Excluding the Jew Within Us - Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Excluding the Jew Within Us by Jean-Luc Nancy Jean Axelrad Cahan Excluding the Jew Within Us. By Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Sarah Clift. Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2020. 60 pages. $15.95 (paper). Understandably, the question of what went wrong in the twentieth century, with (among other things) two global wars and totalitarian political systems, will not let go of us Westerners. In the present work, the internationally renowned French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy engages with this problem. Like a Picasso sketch, the book outlines an answer with disarming simplicity—the achievement of such simplicity in both art and philosophy rests on decades of study and practice. Nancy obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Paul Ricoeur and is strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic approach of Jacques Lacan. He has written on an exceptionally wide array of topics including the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, the nature of pluralist politics, contemporary globalization, and film. Several works were written in collaboration with his friend Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, another pre-eminent postwar French thinker. Nancy is perhaps best known for La Communauté désoeuvrée (1986), usually translated as The Inoperable Community. [End Page 431] Reaching across the Atlantic to both North and South America, Nancy seeks the sources of enduring antisemitism: what course did the "anathemas of John Chrysostom, the diatribes of Luther, the rantings of [The Protocols of the Elders of Zion] and the ideology of Mein Kampf" take, such that antisemitism is still alive and well from Pittsburgh to Toulouse (vii)? What explains this "stupefying continuity with, and continuation of, a disease and a derangement that has belonged to the West since its very inception" (viii)? In order to understand this stupefying continuity, Nancy begins by discussing the Arendtian notion of the banality of evil and the case of Heidegger. Heidegger was at once the great philosopher leading us to critiques of biologism, technologism, and other corruptions, and one who—as is apparent from the Black Notebooks—fell into "a passive acceptance of stereotypes that emerge from the unfathomable depths of hatred" (11), just like millions of other people. What was it about "the very genesis of the West" that permitted or created not merely the emergence of hatred of the Jew but its "intimate incorporation"? Here, Nancy begins to apply psychological or psychanalytic concepts: incorporation as he understands it is a "capacity for absorption that is itself fed by a powerful energy" (13). He compares the incorporation of hatred to the incorporation of a technological device, let us say a smartphone: after an initial self-conscious effort, the usage becomes virtually automatic, or as Nancy prefers, banal. Skepticism begins to seep cautiously into our reading: is this a viable comparison? The habit of using a technical device seems more like the acquisition of a skill, like baking bread, than the adoption of a belief or set of attitudes, however uncritical. There remains an element of assenting judgement, of conscious position-taking, even in the spewing of the most foolish opinions. In conjunction with the case of Heidegger, Nancy also introduces Lacoue-Labarthe's concepts of "historial" and "spiritual" antisemitism. Lacoue-Labarthe's own analysis of antisemitism appeared most famously in the book Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (1986). To say that antisemitism is both historial and spiritual is to say that it is broadly civilizational (a term Nancy is reluctant to use) or cultural—antisemitism is rooted in [End Page 432] the cultural origin(s) of Western civilization. Such a broad civilizational approach, Nancy believes, contrasts strongly with that of the standard authorities, among whom he includes the Critical Theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the historian Leon Poliakov, and the philosopher Hannah Arendt. We might note here that this list is quite outdated: an enormous amount of both empirical and theoretical work has been done since the studies written by these authors were published. Be that as it may, Nancy proceeds to give an exposition of his own civilizational approach, one which I would call a psycho-metaphysical one; it is an approach on two levels, those of psychology and ontology, running as it were concurrently. According to Nancy...