A strange apostle: reflections on the Badiou question

Penitent or impenitent, our ex-Maoists are decidedly inspired by the Jewish question. In 2004, Benny Lévy left us with a despairing testament, from which it emerged that the Jews must bid farewell to Europe, that empire of the void, in order to devote themselves to Talmudic study alone; Jean-Claude Milner, for his part, treated us to a masterpiece of speculative paranoia, from which it emerged that the Jews must bid farewell to Europe, because the annihilation of the “Jewish name” was inscribed in the genetic code of modern democracy. In 2005, Alain Badiou closed the ranks with a reflection on the Jewish question, from which one may conclude that Europe would do well to forget the Jews, or at the very least not to yield to the philosophical and political intimidation of the “Jewish word”¹.

Is it even a book? The little volume is composed, for a quarter, of an article by Cécile Winter, an abridged version of an essay reputed to be unpublishable (even at the Vieille Taupe?), and for half of excerpts from books already published elsewhere (L’Éthique, the Saint-Paul, a novel). What remains is an unpublished introduction, an old newspaper article, a press interview, a film review, a lecture. A sense of urgency must surely have driven the author to publish such a patchwork on a “question” he claims not to enjoy broaching (p. 23).

At the origin of this project lies the (rueful) sentiment that the word “Jew” now plays the role of an “exceptional signifier,” a “destinal, even sacred signifier” (p. 9), which installs it, along with “the community that lays claim to it” (p. 10), in “a paradigmatic position with respect to the field of values” (p. 10). If there is a coherence to be sought in this collection, it lies in the repudiation of this preeminence, judged at once philosophically illegitimate and politically harmful. In a few words, the aim is to: 1/ deconstruct the predicate as such; 2/ deconstruct the moral or metaphysical valorization of the word “Jew”; 3/ denounce the political intimidation that proceeds from this intellectual usurpation. The essence of Badiou’s argument can thus be summed up in simple and dreadfully familiar terms: Judeocentrism leads to the worst².

Thesis no. 1. The fact that the Nazis designated their victims as Jews in no way authorizes us to ratify, after the fact, the political institution of this predicate. The thesis is simple, but the reasoning adulterated: from the fact that Nazism made the predicate “Jew” the watchword of a genocidal project, Badiou deduces that it is the inventor of the said predicate³. Granted, he concedes, “there are Jews” (p. 23)⁴, people who, “generally for religious reasons, maintain that this predicate is the registration of a communal Covenant with the archetypal transcendence of the Other” (p. 12). But nothing authorizes us to endorse this “religious fable” (p. 13). This discourse finds a caricatural extension in the appended essay by Cécile Winter — who, by the admission of her friend Badiou himself, “maintains with the question of the ‘Jewish name’ an intimate quarrel of rare violence” (p. 18), which lends the exposition an interesting neurotic backdrop⁵. To Claude Lanzmann, who affirms that “the Jews of Europe were exterminated as Jews,” Cécile Winter does not fear to retort: “Could one express the Nazi point of view any better?”, adding: “it was their very Idea, the Jew, and then it was their work, first to give body to this idea […] and then, once the Jews were properly defined, to spot and mark them, gather them and finally destroy them” (p. 103). In short, “it is Hitler who made of the name ‘Jew’ an Idea, his great Idea, and thus a signifying totality. It is he who did the work of stirring up, for this purpose, a mythico-communitarian-racial mush. And now, so it seems, every single one of us is duty-bound to accept it, even to venerate it, to find it grandiose, untouchable and indisputable” (p. 104)!

The only consistent anti-Nazism would therefore be, quite to the contrary, to refuse this new “master signifier” inherited from Nazism and now instrumentalized by the new masters of the world, the “new Aryans” (p. 124) — for those who have not yet understood: the Americans, the Westerners, the Israelis, all drawing the colonial and pecuniary “benefits” (obviously!) from this providential genocide that served the dark Zionist designs so marvelously (pp. 112–114).

Cécile Winter is not a vulgar Holocaust denier: what she contests is not the crime but its qualification. One might nevertheless be entitled to wonder whether the very word genocide is still justified, since the word designates, until further notice, the assassination of a human group, a people, a genos. The foundation of this neo-denialism is a nominalism: for Badiou-Winter, the word Jew covers no substance of its own. The philosopher and his epigone seem to ignore that the notion of “Jewish people” did not await the murderous sponsorship of Hitler⁶. That at the foundation of this self-definition there is a “grand narrative” in which history and legend intermingle; that secularization at first introduced “complication” into Jewish identity, and that Zionism subsequently gave it a new scope, in consonance with the contemporary construction of European national myths — who would deny it? But what of it? Unless one imagines that the Jews are the only ones to ground their collective consciousness in founding myths, to believe that one can, in place of the principal interested parties, define what they are or are not betrays a very strange contempt for the facts, not to say a colonial paternalism — which is rather the height of irony for anti-imperialist thinkers…

Let us nonetheless grant Badiou the merit of consistency: the philosopher, a stranger to historical logics, is fascinated by the mathematical model of truth; his negation of peoples is of the axiomatic order. There is in him a sovereign contempt for everything that constitutes the sedimentation of cultures, nations, mores: all is indifferent in view of the theurgic power of the concept⁷. This blindness to History has, moreover, broader, strictly Jacobin roots: those of an exasperated conventionalism. The definition of a republic “one and indivisible” rests indeed on the direct relation between individuals (abstracting from their origin) and the State. But from the fact that the republican universal refuses to recognize de jure nations within the nation (which is to be welcomed), it does not follow that there is a de facto nonexistence of any collective consciousness or identity; if, for our “Pauline” Republic, there is neither Jew nor Greek, will one deduce that there are none in reality? Would it occur to anyone to confuse a rule of the legal game with a judgment of existence?

Thesis no. 2. The metaphysical interpretation of the Shoah (down to the word itself) has produced two perverse effects: an untimely return of the theme of election, which shatters human unity, whereas antisemitism, like other forms of racism, ought to call forth only “egalitarian and universalist” reactions (p. 10); and a culpable indulgence toward Zionism and “Israeli abuses” (p. 14), when nothing authorizes the passage from the condemnation of Nazism to the legitimation of a “colonial State” (p. 10). The interpretation of Nazism as absolute evil would have conferred in return a metaphysical prestige upon Judaism, as philosophically illegitimate (for Judaism has value only insofar as one detaches oneself from it) as it is politically irresponsible.

To begin, then, explains Badiou, one ought to abandon the notion of “radical evil” to religion (33), for this theme introduces a vicious circle into thought: “what gives the measure must surely not be measurable, and yet must constantly be measured. […] This crime, as supreme negative example, is inimitable, but just as well any crime is an imitation of it” (p. 32). Hence this incessant back-and-forth between the assertion of the incomparable singularity of the Nazi extermination and the permanent recourse to comparison when it comes to justifying policies (by assimilating Nasser or Saddam Hussein to Hitler, to cite Badiou’s two examples, p. 32). The philosopher sees in Nazism the project of determining a “historial community” — a being-together — endowed with a “conquering subjectivity” which, in naming the German “substance,” delimits an “outside” to be evacuated (the “Jews,” notably) in order to bring it fully into being. One will grant him that the triumphs of Nazism proceed from the fact that it presented itself not as Evil but rather as a simulacrum of good⁸. That Nazism has become the general metaphor of Evil in politics deprives it of its historical singularity for the benefit of a Hollywood simplification from which thought, it is true, has nothing to gain. But Badiou would be otherwise convincing if he did not himself lapse, at every turn, into the very failings he claims to condemn — that reductio ad hitlerum that drags the philosophical treatise down to the level of the political tract, where the State of Israel and immigration policy are summoned in turn (which “puts our time in communication with the restricted forms of Nazi politics […],” “the creation of names that mark and designate for denunciation, arrest, confinement, like the name ‘immigrant,’ or the name ‘illegal alien’”…, p. 72).

Correlative to this absolutization of evil, there has been constructed, according to Badiou, an undue idealization of the Jewish signifier. What exactly is the case? In his review of the book for Les Temps modernes, Éric Marty recalled in circumstantial detail what this new theology of Judaism owed to a certain Christianity. It must, however, be specified that it also played out on other planes. From the fact that Hitler had made the Jews his chosen enemies, intellectuals and writers, Jewish or not, were led in return to see in Judaism the antithesis of Nazi thought, or in Jewish existence the antithesis of the Nazi ideal. Rauschning, Thomas Mann, Albert Cohen, Wiesel, Freud, Levinas (one of Badiou’s targets in L’Éthique). The list is long⁹. Is it this list that authorizes Badiou (who only alludes to a “strong intellectual current, marked by best-selling publications and significant media effects” and that supposedly maintains “a kind of ‘communal transcendence’”! [p. 10]) to speak of the “Jew” as a major signifier? Yet one finds in these authors no claim to any sacralization whatever of the Jewish signifier, and still less the monstrous claim to any impunity whatever in the name of sufferings endured — which corresponds, it will be recalled, to thesis no. 3 of the booklet, to which it is now fitting to return.

The philosophical reinvestment of the word “Jew” is reflected notably in its great political fortune: on the market of predicates, that of Jew is assuredly one of the most coveted of the moment, in the name of principles, however, that the author is all the less able to combat in that he contributes to their inflation. Victimary ideology (which Badiou nevertheless claims to combat) has erected the Jew/Nazi and victim/executioner couple into a general political paradigm. A race now seems to be under way among all suffering minorities to appear more Jewish than the Jews… So much so that it sometimes seems that the only ones no longer fully authorized to designate themselves as such are the Jews themselves. Badiou’s booklet is the sad illustration of what is at once a saturation and a semantic hollowing-out: Israel is “the country in the world where there are the fewest Jews” (p. 21), and even “an antisemitic country” (p. 25); the true new Jews are the Palestinians (p. 27); and the historical “Jews” have passed, says Cécile Winter delicately, into the camp of the “new Aryans” busy oppressing the new wretched of the earth¹⁰.

If the extermination was able to provoke a metaphysical overinvestment of the word “Jew,” apt to transform it into a gigantic allegory of disarmed humanity, the consequences are, in our present political moment, often at the antipodes of what the philosopher describes. Modernity erected the Jew into a major paradigm only at the price of his opposition to all figures of the nation and of rootedness. When Derrida comments on Edmond Jabès, it is to say that a Jew, by essence, can attach himself only to the land that does not exist (L’Écriture et la différence); when Deleuze comments on Kafka, it is to make of him the herald of deterritorialization (Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure). This overvaluation of the signifier “Jew” not only determines no indulgence toward Israel, but leads to demanding of it what one demands of no other State. To be acceptable, “the Zionist State […] must become the least racial, the least religious, the least nationalist of States. The most universal of all” (pp. 89–90). The word “Jew” is here a weapon turned against Israel, accused of having betrayed, in the name of reason of State or of an ethnic egoism, the duty of unlimited altruism incumbent upon it by vocation. From then on, Israel can only be a betrayal of the “Jewish name”; it is not even a State like the others, but a State worse than the others, because the “barbarity of Israel” (p. 27) leans upon a “sacred name” (p. 24) which, like all sacred names (?), requires “slaves, and these slaves are the Palestinians and the Arabs” (p. 26). A slaveholder and a colonialist, Israel has only to go to the end of the tragic irony of its destiny, in other words to the genocide of the Palestinians. “Already the will to disperse them at all costs, […] to annihilate them at every opportunity, to shoot at their children, is displayed, carried out with systematic spirit,” writes Badiou in 1982 (p. 26). The context of the Lebanon war might incline one to a certain leniency, if the author took the trouble to make amends, at least on the level of the facts (what genocide?); evidently, this is by no means the case.

It would moreover be a grave misreading to impute this indignation to compassion for the Palestinians. The thinker who has many times proclaimed his “fidelity” to the massacring ideologies of this century¹¹ — who defended the Khmer Rouge and who, along the way, cites Mao four times approvingly — cannot be suspected of an excess of sentimentality; he inscribes himself neither in the humanitarian logic (which he despises), nor in the glorification of the Arab or Muslim signifier (unlike other intellectuals of the radical left). His argument belongs to the theologico-political. More precisely, Badiou’s thought stems from a triple determination: Platonic idealism — whereby the world is called upon to bend to an ideal truth; a Christian eschatology — a politics of Love — and a revolutionary vertigo that nourishes his fascination with the experience of the clean slate and his indulgence for the Terror.

Defined as Nazi or proto-Hitlerian is the introduction of any particularizing predicate into politics: distinction between the national and the foreigner, the taking into account of differences of language, of culture, of religion… “A truly contemporary State and country are always cosmopolitan, perfectly indistinct in their identity configuration. They assume the total contingency of their historical constitution, and the fact that it [sic] is valid only insofar as it accepts not to fall under any racialist, religious, or more generally ‘cultural’ predicate” (p. 15, our emphasis). Anxious to set an example to the Israelis, he evokes his project of fusion between Germany and France (p. 94)… The only democratic nations are therefore those that welcome everyone. “Whoever is here is from here” is the motto claimed by our borderless philosopher — a program one will judge sublime or fatuous, depending on whether it situates itself within the ethical horizon of hospitality or within the political field of contingencies, contexts, differences — those differences that this despiser of Aristotle and of any compromise with the world as it goes¹² attributes to “the human animal,” that is, to the world of needs and interests, whereas “immortality” is conquered only against a backdrop of unconditional universality.

By this standard, a Jewish State is as anachronistic and criminal as the “French State” proclaimed under Vichy¹³: its only way out is therefore to disappear, according to modalities one will be careful not to fix too precisely, in order to join the camp of the democracies — those very democracies that all of Badiou’s work otherwise consigns to perdition, but which recover a singular luster when it comes to opposing them to the Zionist foil. One might just barely understand that his allergy to Jewish particularity stems from his scrupulous will to “normalize” the Jewish exception — a project that, moreover, is at the heart of secular Zionism. In reality, Israel is subjected (as is often the case) to a double regime of condemnation: the one that intends to align it with the common regime of States, and the one that assigns to it, as a Jewish State, a specific responsibility and crime. A reading even slightly attentive shows indeed that the philosopher merely substitutes one predicate for another¹⁴, replaces one myth with another: that of the Jew who sacrifices himself to bring forth the universal. By disappearing as a Zionist entity, Israel will then accomplish what constitutes, at bottom, the best of the Jewish vocation: to break with all particularism so as to dissolve into a New Covenant.

The Palestinian drama appears only as the resultant of two crossed causalities: the one, political, of European colonialism, and the one, religious, of Jewish exclusivism. Of Israel’s geopolitical situation, of the Arab and Muslim parameters of the conflict, the philosopher says not a word — not that he lapses into the idealization of the Palestinian cause, but the theologico-political frameworks that are his lead him to envisage the conflict only through a secularized Christian eschatology, a Paulinism gone mad. Between unlimited Love and nationalist barbarity, there is no space for the political. To the journalist who asks him for his solution to the problem of the Middle East, Badiou replies: “the existence of a Palestine (or any other name chosen in common) that is democratic, secular, where the names ‘Jew’ or ‘Arab’ would be names of the multiple in the same place, names of peace, would have such power for thought, and such political power, that the whole Middle East would be overturned.” (p. 91). At a time when one rightly mocks the neo-conservative naïvetés about the “new Middle East,” shall we deprive ourselves of considering the philosopher’s program for what it is: a figment of the mind, whose emphasis poorly conceals its mawkishness? “It will be a creation, an entirely new paradoxical reality […] that will have universal power, that will astonish the entire world: a site at once completely Israeli and completely Palestinian. In the same place, in the same locales.” (p. 94) What would become of a Jewish minority in a “Judeo-Arab” State? Even Edward Said had the honesty to admit that he knew nothing of it; for the Israelis, the answer is only too clear: it will be Exodus or Dhimmitude; but our philosopher, for his part, overflows with optimism: a Jewish minority will be able not only to survive, but to become “a reference for all” (p. 97). Besides, why fear anything at all? “There is strictly no relation between the Nazis and the Palestinians. […] If one wants to solve the problem, one will have to manage — and I know it is something difficult — to forget the holocaust.” (p. 98) One might add, in order to be fully reassured, that Badiou would no doubt be the first to sign petitions to protest against any persecution, massacre, or deportation of which the Jews might be victims in the Greater Palestine he calls for with his wishes¹⁵.

All in all, Badiou’s project is striking in its extreme simplicity, even if it fails to touch one by its modesty: to save the “name of the Jews” against the danger that Zionism makes it run, and to make of the sacrifice (the conversion?) of Israel a redemptive example for the world (is not Palestine “a symbol for all of humanity”?). The most sinful State will thus be, in its way, the State from which Redemption will come… The most edifying text in this regard remains the review of Local Angel, the film by Udi Aloni — a “pro-Palestinian” and “revolutionary” militant (p. 81), whose film turns toward “the possibility of a new blessing, given to all on the same land by one and the same god” (p. 78). An incantatory alliance of a Christianizing rhetoric and a revolutionary phraseology that ends up ridiculing a cause desirable above all others (the reconciliation of enemies). What is the meaning of the film? It is the idea “of a new place” for “all the people living on the earth.” Placed under the double sponsorship of “revolt” and of a “god of weakness, of pity and of compassion, something like a Christian god” (p. 84), this “new place” is the object of a litanic invocation that turns into psittacism: no fewer than ten occurrences in five pages. This is not poetry, this is no longer philosophy: it is magical thinking. This new place, one suspects, comes paired with a hope: that of a “new Jew” whom “we have to create” (sic) (p. 85).

Whatever may have been said of it, the qualification of antisemitism in no way suits this strange oscillation between extreme contempt and devious idealization. Judaism appears in this scheme now in the form of an atavistic chauvinism (incarnated successively by the Synagogue, the Bourgeoisie, or Israel¹⁶), now in the form of an oblation to the abstract universal (the prophet or the internationalist militant). Just as Cécile Winter declares herself wholly devoted to the cause of the “unpronounceable names” (unpronounceable for whom, by the way?) the better to vilify the “new Aryans,” wagering on the Jews of yesterday the better to stigmatize those of today, Badiou paints a portrait in glory of the revolutionary militant as the inverted mirror image of the Israeli. The anti-Zionist is a philosemite who is one Jew behind.

That the tension between the universal and the particular runs through the Jewish world and the destiny of Israel (in all the senses of that name), as it runs through every culture; that Judaism has contributed, more than others, to dramatizing and exacerbating this tension — since it rests at once on a singularizing bedrock (election) and a universalist teleology (one God, one humanity, messianic hope) — no one could seriously contest. It remains no less true that the struggle for the universal can be waged — unless it is to issue only into the “void,” that key concept of Badiou’s metaphysics — only against the backdrop of an existence symbolically and politically constituted. That the Jews should concern themselves with their collective survival as much as with the immortality of their name seems, however, a rather paltry preoccupation in the eyes of our strange apostle.

If he concerned himself a little less with morality and a little more with politics, Badiou might perhaps understand that there is not a single lesson to be drawn from the extermination of the Jews — just as from the permanence of political antisemitism — but at least two. The first is a lesson of humanity — fundamentally universalist: that of the indispensable resistance to any ideology of national, racial, or religious supremacy. The second is a lesson of prudence — irremediably singular — which teaches that the Jews have the duty to keep mastery of their own destiny, without entrusting it to the sole benevolence of nations, whose past and present history invites one to take the measure of its limits. How to avoid the humanist and democratic exigency entering into contradiction with the imperatives of survival, the duty toward the Other — the non-Jew, the Palestinian — entering into conflict with the duty toward oneself? When one ought to have the courage to recognize the inevitable tensions bound up with political existence, Badiou’s eschatological ecstasies, under the pretext of saving the “Jewish name,” are merely a pretext for putting real Jews on trial.

But what is the point of speaking politics, since the matter is settled? In the prophetic posture that is his, it is perfectly indifferent to Badiou whether the radiant future he promises the Jews in the Palestine of tomorrow falls within the field of the possible: it suffices that it be desirable. Badiou, who declares himself outraged by the blackmail of antisemitism supposedly exerted upon any anti-Zionist position (and why not believe him?) (p. 18), would do well to realize that his own argumentation rests upon a blackmail just as misplaced: the blackmail of the universal. Who could fail to desire the universal? Who could refuse the prospect of reconciliation among peoples? Who could remain deaf to Love? There is not a Jewish conscience, even the most hardened, that does not thrill to the prophetic hope of fraternization. One would gladly forgive Badiou his misreadings, his omissions, and his errors (these are, after all, merely the mediocre geopolitics of a doctrinaire, the common stock — not even documented — of a radical left that has shown, in this domain, a remarkable consistency of spirit) if, with the unctuous intonations of a philanthropist, he did not enjoin us to choose between two fidelities: between our mother and justice, between the survival of a Jewish State and respect for Palestinian rights. Now, against what is here inspired by this blackmail of the universal and elsewhere by the incitement to nationalist withdrawal, if there is a sense in being Jewish today, it lies precisely in the refusal of having to choose between Israel and humanity.

Notes