There is the thesis, and there is the reception given to it. The unease one feels before this book stems from both the one and the other. Before expressing this unease, it is important to clear away a preliminary point. It does not suffice for an idea to be alarming for it to be false. If those of J.-C. Milner were just and solidly substantiated, one would be bound to salute this work of unveiling. To be clear: it is not because this book aims to prove that Europe is consubstantially anti-Jewish, and that this reality would be, for many of us, properly intolerable, that it is fitting to reject it. Such an objection would partake of a form of wishful thinking: taking one’s desires for realities, refusing to look in the face a truth that would constrain us to heartrending revisions. It is thus, one must acknowledge, whatever the reservations that many of Samuel Huntington’s analyses inspire, that The Clash of Civilizations was often received: all too often, moral recusal stands in for intellectual refutation. Reciprocally, however, a thesis cannot be proclaimed prophetic on the sole pretext that it would be politically unbearable…
The thesis…
Let us begin by retracing the broad lines of the demonstration. A task at once difficult and easy: difficult, because the argumentation, which draws on very diverse sources — from Aristotle to Lacan, by way of history and current events — is at once rich and sinuous; easy, because the complexity of the discourse comes down, all in all, to the unfolding of a single idea.
Milner sets out from what, in his eyes, constitutes the specificity of “the history of the Jewish name in Europe: to have been approached from the angle of the couple ‘problem / solution.’” What characterizes Europe is not so much to have thought the Jewish question (a question calls for an answer, is inscribed in the order of language; the answer may never be closed) as a Jewish problem, calling, like every problem, for a solution — which must necessarily be definitive. European modernity furnished several scansions to the history of this problem, from the Abbé Grégoire (Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs — Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Regeneration of the Jews) to Karl Marx and all the way to the Hitlerite Endlösung (the “final solution”), which, for the author, must be reintegrated into this paradigm. This problem/solution couple, to which the Jewish name is attached, is thus inseparable from the essence of European modernity, such as it emerges in the “rupture of 1789–1815.” Why the choice of this periodization? Because it is in the nineteenth century that “society as the organizing point of the political vision of the world, and no longer good government,” emerges (21). Europe thus passes, imperceptibly and according to differing historical and geographical rhythms, from a political moment in which the word democracy designated a mode of government to one in which it designates a form of society: nothing proves, says Milner, that these two political forms have “anything to do with one another” (41).
Now, this society has as its principle — therein lies its modernity — to think of itself under the regime of the unlimited (23); it is characterized by its structural intolerance of any principle of heterogeneity. The point is to act in all domains “so that the de jure nonexistence of the exception becomes a de facto nonexistence” (23). Modern society, Milner explains, has “the vocation to cover the entire earth and to embrace the totality of beings” (24). More precisely, European history passed from a conception of the political founded on the idea of the “limited whole” — inherited from an Aristotelian conception of politics, laying claim to logic and politics, whose emblematic realization, in the nineteenth century, was the Nation-State — to that of the “unlimited whole” that commands the contemporary articulation of the political. In these two moments of European politics, the “Jewish name” has always represented the element of discordance, of heterogeneity: in the logico-political optic of the “limited wholes,” the Jew incarnates the unlimited (the stateless one, the rootless one, the alien element); in the optic of the unlimited society, he incarnates, on the contrary, the unbearable limit, the problematic “not-all” that comes to introduce discordance into the concert of the universal. “The Jewish name is grasped at the point of collision between all and not-all […]. It appears as the support of an exception, of a limit, of a saying-no to the function of society. The solution belongs to the politicians: beyond circumstantial diversities, the formula is simple: the voice of the no must fall silent, whether by interior transformation of the Jew or by material disappearance of the Jew.” (46)
The other major rupture is that of 1914. Before 1914, Milner specifies, the modern solution to all problems was of a juridical and political order: the definitive solution of the Jewish problem therefore passes through the accession of the Jews to citizenship. The study of this solution is examined in Chapter III. It is clearly inscribed in the wake of the Enlightenment, and promises the Jew his integration into the “cultivated-bourgeois becoming within the framework of a nation-State” (49). This solution, Milner also specifies, makes of the Jewish name a “fossil,” or “a philological object” (50). However, almost at once, Maurrassism casts discredit upon this solution, by appealing to the notions of race and lending the Jew all the traits of unlimitation: “they are everywhere, they are from nowhere” (51). The First World War, well before the advent of National Socialism, sounds the death knell of this first solution, for it redefines the modern paradigm by making it pass from the juridico-political to the reign of technique. Nazism is above all the expression of this overstepping of politics toward the unlimitation of technique. By consequence, it could think the solution of the Jewish problem only in technical terms. The gas chamber is the means of rendering Europe judenrein. In this, Milner specifies, it perfectly succeeded.
The most surprising part of the demonstration comes thereafter. Milner recalls that Europe, in the interwar years, was animated by the project of its unity. Now, this unity can come about only once the Jewish problem is settled — the ultimate obstacle to the project of “the unlimited modern society of which it had been the birthplace” (63). The elimination of the European Jews was therefore the “real secret” of European unification. A secret that must be “firstly forgotten and secondly dissimulated” (64). A secret to be “forgotten”: this would be the deep meaning of the Franco-German reconciliation: “to act as if history had not taken place” (64). A new “European axiomatics” is then elaborated, founded on the refusal of History and the cult of peace. A secret to be “dissimulated”: one must feign, after ’45, that the victory over Hitler is complete and that the Jewish name is no longer a scandal. The birth and the victories of the young State of Israel partook at first of this strategy, by buttressing the European good conscience: “could one believe that the extermination had been accomplished, when in the Near East one could see Jews under arms?” (68). This moment remains, nonetheless, a moment of exception that corresponds to what Milner calls “the instant of ’45” or “the paradigm of ’45”: it rests on the idea that the victory of the Allies over Hitler was complete and just, that victory justifies the war, produces definitive solutions, and that justice can be in the camp of the victors. Now, this paradigm is but an ephemeral moment, a sort of fleeting parenthesis in European history. It is naturally supplanted by another paradigm, “the civilized paradigm,” which is proper to democratic and bourgeois Europe, and founded on entirely other premises: the effacement of history (the clean slate); hatred, not so much of war as of victory (justice is supposed to be found in the camp of the vanquished). This paradigm naturally supplants the ephemeral paradigm of ’45: to the myth of the complete victory over fascism is substituted the myth of pacifist Europe. In parallel, the existence of Israel becomes superfluous (one contents oneself with the “duty of memory,” 75), even embarrassing, for it constantly revives “the instant of ’45”; Israel has the bad taste to be a victorious State; the cult of the Palestinian cause is, on this score, an avatar of the European civilized paradigm (77). This paradigm rejoins what is moreover inscribed in the long history of Europe’s orientalist dream: the demand for an immemorial in which the Jewish presence simply has no place (79); it also accords very well with the calculations of Realpolitik.
Chapter V returns to this project of unlimitation of which Europe is the bearer, going back to the Tocquevillian analyses of democracy: a form of society, whose contours the American president Andrew Jackson had traced, in which powers are multipliable without limit, in which frontiers cease to be valid, and in which the arborescent model of the organization of powers cedes its place to a “rhizomatic” model. Hitler was another stage in this history of unlimitation, if one admits that Hitlerism passes not through a reinforcement but through a dismantling of the Prussian state model (contrary to the hopes initially founded by Carl Schmitt). Modern Europe is the latest avatar of this project of unlimitation, except that it has only a single word to incarnate it, the “word peace,” a word now charged with all the resonances of the unlimited: “social, political, military peace, and even inner peace” (86). Europe in its entirety is no more than a “machine for producing peace” (87). Milner then defines the characters of this European-style peace: it passes through “the complete comprehension of the adversary” (88); it is not a state but a process. For Milner, the very expression “peace process” rings like a paradoxical incongruity, since indeed the very idea of a process ought to presuppose the absence of peace and pertain to the register of war. From then on, the very determination of peace is struck with arbitrariness (where does peace begin, where does war end?), delivered to the good pleasure of “the hermeneut.” As for the Durban conference, it marks the historic encounter between the unlimited of European peace and that of the Muslim jihad, communing in the double demonization of the United States and of Israel. Why Israel? Quite simply because “Israel presents itself as a limited whole, in the form of a nation-State, claiming secure and recognized frontiers. Such a language is reputed intrinsically warlike by united Europe, in which the absence of frontiers constitutes the alpha and the omega of the geopolitics of peace” (97). By this very fact, the State of Israel occupies exactly “the position that the Jewish name occupied in the Europe before the caesura of ’39–’45. That of obstacle” (97); its disappearance thus constitutes a precondition for reconciliation, just as the disappearance of the Jews constituted a necessary condition for European unification. The very name of Israel — designation of a State and of a collectivity — permits a politically useful equivocation, which, however, must not deceive: behind the condemnation of Israel, it is virtually that of all the Jews that is aimed at, as the slogan “One Jew, one bullet” of a Durban demonstration revealed. The Jewish name is that of “those who must die so that the planet may live” (101).
In the last chapter, it remains to interrogate the process that led the Jewish name to occupy this position of intolerable limit for modernity. Milner then ventures a final hypothesis: the hidden link between the modern promotion of sexuality and antisemitism. “Modern society presents itself as the place of the eventual satisfaction of every demand; this is called progress.” Now, the demand of demands is the sexual demand. Quite evidently, the Jew sets himself “athwart” this demand. What is the reason for this? In order to answer this question, one must answer the mystery of Jewish persistence. Now, this is explained by the continuity of study — that cult of study to which modernity once attempted to invent metaphorical substitutes (culture, erudition, etc.). For Milner, however, the cult of study itself refers, upstream, to what is the deep structure of Judaism: that of transmission, founded on what the author calls “quadriplicity”: “the quadriplicity masculine/feminine/parents/child — that is what is designated equally by the serene expression ‘from generation to generation’ and by the troubled question ‘what shall I say to my child?’” (119). To the objection that imposes itself (“all groups of speaking beings encounter quadriplicity”), Milner replies: “the Jewish name is the only name that has been able to rest on quadriplicity alone […]. There is, in the last instance, no other material basis for the persistence of what permits persistence” (119). Now, at a historical moment when society “encounters nothing of it anymore except its own unlimitation” (120), when everything, for modernity, appears transformable at will, negotiable under the double sway of biotechnology and individual demands (the blurring of the limits between the sexes, the dissociation of birth from sexual encounter, etc.), when “the new man is full only of emptiness,” when he is “neither man nor woman” and “has neither father nor mother nor child” (125), the Jew appears decidedly anachronistic, stands as an obstacle “rising up before the fantasies of humanity and exposing himself to the odium [the hatred] of the nations.” Milner prophesies, in conclusion, that “anti-Judaism will be the natural religion of the humanity to come” (126) and that, after having too long devoted to Europe a passion never paid in return, “the first duty of the Jews is to free themselves from Europe” (130).
Such are, summarized in broad strokes, the theses of Milner, set forth in 74 peremptory paragraphs. If one is willing to recognize that style is already an indication of the message, the apodictic form adopted by Milner says much about the nature of a thought that leaves scarcely any room for nuance or doubt, and that hurls assertions with an aplomb as disarming as it is intimidating. Proof of this is the often dithyrambic reception given to this work. Robert Redeker, whom one has known to be more lucid, does not hesitate to praise a “profundity” that “has no equal but The Future of an Illusion” (Tageblatt, 21 November 2003)! Roger-Pol Droit, who ordinarily does not lack discernment, affirms that he has encountered “only five or six times in his life this exceptional incisiveness” (Le Point, December 2003).
Whence comes the trouble felt on reading such a book? First, from Milner’s argumentative lockdown, which gives the impression of elaborating a demonstration more geometrico and smuggles in, as if by fraud, arguments very unequally substantiated. Next, from that mixture of penetration and rambling, of accuracy and delirium, that a thesis comports of which one would be tempted to say what Pascal said of imagination: it “would be the infallible mistress of truth, if it were infallibly so of falsehood.”
The Enlightenment and the Jewish problem: Hitler, child of the Enlightenment…
The first part of the demonstration — the one that runs from the Revolution to European unity — is doubtless the one that poses the most acute difficulties. For two reasons: the first is the line of continuity established between the Jewish problem such as the nineteenth century posed it and the Hitlerite final solution; the second, more polemical still, lies in the Milnerian analysis of the birth certificate of European unity. Milner does not fear to draw a genealogy of antisemitism that takes its origin in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The common point: the grasping of Judaism as a “problem” demanding a “solution.” This was first thought of as political (giving the Jews access to citizenship, at the price of the disappearance of their particularity) before being thought of as technical: the pure and simple elimination of the Jews from Europe. In spite of the ruptures and of the capital rupture constituted by the advent of technique in politics, Hitler would be an heir of the Enlightenment.
None of this is new. Neither, in a general way, the locating of the sources of totalitarianism in the ideology of the Enlightenment — this “dialectic of the Aufklärung” has even become a kind of commonplace, which in no way means that everything is to be rejected in it; nor, more specifically, the link established between the assimilationist project of the Enlightenment, which consists in sacrificing Jewish particularity on the altar of the universal, and the final solution. Both would have in common the working toward the disappearance — moral or physical — of the Jewish fact or, to take up Milner’s insistent Lacanian terminology, of the “Jewish name,” insofar as it represents one of the last obstacles to political totalization (whether the latter be placed under the sign of reason, of the nation, or of race). From assimilation to extermination, the difference would be, at bottom, only one of degree, not of nature. For many years now, alas, fundamentalists of every stripe have been dispensing a message of this kind without taking the measure of its obscenity.
Let us content ourselves with underscoring a few differences that are doubtless “details” in view of the conceptual heights of the work. On the one hand, it is perfectly false that the “Jewish problem” was central for the Enlightenment, as the reading of Milner’s book might lead one to think. The place occupied by Judaism in the course of the Revolution and in the years that followed remains minor. On the other hand, it is true that the question of Jewish citizenship was able to constitute a kind of touchstone of political modernity — but for reasons that have little to do with the supposed obsession the promoters of emancipation are alleged to have had with making the “Jewish name” disappear. The point was to put into effect a modern conception of citizenship and of the State, and a new relation between State and religion. From this perspective, as the historians of emancipation have well shown (see, for example, Robert Badinter, Libres et égaux — Free and Equal), the central question was first of all to redefine the political community by dissociating it from religious belonging, at the price of a privatization of the religious, Judaism becoming a “confession,” which it in no way was in its self-definition. For the best-intentioned of the men of the Enlightenment, the problem was not so much to recognize Jewish specificity (what an anachronism!) as to decide whether or not the Jews were worthy of belonging to the new political community.
One is free to consider, like the proponents of identitarian irredentism, that Judaism lost more than it gained from this new pact; but one cannot distort history to the point of passing off a decision of political integration as a will to annihilation. The ideology of the Enlightenment had scarcely any interest in, or affection for, Judaism properly speaking; it is true that, in erecting “the cultivated bourgeois individual” as a model or regulating idea, this republican form of emancipation was scarcely inclined to anything but contempt toward the traditional forms of Jewish life; but it was of each man — and not specifically of the Jew — that it was asked to rise above his religious anchorings; the hostility of the secular left toward Christianity (from the rigors of revolutionary de-Christianization to republican anticlericalism) was no less rigorous. In any event, the Jews were in no way designated in advance as the targets of a process of annihilation: emancipation was that unique possibility for Jewish individuals to accede, in certain European countries, to political and human recognition, at a time when there was simply no middle term between the ghetto and the City. By the measure of this Milnerian equivalence between integration and negation, is there still a distinction between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, between Zola and Barrès?
Moreover, how can one not be struck by the extremely caricatural image that emerges from this “first solution” on reading the work? Let us pass over the deliberate occultation of the different European experiences, as if the “solution” presented itself in the same terms in Germany, in France, or in Austria-Hungary. But to keep to “Franco-Judaism,” is it just to present so uniform an image of it? Is the frenzied anti-Judaism — not to say antisemitism — of a Simone Weil so representative? On close inspection, French Judaism presented a much more nuanced and varied picture. Self-forgetting or self-hatred could well characterize certain celebrated figures; but the “Jews of affirmation” and the “Jews of interrogation,” to take up Milner’s terminology, were just as present there as the “Jews of negation.” The history of a Léon Blum shows it, but still more surely that of those thousands of anonymous figures who mobilized for Dreyfus or to welcome their brethren from the East; the idea that “every good Israelite was necessarily antisemitic” is yet another of those generalizations of which Milner is fond, but a particularly insulting one. How many great European Jews must be consigned to oblivion in the light of this discredit cast upon this political solution that would be merely the antechamber of Auschwitz: Mendelssohn? Rosenzweig? Durkheim? Freud? Einstein? Lévinas? (Troubling concomitance of Milner’s book and the testament of Benny Lévy, Être juif — Being Jewish — which rings like a farewell to the dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem hoped for by the author of Totalité et infini — Totality and Infinity.)
In any event, to place on the same plane a project of racial extermination and what was an ideal of human emancipation shared by the greater part of the Jews (to transcend the barriers of origin and of faith so as to accede to republican equality and fraternity) — whatever the setbacks and the disillusionments may have been — is an intellectual facility far too scabrous. The argument is, all things considered, as out of place as the comparison — murmured here and there — between mixed marriage and the final solution, or between abortion and genocide.
Genesis of European unity: a smell of gas…
Second panel of the demonstration. Since Hitler is merely the radicalization of the project of the Enlightenment, it must indeed be that he expressed what this “democratic Europe” had that was fundamentally “criminal.” First moment of the syllogism: the author affirms that Europe was obsessed, in the interwar years, with its unity, which is at once true and false. True: the projects of European unity or, at the very least, of reconciliation, proliferated among the great minds, the writers, the philosophers, after the slaughter of ’14 (see, for example, Pascal Dethurens: Écriture et culture. Écrivains et philosophes face à l’Europe. 1918–1950 — Writing and Culture: Writers and Philosophers Facing Europe, 1918–1950). However, outside the coteries of intellectuals and their great pan-European high masses, the political and social logics continued massively to be inscribed within national mental frameworks. Second moment of the syllogism: in the European consciousness, the Jews are an obstacle, and even the obstacle par excellence to this reconciliation. Here, the reasoning verges on delirium. On closer inspection, the proof of this appalling truth is… Jean Giraudoux. On the strength of an indeed antisemitic text in which the latter (a great partisan of Franco-German friendship, but certainly not of fusion) complains of the laxity of the French immigration services, accused of opening France to “a horde of Ashkenazim, escaped from the Polish or Romanian ghettos,” Milner deduces that “the name is uttered: the obstacle to the complete opening of the frontiers between European countries is the Ashkenazim” (62).
Let us pass over the fact that this Giralducian dream of a “complete opening of the frontiers” never existed except in Milner’s interpretations. The latter, sensing well what his reasoning may have of the fragile, anticipates the objection: “Giraudoux, it will be said, but Giraudoux is nothing. Not at all — Giraudoux is France, its republican school, its rue d’Ulm, its Quai d’Orsay, its literature, its Third Republic, the beauty of its language […]. He is also more than France; he is the encounter of Siegfried and the Limousin — the bringing into consonance of the two banks of the Rhine. He is Europe, such as it finds itself impossible in 1939 and such as it will find itself possible after 1945” (62–63). An impressive tour de force: to make his thesis accepted, Milner needs to erect into an allegory this poor Giraudoux, who can do nothing about it. Now, the latter has no sympathy for the Jews. Therefore, he regards them as the sole obstacle to the opening of the European frontiers. Now, Giraudoux is at once France and Europe; therefore (third moment of the paranoiac syllogism) Europe dreams of annihilating the Jews to celebrate its unity: this, no doubt, is what certain critics have characterized as an implacable demonstration. How did one not think of it sooner? Of course, one could have chosen other symbols of France. Giraudoux is France? So is Pétain. But perhaps also de Gaulle and Jean Moulin, Robert Desnos, Jean Cavaillès, or those thousands of anonymous “Righteous”? Why Giraudoux rather than Péguy? One has the emblems one can, or the emblems one wishes. Giraudoux is Europe? Truth to tell, perhaps no more than Thomas Mann, who, in the interwar years, lambasted antisemitism and meditated, in a magisterial novelistic synthesis, on the Jewish roots of civilization. Perhaps no more than Nietzsche himself, who regarded the Jews as the only true Europeans, precisely because they were not subject to the rabies nationalis and because they incarnated an authentic cosmopolitanism (Thoughts on the Dear Europeans)? It is true that, in this last case, one would have to establish a distinction between Nietzsche’s philosophical anti-Judaism and his proven philosemitism, which would entail many dialectical complications, sometimes vexing for the purity of the demonstration.
It would perhaps be out of place to raise this more general objection: if one considers the European intellectual elite aspiring to reconciliation and unity, it is contrary to plain historical truth that the European — or “Europeanist” — writers and philosophers should have, as one man, decreed that the Jews constituted the major obstacle to European unity. The centrality of the “Jewish problem” appears in privileged fashion in the most reactionary currents — which precisely are nationalist and anti-European, whether it be a question of pan-Germanism in Germany or of the Action française, not exactly engaged in Franco-German reconciliation… And if it is only too true that great figures of French literature let themselves be contaminated by antisemitism — in a form often more worldly than frenzied: Romain Rolland, Giraudoux, Gide on occasion — and are more representative than Céline or Brasillach, it is no less factitious to erect these figures as the expression of the essence of France and of Europe for the needs of a demonstration. But one understands the necessity of this proof by Giraudoux, since everything is placed within an ultimate horizon: to demonstrate that Hitler accomplished the unavowable wish of Europe, to arrive at this striking formulation, beautiful in its horror, and to which a great intellectual fortune is promised: the peace to come in Europe would forever bear “the indelible mark of Zyklon B” (68). It postulates that the well-kept secret of European unity is to have been rendered possible thanks to the extermination of the Jews. One is led to believe that these were in fact the true obstacle to European unity; in all logic, Jean Monnet ought to have signed Hitler an acknowledgment of debt. Would the antisemites have been right? Milner does not go so far as to say so; one would almost be surprised.
If Europe constructs itself after ’45, it is therefore not because it awakens from a nightmare of fifty million dead, as the naïve might imagine. Post hoc, propter hoc: the succession is worth a causality: the ideology of “never again,” for Milner, was possible precisely because Europe was rid of its Jews. As for the relations of the European construction with the Cold War… As far as one knows, it is in the West that Europe was built, and it is above all Eastern Europe that paid the most crushing tribute to the genocide, to the point of becoming, indeed, almost judenrein. A flagrant contradiction? It takes more than that to throw Milner off: it suffices to add that the builders of Europe “already knew that, in the long run, one would have to go toward the East” (63), and that the terrain was henceforth free, thanks to Hitler, that they had nothing more to fear because “the ugly and sickly horde had been gassed” (63). Robert Schuman, Simone Veil, must indeed have been much relieved. And what lucidity the partisans of the Common Market had, in foreseeing the collapse of the Eastern bloc. One remains dumbfounded before the aplomb with which such enormities are hurled.
Everything is in everything, and reciprocally: antisemitic pansignificance
Dumbfounded, too, before the turn of certain reasonings, of which one knows not whether they pertain to sophistic virtuosity or to paranoia. Examples, among others? When it is necessary to show that, under the Third Republic, “each national definitive solution can be endangered by the influx of Jews coming from countries where the definitive solution has not been put into place” (50), Milner spares no effort: “the Crémieux decree is also made to dissuade the Algerian Jews from coming to settle in continental France” (50). It would certainly be out of place to recall the exemplary role of Crémieux — doubtless an antisemitic Jew — in the creation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle; the generosity of his project (which, initially, the historian Richard Ayoun assured me, included the Muslims); or the fact that French naturalization, inscribed in the logic of the decrees of the Revolution, was a demand of the majority of the Algerian Jews, impatient to be removed from the humiliating status of dhimmis.
The examples could be multiplied, by reason of the very principle that animates the Milnerian argumentation. As in all totalitarian discourses, whether they present themselves as Marxist or Lacanian in inspiration, the argument often takes the form of “unfalsifiable” statements, because they integrate the objections in advance, whether by disqualification of the adversary (relegated to the side of right-thinking conformism — the modern form of ideological alienation in Marxist language, or of “resistance” in psychoanalytic language) or by a skillful use of the universal reversibility of proofs. We have just had an example: not to give citizenship to the Jews would naturally have lent itself to the accusation of antisemitism; to give the Jews access to citizenship likewise signifies working toward their disappearance or their setting-aside.
The other most flagrant example is given a little further on, when it is a question of Europe’s relation to its own past, to the genocide of the Jews, and to the State of Israel. For Milner, the paradigm of ’45 imposed the belief that Hitlerism had been completely vanquished, whence the provisional utility of the State of Israel and France’s solidarity with the young State. As bad luck would have it, this fiction is valid only for France; England does not support the creation of Israel after the war. No matter: it is because “the English had the feeling of having effectively fought and vanquished Hitler, and that they therefore had nothing to prove” (69). But the Soviet Union, a no less triumphant victor, also helps the young Jewish State. And the United States, despite the opposition of Marshall, a great ally of the Europeans moreover… In other words, this explanatory schema explains everything and explains nothing.
The treatment of memory is of a piece. Milner never ceases to explain that the best means of forgetting the shameful secret of the European foundation (the extermination of the Jews) was to recuse history. The École des Annales, in rejecting event-based history, would partake of this project, as would the Europeanism of Giscard: Milner does not hesitate, moreover, to twist a sentence from the presidential inaugural address (“here the book of time opens with the vertigo of its blank pages,” p. 64), feigning not to see that the “blank pages” in question are those of the future not yet written, and not those of the past. But what has become of Willy Brandt’s gesture before the monument to the dead of the Warsaw ghetto? But, the naïve one will object, did not the most spectacular advances of European unification coincide with the haunting, omnipresent invocation of the “duty of memory”? What matter! Milner will soon explain that, “one myth driving out the other, the myth of Europe renders useless the myth of the absolute defeat of fascism. […] In parallel, the material existence of Israel becomes superfluous. The function of transmutation it ensured is dematerialized to such a point that the futile gesture of duty suffices for it: the duty of memory” (75) — a subtle form of forgetting. Not to remember: pernicious amnesia. To remember: programmed amnesia. Milner’s principle is simple: every action hostile to the Jews is anti-Jewish; every action that might seem favorable to the Jews masks in reality the will to efface the Jews.
In passing, Milner does not omit to place Mitterrand within this equation — a Mitterrand delicately summarized in the following terms: “friend of Bousquet and denouncer of the ‘Jewish lobby.’” One may formulate the severest judgments on Mitterrand’s bad company, his political prevarications before and after the war; on condition of not forgetting that he was one of the most sincere friends of the State of Israel, the first French president to break the insidious boycott of that State, and also the one, of all politicians, who denounced in the firmest terms the villainous 1975 UN vote equating Zionism with Nazism. Curiously, it is the man of the “paradigm of ’45,” de Gaulle, who put an end to the Franco-Israeli alliance in 1967, and it is “the friend of Bousquet” who broke the diplomatic and moral isolation of the Hebrew State by going to Jerusalem. All these incontestable facts do not square with Milner’s thesis: it is normal that he should pass over them in silence, for the beauty of his “implacable” demonstration…
Milner and modernity: the thought of blocs…
Must one go further? Yes, in spite of everything. The most aberrant has been dealt with; it remains to say a few words about the elements that open the field of a possible discussion. For lack of space, I shall concentrate on a few precise points.
Absolutely irrefutable seems to me the contradiction pointed out by Milner, but also by many others — Alain Finkielkraut made of it a very early diagnosis as far back as his book Comment peut-on être croate? (How Can One Be Croatian?) — between the modalities of the European construction (founded, globally, on a postnational ideology) and the very definition of Israel as a Jewish State. The idea that there is a “counter-tempo” (128) between the Zionists, who managed to construct a nation-State at the very moment when the European governments were renouncing it, is an incontestable given of the misunderstanding. Whence the growing contention not only between Israel and the European radical left but also between the Israeli nation-State and a certain political liberalism, quick to imagine that what holds for Europe is necessarily transposable, here and now, to the Middle East. The radical anti-Zionists lay claim to a kind of avenging absolutism and are ready to sacrifice real Jews to their humanitarian mystique; the liberals, with the arrogance of nations sure of the morrow who have forgotten that history is tragic, hasten to invite this State to transcend the anachronism of its ethno-national model (see the recent intervention of Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books, 23 October 2003). Whence the recent, and disquieting, favor of the binational option in certain sectors of “pro-Palestinian” opinion — an option that would signify de facto, as some know and others do not, the realization, in time, of a Greater Palestine. Still, in order to be authorized to deplore it, one would have to denounce the senseless, morally unjustifiable, and politically tragic choice of the colonization of the occupied territories — of which Milner does not say a word.
No less incontestable seems to me the antinomy between a modernity that would define itself through a logic of the unlimitation of desires and the Jewish ethos. It could be formulated otherwise, more simply no doubt: the modern ethos answers to a logic of autonomy; moral and political norms obey more and more decisions of society and less and less categorical imperatives and transcendent demands; the traditional Jewish ethos, for its part, pertains to a logic of heteronomy, not soluble in the autonomization of moral norms.
Granted. But then? The first position — the disqualification of Zionism — is a calling into question of the national existence of the Jews that concerns the politics of States; the second — the place of Judaism in the process of secularization — pertains rather to the intellectual and moral antinomy between Jewish normativity and modernity, but it in no way passes through a desire for the elimination of the Jews. In other words, there is, whatever impression the work may leave, no necessary link between “Durban thought” and what Milner seems tempted to call “Raël thought,” after the name of that futurist sect that recently distinguished itself by its celebration of cloning; no necessary link between a Third-Worldist universalism and what Fukuyama calls the dream of a “posthumanity” engendered by the biotechnological utopia. In any case, each of these tendencies of modernity answers a different question of the contemporary world and equally demands an appropriate reflection. One will always be able to find tactical alliances between these two tendencies, but nothing authorizes conflating them. Anti-Zionism and antisemitism today attain heights in States and cultures (the Arab-Muslim world) that could not be more hostile to that “Raëlian” humanity founded on the decomposition or the redistribution of family and sexual hierarchies; conversely, one can very well imagine that the forms of “supermodernity” affect entire swaths of Israeli society and of the Jewish world insofar as they belong, too, to this logic of metaphysical uprooting. The necessity of distinguishing these two tendencies does not have as its aim to reassure — it is not necessarily comfortable to fight on several fronts — but, on the contrary, to better delineate the challenges. It is not by firing on everything that moves, and by placing phenomena as complex as these under the undifferentiated sign of the hatred of the Jews, that one will advance one’s cause. This confusion is at the source of the patent feeling of argumentative slippage in Chapter VI, which answers a question of considerable complexity (the reasons for the permanence of the Jewish “scandal”) by resorting to a sexual grid of interpretation that could not be more reductive and univocal.
Other studies, infinitely more searching and nuanced, have made the archaeology of this modernity. Marcel Gauchet, in Le Désenchantement du monde (The Disenchantment of the World), furnishes remarkable analyses of the religious sources of Western modernity and of the Christian foundations of secularization; Rémi Brague, in Europe, la voie romaine (Europe: The Roman Way), has made us advance capitally in the comprehension of European identity and of the tension between a Europe that is heir (notably to the Law and to the Jews) and a Marcionite Europe, quick to unburden itself of the Law and to celebrate, in the name of a theology of Love deprived of all mediation, its nuptials with itself — a temptation, ever vigorous, ever latent, because it lies at the very heart of the dialectic of modernity and of its Christian foundations. An abyss separates these subtle analyses from those Milner proposes, for they strive to grasp the modern process for what it is: a play of tensions, of contradictions, of interminable negotiations among forces that pull in opposite directions. No society can live under the regime of unlimitation and in the absolute recusal of the relation to the Law, and certainly not of that famous “quadriplicity” that Milner places in the foreground of his approach. On reading such a book, it can seem that European society is wholly plunged into the worst anomie: no more father, no more filiation, no more law, no more hierarchy, simply an unlimited demand for sex, for fantasmatic gratification, and for humanitarian effusion.
It is one thing to point out a modern tropism that tends to the dissolution of the norm; it is another to act as if this process collided with no counterweight, no brake, no regulation (or even cyclical forms of reconstruction and restoration), and described the whole of modern European culture. Let us add, moreover, for good measure, that even if this process were to reign without rival in Europe, it would find in Islam an adversary altogether more formidable than Judaism, if one is willing to admit that the expansion of Muslim rigorism — radically heteronomous — is today the principal antimodern political force and disposes of significantly more numerous “divisions” than Judaism… If Europe were solely what Milner says it is, it would not debate as vigorously as it does the integration of Turkey (whatever the outcome of this debate, it exists); there would have been no law on laïcité; the principle of multiculturalism would have been adopted as a matter of course. Europe is constantly and constitutively on the crest line between the affirmation of a normative ideal (or of a Law) and the abandonment to a logic of the unlimited. One will not emerge from this tension by outrageously simplifying its data. Clemenceau said: “the Revolution is a bloc.” There was something true in that: ’93 is not an unfortunate accident of the revolutionary epic, it was from the outset one of its possibilities; but “the Tiger” was profoundly wrong, for he made himself blind to the play of possibles which, starting from identical premises, could deploy itself just as well in the direction of liberal democracy as in that of the Terror. For Milner, it is to be feared that Europe, too, is “a bloc.” And Judaism too, moreover: as if it were not, since at least the Middle Ages, since Maimonides and doubtless beyond, heir of Europe. As if every Jewish consciousness were not the bearer of Europe and of the European genius. As if Zionism itself were not profoundly European — the author is indeed forced to recognize it (128) — heir of this idea of the nation-State, to which Milner nonetheless seems to grant some merit. As if Milner and his book were not, for better and for worse, full of Europe. For the philosopher, what counts is only this face-to-face between a Europe taken en bloc and a Judaism taken en bloc. Wherein are lost all the nuances and even the most elementary distinctions. Europe is here malleable at will, subjected to hallucinatory extrapolations. If Milner wished only to be a satirist, one would gladly smile at his vitriolic portrait of a certain pacifist inanity (“The good European is at once pacific in his conduct and pacified in his soul,” 86); but his discourse wishes to be the unveiling of the ultimate and hidden meaning of the European being, and his offhandedness sometimes makes one shudder. One can and one must think every possible ill of the complacency from which Saddam Hussein benefited, up until the Gulf War, on the part of certain European (and American) elites — the compromises of some, the silence or the indulgence of others; one will never tire of pointing out the incredible disproportion of figures and of media treatment between the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims of the dictatorship and the Palestinian victims of Israel. But can one say just anything for all that? When, to illustrate his axiom according to which, in the “civilized paradigm,” “the vanquished becomes in himself and forever the Just, were he the worst of tyrants,” Milner goes so far as to take the example of Saddam Hussein, affirming that, defeated, the latter “passed for the incarnation of the suffering Just” (72), one really wonders whether everything is permitted in matters of polemic. For, apart from the most demented fringes of the extreme left, the extreme right, and the most frenzied partisans of the Arab-Muslim cause, one really does not see a single European testimony to this canonization of the Iraqi tyrant. An isolated example? In no way. I defy anyone, on reading certain pages of Milner’s book, to determine whether what he means by “Europe” is incarnated in his discourse in 1°) the policy of the States of the European Union; 2°) European public opinion; 3°) the neo-progressivism of altermondialist and Third-Worldist inspiration; 4°) the modernist and nihilist orientation of European society placed under the aegis of technique. Or rather — always for the needs of the cause — it is all four at once or alternately. In its political aspects — from Realpolitik to leftist utopias — social and cultural, even scientific, the Europe according to Milner is no more than an immense Durban conference.
Already Europe scarcely exists. But the Jews seem to exist scarcely any more in Milner’s construction. To tell the truth, it has long been a question only of the “Jewish name” — a term whose Lacanity struggles to mask its vagueness. In this immense fresco of the relation between Europe and the Jews, the latter are paradoxically the great absentees. I mean the concrete Jews, the Jews as actors of History, agents of their becoming, and not this algebraic formulation that reduces them to being nothing other than the law of “quadriplicity” and the form par excellence of the Name/No of the Father. No account is taken of the manner in which the Jews themselves — sometimes under impulsion from the outside, but also on their own initiative (Zionism, Bundism) — were led to rethink their identity, by placing in the foreground, according to ever-shifting dosages, confession, ethnicity, culture, or nation.
The State of Israel, too, scarcely exists, paradoxically, in Milner’s thought. One would search in vain for the slightest connection between the evolution of the relation of Europe and Israel and the very evolution of the Zionist project: since Europe is, by all necessity and for ontological reasons, devoted to the disappearance of Israel, everything is, from then on, mere play of masks. It is useless to make the difference between those who desire, explicitly or slyly, the disappearance of a Jewish State and those Europeans who found their hopes on the mutual recognition of a Jewish State and a Palestinian State, between those who demonize Sharon because they hate Israel and those who criticize Sharon’s policy because they hope to see Israel find again the path of international legality. It is better to conflate the two in one and the same logic, the one that makes it so that “Oslo or no Oslo, continental Europe cannot but desire the disappearance of Israel” (73). The idea that Israel, whatever the difficulties of the moment, still has friends in Europe does not seem even thinkable to Milner — still less the idea that one might be at once a friend of Zionism, a friend of Israel, and consider that the policy of colonization was and remains a catastrophe. There is therefore no difference between those who let their hatred of Israel speak and those who, in good faith, wish to introduce a little reason into the political and religious passions of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
One also understands the discredit that surfaces, from one end of this book to the other, upon “the peace process,” which is not only the object of a skillful intellectual deconstruction but which is also illuminated in the light of political ulterior motives. Thus, “Oslo was nothing other than this: one of the last circumstances in which the Jew tries to make himself European” (76), significantly in one of those Scandinavian countries that were the first to have “said no to History” (76). Everything happens as if the fine conceptual clockwork had, among other things, the object of elaborating a philosophical justification for a political irredentism. In a later interview (Actualité juive, 11 December 2003), Milner uses more direct language, decreeing that “all the peace plans, including the one that has just been presented in Geneva, are made to be inscribed in the long European tradition of treaties of perpetual peace […]. The question that Israel still poses to itself today is to know whether these plans will receive a ‘good mark’ from enlightened opinion in Europe […]. History is too serious a thing to be made by means of ‘good marks.’” The Israeli patriots who worked for years on this project will appreciate the finesse of the homage; but it is certain that the Israeli nationalist and religious extreme right does not have these coquetries.
In hatred of Europe, or the secret alliance of radicalisms
Two more clarifications.
A book such as Milner’s is inscribed in a tradition of radicality which, beyond political affiliations, unites antimodernist conservatism and certain currents of the intellectual extreme left. A certain “’68 thought” — to take up the title of the controversial essay by Ferry and Renaut — once set about making us believe that the schools of the Republic were concentration camps, that advertising and the television news were manipulations more insidious but no less totalitarian than Stalinist propaganda; in short, that the difference between democracy and fascism was fallacious. At a certain altitude, everything indeed ends up resembling everything else. This thought, which one believed discredited by the antitotalitarian experience, is in the process of being reborn in various forms; and one is struck to see resurge, in authors as apparently different as Milner and Giorgio Agamben, one and the same obsession with the latent terror (the “criminal penchants”) that would govern, sometimes unbeknownst to it, the democratic order. (Curiously, R. Redeker, who has often lucidly denounced certain aspects of Agamben’s thought, does not seem to see this kinship.) I know not whether the reference to Foucault, common to certain analyses of Agamben and Milner, explains this type of conceptual drift, which tends to make of every democracy a crypto-fascism. One perceives, in any case, in such a thought, if not the return of a “sense of History,” at least the obsessive feeling of an inexorable determinism, before which human freedom and reason find themselves entirely disarmed: the biopolitical logic of Agamben, the structure of unlimitation in Milner, with their respective corollaries (extension of the domain of the ban, elimination of the Jew), have replaced the ancient fatality, the Marxist necessity, even the thought of the conspiracy (all those forms of “diabolical causality”). This cultural determinism also brings Milner’s work close, from an entirely different perspective, to that of the historian Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler’s Willing Executioners). The gradation, in a few years, is no less notable: whereas Daniel Goldhagen contented himself with imputing to Germanic culture an “eliminationist” antisemitism that long preceded the Hitlerite genocide, orienting the whole of German cultural history toward the final solution, Milner extends this exterminatory finality to the whole of democratic Europe and prolongs it down to our own day. So much the worse for historical discernment, provided that the intellectual construction have the allure of a beautiful theorem.
More fundamentally still, one is struck by the power of an anti-European resentment that, all in all, is scarcely different — beyond the political antipodes — from the one that, at Durban, made the indistinct and exclusive indictment of Israel and the United States, without sparing Europe, its colonial and slaveholding past. It is one of the most troubling aspects of this reading: this indictment, one-sided and one-directional, directed against the Western world, reveals, in fine, an affinity between its logic and a thought it justly abominates. The indistinct “Durbanization” of Europe betrays the unconscious “Durbanization” of Milnerian thought. One imagines with dread what an anti-Zionist Milner would be. Or rather, one knows it only too well.
Those who, like Claude Lanzmann, praise the radicality of Milner’s thought (“this courage is precisely that of the most radical thought […] for the sapper Milner takes everything at the root,” Marianne, 10–16 November 2003) would do well, indeed, to take note that it is this same purely formal radicality, foreign to all the distinctions, fine or less fine, that found political reason, which is in the service of anti-Zionist hatred. Let us know how to hear these “radical” thinkers of the other shore (infinitely more numerous, let us grant). They explain that Zionism is by essence a racist and expansionist ideology; they have scarcely any difficulty in finding, in the vast corpus of Zionist literature, the wherewithal to feed their indictment; it suffices for them to erect this or that doctrinaire as the emblem of Israel, to pin down this or that damning sentence of a political leader and make of it the abridgment of Israeli history — past, present, and to come — in short, to bury the complexity of the historico-political processes, as well as the internal diversity of the social, political, and human reality of Israel, beneath the empire of a single idea. They continue by explaining that the birth of Israel is founded — like that of post-’45 Europe according to Milner — on an “original sin” (the expulsion of the Palestinians here, the genocide of the Jews for Europe); they go on to develop at leisure analogies between Zionism and apartheid and, for the most refined among them, between Zionism and Nazism (does not the distinction between Jews and non-Jews play a role in both systems?). Let us wager, too, that a few decontextualized biblical or Talmudic citations will be able, for the most intrepid, to prolong this critical archaeology so as to show that all the crimes imputed to Zionism betray a more fundamental barbarism, inscribed in the letter of the Law and in the book of Joshua (such is the elegance of a Louis Sala-Molins, after having been that of a Roger Garaudy). Contemptible? No doubt. But those who suffer, like many of us, to see this type of wild and specious genealogy prosper, applied to the complexity of the Israeli-Arab conflict, ought to think twice before saluting Milner’s radicality. I am waiting for someone to explain to me the difference between those who, in all fraternity, Nazify Israel, and the one who, learnedly, makes of European democracy a soft version of Hitlerism.
Last note, personal and melancholy…
To reject Milner’s theses is not to give proof of an inconsiderate optimism. I had no need of this book to take the measure, long ago, of the fact that, as soon as it was a question of Israel, delirium lay in wait even for those who seemed best protected from it. At the hour at which I write these lines, I have just heard, on a public-service program known for its seriousness and its moderation (L’Esprit public, 13 May 2004), a commentator, Roland Cayrol, declare that Sharon is a man who “conducts the most madly brutal policy that one has seen at the head of a State in decades” (sic). Did it not suffice for him to denounce the political brutality of Ariel Sharon? Roland Cayrol is nothing of an antisemite, but the extravagance of his hyperboles testifies to the precariousness of rational discourse as soon as it attaches itself to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Whence the double humiliation felt by a Jew who espouses the positions of the peace camp: that of seeing the reprobation of a policy take on the proportions of a raving; and that of having to lose so much energy proving that Sharon is not Pol Pot, even as he condemns his policy. There is no conflict that leads, so quickly, to rubbing shoulders with the regions of myth and of madness (gentle, when it is a question of certified humanists, of seasoned republicans, and of well-intentioned liberals; furious, when it is a question of unabashed antisemites). This is why I am not shocked by the formula, already old, and taken up by Milner, that makes of Israel “the Jew of the nations” — on condition, however, of not giving this expression an exclusively exterminatory acceptation… But one does not combat one simplism with another simplism. For years the atmosphere has been poisoned by those who, on both sides, obstinately see in the Israeli-Arab conflict nothing but the confrontation of a hyperbolic Victim and an absolute Executioner, by those who set their golden legend against the black legend of the enemy. We are dying, today, of this empire of the fable and of the melodrama in political analysis.
Today, many European Jews are anxious — less for themselves than for the future of their children. Many come to wonder, at times, whether they will still have their place in the Europe of tomorrow. Milner’s book meets this anguish, but casts upon it a fallacious light, a deceptive rationality, and what is more, with an apparatus of argumentative intimidation that recalls the ideological terrorism of the years of lead. One of the most serious grievances the author of these lines could address to such a book is not so much to have expressed the anxieties too often left unspoken before the dazzling surge of antisemitism; it is, on the contrary, to risk, by its excesses and its wanderings, disqualifying the very expression of this anguish. I fear that the Milner effect may be, all things considered, comparable to the Fallaci effect. For all those — of whom I am one — whom the danger of Islamist penetration in Europe alarms, the firebrand of Oriana Fallaci, far from being a support, is a disaster: in abandoning itself to a hateful and phobic rhetoric, it casts a suspicion of racism over any rational and humanist defense of European culture. I imagine without difficulty that there are sincere defenders of the Palestinian cause for whom the anti-Jewish ravings of a Roger Garaudy or an Israel Shamir are, analogously, a calamity rather than a comfort. To be sure, the debate with Milner is situated at an entirely other intellectual height, and one could not compare the lower depths to which the aforementioned pamphleteers confine us with the demand for thought that a work like Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (The Criminal Penchants of Democratic Europe) solicits. But the grievance is only the more warranted: it is precisely because Milner is a demanding thinker that his extrapolations are irresponsible.
Difficult days are in preparation. We shall have to, all at once, combat those who make a profession of not seeing “the antisemitism that is coming” (Finkielkraut), its new forms and its new masks, and refuse to lapse into that spirit of system which is the sublimated form of Paranoia (and sometimes of contempt). We shall have to, at once, before the new forms of antisemitism, refuse the facilities of “circumstantialism” (the trivialization of antisemitism as a mere repercussion of the Israeli-Arab conflict, of Israeli policy, or of social exclusion) and the temptation of essentialism (a consubstantially antisemitic Europe). In short, to refuse all forms of single-track thought. The paradox of single-track thought, indeed, is that there are several of them: that of Le Monde diplomatique and of Politis is one; the “Masada complex,” which reigns supreme in certain communal milieus, is another.
We have yet to draw all the consequences of the political revolution represented by Zionism. The first: to have repatriated the Jewish people into History, with all that this comports of grandeur, but also of risk — in any case, of responsibility. The second: to oblige us to articulate fidelity to our political and national communities (henceforth defined no longer as a destiny, but as a choice: since the birth of Israel, every Jew is free, if he so desires, to no longer be French or European) and the forms of our solidarity with a State in which the future of the Jewish people of which we claim to be a part is now at stake. On this crest line between the care of the self and responsibility before History, in this delicate, and often uncomfortable, arbitration among our duties, it is more than ever necessary to arm oneself with discernment. Something tells me that, to meet these challenges, books like those of Jean-Claude Milner will not be of great help to us.