Radical French Thought and the Return of the "Jewish Question"

By Eric Marty and Alan Astro

Five seminal essays on contemporary antisemitism and its connections to radical thought.

For English-speaking readers, this book serves as an introduction to an important French intellectual whose work, especially on the issues of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, runs counter to the hostility shown toward Jews by some representatives of contemporary critical theory. It presents for the first time in English five essays by Éric Marty, previously published in France, with a new preface by the author addressed to his American readers. The focus of these essays is the debate in France and elsewhere in Europe concerning the “Jew.” The first essay on Jean Genet, one of postwar France’s most important literary figures, investigates the nature of Genet’s virulent antisemitism and hatred of Israel and its significance for an understanding of contemporary phenomena. The curious reappearance of St. Paul in theological and political discourse is discussed in another essay, which describes and analyses the interest that secular writers of the far left have shown in Paul’s “universalism” placed over and against Jewish or Israeli particularism. The remaining essays are more polemical in nature and confront the anti-Israeli attacks by Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze.

“Both important and timely, it will be a notable contribution to the ongoing public and intellectual discussion . . . of contemporary antisemitism and [the animus of intellectuals] toward the state of Israel.” —Elhanan Yakira, author of Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust

“Represents a significant contribution to our understanding of both the phenomenon of the “new antisemitism” and a certain strain of French critical theory over the last several decades.” —Maurice Samuels, Yale University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253016843

Book preview

1 Jean Genet’s Anxiety in the Face of the Good

I. Funeral Rites

Anxiety in the Face of the Good

Genet is anti-Semitic. Or rather he plays at being so. As one can imagine, it is hard for him to support most of the theses of anti-Semitism. Deny the Jews political rights? But he doesn’t give a rap about politics. Exclude them from the professions, forbid them to engage in business? That would amount to saying that he is unwilling to rob them, since businessmen are his victims. An anti-Semite who was defined by his unwillingness to rob Jews would be a curious anti-Semite indeed. Does he therefore want to kill them by the million? But massacres don’t interest Genet; the murders of which he dreams are individual ones. What then? When cornered, he declares that he couldn’t go to bed with a Jew. Israel can sleep in peace.

I see only the following in his repugnance: as a victim of pogroms and age-old persecutions, the Jew appears as a martyr. His gentleness, humanism, endurance and sharp intelligence command our respect but cannot give him prestige in the eyes of Genet who, since he wants his lovers to be bullies, cannot be buggered by a victim. Genet is repelled by the Jews because he recognizes that he and they are both in the same situation.¹

To my mind, the first sentence of this long passage—Genet is anti- Semitic—is the most profound and remarkable statement in the entirety of Sartre’s unwieldy masterpiece, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr.² Generally, assertions of this sort are not courageous or profound; rather, they are simply meant to accuse their targets, to out or stigmatize them. Here, something quite different occurs. What is paradoxical about the statement Genet is anti-Semitic is that the predicate appears as something neutral, almost indulgent or at least respectful and objective—though it was made by someone who could not be suspected of harboring or tolerating antisemitism in any form. In 1946, a mere six years before, Sartre had published Anti-Semite and Jew,³ a work that, while hardly flawless, offered a phenomenology of antisemitism of such rigor and depth that it precludes our considering lightly or disdainfully his statement about Genet. Instead, we must view the pronouncement with due seriousness. Does it tell us more about Sartre or Genet? To provide an answer, it is necessary, this one time at least, to take antisemitism on its own terms.

The better to grasp the audacity and significance of this statement—though we shall never be able to understand it fully—our best bet is to sympathize with Sartre here, including his apparent respect or neutrality regarding antisemitism. Adopting this viewpoint momentarily, we see that Sartre is hardly suggesting that Genet’s antisemitism may be excused for reasons external to it, that it can be pardoned because of Genet’s genius, for example. Indeed, we sometimes hear it said that a particular individual’s talent should allow us to see his antisemitism as an excusable defect, insofar as he is the greatest writer of his generation.⁴ What is childish and illusory about such a mythic conception of literature is immediately clear. If we wish to appreciate Sartre’s statement in all its profundity, if we wish to behold its significance as amply as possible, we have to get beyond such feeble arguments.

We reason thus: If we can view the statement Genet is anti-Semitic as something neutral, Genet’s antisemitism must have its origin in some ontological fatality. It becomes, therefore, paradoxical that Sartre waters down this primal, powerful insight with the words, Or rather, he plays at being so. For what difference can there be, for Genet, between being and playing at being? Sartre then wastes some time on proving something perfectly obvious: that Genet’s antisemitism is dissimilar in nature to that motivating Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws or the actual process of mass extermination undertaken by the Nazis—two extreme cases of persecution, one bourgeois, the other barbaric. Genet’s attitude would be different from such manifestations of antisemitism, even though—as Sartre fails to mention—Genet was completely fascinated by Pétain’s militiamen, as well as by Hitler personally.⁵ Sartre then goes even further afield of his original insight by attributing Genet’s explicit repugnance for Jews to the fact that both he and they are victims. Sartre’s error is dual. He is wrong about Genet when he writes: Genet is repelled by the Jews because he recognizes that he and they are both in the same situation, for Genet is not a victim, as Sartre well knows, since the 690 pages of his Saint Genet serve precisely to demonstrate this non-victimhood. And if for the well-intentioned soul the Jew can appear to be a victim, if Sartre perceives in the Jew gentleness, humanism, endurance and sharp intelligence, he simply cannot believe that Genet, whom he just called an antisemite, would also view a Jew that way. If Genet is an antisemite, if such a statement can be value free, if Genet can say—untroublingly—that he could not sleep with a Jew, these facts obtain simply because in Genet’s eyes the Jew embodies goodness; he represents absolute Good. Genet’s antisemitism is thus anxiety provoked by goodness, anxiety felt in the presence of the Good. I refer here not only to the dread of the Good of which Kierkegaard proposes a theological interpretation in The Concept of Anxiety but also to statements made by Sartre himself throughout Saint Genet, when he uses Kierkegaard’s conception of Evil to elaborate on Genet’s three metamorphoses, going from the essential question of sacrifice to the re-inscription of the ethical onto the