After religion and nationalism, what remains? A.: Exile.
What distinguishes the Jewish people is not the disciplined rigor of following the particular commandments specific to the religion in all their minute rigor. It is something older than that, in legend as old as Abraham, the first Jew. It is exile. Exile and otherness.
This exile does not mean oppression, which is only one facet it can be manifest as.
Today, along with our identity politics and its latent nationalism and collective narcissism, the revolutionary and radically egalitarian and liberal traditions of an earlier time have transformed for many people into resentment at their oppression, usually reduced to or confused with marginalization and lack of recognition, and normally defined in terms of a suppressed group identity that must be identified and maximally expressed (in the American model). Oppression is real for pariah groups, and pariahs are exiles of a kind.
The Jew as a type in modern Europe was a pariah when not a parvenu. In pre-modern Europe (for the Jews, before the French Revolution which first liberated them as equal citizens of a nation defined by language and geography and not religion or ethnicity), the Jews were a particular group among other groups in feudal society, which was divided up in many ways.
The medieval European Jew was a pariah in gentile society because he was a Jew. The modern Jew is a pariah because he is socially alienated in ways that neither derive from nor require as the price or condition of his status as Other the belonging to a religion, nation, community, or family of pariahs. Therefore, the modern Jewish diaspora experience in European-language societies reveals a possibility of social existence generally rather than merely one of Jewish existence; and it does not point to Judaism (or Jewish nationalism in any form). It allows of that, for those who are able to access it, but it does not require it. The experience is more general. The modern Jewish experience in Spain and later Germany in particular resulted in new forms of subjectivity within Western civilization, which now has become hybridized with non-Western cultures, extending the postcolonial experience, almost, and increasingly, everywhere. (On this logic in Spain, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos, Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, Princeton UP, 2009; and in Germany, Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity Press, 1991).
Concerning the Jews: This modern experience could be, in reassuring, legitimating mythological projects of historical “importance,” considered the second wave of massive Jewish contribution to civilization, at least in the West, the first giving us “ethical monotheism” and the second a modern subjectivity and mode of thinking that is acutely self-critical, with implications for the passage, this time not from pagan empires to more ethically demanding theologically monarchic ones, as in late antiquity, but from the world of modern Europe based on capitalism and colonialism to one that is in various ways “post-“ with regard to what modern European was developing culturally between the late Middle Ages and the First World War. The emergent world is not only post-colonial, and may or may not become post-capitalist, a question that current social crises are likely to keep on the burner; it is also post-patriarchal and indeed post-familial; it is, likewise, post-communitarian, post-nationalist, post-“societalist” (“society” is a creation of the modern nation state, which posits it as a “body” and universal). Obviously, that means that Israeli nationalism, for all that is unique about it, and the real needs and problems that called it into existence, is not “the” consequence that the modernizing trends, historically much associated with the Jews, are most importantly headed. Israel may be necessary; it is not the Messianic age and does not announce it. Nor can a Judaism still immersed in the Middle Ages, as much as many liberal and modern Jews would like to think they are not, or do not need or want to be.
Today’s late modern subjectivity (which includes much of what was called not long ago “postmodernity”) is acutely exilic. This is to fundamentally a question of ethnic groups and their proper national states, if one follows the schema established in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia and incarnated today in the United Nations, as well as, a bit less idealistically and more successfully, the European Union. No, the exilic is fundamental the “spiritual” condition it has been since Abraham.
There have been various figures of the pariah in terms of national cultures, and the pariah is a figure that takes several forms in America and the world today. In modern Germany before the Shoah, Jews were pointedly excluded from the society. Being German and being Jewish were not separate but they were distinct. That distinction persists, though often, fortunately, in less ways less anguished and often seemingly impossible. If one group or entity must be different from another, yet in the space space or otherwise related to it, and so both part and not part of a whole, which was the modern nation-state and before and (in Germany, much less so France) continuing and overlapping with it, Christianity and its culture. The Nazis declared them separated, having nothing essential in common, and they “demonstrated” this by violently eliminating them. But in German culture it was romanticism in philosophy and the arts that created the particular forms of modern German exclusion within an inclusion. This form is larger than the pariah, but it is a form of exile. It is a way of being defamiliarized, Unheimlich, not at home where you are, not belonging where you do and belonging where you do not. Or in Sartre’s terms, borrowing language from Shakespeare, being what you are not and not being what you are. Yovel and Bauman, in the above-mentioned treatises, show how a new form of modern subjectivity, broadly available and no longer deriving from or locatable within religion, nor, certainly, identified with any particular group on the medieval, feudal model, which American identity politics is always looking longingly back at from a great distance that is untroubled by medievalism’s downsides (they have long formed much of the background of modern culture in Europe itself), and a modern subjectivity that is no longer a property of “the Jews” but available to everyone. And also resisted by conservative forces and tendencies potentially with regard to everyone.
The dominant form of social exclusion in America today, outside of that of the African-American peoples, who are not excluded so much as marginalized, is via the triumphant ideologies of the therapeutic in all of its forms. This includes most forms of popular “spirituality”; more importantly, it includes the medical apparatus and its practices of social control. This system also creates pariahs through a logic of ascribed stigma. But the pariah who is such qua a particular category of persons and forms of life or ways of behaving particular to them, that they may be identified with as objects of scientific, medical, and therapeutic, or policing and legal, this is a particular phenomenon within the larger field of exilic subjectivities.
Modern persons are not exiles because exiled by a majoritarian or institutional prejudice that excludes them because it will not recognize their particularity. We are exiled because modern bureaucratic and capitalist (consumerist, market-based, propertarian, etc.) ways of forming and treating the subjectivity of persons calls the exilic into existence as a necessity. It may answer to ethical and political demands, including one of thinking.
If the most pervasive and general late modern form of social exclusion is through judgments about person’s health and normality, the positive identity that best suits those wanting something else, while affirming and clinging to, perhaps, their identity as the common object of both targeting and exclusion on the one hand and self-affirmation on the other, that identity would be that of the artist, best understand as an amateur of thinking in a field that permits itself chaos, and all that the institutions of “The Man” will consider abnormal. And it does this for a reason known of since Aristotle. The first sentence in the Metaphysics, the central work in the West of theology and ontology, the thinking of what is as it is, and what it means for us, the world, others, or anything at all, to exist, states categorically, in what may be taken as a prescription for all who would think:
“Everyone desires to make sense of their experience, and the clearest evidence of this is the delight we take in what appears to our senses.” (Revision of standard translation mine).
In the modern world we must add:
And everyone needs to make sense of their way of existing in the world when that existence (and maybe that world) is in crisis, so that they must call it into question.
And the way people do that is what makes, in general, statements and expressions and modifications of perceptions through skillful artifice, art.
Such art is by definition (it follows clearly from the above) political and also ethical. That is, it concerns the question of the good that can be found and enjoyed in the form of life that is possible for us, and it also concerns the way things are in the social and cultural world as a question. Heidegger said that our way of being in the world is a question and an issue for us. The political is the mode of thinking and acting that aims to question the world held in common, which has sometimes been called the polis or the city.
Jews in America were replaced by other forms of ambivalent pariah status identified with other groups. The Blacks were oppressed as Jews were not necessarily (and today usually are not, at least not in the most obvious terms). Others were objects of ambivalence because people did not know where to place them. The ambivalences may get worked out in time, with regard to the particular group. This has largely happened in more liberal circles and places with gayness. But note that the logic involved here is tied to changing not that logic itself but the particular groups subjected to it. More persistent is the exclusion of the mentally ill. Though that is changing because so many people are so called that the designation is becoming banal.
But mental illness is partly created by policing.
German pariah-hood was tied to the internal externality of romanticist subjectivity. That is why German-Jewish thought was never separated from non-Jewish German thought, with variations that in the end are probably just quantitative, matters of degree. The romanticist subject may be, and want to remain, “outside society” in some sense maintained within it. German romanticism mostly died with the war. Its finest fruits, like the thought of Heidegger, survive and thrive mostly by having been taken up elsewhere. In France, the outside is temporal, thanks to the revolution and the historically strong character of the French state and the ideas of society that correspond to it. In France, the outsider is a thinker who is avant-garde; only French society and culture does a great deal to include and honor rather than excluding such figures. The French revolutionary sensibility is part of this, and differs from the American one, which is about individual rights and the need to defend them. Related to this, our liberal state is supposed to be limited in all of its powers, though recent history has tended to forget this. In America, the outside is individual. My supposition that the ideal figure of the outsider for us is the artist is very apt to us. But the political form is still most usually that of identifying as a member of a marginalized group. It is oppressed, but only because of marginality, which is a variable involving degrees of appearance. The member of the potentially oppressed marginal group appeals to a logic of making what was marginal part of the normal and central. There is, though, a possible figuration that borrows from the first two logics, especially the second. What we know of as “the left” most truly belongs to the second, as it did for Marx. The very metaphors of politics as “left” and “right” come from an accidental feature of the French Revolution: it was where the factions were seated in the assembly.
French society’s characteristically willed blindness to social particularities is not only its Achilles’ heel perhaps, but also one of its strengths, and that has particularly been the case in the world of ideas, because the outside is temporal, the future, rather than spatially located in subsets. French society constructs its “republican” universality as an abstraction and effect subtraction of particularity from universality in the public sphere. One consequence that quite naturally followed is that Jewish philosophy in France, which is both very vital and unrecognized (at least as a possibility of Jewish identity and culture) in America, is not a possibility of individuals who are factually Jewish (factually meaning that they meet membership criteria, answering the question who is a proper member of the set “Jews,” rather than the hermeneutical problem of interest to many modern Jews, “what does it mean to be Jewish?”) but a possibility of forms of thinking that can be called Jewish in terms of their relationship to other recognizably Jewish forms of thinking, or texts. American society constructs universality in a very different way: here it is the sum of all the particulars, when their essential qualities are maximally expressed by them (and normally by them alone). The formula for America would be U = a + b + c + …. n. France’s would be something like U = Ax - P(Ax), where U is the Universal set that includes all and only whatever is the nation, Ax is All x (who are found in the place of Ax, the territory) and P(Ax) is the particularity of All x’s in terms of their sum. That could be represented as U = Ax - (P(a) + P(b) + …. P(n)), except that the operation of abstraction or subtraction is effectively performed not upon elements in the series but originally upon all of them, who do not even appear as particulars (in the public space) at all. The French model may be better for the development of science and culture than for some particular persons. But the American system has its own problems; first, the universality itself may be eclipse, for what is its independent grounds of appearance? In the formula, it has none; the totality just is the particulars taken together. This expresses not a truth about America so much as a tendency and a danger. But it is the schema by which people tend to think, and France operates, for better and worse, according to different principles, linked to a strong sense of a national society and its non-particular character at least in principle, and especially with regard to ethnicities and religions. America was founded partly to give space for particular ethnicities excluded in their place of origin, and indeed for a set of these groups taken together. And our identity politics follows a similar logic. So does our individualism, because in another sense we tend to think we are a nation of collection of not necessarily related individuals gathered together in a union that is constituted by us but without constituting us in turn. That too is a myth but it defines a tendency. So in America, you can aspire to almost total freedom to express the mentality and culture of your particular group. We have our ways of cultivating styles of political difference and talk about oppression that are quite accepted and maybe a bit neutralized by this overall strategic form. That is ultimately why American Jews have relatively little to fear in being Jewish on the medieval model. And also, here Jewish thought will tend to be understood as limited to and by thinking about Jews as people, rather than anything more abstract, such as a way of being or form of life that could be considered in abstraction. For the idea of abstraction in thought, which has helped make possible the tremendous achievements of French philosophy in recent times, is related to the social abstraction. The French find this natural partly because the language distinguishes between polite and familiar address. Lacking this, Americans might want their intimate personal selves to have public recognition, and the French model makes that less likely. The philosophy of Spinoza, or that of Walter Benjamin, is not dependent on the Jewish people. There are possibilities of thought that are not tied to the identities of the persons enunciating them. The French take that for granted, while in America we tend not to.
Hegel said that art and philosophy are the Aufhebung of religion; they surpass and also complete it, because they express more clearly its ideas. That is not the whole truth, so long as archaic and ancient relics are somehow preserved, and perhaps mainly studied, which accounts for much of Judaism. But Hegel’s dictum is very largely true. To make it explicit as, when possible, we should: if there were a future world religion, we might start from the idea that once founded the religious traditions of the “West”: exile.
In the messianic age, exiles will not be pariahs. Exile will not be policed. Exile will not be reduced to protected existence in a delimited and confined space, like a territory, national or otherwise. Israel, perhaps, will be treated as, in Agamben’s reading, Paul did social statuses: they will be maintained, not abolished, but as if they both were and were not.
Whatever is good to be, or a possibility of being, might both be and not be as that quality that is given for it. There are no absolutes. But there is a tendency in that direction.
Witness: in the health care system, there is often no speaking of justice, because that belongs to a different and separated world entirely, that of law and legal judgment. Patients are not subjected to a regime of judgment that is like that of law, be it secular, Roman, English, Jewish or Muslim, or anything else. That’s why you can’t argue that you are not really subject to their judgment; you cannot argue anything at all with health care professionals, so long as they are strictly functionaries in their role and with their professional license and practices of their protected guild or trade. (A medieval idea, again!).
As long as there are states and (their corrollary), societies, there will be proper normalities they will enforce. And that will make pariahs of some of us exiles. What to do about that? For starters, let’s all try to minimize the scope and power of the state apparatus, and limit it by other powers. But let’s also be exiles, like Abraham, who belonged to no state. He was given a promise.
The promise is a promise of happiness linked to justice. There is no such promise unless we are exiles. We are all born destined to be exiles if we happen to recognize it. Our animal species is born helpless practically, with huge brains that make possible connections but originally have almost none, with the ability to learn languages that enable us to be creative, and without a proper task, set of instructions for managing the fixed household of one’s life, without an architecture, without the thick sense of world as something given woven of elements that are given, as if the particles in our embodied minds contained no disposition to swerve and deviate. But they do.
As exiles we encounter today everywhere attempts to enforce regimes of normality, propriety, security, and identity that are, ultimately, false. When everyone is an outsider, there will not be a boundary to our ways of inhabiting the places where we are as everywhere is being enforced with brutal violence by the world’s reactionaries. Their time will be up. Ours, the exiles, is just beginning.