*Article published in the review Labyrinthe No. 28, 2007, which we thank for the authorization to reprint it here.
For two decades, a radical current of thought has been asserting itself around the “Jewish question.” Driven paradoxically (or significantly) by pure products of French university culture, this current mobilizes itself in the face of the observation of a progressive dissolution of Jewish identity. These “thinkers of return”1, strongly marked by the magisterium of Emmanuel Levinas, arrive at one and the same fundamentally pessimistic conclusion: emancipation would be but a watered-down term meant to mask a phenomenon of assimilation deleterious to Jewish identity2. The responsibility for it would fall to the modernity born of the long process inaugurated by the French Revolution and pursued by Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in 1807, set up the Grand Sanhedrin. This is why the thinkers of return make of 1789 and the “Napoleon moment” the point of departure of a history retracing the pernicious influence of the Enlightenment which, under airs of apparent neutrality, would mask a diffuse Christianity, deeply impregnating all sectors of society.
The remarks of Benny Lévy present the French Jews as unconsciously constrained to fit themselves into a mold of identity forged by Christianity and placing them at odds with themselves. They resound as an irrevocable condemnation of modernity conceived as an avatar of Paulinism:
In the notion of the French Jew, there is a kind of time bomb. […] A French Jew, such as he has constituted himself since emancipation, since Napoleon, since the Consistory, is someone who considers that he is a particularity — Jewish — come to join the universal — that is, culture and its highest ideal, at the decisive moment that was the aftermath of the French Revolution, that is, fundamentally, the French Israelite believed, the fulfillment of the prophetism of Israel itself […]. That model of integration, I said it is a time bomb. Why? Because you can clearly see that it is false […]. The Jew is not a particularity that joins the universal3.
The golden legend of emancipation has therefore had its day. The increase of Judeophobic, antisemitic, or anti-Zionist manifestations, perceptible since the beginning of the 2000s4, placed in series with the historical peaks of violence exercised against the Jews of France — of which the Dreyfus affair has the value of a symbol — the whole reread in the tragic light of the Shoah, convinces the thinkers of return either to reveal structural blockages born of the Enlightenment, or to grasp in a vast continuum all these episodes5. In this latter case, they seek to detect the hidden logic that would preside over their advent and would irremediably link these events to one another. Some thus elaborate totalizing hermeneutics. The Jean-Claude Milner of Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (The Criminal Inclinations of Democratic Europe) sets at odds a hypostatized Europe seeking to bring by every means a “solution” to the “Jewish problem”: the latter takes, in its most brutal, scandalous, and inhuman form, the face of the Nazi extermination and, in its most insidious form, that of emancipation, the bearer of assimilation. Integration, assimilation, dissolution, such would be the stages the Jews would find themselves condemned to follow in order to be sacrificed on the altar of the Universal. Milner shows nothing other than the metamorphoses of the “assimilation machine” of emancipation, when he describes the successive figures of the “Jew of knowledge,” of the “Jew of human rights,” then of the “Jew of negation”6.
The blossoming of this current of thought of return at this end of the French 20th century is not fortuitous. If the very project of the promoters of emancipation harbored disturbing ambiguities and implicit assumptions incompatible with Jewish identity — the Abbé Grégoire’s text offers a flagrant illustration of this — it took a certain number of events punctuating the 20th century for a handful of authors to become conscious of the traps set by the Enlightenment. Emmanuel Levinas was one of the first to speak of the process of “de-Judaization” that emancipation implied. Evoking the accession to citizenship of the French Jews and their full adherence to the philosophy of emancipation, lived as a “metaphysical act,” a “solemn act resounding on their inner life,” he writes:
It is on the basis of that exceptional essence of France, where political life and moral life rejoined one another, on the basis of the ideals of the Revolution of 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, through the literature and the institutions that expressed it, that the attachment extended to the history and the landscapes that generated these ideas, until it became the consciousness of a vegetal rootedness in which many French Israelites would have forgotten the religious source of their love, henceforth children of the soil, autochthons, French as naturally French as the meadows are green and the trees in bloom7.
Levinas takes up his pen shortly after the Six-Day War, in order to meditate on the repercussions of this event on the situation of the Jews of France. The latter’s sympathy for the Hebrew State and their disagreement with the French government on this point of international policy earned them being accused of duplicity and of “double allegiance.” For some, the Jews excluded themselves from the national community by signifying their attachment to Israel. De Gaulle’s speech in November 1967, which qualified the Jews as “a people sure of itself and domineering,” is felt as a divorce between the Jews and the French nation. In this charged context, Levinas delivers a retrospective look at their relations under the regime of emancipation. In doing so, he restores the events that led him to draw the conclusion of the dissolution of Jewish identity and to formulate a series of capital questions underlying the theme of emancipation: “What is it to be a Jew?”, “Can one be an emancipated Jew?”, and finally “Is there a new way of being a Jew in the France of 1967?” For there are events that “burn the concepts that express their substance”8, that render visible the contradictions of the configuration born of emancipation by exacerbating certain hitherto hidden tensions: the Nazi extermination and the Shoah, the creation of Israel and the question of secularism with its vagaries in France. Each of them obliges one to rethink Jewish identity and its compatibility with the French model of emancipation, and, beyond, with “modernity.” The Shoah arouses, notably, a reflection on the universality of the Jewish people in its relation to evil. Paradoxically, it was thus able to permit the erection of a theater of the death of God, responsible for a quasi-renunciation of the Torah by the affirmation of suffering (an attitude that Benny Lévy condemns). The creation of the State of Israel, for its part, reinstalls Jewish identity in a strong historicity by posing anew the question of messianism and the question of Hebrew. Moreover, it fissures the model of the universal Jew and incites one to question the bonds between people, nation, and State. Finally, the difficulties with which the French secular model finds itself confronted underscore the gap that separates “confession” from “religion,” conviction of the inner forum from external injunction, “faith” from “study.”
It is therefore a matter, for us, of restoring “in movement” these thoughts of return in France, at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. In order not to fall into the catalogue, we shall not start from the reflection of any particular thinker, but we shall examine the couples in tension born of the “traps” of the Enlightenment, each of them capable of triggering a mechanism of dissolution of Jewish identity. We shall study successively the question of the universal, keystone of the Enlightenment, then the antagonism between religion and confession grasped through the question of secularism9. The problem of rationalism and of the relations between religion and philosophy, a transversal theme, will constitute the underlying line of these debates. These stumbling blocks will make it possible never to lose sight of the question of emancipation (in which some see a prelude to assimilation and to dissolution), while introducing into the debates the positions of the proponents of emancipation or of the thinkers hostile to the idea of a Jewish singularity.
The Universal in Question: The Implacable Assimilatory Logic of the Enlightenment
The tragedy of the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel had contradictory effects on the image the West fashioned of the Jewish people. Whereas the memory of the Nazi extermination had been able to erect the Jew into an incarnation of suffering humanity in the grip of evil, into a symbol of the universal10, the creation of Israel, as a State characterized by an ethnico-religious particularism, fissured, in people’s minds, this figure of the universal. A widespread reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict brought this tension to incandescence, reviving the debate around this question of the universal. Certain thinkers of return were thus incited to make explicit through this prism their rejection of the Enlightenment and of the process of assimilation it carried within its flanks11.
The violence of the discourses that punctuate the “quarrel of the name ‘Jew’” is explained by the magnitude of the stakes. Beyond “Paulinism”12, it is the West as the concretization and product of the Enlightenment that finds itself in the dock. The polemic hollows out the arena where two irreconcilable regimes of thought confront each other, two ways of apprehending the bond of the self to the all declined in its logical, political, and theological dimension.
For Alain Badiou, the Shoah would have consecrated the word “Jew” into a destinal signifier, placing it outside all ordinary handling of the predicates of identity13 and establishing a communitarian transcendence incompatible with contemporary universalism14. Strengthened by a victimary ideology presenting Hitler as the absolute evil, the Jews would benefit from the sacralization of their name, in order to impose a fictitious transcendence through the Hebrew State which, “in its closed identitarian pretension to be a Jewish State and to draw privileges from this pretension” to the detriment of the Palestinians15, would refuse to enter the universal through the ostentation of an irreducible singularity16. The conclusion delivers the death-blow: by displaying a religious predicate, “the State of Israel is the external form, of a colonial nature, that the sacralization of the name of the Jews has taken”17.
To strike out the name “Jew” in the name of a “false immediacy of the universal”18 makes appear, for Jean-Claude Milner, the “criminal inclinations of democratic Europe,” and corresponds, in Badiou, to a secularization of Paulinism19. Milner inveighs against the Enlightenment, Christian in its essence insofar as it inscribes itself in the prolongation of the apostle. Guilty of having instituted the Jew as a structural problem calling for a question and generating an unheard-of violence against the name “Jew”20, the ideology of the Enlightenment would exacerbate the dynamic of assimilation insofar as any contradiction of the conception of the universal it has built would undermine it from within. This is indeed the point Milner debates, as he analyzes this “easy universal” that makes it possible to dissolve the one into the all by denying singularities, and proceeding by successive encompassments because it says itself to be unlimited and, consequently, because it tolerates no limit. The linguist affirms that the Aristotelian vulgate forges a European logico-political paradigm drawing from two sources. The first, the Organon, reflects on the all as the rule of thought, in the form of the universal. The second, the Politics, thinks the all as the rule of the various human gatherings. The doctrine of Paul would make it possible to cement the system, in that it would realize the amalgam — foreign to the thought of the Stagirite — of the logical all and the political all, in order to interlock logical language, theological language, and political language. But the assimilation of the political all and the logical all transmuting the indifferent into the nobler figure of the universal would find itself shaken by the survival of the Jew in his irremediable singularity. It is in this perspective that Milner interprets the hostility that the Hebrew State arouses in the West21.
Facing the unlimited all of the Enlightenment, which tracks the same everywhere and wishes itself in perpetual expansion, there would exist a limited all, the one incarnated by the name “Jew,” which articulates the singular and the universal otherwise. Resisting against the dynamic of dissolution of the name “Jew” into a great all of the indeterminate issued from emancipation, certain thinkers of return edify the particular into the universal. The most complete response formulated against the Enlightenment is probably that of Emmanuel Levinas. The latter thinks a “universality of radiance” and no longer of encompassment, seated on the particularity of Israel defined as the study of the Torah22. Levinas distinguishes, on the one hand, the originary gesture of Western thought, Christic since it corresponds to the destruction of transcendence and to the exaltation of the figure of the Son as self-engendering and, on the other hand, the founding gesture of Judaism of welcoming the Revelation on Sinai, through obedience to the commandment and submission to the yoke of the law through the figure of the Father23. Judaism is defined precisely by this gesture incomprehensible to the rest of humanity to the point of splitting it in two, which consists in obeying before understanding and which erects this heteronomy into the touchstone of freedom and universality. In an antinomic logic, the West and the Enlightenment set reason and revelation in tension. They consider that only the autonomy of the mind, only self-engendered thought and reason drawing from itself alone, in a word, only the discourse of the Son is non-alienating and universal, because disenclaved from all particularism. One sees better why, according to Levinas, the Jews cannot accept the universal of the Enlightenment, on pain of denying themselves. The whole effort of the philosopher will thenceforth resume itself in building an ethics founded on the singularity incarnated by the face of the other, at once vulnerable and inviolable24. The philosopher rejects the Western approach of conceptualization, which grasps of things only what they have of the general and reduces the other to the same. Counter to Hegel and his dialectic assimilated to a form of Christian parousia, Levinas merges singularity into a universal — the face, that is humanity — depicted as an infinite that exceeds totality and opens onto the beyond25: “Justice rendered to the other gives me of God an insurpassable proximity”26.
The Political Traps of the Enlightenment: Emancipation, Rights, and the Law
For the thinkers of return, the analysis of the universal as the driving principle of the Enlightenment thus renders manifest the inextricable association of the logical, the political, and the religious. If the Enlightenment, as an offshoot of Paulinism, engenders a totalitarian and “parricidal” thought (in a Christological sense), incompatible with Jewish singularity, how is one to receive the Enlightenment in its political emanation: the nation-State, the rights of man, and universal suffrage?
The heritage of the French Revolution did not, however, seem to threaten Jewish identity with dissolution. Thanks to emancipation, which makes the Jews full citizens, thanks to the separation of the political and the religious, a great understanding became possible among men outside religion, henceforth confined to the private sphere. The door was being opened to an era of fraternity among free citizens gathered no longer by their attachment to a soil, but around values and ideas. Such an adult and irenic conception of the social bond resounded in perfect harmony with Judaism as Levinas defined it: a religion of responsibility setting religious bond and ethical bond in synonymy and tending to build a just society where there would cohabit the great fraternity of men and, within the nation-State, citizens. Nonetheless, the assessment of emancipation displays alarming results: desertion of the synagogues, poverty of contemporary Jewish thought, predominance of a Judaism conceived no longer as a religion, nor even as a culture, but as the inert accumulation of “family memories”27, indeed as a diffuse sensibility sometimes animated by an impulse of solidarity for persecuted coreligionists. For the thinkers of return, the process of dissolution of Jewish identity passes through the triumph of this Judaism-remnant on borrowed time.
What are the hidden mainsprings of this mortifying dynamic? In their majority, the thinkers of return do not seek the key to it in an analysis of revolutionary discourses. If one excepts Milner, who places himself at the European scale, neither do they track occult principles — “inclinations” — whose fulfillment they would decipher by unrolling a factual web. The events that recall the French Jews to their singularity and give them the occasion to “pull themselves together” in a conflictual or even tragic mode have as their cause as much the stupidity, the intolerance, the barbarism that constantly threaten to well up according to a pulsatile and non-serial dynamic, as structural incompatibilities issued from the Enlightenment and deleterious, not because they would express the implementation of a hidden design of destruction, but because they would imprison the Jews in an alienating model, unbeknownst to them. In France, the political regime set in place by the Enlightenment would not be criminal in the sense of murderous, but would push toward suicide by alienation. The question is therefore that of assimilation.
Let us see more precisely how matters stand. The Enlightenment promotes the abolition of singularities in the unlimited all of society presented as the universal, as well as the non-heteronomy of thought. The democracy of universal suffrage realizes the first point of this program; the separation of the political and the religious, the second. The rights of man, for their part, subsume the two panels of the diptych. In doing so, emancipation signs the victory of rights over the law and provokes a series of consequences threatening Jewish identity.
Thus, Benny Lévy denounces in the separation of the political and the religious a Christological gesture. The “murder of the shepherd”28 transforms the word of the Ancients founded on the authority of wisdom into a political word that seeks to seduce because it will have consistency only by carrying the assent of the greatest number. The rationality of the Enlightenment thus implies secularization and prolongs the political destiny of the logos. Now, according to Lévy, the good fortune and the singularity of the Jews is to have escaped this regime of the word. The confrontation of Alexander the Great and Simon the Just signals that the Jewish word remained knotted to the wisdom of the masters. As for the adage of the Talmud, “the master is more than a prophet,” it signifies that the master accedes to the content of prophecy by way of wisdom, not by the reception of the On-High like the prophet, but by a “labor that, from below, tears us from obscurity and recovers the brilliance of the word of fire”29. Submission to the yoke of the law, the strict observance of the rite, do not dissociate the religious from the political, which is founded in the word of the sage30. Secularism renders the Jew a stranger to himself because it leads him, unbeknownst to himself, to speak a language that betrays his own. The rejection of heteronomy and the triumph of rights over the law thus cause for the Jews a non-coincidence of self with self mortal in the long term, because it transforms religion into a confession confined to the sphere of the private and to which one adheres because one believes in it. Levinas describes well this phenomenon of assimilation bearing dissolution:
The Western spirit to which the Jew has assimilated himself in order now to touch only the surface of Judaism is defined, perhaps, by the refusal of all adherence without an act of adhesion. […]. Every exceptional attachment is for him worked over by the suspicion of being shared by all. One must thenceforth not accept oneself spontaneously and, consequently, begin by taking a distance with regard to oneself, look at oneself from outside, reflect on oneself; compare oneself to others, therefore reduce this personal identity that one is into so many indices, attributes, contents, qualities, values; analyze oneself, monetize oneself31.
Elsewhere, he recalls the absurdity of a Judaism reduced to a credo: “a true culture cannot be summarized, for it resides in the very effort that cultivates it”32. What is there in common between this fossil confession and a Judaism lived as an injunction, a commandment, and which realizes itself in the daily round of study and of observance of the law?
One must therefore admit that, behind appearances of neutrality, French society conserves in its secularized forms a Christian atmosphere that acts by impregnation33. According to Levinas, one of the gravest effects consists certainly in a “domestication” of the Divine. The separation of the religious and the political translates into an aseptic spiritual, a compartmentalization between the daily activities and an inner life unbound from all responsibility. This is, for Levinas, to forget that it is among men, before the face of the other, that the Jew becomes conscious of the beyond. The Jew is never situated outside the world34.
Finally, emancipation offers the Jew a radical and seductive freedom of choice, where the refusal of a thought without adhesion necessarily translates into a passage through atheism (I feign that I do not believe before deciding whether I believe) which dispenses no safeguard against nihilism. By favoring an exit from the religious, the political regime instaured by the Enlightenment nourishes in the citizens materialism and individualism.
Difficile Liberté (Difficult Freedom)
In the end, for the thinkers of return, the malady of the emancipated Jew comes from his fitting the totality of his existence into the Western categories of “nation,” “State,” “confession,” “profession,” “social class,” etc., so many categories ill-cut for him, which confound him. And one points there to thorny questions: what is it to be a Jew? are the Jews a people, a nation, a community, a religion, a remnant-culture? can one be Jewish and French? can one be an emancipated Jew? For it is when the Jew says himself and lives himself a citizen, when he vibrates in unison with the national mystique, when he thinks he has a grip on his time, that the contradictions are exacerbated.
Is such a laceration of the Jewish soul irremediable? The answers diverge. For Benny Lévy, who incarnates here one of the firmest lines of the thought of return, one cannot be Jewish and French35. The only reality of the Jew is the knowledge of the Torah; it is therefore as a stranger that the latter obeys the laws of the French State36.
The Jew is not a question calling for a solution because he impedes the extension of the universal, as the Europe of the Enlightenment suggests to him. He is in his facticity, and this ever since 600,000 Hebrews discovered together, on Sinai, the uniqueness of each. The Jew must consecrate himself entirely to fulfilling the mitzvot if he wishes to remain Jewish in a movement of withdrawal from the world alone capable of restoring to him his independence37.
At the antipodes, Alain Finkielkraut judges the thing possible38. For, for him, if a dialectic of the limited and the unlimited is indeed at work, it is not a matter of a perverse mechanism intrinsically linked to the Enlightenment, but of a conjunctural deviation of right transmuted into “the rights,” guilty of a fallacious opposition between good autonomy and bad heteronomy. Secularism is not reduced to the separation of the religious and the political. It is what permits the total independence of the spiritual: “Freedom of the mind is not freedom of opinion, but the possibility for the mind to attain truth without external authority”39. However, the fractioning of the nation into a mosaic of communities exacerbating their particularisms would set against the right that demands obedience to the limits it posits, the rights serving the thirst for expansion of individuals. Pluralism would no longer correspond to the cohort of ways in quest of truth, but to “the peremptory exhibition of identities” where “recognition substitutes itself for knowledge”40. As for Levinas, he chooses the middle way, starting from the idea that the election of the Jewish people consists in the unique articulation it realizes of the singular and the universal:
The Jewish community is, by contrast, a community that has eternity in its very nature. It holds its being neither from a land, nor a language, nor a legislation subject to renewals and revolutions. Its land is “holy” and the term of a nostalgia, its language is sacred and is not spoken. Its Law is holy and is not a temporary legislation, made for the political mastery of time. But the Jew is born a Jew and is confident in the eternal life whose certainty he lives through the carnal bonds that attach him to his ancestors and to his descendants41.
For Levinas, a community, a people without a State, diasporic, escaping the contingency of history because it lives its invariable law — where the separation of the political and the religious does not have much meaning — in a cyclical ritual life that takes on an ontological importance42. A people of the Book and not of the land, where freedom with regard to the sedentary forms of existence relegates far away the values of rootedness. There is the human way in which the Jews are in the world, by instauring the highest forms of responsibility43. Then, for Levinas, one can be an emancipated Jew if one knows how to maintain the fragile equilibrium between engagement and disengagement, if one assumes that one is “a non-coincidence with one’s time, within coincidence: in the radical sense of the term, an anachronism, the simultaneity of a youth attentive to the real and impatient to change it and of an old age having seen everything, going back to the origin of things”44, if one can recover, in the breath and the rhythm of the square letters, the wisdom and the knowledge where all generations merge. In two words, a “difficult freedom”! For it is there that everything begins. For our authors, one could not petrify oneself in the very movement of return, which is rather of the order of the about-face. The denunciation of the Western Enlightenment is but a preliminary, often expressed in a polemical mode, which is worth only by the coming-to-consciousness it must provoke. It is rather the sociologists, the historians, or the linguists who dwell on it. For those who accomplish the return, it is not a matter in itself of making of the denunciation of the Enlightenment and of the perverse effects of emancipation the matrix of a philosophy of the Revelation. For them, all that finally matters is to think otherwise and to recover the Torah so that it may become again the sap of life.
Notes
The thinkers of return radically reject the Enlightenment — notably in that it would be Christian (Pauline) in its essence — and advocate a return to the Torah. The denunciation of the Enlightenment and of modernity thus constitutes only a moment of their thought, whose point of departure is the question of assimilation-dissolution. In this strict sense, the figures of Emmanuel Levinas and of Benny Lévy dominate. One must not confuse this current with the one that repudiates modernity and constructs the murderous genealogies of an antisemitic Europe, where the Enlightenment remains a positive referent opposed to obscurantism. The work of Georges Bensoussan, L’Europe. Une passion génocidaire. Essai d’histoire culturelle (Europe. A Genocidal Passion. An Essay in Cultural History), Paris, Mille et une nuits, 2006, does not condemn the Enlightenment: it does not, significantly, constitute the terminus a quo of his reasoning, since he seeks the sources of evil as far back as the Middle Ages. He deplores that it could not arrest the rise of hatred and violence and that it carried a negative double, the “anti-Enlightenment.” As for Jean-Claude Milner, if he reflects first as a linguist and does not accomplish the return — the teshuva — his radical rejection of the Enlightenment rejoins the thinkers of return stricto sensu. His thought has largely irrigated that of Benny Lévy, who cites him on numerous occasions, both in Le meurtre du pasteur. Critique de la vision politique du monde (The Murder of the Shepherd. Critique of the Political Vision of the World), Paris, Grasset/Verdier, 2002, and in Être juif. Étude lévinassienne (Being Jewish. A Levinasian Study), Lagrasse, Verdier, 2003. Milner gives his reflection the form of a genealogy and knots the question of assimilation-dissolution to that of extermination. Finally, a last stratum of thinkers interact with the bards of return: they point to the ambivalences of modernity and the shadow part of the Enlightenment, without however amalgamating themselves with it. These sociologists (the Shmuel Trigano of L’Avenir des Juifs de France [The Future of the Jews of France], Paris, Grasset, 2006 and the review Controverses), linguists (Henri Meschonnic in L’Utopie du Juif [The Utopia of the Jew], Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 2001) or historians (Monique-Lise Cohen, Les Juifs ont-ils du cœur ? Discours révolutionnaire et antisémitisme [Do the Jews Have a Heart? Revolutionary Discourse and Antisemitism], Toulouse, Vent Terral, 1992), if they reason on the basis of an event-based web, do not build a system like Milner. They prefer to underscore the ambiguities of the revolutionary project of the Enlightenment, or to attack manifestations of contemporary antisemitism and of a certain malaise reigning within the Jewish community of France, which are explained in large part by the sociological evolution — never posited as a given in advance or irreversible — of the France born of the Enlightenment with secularism and the proclamation of the rights of man.↩︎
The thinkers of return radically reject the Enlightenment — notably in that it would be Christian (Pauline) in its essence — and advocate a return to the Torah. The denunciation of the Enlightenment and of modernity thus constitutes only a moment of their thought, whose point of departure is the question of assimilation-dissolution. In this strict sense, the figures of Emmanuel Levinas and of Benny Lévy dominate. One must not confuse this current with the one that repudiates modernity and constructs the murderous genealogies of an antisemitic Europe, where the Enlightenment remains a positive referent opposed to obscurantism. The work of Georges Bensoussan, L’Europe. Une passion génocidaire. Essai d’histoire culturelle (Europe. A Genocidal Passion. An Essay in Cultural History), Paris, Mille et une nuits, 2006, does not condemn the Enlightenment: it does not, significantly, constitute the terminus a quo of his reasoning, since he seeks the sources of evil as far back as the Middle Ages. He deplores that it could not arrest the rise of hatred and violence and that it carried a negative double, the “anti-Enlightenment.” As for Jean-Claude Milner, if he reflects first as a linguist and does not accomplish the return — the teshuva — his radical rejection of the Enlightenment rejoins the thinkers of return stricto sensu. His thought has largely irrigated that of Benny Lévy, who cites him on numerous occasions, both in Le meurtre du pasteur. Critique de la vision politique du monde (The Murder of the Shepherd. Critique of the Political Vision of the World), Paris, Grasset/Verdier, 2002, and in Être juif. Étude lévinassienne (Being Jewish. A Levinasian Study), Lagrasse, Verdier, 2003. Milner gives his reflection the form of a genealogy and knots the question of assimilation-dissolution to that of extermination. Finally, a last stratum of thinkers interact with the bards of return: they point to the ambivalences of modernity and the shadow part of the Enlightenment, without however amalgamating themselves with it. These sociologists (the Shmuel Trigano of L’Avenir des Juifs de France [The Future of the Jews of France], Paris, Grasset, 2006 and the review Controverses), linguists (Henri Meschonnic in L’Utopie du Juif [The Utopia of the Jew], Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 2001) or historians (Monique-Lise Cohen, Les Juifs ont-ils du cœur ? Discours révolutionnaire et antisémitisme [Do the Jews Have a Heart? Revolutionary Discourse and Antisemitism], Toulouse, Vent Terral, 1992), if they reason on the basis of an event-based web, do not build a system like Milner. They prefer to underscore the ambiguities of the revolutionary project of the Enlightenment, or to attack manifestations of contemporary antisemitism and of a certain malaise reigning within the Jewish community of France, which are explained in large part by the sociological evolution — never posited as a given in advance or irreversible — of the France born of the Enlightenment with secularism and the proclamation of the rights of man.↩︎
Alain Finkielkraut and Benny Lévy, Le Livre et les livres. Entretiens sur la laïcité, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2006, p. 84.↩︎
The interpretation of these events in their globality (arson against synagogues, antisemitic aggressions, desecrated cemeteries, etc.), informed by the international context (Al-Aqsa Intifada, Durban conference, September 11, etc.), is the object of debates and polemics on the importance and the nature of the phenomenon.↩︎
For Jean-Claude Milner, the Durban conference (31 August-8 September 2001) and the marches against the Iraq war in France and in Europe at the beginning of 2003, where the denunciation of Israel was a recurrent theme, constitute the terminus ad quem of the “criminal” genealogy against the “name ‘Jew’” of democratic Europe that he establishes: Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2003, p. 94-101.↩︎
Jean-Claude Milner, Le Juif de savoir, Paris, Grasset, 2006.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “L’espace n’est pas à une dimension,” in Difficile Liberté. Essais sur le judaïsme, Paris, A. Michel, 1963, repr. Paris, Librairie générale française, 1984, p. 388.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 390.↩︎
One must take the confession-religion couple as an interface, and not as a strict opposition. Judaism is not only a religion, but the assimilation to which the Enlightenment incites, between religion and confession, implicitly deprives Judaism of its other dimensions (political, social, etc.) and thus denatures it through this work of engulfment.↩︎
One need only listen to Levinas, “De la montée du nihilisme au juif charnel,” ibidem, p. 331: “After twenty centuries of anachronistic existence, Judaism was becoming again the theater of the Divine Comedy.”↩︎
We do not here treat of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for itself, but apprehend it only insofar as it is a symptom of divergent conceptions of the universal, leading thinkers of return to call into question certain values of the Enlightenment.↩︎
According to Paul: “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer man nor woman, for you are one in Jesus Christ” (Gal. 3:28). Crossing the particularisms, Paul erects the universal upon “each-ones” who become “one.”↩︎
Alain Badiou, Portées du mot « juif », Circonstances, 3, Paris, Lignes et Manifeste, 2005, p. 9.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 10 and p. 58.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 15.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 11.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 25.↩︎
Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, op. cit., p. 108.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 103.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 9.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 97-98.↩︎
The relation of Jewish singularity to the universal has nothing of a complacent extrapolation. For Levinas, the question of the universal is consubstantial with Judaism: “There is our universalism. In the cave where the Patriarchs and our mothers rest, the Talmud has Adam and Eve rest: it is for the whole of humanity that Judaism came.”, Emmanuel Levinas, “Israël et l’universalisme,” op. cit., p. 266.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Être juif,” Cahiers d’études lévinassiennes, 1, p. 102.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité, Paris, 1990.↩︎
And not of an infinite totality, expression of the beyond. On the way in which Levinas treats the philosophical legacy of Hegel, see: Emmanuel Levinas, “Hegel et les juifs,” Difficile Liberté, op. cit., p. 352-357. To better understand the influence of Rosenzweig on Levinas, through the release from the Hegelian dialectic that the German philosopher operates, see Emmanuel Lévinas, “Entre deux mondes,” ibidem, p. 272-302.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Une religion d’adultes,” ibidem, p. 38.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “L’assimilation aujourd’hui,” ibidem, p. 383.↩︎
Benny Lévy, Le Meurtre du pasteur, op. cit.↩︎
Alain Finkielkraut and Benny Lévy, op. cit., p. 40.↩︎
Levinas says nothing other when he assimilates political bond and ethical bond in a religion of justice.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Pièces d’identité,” Difficile Liberté, op. cit., p. 87.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Comment le judaïsme est-il possible ?,” ibidem, p. 376.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 367.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 370.↩︎
Benny Lévy reproaches Levinas with having operated the philosophical conversion of Judaism by having diluted revelation into “the humanism of the other man.” He interprets the opening toward the beyond that the confrontation with the face of the other permits as an intolerable coincidence between death and the infinite. By making of the Shoah a religion that opposes the angelic dead Jew to the imperfection of the living Jew, Levinas does not present the beyond as a positivity, a full presence; he deprives the Jew of all consolation. In sum, Levinas would continue to philosophize; he would simply have reversed the etymology of philosophy, which would be no longer love of wisdom but wisdom of love. These points are the object of Visage continu. La pensée du retour chez Emmanuel Levinas (Continuous Face. The Thought of Return in Emmanuel Levinas), Lagrasse, Verdier, 1998, and of the work Être juif, op. cit.↩︎
The fact, for a Jew, of being a French citizen and of living in France in no way affects his essence, which resumes itself in his Jewishness. It is in this sense only that one cannot be Jewish and French. This does not signify that a Jew cannot live in France. On the contrary, according to Lévy, the regime born of emancipation offers a framework favorable to the study of the Torah. The whole point is to be conscious of the traps of the Enlightenment and not to let Jewish identity dissolve, on pain of becoming what Lévy names an “imaginary Jew,” taking up the title of the famous book by Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire (The Imaginary Jew), Paris, Le Seuil, 1980.↩︎
Lévy shows himself very vehement on this aspect. See Alain Finkielkraut and Benny Lévy, op. cit., p. 88.↩︎
Alain Finkielkraut expresses reservations in the face of the injunction of Benny Lévy, which would tend to reduce the action of the Jews to remaining Jewish at all costs and to having thus a tautological vocation. Against Lévy, who advocates separation, Finkielkraut follows Levinas on the idea of a Judaism participating in the world in order to favor its humanization. See “La déplorable affaire du foulard,” in Alain Finkielkraut and Benny Lévy, ibidem.↩︎
Alain Finkielkraut and Benny Lévy, ibidem, p. 65-66.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 92-93.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Entre deux mondes,” Difficile Liberté, op. cit., p. 291.↩︎
One sees what problems the creation of the State of Israel raises. After centuries of political innocence, would the Jews see in the form of the Western nation-State that of their fulfillment? A tragic irony, some will say. Unless one sees in it a possibility of inscribing oneself in history in order to realize a just world? Levinas devotes a reflection to the State of Israel in À l’heure des nations (In the Time of the Nations), Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1988.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Une religion d’adultes,” Difficile Liberté, op. cit.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaïsme et temps présent,” ibidem, p. 318.↩︎