- Is Theory Good for the Jews? French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism by Bruno Chaouat
In this engaging, vigorous, and well-informed book, Bruno Chaouat explores some of the reasons for which “theory” or “French thought” not only has failed to respond to the new antisemitism or new Judeophobia that has arisen in France and Europe since the new millennium but also has (unintentionally) contributed to it. For Chaouat, French thought consists of discourses shaped by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s legacies like poststructuralism and deconstruction. It includes the work of French thinkers from Alain Badiou to Elisabeth Roudinesco as well as that of such thinkers indebted to postwar French philosophy and French writing as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Rothberg, and Gianni Vattimo.
After a brief Prologue in which he discusses his own relation to French thought and its broaching of the “Jewish question,” Chaouat devotes his Introduction to showing that the new antisemitism is no longer racist. In fact, it takes the guise of antiracism. In the enlightened, post-nationalist Europe of today, Jews—real ones, Jewish ones, attached to roots, to community, to land, to Israel—are no longer viewed as archetypally inferior and impure, as exemplars of victimhood and affliction, or as rootless wanderers and agents of subversion. Rather, they are viewed as stubbornly particularistic, fiercely exclusionary, enemies of métissage, racist, and neocolonialist to boot. Chapter I of Chaouat’s book focuses on Heidegger’s deconstructionist and postmodern heritage, with its decentering of the subject and its questioning of sovereignty. For Maurice Blanchot and Michel Deguy, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Giorgio Agamben (not to mention Gianni Vattimo and his virulently anti-Zionist diatribes), the good Jew is an exilic, marginal figure or else a revolutionary one—and the less bound Jews are to peoplehood, the Law, and the distinction [End Page 327] of Jewishness, the better. Concentrating on such texts as Stéphane Hessel’s indignant Indignez-vous, Jacqueline Rose’s Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East, and Salim Bachi’s Moi, Khaled Kelkal and “Moi, Mohamed Merah” (written in the wake of Merah’s murderous spree in Toulouse and Montauban), Chapter II studies how Israel is increasingly equated in French thought with global capitalism, the elimination of minorities, and Nazism, how equivalences are more than suggested between the Holocaust and the plight of the Palestinians, and how perpetrators of racially-marked terroristic acts are portrayed as victims of racism. In Chapter III, Chaouat examines the theory of multidirectional memory proffered by Michael Rothberg and others. He argues that, in attempting to reject competition among collective memories of persecution and to unite these memories, the theory obscures the specificity of the Holocaust and ignores recent instances of Islamic antisemitism. Chaouat is at his most polemical in Chapter IV, where he criticizes thinkers and scholars like Enzo Traverso and Judith Butler. Because of their attachment to diasporic Judaism, the latter are not above misreading texts and distorting history in order to demonize Zionism and to prove that, if there is any antisemitism today, it comes from neocolonialist (ethnic as opposed to ethical) Jews. A Postscript on Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala allows Chaouat to characterize the comedian’s anti-Semitic laughter as a rebellion against the moral Law and as a call, in the name of racial impurity, for the extermination of the Jewish people. Finally, in a chapter entitled “Envoy,” Chaouat wonders whether French Jews, following the example of Myriam in Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission, will say “adieu to France.”
Particularly interesting in Chaouat’s exploration of the new antisemitism is his attention to basic moves by the theorists who ignore anti-Semitic discourses and actions or who sometimes generate them: Jew-splitting, for example (between authentic and inauthentic Jews, non-Jewish and Jewish Jews), philosemitism (it is for their own good that Jews must be reviled), or antisemitism as anti-racism. Equally interesting are the pages that Chaouat devotes to such works as Boualem Sansal’s...