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

about “la francophonie” and the notion of a “littérature-monde.” This volume is certain to foster a more comprehensive understanding of these complex issues. University of Nebraska, Omaha Patrice J. Proulx HAMMERSCHLAG, SARAH. The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 2010. ISBN 978-0-226-31512-6. Pp. 312. $25. As the title suggests, Sarah Hammerschlag’s main purpose is to examine the significance and functioning of a trope. By studying the way in which Jews and Jewishness are represented in French literature and philosophy, especially after World War II, the author not only sheds light on social and cultural change, but also promotes a new way of dealing with such politically charged issues as multiculturalism and identity politics. For example, a tropological approach is able to enact a process of “défiguration”—a term coined by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe— and open up “the possibility of figural language calling attention to itself, calling itself into question as representation and truth source” (14). What makes such an approach particularly useful, Hammerschlag argues convincingly, is its capacity for counteracting myth and disabling the political exploitation of mythological representations. While she begins her study with the Dreyfus Affair and the figure of the uprooted Jew popularized by Maurice Barrès, the key moment in the evolution of the trope, for her, is May 68 because “it marks a turning point in the history of the significance of the Jew as French cultural and political symbol” (6). It was occasioned by the French government’s decision to prevent Daniel CohnBendit , one of the student leaders, from reentering France. Energized by the interdiction , the students expressed their solidarity with Cohn-Bendit—who happened to be a German Jew—by adopting the slogan “Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands.” Since it claimed an identity impossible to assume, the slogan was clearly paradoxical but, as Maurice Blanchot was to explain, while it rejected traditional forms of a communal affiliation, it also represented the possibility of turning a negation into an affirmation, “of maintaining a refusal that affirms” (197). By May 68, the figure of the Jew had already been given a positive value by Sartre. Emmanuel Levinas eventually reconfigured the notion of rootlessness into a moral ideal, but it was the work of two of his followers in this area—Blanchot and Derrida—that became particularly significant in developing both a theory and a practice of the figure’s tropological deployment. Specifically, they “cultivate the figurative nature of the postwar representation of the Jew in order to develop a political strategy that offers a real alternative to the universalism-particularism dichotomy” (263). The productive tension between the two positions becomes especially apparent in Derrida’s treatment of the notion of exemplarity. It is a troubling claim, Derrida finds, being convinced that any appeal to a morally superior stance and universal values eventually engenders violence. The alternative to the dilemma, he proposes, is undecidability—a consideration that turns positive once we realize that it undermines anyone’s claim to election or exceptionalism. To recognize the necessity to go beyond the dichotomy of particularism-universalism is to enter on the path to a “new mode of political engagement,” Hammerschlag tells us. It is an alternative that can prove useful in France’s efforts to integrate its Muslim minority within the traditional fabric of French republicanism as well as in the United States, “in our universities and in the larger sphere of our national politics,” since these Reviews 553 are areas where “we are attempting to move beyond the debates over multiculturalism and to find new ways of defining and understanding pluralism” (266). Given the clarity and eloquence of her analyses, Hammerschlag’s book will be a welcome resource in diverse fields of study and offer a useful teaching strategy in a university setting—even though French theory has lost some of its luster and influence . The public at large, however, may not be quite as prepared to assimilate or even appreciate the sophistication and radical originality that distinguish the arguments presented here. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis HINER, SUSAN. Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth- Century France. Philadelphia...