Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification

Notes

201 Introduction. Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite 1. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution , 1933–1939 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1998), 108. 2. Gaceta de Tenerife (June 14, 1935), cited in C. B. Morris, This Loving Darkness: The Cinema and Spanish Writers, 1920–1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 28–29. 3. Humphrey McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944 (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Cooperative, 1979), 39. 4. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Vom Glück und Unglück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem Letzten Kriege (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1990). Translated and cited by Ian Buruma, “There’s No Place Like Heimat,” New York Review of Books (December 20, 1990): 36. 5. Syberberg, Vom Glück und Unglück, 36. My translation. 6. Sander L. Gilman, “The Mad Man as Artist: Medicine, History, and Degenerate Art,” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 4 (October 1985): 575– 597. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 7. See Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 14; Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 304. 8. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 9. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 349. N o t e s 202 Notes to pages 7–14 10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 291–312. 11. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 151. My emphasis. 12. On “political formalism,” see Rita Felski, “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Method,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 501–517. For “activist formalism,” see Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism ?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 558–569. Levinson attributes the term “activist formalism” to Susan J. Wolfson, “Reading for Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 1–16. 13. Felski, “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies,” 512. 14. Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” 560. 15. My thoughts here develop and modify Gillian Rose’s claims that for postwar thought the Holocaust is “the great contaminator” and Judaism “the sublime other of modernity.” See Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28, 37. 16. Melena Ryzik, “Lars von Trier Kicks Ups [sic] a Cannes Controversy,” http://www.artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/lars-von-trier-kicks-ups-a -cannes-controversy. 17. For a more complete picture of von Trier’s comments and their context, see Chris Heath, “Lars Attacks!” GQ (October 2011), http://www.gq.com/enter tainment/movies-and-tv/201110/lars-von-trier-gq-interview-october-2011. 18. Scott Spector, “Modernism without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument ,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 620. Spector discusses Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 19. Amir Eshel and Todd Presner, “Introduction,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 611. 20. Sarah Hammerschlag gives a subtle, nuanced account of that tradition in The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Nevertheless, I am proposing an alternative perspective to that offered in her book. I am suggesting that the postwar Western European fetishization of the figure of the Jew must be seen as not only welcoming alterity but also seeking to avoid further contamination. So we might say that while it was laudable for the French student movement of 1968 to declare, in a nation that refused to acknowledge its own role in the deportation of Jews to the death camps, its identification with the radically other— “We are all German Jews”—this gesture also represents a striking disavowal. “We are all German Jews” also means “We are not the children of Vichy Notes to pages 14–27 203 France.” If these same students had found a way to express solidarity with the outcast, oppressed, and...