Reading May ’68 through a Levinasian Lens: Alain Finkielkraut, Maurice Blanchot, and the Politics of Identity

Amid the french student protests of May 1968, there was a moment when the figure of the Jew made an unforgettable appearance on the public scene. In the third week of May, during a lull in unrest, radio broadcasts reported that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the young German Jewish strike leader, had been denied reentry into France after a brief trip to Germany. The government decision, clearly meant to diffuse the protest, had the opposite effect. Crowds poured into the streets without directive, organization, or planning and united in the following chant: “Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands.”¹

On one level, the function of this call amid the student riots was straightforward: it was a rallying cry, a statement of solidarity with the movement’s boisterous leader. By capitalizing on the act of deportation, this slogan allowed for the easy (although obviously unfair) analogy between the French government and Nazi Germany. Thus, the phrase underscored the position of the students as victims of an oppressive and authoritative regime while simultaneously reenacting the ideal of fraternité illustrated here by the students’ insistence that nothing separated their status from that of their foreign-born Jewish leader. Given this interpretation, the students’ expression of solidarity could be read as a demonstration of the French republican spirit, evoking the stance of the Dreyfusards some eighty years earlier when they refused to allow one man to be condemned unjustly—except, of course, for one remarkable difference:² During the Dreyfus affair, those who rallied for the Jewish captain’s cause did so in the name of the Enlightenment ideal of humanity, an ideal uniting men above and beyond their differences.³ They protested the suspicion directed at Dreyfus as a Jew and established their solidarity with him as a man and as a French citizen. As Emile Zola so famously wrote to President Faure, “I have but one passion, that of the Enlightenment, in the name of the humanity that has suffered so much and that has a right to happiness.”⁴ Dreyfus’s Jewish identity was nearly beside the point. The student protestors of May ’68, in contrast, allied themselves with Cohn-Bendit by adopting his identity, not by asserting that he shared in theirs. They did not protest in the name of an idea of humanity but in the name of “the Jew”; instead of claiming the status of the universal for Cohn-Bendit, they claimed the status of exception, of Jewish particularity, for themselves.⁵

In what follows I will be considering two interpretations of this event and its significance for thinking about the status of the Jew and Judaism in France, one by the contemporary philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut (b. 1949) and the other by the writer and critic Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003).⁶ Despite the differences in these two interpretations, both come to their conclusion, I will argue, by way of Emmanuel Levinas’s (1906–95) representation of Judaism in what have come to be called his Jewish writings. My argument is that these two interpretations, despite certain commonalities, reveal in the starkness of their opposition a tension at the heart of Levinas’s conception of Judaism. For Finkielkraut, Levinas provides a means to reject the actions of the student protestors and yet simultaneously to defend Judaism as a teacher of moral autonomy in line with the tradition of the Enlightenment, a true center worthy of defending from the onslaught of multiculturalism. For Blanchot, on the contrary, the protestors’ actions enact the political principles inherent in Judaism. In the very impropriety of their actions they perform an act of uprooting, the inspiration for which Blanchot discovers in Levinas’s philosophy. In what follows, I will first trace the architecture of Finkielkraut’s and Blanchot’s position, contextualizing their reactions to the slogan within the larger framework of their thought. I will then turn to Levinas in order to illustrate how their positions on...