Foreign Spirits in the "Nation of Kant": Racializing Antisemitism and the Secularization of German Philosophy

This essay suggests that a distinctive shift toward racializing antisemitism can be traced in early twentieth-century German philosophy. Focusing on the neo-Kantian philosopher Bruno Bauch, the essay reflects on the role of idealist philosophy in introducing an epistemology of race and racial value. Examining Bauch's explicitly secular and scientific idiom, the essay attempts to interrogate the relationship between secularization in modern German intellectual history and the interpellation of Jewishness as a religio-racial specter in the specific context of German philosophy. In conclusion, the essay presents an argument about the peculiar discursive imagination of modern racialization, particularly when taking into consideration the racialization of Jews as both ideal and real, both spiritual and embodied. By probing this peculiarity of antisemitic constructions of the "Jewish race," the essay critically analyzes how discourses of racialization impose specific categories, signifiers, and markers on bodies.