Against Zero-Sum Logic: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels

In "Plots Against America: Neo-Liberalism and Anti-Racism," Walter Benn Michaels brings together three significant problematics that converge with my own concerns: namely, the Holocaust and Holocaust memory; comparative accounts of social difference and identity; and the critique of capitalism. About these issues, Michaels makes three central claims. First, he suggests that discussion of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism occupies a disproportionate place in the landscape of American culture. Second, he argues that class should be thought of as fundamentally different from social identities such as racial and gendered identity. And third, he renders the accusation that in abandoning class analysis for cultural analysis, contemporary criticism and theory are complicit with a neoliberal logic in which "we are allowed to do what we can afford to do." There are important aspects of this discussion with which I agree, but I will also articulate some strong disagreements with the logic that unites Michaels's claims. In presenting my response in terms of disagreements, readers will recognize that I agree with the claim in Michaels's recent book The Shape of the Signifier (2004) that one of the most dismal effects of postmodernism—which he calls posthistoricism—is the replacement of ideological disagreement with identitarian differences, that is, the replacement of what we believe by who we are. In the name of politicizing identity, posthistoricism actually depoliticizes difference. Michaels's recent work has the great virtue of forcing us to think harder about questions of identity under global capitalism. This response aims to repoliticize questions of difference from a perspective that is indebted neither to "posthistoricism" nor to Michaels's version of class analysis.

Let me first take up the question of the Holocaust through a response to Michaels's mobilization of Roth and Spiegelman in this article. I refer to Michaels's mobilization rather than his reading or interpretation because I'm not sure that the genre of this essay is best described as literary criticism. He argues in this section of the essay that Roth evokes the threat of imaginary anti-Semitism in such a way that it displaces outrage over real American racism and that Roth's and Spiegelman's evocations of the Holocaust amount to "another kind of Holocaust denial," because they distract from genocides closer to home.¹ Although I agree with Michaels that the presence of a national museum dedicated to the Holocaust on the Mall in Washington makes for an odd and somewhat troubling version of American history, I argue that memory and representation don't actually obey the same logic of scarcity as real estate development.

The Plot Against America and Maus are extremely self-reflexive works that should be understood as engaging both implicitly and explicitly with questions of representation, including especially the representation of ethnicity and race. This meta-literary quality of the two works is also common to most of the authors' other works. To begin with Maus, it is certainly true that Spiegelman's allegorical, animal motif deliberately comes uncomfortably close to the racial system and stereotypes of the Nazi era, especially when he imports it provocatively into the American context. But it is also true that much of the work of Maus consists in putting into question the adequacy of those codes for an understanding of the situation of the Holocaust survivor's son; Art Spiegelman marks this clearly in the second volume of Maus, in which Art's already anthropomorphic mouse body morphs into a more human form, complete with a mouse mask. But even before he introduces his self-portrait as the man in the mouse mask and, thus, in conventional postmodern form draws attention to the artifice of his representational codes, Spiegelman goes to great lengths to differentiate the life and experiences of Vladek, the survivor, from those of his Swedish-born but fully American son. In fact, I would argue that the major theme of Maus is precisely this disjuncture between the generations—a disjuncture with which Spiegelman is able both to register the transmission of certain legacies of the Nazi genocide across the generations and to...