Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism by Elad Lapidot (review)

This book is a critical and provocative analysis of the post–World War II intellectual discourse against antisemitism, termed here "anti-anti-Semitism." As Lapidot claims, the basic claim against antisemitism in the discourse of anti-anti-Semitism relates to political epistemology. Antisemitism in this discourse is primarily an epistemological phenomenon, a form of knowledge, albeit a negative kind, and its basic flaw is not its "anti," that is, the animosity toward Jews, but the claim for knowledge of Jews, a knowledge which the stance of anti-anti-Semitism claims holds no real relation to actual Jews. Yet when anti-anti-Semitism rejects antisemitism's claim for knowledge, it in fact rejects the possibility of any knowledge of the Jews. As anti-anti-Semitism sees it, the problem with antisemitism is above all the very thought about Jews. Thus, Lapidot maintains, the defence against antisemitism results in situating the Jewish people outside the realm of thought, in the sense that any engagement with the Jews—or better, "the Jews," with scare quotes—as an object of thought is renounced as antisemitic by definition. While staging a clash between opposing sides, the discourse itself is framed by a shared negative political epistemology—there is nothing to know with regards to Jews, and any such "knowledge" is mere projection, myth, illusion, disfiguration. Jews are beyond the realm of thought because anything Jewish cannot be an object of judgment. Or as Lapidot puts it: "The Jews have come to signify the limit or end of philosophy" (29).

The book has two sections. The first section begins with an analysis of some of the key responses to the controversy over the apparent antisemitic utterances found in the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's recently published private notebooks (the "Black Notebooks")—responses which in many respects constituted the controversy—and claims that they embodied the anti-anti-Semitic logic, whereby Heidegger's main sin in this context is not so much what he thought about Jews, but that he thought about them in the first place (chapter 1). This analysis itself is a crucial intervention in the Heidegger controversy and one can only hope it will be engaged with in future iterations or "waves" of the controversy that will no doubt ensue.

The following three chapters outline three positions within the anti-anti-Semitic discourse. The first position is one that negates knowledge of Jews by claiming that any such knowledge is nothing but the antisemite's own subjective fantasy. The Jew does not exist in and of itself, but is invented, "created," by the antisemite. Lapidot identifies a "weak" version of this logic in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment and a "strong" version in Jean-Paul Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive (chapter 2). The second position is the mirror image of the first: conceptually, antisemitism has a Jewish origin. The Jew creates the antisemite in the sense that the Jewish episteme has the same core elements of antisemitism, like particularism, racism, identitarianism. The prime manifestations of this position, according to Lapidot, are Hannah Arendt's analysis of the genealogy of antisemitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Alain Badiou's recent writings on the word "Jew" and on Paul, where he presents the idea of Jewishness as the universal principle of particularity (chapter 3). The third position, associated with Jean-Luc Nancy's recent analysis of antisemitism in the Heidegger controversy and other writings, posits Jewishness as anti-anti-Semitism, that is, as the postmodern "alterity" that interrupts the Western self (chapter 4). Either way, from all three directions, Jewish knowledge is negated and any epistemic statement about Jewishness, either positive or negative, is delegitimized. There is simply nothing to know.

The second section of the book buttresses the argument of the first section by focusing not on anti-anti-Semitism but on antisemitism proper. More specifically, it explores the nineteenth-century foundational invocations...