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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Why does anti-Semitism seem to be so deeply engrained in our societies, our institutions and our attitudes? To answer this question we need to look beyond our current practices and see that anti-Semitism has much deeper roots - that it is woven into the very structures of Western thought. Jean-Luc Nancy argues that anti-Semitism emerged from the conflictual conjunction of two responses to the eclipse of archaic cultures. The Greek and the Jewish responses both affirmed a humanity freed from myth but put forward two very different conceptions of autonomy: on the one hand, the infinite autonomy of knowledge, of logos, and on the other, the paradoxical autonomy of a heteronomy guided by a hidden god. The first excluded the second while simultaneously absorbing and dominating it; the second withdrew into itself and its condition of exclusion and domination. How could the long and terrible history of the hatred of the Jew, masking a self-loathing, be generated by these intrinsically contradictory beginnings? That is the question to which this short book gives a compelling answer.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Contents
Cover
Front Matter
Preface to the English edition
Introduction
Notes
1 Banality
Notes
2 Historial and spiritual
Notes
3 Autoimmunity
Notes
4 Extermination
5 Omnipotence
6 Revelation
Notes
7 Incompatibility
Notes
8 Judeo-Christianity
Notes
9 Self-loathing
Notes
10 Mutation
11 Drives
12 Antisemitic God
Notes
Additional notes
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End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Excluding the Jew Within Us
Jean-Luc Nancy
Translated by Sarah Clift
polity
Originally published in French as Exclu le juif en nous by Jean-Luc Nancy. Copyright © EDITIONS GALILEE 2018
This English edition © Polity Press, 2020
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4274-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Nancy, Jean-Luc, author. | Clift, Sarah, translator.Title: Excluding the Jew within us / Jean-Luc Nancy ; translated by Sarah Clift.Other titles: Exclu le juif en nous. EnglishDescription: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | “Originally published in French as Exclu le juif en nous by Jean-Luc Nancy. Copyright © Éditions Galilée 2018.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A leading philosopher argues that anti-Semitism is rooted in the structures of Western thought”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020001435 (print) | LCCN 2020001436 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542727 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542734 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509542741 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Antisemitism--Philosophy. Classification: LCC DS145 .N2713 2020 (print) | LCC DS145 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/4001--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001435LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001436
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Preface to the English Edition
I put the finishing touches on this text for the English translation of this book in early November 2018, just days after the most serious antisemitic attack in US history took place, on October 27 in Pittsburgh. Evidently, imitators are still emboldened by the anathemas of John Chrysostom, the diatribes of Luther, the rantings in Protokoly Mędrców Syjonu [The Protocols of the Elders of Zion], and the ideology of Mein Kampf to claim that “the Jews are children of Satan” before shooting them in the middle of an American city whose motto is benigno numine (“by a benevolent divine power,” “by the favor of heaven”).
This rapid geographical expansion of antisemitic violence might be seen as the symptom of a general increase in incidents of impulsive or impassioned violence (insofar as this type can be distinguished from others, for example social, economic, or political violence) that are taking place in a disoriented world. But, even if that were the case, it still has to be understood in terms of its stupefying continuity with, and continuation of, a disease and a derangement that has belonged to the West since its very inception.
That this is how such a ferocious hatred, unique in the history of civilizations, would reach the continent and country where the West underwent its most major expansion before spreading everywhere—this is what gives the present book its horrible justification: to expose the originary and constitutive role played by antisemitism in the development of the symbolic, ethical, and emotional structure of this West.
Introduction
The work undertaken here consists of uncovering at least one of the sources—no doubt the main one—of the phenomenon of antisemitism, as it has continued and intensified over the last twenty-two centuries and as it stubbornly continues to resurface well into the twenty-first century—in Europe, but also in North America, where it is not new but is being reactivated, and in South America, where it seems to be reignited by issues related to Israel and Palestine.
The present study locates the deep origin of antisemitism—this entirely unique phenomenon in the history of civilizations—within a division created in the European world. An originary division, as it were, which also means a divided origin or a division at the origin. The two meanings must be explored and examined together; and the present essay is meant to be a preliminary foray into this work.
Nonetheless, it will be clear to everyone that the hideous gash that the extermination of the Jews has inflicted on the history of Europe shall always remain tethered to that history: when it has resurfaced elsewhere, it has done so in derivative and never comparable forms. In producing the West, Europe has certainly spread a great many of its features throughout the world, but its delirious and mythic racial fury could never export what tied that fury to the intense desire to regenerate and rebuild Europe.1 In a sense, the discovery of what would come to be called “the New World” initiated a new generative process and, in that sense, diverted the original anxiety.
This is why I cannot forego a new introduction to the first version of this book in English. Not only must the question be situated within a context other than that of Europe, but this change in perspective will allow me to verify the analysis of Europe itself.
There are many features that make the invasion and conquest of the American continent beginning in the fifteenth century not only an expansion of Europe but also a break from it, or from the continuity of European history—a break whose decisive mark is the independence of the United States, followed by the multiple independences of Latin America. Among such features, I must emphasize the foundational character of these independences. The gesture of breaking from the European states is itself inseparable from the gesture of founding: it is the beginning of another history. Whatever dissimilarities there are between the independence of the Thirteen Colonies and those that followed, these acts will all have been of a different nature from the acts of founding the European states: from Russia to England or Sweden, despite important differences, they all emerged from under the shadow of the Roman Empire. This was Europe’s true starting point: Rome was its own foundation, or at least this is how it understood itself. One could say that Greece invented autonomy—breaking with the old autochthonies—and that Rome invented a new autochthony: that of an empire founded above particular peoples, in a power that is both autocratic and virtually universal.
This is how Rome gets divided into two, the
