now more and more orthodox Jews seem convinced that they indeed believe in god. The consequence of this unique ideological situation is the paradox of atheists defending Zionist claims in theological terms. Exemplary here is The Arrogance of the Present, Milner’s exploration of the legacy of 1968, which can also be read as a reply to Badiou’s The Century as well as to his exploration of the politico‐ideological implications of the “name of the Jew.” In an implicit, but, for that reason, all the more intense, dialogue with Badiou, Milner proposes a radically different diagnosis of the twentieth century. His starting point is the same as Badiou’s: “a name counts only as far as the divisions it induces go.” Master‐Signifiers that matter are those that clarify their field by simplifying the complex situation into a clear division — yes or no, for or against. Milner goes on: “But here is what happened: one day, it became obvious that names believed to bear a future (glorious or sinister) no longer divide anyone; and names dismissed as thoroughly obsolete began to bring about unbridgeable divisions”. Names that today no longer divide, generate passionate attachment, but leave us indifferent, are those that traditionally were expected to act as the most mobilizing (“workers,” “class struggle”), while those that appeared deprived of their divisive edge violently reemerged in their divisive role — today, the name Jew “divides most deeply the speaking beings”: “Contrary to what knowledge predicted, the culminating point of the twentieth century did not take the form of social revolution; it took the form of an extermination. Contrary to what the Revolution has been promising, the extermination ignored classes and fixated on a name without any class meaning. Not even an economic one. Not a shadow of an objective meaning”. Milner’s conclusion is that “the only true event of the twentieth century was the return of the name Jew” — this return for an ominous surprise also for the Jews themselves. That is to say, with the political emancipation of the Jews in modern Europe, a new figure of the Jew emerged: the “Jew of knowledge” who replaces study (of Talmud, i.e., of his theological roots) with universal (scientific) knowledge. We get Jews who excel in secular sciences, and this is why Marxism was so popular among Jewish intellectuals: it presented itself as “scientific socialism,” uniting knowledge and revolution (in contrast to Jacobins, who proudly said, apropos Laplace, that “the Republic doesn’t need scientists,” or millenarists who dismissed knowledge as sinful). With Marxism, inequality/injustice and its overcoming becomes an object of knowledge. Enlightenment thus offers European Jews a chance to find a place in the universality of scientific knowledge, ignoring their name, tradition, roots. This dream, however, brutally ended with holocaust: the “Jew of knowledge” couldn’t survive Nazi extermination — the trauma was that knowledge allowed it, wasn’t able to resist it, was impotent in the face of it. (Traces of this impotence are already discernible in the famous 1929 Davos debate between Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger, where Heidegger treated Cassirer with impolite rudeness, refusing a handshake at the conclusion, etc.) How did the European left react to this rupture? The core of Milner’s book is the close analysis of the Maoist proletarian left (la Gauche prolétarienne), the main political organization emerging out of May 1968. When it fell apart, some of its members (like Benny Levy) opted for fidelity to the name of the Jew, others chose Christian spirituality. For Milner, the entire activity of the proletarian left was based on a certain disavowal, on a refusal to pronounce a name. Milner proposes a nice Magrittean image: a room with a window in the middle and a painting covering up and obstructing the view through the window; the scene on the painting exactly reproduces the exterior one would have seen through the window. Such is the function of ideological misrecognition: it obfuscates the true dimension of what we see. In the case of the proletarian left this unseen dimension was the name of the Jew. That is to say, the proletarian left legitimized its radical opposition to the entire French political establishment as the prolongation of the Resistance against the Fascist occupation: their diagnosis was that the French political life was still dominated by people who stood in direct continuity with the Petainist collaboration. However, although they designated the right enemy, they kept silent on the fact that the main target of the Fascist regime was not the left, but the Jews. In short, they used the event itself to obfuscate its true dimension, similarly to the “Jew of knowledge” who tries to redefine his Jewishness so that he will be able to erase the real core of being a Jew. Benny Levy’s transformation from a Maoist to a Zionist is thus indicative of a wider tendency. The consequence drawn by many from the “obscure disaster” of twentieth‐century attempts at universal emancipation is that particular groups no longer accept “sublating” their own emancipation in the universal one (“we—oppressed minorities, women, etc. — can only attain our freedom through universal emancipation,” i.e., the Communist revolution): fidelity to the universal cause is replaced by fidelities to particular identities (Jewish, gay, etc.), and the most we can envisage is a “strategic alliance” between particular struggles. Perhaps, however, the time has come to return to the notion of universal emancipation, and it is here that a critical analysis should begin. When Milner claims that the class struggle, etc. are no longer divisive names, that they are replaced by “Jew” as the truly divisive name, he describes a (partially true) fact, but what does this fact mean? Should it not also be interpreted in terms of the classic Marxist theory of antisemitism, which reads the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” as the metaphoric stand‐in for class struggle? The disappearance of the class struggle and the (re)appearance of antisemitism are thus two sides of the same coin, since the presence of the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” is only comprehensible against the background of the absence of class struggle. Walter Benjamin (to whom Milner himself refers as to an authority, and who stands precisely for a Marxist Jew who remains faithful to the religious dimension of Jewishness and is thus not a “Jew of knowledge”) said long ago that every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution—this thesis not only still holds today but is perhaps more pertinent than ever. Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and camps imitated Bolshevik terror, the Leninist party is today alive in Al‐Qaeda—yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how Fascism literally replaces (takes the place of) the leftist revolution: its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, that the left was not able to mobilize. How are we to understand this reversal of an emancipatory thrust into fundamentalist populism? It is here that the materialist‐dialectic passage from the Two to Three gains all its weight: the axiom of Communist politics is not simply the dualist “class struggle,” but, more precisely, the third moment as the subtraction from the Two of the hegemonic politics. That is to say, the hegemonic ideological field imposes on us a field of (ideological) visibility with its own “principal contradiction” (today, it is the opposition of market‐freedom‐democracy and fundamentalist‐terrorist‐totalitarianism: “Islamo‐Fascism,” etc.), and the first thing to do is to reject (to subtract from) this opposition, to perceive it as a false opposition destined to obfuscate the true line of division. As we have already seen, Lacan’s formula for this redoubling is 1+1+a: the “official” antagonism (the Two) is always supplemented by an “indivisible remainder” that indicates its foreclosed dimension. In other terms, the true antagonism is always reflective, it is the antagonism between the “official” antagonism and what is foreclosed by it (this is why, in Lacan’s mathematics, 1 + 1 = 3). Today, for example, the true antagonism is not the one between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded third (radical emancipatory politics). Badiou already provided the contours of this passage from Two to Three in his reading of the Pauline passage from Law to love. In both cases (in Law and in love) we are dealing with division, with a “divided subject”; however, the modality of the division is thoroughly different. The subject of the Law is “decentered” in the sense that it is caught in the self‐destructive vicious cycle of sin and Law in which one pole engenders its opposite; Paul provided the unsurpassable description of this entanglement in Romans 7: We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin. What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Miserable one that I am! It is thus not that I am merely torn between the two opposites, Law and sin; the problem is that I cannot even clearly distinguish them: I want to follow the Law and I end up in sin. This vicious cycle is (not so much overcome as) broken, one breaks out of it, with the experience of love, more precisely: with the experience of the radical gap that separates love from the Law. Therein resides the radical difference between the couple Law/sin and the couple Law/love. The gap that separates Law and sin is not a real difference: their truth is their mutual implication or confusion — Law generates sin and feeds on it, etc., one cannot ever draw a clear line of separation between the two. It is only with the couple Law/love that we attain real difference: these two moments are radically separate, they are not “mediated,” one is not the form of appearance of its opposite. In other words, the difference between the two couples (Law/sin and Law/love) is not substantial, but purely formal: we are dealing with the same content in its two modalities. In its indistinction/ mediation, the couple is the one of Law/sin; in the radical distinction of the two, it is Law/love. It is therefore wrong to ask the question “Are we then forever condemned to the split between Law and love? What about the synthesis between Law and love?” The split between Law and sin is of a radically different nature than the split between Law and love: instead of the vicious cycle of the mutual reinforcement, we get a clear distinction of two different domains. Once we become fully aware of the dimension of love in its radical difference from the Law, love has, in a way, already won, since this difference is visible only when one already dwells in love, from the standpoint of love. In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion — to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts. Let me take a contemporary example. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured in exactly the same way as the one between Law and sin in Paul, i.e., liberalism itself generates its opposite. So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, etc.? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them — i.e., its own core — against the fundamentalist onslaught. Why? The problem with liberalism is that it cannot stand on its own: there is something missing in the liberal edifice; liberalism is in its very notion “parasitic,” relying on a presupposed network of communal values that it is itself undermining its own development. Fundamentalism is a reaction — a false, mystifying, reaction, of course — against a real flaw of liberalism, and that is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself — the only thing that can save its core is a renewed left. Or, to put it in the well‐known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical left. SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, “The Jew Is Within You, But You, You Are in the Jew” in UDI ALONI, WHAT DOES A JEW WANT? On Binationalism and Other Specters, Columbia University Press New York, 2011.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 16:28:47 +0000
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