Three Paradigms of "The Negative Jew": Identity from Simmel to Zizek

Much historical study in recent years has been devoted to positive conceptions of Jewishness, especially those centered on "race." Positive conceptions ascribe to the Jews particular attributes. Somewhat surprisingly, given their significance for modern Jewish history and in the history of the social sciences, negative conceptions of the Jews and Jewishness—conceptions that decline to assign the Jews inherent specific attributes—received much less attention. This article will examine three paradigms of the social construction of "the negative Jew." The three thinkers to be discussed all propose a concept of negative identity formation that they exemplify by alluding to the Jew. Georg Simmel (1858-1918) sees the Jew as a type; Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) sees the Jew as being-for-the-other; and Slavoj Žižek (1949-) sees the Jew as a signifier. By reconstructing their theories of identity formation, I shall demonstrate the radicalization that this central aspect of social thought undergoes over the course of the three generations from Simmel to Žižek. However, concentrating on the Jew's negative identity will reveal no less than what, according to three generations of social thought, makes the Jew a Jew.

I intend to address the question of identity formation by examining how these thinkers understand the epistemology of the Jew. Although knowledge (epistemology) of a thing and the thing known (ontology) are always closely related, the focus of this article is the knowledge of what and who make a Jew a Jew in three generations of philosophical social thought rather than what or who make a Jew as such. This reading will exemplify the close interconnections, or, more accurately, the interdependencies that exist between philosophical notions of identity and notions of the Jew's identity. I focus on three writers for whom the "Jew" is socially negatively determined. That is, the Jews' Jewishness is defined not by reference to the Jews' history, religion, biology, and the like, but by the fact that they live in a society of non-Jews taking them for Jews. I would like to stress that the case I find particularly interesting in this context is that of the assimilating or assimilated Jew, in whose case the explicit "material" aspect is most possibly absent. (Punning on the title of an important book that appeared recently, this could be termed "The Jew Without.") Precisely here the negative aspect of identity formation in its crystallized form comes to the fore. There is a close connection between the identity-formation concept and the conditions of possibility of assimilation. Simmel, Sartre, and Žižek fix the Jew as unassimilated even when assimilated. However, in the progression from Simmel to Žižek, assimilation—which is attached to the respective identity formation concepts—is increasingly recognized as impossible in its very conditions of possibility. Using the Jew as a heuristic device, I will be investigating a progression that is indicative of changes more widespread in social scientific literature on identity formation.

I shall read these three thinkers according to two fixed and interrelated questions: First, how is the Jew's identity constructed? Second, who, or what, decides his identity? I want to show that the paradigms move from the Jew as effect of interaction (Simmel), to the Jew as effect of the non-Jewish other (Sartre), to the Jew as effect of language (Žižek). The progression in this genealogy of society moves steadily away from any individual self-determination toward an increasingly stable and asymmetrical structure of signification. Social identity, as the Jew's case will exemplify, is decreasingly voluntary, decreasingly material (biological, historical, religious), and decreasingly open to willful modification. In all these senses the Jew may serve as a key, or symptom (in the sense of coded truth), to social thought on social identity.

It is necessary to place the progression concerning the Jew's identity from Simmel through Sartre to Žižek within a wider context&#8212...