For the last couple of decades, the intellectual situation in France has been marked by countless discussions about the status to be accorded to the word “Jew” within the divisions of thought.
Undoubtedly, this has to do with the suspicion, based on some indubitable facts and some contrived ones, that anti-Semitism has made a “return”. But had it ever disappeared? Or is it not rather crucial to see that a considerable change has taken place in the nature of anti-Semitism’s forms, criteria and inscription in discourse over the last thirty years? Recall that in 1980, after the attack on the synagogue in rue Copernic, the prime minister in person, and in all calmness, distinguished between those victims who had gone to worship and the “innocent French” {sic} who were only passing by. Besides distinguishing between Jews and French with a kind of false concern, the good Raymond Barre appeared to mean that a Jew blindly targeted by an attack must be guilty in some way or other. People said it was a slip of the tongue. Instead, this amazing way of looking at the situation disclosed the subsistence of a racialist subconscious directly from the 1930s. Today, as regards the uses of the word Jew’, such discriminatory confidence would be inconceivable at the level of the state, and one can only be unreservedly glad of it. Calculated anti-Semitic provocations and false discriminatory naivety, such as denials of the existence of gas chambers or the Nazi destruction of the European Jews, have today been taken in by, or confined to the extreme right. So, although it is quite incorrect to say that anti-Semitism has disappeared, it is fair to maintain that its conditions of possibility have altered, to the extent that it is no longer inscribed in any sort of natural discourse, as was the case during Raymond Barre’s time. In this sense, Le Pen, in France, is the somewhat jaded custodian of a historical anti-Semitism that public opinion of the 1930s accepted as entirely commonplace. All in all, it may well be that this new sensitivity to anti-Semitic acts and inscriptions is a basic component of the diagnosis that anti- Semitism has made a ‘return’. Thus this return might for a large part be simply an effect of a significant and favorable lowering of the threshold at which public opinion no longer tolerates this sort of racialist provocation.
Below, I shall return to the issue of the birth of a new type of anti-Semitism, one articulated on conflicts in the Middle East and the presence, in France, of large minorities of workers of African extraction and of Muslim persuasion. For now, suffice it to say that the existence of this type of anti-Semitism is not in doubt, and that the zeal with which some deny its existence – generally in the name of supporting the Palestinians or the working-class minorities in France – is extremely harmful. That being the case, it doesn’t seem to me that the data, which are freely available, are such that they justify raising a full alert, although it should be clear that, on such questions, the imperative of vigilance admits of no interruption.
What constitutes the point of departure, what has sparked its existence, is not the obviousness of anti-Semitisms, old and new. It is a debate with further-reaching consequences, or rather a debate that is to be settled beforehand, including by those who agree that the slightest anti-Semitic allusion is not to be tolerated. Indeed, what is at issue is to know whether or not, in the general field of public intellectual discussion, the word “Jew” constitutes an exceptional signifier, such that it would be legitimate to make it play the role of a final, or even sacred, signifier. It is evident that tackling the eradication of forms of anti-Semitic consciousness is done differently, and with a different subjectivity, depending on whether we consider these forms of consciousness to be essentially different to other forms of racial discrimination (e.g. to anti-Arab sentiments or to the segregating of blacks to their communitarian activities); or whether – given certainly distinct and irreducible historicities – we consider that all forms of racist consciousness alike call for the same egalitarian and universalist reaction. Further, this shared repugnance of anti- Semitism must be distinguished from a certain philo-Semitism which claims not only that attacking Jews as such amounts to criminal baseness but that the word “Jew”, and the community claiming to stand for it, must be placed in a paradigmatic position with respect to the field of values, cultural hierarchies, and in evaluating the politics of states.
Suffice it to say that, regarding the question of old and new anti-Semitisms and the process of eradicating them, there are two conflicting approaches, where what is at issue is to know what a contemporary universalism might consist in and whether it is compatible with any kind of nominal or communitarian transcendence.
Today it is evident that a strong intellectual current, featuring bestselling publications and considerable media impact, indeed maintains that the fate of the word “Jew” lies in its communitarian transcendence, in such a way that this destiny cannot be rendered commensurable with those of other names that, within the registers of ideology, or of politics, or even of philosophy, have been subject to conflicting assessments.
The basic argumentation, of course, refers to the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices. In the victim ideology that constitutes the campaign artillery of contemporary moralism, this unprecedented extermination is held to be paradigmatic. In and of itself the extermination would underpin the political, legal and moral necessity to hold the word Jew above all usual handling of identity predicates and to give it some kind of nominal sacralization. The progressive imposition of the word Shoah to designate what its most eminent historian, Raul Hilberg, named, with sober precision, “the destruction of the Europe an Jews” can be taken as a verbal stage of this sacralizing of victims. By a remarkable irony, one thereby comes to the point of applying to the name “Jew” a claim that the Christians originally directed against the Jews themselves, which was that “Christ” was a worthier name than all others. Today it is not uncommon to read that “Jew” is indeed a name beyond ordinary names. And it seems to be presumed that, like an inverted original sin, the grace of having been an incomparable victim can be passed down not only to descendants and to the descendants of descendants but to all who come under the predicate in question, be they heads of state or armies engaging in the severe oppression of those whose lands they have confiscated.
Another approach to this type of fictive transcendence is historical. It claims to show that the Jewish question’ has defined Europe since the Enlightenment era, such that there would be a criminal continuity between the idea Europe has of itself and the Nazi extermination, which is presented as the ‘final solution’ to the problem. Further, there would be a basic continuity between the extermination and European hostility to the State of Israel, the prime evidence for which would be the constant support – in my view really inconsistent, but let’s leave that aside – the European Community gives to the Palestinians. Europe would be enraged by the fact that the “final solution” was defeated in the last act by the sudden appearance, on the balance-sheet of the war, of a Jewish state. As a result, there should be a legitimate distrust of everything Arab, for in starting out from support for the Palestinians we soon come to an undermining of the State of Israel, then from that undermining we come to anti-Semitism, and from this anti-Semitism to extermination – the logic, in short, has to be good.
I would like as far as possible to document a position utterly irreconcilable with the above assertions I will submit a position that is avowedly my own. On such issues, and taking account of the passions that inevitably emerge with every dispute over the power of a collective nomination, it is better to state straight away that one is only speaking for oneself, or, more precisely, in one’s own name.
Obviously, the key point is that I cannot accept in any way the victim ideology. I clearly explained my position on this point in my little book Ethics in 1999. That the Nazis and their accomplices exterminated millions of people they called Jews does not to my mind lend any new legitimacy to the identity predicate in question. Of course, for those who, generally for religious reasons, have maintained that this predicate registers a communitarian alliance with the archetypical transcendence of the Other, it is natural to think that Nazi atrocities work in some way to validate in a terrible and striking paradox the election of the “people” that this predicate, so they say, gathers together. Furthermore, it would be necessary to explain how and why the Nazi predicate Jew’, such as it was used to organize separation, then deportation and death, coincides with the subjective predicate under which the alliance is sealed. But for anyone who does not enter into the religious fable in question, the extermination brings to hear on the Nazis a judgement that is absolute and without right of appeal, without in any way establishing any supplementary value for the victims, other than a profound compassion. In passing, I submit that veritable compassion does not concern itself in the slightest with the predicates in the name of which the atrocity was committed. As such, it is all the more wrong-headed to think that an atrocity confers a surplus value on a predicate. Neither can an atrocity work to provide any kind of special respect to anybody who today expects to take shelter under such a predicate and demand exceptional status. Instead, from those limitless massacres, we should draw the conclusion that every declamatory introduction of communitarian predicates in the ideological, political or state field, whether criminalizing or sanctifying, leads to the worst.
Let me add something of a more affective note. It is wholly intolerable to be accused of anti-Semitism by anyone for the sole reason that, from the tact of the extermination, one does not conclude as to the predicate “Jew” and its religious and communitarian dimension that it receive some singular valorization – a transcendent annunciation! – nor that Israeli exactions, whose colonial nature is patent and banal, be specially tolerated. I propose that nobody any longer accept, publicly or privately, this type of political blackmail.
An abstract variation of my position consists in pointing out that, from the apostle Paul to Trotsky, including Spinoza, Marx and Freud, Jewish communitarianism has only underpinned creative universalism in so far as there have been new points of rupture with it. It is clear that today’s equivalent of Paul’s religious rupture with established Judaism, of Spinoza’s rationalist rupture with the Synagogue, or of Marx’s political rupture with the bourgeois integration of a part of his community of origin, is a subjective rupture with the State of Israel, not with its empirical existence, which is neither more nor less impure than that of all states, but with its exclusive identitarian claim to be a Jewish state, and with the way it draws incessant privileges from this claim, especially when it comes to trampling underfoot what serves us as international law. Truly contemporary states or countries are always cosmopolitan, perfectly indistinct in their identitarian configuration. They assume the total contingency of their historical constitution, and regard the latter as valid only on condition that it does not fall under any racialist, religious, or more generally “cultural”, predicate. Indeed, the last time an established state in France believed it should call itself tile “French state” was under Pétain and the German occupation. The Islamic states are certainly no more progressive as models than the various versions of the ‘Arab nation’ were. Everyone agrees, it seems, on the point that the Taliban do not embody the path of modernity for Afghanistan. A possible of modern democracy then, is that it count everyone, without factoring in predicates. As Organisation Politique says in relation to France’s reactionary laws against undocumented workers; “Whoever is here is from here.” There is no acceptable reason to exempt the State of Israel from that rule. The claim is sometimes made that this state is the only ‘democratic’ state in the region. But the fact that this state presents itself as a Jewish state is directly contradictory. We can say on this point that Israel is a country whose self-representation is still archaic.
Taking a different approach, I shall generalize the claim. I shall maintain that the intrusion of any identity predicate into a central role for the determination of a politics leads to disaster. This should be as I’ve already said, the real lesson to be drawn from Nazism. Since it was above all the Nazis who, before anyone else, and with a rare zeal for following through, drew all the consequences from making the signifier “Jewish” into a radical exception – it was, after all, the only way that they could give some sort of consistency, in their industrial massacre, to the symmetrical predication “Aryan”, the particular vacuity of which obsessed them.
A more immediately relevant consequence is that the signifier “Palestinian” or “Arab” should not be glorified any more than is permitted for the signifier ‘Jew’. As a result, the legitimate solution to the Middle East conflict is not the dreadful institution of two barbed-wire states. The solution is the creation of a secular and democratic Palestine, one subtracted from all predicates, and which, in the school of Paul who declared that, in view of the universal, “there is no longer Jew nor Greek” and that “circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing” – would show that it is perfectly possible to create a place in these lands where, from a political point of view and regardless of the apolitical continuity of customs, there is “neither Arab nor Jew”. This will undoubtedly demand a regional Mandela.
Lastly, there is no question of tolerating the anti-Jewish diatribes, uttered in the name of colonial guilt and the rights of Palestinians, that circulate in a number of organizations and institutions that are more or less dependent on identitarian words such as “Arab”, “Muslim”, “Islam”… This anti-Semitism could not be passed off with give-and-take for a progressivism that settles for little. Besides, we already know the story. At the end of the nineteenth century in France, certain “Marxist” worker organizations, notably of the school of Jules Guesde, saw nothing wrong with the vulgar anti-Semitism that was very widespread at the time. They thought that anti-Semitic affairs, and notably the Dreyfus affair, did not concern the working class, and that to engage in them would distract from the principal contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletarians. But it soon became obvious what fuelled this concern to stick to the “principal contradiction”: in 1914, Jules Guesde, in the name of narrow-minded nationalism and a hatred of the Boches entered into the sacred union that organized the military butchery. One dialectic for another, it will be recalled that a correct treatment of the principal contradiction most often consists in publicly assuming responsibility for managing a “secondary” contradiction. Today, some among us are visibly tempted, in the name of the principal character of the contradiction between North and South, or between Arab peoples and American imperialism, to find all sorts of excuses for transforming (legitimate) opposition to the activities of the State of Israel into open and frank anti-Semitism, which is intolerable, and should not he tolerated. All the less so as the actions of progressive Israelis, who constantly show proof of a rare courage, have been crucial to advancing the situation in Palestine.
It’s true enough that, to anyone wanting to eradicate such circumstantial anti-Semitism, it would be helpful if the State of Israel were no longer referred to as the “Jewish state”, and it everywhere it was agreed that a strict separation should be maintained between, on the one hand, religious, customary and private uses of an identity predicate – the words “Arab” and “Jew” as much as “French” and, on the other, its political usages, which are always harmful.
Translated by Steve Corcoran
This collection was published as Circonstances 3: Portées du mot “juif”, Paris: Leo Schéer, 2005.
11 Comments
Alain Badiou proposes a “global” or “reboot” solution for the Middle East conflict. The living body is not included in this perspective.
I will say, firstly, that I feel deeply touched by Badiou’s statements and conclusions regarding the abolition of identity predicates, among them, as he writes, “Jew” and “French” as means of establishing national and political boundaries, because they are prone to not desirable consequences. I thank him personally. I also agree. It is surely desirable to reach this advanced phase. I’m also afraid it is too advanced for a species with a body, an enjoying body, to live with.
It is a fact—a discourse fact– that the state of Israel, founded in 1948, if it is supposed to be the consequence of Zionism as political ideology and movement, undoubtedly was a de facto consequence of what I shall call, yes, the Shoah—because that is the name most convenient subjectively for survivors, if we believe some testimonies—and there is no reason not to believe them. Survivors feel, in my experience, less persecuted when they use “Shoah”–. Survivors lost their entire families by the industrial massacre orchestrated by the Nazis, with the inestimable, precious help of European democracies and governments. Without the precious European help, it is perhaps difficult to imagine such perfection in economy, means, timing, transports, information, data recollection, statistics, etc. etc.
Those economies and democratic states are very civilized nations today, that after great and moving efforts of many years have reached an agreement to slowly form an entity, political and economical, called in the meantime the EU, that puts aside as a sort of temporary “semblant”, some of the many national characteristics of the people living there, as Badiou says, in Europe. But they still live and call themselves with generic names, attributive suppositions of identity.
It is also undoubtedly a great achievement for the United Nations to have reached to the conclusion that helped to create the state of Israel, a home for those bearing the danger of believing too intensely to have something to do with the “Jew predicate”. It alliviated many more continued forms of persecution for these people. If you strogly believe you “are” something “called X”, and you are persecuted by people who coincide with your identity delusion… Well, it is rather urgent for you to find a place where you may feel that this “identity predicate” has some chances of being included in discourse, kept away from persecution, to give you some time to bear your own definition of it, to reach a sort of a pact with it, etc. You will need time, and a place to live.
It is also a sort of paradox that it is asked—as Badiou does– precisely from Israel, as a state, to “cross the fantasy” of collective predicate– to cross it collectively. It sounds as if Badiou is asking Israel “to be the light to Nations” once more. To achieve as a community precisely what so many nations only touch as a very far “semblant” (make-believe).
Perhaps. There are many courageous people in Israel—Badiou dixit—who are already ready for this, at least in declaration. This sort of change takes more than exhortations or desires. In psychoanalysis, it takes the one-by-one crossing of the “identity attributions”. “Identity attributions” include the body, the living body of each one.
To reach the point where you agree to separate from some attribution of identity, (a signifier of the Other, a S1 as Lacan writes it) you will need to do it with some distance from the attribution of the Other who, starting to say you are effectively “X”, you must depart from “the territory for X”, or perhaps to turn “the territory for X”, into “the territory for X, Y, and Z”, and so to help solve “a problem”” that your erroneous solution of identity has somehow fixated in a way incompatible to enlightened Europeans/Americans. I use the plural. But I don’t know what sort of plural is this. We are in a complete imaginary field. Testimonies are one by one.
The problem with Badiou’s solution (a “global” or “reboot the system” solution)
The problem with Badiou’s proposed solution for the Middle East conflict is built-in the solution itself. The solution is a sort of generalized proposal: “You should undo the collective identification that defines you as “Jewish state”, and then proceed to define the new situation as ‘Israeli is who is situated here’”.
This is a sort of “reboot the system” proposal. The only problem with this global solution is that the identification of “Jews” as “ Israelis” was made necessary and urgent by the fact of the Shoah, which in turn was a “final solution” of the Nazis for the “Jewish problem”. It became evident that the Nazis caught even those enlightened ones for the only reason they had ancestors who called themselves “Jew”. Thn they reduced their bodies to ashes or soap. Now Badiou asks for the undoing of the state as a “Jewish state”. May I remind, by the way, here that the title of Hertzl’s seminal book is “Judenstaat” (“A state for/of the Jewish”).
Spinoza refused to accept the idea of “the chosen people”, except for: (PTT, Ch 3)
Lastly, if any one wishes to maintain that the Jews, from this or from any other cause, have been chosen by God for ever, I will not gainsay him if he will admit that this choice, whether temporary or eternal, has no regard, in so far as it is peculiar to the Jews, to aught but dominion and physical advantages [imperium et corporis commoditates](for by such alone can one nation be distinguished from another), whereas in regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another.
But Spinoza is inimitable. He separated himself from “the chosen” position by his singular invention—as Borges writes, Spinoza created God. From there he could examine what is the function of “chosen” positions. This is something that only can be made-through “one by one”.
This is partially the reason for which Lacan preferred Kant to Spinoza. Kant includes Shylock. Shylock is an “anti-reboot” character. Spinoza, with all its lovable beauty, rejects the body, even if he writes “imperium et corporis commoditates”.
After a subject arrives to a little separation from “the Other’s attribution”, he still may decide to continue using this “attribution”. I don’t see how it is only by “force of the Other” that the use of “Jew” exists as such.
This distance, we need a name for it. Perhaps is more precisely a sort of “moment to understand”. Perhaps it is “subjective time”. It took Freud many years to reach his “Acropolis conclusion” that put him a little step forward from one particular use—Freud’s use– of the “name of the father”. Is there a chance of a collective pluralisation , something like “the names of the Father” as a basis for a new collective discourse?
Israel is “archaic” as a state in the same sense that to “have a body” today is “archaic”.
Finally, in these times where the best 50 internet sites of the World as “chosen” by “Time inc” are sites where you may have the sensation that nothing is lacking there, that “everything is there” and it is a sort of surfing experiment in anxiety, may I say that I read Badiou’s sentence about the state of Israel as “archaic” in this sense: to attach such an importance of a state and the definition of its citizens— among other, circumcised in general – is archaic in the same sense as today it is more and more difficult to say you have a body.
Hello Lacan blokes,
Re: “We can say on this point that Israel is a country whose self-representation is still archaic.”
No need for such euphemisms here sir, those of us who read those “progressive Israelis” you refer to later in the text, like Ronit Chacham whose _Breaking Ranks_ I’ve quoted from extensively, we know that you should just go ahead and use the word barbaric instead of archaic. Don’t restrain yourself in the name of intellectualism, Alain, just do it. We won’t let you end up like Norman Finkelstein, hahaha ;-P
But seriously, the IDF using sites like Google to censor access to critics, like my personal blog-posts exposing the IDF propaganda front Public Movement, who themselves openly admit being backed by the IDF while touring Europe under the pretence of being a harmless “performance art group” (German curators censor their bio short deleting any mention of PM collaborating with the IDF, Germans themselves are ashamed of admitting they are backing a group of Jews backed by the IDF), or Youtube deleting Jason Bermas’ whole account (now fortunately restored after much public protest) and thus also his _Fabled Enemies_ video exposing the fact that Israeli “art students” were spying on the USA under the guise of doing harmless art studies, that kind of hi – tech censorship of critics of Israel does not exactly fit my idea of “archaic”. And besides, how are the “state of the art” weapons that Israel receives from their USA friends to test on their undemocratic neighbours “archaic”?
It can not be put better…
Hats down to that, pllease.
A most truthful and powerful message to all, indeed…
Many thanks to the Author and lacan.com for this.
Yours,
Ilza
This notion of bringing a universality to the Israel/Palestine issue, such that “there will be no more Arab and Jew” is patently silly. Jewish identity is the reason the Jews are there; in the absence of Jewish identity, why would any Jews be in Israel, or remain there?
Re: Joseph’s comment,
Dear Joseph,
… to read yor comment–this is a rhethorical quetion you should be able to answer yourself…. I think.
… and, what about equality of Human Beings on this on Earth?
Ilza
I agree with Marco Mauas. It is highly problematic to ask the citizens of the State of Israel — who are, of course, not all Jewish, though the state, alone of all the states in the world, has a Jewish ethos — to dissolve their state in the name of a state where there is “neither Arab nor Jew”, when (1) no other state, including France is asked to give up its national identity in this way, and (2) the problem of persecution of the Jews has not been solved. Perhaps most important is the fact that Israel is NOT solely a response to the Shoah of European Jewry, but also to the persecution of Jews in Islamic countries, where they have rarely enjoyed equal rights. Over 50% of Israeli Jews are from Islamic, not European countries, and most families fled persecution or were expelled. To ask these Jews to give up the Jewish character of the state that is their refuge only because it is Jewish, in a situation where other Middle Eastern states continue to define themselves as Moslem and/or Arab, is not only utopian. It is to ask them to acquiesce to their own continued non-recognition.
Marco:
I do not believe that the persecution, oppression and destruction of a multiplicity united under a signifier justifies that multiplicity, under the the same name, to themselves persecute, oppress and destroy, in order to retain the validity and existence of that signifier, other multiplicities. It seems, from what you say, that you come dangerously close to justifying such acts, so long as the group has a “place to live.”
The point of the article, as I read it, is that all of these struggles rooted in signifiers of identity, culture and language cannot make, no matter where they are staged (or when), an egalitarian collective, a place for all — which is the very notion of Badiou’s politics. If you, and others here, are arguing that Badiou’s thought does not allow for this exclusive nation-state governed by a transcendent signifier (it doesn’t matter what this signifier is, just as long as it is exceptional) to exist alongside the political (which is, for Badiou, always the thought-being of the universal), then I can only say “duh.” Without some level of secularization, that is, of an employed indifference to signifiers of difference, there will only be places to think the meaning of one’s identity, of my identity, of us, of ours. Of course, there is nothing of the universal in any of this, nothing of the political, nothing of truth.
Walter:
Badiou, his philosophy, is not asking anyone to give up their private (social) identity, but rather to realize that only under the domain of a state without a name — a state which does not define itself on the basis of a particular identity — can there be a peaceful solution to the conflict between particularities. The crucial difference is in the precise formulation: to be Jewish is nothing, to not be Jewish is nothing. This does not mean the becoming of some kind of homogenized, impossible state without history or culture, but a state which proceeds on the basis of an indifference to religious identity, familial origins, cultural heritage, so that, qua citizen, all are equal under the law. This article is supported by Badiou’s very nuanced political thought. I would also say that Badiou is not asking the state of Israel to do anything that he has not addressed in France — indeed, everywhere there is a struggle defined by particularities.
There is no point in “justifying”. This begs the question.
The absurdity is to jump on the de facto Shoah–European resposibility– for a purely reboot-intellectual argument.
You cannot jump over what has been done–with an industrial, formidable agreement among “enlightened” civilized countries–France is among the most implicated–to suggest: “lets begin with a new computer”. Lets drop the “archaic” one, we have a new model.
Dear Mr. Badiou,
I’m currently reading your book on Saint Paul, the chapter about the theory of the four discourses. I wanted to ask you whether to your oppinion we can interpret Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis as belonging to the third type of discourse that posits the discovery of the unconscious as being of the order of event? And to interpret Freud’s/Lacan’s endeavor to delianate the structure of the unconscious as a way of staying faithful to this event, while all other schools are beraying it either by denial (ego-psychology/Greek logos in your terms) or concentrating on its content/signs (the likes of Jung/Jewish discourse in your theory)? Isn’t it how we should read Lacan’s formula “God is unconscious”? Would be grateful for an answer.
Pavlo
As a comment, some lines on Alain Badiou’s book on Heidegger’s nazism. It may be relevant.
Here it is:
—–
Poetic sublimation of Nazism:
Alain Badiou and the political-love life in Heidegger
Marco Mauas
A book by Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin “Heidegger” , Nazism, femmes, la philosophie “”(Fayard, Paris, 2010), written and spoken in a poetic style, is the exquisite poetry sublimation of Heidegger’s Nazism.
This intersects well with the “poetic Lacanianism” of Badiou and Cassin. Lacan is useful when you have to explain what femininity from the perspective of a philosopher, emphasizing that this is a great man, where the accents of his greatness are between the lines. You have to feel them. Touching. “Yes. Fetch it. Touch it. I did. “The works of art deserves you feel it, experience it, touch it. A great man, would have to conclude this book, is one who makes us forget, thanks to the sweetness of the senses, how a scoundrel he was, every sigle day of his life.
We live in an amazing time, we must say: Freud is accused of incest and pedophilia, and Heidegger’s Nazism is poetically sublimated. Just in the same bookstore in Paris, one so close to the other. Amazing.
The teachings of the great man Heidegger can be captured in the details of his love letters. To Elfriede, his wife, he wrote “Ma chere petite love.” “Mein lieber Seelchen. It is so important, for the poetic, to quote in German. This “petit” is “a feature of the time.” Sartre himself – great man – perhaps is not using that little word, too? “Ma chere petite fille.” “Ma chere petite Pollack.”Poetic sensitivity of the appointment. Heidegger Then the great man will reveal, thanks to the versatility of this text, how another woman can be closer to this real man. Read: “Without a doubt in honor of Heidegger (sic) than anything close to this kind of astute paternalism [you really feel how women are respected by the authors! But alas, they respect even more Heidegger] is not present in his letters to Hanna Arendt, even and especially when described:
“The young woman, dressed in a raincoat, and the brim of his hat down its guard before their eyes look that accentuates the quiet evening with a sovereign, young basket for the first time crossed the threshold of my desk. “” This love – say the authors – was rebellious to any understanding from the Small “(sic,” Petit “capitalized).
Arendt, in turn, define Heidegger’s Nazism in a letter to Jaspers as “a psrofessional deviation.”Nothing sublime. Neither a renegation. Just a little more down to earth, maybe not much. Enough to inspire a pause in the middle of the intellectual fad.
Elzbietta Ettinger, Holocaust survivor and author of a biography of Arendt, summarized in one sentence the difficulty of the thing – or “Petite” or great, for Americans, supposedly. But it is “something else.” She is a woman, of course, speaking. There is no great villain that can not be seen, sometimes, ever so suddenly and just as a small man, from the perspective of a woman.She says;
“No person who knows about love and passion will Consider Forgiveness of Heidegger Arendt’s unusual,” she said. “Americans Have Difficulty Understanding great passion. When I discuss ‘Anna Karenina’ with my Students, They cannot understand why Anna Gives up a loving husband, a beautiful home and a wonderful child for this jerk of an officer. I tell them to read ‘Manon Lescaut’ or DH Lawrence’s’ Women in Love. ” Then They understand. Love is irrational. There is nothing we can do about it. ”
Did you say Americans?
Oh, how curious I am to know how to conciliate Mr Badiou’s supposed “left-revolutionary” (de salon) criticism of Israel and the Jews with Fidel Castro declarations
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fidel-to-ahmadinejad-stop-slandering-the-jews/62566/
“Stop slandering the Jews and denying the Holocaust”.