Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification

By Neil Levi

Why were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art.” Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.

Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections—not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780823255078

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Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levi, Neil Jonathan (1967)

    Modernist form and the myth of Jewification / Neil Levi. — First edition.

        pages cm

    Summary: This book argues that the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form as a symptom of a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit needs to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. The notion of modernist form as Jewified lies at the heart of both a certain modernism’s hostile reception, and its self-conception — Provided by publisher.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8232-5506-1 (hardback)

  1.  Modernism (Art)   2.  Art criticism.   3.  Antisemitism.   I.  Title.

    NX456.5.M64L48 2014

    700'.4112—dc23

2013016311

Printed in the United States of America

16  15  14          5  4  3  2  1

First edition

For Beth

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite

PART I: MODERNIST FORM AS JUDAIZATION

1.    Genealogies: Judaization, Wagner, Nordau

2.    Jews, Art, and History: The Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art as Historicopolitical Spectacle

3.    Fanatical Abstraction: Wyndham Lewis’s Critique of Modernist Form as Judaization in Time and Western Man

PART II: MODERNIST FORM AND THE ANTISEMITIC IMAGINATION

4.    Straw Men: Projection, Personification, and Narrative Form in Ulysses

5.    Images of the Bilderverbot: Adorno, Antisemitism, and the Enemies of Modernism

6.    The Labor of Late Modernist Poetics: Beckett after Céline

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First thanks must go to my invaluable mentors, Franco Moretti and Andreas Huyssen: this book would not have come into existence without them. For their crucial encouragement and support for this project in its earliest incarnation, I would also like to thank David J. Levin, Ursula Heise, Benjamin Buchloh, and Martin Puchner. David Damrosch, Colleen Lye, and Kelly Barry made helpful suggestions at important stages of my research. Dominick LaCapra, Jim Shapiro, and Rebecca Walkowitz gave me valuable advice and encouragement when I most needed it. I am especially grateful to Andreas and Dominick for their continued support of my work in recent years.

Early research on this book was made possible by the support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). I would also like to thank the archives of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin for allowing me access to its newspaper and image files on the Degenerate Art exhibition. A Sesqui Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sydney gave me time to rethink this project from the ground up; I am also grateful to Sydney’s English department for providing me with an institutional home for that period. Support from Drew University, including a research grant and periods of leave, gave me time to turn this into the book I wanted it to be. Many thanks in particular to my colleagues in the English department for all their encouragement and moral support over the period of this book’s development.

I would like to thank Helen Tartar of Fordham University Press for her patient support of this project, as well as the authors of the two anonymous reports I received on an earlier version of the book’s manuscript. Both reports made a significant difference to the book’s final shape. Portions of Chapter 2 appeared in the journal October, and portions of Chapter 4 appeared in Modernism/Modernity. Both have been significantly revised.

A number of friends and colleagues have contributed in important ways to this book. I am particularly grateful to Michael Rothberg, who has been a valued interlocutor and collaborator, a thoughtful and generous reader, and an endless source of references and suggestions, from the days of this project’s inception to its conclusion. Chris Hill’s friendship, wisdom, and insight were important at the book’s beginning but absolutely invaluable at the end. Yasemin Yildiz advised me on matters structural and editorial. I am very happy to have the opportunity to express my gratitude to friends and colleagues from my various lives in Australia: Tim Dolin, Humphrey McQueen, Dirk Moses, Paul Sheehan, Gil Straker, and Elizabeth Wilson. I am particularly indebted to Elizabeth for a series of conversations that helped me clarify my arguments about Adorno and Beckett. In New York, Moustafa Bayoumi, Chris Mertz, Mark Sanders, Matthew Sharpe, Martin Walker, and Jenny Weisberg were all there for me when it mattered most. Thank you.

I am pleased to be able to acknowledge the love and support of my family: my mother, Melanie; my brother, Jeremy; my sister, Meredith; and my father, Mashie Levi, who died a little more than a year before this book was finished, after a long battle with cancer. I regret that he did not live to see it in print.

My greatest debt is to Beth Drenning, for reading and challenging and thinking deeply about every sentence on every page of every draft of every chapter, for living through the time and labor of the writing of this book with me, for inspiration, and so much more. I dedicate the book to her.

INTRODUCTION

Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite

Dresden, 1850. Richard Wagner denounces what he calls the Verjüdung der modernen Kunst—the Jewification or Judaization of modern art, in which Hebraic art taste has come to dominate all of German culture.

Munich, 1919. Protesters disrupt the final performance of Frank Wedekind’s play Castle Wetterstein, decrying it as Jewish garbage, and beating up those in the audience who look Jewish. It does not matter to the protesters that Wedekind is not Jewish and that his play is not about Jews.¹

Tenerife, 1935. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s second film, L’Age d’Or (The Golden Age), is banned by the civil governor in response to the demands of the local Catholic bishop and press. In the ensuing debate, the newspaper Gaceta de Tenerife denounces L’Age d’Or as a film made expressly to induce heresy, to poison souls, to debase them and spread degeneration—in short, it represents the new poison which judaism, masonry, and rabid, revolutionary sectarianism want to use in order to corrupt the people.²

Munich, 1937. The city plays host to the best-attended exhibition of modern art in history. The works on display as Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) appear under headings including Jewish, all-too-Jewish, Revelation of the Jewish racial soul, German farmers seen yiddishly, and Jewish longings for the desert are vented. Yet very few of the paintings and sculptures on display are by people who could be identified, even by the Nazis’ inclusive measures, as Jews. Indeed, the artist with the most work in the exhibition is the German Expressionist painter Emil Nolde, himself a longstanding member of the Nazi Party.

Melbourne, 1942. In his book Addled Art, the critic Lionel Lindsay, brother of the renowned Australian painter Norman Lindsay, claims that works of the School of Paris—in which he includes Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism, and Surrealism—are all the product of a Jewish conspiracy.³

Munich, 1990. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, one-time follower of Brecht and the director of the epic film Hitler, declares that the postwar era has submitted itself to the Jewish interpretation of the world.… We live in the Jewish epoch of cultural history.⁴ As a consequence, he says, art has turned away from all traditional values of depth, elevation, pathos, and passion and turned to an aesthetics of the small, the dirty, the sick …⁵

How can so many different kinds of art—the music of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, the drama of Wedekind, the paintings of Kirchner and Picasso, the films of Buñuel and Dali, each displaying markedly different symptoms—lead such a geographically, historically, and ideologically diverse range of interpreters to the same diagnosis? How can works of art—particularly modernist and avant-garde works—that are neither by nor about Jews be interpreted as Jewish? How, in short, to interpret such interpretations?

Historically, scholars have tended not to interpret them, have tended, rather, to assume that we already know what these interpretations mean, or at least to assume that we understand them well enough to know that we do not need to know any more. Often these interpretations are treated as self-evident proof of the complicity between antisemitism and antimodernism, even as foreshadowing the Nazi genocide, in which the modernist work of art is interpreted eugenically, as a figure for the Jewish body (think, for example, of the work of Sander Gilman and his followers or of the perspective of philosophers of biopolitics such as Roberto Esposito).⁶ Or they are regarded as not worth interpreting, whether because their meanings practically go without saying, or because it is thought that to accord them such attention would be to give them a kind of recognition that they do not deserve (rather than the moral condemnation that they clearly call for), or because to engage with them is to risk contaminating oneself with the views they promulgate (a view I will discuss in more detail later in this introduction).

In this study, on the contrary, I will show that what I call the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form should be regarded as integral to the history of European modernism. It proceeds from the premise that the antisemitic interpretation of modernism is itself worth interpreting and that doing so need not mean that we are either according undue recognition to the worldview of the antisemite nor exposing ourselves to ideological contamination by it. Nor, for that matter, will interpreting such interpretations mean accepting the validity of their claims about modernist form: rather, I inquire into why it is modernist form in particular onto which such concerns, anxieties, and identifications are projected, and what such projections reveal about the fears, desires, and contradictions of the antisemitic imagination.

This book examines the ways in which the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, pervasive, contagious Jewish spirit—the myth of Jewification or Judaization (the terms are semantically equivalent)—shaped both the interpretation and creation of modernist form. If, as the historian Gavin Langmuir argues, antisemitism is historically distinguished by the hostile attribution to Jews of unreal characteristics and actions that no one has ever observed (conspiring to poison wells, desecrate the host, and ritually murder Christian children) and particularly, as Moishe Postone points out, characteristics and actions that involve the exercise of a tremendous degree of power (spreading the Bubonic plague, introducing capitalism and socialism), then the fantasy of Judaization (the term that I will use throughout this book) provides the lens through which that invisible power and those unseen actions become visible and manifest.⁷ The first half of this book explores the critique of works of modernist art and literature that were derided as Jewish but that were neither by nor about Jews; the second half demonstrates how certain canonical modernist writers articulated their own formal innovations as negations of the fantasy of Judaization. By focusing on the role of Judaization I seek to show how we might understand the question of form (rather than, say, the representation of Jewish people) as central to the relationship between modernism in the arts and modern antisemitism. I argue that both aesthetic modernism and modern antisemitism seek formal solutions to the problem of how to render intelligible the experience of modernity, and that the figure of the Jew is made to personify otherwise unrepresentable, disorienting experiences that enter a condition of chronic crisis in modernity. It is only by addressing the centrality of this personification to the antisemitic imagination that we can understand why modernist works of art and literature that were neither by nor about Jews come to be interpreted as Jewish or, more precisely, Judaized. Such an approach enables us to move discussions of modernism and antisemitism away from moral evaluations of any individual author’s complicity with or opposition to antisemitism, and toward a study of relations of mimesis and disavowal.

To be clear: in emphasizing the abstract notion of Judaization, my point is not to deny the importance of connections between certain ideas about Jewish bodies and these antisemitic interpretations of modernist form, but to show that what importance the Jewish body does have in these wild, suspicious readings of modernism is less as their ground or telos than in the role that it plays in fantasies about the transmission of putatively Jewish properties to the work of art. The antisemite does not interpret the modernist work of art as analogous to the Jewish body but as a symptom of his (the antisemite’s) own subjection to Jewish spiritual domination.

I begin with the emergence of the notion of Judaization of the arts in the mid-nineteenth century and follow the antisemitic interpretation of modernism through to its late modernist negation. The first half of this book seeks to undo the teleological narrative in which all antisemitic interpretations of modernism (and those antimodernist writings like Max Nordau’s that might be understood to unintentionally feed into antisemitism) prefigure the Nazi genocide; the second half undoes the widespread habit of identifying certain modernist writers with one or another form of fetishized Judaism, be it formal or ethical, by demonstrating that these modernists all reject such identitarian thinking. Most of the first half of this book constitutes, then, a kind of counternarrative, a series of studies—of Richard Wagner’s Judaism in Music and Max Nordau’s Degeneration, of the Nazi exhibition of Degenerate Art, and of Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man—that show that these interpretations of modernist form do not constitute a homogeneous unity that leads inexorably to the camps, that there are more productive ways to approach them than by considering the moral question of whether or not they are complicit with the Nazi genocide, and that each interpretation links modernist form to the Jews for different reasons and in different ways. In place of the narrative in which these interpretations anticipate a future catastrophe, I show how these antisemitic interpretations seek to document and fight against a catastrophe that they think has already happened and for which they hold the Jews responsible: a radical loss of social, cultural, and subjective integrity, coherence, autonomy, and self-possession that extends in quite specific ways to the realm of aesthetic value, to how works of art are made, the material they draw from, the forms and shapes they take, the traditions they build upon or break with, and the modes of their recognition, interpretation, and consecration.

This catastrophe, so described, might sound like a picture of the experience of modernity rendered in broad brushstrokes. But the antisemitic interpretations I examine consistently take modernist form to be Jewish because it belongs to, draws upon, or reverts to an inert past, one either moribund or dead, and refuses to recognize the needs of the present and the demands of the future. For the antisemitic interpreter, the artistic and literary works and forms that we identify with European modernism are distinguished precisely by their failure to be properly modern. This preoccupation with the putative obsolescence of modernism shows that the antisemitic interpretations I consider seek to contest the terrain of modernism itself, in terms that are themselves strikingly resonant with modernism’s own language and ideology. But it also reveals how, in construing modernism itself as that blind, inert dispensation that must be superseded, these antisemitic interpreters have recourse to a discourse that is decidedly Christian.

In the second half of this book I argue that the antisemitic interpretation of modernism (and, more broadly, of modernity) constitutes a crucial element within the works of figures more conventionally recognized as modernist: James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett. Each seeks to legitimize his modernist aesthetics by staging the negation of what we might call an antisemitic poetics: each critiques certain styles as belonging to the antisemite’s toolbox, as modes by which the antisemite makes sense of the world. I argue, in other words, against the narrative in which the abject, outcast figure of the Jew is redeemed by the embrace of canonical high modernism. That view, I suggest, posits too conceptual and too clean a departure from the antisemitic past. The modernists themselves, we will see, are far less sanguine. While Joyce does seem to present the second half of Ulysses as a radical break with a certain antisemitic poetics, for both Adorno and Beckett the problems presented by antisemitic modes of interpreting the world are not to be resolved by a simple conceptual reversal implicit in embracing the previously abjected figure of the Jew but by long and difficult labor understood along the lines of a psychoanalytic working through.

I am, then, as much concerned with the poetics as with the ideology of antisemitism and its critique. I focus on how the texts I consider exhibit, imitate, and negate the forms and poetics against which they define themselves and the ways in which those disavowed forms are connected to one or another abjected figure—be it the Jew (Part I) or the antisemite (Part II). In the antisemitic interpretation, modernist form is identified with the figure of the Jew insofar as both modernism and the Jews are regarded as matter out of place—to cite the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt—meaning, in this instance, that which does not belong within the aesthetic sphere, the nation-state, or the realm of human culture.⁸ I examine both the negative permutation of this idea, manifest in the antisemitic interpretation of modernism, and its positive form, which is on display in the postwar conflation of modernism and the Jews as the sublime others of a homogenizing, genocidal modernity. But I am also at least as concerned to critique and offer an alternative to certain dominant interpretations linking modernism and the Jews, particularly those predicated on unmediated analogies and identifications between modernist works of art and Jewish bodies, identities, and religious tenets and practices, whether this be the polysemy that somehow makes Joyce Judaic or Adorno’s invocation of the Second Commandment self-evidently proving the Jewishness of his thought. I argue that the analogies and identifications that dominate our thinking about the relationship between modernist form and the Jews frequently obscure from sight more complex, less predictable connections. In short, in this study I employ the notion of dirt both as a kind of methodological lens for examining the disavowal of certain kinds of aesthetics and as a way of thinking about the limits and problems of the conventional associations we make between modernism and the Jews.

Underlying much of what I have to say about the antisemite—both how he relates to modernism and to the Jews and how he appears in modernism and in critical theory—is a further, crucial way of thinking about what is in and out of place: the psychoanalytic concept of projection. In psychoanalytic terms, projection is the operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes or even ‘objects,’ which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing.⁹ The expulsive structure of projection deserves emphasis: because I project onto you what I expel from within myself, I must in turn expel you from the space I control, since I cannot stand to see the rejected quality in you any more than I can stand to see it in myself.

The concept of projection is useful because it asks us to refocus our attention on the interpreting subject—the one doing the projecting—rather than upon the projected-upon object. But while such a focus is necessary, it is not always sufficient. The focus on the projecting subject alone does not explain why certain groups or objects are subject to the particular projections they are. I propose that we can do so, however, by thinking about psychoanalytic projection in terms of the analogy of an actual projection screen, which is not literally a blank surface but a material object with specific properties that make visible images that we would not be able to see if they were projected into thin air or, for that matter, onto a less amenable surface. This model, I suggest, helps us explain why some groups (whether classified by race, gender, religion, class, or sexual orientation) and objects (modernist works of art and literature) are the surfaces for the kinds of projections I discuss in these pages, without having us lapse into holding the objects of those projections responsible for causing them. (I elaborate this theory further in my discussion of Adorno.)

Antisemitic projection reveals a dialectic of disavowal and desire that we can understand through the concept of mimesis, a notion central to the accounts of modern European and specifically Nazi antisemitism offered by the Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno and the French poststructuralist philosophers Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy.¹⁰ In several of the chapters that follow I make particular use of the suggestion found in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment that antisemites detest the Jews and [yet] imitate them constantly. There is no anti-Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be Jewishness.¹¹ Note that this does not mean that the antisemite imitates the Jew; rather, he imitates an externalized image of his own repressed impulses, that is, he imitates a disavowed part of himself. Adorno and Horkheimer’s aperçu seems to capture quite precisely the dialectic of disavowal and desire on display in all the cases of antisemitic projection discussed in Part I, and I will make much of the ways Wagner and the Nazis in particular imitate the forms that they interpret and disavow as Jewish.

Political Formalism versus Political Phobia

I seek, then, to contribute to the study of the racial, religious, and political meanings attributed to modernist forms. In a sense, the argument of this book resides not only in a specific hypothesis about the relationship or, better, relationships between various modernisms and antisemitisms but also in this book’s own form, in seeing what comes to light when we read these texts alongside one another. While such a methodological gambit might allow the present work to be classified as a distant relative of a cultural studies inspired by Ernesto Laclau’s concept of articulation, a number of features more obviously align it with what has recently (usually pejoratively) been called political formalism or activist formalism.¹² Political formalists are charged with seeking to determine the political valence of texts in themselves (rather than in their empirical reception histories) and with doing so through close or hypervigilant attention to the strategies and formal procedures those texts display (rather than, say, through broad historical narrative or sociological inquiry). In short, political formalists tend, as Rita Felski puts it, to see the world in a grain of sand.¹³

In what follows I do, like many political formalists, incline toward detailed attention to individual texts. I examine the implications of specific names and word choices and extract political significance from close readings of distinctive sentence structures, unusual textual citations, arresting collages, and dense cultural and philosophical meditations. Building on the work of theorists such as Moishe Postone, Slavoj Žižek, and Eric Santner, in much of this book I explore the premise that there is an intrinsically formal component to antisemitic ideology, insofar as the figure of the Jew provides both a personification and an explanation of otherwise unrepresentable, disorienting experiences that, in modernity, are associated with a kind of crisis, whether subject formation, transformations in economic, political, and aesthetic value, or the experience of change itself. This terrain is crucial to the modernist imagination’s engagement with antisemitism. Moreover, to lay all my formalist cards on the table, I am inclined to believe that if one is going to study aesthetic modernism and not attend to the question of form, it is hard to explain why one is studying aesthetic modernism at all. I am not talking about subjecting oneself to a hegemonic modernist ideology but about recognizing what is historically distinctive about the object of inquiry.

That said, the present work differs from the picture that critics such as Rita Felski and Marjorie Levinson draw of political formalism in several crucial respects. First, apart from the broad premises I have just sketched, in this book the relationship between aesthetic form and politics is less a premise than a question. I’m less inclined to see the world in a grain of sand than to ask just what a grain of sand is, what it looks like, and how it is constituted, in order to understand what it is we are looking at when we look at and talk about … whatever it is that grains of sand are meant to add up to. And rather than assuming that these texts possess an inherent political value or critical agency,¹⁴ I show that the texts and figures I examine themselves attribute ideological and political meaning to aesthetic form, that they themselves explicitly present artistic form as an immediately political matter, one of giving shape, coherence, and embodiment to the world and to the experience of modernity. I am interested, in other words, in showing how the various relationships between ideas about modernist form and ideas about Jews and Judaization show modernism itself to be from its origins already politically formalist.

Second, I reject the idea that to read texts attentively or, as we so often say, closely is necessarily to consecrate or overvalue them. Such claims reveal a rather restricted understanding of what it means to interpret something and why one might do so. I interpret some texts that I admire and others that I wish had never existed. I do so because they trouble me and because they present questions and puzzles to which extant commentary has not provided solutions I find satisfactory. I write about all of them not in the belief that I will thereby change the way that they are valued but in the hope of changing the way that they are understood. Antisemitic interpretations and figures in particular require close attention, but they have historically tended not to receive this, perhaps because they are associated with dirt and pollution. Interpreting antisemitic texts and fantasies requires, it turns out, working through particular kinds of resistance and disavowal. I argue that just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that we might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism, and that we have elaborated a series of pollution rituals and behaviors around the ways we talk about antisemitism to defend ourselves against that spirit.¹⁵ One of the ways we defend ourselves against that contamination, I suggest, is by a reactive attachment to the idea of Jewishness and to the figure of the Jew, one manifestation of which is the philosemitic idea of modernism as Jewish that lauds certain writers—such as Joyce or Beckett—as non-Jewish Jews, or Judaic authors.

My response to this tendency and, more broadly, to the treatment of the figure of the antisemite as himself a kind of dirt, subject to pollution rituals and interpretive foreclosure, shapes the kinds of questions I ask in this book. One of the more obvious examples of what I call the phobic approach to antisemitism in contemporary culture can be found in the spectacle that ensued following Lars von Trier’s May 2011 press conference at the Cannes Film Festival to accompany the screening of his film Melancholia. Von Trier announced, I really wanted to be a Jew and then I found out I was really a Nazi because my family was German [with the name] Hartman, which also gave me some pleasure. What can I say? I understand Hitler.¹⁶ He repeatedly said that he did not approve of Hitler, did not think he was a good guy, but that he felt some sympathy for him, sitting in his bunker. Von Trier said he was not against Jews but was in fact for the Jews (but found Israel a pain in the ass). It was a fascinating performance, which of course led to the filmmaker being roundly condemned by the festival and certain Jewish groups and then banned and ejected from Cannes. We take such gestures of repudiation for granted today. As with certain responses to the events of September 11, 2001, the attempt to understand—or, more precisely in von Trier’s case, a complicated, awkward attempt to work through his personal relationship to the legacy of Nazism in Europe—was immediately treated as an inexcusable attempt to exonerate.¹⁷

Are scholars in literary and cultural studies not more sophisticated than that? Some years ago at a conference at one of the more well-known American universities I presented a paper on the ways in which the Dada slogan Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it! was refunctioned by the Nazis in the Degenerate Art exhibition in a way that raised the possibility that the Nazis’ own imitation