When Killers Become Victims

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2007/3
When killers become victims: anti - semitism and its

critics
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GIL ANIDJAR
Gil Anidjar is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and
Cultures at Columbia University. His most recent book is entitled Semites: Race, Religion,
Literature (Stanford University Press, 2007).
Rsum / Abstract
La lutte contre lantismitisme est dsormais un phnomne global. Elle sinscrit - elle est mene dans de nouvelles lgislations et de nouvelles politiques nationales et internationales, dans la
culture populaire amricaine (Hollywood) ou dans la vie intellectuelle franaise, dans des effets
statistiques et des inquitudes sociologiques de proportions plantaires. Il sagira ici de
comprendre ce phnomne fragment comme un mouvement de masse qui demande tre
interprt en tant que tel. Que faisons-nous, qui sommes-nous, nous qui combattons
lantismitisme lchelle plantaire ? En tant que nous ne sommes pas organiss mais diviss,
en tant que nous ne nous connaissons pas nous mmes, en tant que la tradition dans laquelle
nous nous plaons - y-a-t-il une tradition anti-antismite ? - nous est inconnue ou inaccessible,
nous restons ignorants de nos succs et de nos checs, ainsi que du rle que nous jouons (ou
non) sur la scne mondiale. Telles sont les questions qui motivent la rflexion engage ici. Il
sagira de tracer quelques lignes qui permettront de commencer comprendre la lutte contre
lantismitisme telle que, consciemment ou non, nous la menons : mouvement transnational,
comme aurait dit Hannah Arendt ou effet de masse et pouvoir, aprs Elias Canetti.
Im a recovering anti-Semite. I was saved by A-S.A.

A-S.A.?
Anti-Semites Anonymous.
Philip Roth, Operation Shylock
It is undoubtedly the case that anti-Semitism, along with other forms of racism, must be combated.
It must also be documented. Having painstakingly engaged in such a precise, documenting
endeavor with regards to the devastation imagined and unleashed by Western racism in its literary,
technological, and legal dimensions, Sven Lindqvist confessed to having pursued an additional goal
as well. What he wanted to do, in The Skull Measurers Mistake, was to remind readers that the
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struggle was altogether older, if not time-honored. He wanted to show that there were also those
who had long opposed and fought racism, those who today are often forgotten, and as far as I
know have never been discussed together. Lindqvist had hoped to show those who are today
fighting against racism something of the long and proud tradition to which they belong.1 It is
precisely with regard to such tradition whether known or unknown that a renewed, comparative
reflection has now become necessary with regards to the history of the struggle against racism
and, more generally, the history of resistance and liberation movements, groups and organizations
who oppose discrimination and oppression in one or all of its forms, which may gain by being
discussed together. Indeed, even a cursory look at this history should reveal the exceptional place
occupied in it by the current battles waged against anti-Semitism. Most historical struggles and
movements, Lindqvist suggests, belong to and partake of long traditions, precisely: intellectual and
scientific, social and political, and even theological traditions. In order to establish or increase its
reach and legitimacy, each of them inscribes itself in an often contested (oft forgotten, sometimes
even fictitious) but always weighty and venerable lineage, rich with antecedents and precedents.
The abolitionist movement, for example, elaborated its complex ties to the biblical account of
Exodus and to Christian doctrine; and the earlier arguments, however ineffective, that were
inaugurated by Bartolome de Las Casas or Thomas Morton against the persecution of Amerindians
are still alive and remembered; 2 consider as well the force of anti-colonialism (the appeal to
universalism of Toussaint lOuverture) and the consistent, if also rare and problematic, opposition to
the scandal of Empire; 3 recall the nineteenth century struggle against sexual inequality and later
against misogyny and sexual discrimination; 4 think of Montaigne and later of Herder, who
articulated some of the most essential arguments still necessary to refute a form of racism that,
paradoxically, had yet to emerge in its full-blown, modern incarnation; 5 think finally of the
protection of the environment and of its religious roots (real and imagined), and of radical antiZionism such as was elaborated within Jewish orthodox consciousness.6 What is remarkable is
that nothing of the sort can be said about the current struggle against anti-Semitism, which neither
invokes nor claims traditional roots or historical antecedents. One what basis, then, do we
understand this struggle? Do we understand it? And can we should we isolate, among all
struggles and movements, the struggle against anti-Semitism? Why distinguish it from the antiracist struggle? Do we even agree that there is one such struggle? That it is one at all? What are
the signs pointing in its direction? And if there are such signs older or newer of the struggles
existence, have they been discussed together? What would thereby be gained?
Lindqvist continues to be instructive, who acknowledges, while markedly distinguishing, the
specificity of each of the collectives targeted and defended and the traditions of responses to
prejudice and attack. 7 The following essay is premised on a similar acknowledgment. More
specifically, the apparent absence of tradition notwithstanding, it is easy to grant that anti-Semitism
can be and more importantly, has been isolated and singled out, raised up in its singularity. It
has become a target unto itself, distinguished in numerous sites and manners from other forms of
racisms. Moreover, there are today massive signs, and indeed, efforts, that make it impossible to
ignore the relative integrity (not necessarily the coherence, much less the concerted and unified
intent, perhaps, but a relative integrity nonetheless) of a phenomenon I will be referring to, after the
war on drugs, the war on poverty and the war on terror, as the war on anti-Semitism (hereafter,
WAS). These targeted efforts have been deployed by states and governments, international
institutions, the mass media in all its forms, various organizations and public intellectuals, all
mobilized to fight anti-Semitism in particular, and increasingly so in recent years. They are
impressionistically and globally manifested in the enduring, international concerns (and
considerable media barrage) over the new anti-Semitism in Europe and in the US, and in the
slew of responses to it. A random and non-exhaustive sample should suffice to illustrate the extent
of this struggle for now: from an Anti-Defamation League campaign in New York City to a range of
reactions to Hollywood movies, and the number of subsequent New York Times editorials
dedicated to the issue; from groups like Campus Watch and accusations of anti-Semitism at
Columbia University and elsewhere to the numerous pieces of legislations passed by the U.S.
Congress as well as by many European parliaments; from the scholarly institutes established and
expanded to study anti-Semitism to international conferences on the topic conducted by scholars
and policy makers (in Europe, the U.S., Australia, and so forth); from Harvard President Lawrence
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anti-Semitic
Summers statements (raising the specter of speech and acts that would be anti-Semitism in effect
if not in intent) with rejoinders by intellectuals and writers, all of whom are participating in renewed
reflections on and responses to anti-Semitism. 8 But the list is longer (I return to it in more details
below) and there seems to be more than sufficient ground, therefore, to take stock and consider
these public acts and gestures as parts of a wide, indeed, massive mobilization to combat antiSemitism. As mobilizations go, it appears to be a successful one. It seems to me obvious, at any
rate, that there is, if not a concerted effort and struggle, at least a multiple and layered deployment
of diverse means and interventions, united or not, minimally tactical if not always strategic, all of
which gather in pursuit of the same purpose, namely, to wage a fight against anti-Semitism. There
is, there appears to be, a war against anti-Semitism. It is this visible manifestation (with or without
additional depth, with or without constituency, with or without unity) that warrants the reflections I
wish to offer here.
Now, as I have said, in this multifarious struggle, no tradition, no antecedents, appear to be active,
none simply found not even an invented or an imagined tradition (in another lexicon, one
might consider that there is no appeal to the universal on the parts of the victims, only a claim to
the universal dimension of the prejudice). Certainly, no tradition or antecedents are invoked in the
still unsurpassed interventions of Horkheimer and Adorno, Sartre and, last but not least, Arendt.
These early representatives of the struggle against anti-Semitism are conspicuously discreet about
their forerunners, if there were any. Arendt does retrieve from oblivion the idiosyncratic figure of
Bernard Lazare; 9 Horkheimer and Adorno rely on Freud (though not on his explicit attempt to
participate in WAS, namely, Moses and Monotheism); and whereas Fanon could complain about
the inadequacy of his predecessors (Maran, Mannoni) in the struggle against racism and
colonialism, Sartre who inspired Fanon before writing a preface for The Wretched of the Earth
makes no similar gesture in his famed attack on the anti-Semite. Clearly, voices had been raised
before in defense of the Jews, alliances had been formed to protect them and vindicate their
cause, their very existence. After all, had not the Church itself produced arguments against the
massacre of Jews?
In order to give ourselves the means to understand and interpret what WAS is and the place it
occupies today, in order to rate its success and take the measure of its effects the admittedly
ambitious goal of this essay it is essential to recognize that, although the two moments may be
related, the fight against a particular form of oppression or persecution is not always accompanied
by concerns on behalf (much less in favor) of its victims. To argue and fight against slavery, for
instance, does not require that one take a position on the needs and rights of slaves (hence white
supremacists could wish for the abolition of slavery but do so only in order to send blacks to Africa
and cleanse the United States of their presence). Inversely, to uphold the cause of womens
rights, as Mary Wollstonecraft and others did, does not explicitly or necessarily convey a critique of
its perpetrators and enforcers, of male-dominated power or even misogynists. Today, one may also
consider reigning attitudes toward the targets of the current if also older tendency to malign or
pathologize Islam (and to deny the rise, nay, the very existence, of Islamophobia), an issue to
which we shall return and one with all too obvious, and all too ignored, connections with the
subject matter of this essay. And consider how long it took for the principle of race equality [to]
become an accepted part of Western political culture and [to be] endorsed as a fundamental
principle of international affairs. 10 Finally, and by way of a closing illustration, if there is a strong
sense in which the members of the School of Salamanca and their heirs were, as the settlers in
America dimly perceived them to be, anti-imperialists, it is also the case that they were not so
because of their horror at the human suffering which the Spanish colonizers had inflicted upon the
colonized although that horror was real enough but because of the threat which, in their view,
all extended empires posed to what they conceived to be the true nature of the civil community.11
There may exist, therefore, a philo-Semitic tradition, as well as a Jewish and non-Jewish apologetic
tradition in praise of the Jews and of Judaism, but these do not amount to a reserve of
argumentative and political weapons available to WAS, 12 nor do such historical armament seem to
figure in it, in fact. Inversely, WAS, were it to have older roots (or a longer history), would not
inevitably testify to a positive attitude toward Jews. Clearly, anti-Semitism has always been, as
Arendt put it, an outrage to common sense, but this has not meant (nor should it necessarily
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mean) that Jews would be considered passive and innocent, universally blameless or inherently
worthy of adulation. To understand anti-Semitism one should no doubt have some understanding
of the Jewish condition (or rather, the Jewish conditions), much as one will surely gain from
considering the hatred of the Jews and its different historical forms in order to study Jewish history.
Yet, as Sartre well understood, anti-Semitism (and, by extension, the struggle against it) constitutes
a phenomenon that, comparable to racism, slavery or colonialism (and the opposition they elicit),
warrants that the lens of inquiry be turned primarily upon its subjects and agents not its targets.
We must acknowledge therefore the absence of a tradition of struggle against anti-Semitism and
confront the novelty of its recent appearance, and we must do so according to the terms and
grammar it has deployed.
Such a perspectival turn, by now somewhat banal, has little to do with the harm that oppression
and persecution are said to bring upon their perpetrators. It is undoubtedly the case that the
occupation hurts all of us (as the Israeli left has it), or that racism and colonialism frequently
indicate, or at least result in, ethical and cultural decay and corruption among those who practice it.
And this is certainly true for anti-Semitism as well. Such social and ideological phenomena might
therefore be opposed (as they in fact should), though not necessarily, nor primarily, for these selforiented (or outright self-serving) reasons. But granted that there might be these as well as other
reasons, must they be articulated or worse, interrogated for fighting that which is so clearly
blameworthy? Is it not the case that evil should be fought wherever it shows its protean face? In
the particular case of anti-Semitism, lines of argument such as these have, I think, actively
contributed to a naturalization of the struggle, making anti-Semitism all too obvious and necessary,
indeed, natural, a target. True, anti-Semitism should be implacably resisted and fought. But how
has it come to be so? At what price? With what consequences, or (hidden) benefits? And to
whom? Out of what sources and resources? And whence, finally, its resilience?
The Holocaust is obviously of great significance here but one should recall that WAS has not been
an immediate, much less a natural response to this event. 13 Minimally, the delay in the
coagulation and institutionalization of memory practices, the hesitations and debates as to proper
pedagogical consequences and their variety, the wide and singular array of legislation enacted and
its numerous temporalities, would suffice to de-naturalize the Holocaust and mark it as insufficient a
cause for anything but mechanical psychic and political responses. Moreover, and to my mind
more significantly, the manifest absence of a tradition going back to earlier times and actively
engaged in contesting and opposing anti-Semitism, as well as the nature of the current WAS, must
be explained and historicized by way of additional events and dynamics. WAS must thus be
reflected upon and treated as a relatively autonomous phenomenon, even if one to be
subsequently reframed and recontextualized. Otherwise put, WAS must be interpreted and
understood at once in its own right and from within a larger interpretive frame (that includes but is
not exhausted by the Holocaust). Minimally, it could only gain from engaging in the kind of selfreflexive interrogation that is necessary for its advancement.
But has anti-Semitism been understood? Can we already claim, after decades of intensive
studying, learning, thinking, legislating on and combating anti-Semitism that it is now better or even
sufficiently known? More importantly, has anti-Semitism been refuted? The current case against
Islam under the guise of a critique of (a) religion that, only yesterday, was considered
paradigmatic among the religions of the Semites should give us pause, and might well be kept
in mind throughout what follows. For now, recall that Hannah Arendt had already remarked that, in
the decades after the Dreyfus affair, and in spite of its apparent, if protracted, results, in spite of
the intellectual achievements and prestige of the Dreyfusards, it long remained the situation in
France that anti-Semitism in general had never fallen into the same social and intellectual
disrepute as in other European countries.14 In a similar, if more ironic and even cynical, spirit,
Horkheimer and Adorno argue (in 1944!) that there are no more anti-Semites, albeit because
anti-Semitic psychology has been replaced by mere acceptance of the whole Fascist ticket, the
slogans of aggressive big business. For them, anti-Semitism has virtually ceased to be an
independent impulse and is now a plank in the platform . . . The conviction of the anti-Semites
however artificial it may be has been absorbed in the predetermined and subjectless reflexes of
a political party.15 Anti-Semitism an unworthy, vanishing opponent? Closer to us, Jean-Franois
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Lyotard raises at least the specter of an uneasy victory over it when he writes that the destruction
of Nazism also leaves a silence after it: one does not dare think out Nazism because it has been
beaten down like a mad dog, by a police action, and not in conformity with the rules accepted by
its adversaries genres of discourse (argumentation for liberalism, contradiction for Marxism). It has
not been refuted. 16
In 1944, Horkheimer and Adorno could hardly think that anti-Semitism had actually vanished, but
they felt confident that it would (the fact that anti-Semitism tends to occur only as part of an
interchangeable program is sure hope that it will die out one day). 17 By the 1980s, Jean-Franois
Lyotard takes stock of that vector of change emphatically not a refutation and he is not so
certain. The French philosopher is clearly not regretting the beating in question, nor is he
necessarily affirming the need to engage Nazism in conversation. He is moreover unlikely to be
commenting here on the political dimension of Nazism, on the Nazi regime as a mode of
government and on its status after World War II. Furthermore, the subsequent end of anti-Fascism
as a social and political movement (its becoming equated with the all but discredited, and at any
rate vanished, Communist bloc) would suffice to indicate rightly or wrongly that the refutation
here evoked is no longer needed.18 But be that as it may, Lyotards recurring concerns regarding
the persecution and the forgetting of the Jews, as well as the enduring battles currently waged
against anti-Semitism, more forcefully and equally ominously suggest that it is, in fact, the
elements of anti-Semitism (in Horkheimer and Adornos phrase) that have survived and antiSemitism itself that has escaped refutation. The silence that Nazism leaves after it, the silence or
absence of a tradition fighting against anti-Semitism to which WAS could relate today, and finally,
the nearly complete lack of public self-reflection on the part of the thinkers, writers, militants and
leaders of WAS (What are we doing? What does it mean? How to explain our achievements and/or
successes? Are we, in fact, effective? If not, why not? What role do we play in relation to other
social and political struggles?), the possibility, in short, that anti-Semitism was not refuted but only
beaten down like a mad dog these are the reasons why it has become imperative today at
least to attempt to explain the political significance of the anti-anti-Semitism movement. 19 An
additional purpose of this essay is therefore to lay down some of the premises and conditions that
could make such an explanation and evaluation possible.
I take my first point of departure, then, not only in the recognition of the fact of the struggle against
anti-Semitism and in its scale (if not necessarily in its concerted or organized dimension, which
may well be lacking), but also in the near complete absence (to the best of my knowledge, at
least) of reflective and indeed concerted gestures on the part of those of us who struggle against
anti-Semitism. We have neither history nor account of the movement we constitute, no description
of our unity and/or differences, no sense of our struggles relation to, say, Islam and to
Islamophobia (this in spite of the accumulated work of Edward Said and his readers; in spite of the
historical ground and countless cultural markers pointing to a relatedness, and first and foremost to
Semites as both Arabs and Jews, both Muslims and Jews). 20 Over against the abolitionists or
todays human rights activists, we are unknown to ourselves; we are soldiers of a peculiar army
that does not think itself, participants in a war that may know its enemies (or think it does) but
hardly its allies.
My second point of departure, implicit in the first but distinct from it, is that WAS must be treated
as a social and political movement, one that is related and in fact comparable (for obvious reasons
having to do with the mimetic dynamism at work in adversarial relations) to that which it has
historically opposed. As a movement that vocally proclaims its affinity with, its centrality in, the
spread of democracy and freedom, WAS must be presented as, in fact it is (to borrow Arendts
formulation on anti-Semitism), an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology
must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority. And if WAS thus testifies to an
ideology (taken in the most positive sense of the term, in this context), it remains nonetheless the
case that this ideology has to persuade and mobilize people. As Arendt explains, moreover, it
cannot choose its targets arbitrarily (Arendt, OT, 6-7). Conducting her inquiry into the intricacies of
such an ideology and its mode of functioning, Arendt underscores the historical effort that the work
demands. She likens her own task and perspective to those of the historian (An ideology which
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has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victims arbitrarily. In other words, if a
patent forgery like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is believed by so many people that it can
become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a
forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical fact
of the matter: that the forgery is being believed [OT, 7]). Is anti-Zionism, for example, identical
with anti-Semitism? To this ever recurring question Arendt would answer, I think, that the identity
or difference between the two matters less than the discursive contribution (and accumulation)
made by both positions or oppositions with regards to the larger movement that WAS has
become. To ask whether anti-Zionism is or is not anti-Semitism, in other words, is to leave
unattended the question of what anti-Semitism itself is or has become; what it is believed to be;
on what premises does it function across a wide social and political field and, more importantly,
how it is made to function and operate as a non-arbitrary adversary in relation to a tradition
that may have come about or not. Arendt enables us to ask these important questions. What she
does, what she enables and enjoins us to do today, could thus accurately be described as
stretching across the borders of political sociology and cultural psychology where political cultures
shape the fate the birth, growth, decline, death and after-life of traditions.21
Anatomy of a Movement
Only in the nationalist imagination, and not in real social history, writes Mahmood Mamdani, can
movements emerge full-blown as the Greek goddess Athena is supposed to have done from the
head of Zeus. Mamdani pursues this argument and explains that
That is why the question we need to ask when assessing the democratic content of a movement is
not just one concerning its geographical sweep, but also one that underlines the social character of
its demands: Do they tend toward realizing equality or crystallizing privilege? Are they
generalizable to other ethnic groups or can they be realized only at the expense of others? In other
words, when do they signify a struggle for rights and when a demand for privilege? 22
Determining the geographical sweep as well as the social character, accounting for the political
significance, of anti-Semitism as a mass political movement was precisely what Hannah Arendt
had proposed to do. Key to her analysis was an understanding that anti-Semitic movements and
parties had elaborated a consistently supranational approach to politics (OT, 3). At the same
time, she called for a recognition of the moment when social discrimination changed into political
argument, the dynamic whereby each class of society which came into conflict with the state as
such became anti-Semitic because the only social group which seemed to represent the state
were the Jews (25). Regardless of the exhaustiveness or even the level of accuracy of her
analysis, Arendts approach imparts an essential understanding of two key elements of WAS. First,
like anti-Semitism, WAS is supranational. That is to say that, to use a less old-fashioned word, it
is global. It engages international law and global institutions, non-governmental organizations, as
well as museums and memorials; schools, universities and research centers, as well as literature
and film, media and entertainment, world-famous personalities, educational material and more. Its
geographical sweep is, simply, the entire world. Second, WAS is a political and social movement
that must be accounted for politically (much like modern anti-Semitism, which often had political
rather than economic causes [OT, 28]) although the economic dimension of WAS does not lack all
relevance: the sources of its means and funding, as well as the social stratification to which it
testifies, interrogates or maintains, or simply preserves and reproduces; the kinds of individuals,
specific classes and groups who engage in militant or sporadic activism on its behalf; the circles of
discussion and action; the origin and location of those who intervene as its public representatives or
intellectuals; the kinds of platforms it has gained in the global public sphere; the literary and
journalistic dissemination of its concerns in newspapers, magazines, professional journals, books
and other publications; the kinds of audiences it reaches or mobilizes, and so forth. All these and
more certainly testify to the economic significance of WAS, as well as to its political significance.
Turning our attention to these elements will, moreover, illuminate whether WAS tends toward
realizing equality or toward crystallizing privilege, as Mamdani asks. Does WAS partake of, is it
generalizable to, other ethnic groups or can it be realized only at the expense of others? Finally,
when does WAS signify a struggle for rights and when a demand for privilege?
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It is worth repeating, I think, that such an inquiry, even at a most preliminary or rudimentary level,
has yet to be initiated or conducted. To the best of my knowledge, no perspective has been offered
on the struggle against anti-Semitism as collective action; none that would explain what it is that
makes an individual (much less a state) into an opponent of anti-Semitism. There is, as it were, no
grammar of a discourse, much less a portrait, of the anti-anti-Semite. 23 Nor is there a
description or an account of WAS in its social and institutional, cultural and political sweep, or of its
rate of success (including, of course, a measure of its failures).24 Yet we can all agree that, in this
urgent case as well, a perspective that sees a social movement as a simple historical residue or
as the unmediated outcome of a policy decision is incapable of explaining it, for it necessarily ends
up denying the movement any social history. 25
It seems reasonable to surmise that WAS is part of a lengthy series of political elements and
factors that engage popular, as well as international and geopolitical, issues (Zionism and the
existence of the State of Israel being, I would argue, only one salient case in point). WAS certainly
functions as an international movement (not an organization) with its own attributes and particulars.
Proximate with, if not necessarily analogous to, the case of anti-Semitism in Arendts analysis, this
international dimension is essential to contend with even if it does not exhaust the nature of the
phenomenon. 26 WAS is a movement that has a center (or more precisely, centers) and a
periphery. It operates locally, of course, fighting on distinct battlegrounds that are distributed
unevenly in the social cartography, and on the surface of the globe as well. It is conducted as a
program of increased vigilance and discourse which involves heads of states, political and cultural
figures, institutions and media, actors, books, journals and countless other sites. It is at work in
legislative assemblies and in international courts (witness the often redundant explosion of
legislative activity in France, the U.K., and the U.S., often with an international dimension); 27 in
crowded museums and in Hollywood studios (from Shoah and countless other documentaries to
Spielbergs feature films and the scrutinization of Mel Gibsons life and works,28 and to the
adaptations and showings of Shakespeares Merchant of Venice) and on the streets of New York
(Anti-Semitism is Anti-Me was the motto of an Anti-Defamation League 2004 campaign
disseminated throughout the city) or the walls of Paris (contested counts of anti-Semitic acts,
including a number of embarrassing fabrications; intense and unified emotion and repeated public
condemnations; and a 2004 sensitization campaign by the Jewish Students Organization (UEJF)
with the words sale juif [dirty Jew] sprayed over a representation of Jesus-Christ and other
iconic figures), in London and Berlin (with the intensified pursuit of memorialization, or the
controversy over Gnther Grasss past and merit) as well as in Buenos Aires and Caracas, and
even in Lincoln and Lynchburg. Moreover, we are told that a comparable, if highly distinct, set of
WAS battles are being fought (or in need of being fought) in Cairo, Beirut and Teheran, Jerusalem
and Baghdad, in truth from Casablanca to Kuala Lumpur via Istanbul and Mumbai. But these
battles, wherever they are conducted, are also observed or waged from a paradoxical center. In yet
another instance of historical irony (if that is what this is), it is precisely where anti-Semitism has
evolved, where it has historically extended most of its political, psychological and, ultimately,
material and physical damage; there where it has claimed to fight for the defense and value of the
civilization from which it grew and in whose name it rose, that WAS is today being fought most
vocally and adamantly. More generally, it is the very site of a culture (or cultures) that has
developed and subsequently taught to and inflicted upon the world new ideologies of hatred and
new techniques of repression, that is now pursuing a new pedagogical mission, with anti-Semitism
at the top of its list of intolerable offenses.29 The abrupt turn-around and transformation that seems
to have occurred in the Western centers of WAS is made all the more puzzling when seen in the
light of Lyotards comments quoted earlier. For the West has quite suddenly become the World
Headquarters of WAS, the latter being itself an unprecedented phenomenon. 30 The historical record
is quite explicit and by all means well known if not quite attended to. No protracted struggle, no
force of persuasion or sudden flash of understanding has brought anti- Semiti sm to its abrupt (and,
if one is to trust current reports, ephemeral) end. Rather, the violent confrontation with the
extremities and horrors of its consequences on its own territory made anti-Semitism a kind of
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taboo. The sudden seizure o f the European consciousness (and the intervention of the allied
armies) is what had beaten anti-Semitism down like a dog. But it did not constitute its refutation
(nor did it always contain the eruption of symptoms). And if satisfactory explanations are still
lacking as to what could have brought about the excess of murderous violence wrought by the
Nazi state, if anti-Semitism remains an enigma (albeit hardly for lack of explanations of the most
diverse kinds), the general conversion undergone by the same countries and states and
populations the radical shift of policies and ideologies that took place and moved individuals and
institutions from widespread anti-Semitism to the struggle against it, is hardly less puzzling
(consider that the abolition of slavery in the United States did not put an end sudden or
otherwise to the racial theories and numerous accompanying practices that were supporting and
surround it). Clearly, this is historically where the language of anti-Semitism was exclusively
spoken and also where it is no longer possible, nor even tolerable but what is the nature of this
impossibility and of the transformation underlying it? Was this a metamorphosis? A temporary
reform? A distinct and novel management of populations and issues? A change in the allocation of
social energies and knowledge/power practices? For those of us concerned with and fighting
against anti-Semitism, there are as of yet no answers available to these questions. Hence, the
importance of considering WAS within a larger context, of reframing what qualifies as the unit and
limits of its analyses and operations.
I have mentioned slavery as a plausible comparative term, but let me suggest, at this juncture that
Donna Haraway proposes just this kind of reframing when she addresses another, parallel shift in
Western prejudices. What Haraway thereby makes palpable is the kind of tortured logic and
implausible trajectories our inquiry must follow (and the historical turns to which it must attend).
Thus she points out that European culture for centuries questioned the humanity of peoples of
color and assimilated them to the monkeys and apes in jokes, medicine, religious art, sexual
beliefs and zoology.31 With decolonization, that is, with the re-entry of the West into Africa at the
moment of decolonization, man (which is to say, western, scientific, European, and EuroAmerican generic man) came to regret his alienation from nature, his having been thrown out of
the garden by decolonization and perhaps off the planet by its destruction in ecological devastation
and nuclear holocaust. It is at this particular and abrupt historical juncture, Haraway explains, that
the discourses of exterminism and extinction in space and the jungle intervene, that the
protection of the environment and of endangered species takes root. 32 Today, for the monkey to
exist [i.e., as a creature in need of defense and protection GA], natural variation had to have an
enforceable social and technical status of raw material. Historically, this status has depended on
the social relations of extractive colonialism and neo-colonialism. 33 The study and protection of
primates (a war on poachers, as it were, and on the nineteenth-century legacy of the war on
Africa conducted along clear lines of continuity and still without much regard for its human, local
or global, consequences) did not mean that the ruling elites seriously considered gorilla, lemur,
and baboon behavior of crucial national importance, nor was it the result of a ground swell of
democratic demand to know how gorilla families stay together or the unmediated demand that they
be protected.34 Still, it did become a global movement, a multifarious network of concerns
projected and operative upon particular regions and populations. The parallels, with all due
reservations, should be clear as this is where primatology recasts Orientalism (without canceling it),
and where the Third World becomes responsible for the preservation of that which was and
continues to be destroyed by Europe and the rest of the First World: Primatology is a First World
survival literature in the conditions of twentieth-century global history. 35 Departing from Haraways
insights, and with a raised awareness with regards to similarities and differences, some questions
may be asked of WAS in equally direct ways: Is it after all the case that the anti-anti-Semitic West
is no longer anti-Semitic? Is its concern with the anti-Semitism of others the sign of a change of
heart or a change of policy? What continuities, if any, can be found between the history of antiSemitism and the current struggle against it?
I have already asserted that, like anti-Semitism (to which it has had to adapt itself), WAS must be
considered in its international dimensions. I have also tried to indicate, if cursorily, its local mode
of functioning, the way in which, like anti-Semitism and other forms of political trends (exclusionary
or not), it must be recognized as a social and political movement involving particular groups and
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classes, organizations and individuals. In the remainder of this essay, I want to pursue this inquiry
by pointing to elements of WAS that relate to these political, glocal, dimensions and to the sense
that political movements are participants or instruments in wider power dynamics. Wittingly or not,
they can become they are part of an array of symbolic investments, ruling practices, players in
social struggles, or actors in international politics. Consider, as Arendt does, that anti-Semitic
parties, when they appeared in the nineteenth century, distinguished themselves by their original
claim that they were not a party among parties but a party above all parties (OT, 38). They not
only positioned themselves above the state at a time when the unifying power of the latter was
declining, seeking in fact to become representative of the whole nation, . . . to substitute
themselves for the state, all the while showing themselves chiefly concerned with foreign affairs
(ibid.). Their relation to the state put them in a unique position vis--vis imperialism, developing
close affinities and colluding with it in more than one way, beginning with their common
supranational organization (39). When it came to international issues, in other words, anti-Semites
and imperialists seem to be the only ones who knew the answers to world problems (41). The
breadth of horizon, mode of governance, the sharing of technologies of rule, as well as certain
political ideals common to a wide variety of political movements, benevolent or not is what a
political sociology of WAS would have to interrogate and analyze. I propose to make a small step
in this direction by pointing to two elements in the political significance of WAS as an international
mass-movement charged with much psychic and symbolic investment. First is the centrality of the
survivor in it, a figure whose political dimension was evoked and elaborated upon most eloquently
by Elias Canetti when he asserted that the moment of survival is the moment of power. 36 This
will enable us to go on and explore the complex and even contradictory relation between WAS and
the Holocaust and the tradition (or lack thereof) out of which they grow in scholarly and
philosophical discussions, which inform the struggle against anti-Semitism and inevitably partake of
WAS. Second, and by way of a conclusion, I want to consider WAS within the context of an
ancient and well-known phenomenon, the singularly modern emergence (or resurgence) of which
finds its origins in the colonial period but reached some of its most extreme manifestations in the
postcolonial one. This phenomenon is known by various names, from communalism in the Indian
subcontinent to sectarianism in the Middle East, tribalism in Africa and, more recently,
communautarisme in France. Yet, the light shed on these movements (for this is, once again,
what is at stake here, connected and disconnected social and political movements) by historians
and social scientists suggests that their political significance, indeed, their political existence,
manifest, or more precisely proceed from, specific modes of rule and governance. This perspective,
if correct, should enable a different framing of these movements taken as a whole (that is, once
again, in a supranational perspective) as well as a different framing of WAS. As I offer the outline
of this new frame, the question that will inform my provisional conclusions concerns, therefore, the
place occupied by WAS in national and international modes of governance.
Survival of the Saddest
Crucial to an understanding of WAS and its social and political dimensions is obviously the
immense fact of persecution, as well as the accompanying emotions and feelings the
overwhelming sadness and loss, the anger and the condemnation that understandably
accompany it, lingering long after the devastation it caused has passed. This is a collective
phenomenon, a matter of collective psychology as well as of political sociology of the kind Elias
Canetti has studied in a manner uniquely pertinent for our inquiry. Adding essential elements to our
comprehension of social and political movements, and thereby of the nature and genealogy of
WAS, Canetti argues, in fact, that there is an essential link between masses or crowds, between
the inner life of a crowd, and the feeling of being persecuted I have just evoked (CP, 22).
Directly related to that feeling and its management are different kinds of crowds and social entities
as well as, not surprisingly, religions (recall the hopes and fears said to define religions, as Hume
had it). The novelty of Canettis contribution lies in his linking religion to the kind of collective
phenomena that crowds social and political, as well as psychical and cultural movements
constitute. More precisely, Canetti conceives of certain (not all) religions as managing the energy
and instability of crowds. These are some of the prominent world religions and they have
succeeded in holding their crowds in the most diverse circumstances. They have engaged, in
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other words, in crowd control and in population management. Strongest among these religions,
most endowed, that is, with the staying power of resistance and resilience, are those that harness
the power of loss and lament, that manage to gather their members into packs, and most
particularly into lamenting packs (144). In the social activity of lament, those feelings of
persecution typical of crowds are further strengthened as individual members are increasingly
bound to each other, collectively expiating their guilt (someone else is dying, if often by the crowds
own killing) through mournful identification with the one who dies. They attach themselves to one
who will die for them and, in lamenting him, they feel themselves as persecuted. Whatever they
have done, however they have raged, for this moment they are aligned with suffering (145). What
is most peculiar about this complex internal dynamic is that it includes a radical turn and a sudden
change of side. Members of the pack and of a religion of lament ritually undergo a
transformation, a conversion, as it were, from persecutor to persecuted, from killer to victim. They
see themselves as victims of their own offense, and thereby lament a loss of literally their own.
Where they previously exercised violence and indeed murder, they now suddenly proceed to mourn
themselves as victims of that very violence. Canetti concludes this section of his rapidly narrowing
and pointed analysis (which moves from crowd to pack, and from religions, in the plural, to one
singular religion) with the following statement: the most important of all the religions of lament is
Christianity (ibid.). This is not to say that Christianity is the only religion of lament, of course. Nor
that it is the only religion that manages (or aggrandizes) the crowd and its feelings of persecution.
There are, according to Canetti, other religions that institutionalize and organize the metamorphosis
of group identity within them, that perform within themselves that most curious and sudden change
of side from persecutor to persecuted. Christianity is, however, the most important among such
religions. 37 What does this importance consist of? Later on, Canetti will account for it by attending
to the massive, global reach of Christianity, but also by relating the heightened feeling of
persecution that expresses itself in the sudden transformation just described (when killers become
victims, as i t were ) , as well as in the sense of superiority, indeed, of triumph that opera tes in it
as well. Christianity, one could say without forcing Canettis description, is not only a religion of
lament, it is the religion of the triumph of lament, an unexpected version of the triumph of the
spirit of the persecuted survivor.
As could be expected, fear and hope continue to play a central role in this history of collective
psychology, but not (as Mamdani makes clear in a different, if related context) in a consistent, ahistorical way. Fear in particular is at work, not as a relatively timeless cultural reflex but as a
much more time-bound response to a rapidly shifting political and social context.38 There would be
events, certain configurations of events that might give rise to such emotions. To be sure,
Horkheimer and Adorno had already made clear that these repressed mimesis, not projective
behavior as such, but the absence from it of reflection, the dazzling power of false immediacy,
paranoiac forms of consciousness, and a delusion of persecution that accepts the persecution to
which domination must necessarily lead are all elements of anti-Semitism. 39 More importantly
(and this is my argument in the wake of Canetti), there is the unsettling possibility that these also
make up, as if by sudden conversion, the very elements of the struggle against anti-Semitism.
If WAS is a social and political movement, and a successful one at that, it would be because it
partakes of an understanding of politics in which we have all come to share. It is this
understanding, this collective practice, that Canetti illuminates. WAS may not fully determine our
understanding of politics, but it is surely determined by it and by the figures it invokes or deploys.
In this context, it might be important to consider the argument made by Lee Edelman on the role of
such figures and their temporal dimension. For Edelman, we seem unable to conceive of politics
without a fantasy of the future. Key to this inability is a logic (the absolute logic of reproduction,
as Edelman calls it) sustained by the figure of the child, without whom we cannot conceive of the
future or of politics. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full
rights to its future share in the nations good.40 From the rebellion of the sons against the fathers
and, more generally, from the antagonistic relations to dead ancestors to the significance of a
narrative of conception that figures the spermatozoa as survivor of a hecatomb (all the
spermatozoa except one perish), 41 the political figure that Canetti describes silently resonates with
Edelmans, for it is fundamentally linked to reproduction and to its interruption, its result: the child.
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Edelmans child, in other words, is Canettis survivor. At once prop and ideal, site of all mans
designs on immortality, embodiment of a superiority that promises or embodies the survival of the
fittest (Fortunate and favoured, the survivor stands in the midst of the fallen. For him there is one
tremendous fact: while countless others have died, many of them his comrades, he is still alive), 42
the survivor as child the child as survivor is thus the end of all genealogies, the last of the
invulnerable heroes (the fathers) as well as the model of all despotic rulers (hence, the intensest
feeling for power is that found in a ruler who wants no son [CP, 245]). He is at once the political
paradigm and its most extreme instantiation, within and without the realm of the human. Indeed,
like Canetti, Edelman sees in the function of this crucial and widespread figure a religious
dimension that extends over and beyond the human. For him, the child is the prop of the secular
theology on which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of
our collective narratives and our collective narratives of meanings. 43 Freudian echoes of a son
religion notwithstanding (in Moses and Monotheism), it is clear that what Canetti and Edelman
diagnose continues to have a religious character, which, however particular it may have been in
the past, has now acquired a quasi-universal, indeed, global dimension. No matter how conflicting
and conflicted the visions of politics we uphold, these all share as their presupposition that the
body politic must survive. 44 The ideal of survival, the survivor and the child as figures, models and
ideals that confirm and transcend the bounds of the community, are thus revealed as coextensive.
Together they are one model. At once political and individual model, hero and victim, the survivor
is the child and the child is the survivor. He is the novel figure, if not the ground, of modern
politics. 45
It may be surprising (and to my knowledge, it is at any rate unique) that, writing in the late 1950s,
at a time in which World War II stories of surviving children and adolescents were becoming
widespread (Elie Wiesel in France and Ka-tzetnik in Israel are examples that may come to mind),
Canetti would have offered such a negative picture of the survivor, an apocalyptic conception he
maintains to the very end, as the culmination of his reflections on masses and power (the
survivor is mankinds worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom. Is it possible for us to escape him,
even now at this last moment? [468]). To be fair, Canetti does not direct his argument at
Holocaust survivors in particular, although the paradigmatic value he grants the very figure of the
survivor certainly seems to resonate with the iconic status then reached by Holocaust survivors in
the political culture. I suppose, moreover, that one may feel somewhat inclined to refrain from
endorsing Canettis evaluation even while keeping in mind that he is not speaking of the survivor
per se (as if survivors themselves were to blame for the cultural and political response they have
elicited; as if Primo Levi had offered the survivor rather than the Muselmann about whom I will
have more to say below as an image for our time). But what seems harder to deny or at least
ignore is the pertinence of his argument as the basis for a reflection that would concern itself with
the prominence and centrality of the figure of the survivor in current politics and culture (a centrality
and a popularity that ultimately shines, it must be acknowledged, an important but somehow
banalizing light on its role in WAS). Clearly, it is in wider circles that the survivor has been glorified
as a hero and obeyed as a ruler (ibid.). 46 It is also a general and extensive fact today that the
survivor is himself afraid. He has always been afraid but with his vast new potentialities his fear
has grown too, until it is almost unendurable. . . . Whether or not he is actually in danger from
enemies, he always feels himself menaced (469). The entirety of the surviving condition the
inhuman condition, Canetti would perhaps say echoing Arendt is a recent development, and one
that is contemporaneous with the sudden shifts and conversions I have described earlier, whereby
the sites of anti-Semitisms worst excess (and the site of enduring racial fears poorly disguised
as demographic concerns and of an entire culture of fear) have now become the radiating
centers of WAS and of an old-new kind of world politics. 47 There are the surviving centers of the
greatest among the religions of lament, whose legacy, writes Canetti, is greater than might be
supposed (467).
There is no-one who suffers persecution, for whatever reason, who does not in part of his mind
see himself as Christ. So Canetti pursues his argument placing Christianity and the Christian
imaginary at the center of a reflection on the survivor. And indeed, the dissemination of Christ as
paradigm has grown in unprecedented ways since the advent of colonialism and of ever more
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modern technologies of missionizing. Christs image (literally so, at times) has undoubtedly
become part of the consciousness of mankind. He is the dying man and the man who ought not to
die. Through him, the value of the individual has become not less, but more. In him, is mans
desire for indestructibility justified. Each feels himself a worthy object of lament; each is stubbornly
convinced that he ought not to die. Here the legacy of Christianity . . . is inexhaustible (467).
Christian theologians have long made clear that Auschwitz was, for them, a new figuration of the
Passion, and critics have remarked on the Christological role played by the Jews in Christian
responses to the Holocaust. 48 But the important or at least central dimension within which this
widespread victimology and other aspects of WAS must be understood, as the growing political and
social moment it has become, is not primarily anti-Semitism (or its earlier form of Gentile Christian
anti-Judaism), which always played an internal role anyway, even and perhaps especially in the
absence of Jews. What is at stake rather is the cult of the survivor in the dominant religion of
lament through its historical transformations.
Amos Funkenstein is obviously correct when he writes that to argue that only a Christian world
could have led to a genocide is, to say the least, hypocritical.49 But given that the Christian world
did lead to and host one particular, and perhaps the most brutal, genocidal endeavor, given that it
continues to adhere (ever in novel and changing forms) to political models that echo or reproduce
earlier conceptions, that remain, in fact, theologico-political models; given that the western
Christian world has proceeded to embrace, indeed, initiate and foster, disseminate and wage WAS,
it seems essential to understand the earlier (and enduring) forms taken by parallel or comparable
types of political practice, as well as the precedents it has and which it has altered to this day. In
this specific context, more space would obviously be needed to elaborate on the function of the
conceptual opposition between image and figure, between example and exception, and the role it
plays. Is the particular history of anti-Semitism an example (of, say, universal hatred) or an
exception? Does the Holocaust constitute a paradigm according to which one could establish or
dismiss measures of comparability? Conversely, should these two phenomena (and the distinction
or lack thereof between them) be viewed as exemplary? And if so, of what? Were one to
argue that there are (or could be) comparable phenomena in other cultures or in other periods, the
burden thereby created toward an argument would be on providing a ground for comparability (rule
and example? Rule and exception? Equivalent examples?). As Giorgio Agamben has compellingly
argued, one may have to conceive otherwise of comparison itself for even if the exception is
situated in a symmetrical position with respect to the example, it is nonetheless the case that the
latter forms a system with the former. 50 Arguing in terms of historical comparison, Funkensteins
position is that modern anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are not instances of the ancient conflict
between Christianity and Judaism. On the other hand, in tracing the history of the exemplary
places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian
states of the twentieth century, Agamben locates himself at the almost precise opposite.51 I write
almost because, over against a number of thinkers and scholars, Funkenstein is nonetheless
adamant about not treating the Holocaust as an absolute exception. While Agamben seeks to
maintain, if also to generalize, the exception as rule. Funkenstein and Agamben are themselves
exemplary, as it were, in the clarity they bring to the issues, and in the probity with which they
engage the complexities of the matter at hand. Neither of them is arguing that the Holocaust is not
unique. It is. But the tension between example and exception (and their respective reference to the
universal and to the rule) has everything to do with history, as both interpretation and
transformation of the world. More important, therefore, and more striking, is the fact that the two
scholars are agreeing on what not to compare, on what the Holocaust and its conditions of
possibility do not refer or relate to. Phrased in a more general way that transcends their particular
arguments, their agreement consists in the following: whether exemplary or exceptional, modern
anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are not to be understood with reference to Christianity (by which
is meant, of course, Western Christendom and the history of its relation to Jews and Judaism). We
have begun to see how this is the case for Funkenstein, who is quite explicit on the subject. I will
therefore turn briefly to Agamben in order to substantiate my claim for what the two scholars
share. But before I do so let me quickly mention that the study of the historical and contemporary
relations between Nazism and Christianity (not just th e Na zis and the Catholic Church) has
already made many advances, even i f these are still ongoing.52
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Recall that what remains at stake here is the paradigmatic nature of the survivor for an
understanding of WAS, and most particularly, of the Holocaust survivor. To acknowledge this
paradigm is hardly to make a contentious claim, of course, and Agambens work including his
contribution to having made manifest the visible invisibility of that exemplary example, as it were,
that are the Muslims and its impact in the public, or at least academic, sphere would certainly
confirm it. 53 One could further argue, after Agamben, that if the camp is the nomos of modern
politics, then the survivor is its main, if not its only, inhabitant. He is the subject of modern politics.
He is therefore equally paradigmatic. This is why in his rigorous focus on the testimonies of
survivors, Agamben can nonetheless claim that these make manifest a universal, philosophical
problem, namely, that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna. This is why he can
write that the aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a noncoincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension.54 Testimony and
survival are fundamentally linked, of course, since in the camp, one of the reasons that can drive
a prisoner to survive is the idea of becoming a witness (15). Finally, it is also the case that Primo
Levi is a perfect example of the witness (16). But note that Levi is only one example (among
potential or actual others, therefore). Yet he is an example of the witness as well as of the survivor.
Throughout, Agamben will in fact refer to the witness and to the survivor as equivalent terms, and
so for obvious and justifiable reasons.
There comes a moment, however, when the equivalence breaks down. Yet, this moment does not
constitute the end of the paradigm but rather its culmination. Agamben never denies nor qualifies
the claim that the survivor is the paradigmatic witness. On the contrary, he argues that the survivor
gives us access to a further, even more exemplary, instance of the witness. Doing so, Agamben
scrupulously follows Levi, of course, who himself named the Muslims in his famous description of
the drowned or the submerged. Agamben quotes Levi as the latter insists on the distinction
(rather than equivalence) between survivor and witness in order to explain that we, the survivors,
are not the true witnesses. Those who are, that is, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned
to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete
witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance.55 For Agamben, what is
thereby confirmed is the exception as rule, or, in other words, the exception as paradigm. That is
why Agamben writes that Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception
coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of daily
life.(49)
If the witness the Muslim is the paradigm of the survivor, it is because the survivor is the
exemplary figure of the camp, while the camp is itself the paradigm of modern politics. This
concise, and essential, argument, which Agamben had made earlier, engages our understanding of
WAS if only because of the massive and enduring, if still largely anacknowledged, significance of
the ferocious irony (in Agambens own phrase) that brings together, in Auschwitz and elsewhere,
Jews and Muslims. I have already presented my own argument on this issue and do not want to
burden this essay with a rehearsal of it, however brief.56 The rest of this paper, moreover, will
continue to explore additional links between Jews and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, and their joined
pertinence toward an understanding of WAS, together with the larger, distributive political frame
within which the latter operates. By way of a conclusion for this section, I want instead to return to
the history of politics traced by Agamben and note the iterative status of a configuration that places
the survivor at the center of politics (Canetti, Agamben) as well as the relevance (or irrelevance, as
the case may be) of Christianity as the name and form of politics, of what we call the Western
political tradition (Canetti, Agamben, Funkenstein). Let me immediately underscore that when
pursuing the particular task of tracing the history or the metaphysics of Western politics,
Agamben has very little to say about Christianity, and although he dedicates an intensely
committed volume to Saint Paul, it is unclear to me (and at any rate, textually invisible) what the
connection might be between Christianity assuming, of course, that this is what Paul (that is,
Agambens Paul) might stand for and Western politics. The absence of Christianity from
Agambens sustained argument in Homo Sacer (an argument for which the Muslim provides, as I
have said, the culmination), that absence may never be as clear as it becomes at the moment
when, after having insisted that the word sacer in homo sacer is not to be understood as
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belonging to the sphere of religion (we will try to interpret sacratio as an autonomous figure, and
we will ask if this figure may allow us to uncover an originary political structure that is located in a
zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical), 57 after having
argued that scholars who resolutely located the link between the two bodies of the king in the
Christian, indeed, Christological tradition, had missed the Roman link (to the origins of homo
sacer), Agamben writes the following:
If the symmetry we have tried to illustrate between the body of the sovereign and that of homo
sacer is correct, then we ought to be able to find analogies and correspondences in the juridicopolitical status of these two apparently distant bodies. (102)
One such analogy or correspondence, indeed, one example of the link between the sovereign body
and the abandoned, abjected body may come to mind, as it has to the mind of countless medieval
writers, jurists and others, and later to that of countless medievalists (some of whom are quoted by
Agamben). But that peculiar figure of sovereignty and abjection, of example and exception, that
Christ is does not appear to have come to Agambens mind. Theology, let alone, religion, much
less Christianity none of these come to mind (prompted perhaps, or rather un-prompted by a
focus on the juridico-political, rather than on the theologico-juridico-political). It is as if the entire
understanding of political theology, upon which Agambens sources rely (Schmitt and Benjamin,
and Kantorowicz as well) was no longer relevant, as if Christianity was exclusively a theological,
not a political let alone a bio-political tradition. Agamben makes this ever more evident when
he announces the indubitable significance of his own insight for an understanding of modern
politics and of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. For him but we have seen that he is
not at all alone (he may, in fact, be exemplary) the dimension in which the extermination took
place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics (114). From Roman law to Hobbes (directly so) and
all the way to the Nazis, the history of Western politics has little to do with religion, and even less,
it seems, with one religion one bio-theologico-political tradition in particular (example?
Exception?), namely, Christianity. This would be to suggest that the very religion the very political
religion whose Western history and chapters can be traced as the history of anti-Semitism, in its
different forms, bears no relation (no contingent relation, nor a necessary one) to the event that
made most horribly manifest the very structure of modern politics, and of Western politics as
such. 58 Now, if WAS is a political movement, as I have been arguing, and if, true to its sources in
the religion of lament, the survivor is its paradigmatic figure; if the complete witness to the
extermination of the Jews at the heart of Christian Europe was called exceptionally or
paradigmatically Muslim, it would seem that Canettis insight into Western Christendom is either
invalid or, if it has yet to be invalidated, in fact, that it remains to be contended with. Only by
deciding upon this alternative, will we give ourselves the means to reach an understanding of WAS
and of the tradition (or lack thereof) in which it finds its source and strength. Clearly though, we
need to pursue the inquiry yet further.
Unite and Rule? The Politics of WAS
It is a notorious tactic of political power to deny a distinct unity to populations it seeks to govern, to
treat them as contingent and indeterminate. The strategy of disaggregating subject populations in
order better to administer them does not require a pure and settled past all it requires is a
manipulable, re-creatable present.
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion
Politics, as we have been considering it, is a tradition (a diversity of traditions) of social movements
that deploys, for overdetermined reasons, specific historical and political, as well as religious,
figures. It is also a tradition of governance, a way to rule, manage or treat groups of people,
masses of them, on a local and international stage. And politics is also war, of course, by other and
not so other means. According to legal scholar Karl-Heinz Ziegler, it was Abu Hanifa, a Muslim
thinker and founder of one of the major Islamic schools of juridical interpretation, who first forbade
the killing of women, children, the elderly, the sick, monks, and other noncombatants. He also
condemned rape and the killing of captives. Commenting on the effects of his recommendations
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on the history of law, and more importantly, on the history of war, it is again Sven Lindqvist who
points out that the attempt has yet to succeed to make war more humane by setting forth rules
that were not accepted in Europe until several centuries later. 59 Indeed, it seems fair to say that,
to this day, such rules are still not accepted, or in any case not practiced, when colored people
[are] involved (ibid.). It is as if the struggle for the rights of the oppressed had an extended
tradition but one that was, if not absent (as is the case with WAS), surely ineffective. Like any
other struggle, it had to contend with, and adapt itself to, evolving modes of rules, management of
populations, and technologies of power many of which rendered possible the most atrocious acts of
war and genocide in human history, culminating with the Holocaust. This is why I want to turn to
that other side of social and political movements the government and management of populations
in order to demonstrate its relevance for the struggle that is WAS today.
Until World War II, the bomb served as a major instrument in these technologies of rule and
management. The bomb has served as one of the main tools of the legal and practical
differentiation between white Europeans (and Euro-Americans) and the rest of the colored people
world. More specifically, as Lindqvist painstakingly documents, it was not just any bomb but its
evolved, modern version, the bomb dropped from airplanes. Airplanes and bombs were examples
of progress in military technology. And technology was civilization . . . Bombs were a means of
civilization (34). The first bomb the first civilizing bomb ever dropped from an airplane
exploded on November 1, 1911. It came from an Italian machine flying over North Africa. Its
geographical target was an oasis near Tripoli. Its human targets were Arabs. By 1924, by the time
of the bombing of the town of Chechaouen, bombing natives was considered quite natural. The
Italians did it in Libya, the French did it in Morocco, and the British did it throughout the Middle
East, in India, and East Africa, while the South Africans did it in Southwest Africa (74). By 1939,
Hitler had embraced and enhanced this tradition, deciding that Poland shall be treated as a
colony. . . . In short: the ruthless expansionist policies carried out by Italy in Ethiopia and Libya,
Spain in Morocco, the United States in the Philippines, and the Western European democracies of
Belgium, Holland, France and England throughout Asia and Africa for more than 100 years were
now brought home to Europe by Hitler and applied in an even more brutal form to the Poles (83).
Such colonial policies and practices, along with improved technological and legal means, the
accumulation of decades of race science and eugenics, made the Nazi genocide of Jews, Sinti
and Roma possible, along with the massive incarcerating and killing of communists and
homosexuals, and the incendiary bombing of almost every major city in Europe (if not only there)
by both German and Allied planes and rockets. The technology of the civilizing mission had come
home to roost. Aim Csaire speaks of this movement as of a terrific boomerang effect inflicted
on the European bourgeoisie, indeed, on the European population at large. 60 It is about them that
Csaire comments that before they suffered from Nazism before they were its victims, they were
its accomplices . . . they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, . . . they absolved it,
shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because until then, it had been applied only to non-European
peoples. Yes, writes Csaire, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken
by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian
bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him.
Equally important (and perhaps more so), is the fact that this collective subject cannot forgive Hitler
for his crime, for the humiliation, for the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which
until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the
niggers of Africa (ibid.).
As I have already suggested, airplanes and bombs were only the most recent among the ruling
instruments dispensed and deployed by the civilizing mission of Christian Europe upon colored
people. Law and education, Christian missionaries and the production of local elites, all the
benevolent (that is, less bloody) techniques summarized under the old principle of divide and rule,
had long been efficient means of transforming and civilizing, that is to say exploiting, ruling and
often, if not always, eradicating or exterminating communities and ways of life. Writing of Algeria in
the 1830s and 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville is well aware of the fine nuances of political and
military rules and their effects and he unapologetically advocates a view from above that would
later become the pilots vantage point, although distinct from it as well. Tocqueville affirms the
importance of distinguishing between the two great races Arabs and Berbers (or Kabyles) that
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inhabit the conquered land. It is obvious that we must tame these men through our arts and not
through our weapons (il est vident que cest par nos arts et non par nos armes quil sagit de
dompter de pareils hommes). 61 But the distinction he proposes goes further than the recognition
of different races, and of different ruling techniques. It is more refined, more discriminating. It
divides reality and redistributes knowledge along novel lines. With the Kabyles, one must address
questions of civil and commercial equity; with the Arabs, questions of politics and religion (ibid.). It
is not just that there is a difference between Kabyle and Arab, then, but also that the very
epistemological realm to which each group or community belongs or is allocated is, in fact,
different. Further on, Tocqueville will calibrate his concerns further, zooming in on the distinction
between religion and politics. It is imperative, he says, to downplay the religious hostility that
opposes the Muslims to the French the latter being clearly perceived, and perceiving themselves,
as Christians. Instead, Muslims must be made to feel that their religion is under threat, that
colonialism is not a war of religion. The goal of this pacification (an infamous euphemism, if there
ever was one) is nonetheless clear. Thus, religious passions will finally die down and we shall
have only political enemies in Africa (59). Tocqueville understands that the distinction between
religion and politics is quite tenuous and difficult to maintain in Algeria and elsewhere. Still, in
defining the political enemy as distinct from the religious enemy, he is forcefully deploying the
division of knowledge that we have already encountered (if precisely inverted), one most
characteristic of Orientalist and imperial practices, and that enables the division of populations
along distinct lines of belonging and classification. Hence, Muslims must not be made to feel that
their religion is in danger, but that is because the goal is to have to recognize only political
enemies. War is thus negotiated first by determining the battlefield as political, and subsequently (or
simultaneously) by restricting, then denying, its religious dimension. Indeed, what must be
prevented is precisely the awareness that what opposes France to Algeria is religious difference.
What must be prevented is the religious association that could transcend local divisions or disable
organized resistance against the French conquerors. The only common idea that can link and
relate all the tribes that surround us is religion. The only common feeling upon which one could rely
in order to subjugate them [and therefore lead them], is hatred against the foreigner and the infidel
who came to invade their land (103). Religion and politics therefore appear as strategic divisions,
fighting terms, as it were, which not only distinguish between communities but also within them for
military and ruling purposes. Kabyles and Arabs are thus not onl y distinguished on the basis of
race, they are also said to belong to diffe rent realms (commerce on the one hand, religion and
politics on the other). And the separation of realms, the distinction between religion and politics,
further divides communities from themselves. It disables the possibility of collective action, the
ability to recognize, and fight, the true enemy. Still, whatever its success, it is revealed as a
technology of rule and governance.
The technological sophistication of colonial divisions harks back to ancient and well-tried principles
(such as divide et impera), but like the bomb and the airplane, they combine earlier techniques
with new scientific advances. Commerce and politics, race and religion spheres of modernity in
its benevolent and fighting faces such as they were deployed in the colonies of Christian Europe
came to function as divisions of knowledge whereby old alliances, different conceptions of
community and of sociability, older forms of identity, were renamed, reshaped, abolished, and
indeed, destroyed. Contemporaneous with Tocquevilles visits in Algeria, Jesuit missionaries were
deploying the same means of distributing knowledge, the same divisive understanding, aimed to
create pure Christian spaces in Mount Lebanon. 62 They expressed revulsion at the intermingling
of Muslim and Christian, at the Christians practice of adopting Muslim names, and at their habitual
invocation of the prophet Muhammad.
We are sorry, these Jesuits wrote, that there was a sort of coexistence [fusion] between the
Christians and the Muslims of Sayda. They visited each other frequently, which resulted in intimate
relations between them and which introduced, bit by bit, a community of ideas and habits all of
which was at the expense of the Christians. These latter joined in the important Muslim feasts, and
the Muslims [in turn] joined in the Christian feasts; this kind of activity passed for good manners,
sociability, while in truth it resulted in nothing more than the weakening of religious sentiments. 63
The danger of coexistence was to be prevented not only by separating communities, but by
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dividing them from themselves, from their own habits and practices, by fostering a different division
of reality. The modern separation of spheres described by Max Weber, and by Karl Marx before
him, found its origins and terrain of application in particular technologies of governing, embodied
technologies that divided populations, but also divided colonial labor: the missionary is neither
settler nor diplomat, the governor is neither priest nor general. They do not serve the same
function. In the colonies, this complex political, religious, military and economic apparatus, this
novel technology, divided Druze from Maronite, Arab from Berber, Hindu from Muslim, and Hutu
from Tutsi. It marks a rupture and a beginning, a very modern beginning of communalism, of
sectarianism. In Mount Lebanon, it marks the birth of a new culture that singled out religious
affiliation as the defining public and political characteristic of a modern subject and citizen." 64 In
India, it puts into place the essential (even if not inevitable) premises of partition. Moreover, and in
a way that remains more difficult to recognize but to which Tocqueville alerts us, the new
technologies of colonial divisions were at their most efficient in the realm of knowledge. These
forms of colonialist knowledge were about restructuring knowledge and functioned so as to
separate religion from politics, politics from commerce, and commerce from religion and politics. 65
And each of these separations was enacted, incarnated in the restructuring, the management of
communities and that soon to be invented object of demography, populations." 66 The point was
less to eradicate enmity, as Tocqueville makes clear, than to manage enemies, to rule and
discipline them by refusing to grant them political identities or preventing their unification on the
basis of religion. Colonial rule and knowledge was about preventing religion from becoming politics,
hiding that conquest and commerce were a Christian enterprise, in which Christian powers
competed but also collaborated. Not just divide and rule, then, but divide knowledge and rule,
calling one group a race, another a religion, a third a polity.67 Calling this religion, and calling that
race; calling this commerce, and calling that science.
Like the bomb and the airplane, which were exported and imported in and out of Europe, colonial
rule, along with its theologico-political divisions, along with race science and legal devices to claim
territories or redistribute land, was practiced outside of Europe and inside it as well. The balancing
movement between Europe and the colored world is, however, a complicated one. It is said, for
example, that Columbus took an Arabic speaking Jewish translator with him, for he thought he
would thus be able to communicate with the natives of India, whom he expected to encounter. In
the conclusion of this essay, I want to turn briefly to a major site of WAS its role in the
reproduction and the enforcement of the division between Jews and Arabs in order to describe
some of the ways in which the dividing lines that continue to separate these groups have been
constructed by means of technologies of rule and governance such as I have been describing so
far.
Jews and Arabs
In-dissociable in the theological and political imagination of Western Christendom as well as in the
rich history of their social and cultural contacts, Jews and Arabs continue to function as
paradigmatic markers of distance and antagonism rather than proximity and affinity. To this too, the
Muslims of Auschwitz bear witness. But this is increasingly the case in France, the United States
and, of course, Israel/Palestine, and beyond a geographical logic that seems to maintain an
East/West division. More and more visibly (or so one hopes and fears) the antagonism between
Jews and Arabs operates, like the colonial technologies I was just describing, on a number of
levels and dimensions: historical (Holocaust versus colonialism), sociological (sexual difference,
anti-Semitism versus islamophobia), political (the hegemony of liberal, secular democracies and the
so-called war on terror) and religious (the judeo-christian tradition). Following Edward Said, I
have argued elsewhere that these dimensions partake of two histories that have been kept
separated for strategic reasons, two histories that come under the headings of Islam and the
West and Europe and the Jews. I conclude, therefore, with the (only seemingly paradoxical)
claim that these two histories are, in fact, one, of which WAS is an essential, novel and not so
novel, moment: the singular management of Jew and Arab in Western Christendom through its
transformations (Roman Catholicism, Reformation, Secularism, WAS). I argue, in other words, for
the provisional articulation of a Semitic perspective which may underscore the historical nature
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and historical extension of WAS.

Let me begin toward this goal by quoting again from the description by Jesuits of the coexistence,
taayush or convivencia, that existed between Christians and Muslims on Mount Lebanon.
They visited each other frequently, which resulted in intimate relations between them and which
introduced, bit by bit, a community of ideas and habits all of which was at the expense of the
Christians. These latter joined in the important Muslim feasts, and the Muslims [in turn] joined in
the Christian feasts; this kind of activity passed for good manners, sociability, while in truth it
resulted in nothing more than the weakening of religious sentiments. 68
There is no question that this kind of coexistence is predicated on vastly different understandings of
political rule and legal regime, social relations and collective identity, a distinct distribution of
resources as well as a different way of negotiating violence and conflict. For better or for worse, it
is the kind of coexistence (what Marc Abls has called convivance) that was brought to an end
with modernity. In the specific case of the Jews, the transformation entailed a reflected division, a
logic of separation that was meant to increase the political and conceptual distance between Jews
and Arabs, Jews and Muslims. A well-known and determining example is the Crmieux Decree of
1870 (which was operating alongside the 1865 legal formulations that, applicable to Muslims only,
would constitute the basis for the Code de lindignat and its ensuing discriminations) 69 but equally
important, and no doubt more massive in terms of the numbers affected and the depth of its reach,
the activities of the French based network of schools of the Alliance Isralite Universelle. As one of
the teachers of the Alliance wrote in Damascus in 1930, France has achieved the moral conquest
of the Jews in the East. 70 Working in a way that is uncannily similar to the missionaries of Mount
Lebanon, the Alliance furthered the goals of the French civilizing mission and participated in
making the Jews into aliens to their native environment. It pursued this goal as an explicit moral
conquest, and it achieved it, claiming victory over a human territory. What is essential to
remember, however, is that the attention lavished by the different empires with varying degrees of
success on newly constructed minorities (the Maronites, the Kabyles, the Jews) was part of a
new management of populations, a larger restructuring of rule and knowledge, an extensive
redefinition, the universalization of the separation of politics and religion, race and ethnicity, and so
forth.
It is in this context that two crucial and related vectors become, I think, ever more significant. First
is the lack of attention directed at Edward Saids assertion that the history of Orientalism, the
history of islamophobia, is the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism, an
assertion that, grounded in the sound knowledge of a still invisible history, sought to alert us anew
to Aim Csaires insight into the relations that link colonialism and the Holocaust. 71 Second, and
obviously connected to the absence of an anti-anti-Semitic tradition with which I began, is the lack
of attention directed at the history of the category of Semites, its sources and its enduring effects.
Particularly troubling is the complete ignorance of the way this category functioned, the way it was
deployed (or not) by the Nazis in their racial doctrine and policy. Until 2002, no inquiry had been
conducted or at least published regarding the presence or absence of Arab or Muslim
detainees in Nazi concentration camps. Similarly, and equally striking, is the fact I have already
alluded to, namely, that there has been little reflection on the name given to the most haunting
figures among Auschwitz inmates, those named Muselmnner, or Muslims. 72 That name, widely
disseminated throughout the most canonical works of post-Holocaust writing and scholarship,
remains massively ignored at the same time as it the witness, the survivor as well as the
impossibility of both has become the very paradigm, the very image of our collective lament. Any
knowledge of the issues sedimented in these two illustrations would make it obvious that Holocaust
denial is tantamount to colonial denial of the kind practiced in and by the French state, and that
WAS is therefore far from participating in the struggle against racism and its long history. Clearly,
the two events the Holocaust and colonialism are distinct and unique events (as all historical
events must be, by definition), but they emerge from the same (if divided) culture; they partake of
the same logic, the same movements, technologies and conceptions I have tried to describe in this
essay. Moreover, the division between them, a division upon which WAS, along with the Holocaust
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industry described by Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein,73 remain dependent, this division and
its strategic purposes are singularly illuminated when one considers the revisionist law promulgated
by the French parliament on February 23, 2005 that is, one month minus one day after the
much-publicized 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. For it is clear that this law was
meant precisely to maintain a distinction that has been foundational to colonial knowledge and
practice.
At a time when the distinction between Jew and Arab is serving so many interests in
Palestine/Israel (where Jew and Arab are distinct nationalities that ground in the law the
discrimination and the separation the apartheid logic that constitute the dominant horizon of a
solution to the conflict), in France (where anti-Semitism is used to obscure the presence of other
forms of racism, indeed, used to enforce old and new forms of racism and inequalities; where Arab
Jews are turned against Arab Muslims), in the United States (where the war on terror is waged
on Arabs and Muslims while laws condemning anti-Semitism are increasingly promulgated; while
support for Israel grows ever more unconditional, ensuring American hegemony in many more, if
less publicly discussed, ways), it is imperative to recognize that Jews and Arabs, Jews and
Muslims, continue to constitute one of the main foci of modern technologies of rule and governance
on an ever growing global scale , as well as a site of massive investment that operates concretely
in mass movements (not to mention mass media). This, then, is the tradition to which WAS harks
back to. For to uphold the division between Jew and Arab, between Jew and Muslim is to
reproduce the origins of racism and of anti-Semitism at once. It is to maintain a singular political
tradition, to uphold the division of sectarianism and nationalism, between religion and secularism,
religion and politics a hypocritical division that serves a Christian-dominated hegemony, a
Christian view of religion. It is to maintain the division between Holocaust and colonialism, the
spread of democracy and capitalism and missionary activity, and so forth. To uphold these
divisions, even if it is to combat anti-Semitism is therefore to engage in an old and familiar gesture,
which constitutes a ludicrous denunciation of a secret known to all and the divulgation of which,
far from having to lift any obstacle is encouraged by all the medias of dominant opinion, the
imaginary confrontation with power there where it does not exist.74 To uphold these divisions is to
serve the power and interests of those who, like Tocqueville, showed selective concern for the
enslaved and the oppressed; those who, like Tocqueville, seek to tame populations by making
them into convenient enemies, turning them against each other, and more dangerously, against
their own selves. To uphold these divisions is one of the main effects, intended or not, of WAS.
Conclusion: What WAS?
The non-exhaustive, if admittedly exhausting (or at any rate exhausted), path that has brought us to
this point seems to me to have demonstrated one thing at least, namely that the premise, with
which this essay began, was the wrong one. I will put it in a somehow perfunctory manner: WAS is
by no means an exception among the historical, emancipatory struggles with which we are familiar.
Not is it the case that it has no antecedents, no tradition it could claim as its own. That WAS does
not make such an appropriating claim, not explicitly (or at least no longer so), is certainly true. But
what is clear is that there is, in fact, a rich and complex tradition that nourishes and sustains WAS,
a tradition that explains its breadth and success because it relies on existing institutions, networks
and patterns of thought and behavior. This tradition is not, however, a tradition of struggle against
anti-Semitism. It is rather the Christian theologico-political tradition itself.
This was not inevitable, and I want to make clear that I do not conceive of the arguments
presented here as proposing an essential and essentialist view of Christianity. Quite the contrary.
At stake is rather a historical, highly divided and transformative understanding of Christianity as it
has evolved and inscribed itself and continues to do so, effectively in the world, out of one of its
cradles, in and out of Western Europe. I seek therefore to insist on and highlight unacknowledged
continuities (not prior or predestined intentions) such as those belonging to a cultural and political
sphere that has been otherwise recognized that has at times proudly recognized itself (as the
Judeo-Christian tradition, for example) as having a definite, if fragile and conflicted, contested,
integrity. This integrity which is, rather than expresses a certain will or intention, has varied, more
marked at some times than at others, more significant in some dimensions than in others, more
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hidden, and perhaps more powerful, in some sites than in others.75 It has constituted, without a
doubt, the theological and political, and again fragile, integrity of Western Christendom. But it has
followed what was by no means an inevitable trajectory (nor is it now inevitable), nor was it a
tradition at all until it made itself so (by marginalizing or excluding, destroying, if not without
remainder, that which was said to be other in it, that which remains as other in it), until it named
itself so, repeatedly and more or less rightly, more or less correctly (but who would judge what
true or correct Christianity might be?). It made itself so at each juncture it reiterated itself, with
or without difference, every time it effectively reinscribed a certain, selective and selected past,
doing so by way of practices of all kinds, signs and justifications of all sorts. To the extent that
there are continuities, then, to the extent that they are inscribed in history and operative in the
present, more reflection more action is needed. Whether this reflection, this action, should take
the form of a war and particularly of a war on anti-Semitism remains, I think, to be
demonstrated.
Cosmopolis - 2008
Tous droits rservs | All rights reserved
[1] Sven Lindqvist, The Skull Measurers Mistake And Other Portraits of Men and Women Who
Spoke Out Against Racism, trans. Joan Tate (New York: New Press, 1997) 3; emphasis added.
[2] See e.g., Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sven Lindqvist, The Skull Measurers Mistake and
Other Portraits of Men and Women Who Spoke Out Against Racism, trans. Joan Tate (New York:
New Press, 1997; Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain
and France, c. 1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Richard Drinnon, Facing
West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1997), and see also Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better
Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), esp. 185-192
(Eugenics and Its Critics).
[3] Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
[4] Joan Wallach Scott, ed. Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
[5] Alastair Bonnet, Anti-Racism (London: Routledge, 2000); for a different, and relevant
perspective in what follows, see Frank Fredis questioning of the anti-racism said to be
operative in the West since the end of WW II (F. Fredi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the
Changing Perception of Race [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998]).
[6] Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism. Trans. Michael
Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Yakov M.
Rabkin, Au nom de la Torah: Une histoire de lopposition juive au sionisme (Qubec: Presses de
luniversit Laval, 2004).
[7] Lindqvist singles out Abb Grgoire and Theodor Mommsen (and even George Elliot) as
figures of the struggle against increasing anti-Jewish prejudice (Lindqvist, Skull Measurer, 84).
[8] See The Politics of Anti-Semitism, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, eds. (Oakland:
AK Press/Counterpunch, 2003) and Etienne Balibar et al., Antismitisme: lintolrable chantage.
Isral-Palestine, une affaire franaise? (Paris: La dcouverte, 2003); and see the fine analysis by
Jolle Marelli, Usages et malfices du thme de lantismitisme en France in La rpublique mise
nue par son immigration, Nacira Gunif-Souilamas, ed. (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005) 133-159.
[9] Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1995); and see Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern
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Age, Ron H. Feldman, ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1978), esp. 76-79 & 125-130.
[10] Fredi, Silent War, 9.
[11] Pagden, Lords of all the World, 49. Edward Said makes a similar point about the critique of
imperialism deployed by someone like Joseph Conrad (Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism
[New York: Vintage, 1993] 19ff.).
[12] One may even consider that some apologia works in unconscious congruence with that which
it opposes. Hence, as Yuri Slezkine points out, both philo-Semites and anti-Semites agreed, as
did everyone else, that there was a peculiar kinship between Jews and the Modern Age, that
the Jews, in some very important sense, were the Modern Age (Y. Slezkine, The Jewish Century
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005] 60). Himself asserting that the Modern Age is the
Jewish Age (The Jews did not launch the Modern Age . . . They did adjust better than mostand
reshaped the modern world as a consequence [64] Slezkine seems cautiously to join the very
consensus he describes.
[13] On this belated response see, for example, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the
Holocaust. Trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993)
[14] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [hereafter abbreviated as OT](New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) 49.
[15] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming
(New York: Seabury Press, 1972) 200-201.
[16] Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 106.
[17] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 207.
[18] In May 2005, political philosopher and Member of Israeli Knesset Azmi Bishara delivered an
official speech celebrating (for the first time in Israel) the sixtieth anniversary of the victory over
Nazi Germany. Relating to Lyotards assertion, Bishara argued that the victory over Nazism is
hardly to be taken for granted. He recalled that the struggle against its and its enduring legacy
must persevere still.
[19] The term anti-anti-Semitism was recently deployed by Jonathan Judaken as an alternative to
philosemitism because it clearly denotes an opposition to prejudices and stereotypes related to
Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. Anti-antisemites, Judaken continues, resist the
institutionalization of discrimination against Jews. Furthermore, the point of focusing on antiantisemites is to evaluate the conceptual and perceptual biases that animate the opposition to
anti-Semitism (J. Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the
Politics of the French Intellectual [Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006] 20).
With regards to the issue of a refutation, it is remarkable that Judaken insists that, however
significant his contribution, Sartre never adequately demolishes the antisemites image of the
Jew (142).
[20] I elaborate on the complex figure of the Semite in my Semites: Race, Religion, Literature
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
[21] Ashis Nandy, The Romance of the State And the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2003) ix; emphasis added.
[22] Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 203. Charles Tilly phrases the matter in
an illuminating way when he writes that collective action is about power and politics; it inevitably
raises questions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, hope and hopelessness; the very setting
of the problem is likely to include judgments about who has the right to act, and what good it does
(C. Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution [New York: Random House, 1978] 5).
[23] Talal Asad makes productive use of Wittgensteins notion of grammar in his anthropological
analyses (T. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity [Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003] 25 & 25n9). The phrase the grammar of a discourse occurs on p. 161.
[24] A portrait of the militants struggling against anti-Semitism would provide an account of the role
played by Jews in the struggle, however extensive or relative. Although there are obvious reasons
to consider that Jews and Jewish organizations are particularly proactive in the matter, I am
leaving that question suspended in order to emphasize the global dimension of WAS (and,
accessorily, to perhaps urge an inquiry into the matter).
[25] Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 188.
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[26] In a related context, Stathis Gourgouris recalls that Antonio Gramsci made a point of
perceiving international order not simply in terms of Realpolitik but as an extension of internal
social processes: in other words, to perceive the inter-national (what goes on between nations) as
an immanent dimension of the national, as internal to it. Whence the importance of testing
Gramscis idea vis--vis the dominant culture itself . . . as that social-historical entity that is itself
subjugated to the internalized domination of the geopolitical order it represents (S. Gourgouris,
Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonialism and the Institution of Modern Greece [Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996] 159-60).
[27] See U.S. Congress, Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, September 29, 2004.
[28] In his own version of The Jewish Century, Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan responded to
the news of Gibsons alleged anti-Semitic comments while inebriated with the following: To make
all of your money from Jews in Hollywood, and then have a few drinks and say you hate Jews, is
shocking (Hollywood Reacts to Gibson Furore BBC News, Aug. 1, 2006).
[29] Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice (New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1999) 132. Lewis is here commenting on the percolation of the distinctively
Christian kind of hostility to Jews into the Islamic world. Just earlier, Lewis had explained that
one characteristic feature of later European anti-Semitism was entirely lacking in the Islamic
world, even in the pattern of discrimination which it imposed, and that was racism (131).
[30] A similar transformation occurred with racism, of course, although, as Fredi explains, it is
easy to underestimate the speed with which public attitudes toward racism changed . . . the volteface is often overlooked (Furedi, Silent War, 15). It is also the case, however, that anti-Semitism
became disreputable, whereas racism, refuted as it was, continued, indeed, continues to be
blatantly operative for much longer (consider American segregation, South African apartheid, and,
ever more insidiously, the enduring legacy of colonialism through and after decolonization).
[31] Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(New York: Routledge, 1989) 154.
[32] Haraway, Primate Visions, 152. Echoing Adorno, one could suggest that the culmination of the
hatred of animals, contemporary with the hatred of the Jews, marks a subsequent turning point in
the rapport to some animals (see Derrida, Lanimal que donc je suis, 142ff).
[33] Haraway, Primate Visions, 115.
[34] Haraway, Primate Visions, 121.
[35] Haraway, Primate Visions, 369; in a related context, Alexandra Minna Stern proposes to
challenge the prevailing historical understanding of eugenics and its underlying assumptions about
time, place and thematic relevance. She insists most particularly on not treating Nazism and its
defeat as the end of eugenics (nor as its origin, of course). Instead, she traces the origins and
endurance of the politics of breeding in the United States, before the Nazis ever became
acquainted with it and well into the 1960s (Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults &
Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005] 3).
[36] Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [hereafter abbreviated as CP]. Trans. Carol Stewart (New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984) 227. Marc Abls has suggested that Canetti figures an
earlier stage in the generalization of survivance (as opposed to convivance that is politics as
concerned with living-together) which defines the new dimension of political life Abls diagnoses
with regards to the years that follow the Cold War (M. Abls, Politique de la survie [Paris:
Flammarion, 2006]). Abls would agree, I think, that Canetti identifies a ground upon which
politics as survivance feeds and grows, and ultimately extends and disseminates itself.
[37] The Church was of course one of two privileged examples of the mass in Freuds Group
Psychology, the other being the army.
[38] Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide
in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 191.
[39] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 187ff.
[40] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004) 11.
[41] Canetti, CP, 247.
[42] Canetti, CP, 228.
[43] Edelman, No Future, 12.
[44] Edelman, No Future, 3.
[45] It may be important here to note that, for the founder of modern politics, space is the very
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phantasm of the survivor. Shapin and Schaffer describe Thomas Hobbes rejection of the view that
space is a real existent, by paraphrasing Hobbes request to his readers that they imagine that
the entire world of things were annihilated. Imagine further that one man alone survived this
universal destruction. What remains of the world before the supposed annihilation, Hobbes
continued, is a being without the mind . . . an imaginary space indeed because a mere phantasm,
yet that very thing which all men call so . . . I define space thus: Space is the phantasm of a thing
existing without the mind simply . . . (Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985]
149).
[46] Compare Terence Des Press assertion, at the very opening of his inquiry into the survivor,
that we may find, in the end, that the heros death is appointed that one of the functions of
culture is to provide symbolic systems which displace awareness of what is terrible, and that
through death the hero takes upon himself the condition of victimhood and thereby grants the rest
of us an illusion of grace (T. Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976] 5). Although Des Pres opposes the survivor to the hero,
the associations he himself raises, their resonance with Canettis analysis, and the subsequent
history of social movements and identification with victims seems to me to warrant further inquiry.
[47] Fredi, Silent War, 25ff, 48ff; and see also Sven Lindquist, A History of Bombing. Trans. Linda
Haverty Rugg (New York: New Press, 2001) and Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why
Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999), a book that would
have to be largely expanded following the events of September 11, 2001.
[48] Sartre is a case in point as Judaken demonstrates (Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre, esp. chapter
5, Sartres Passion, 147-183).
[49] Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993) 326; on the internal functions of anti-Jewish propaganda, see 316, 322.
[50] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 21.
[51] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 4; emphasis added.
[52] For a recent and illuminating account, see Richard Steigman-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi
Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
[53] I am referring here to Agambens Homo Sacer series, and most particularly to Remnants of
Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [New York: Zone Books,
1999]).
[54] Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 12-13.
[55] Agamben, Remnants, 33; quoting Lvi.
[56] Cf. Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2003) 113ff.
[57] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 74.
[58] I use the verb trace in order to recall Jacques Derridas discussion of the trace in Of
Grammatology and elsewhere.
[59] Lindqvist, History, 9.
[60] Aim Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2000) 36.
[61] Tocqueville. Sur lAlgrie. Seloua Luste Boulbina, ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 2003) 52; on the
Kabyle Myth and its use in French colonial policy, see Charles-Robert Ageron, Politiques
colonials au Maghreb (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972) and Patricia M. E. Lorcin,
Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London and New York: I.
B. Tauris, 1995)
[62] Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in
Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 91.
[63] Quoted in Makdisi, Culture, 92.
[64] Makdisi, Culture, 174.
[65] Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1990) 6.
[66] See Kamel Kateb, Europens, Indignes et Juifs en Algrie (1830-1962): Reprsentations et
ralits des populations (Paris: INED, 2001), and see Linvention des populations: Biologie,
idologie et politique, Herv Le Bras, ed. (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000).
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[67] Laurent Lvy explains how, in a strikingly similar way, the lexicon of communautarisme in
France has managed to raise the threatening specter of one community in particular, namely,
Maghrebian Muslims (Laurent Lvy, Le spectre du communautarisme [Paris: ditions Amsterdam,
2005]).
[68] Makdisi, Culture, 92.
[69] See most recently Sidi Mohammed Barkat, Le corps dexception: Les artifices du pouvoir
colonial et la destruction de la vie (Paris: ditions Amsterdam, 2005).
[70] Quoted in Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewry in Transition: The Teachers
of the Alliance Isralite Universelle, 1860-1939 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993)
269.
[71] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) 27.
[72] I have elaborated on this point in my Muslims (Hegel, Freud, Auschwitz) in Anidjar, The
Jew, the Arab, 113-149; and see also Anidjar, Semites, esp. chapter 1.
[73] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Norman
Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York:
Verso, 2000).
[74] Jacques Rancire, Les scnes du people (Lyon: ditions Horlieu, 2003) 306.
[75] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 12.
Page 24 of 24

When Killers Become Victims

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When Killers Become Victims

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When killers become victims: anti - semitism and its

Im a recovering anti-Semite. I was saved by A-S.A.

and historical extension of WAS.

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