Žižek's Jews

Abstract

Žižek's Jews Adam Komisaruk In memory of Dennis W. Allen Jews are everywhere in Slavoj Žižek. Jewish jokes are among his most vibrant textual examples; anti-Semitism is one of his most insistent themes, not to mention a tendency of which he himself is sometimes accused. His passionate engagement with theorists both Jewish (Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Levinas, Arendt, Eric Santner) and Jewish-agonistic (Hegel, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger) places identitarian issues front and center. From his earliest English writings onward, the figure of "the Jew" epitomizes for Žižek the convergence of capitalist ideology and psychical fantasy in the modern European imagination. More recently, and in dialogue with thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Zahi Zalloua, and the filmmaker Udi Aloni, Žižek has brought his analytic of violence and neighborliness to bear on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What has received somewhat less attention, however, is the fact that Žižek does not merely instrumentalize Jewishness in the service of an ontological critique, but seems interested in it as such, even if that "as such" demands continual interrogation. His inquiries into the very structure of Jewish belief and subjectivity remain somewhat independent of the gentile construction of Jews on the one hand, and of the Zionist identifications or non-identifications of Jews on the other. Although Žižek is far from endorsing the notion of an "inaccessible X, 'Jewishness' … the trans-phenomenal 'hard kernel of being,'" he recognizes that there is not one but a multiplicity of "Jewish questions," some of which are often posed by as well as about Jews (Tarrying 152). Žižek is a recursive rather than linear thinker, and rarely stays in one place for long. Nevertheless, I organize the following discussion according to what I would very roughly characterize as three phases of his "Jewish" commentaries. In the first, he elaborates the mechanics of anti-Semitism in terms of the Lacanian symptom, an external screen onto which Europe has historically projected its internal anxieties and thereby sustained its illusions of self-completion. The second phase corresponds to Žižek's theological turn; examining Judaism from the inside out rather than the outside in, it takes stock of such matters as the Jewish relation to the law, the status of Jewish guilt, and the supposed supersession of both by Christian love. Žižek's signal argument is that the Jewish law represses not only the parricidal break with paganism that Freud posited, but the vortex of the Che vuoi? that not even the [End Page 156] divine can answer. In the third phase, Žižek trains his eyes on the Middle East as a field where the contradictions of cultural identity play out. While his analysis does not readily translate into practical advice, he urges us to think in terms of intensifying rather than resolving these contradictions—even to the point of acknowledging the "monstrosity" of the national other and (mutually, though irreconcilably) the national self. Across this varied terrain, Žižek consistently attempts to think Jewishness as a dialectic of universality and particularity. That is, in the different roles that interest him—as the victims of centuries-long abuse, as worshipers navigating the injunctions of monotheism, as parties to a violent contestation of political borders—Jews simultaneously represent instantiations of a recurring pattern and an exceptional case. Anti-Semites stereotype Jews as both rootless cosmopolitans and as hopelessly "stuck" in esoteric practices; Jews separate themselves from people of other faiths in order to achieve what is true of people of all faiths, as in their own way do Christians; those who support the Israeli occupation claim to be defending a homeland in the face of atrocities, as in their own way do those who oppose it; and Žižek himself invokes Jews to dramatize the dialectical process where other examples both could and could not possibly suffice. Žižek stubbornly resists any irenic reductions of these paradoxes, because what is common to them—a trauma at the core of the Real that must be both recognized and disavowed—is by definition not generalizable. To deal with identity authentically means to cultivate a plural sense of "universal singularity" or the "concrete universal...