The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (review)

Sarah Hammerschlag has written a fascinating account of the construction of the Jew in modern and postmodern thought. Her argument traces the way in which the figure of the rootless and wandering Jew, stigmatized in an age of nation building and race thinking in the half-century or so leading up to the Second World War, was ‘revalorized’ (to use her word) by Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida after the war to become the exemplary trope of postmodernity. She starts with fin-de-siècle France to show how the constructed Jew slides between the poles of universalism and particularism in the thought of Barrès, Bernard Lazare, and Péguy. Sartre then makes the ambivalence of the Jew a model for rootless existentialism. The post-humanist thinkers to follow — including Lyotard and his allegorical ‘jews’ and Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe and their ‘anti-mythical’ Jew — will all, in their different ways, adopt the trope of the ‘deracinated’ Jew as a sign of the challenge to all totalizing systems of thought. Levinas is the pivotal figure in this reworking of rootlessness. It is not so much Sartre who will influence Derrida and Blanchot in their equation of Jew and otherness, but Levinas’s reading of Sartre. In Levinas’s philosophy ‘deracination’ becomes a moral ideal. However, Hammerschlag makes a convincing case not only for the moral status of the figure of the Jew after Auschwitz, but also for its status as a blueprint for a new politics (or the ‘democracy-to-come’, in Derrida’s terms). Neither particularist nor universalist, neither identitarian nor communitarian, this post-national politics of ‘disidentification’ would not only disturb the foundations of Republican France but of all nations struggling to redefine the human in the wake of modernity’s broken promises. Blanchot’s reading of the 1968 slogan ‘nous sommes tous des juifs allemands’ is in terms of a politics of refusal of old identities (although Alain Finkielkraut, in Le Juif imaginaire, interprets the slogan as a sign of the very identity politics that Blanchot rejects). Hammerschlag is slightly peremptory in her dismissal of the Boyarins, Susan Shapiro, and others who have seen in this allegorical use of the Jew another form of assimilation of the Jew into some universal, and often messianic, truth or other (Christianity, the Enlightenment, Nazism, post-humanism), and she never really resolves the tension that they highlight between the figural Jew and real Jews. It is odd that she makes only passing reference to Elizabeth Bellamy’s excellent book Affective Genealogies (1997), which covers similar ground, and none at all to Zygmunt Bauman’s classic work Modernity and Ambivalence (1991). However, the readings of her chosen thinkers are always erudite and scholarly, and the analysis of their works through the prism of the figural Jew is often original and always illuminating. Edmond Jabès said that Judaism and writing were ‘the same hope’: this critical study reads the philosophical and political implications of this idea in a profound and elegant way.