For a post-colonial leftist culture, against all depoliticizing spiritualisms, with observations on Judaism and the Holocaust

For a post-colonial leftist culture, against all depoliticizing spiritualisms

(Part of a series of deliberately meandering essays in a work in progress).

What did Jesus claim according to the Gospels, making himself stand in and mediator of all of the good? (He did not invent the idea of radical welcoming and love of neighbor and stranger; Judaism had that, Christianity made that idea the referent of its monumental points of reference.. It provided a certain image of the good. But the good life is not the referent of an Idea or imaged person; it is the work that poses this as question.). In other words, what happened to thinking?

What happened to thinking in late modern capitalism is that it no longer was focused, as ancient and medieval philosophy was, on notions of ethics (the good life) that could be implemented in what we might call a governmentality. What is new in European philosophy after Hegel is that its starting point often, and increasingly, is the will to critique the existent social order and its givens in the interest of a political task, which is no longer that of implementing ideas of the good, but part of a project that was given its clearest form in the modern, and especially the French, revolutions. Philosophy no longer was advice to princes; now it becomes a way of thinking for ordinary people whose desire is a different social world than the ancien régime.

That is why all of the greatest and most interesting Jewish philosophers in the 20th century, with the possible exception of Levinas, are political philosophers and not religious at all. So Judaism does not recognize them, though they are all central to an emergent tradition that today lives most intensely in French and Italian philosophy, with their many American and English readers. If Judaism ever caught up with the larger world those who evoke the traditional if troubled idea of chosen-ness, which was never for glory but for a task, that of what modern thought calls the, or an, avant-garde; the political name for it today is of course “the left”— if it caught up with that, it could achieve within Judaism at least what Philo and Maimonides did for it in the ancient and medieval worlds. They habilitated philosophy for Judaism on the grounds that it gives the needed link of ethics and morals to the good life, and gives that link through the idea of reason. (The spectacular result of this was the Talmud itself, the defining text of rabbinical as opposed to Biblical Judaism) A parallel move today would develop a “Jewish” philosophy that articulates itself in the terms of the tradition of European philosophy as developed after 1968, and to a significant extent after WW2 and even WWI. If it did that, it would be more faithful to the aspects of the religious tradition which were in fact nourished by European cultural and intellectual contents, and of course also did much to nourish them. If the Jews or the Americans have left Europe entirely, they are culturally moribund and going nowhere. It is impossible as well as a horrible mistake, a mistake that is visible as an exclusion and absence everywhere. Why does religious thought want now to be outside contemporary world culture and what is most vital in it?

In intellectual and cultural history, the past is not a smorgasbord with different dishes you can buy and eat; the idea of tradition always was that of a history that is alive because it is always in question in relationship to how people today who do stand within it find themselves posing questions that emerge in the light of present problems. But the Jews now mostly think they have left Europe utterly, a tendency they share with the Americans, whose society is founded on that idea not as fait accompli but militant project. So “Jewish” Jews don’t read Foucault, Badiou, Deleuze, Negri, other Marxists, even (gasp) Heidegger, whose thought is so dangerously fruitful (what vital resources are not?); they only read the rabbis. I think this may in the long run prove to be the biggest obstacle to Judaism’s continued vitality, which rabbis are always worrying about since so many people marry out or become secular, and they can only envision keeping them by finding some new clothes for the old ideas. At the same time, the old thing is always being marketed with supplements: Modern Orthodoxy embraces modern arts and sciences, Hasidism invokes inevitable links to Hinduism and other traditions of antiquity since its focus is ethics and a charismatic spirituality, Reform once added modern liberal republican professional life, liberals add feminism, gay welcoming, vegetarianism, and animal rights, leftist activists add activism and join causes when not content to write checks for them. There is an intellectual left; it lives in universities, and sometimes in the art world. Apparently the guardians of Judaism are content to keep it there. That can only mean that for a radical left Jewish intellectual, what he does in this field is from a “Jewish” standpoint merely his profession; but it is contradictory to think that way: if you really care deeply about what you do professionally, then, if your work is in a field of thinking, how can it be that it is something your religion certainly allows but in no way includes?

I don’t think any of the liberal rabbis whose sermons and books I may enjoy have ever given much thought to contemporary European political philosophy in the wake of Marxism. It’s a different universe. Which leaves me feeling divided, though that is ok, outside my own research and writing. I remind myself that actually since the Hellenistic period in the 3rd Century BCE, most Jews have simply not even thought it a problem at all, the question that is posed as Judaism vs. philosophy, vs. the culture of Germany, France, where ever else, or of mathematics and sciences, or the “arts and science,” which is the name for the principle part and defining heart of most American universities. But I feel divided. It seems I have a Jewish soul, and think I should, and maybe also Irish and Germano-Franco-European, mind; or a mind that can live in the former on shabbat (should I read political philosophy only on weekdays and only “Jewish” texts on Shabbat?). And I find that division painful, in part because most American Jews seem to me to be very American and to have no need for any of the European philosophy that I cannot live without reading and thinking about. The division between the old philosophy that I have called ethical and the new one I say is mostly political (or is always partly that) is the most obvious way to negotiate this. But then who do they connect, and do they? Not easily or much, it seems to me. In some contemporary philosophers there is both political and ethical (or aesthetic) thinking, while in the “religious” ones there is only the moral and ethical. But this is like living in different countries during the two parts of the week; intuitively, that seems not easily tenable. And it isn’t.

As philosophy in the modern republican era became dominated by social criticism, Marxism quickly became and long remained the most conspicuous tendency in this regard, but in the years since WW2 it can be seen that its forms occupy a field of thinking that has many variants and possibilities. The true meaning of Marx’s statement that the philosophers have interpreted the world and the task is to change is not that a partisan project led by enlightened leaders (and ultimately a bureaucracy) must implement the ideas in the philosopher’s interpretations; rather, theory is interpretive because it wants to change the world. Not seek and find a truth and realize it. Nearly all “religious” philosophy up to the present, including not only in the great philosophical religion to date that Catholicism has been, but also in Judaism, fails to capture this shift, and still seeks to supplement moral and ethical injunctions with philosophical explanations for them. That was the task of philosophy vis-à-vis Judaism for Philo and Maimonides, and it remains the sole province of thinking for today’s philosophical rabbis (Cohen, Baeck, Rosenzweig, Buber, Heschel, Levinas, Soloveitchik, Fishbane— and a fortiori the rabbinical writers of ethical and wisdom literature who seem to be living in an utterly upper middle class suburban “white” American world whose concerns ware basically with good manners and neighborliness; thus, in writers like the late Eugene Borowitz, unofficial head rabbi of American Reform Judaism, or ethicists like Joseph Telushkin, one can get the impression these people have no politics at all, and they also do not seem to live in the same world many of us do. Those of us who are on the “left” worry about all kinds of barbaric things happening in the world today; people like Borowitz and other spokesmen of “liberal” Judaism today seem utterly unconcerned and clueless. The liberals among them who are eager for something more usually turn either to some form of the New Age (in New York, the hip synagogue “LabShul” is a form of this, along with the fraudulent Kabbalah Center which sells mysticism as not scholarship but magic, and other things) or some iteration of 19th century liberalism, updated to offer equal standing in the professional class not only to synagogue-attending Jews (Reform Judaism’s signal task and achievement in both Germany and America in the 19th), typically focusing on feminism and gay inclusion, things we surely ought to take for granted rather than posit as the terrain of a struggle. But I started with a comment on Christ to which I return. Presenting himself as the “answer” to whatever one’s ethical problems, the Gospel’s Christ, beyond message, was:

Identity politics. Representation. Charismatic rebel ruler-to-be of an invisible kingdom. Instead of resisting the empire, "spiritualize" it. Love conquers all, since something must. This is your empire, this is your empire on great ideals.

It is easy to see what is beautiful and great in this picture; is there something that it leaves out? Where is the democracy of well-educated citizens? Hidden inside scrolls treasured by the cognoscenti? Waiting for the arrival (or return) of the messiah or savior?

Christianity was anti-political from the start and in its essence. Its project is not, as in Jewish messianic thinking, to improve the world but find a personal salvation apart from it. Involvement in worldly affairs then becomes an optional project and perhaps a special calling or task. The model of the activist today is typically a form of this; it is voluntaristic; first you are who you are, then you might think, shall I go out into the world (that you are absurdly imagined as in the first place not part of: inclusion must be premised on exclusion) and “do” something there, perhaps by putting some idea into practice, implementing it, which is not so different from enforcing some presupposed reality, truth, or name of what is important or absolute. A logic of presupposition involves the representation of something of paramount importance though essentially imputed. Enforcement, whose less ominous synonym is implementation, as it putting ideas or theory into practice, always references some absent and empty authority that legitimates the exercise of power and violence. Presupposition is part of the logic of representation. The idea of an order of things involves a typically hypertrophied claim for the importance of the referent of the acts of violence of those exercising representational power, and thereby legitimates them. The practical referent that tacitly and implicitly corresponds is always that of the command, which is the action called for, whose name is obedience. This always works by correlating not just statements and actions, but statements and persons, as power is always a relationship between persons that claims authorization through statements. The statements had better be true, because their enunciation as act is authorized by the recognized authority of those uttering them. In the modern world, Descartes’s philosophy further radicalizes the same separation and privacy that Christianity made the tacit principle of its anti-political shift, to the self or subject in question, in the context of empire and blatant national oppression, as an epistemological gesture that makes the very existence of other people and the world itself as ‘external’ a problem, of doubtful existence, which simultaneously problematizes the self in a way that includes the risk of madness. This gesture is part of a machine or apparatus of generating certitude for the self in the face of the doubtfulness of the Other and fear of his possible violence. Anti-political thinking and spirituality are typically privatizing; they tend to turn distinction into separation, which can mean that the other who is different is so in absoluteness; the stranger cannot be the neighbor (when in fact, only he can be, and of course self and world are always strange or can become so, and this can be salutary; exile has its truths which are at the core of Western ideas of being. When the question is “who,” I, you, and we are possible “places” of being, and one can ask who owes, who pays, who has, who wants or needs, and who is responsible. The police will always be sure to recognize your individuality and identity. Your potentialities or even freedom of movement may be very limited by them, but you can be sure they will be tied to your identity (given by a census category), which will also be carefully observed so that you can be optimally controlled by direction and (a term loved by psychiatrists and social workers) “re-directed” (which only requires “compliance,” an Orwellian synonym for obedience which shifts the relation to someone exercising authority to what they say and represent as content of the commands, rendering it unarguably objective, maybe even having the support of “science.” In medicine, which is the main sophisticated technology today for the policing or management of persons, the “evidence-based” theories and methods that they make use of are based on the pseudo-scientific use of inquiry to produce enforceable dictionaries of identification and conduct, like psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). A pseudo-science articulates a theory to a set of facts, and the bureaucratic functionaries who wield it as social technology will justify anything that might also be called injustice by exhibiting any particular at all under the conceptual name used to identify it, and affirming that the named entity exists. (Psychiatric hospital patients are under this regime given very minimal attention while basically being punitively warehoused, in ways that allow the authorities to say that they did what was appropriate, since the actions and observations needed to make such a claim are capable of being supplied exhibitable referents: they said or did something, so it was appropriate.) Of course the referent of the named entity exists; more interesting would be to ask if the property named is the best description. The question is whether the situation and its identifiable facts might not be better explained by some other theory, not whether the entities named can be exhibited and so said to justify theory and techniques of intervention by affirming the existence of a referent to support the sayability of what ultimately are the commands, since the function of theories in social technology is to regulate the movements and behaviors of persons by legislating the actions used to intervene to affect, limit, or control them. Perhaps if the question is instead posed as not “who” or “what” but “where,” it may be one of situation, as prior to its recognition and affirmation of self as prior essence, origin, or stance, maybe this changes things a bit. Not that saying the Biblical “Here I am” is never relevant and important, but note that this statement includes the “where” together with representation of self as being in that place and called on to respond. in most cases the first thing is the situation; the first question is what is the matter. With “where” also goes “what.” Whose property or problem it is, yours or mine, is secondary. It may be worth resuscitating something of the middle voice in both classical Greek and Hebrew, where what is happening or being done is more important than its subjects and objects. A logic of representation elevates the importance of the objects and subjects identified, but the question “what is it?” (so common in French and Italian, where “qu’est-ce que c’est?” or “che cosa?” means “What is the matter/problem?” Icons reveal, and idols represent or monumentalize, and commands link statements to actions; all can lead to a stand-still, while thinking is an affair of questions and statements, and it needs the ability to judge how a situation might be identified or problematized, and to trace the implications or inferential links between statements, not just, as in much rhetoric, the associational ones between objects. Consistent with this perhaps, Judaism, which has many stories but few images and not much of theory, has almost never concerned itself much with the manner of being of the nameable individual that is its deity, but instead with what people should do and perhaps also think, yet without orienting its questioning to objects of belief. Nameable things and beings can have identities, actions and events involve us more in memory and possibility. And so it was time more than space that was to be sanctified. It matters a lot what is done, what is experienced, what happens.

The traditions have in them some good and useful ideas, but they are not enough. This is true of all of our available religions. American New Age orientalists are even worse, because they are chasing something that does not even exist, and to the extent it does, it is an image of antiquity. There is today much interesting thought and cultural resources in places like India and China, but they are not in the ancient "religious" texts and their temples. They are in things that do not pretend to be the place or placeholder of some magically wonderful alternative way of thinking and being ("spirituality"). Instead, they are found in contemporary works of art and thought that are fully conversant with and part of the contemporary world of people in New York, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, and elsewhere. The thinking that matters most in "Western" societies, while not incompatible with our houses of worship, cannot consistent in merely calls to pray in them. Even Pope Francis knows that. The New Age, in a move that goes back to the American Renaissance in the 1850s, argued for America as the alternative to European culture and modes of thinking, and did so by appealing, falsely, and ideologically, to the phantom Oriental other to be found on some imaginary road leading to a temple that is part Krishna and Buddha, and partly Confucius and Lao Tze, which is as absurd as it is incredibly reactionary.

It was Americanism and certain Protestant ideas of liberalism that was in fact what the New Age was championing. Ask Americans who think they are militantly against something in our culture they can't stand: patriarchy, for example, and ask them to draw you a picture. It will resemble what they think their ancestors in Germany or Russia, of France or Italy, or somewhere else in old Europe were like. The American radical liberal wants to not be European.

Perhaps the biggest bugbear was the idea of reason. Without which, of course, there may be some ethically resonant practice one can enjoy, but of course there would be no critical thinking and none that could inform a politics. American radical liberals more often want to embrace something wholly irrational, and quite likely anti-political, like "meditation," which is a way of focusing the mind without thinking, because thoughts are suspected, as pure perception and obedience to the demands of the situation with no baggage from memories, is preferred.

In fact, what is really opposed is the two pillars traditionally associated with "Western civilization": the names are often given as "Athens" and "Jerusalem." Rejected in both are the culture of the intellect and the demand for justice. Not a liberty and happiness that can do without either of these things. Yet, "spirituality" is basically that. Of course, there are tendencies within Christianity and other elements of Western cultural and intellectual history that moved in that direction and always do, and others that pose different possibilities, from Machiavelli to Heidegger.

And this is where the New Agers (whose phantoms continue to enchant many liberal Jews and Protestants) were so wrong: The world is not becoming East Asian so much as post-colonial. We must hope it becomes post-capitalist.

The post-colonial world is in no way anti-European or anti-Western. This is laughably impossible, and only the fascist-leaning elements of the liberal-left, with their false and implacably angry militancy, expressing the adolescent desire to reject everything about the world of the fathers, can consistently embrace this position, or rather call for it. The post-colonial world knows that "the Bantu Tolstoy is Tolstoy," and no one in it with any sense wants to be told to read Fanon but not Shakespeare. (They can perhaps be read together; in any case, there is no need to decide between them). The post-colonial world has perhaps three pillars: Greek reason (and democracy), Jewish insistence on justice, and a proud bastard child, born in lands conquered by empires, that would be home to mixed races and peoples. Differently put: reason, justice, and perhaps what only makes sense as a definite idea recognizable in its own terms as something like the (post-)(no more than anti-)colonial left. The two main cultural forces are capitalist liberalism in all its variants and the left.

The world today is not divided between religions or cultures; it is divided politically between left and center-right, and this division runs right down the middle of every other existing cultural entity, including all the religions, including the Catholic Church, including Islam, including Judaism... And this is how the future of those traditions themselves, even from within their institutions, will be wrestled with.

There are no alternatives. Alternatives are not choices, but tasks; they are not found but constructed; they do not exist as realities but are indicated through signs of possibility. The apparent absence or exclusion of alternatives in the present social order is an effect of their futural character. The only alternatives to the canonical monuments of the dying present order are found in the work upon what those monuments represent. Post-colonial culture is not, and does not seek, an alternative to the old world. The new world was not a wholly new world (whatever ever is?) but a transformation of the old world in a new place, together with indigenous cultures which can no longer be seen merely as not-yet possessed of the colonial empire's civilization, nor as outside it. The colonial other was always what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has identified as part of the logic of power in the West: the other that can be figured as completely outside but, following perhaps conquest and then independence, is also inside, and both inside and outside in some ambiguous and problematic way, in a problematic that always is invoked to solve it somehow, and then can be solved in ways that intentionally or unwittingly sustain the system, and do so by including them as excluded , and perhaps also excluding them as included. So what is included and how becomes an ongoing question whereby the liberal state appears to be constantly renegotiating its own terms of representation, or the terms of belonging of the subjects who are placed in question, made problematic subjects in their very identity and being. (In many professional spaces, one now negotiates these terms partly by briefly stepping forward from the chorus line, and doing a little dance avowing how your particular identity has sometimes been the object of inconveniences or hatreds calling for a work of angrily committed personal struggle; together with recognition of those from different backgrounds in the group who say much the same thing, this marks one as a good corporate liberal, and it does this partly by assigning you a political subjectivity that is more suited for representation and recognition than anything else, while also affirming the polite terms of engagement that make you a good member of the kind of class you have been in since kindergarten, since Americans tend to have a group meeting notion of what it is to do or especially learn anything; in this way, a social relationship manifestly marks what is said as legitimate). This path led partly to the contemporary American liberal multiculturalist militant strategy of inclusion; Agamben argues that it also led to the Nazi camps, and others that compare favorably in only being of lesser quantity (extent or intensity), that is, less horrifyingly violent. It surely is the case, melancholy as this fact is, the emergent global culture still owes more to the West than any of the indigenous peoples who were once found completely outside it. I think this is best thought of by treating cultural exemplars as resources; Europe historically has more interesting theories and artworks than many places for the same reason that it had more universities, and more banks. The project of appropriating for possible transformation and use (which we should certainly do freely) what may appear to be monuments of relics from the past is not a project of finding an enjoyable identity you can be proud of instead of the humiliation or depression and anxiety you are expected otherwise to fear and need to defend against. Do you need an identity? What does this mean? Do you need a plausible self-image? The question may be not who we are but where we are, a question that has as its logical sequel not what can we have or how or by whom we are best represented, and maybe called to account by police, doctors, or other agents of social control, but, given where we are, what now is to be done?

In this hybrid cultural world, ultimately everything besides whatever is immanent to capital and its use of labor power in the situation is treated as contingent and up for grabs, not as to whether its existence permits or demands more appearance in the space of the present situation, but what can be usefully wrung out of it. Beyond that, the whole of world culture now is both imaginary museum and a set of ethnic food restaurants: multiculturalism as a set of boutiques for tourists. Maybe “God” can be found in any and all of these details; who could doubt it? Most political conflict will reference any of them minimally if at all.

Even revolutions retrieve elements from the past; indeed, perhaps every novelty is antiquarian and vice-versa, but it is never a matter of voting for or against some national culture; that is an absurd fantasy shared by liberals and conservatives, whose endless pro and contra merely functions merely to keep alive a plausible semblance of the democracy that includes a diversity of voices.

The temporality of memories is always partly traumatic and never works with fixed entities that have given essences. There is no proper content to the life of a mind, person, or society. Cultures are a way societies work on themselves. So are individual persons. When identity politics treats demographical categories as representing fixed essences proper to persons by their type, it travels the road that national liberation movements could easily stumble in, and which in Europe led from Sarajevo to Sarajevo by way of Hitler, who knew that when people are reducible to essential traits conferred by genetics, if found not useful, they can be round up, degraded, and eliminated to prove that they are reducible to animality. The destiny of every identity politics is hatred of the foreign neighbor, inclusion of targeted peoples (including on medical grounds) by exclusion, and the concentration camp, which even more than the site of a killing operation may be one for excluding and isolating, degrading, and letting die.

The New Agers think in ways surprisingly similar to Columbus: they think they are sailing to or have reached, a mythical image of an Oriental Other. The truth is not that it is oh so beautiful but hard to realize (and so requiring endless private work on one's self, to improve the soul for---an other world, afterlife, something great, especially in America where "great" is the word for every banal good). It is not above the earth or beyond the seas, but right of front of you. There are no alternatives, only the wrestling that changes both us and the place where we find ourselves. If I wanted to succeed as a liberal, I would package this idea and market it under some cute slogan. But I am a writer, not a huckster; keep your snake oil, phony shaman, I’m not buying it.

Thinking is not buying and selling but a mode of working. It is a work done not for bosses but among friends. It is not a search for a new boss. Leave that to old Christians. There will be no Messiah, there is only the work that moves the land inhabited into one whose novelties will in surprising ways honor the best memories and the hopes imprisoned in them.

The answer to the horrors of civilization’s barbarisms lie not in repudiating it for some alternative, but working out differently those of its elements that might have redemptive and liberatory facets and not only those that led to the massacres, the enslavements, and the camps.

Related to this insight is the interesting fact that today, the Holocaust persists as both reminder and exemplar of possibilities and realities that are still with us, which means that the idea that the Holocaust is the great affair of the Jews, no longer possible once they have been granted acceptance of their national identity as a people, and also when enough good people stop having those nasty prejudices, and instead will themselves as polite and respectful to their neighbors, rather than holding false beliefs of inconvenient consequences for them. Together with the idea that the Nazi’s hatred was not only an avatar of a traditional prejudice, but as a hatred was a psychosis, so that the solution is an effective policing of mental illness. One reason to doubt that is that the effective policing of mental illness was precisely a key part of the Nazi strategy, and its logic, without which the Shoah or Holocaust surely would not have been possible. It was the result of an identity politics of a particular kind, leading to what both was and was more than a merely ethnic cleansing, in a state devoted to images and ideas of purity and health. Thus, the standard idea of the Holocaust is false for three reasons: 1) It is not true that it resulted from the misrecognition of the neighbor or Other due to false opinions about them that is prejudice; 2) it is not true that its essence was (only) its anti-semitism (as other groups were targeted, in what must be seen as a logic and not a purely adventitious fact; the mere fact of the inclusion among the excludable of the Gypsies or Roma, the handicapped and “mentally ill,” and others, is sufficient proof that anti-semitism is not the unifying concept of what it was about—unless one has some notion of Jewish subjectivity as having the very structure of human subjectivity in a way both exemplary and conspicuously shareable by at least these other groups).
3) It is not explained by mental illness. The last of these is the greatest, stupidest and most consequentially obnoxious canard. Nazism was the result of a bad politics, whose roots need to be understood. Anything else winds up being Holocaust denial because the consequences will be to deny that there can be other camps and other victims, as we know today there are. The obvious function of such denial is to legitimate the current global capitalist neoliberal world order. The enemies of the state in the neoliberal order are all the exemplars of the old bourgeois demon that is simply crime and violence, the corollary risks and threats for property. The fight against prejudice achieves only that. The effect of the usual thinking about hate is to banish all politics by equating it with terrorism on the grounds that anger is hatred and violence. But all Western politics, in both its Greek and Jewish sources, has regarded anger as its problematically but essential facilitating asset. It is true of Moses and his God as much as Achilles and the Greek army at Troy. Our tradition does not pose love as the alternative to anger. If it did it would be Christian in a way that is anti-political. Anger calls not for sacrifices and forgiveness, but the work of justice and freedom that is reason. And of course, reason is not a method to be extolled as placeholder for particular truths so much as a process. By enabling us to inquire into the justice of statements in reference to others that can be linked consequentially to them, it makes it possible to distinguish what is from what ought to be in a way that is not haphazard or adventitiously, but allows, therefore, for the open and risky activities of the political rather than mere worship and enjoyment, or experience for its own sake. Without reason and politics, we could not pursue justice but only hope for it; we would be stuck with whatever is the case at the present time and the sad assumption that what happens, good or bad, is a mere arbitrary fate dictated by indifferent gods. We might then have leaders who systematically sow cynical disbelief in the very use of statements to mean anything other than what the inscrutable boss of it all has chosen this time to demand. Been there, done that. Nonsense kills.

—-

Finally, something must be said about the profound conservatism of most of the official Jewish world today. There is now a struggle for the very possibility of the political as a feature of social life which is manifest as the opposition between political conflict and the idea of hatred.

The well-being and future of the Jewish world cannot likely be decided in absence of that of the world as a whole. Our whole traditions teaches us that we must not be for ourselves alone. Like the “Jewish” aspects of the human condition itself — exilic and existentially homeless and alienated, a self divided from itself, always potentially in excess of its actuality and in exception to the given, recognizant of the fundamental vulnerability and precarity we humans all share — so too the idea of chosen-ness is today generalizable, at least in certain ways, if not to everyone in actuality, to anyone who chooses this chosen-ness: it lies in the concern for universality that was always the condition of Jewish particularity; the idea of the chosen-ness of the Jewish people was an idea of an avant-garde within human civilization as such, traditionally meant to serve as moral exemplars, in a manner befitting the classical object of philosophical thinking, which was an individual ethical and moral virtue. This stance is obsolete only because it is no longer enough. The late modern and contemporary world is political in ways to which the world of the ancien regime with its monarchical and theatrical/moral understanding of collective and individual subjectivity did not attain. The existence of Israel, together with American-style identity politics, and the very inadequate thinking behind the typical responses to the memory of the Shoah, have posed the possibility of this collective narcissism as a critical one. Today, there is a global avant-garde, as loosely organized as every meaningful one always been, yet clearly recognizable as more or less embodied in a project that can be identified as that of the left. Or, if you prefer, a left, since those of us who are part of it are bound to question and argue about what precise character it should take in terms of institutions or projects. Jews are not replaced by some other social subject, as Christianity traditionally maintained, but supplemented, added to, as they have become a non-exclusive center, something that already happened negatively in the Shoah, since related principles of exclusion placed millions of other people in the same situation of forced degradation, and as has to some extent happened positively simply in the proliferation of instances of exile (both diasporic and collective, and individual and existential), alienation, and the formation of subjectivities with a problematic relationship to the extant social totality or modes of givenness of social life. This broadened set of social conditions is not a loss but a gain for the Jewish people, as it is partly an index of their success in the modern world, which is extraordinary and worthy of celebration. Judaism itself is of course a way of living with that condition that classically was the site and means of particularly intensive forms of the good life and its pursuit ethically through certain practices of holiness and intellectual life. Nothing will imminently erase as such this form of life and its intrinsic vitality; it is merely the case that in the late modern world an exemplary ethical life comes to seem insufficient without a political orientation that effects a shift in the determination of the most consequential modes of avant-gardism. The distinctness of the Jewish people for themselves will remain until that “messianic” age when the norms and possibilities that the avant-gardes pursue have become truly universalized. That at least is the traditional Jewish myth, and there is no reason to deny its continued meaning, particularly if many Jews continue to choose it, as they will as long as Judaism as such continues to exist. At the same time, the modern world is different from the traditional one, and not so much, nor only, because of modern conditions of criticism and autonomy, but also because of the social conditions of crisis that modern capitalism has created and that have resulted in the need for an ethics that is much more of a politics. Capitalism is a transitional social form defined by crisis. Its successor will need to be a world that is much more fully modern and also one we can live in, in a way that the global capitalist police state at war against vast numbers of the people subjected to it renders impossible. That is the great crisis of our time. To avoid it at best condemns one to irrelevance, while the catastrophes that this crisis makes all but inevitable could even threaten us too for the ultimately tragic reason that neither we nor others did enough to try to solve it.

It is clear enough what we on the left are against, even though it is necessarily far less clear what we are or should be for, and how we should be against the actual and for something that necessarily is as yet only possible. The world is capitalist, and the capitalist world is increasingly authoritarian, highly inegalitarian, and unfree. There is an emergent global capitalist police state engaged in a permanent civil war against the vast majority of the world’s people. It impoverishes us, it enslaves us, it kills many with impunity, or, which is effectively the same thing of course, allows them to die; and it is destroying our shared planetary habitat. This world’s system of governance is of very doubtful sustainability, and that is why there are ongoing crises and forms of resistance and opposition, now popping up with regularity and frequency in various parts of the globe. Because of this resistance and its doubtful sustainability, the global police state is increasing violent. It is engaged in what approaches a global civil war. Its battles are fought by mercenary soldiers and high-tech military operations directly controlled by governments, and they also may be fought by people themselves, as we are encouraged to fight each other.

It is within this situation that the Jewish people, tiny in numbers by comparison, are found organized and represented by institutions and ideological forces that serve the existing system of domination. Of course, recognizing this is no authorization for hatred, in all its blindness, however understandable it may be or seem. Though certainly it must be admitted that most violent passions come from real frustrations that can and should be understood, rather than supposing that mere and total irrationalism that amounts to the claim to be confronted with a figure of the devil, that is, a pure form of violence arising ex nihilo from causes that are absent or without sense other than the pure deviance from any reasonable norm of those who are so morally depraved that they hate us, perhaps just out of resentment for our success or the moral judgement of their own inadequacies that they fear. The idea of a pure hatred with no basis other than evil ignores that in general people become angry not just because they failed to get something they wanted, and presumably have no title to, but because they believe that they are some object of care or identification is the victim of some injustice. Anger can be a basis of war and its principal affect, hatred, or of the political, which is contestational but needs peace to flourish. In the traditions of the West in particular, anger is the political affect par excellence. It is a dangerous one, but not one we could live without. Our sacred texts make this clear enough, even more than those of Greek antiquity, which also do. Anger is not the opposite of love (an essentially Christian idea that has found its way into our mental health practices through psychoanalysis, including the influence of the profoundly conservative thought of Melanie Klein, who seemed to believe this). People get angry if they believe they have been subjected to injustice, and what anger compels one to do above all is engage in the discipline of thinking. Hatreds exist, but refusal and opposition to them in itself makes for quite an inadequate politics, and it is irresponsible if that is all it says or does. Jews like everyone have the right to be wrong and not be denied by reason of this their humanity. Our tradition does oppose as morally culpable living only to prosper or enjoy participation in the exercise of power and whatever are its material or other benefits. Jewish tradition is highly self-critical. This may be thought a condition of having a moral and political orientation that is truly adult. Friends, like socialists traditionally, can criticize each other. We believe that people should all judge and be judged. We do not refuse moral judgment as inhumanly cruel, nor do we equate it with punishments. And that is why we are not moralistic in the way that some Christian and Muslim thought and practice often has been, and also the way much of American political culture is.

By moralistic I mean not moral concern but a false semblance of it that wields attitudes of intolerance towards others who are judged as morally wrong and so worthy of exclusion from the social body, in what Nietzsche recognized as the stance of resentment: it always implicitly says “I/we are so good (or innocent), because you are so bad”; and this can be shortened to merely enunciate the consequent in a relentless “j’accuse” that calls up memories of the Salem witch hunt trials and other nonsense. We see this today in the carceral and punitive thinking of some overzealous partisans of race or gender justice, who typically pursue it through the exercise of law and punishments analogous to it, as in our cancel culture. In fact, the essence of justice is judgment, which aims at setting right or perfecting some part of the world by a work on the understanding. Punishments and sanctions derive their reason for being from the need for judgement. That is one reason why we can look forward to a “messianic” age; then people will not be so concerned to punish malefactors, who will be few, and instead the moral principles we still have and the stories of persons that they involve, will simply be studied, as Jews have for 2,000 years only studied the laws of sacrifice. As we believe in judgment and thinking, we can criticized and be criticized, and the religious practices that enable people to learn and change ethically and morally retain validity for this reason.

And this principle of criticize-ability extends as well to politics. The result is radical in enabling the disabling of forms of hatred and distinguishing the political from something like mere civil war. Thus, you can criticize your country, or another, and that need not be confused with hatred. This is the meta-argument or struggle for the very ideas of pursuing justice or being-political today at all. Saying that criticism is hatred or opposition violence is declaring the impermissibility of the political as such. This is what most anti-anti-Zionists seem to not recognize, though certainly not they alone. Indeed, part of what sustains the deadlock with regard to Israel/Palestine is that on both sides the prevailing tendency is to identify the conflict with the existence of Israel (or, minimally, a Jewish presence in a future state that is somehow non-exclusive in defining citizenship of the state on the basis of national identity), so that the anti-Zionists will concede no existential right to the Jews living there as the price of opposing the neo-colonialist practices of a state at permanent war against a displaced people, while ‘Zionists’ insist that all criticism of Israel, and any attempt to achieve a more just solution for the Palestinians is ipso facto an attack on those very existential claims. In other words, both sides have articulated this situation as one of war, which means all discussion is reduced to a discursive means for achieving the ends associated with that war.

This is also a possibility of other supposed inter-ethnic conflicts to be similarly articulated with built-in deadlocks. In the US, it should be obvious that upholding the current status quo is the only likely consequence of the construction of the conflicts around race as one that pits black Americans against “white” people as their presumed oppressors, instead of recognizing their position as a non-exclusive center of practices of state violence used to defend existing property relations. (As Jews should be recognized as the non-exclusive center of the state violence of Nazism; they certainly were not its only victims; their victimization followed a logic that was unique in some ways, as a novel form of anti-semitism based on the idea of race, but this uniqueness does not fully define the field of victimization.) In the latter case alone, the struggle could be broadened, whereas in the former the dominant theoretical construction will be of claims of injustice on the one hand versus claims of the need to oppose criminal violence on the other. This is an unsolvable deadlock by definition. (James Baldwin points to this in a quote mentioned in the recent Raoul Peck film, “I am not your negro,” saying that white people tend to hate black people out of terror, and black people tend to hate white people out of rage. So, one might wonder, why not both? Arguably, that is what we have. The genius of this statement is easily missed, as its truth does not lie in a judgment about the relative importance of freedom from injustice or from violent crime, but in recognition that this is the set-up that sustains the lack of progress on racial divisions in America. It is a statement that defines a reality that is fundamentally conservative.) In that case, the white and substantially more middle-class plurality will tacitly side with the police and the Black Lives Matter movement will be unable to achieve its objectives, which would require the construction of a broad front opposing the practices of a neoliberal capitalist police state that involves other, linked, problems and victims. The predictable result of the failure of this to happen is the continuation or even exacerbation of the practices of de facto racial segregation that we have seen in the last 50 years, marked with the violence of impassioned disaffections that lack a constructive political object.

No one on the left who has not forgotten how to think and how to judge in ways that are careful and not short-circuited by the need to enforce judgments knows that opposition to capitalism and its police states, or anything else that might be soundly criticized and opposed because it is thought wrong or mistaken, — no one thinking responsibly on the left is going to go in for hatred of some demographic of people. Indeed, it is not even clear that there is any benefit to anyone from hating billionaires. It might be better to relieve them of much of their wealth and power, with no more coercive efforts than are needed to do that. Judaism holds that people are equal and equally possessed of the capacity to manifest the divine or its “image.” There are practices and experiences that are essentially equal, even while other things are not. That billionaire and you and I are not so different when reading the same book or looking at or listening to the same work of art or music. There are, this is to say, sound bases of pursuing a radical equality, or even a much less extreme inequality. Those billionaires also own far more property and wealth than they and those close to them can possibly enjoy. Also, the left has never believed in conspiracy theories, which are an affair of the right. Capitalism has been shown, and we have known this at least since Marx, maybe since Adam Smith, to be a system with a logic, something like a set of rules that are involved in orienting production of goods and/or wealth by means of the mechanisms that enable actors participating in its markets to succeed and not fail. The system is of course organized and managed through deliberate actions and policies, but it will not be replaced with something better just because some organization succeeds in dethroning some persons or enterprises. A revolution is much more than that, and it would have little interest to anyone otherwise. There were, indeed, exploitative, usorious Jewish moneylenders, but what makes them figures of anyone’s oppobrium is that they were moneylenders and highly exploitative, and not the fact that they were Jews. The defense of such practices that pretends that the only thing impermissible in politics is opposing what anyone does is a transparent tactic that merely defends all existing wealth, power, and privilege. Anyone who doesn’t understand that it is possible to criticize inequality without mortally hating the rich is either a fascist or a fool or both, and no careful reader of the Jewish Prophets. It is not who people are but what is done that matters. There are still many people in the Jewish world who understand the good life as tied up with attaining or exercising wealth and/or power in the existing system. Since they are this way not because they are Jews but because they are conservatives, it is not them that we oppose; it is the conservatism that aims to keep things the way they are. Today there is an astonishing degree of powerful conservatism among officially Jewish institutions of every kind. It is of course for Jews who want something other than the status quo to oppose this within Judaism. The meta-argument, or struggle, about being-political concerns both the thesis of impersonality (what matters is what is done, not who does it or has it done to them) and that of conflict as irreducible to hatred. That there can be and often is a subtle slippage from one to the other, as we are sometimes reminded (this is the problem of left-wing anti-semitism, which comes partly from the moralism discussed above, which figures the field of the political as a civil war, such that every argument is engaged in not to learn, understand, and think better about the problems being discussed, but only to win and not lose) is simply a feature of the basic problem here, which is the reduction of politics to war. There are powerful political and economic interests that are invested in sustaining the civil war paradigm, and their effect and function is to render the political impossible, so that nothing can be opposed or questioned and no one can be criticized. It would then effectively be a crime to do so. So the paradigm of politics as civil war is also that of governance as a police force and the political itself, which is contestational (and oppositional only as consequence, though of course every conflict by its existence does imply the potentiality to degenerate into war, perhaps because the political has become technique and means to and end, and so is not an end in itself). Then the truly terroristic rule of governments that oppose all political contestation will treat it as violence and crime.

Jews and Judaism have a stake in the continued existence of the political as a potentiality for contestation of self and other, and the way things are at any given present time, independent of that of war, policing, and the mere defense of property and power, identified of course as that of persons and their lives or form of life. The political is an aspect of peace, and there surely is no peace if it is excluded, because then the existing conflicts will of necessity rupture that peace. The massive failure of this, which affects most major religious and secular Jewish institutions in the world today, and thus much of the sensibility of our people, this is the principle obstacle to a progress that would benefit most of us and the world today.