On the personal and the political: why the left flirts with anti-semitism and other disasters

The object of criticism and opposition for the left was not the bourgeoisie but capitalism.  The bourgeoisie as a class had some distinguishable tendencies within it.  It articulated some ideas that at certain moments could appear revolutionary.  These ideas were not taken far enough.  It is true that the bourgeoisie as a class, given its ties to capital and state power, including in the form of class power that emerged after the French and industrial revolutions and became dominant in the 20th century (including under "Communism"), which is the class of university-educated professionals, was historically tied through its material interests and the tendency of ideology to reflect and repeat them, wound up limiting the results of its own more progressive tendencies.  The left did and does draw on progressive bourgeois traditions, and is unimaginable without them.

It is important to see that the reason why hatred of certain social groups is a path that must be rejected by the left not because those groups are socially oppressed, but for a deeper reason (which certainly acknowledges that).  The most conspicuous social group (not necessarily the only one) that is left out by that way of thinking is, of course, the Jews.  The Jews will be potential targets of hatred as long as there are forms of political contestation that target not forms of social life but groups of persons.  They will then, typically, target those people who appear to oppress them.  That oppression may be real, but revolutions are aimed not, at least primarily or fundamentally, at moral judgment of oppressors, but at liberation, which is to say at possibilities of their own social life affirmed by people in revolt against the deformation or denial of these possibilities. 

The left’s dominant concept of social oppression simply does not apply to the Jews. If they were forced to defend themselves ideologically against anti-semitism on the ground that they are (or can be) oppressed, they would lose. The Jews were not hated because they were outside the dominant society and suspected of opposing or resisting its power on the basis of poverty, but because they were consistently suspected of being committed to something like values (or a different form of life and the image of it) that somehow was resistant to the dominant community and those things it took “for granted,” as “natural” or given. In the dominant modern discourse of “oppression,” a term that entered the English language with the Wycliff Bible translation in 1382, and that figured heavily in European and British Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries, which people forget was very much political, those persons or groups with whom the subjective force of oppression can be identified are figures of evil, as much as imagined exploiters of the poor or violators of property right, or those who are “subversive,” a term that first entered our language early in the 14th century, in an England already Judenrein following the expulsion of 1290. (The term was first used in 1325 by British Parliament in its Statutes of Realm to mean (to put it in modern English, from the OED) “merchants of other lands bringing into our realm…monies…counterfeited…to our great harm, and to the subversion of our money”). This was clearly directed at the Jews, who were consistently figured as the great social force of injustice in the medieval Christian European world. The Nazis were not as irrational as it might seem in including in their discourse hatred of Jews both for being oppressors and subversives. The reason is less in the empirical fact that they could be bankers or factory owners, as in the middle ages many had been moneylenders (generally at the encouragement of state authorities who, after they were driven out of agriculture and other trades, used them to provide credit for business expansion, and alternatingly a source of funds by confiscations facilitated by the expulsions driven by fears of Jews transgressing or contaminating the faith- and identification- (with the figure of their savior) based community, normality, and propriety of the Christians), or they could be communists or other subversive radicals. Oppressors and subversives of course have in common that these are names of social subjects that are imagined to threaten social order from, respectively, “above” or “below,” but in either case outside, and indeed, a figure of the properly outside found in uncanny impropriety inside the social order. Though it has origins as old and sanctified as the book of Exodus itself, where it originally meant that the slaves were “weighed down” with burdens by their Masters, the concept of “oppression” is perhaps a problematic one. Like all concepts that have had some salutary use, their deficiencies call not for moralism’s rejection but science’s rethinking.

We need not to have no concepts of social life that we would oppose or reject, but better ones, and better ways of thinking about such opposition, and so about the political itself, the political as such. This is a question that has been germane in recent social and political theory precisely because we live in a period where the very possibility of a politics or being political seems to be something that is being called into question and doubt. And this is the case even and precisely as we are witnessing the hypertrophy of seemingly political discourse in social media, an absolute democracy which, however, has as its real function not to make use of debate and discussion to address in a collective project of some kind the question of the good society and how to better realize it, but instead only to keep people in surveilled control for the purpose of both advertising, which sells you who you think you are or want to be, and every association that you might find that seems to go with it, and policing, to limit the realization of any potentiality that might be risky and thus dangerous for the continued existence of the profit system.

The deeper social cause of anti-semitism is that Jews had an exilic understanding of their relationship to the world, a conception that was not necesssarily “lachrymose,” as the Jewish historian Salo Baron put it, but is in Judaism quite affirmative. Jews were resistant to every form of social “naturalism” (which says that things in the social world must be as they are, because the way they are is —- the way they are) and “normality.” What the current period in Jewish history is going to have to better resolve than it has so far, is to think out clearly how Jews can be a nation that is like any other in being a nation with a state, and at the same time a people unlike any other because their fundamental commitment is not to any given but to a transcendent God who promises happiness and demands justice, and with great rigor. And that this is not a call merely to private holiness, because having their own state, and being contented morally about the fact that that state is beleaguered, and its people not necessarily guaranteed of safety against future catastrophes, cannot mean that our prosperity, liberty, and happiness do not require that we be concerned with that of the rest of the world’s peoples. As Wittgenstein famously said of languages, there is no (collectively) private Judaism. A Judaism which affirmed the Jewish people’s separation from others would not be Judaism as we have known it until now, but something else. It might be a new xenophobia legitimating itself, as the American colonizers did, on the basis of religious principles and modeled explicitly on neo-colonial grounds (the religious principle here are of course not merely false; they certainly have their sense and greatness, and it is not a mere unhappy coincidence that Jewish intellectuals like the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Head Rabbi of England, repeatedly recollected the celebration of themselves by the American colonists of the 17th and 18th centuries as driven by the radical Protestant commitment to political values of liberty and equality that were literally held sacred; Sacks can find no better model for affirmation of a Jewish politics today than this colonialist American model), giving the Jews of Israel and those who identify with them more in common indeed with the original British and Western European Protestant settlers in North America, and other settler colonists, than either the national liberation movements, once waged against colonial powers, that Zionism once had some relationship to, or to anything historical in Jewish life including the worlds of the First and Second Commonwealths, which Jewish religious reactionaries now imagine that they are returning to. (They think the Messiah promises national sovereignty only, not freedom from forms of social oppression — note that nothing in the concept of being weighed down upon (op-primere) intrinsically means that that oppression is unjust; it only becomes possible to think and say that, and act to overthrow it, if it can be seen that such overthrowing is possible — and this is not the same as a Hegelian historicist, based on colonialist models of development, finding that it is no longer “necessary,” for power is always “necessary,” it consists of techniques and operations justified precisely as such, and this also amounts to saying that they can be given a rational justification. Clearly, whatever else a modern messianic politics would include, it would include the anarchist/communist notion of a world without economic scarcity or coercive authority, and so too law and commandment as we know it — note that the Jewish ideas of law and command are distinctive because of the way something like “the good” (in Judaism conceptualized through the concept of the “holy”) is part of them; in Roman thought, authority rests on itself and its own imposition alone, while in Jewish thought it does not. The Roman conception is also exclusionary by definition: power can thus be defined in a logic of “us” against “them.” The important thing to grasp here is that in Jewish thought power does not found law or justice; Judaism was born in a protest against this idea, and will die if it does. Thus, the concept of the state cannot be central to any Jewish political philosophy whether not one of the nation or people can be, since the nation in Judaism is not determined by geography, language, or government and governance; though these obviously may exist and it certainly does not ask to eschew them, as every Gnostic and other antinomian political thinking must, leading to the programs of renunciation of property and wealth, marriage and sex, that haunted Christianity along with the heresies that resulted from this. This is why the messianic is not the utopian exactly, as utopia by definition is nowhere, an outside of all power, typically thought of in the West as something like the achievement of a world of permanent Shabbat, and this as something not that might come into being one day or that could be invoked in moments of holiness, but that can be instituted and now; Christianity thus always had antinomian tendencies, as well as, following the Patristic period and Constantine, imperialist ones. The options are either the Pharaonic state or no state; the Kingdom is “not of this world.” But the exilic is not the utopian for the same reason that there is no absolute exile, a notion that underwrote Christianity’s need to believe in an afterlife, an idea Judaism in the Talmudic period embraced but that it does not need and has never made primary, an idea that is entailed in none of its essential ideas. An absolute exile is an absurdity, because exile is displacement, not absence of place and world. To refuse the world would be Gnosticism or something like it (including similar tendencies in Indian thought, including Buddhism); it would have to place salvation outside both politics and perhaps world and life themselves.

The opposite of the exilic imagination, of which the messianic is a form, is the “natural” state engaged in a war against the deviance or disobedience of sinners, or those suspected of “violent” (political) tendencies, perhaps on the medical grounds (“mental illness”) that have simply posed the specter today of a universalized Nazism whose dream is always the final solution that eliminates tendencies towards evil (however that concept is imagined) and that multiplies places whose logic merits that they called a mini-Auschwitz. Less horrible in most (not all) instances, less totalizing in their explicitly genocidal character perhaps, but as a general tendency, even more pervasive than they were eighty years ago this year, in 1941, when the Holocaust itself first became explicit military and government policy of the German Reich.

The Jews are not the only people in the modern world with a deep, in their case at least defining, commitment to both justice and the exilic, but they were historically unique (I use the historian’s “we” because I don’t know if they will still be unique in this way “tomorrow,” as it seems to me this question is on the historical agenda broadly today, in a time that clearly is one of continuing upheaval and transition) in the way in which such a commitment has exceed any other, and particular all forms of givenness. There are thinkers on the left today who have made use in their theories and inquiries of a condition like this, and this drove the intellectual movement of French Judéite (e.g., Sartre, Blanchot, Levinas, Derrida, Lyotard, Zizek (who is French-educated), Badiou, and the Heideggerian tradition in France, Italy and elsewhere that includes philosophers like the late Reiner Schurmann and Giorgio Agamben), an intellectual movement defined by an affirmative idea of Jewishness but that is not part of Judaism properly so called, just as Spinoza’s thought was not, not because they exclude it or it them, as they do not, but because what they theorize is a more general phenomenon though meant to be developed as a critique (in the Kantian sense, aimed at identifying conditions of possibility of a thing, not defined by rejection). This thinking derives from motifs in modern philosophy. (Judaism as a religion, or the observant Jew, in this context, is theorized in a general way such as philosophy today makes possible and practically this supplements and is supplemented by the prayers, rituals, holidays, and commandments that have defined Judaism practically, or what a rabbi who is not a philosopher, as few are, would call it.)

It seems to me that this tradition (the modern European philosophical one) is the main theoretical force in the world today potentially separating a radical left project from some kind of polemical and Manichaean oppositionality that is destined inevitably to reduce to the policing of morals. One theoretical modification that would be useful is to make the category of oppression, and all associated categories, like violence and evil itself, secondary at most to the thinking of the being of the subjects we are and our potentialities. Indeed, one thing that has separated the dominant thinking in both Christian and Muslim traditions from trends drawing more on Judaism is the category of evil itself. An exilic consciousness that also affirms the singularity and unity of the divine cannot consistently think the good that it affirms as in opposition to an evil it must exclude, or defeat. There are conservative liberal Jews who are content to rely on these and other figures in the discourse of governmentality today, with the mere caveat that Judaism calls for a thinking that is moderate and not radical, perhaps in analogy in the French theoretical field to François Jullien’s arguments about the Chinese mind, which starts in media res and is “bland” rather than root-reaching and categorical. But to do that is to abandon theory as such, and to abandon theoretical thinking about politics and ethics is to abandon all hope of transforming a society that is increasingly one of policed sadness into a world that offers a truly good life, and not just survival or hope — as in “the American dream,” which limits the good to prosperity and only makes sense as a discourse of austerity that justifies its impositions of finitude by appeals to a future imagined only as deferral of contemporary desires.

If our only political concepts are those of distributive economic justice, and absence of, or even just limitation to, forms of domination that function to maintain the existing inequalities, then we are positing and moving towards a world that wants to be just but not to be happy. Such a world can only have a morals but not an ethics, its cosmos is closed and centered like the medieval one, it has no experimental scientific thinking, no art in the modern sense which is always political, and no history. It would be a world where the state rules the society (its imaginary theoretical object) through something like a religion, and its dictates, but there would be none of the political tendencies introduced in the ancient world through prophets in the Jewish world and tragedy and philosophy in the classical Greek world. The specter is that of the Pharaonic. It is a specter that today has again come to haunt the world, more than two centuries after the European Enlightenment began to imagine and theorize its supercession and disappearance in a world of liberty and equality and freed, not necessary of anything that, especially today, might be called religion, but freed of superstitions, ideologies, intellectual idols.

Such specters have lately been evoked or imagined often, because it seems like our bourgeoisies and their allied governments have abandoned their historical ideals, limited as they were, in a world that is not supposed to be democratic, promise most people a good life, or even the ability to live at all. We have clearly entered a time of greater repression and less liberty. As might be predicted, this has in part meant continuing social conflict, though with as of now no clear path from an oppressive present to a different future that masses of people can have some confidence in.

Power generates opposition.  Whenever that opposition remains defined by its opposition to the power over it alone, it remains defined by the power it opposes and the relationship (a sad one) that that it imposes. 

The mistakes of social justice warrior left-liberals are along these lines.  The left itself is of course a graveyard of defeats and failures.     

The major failure of the liberal-left today is its combination of obsession with the sole concept of oppression on the one hand and a politics of identities on the other.  The consequences will include anti-semitism, misandry, left-fascist hatred of “white” people, and things of that nature.  Their defense will then be taken up by the right, which will incongruously take a page from left-liberalism but apply it to the “wrong” subjectivities. 

The most basic political problem is that of (existing) social authority and the possible disconnect between its demands and something that we might want that is other than them, and what they offer us. That is, between authority or power and duty, what subjects and citizens “owe” to those with authority and power over them, and something like desire. This problem has been given various solutions historically in the world of ideas, and which have failed. The familial (and so psychical) figure of this is of course that of patriarchy, the rule of fathers. It is thus the figure of a father or paternity as rule or domination. What made Judaism distinctive politically was the depth of the field of alternatives to what we might call the Pharaonic and Roman ideas of governmentality or authority and power. To date, no Jewish society or movement has realized an absolute alternative to this, but it has posited it; such is the very idea of the Messiah or Messianic.

It is always easier to understand what went wrong than what may go right; the latter is not an object of historical knowledge at all but is outside it, potentially residing at all only in works of imagination and theorizing. The tendency now among conservative liberals is abandon all such social theorizing, on the supposition that evil results from the pursuit of good, which is another way of saying that evil cannot be opposed, and injustice cannot as such even be named. The liberal-left often makes a corresponding though different mistake: constructing politics completely from opposition. Dialectical thinking often tends in that direction. Psychically, the figure here is that of a father as antagonistic force who must be defeated to access the desired world promised by an equally Oedipal figure of a maternal beloved that the father’s power prohibits access to. These are politically fantasmatic.

No “oppressive” evil (that is, no tyranny or government that we can have the courage to call “injustice”) can be overthrown without some affirmative idea or image (or set of such) of the good. Often the liberal-left seems determined to reinvent the idea of a war against oppression, which since wars are fought against particular peoples and their governments, can only be conceived as a war against the oppressors. Not only does this lead to a destructive nihilism (e.g., ISIS with its pure opposition to “the West,” opposing to it nothing in reality except its own war machine); it also is an aspect of the ruling systems itself today, as it only figures and gives intelligible, recognizable form, to the global civil war waged by the capitalist powers against the world’s poor, their (and all of our) environmental habitat, and ultimately the world and its people itself.

The target of the left is not property so much as the domination of labor power. (The late Moishe Postone argued this in his treatise on Marx based on the Grundrisse, his book Time, Labor, and Social Domination.).

A politics worthy of the name is not right or wrong morally, but only successful or failing by the standard of some particular project or “struggle” engaged in, and more broadly, as in the arts, it is more or less interesting.  Don’t try to be right, try to be interesting.