Contemporary French Jewish Intellectuals and Ambivalence

An inexhaustible nostalgia for the Jewish life of Central Europe: there is my whole inheritance

(A. Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire [The Imaginary Jew], 1980)

Introduction

Alain Finkielkraut, a French intellectual well known to the general public, has followed a rather astonishing trajectory at first glance, which led him from a revolutionary youth alongside the Maoists of May 1968 to his controversial election to the Académie française in April 2014, by way of a series of public stances that earned him many a polemic and malicious accusation. While he was long “catalogued” on the left because of his commitments in favor first, though briefly, of revolutionary socialism, then more durably in favor of the French republican ideals issued from 1789, he seems to have progressively slid toward the right, notably since his commitment in favor of the small Balkan nations during the war in the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s, up to his virulent diatribes against the multiculturalism of Western societies in the course of the 2000s. Now, is such a slide imputable to the simple individual “drift” of one man, even an intellectual, or is it revelatory of a tectonic movement of French society, a movement by virtue of which the French intellectual landscape would have reorganized itself in its entirety? And what role does the reference to Jewishness play, more precisely, in the trajectory of Alain Finkielkraut?

While the encounter between the revolutionary movement of May 68 and Jewish existence could seem for a time to go without saying (to the point that one could hear ring out on the Parisian pavement the famous slogan: “we are all German Jews”), the post-May left a bittersweet taste to which Finkielkraut’s first work, Le Juif imaginaire, already attested in 1980. Thirty years later, the sweetness seems to have effaced itself before the bitterness, and the junction between Jewishness or Judaism and the Revolution no longer goes without saying. On the contrary, the French Jewish intellectuals, Finkielkraut foremost, found themselves regularly, in the course of the 1990s and especially the 2000s, reproached for their “treason” with regard to both the ideals of the Revolution and those of the Republic. But, when the contemporary Western societies as a whole are plunged into a grave crisis and scarcely seem to believe any longer in their own ideals, why should the Jews, even if they are intellectuals, be the only ones to make themselves its guarantors? And in the name of what conception of Judaism or of Jewishness would they do so?

The “Jewish Question” and European Modernity: A Brief Historical Reminder

To understand how a “Jewish question” (or a “Jewish problem”) durably imposed itself as an essential question of Western modernity, a question that fell specifically to the “philosophers” or the “intellectuals,” whether against their will or not, to assume and to take charge of, one could go back as far as the European “Age of Enlightenment.” Closer to us in space and time, the Dreyfus Affair has constituted in France for more than a century the emblem of the intellectual cause: it attests to the fact that the Jewish question “is not the affair of one alone” (to take up the famous formula of Clemenceau), nor that of a particular group within the Republic, but that it is a universal question touching all citizens and all men. Such is the meaning of the public proclamation of those whom Barrès, in January 1898, had saddled with the (supposedly infamous) name of “intellectuals”: the academics, scholars, writers, or artists who co-signed and published in L’Aurore (Clemenceau’s daily) the petition (or “protest of the intellectuals”) in favor of the revision of the trial of the young Jewish captain. For all that, apart from a few cases that remained quite exceptional — among which that of Bernard Lazare appears today the least misrecognized — few French Jewish intellectuals took an interest then in this affair as Jews or in the name of their “Jewishness.”

But the time when the Jewish question could be circumscribed to a strictly public affair, in which Jewishness as such took no part, seems today to be over. The time is no more when a great French (non-Jewish) intellectual such as Jean-Paul Sartre could write: “Not a single Frenchman will be free as long as the Jews do not enjoy the fullness of their rights. Not a single Frenchman will be safe as long as a Jew, in France and in the entire world, can fear for his life”¹. Indeed, the upheavals of the 20th century, in particular these two events — the Nazi judeocide during the Second World War and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 — changed the situation, in France as in the rest of the world. Following these events, the “Jewish question” could no longer be a question that public intellectual debate would have seized “from outside,” but it appeared at once necessary and legitimate that the Jews themselves should be able to “take in hand” their own social, historical, and political situation in modernity. Thus the contemporary Western Jewish intellectuals took hold, from the 1960s-1970s in France, of a question in which they were themselves directly interested. On the one hand, they questioned the values of the modern Western world and examined them by adopting, voluntarily and consciously, a Jewish point of view. On the other hand, as if by symmetry, they were led to question anew the values of traditional Judaism in the light of the modern and contemporary world. The philosopher Hannah Arendt admirably summarized this new state of mind, widely spread among the Western Jewish intellectuals of the immediate postwar period: “One thing seems clear to me: if the Jews are to be able to remain in Europe, it will not be as Germans or French, etc., as if nothing had happened. It seems to me that none of us can return (and yet writing is a way of returning) merely because people seem again ready to recognize Jews as Germans or whatever; it will be only if we are welcome as Jews. That would mean that I would gladly write if as a Jewess I can write on any aspect whatever of the Jewish question”².

Contemporary French Jewish Intellectuals Faced with the Resurgence of the “Jewish Question” in the France of the 2000s

In this context, we should not be too astonished by the fact that contemporary French Jewish intellectuals found themselves projected, since the beginning of the 2000s, to the center of the public debate in France. This is but the effect of a historical evolution begun during the 1960s-1970s, then which, having deepened in the course of the 1980s-1990s, today knows a sort of “epilogue.” Nonetheless, one can only be scandalized by the fact that these intellectuals were often the object, at this beginning of the 21st century, of interpellations, indeed of public accusations alleging their supposed “communitarianism” — which amounted to placing them under the ban of the national community. Such was the case, for example, in October 2003, during what the sociologist Michel Wieviorka called the “Tariq Ramadan moment”³. The Muslim preacher and intellectual had published a text entitled “Daring the Critique of the (New) Communitarian Intellectuals”⁴, in which he denounced by name a certain number of contemporary French Jewish intellectuals, namely: Alexandre Adler, André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, or else Alain Finkielkraut, on account of their supposed “communitarianism.” “Whether on the domestic plane (struggle against antisemitism) or on the international scene (defense of Zionism),” he wrote, “one is witnessing the emergence of a new attitude among certain intellectuals omnipresent on the media scene. It is legitimate to wonder: what principles and what interests do they defend first and foremost? One clearly perceives that their political positioning responds to communitarian logics, as Jews, or nationalist ones, as defenders of Israel. Gone are the universal principles, the identitarian withdrawal is patent and biases the debate, since all those who dare to denounce this attitude are treated as antisemites. It is, however, on this terrain that the dialogue must be engaged if one wishes to avoid the clash of perverse communitarianisms”⁵. It is perfectly clear that “communitarianism,” or more exactly antisemitism, was then expressing itself through the voice of the one who proffered such accusations, as the sociologist Wieviorka also noted: “Ramadan’s text is effectively antisemitic since it essentializes its targets, rather than limiting itself to a debate of ideas”⁶. The equivalence established among “Jews,” “nationalists,” and “defenders of Israel” amounted to anchoring ideological and political stances in a Jewish identity or essence.

Beyond the “Ramadan affair,” which had a certain media-political resonance, one could also evoke more “scholarly” challenges — which conceal rather poorly, in reality, ideological stakes and partisan interests. Such is the case for example of the accusations against certain French Jewish intellectuals launched by the historian of ideas Daniel Lindenberg, in his pamphlet Le rappel à l’ordre, enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (The Call to Order: An Inquiry into the New Reactionaries) published in October 2002⁷. The latter attacked by name intellectuals such as Shmuel Trigano or Bernard-Henri Lévy, there again in the name of the critique of the supposed “communitarianism” he attributed to them: “The most influential spokesman of Jewish communitarianism today, the political scientist Shmuel Trigano, has indeed professed for more than twenty years the idea that the emancipation of the Jews was a lure, which disarmed them as a group. From his book La Nouvelle question juive (The New Jewish Question), Trigano arraigns European (Ashkenazi) Judaism, which yielded to the sirens of a fallacious modernity (individualism, secularism) and finally created the conditions of possibility of its own annihilation. This iconoclastic intellectual construction, without one being able to ascertain the slightest connivance between the two authors, reinforces the effects of a book such as L’Idéologie française (French Ideology) by Bernard-Henri Lévy”⁸. Let us cite again the concomitant publication of two works by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, respectively Circonstances 3, portées du mot « juif »⁹ and La haine de la démocratie (Hatred of Democracy)¹⁰, which are devoted, for the essential, to the critique of certain contemporary French Jewish intellectuals accused of wishing to oppose the defense of Jewish identity to the progress of democracy. Thus Rancière denounces a certain critique of democracy that marks, according to him, a “displacement” or an “upheaval” of contemporary French thought, a displacement of which the “Jewish name” would be precisely the central axis: “This displacement is summarized, in Milner’s book, by the conjunction of two theses: the first sets in radical opposition the name of Jew and that of democracy; the second makes of this opposition a division between two humanities: a humanity faithful to the principle of filiation and transmission, and a humanity forgetful of this principle, pursuing an ideal of self-engendering that is just as much an ideal of self-destruction. Jewish and democratic are in radical opposition. This thesis marks the upheaval of what still structured, at the time of the Six-Day War or the Sinai war, the dominant perception of democracy”¹¹.

For their part, the French Jewish intellectuals thus challenged are not to be outdone. Thus Alain Finkielkraut denounced, in a virulent pamphlet published in 2003, “the antisemitism that is coming,” that is, according to his own definition: the appearance of a new and paradoxical “incitement to antiracist hatred” that would be directed principally against the Jews¹². Denouncing in the same sense the emergence of a new antisemitic danger in the France and the Europe of the 2000s, though in different registers and with quite different argumentations, one could also cite the works of Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (The Criminal Inclinations of Democratic Europe)¹³, of Shmuel Trigano, L’Avenir des Juifs de France (The Future of the Jews of France)¹⁴, or else of Danny Trom, La Promesse et l’obstacle, la gauche radicale et le problème juif (The Promise and the Obstacle: The Radical Left and the Jewish Problem)¹⁵. The first of these authors, Jean-Claude Milner, appears by far the most virulent in his critique of European modernity, and more precisely of its evolution in the most recent contemporary period, when he notably writes: “All there is to understand is that the Jews no longer interest anyone in Europe. Not even those who give themselves, each day more openly, to anti-Jewish practices and declarations. Anti-Judaism has become the modern form of indifference; persecution, the natural form of idleness; the denial of anti-Judaism and of persecution, the natural form of reasonable opinion”¹⁶.

To Exit an Aporetic Debate: Jewishness and the Concept of “Narrative Identity”

Is this to say, in sum, that there would be a permanence of antisemitism in French society and, beyond, in the whole of modern Western societies, behind the appearances of modernization or progress? Or else, inversely, that the question of antisemitism would be a pure invention on the part of communitarian intellectuals practicing an “intolerable blackmail”¹⁷? The fact of taking into consideration the French intellectual debate of the 2000s about the “new antisemitism” places us before a double pitfall. On the one hand, one must take care not to sink into a sort of stupefaction in the face of the antisemitic phenomenon, which appears indeed as enigmatic or mysterious in many respects, for political thought would risk in this case tipping over to the side of metaphysical, indeed theological, speculation. Now, inversely, our study must no more lead us to relativize, indeed to deny, the importance of this phenomenon that is antisemitism. We must not let ourselves be enclosed in a “bipolarized” debate, by definition vain and sterile, opposing those for whom any attempt to “explain” or to “understand” antisemitism would partake of “absolute Evil,” and those for whom antisemitism would be but a secondary “episode” on the path of a triumphant history, devoted to the ineluctable progress of Reason and to the universal emancipation of Humanity. A debate posed in these terms reveals itself perfectly aporetic and insoluble — and all the more so as the French debate of the 2000s is burdened by a systematic practice of “suspicion,” each intellectual “camp” accusing the other of secret and unavowable ulterior motives, to the point that it risks reaching the breaking point where it is the very possibility of public intellectual debate that appears threatened. The sociologist Abram de Swaan questioned himself on this subject in quite explicit terms, even if he strove to be reassuring in his answer: “But does there remain a common space where encounter and the search for a mutual understanding are still possible?”¹⁸. In other words, it seems impossible to establish a unilateral truth concerning this debate, whether to put forward purely transcendent theological reasons, or to put forward strictly immanent social and political reasons since, precisely, Jewish existence overflows the framework of the alternative, imposed by modern Western thought, between metaphysico-religious transcendence and sociopolitical immanence. The only question it would be fitting to pose in this framework would therefore be the following: what becomes of Jewish identity when it appears in the public space, notably through its most conscious and most “advanced” representatives, that is, the intellectuals? And reciprocally: what becomes of the public space, and more precisely of the public intellectual debate that constitutes its “heart,” when the latter lets identities appear, and singularly Jewish identity?

Let us pause a moment on this point: Jewish identity reveals itself to be a very paradoxical identity in regard to the categories of Western thought. Neither quite subjective nor quite objective, neither truly chosen nor merely undergone, neither perfectly autonomous nor absolutely heteronomous, “anti-natural” without being purely cultural, at once received and constructed, innate and acquired, etc., this identity concentrates within itself all the contradictions that “work over” Western philosophy from Greek antiquity to modern and contemporary anthropology and ethnology, by way of the philosophical tradition — from Socrates to Claude Lévi-Strauss by way of Rousseau. If it is indeed linked to an ensemble of symbolic representations (the Covenant at Sinai, the Law and the prophets) that perpetuate its meaning in history, Jewish existence is inscribed also in a carnal filiation, quasi-biological, that constitutes its irreducible substratum. The philosopher Paul Ricœur precisely described this ambivalence, which can be resolved according to him only in the form of “circularity”; he saw in Jewish existence an exemplary illustration of his concept of “narrative identity” — which grounds “ipseity,” the identity of the “self,” distinct from “identity” in the metaphysical or “substantial” sense of what always remains the “same”: “[Our example] is borrowed from the history of a particular community, biblical Israel. The example is particularly topical, for the reason that no people has been so exclusively impassioned by the narratives it has told about itself. On the one hand, the delimitation of the narratives later received as canonical expresses, indeed reflects, the character of a people that gave itself, among other writings, the narratives of the patriarchs, those of the Exodus, of the settlement in Canaan, then those of the Davidic monarchy, then those of the exile and the return. But one can say, with just as much pertinence, that it is by recounting narratives held by the testimony of the founding events of its own history that biblical Israel became the historical community that bears this name. The relation is circular: the historical community that calls itself the Jewish people drew its identity from the very reception of the texts it produced”¹⁹. In other words, the concept of “narrative identity” proposes an original and interesting solution to the antinomy of the “natural” and the “cultural,” of the “given” and the “constructed,” of “character” and “narrative,” in short of the “real” and the “symbolic” that works over Western thought: Ricœur shows that these two dimensions are an integral part of the constitution of the “self,” whether at the level of the individual (the “I”) or of the collective (the “people”). For all that, these considerations in no way attenuate, quite the contrary, the fact that, in the contemporary world, marked at once by the loss of identity and by the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of “return,” Jewish existence presents itself, today more than ever, as a “problem” of which the Jewish intellectuals can and must take hold, as the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas recalled: “To question oneself about Jewish identity is already to have lost it. But it is still to hold to it, without which one would avoid the interrogation. Between this already and this still, is drawn the limit, stretched like a tightrope on which ventures and risks itself the Judaism of the Western Jews”²⁰.

The Case of Alain Finkielkraut: An Illustration of the Constitutive Ambivalence of the Jewish Being in European Modernity?

As his 1980 essay, Le Juif imaginaire²¹, attests, Alain Finkielkraut began his intellectual and political career at the moment of May 1968. He drew from these events the ironic portrait of a generation, that of the French Jewish intellectuals engaged in various political movements of the left, to which he declares he himself belonged: “They were Jews for the image, as I was myself, and as the whole of our generation was, at the same moment, anarchist, Trotskyist, or Maoizing”²². But, for his part, Finkielkraut affirmed having adhered only for a very short time to the Maoist current: “I was a Maoist between May 68 and the end of the month of June 68”²³. Be that as it may, his career as a public intellectual properly speaking truly began only in the post-May, with the publication of the first works thanks to which he was able to accede to notoriety: Le nouveau désordre amoureux (The New Amorous Disorder)²⁴ (co-written with Pascal Bruckner), in 1977, and Le Juif imaginaire, in 1980. These two first books have a point in common: they are both devoted to the critique of the May movement. The first work denounces indeed the illusions engendered by the “sexual revolution” issued from May, and aims to rehabilitate amorous sentiment. As for the second, it delivers the bittersweet portrait of a generation that lulled itself with the illusion of living a moment of history when it was merely indulging in a “verbal fairyland”²⁵.

Let us interest ourselves more particularly, first of all, in this latter work, which played an important role in the coming-to-self-consciousness of a whole generation of contemporary French Jewish intellectuals. The 1980 essay devoted to the generation of the “Jews of May,” so to speak, formulates a critique whose signification is rather ambivalent. In this book, Finkielkraut shows indeed that the May movement translated a form of illusion or self-mystification on the part of a whole intellectual youth, in particular Jewish, that engaged itself in the name of the struggle against fascism and against antisemitism, while it lived in a society of peace, of tolerance, and of opulence. On the one hand, this book attests to the fact that the combat for the defense of the Jews was erected into a universal combat for the defense of human rights: “it was no longer reserved to the Jews to take themselves for Jews; an event was occurring that suspended all exclusivity, that allowed each child of the postwar period to occupy the place of the excluded, to wear the yellow star: the role of the Just became accessible to whoever desired to take it on; the mass felt entitled to proclaim its quality of exception”²⁶. On the other hand, the work formulates the regret that “Judaism” or “Jewishness” had then no true content, even for the bearers of the Jewish name of whom the author is one: “Extermination was a success that is measured not only in number of dead, but by the present poverty of our Judaism. (…) despite the monstrous figure of their victims, the Germans failed numerically: the rout did not leave them the time to bring the final solution to completion, but their success was qualitative: they effaced from the world a singular culture, that of Yiddishkeit. And that is why I, an Ashkenazi Jew, am a Jew without substance, a Luftmensch, but not in the traditional sense of vagabond or beggar… The Luftmensch of today is the Jew in a state of weightlessness, unburdened of what could have been his symbolic universe, his particular place, or at least one of his domiciles: Jewish life. As a consolation, I always have this bone to gnaw on: my depth. I avenge myself in psychological complexity for the diaphanous thinness of my real Judaism”²⁷. Thus, Finkielkraut calls into question, in his 1980 essay, the value and the meaning of this fragile synthesis between the universalism of political demands and Jewish particularism that had been the prerogative of the “generation 68,” the very one that cried out: “We are all German Jews”²⁸. In other words, Finkielkraut doubts, in this work, the possibility of the “taking up of the word” (in the sense of Hirschman), on the part of a generation of young Jewish intellectuals who posed themselves, unduly according to him, as “conscious pariahs” (in the sense of Arendt). Now, by the same stroke, Finkielkraut then re-inscribes the “Jewish question” in the public intellectual debate: “For lack of being the member of a living community, I can, at any moment, devote myself to the pleasures of solitary interrogation: to the one who is deprived of the Jewish ethnicity, the Jewish question furnishes its interminable subjects of meditation”²⁹. Thus, one may consider that, in his 1980 work, Finkielkraut revived the disquiet (in the primary sense of the term: that is, “intranquility”) that was the principal characteristic of the condition of the Jews in Western modernity, as Hannah Arendt analyzed it: namely the perpetual oscillation between the condition of “pariah” and that of “parvenu.” Were not the French Jewish intellectuals of the generation 68 fundamentally, according to Finkielkraut, “parvenus” who passed themselves off as “pariahs”?

To be sure, Finkielkraut did not call into question, in his 1980 essay, what constituted, according to him, an indisputable contribution of May 68: namely the denunciation of the abstract universalism proper to Western modernity, and the correlative affirmation of a “right to difference”: “They are no longer credible, the good apostles who, in his interest of course, out of devotion, out of philanthropy, invite the Jewish minority to a little more restraint”³⁰. However, while he accepted this heritage of May, Finkielkraut did not indulge in the joys of “identity” and “difference,” but he seemed to express on the contrary a certain nostalgia toward the bygone model of a French society unified by common social and cultural values: “A Jewish individual, I confront a disaggregated social landscape that is no longer unified by the national idea”³¹. On the other hand, Finkielkraut seemed also to regret that his “Jewishness” could not have substantial content at the very hour when the idea of assimilation seemed obsolete: “After having long lived at the door of their being, the French Jews now know the joys of rediscovered difference. An improbable difference, an ostentation of nothingness, for what do I affirm when I say: ‘I am Jewish’? I de-alienate myself, if you will, from these imposed figures: the Citizen, Man, the Frenchman of France — I escape the foreign powers that wished to enslave me, but I find, in this freedom, no durable comfort, for my interiority is empty”³². There were there, in sum, some contradictions or ambivalences that one could formulate in Hirschmanian terms. In Le Juif imaginaire, Alain Finkielkraut called into question the May 68 movement as a moment of “taking up of the word” (“voice”), and he expressed a form of nostalgia with regard to a “loyalty,” henceforth bygone, on the part of the Jews toward French society. But this did not prevent him also, moreover, from expressing his disillusion both with regard to the “taking up of the word” and to “loyalty,” which translated on his part a certain attraction for the attitude of “defection” (“exit”). Or, to say it in Arendtian terms: Finkielkraut attested, in the 1980 work, to a hesitation or an uncertainty between these two poles of modern Jewish life that are the condition of “parvenu” (that of the Jew falsely integrated into the non-Jewish society in which he lives: the Shoah committed with the active complicity of the French State of Vichy having amply demonstrated, indeed, that the French Israelites had been but “parvenus” falsely assimilated into French non-Jewish society), and the condition of “pariah” (the Jew excluded from non-Jewish society and living withdrawn into his community of origin). While he was neither quite the one nor quite the other, but no doubt a bit of both at once, Finkielkraut considered in any case that the status of “conscious pariah,” claimed by a certain number of French Jewish intellectuals of the generation 68 of whom he himself was one, had been but a lure. In any event, we, for our part, consider that the whole of Alain Finkielkraut’s subsequent stances can be illuminated in the light of this inaugural observation, subtle and ambivalent, concerning the condition of the Jews in the French society of the post-May.

Thus, the public stances, as well as the works published by Alain Finkielkraut in the course of the 1980s, first expressed a certain attachment to the French model of society as a society of individuals and abstract citizens, detached from the “identities” and “differences” that characterize their origins or their belongings. The 1987 work, La défaite de la pensée (The Defeat of the Mind)³³, which allowed Finkielkraut to accede to a wide notoriety in France, contains for example a severe charge against the “multiculturalism” of his contemporaries: “The alternative is simple: either men have rights, or they have a livery; either they can legitimately liberate themselves from an oppression even and especially if their ancestors already underwent its yoke, or it is their culture that has the last word (…) In our day, this opposition has become blurred: the partisans of the multicultural society demand for all men the right to the livery”³⁴.

On this question, the beginning of the 1990s, and more particularly the year 1992 when Finkielkraut published an essay on Charles Péguy³⁵ as well as an essay on the war then under way in Yugoslavia³⁶, marked a clear inflection on his part. In the first work, indeed, Finkielkraut strove to rehabilitate the thought of Péguy — such as this idea according to which “the spiritual is constantly lying in the camp bed of the temporal”³⁷, or else the one according to which the rights of man do not stem purely from the ideal, but “have [also] a body”³⁸. In the second work, Finkielkraut took the counter-position of the majority opinion in France concerning the war then under way in Yugoslavia: he defended the right of the Croats and of the other ethnic nations of the former Yugoslavia to form independent nation-States, against the idea of a federal Yugoslavia under Serbian domination. “There again,” Finkielkraut declared during our interview, “confronted with the event, I became aware of the ravages of antinomies, the ravages of simplism and of binary oppositions. There was something paradoxical and horrible in this blank check given to Serbian aggression in the name of republican values. For that is what it was about. People projected onto the Yugoslav federation the categories that have modeled French history, and they said: the Croats are the Corsicans, the Slovenes are the Bretons, that is, people who have only one idea, to dismember an old nation in order to substitute an ethnic nationalism for the beautiful assembly of citizens that the Republic had been able to set on its feet. The event obliged me myself to reflect more profoundly, and I became conscious of the fact that a disaffiliated citizen had strictly no sense. I became conscious of the fact that citizenship was also a filiation. I became conscious of the fact that the grandeur of homelands is not to efface themselves as homelands, but to be adoptive homelands. And I do not see, indeed, how one can separate in order to oppose them the particular and the universal. A universal without the particular is a democracy without a body, and a democracy without a body is a catalogue of good intentions: it does not make a republic. For there to be a republic, for there to be a public thing, there must be a territory, there must be limits, and that is what I tried to say against precisely the rigid republicanism of the French”³⁹. In other words, Finkielkraut then seemed to take note of the existence of “cultures,” “differences,” and “identities” as the inescapable substratum of modern societies.

Finally, the 2000s saw Finkielkraut completely invert, in a way, the direction of his attacks, since these turned no longer toward “differentialist racism” (for example that of the New Right of the 1980s), as he did at the time of La défaite de la pensée, but toward a certain “antiracist” militancy, qualified by him as “new antisemitism.” Here is what he declared on this subject during our interview: “It mattered to me at the beginning of the 2000s to make clearly appear the difference between the antisemitism that was then unfolding and the antisemitism that raged in the 20th century. It was a misreading in my eyes to fold one onto the other. Bernanos used to say: Hitler dishonored antisemitism. Unfortunately that is not true! What is true is that Hitler dishonored racist antisemitism and even nationalist antisemitism. These no longer have a right to exist. By contrast, another antisemitism rages today, which is not as new as I first believed, but which is very different from racist or nationalist antisemitism, since it is precisely an antiracist antisemitism. And it is not so new because it takes up, radicalizing it, the argumentation of the first Christians: the Jews were not accused then of forming a race, but of being a racist people, that is, of being an obstinate people, refusing to hear the ‘good news’ of Christian universality. (…) What is more, while one is armed morally, juridically, and politically against incitement to racial hatred, one is by contrast totally disarmed in the face of incitement to antiracist hatred”⁴⁰.

Fundamentally, there are indeed notable differences, if not contradictions, among these different moments of Finkielkraut’s intellectual career. Now these are, according to us, but manifestations of the ambivalence that characterizes the condition of the Jews in modernity as it was analyzed notably by Arendt. Since the beginning of the 2000s, Finkielkraut found himself at the center of numerous public accusations and polemics: whether during the “Lindenberg affair” of 2002, that is, the polemic on the “new reactionaries” where Finkielkraut was targeted in the front line, or else during the “Ramadan affair” of 2003, following the already cited article in which the Muslim preacher attacked the “communitarian intellectuals” among them Finkielkraut, or else again during the riots in the French banlieues in November 2005, which gave rise to the publication of a very controversial interview with Finkielkraut in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, etc. All these episodes, as well as numerous others, attest to the fact that Finkielkraut passed from the status of a listened-to and respected intellectual, which was his during the 1980s, to that of an intellectual placed under the ban of opinion which has been his lot since the beginning of the 2000s. Now the whole of the accusations targeting this intellectual rest on the idea that Finkielkraut passed from a state of legitimate revolt, as a “conscious pariah,” to a sort of situation of abuse of intellectual and media power, which would tend to make of him a sort of “parvenu.” What is more, Finkielkraut would not only be a “social parvenu,” but he would in addition be a “political parvenu,” insofar as, as a French citizen well integrated into the dominant cultural and social values, he would enjoy rights to which minority and oppressed social groups would not have access, groups thereby treated as “pariahs.” This is indeed what this analysis indicates — which takes on the air of a virulent polemical charge — made by the sociologist Michel Wieviorka: “Alain Finkielkraut is part of that ensemble of intellectuals who, for 25 years, have put forward an excessive and ‘republicanist’ vision of the republican idea. As a result, his remarks have become more and more incantatory and remote from realities. They have been contradicted by the very functioning of the French institutions. By dint of permanently holding a discourse vaunting the promises of the Republic, while these same promises are not kept for everyone, Finkielkraut has enclosed himself in an incantatory logic, which can lead only to extreme remarks and to the call for police repression”⁴¹. Now, as we have shown, in conformity with a dialectic well brought to light by Arendt, this type of accusation targeting a presumed “parvenu” has the effect of transforming him at once into a “pariah.” The debate on the “new antisemitism” of the beginning of the 2000s showed indeed the great isolation of the French Jewish intellectuals in general, and of Finkielkraut in particular, within French society. However, although he has in a way acquired a status of “social pariah” in contemporary French society, Finkielkraut does not intend to accomplish, unlike Benny Lévy, a movement of “exit” out of this society. The author of Au nom de l’autre, Réflexions sur l’antisémitisme qui vient (In the Name of the Other: Reflections on the Antisemitism That Is Coming)⁴² in no way tends to withdraw into a “Jewish identity” liable to be for him a sort of “refuge” against modernity. Quite the contrary, Finkielkraut for his part considers that he remains an intellectual whose role is to “take up the word” (“voice”) within the public space, but by assuming the particular place that is his within this space — thus without claiming to occupy the place of the universal that the “classical” intellectuals in the sense of Benda had arrogated to themselves in the past, but also without withdrawing into Jewish particularism. Is he then a “conscious pariah”? In reality, after having unmasked with an ironic and biting brio, in his 1980 work, the illusion that the model of the “conscious pariah” adopted by the French Jewish intellectuals of the generation 68 of whom he was one had represented in his eyes, Finkielkraut could in no case renew ties with what is according to him but a chimera. But it seems that the author of Le Juif imaginaire, conscious of the failure of the figure of the “conscious pariah,” is rather torn between contradictory tendencies, namely, to say it in Hirschmanian terms: between the reaffirmation of his “loyalty” toward modern French society, and the temptation, or rather the threat, of the always-possible “defection” with regard to this society on the part of a Jew who no longer finds his place in it. In short, beyond the illusions of 68 that had led people to believe that the encounter between revolutionary universalism and Jewish particularism was possible, Finkielkraut recovers the ambivalence that has been the distinctive mark of the Jewish condition in modern Western societies, not only before, but also after the civic and juridical emancipation of the Jews.

In the likeness of Hannah Arendt, Finkielkraut could thus say himself too: “The fact remains nonetheless that many Jews are like me totally independent of Judaism and are yet Jews”⁴³. Which signifies, according to his own terminology, that Jewishness identifies itself in him with “memory,” in the precise sense in which he defines this term: “The force of circumstances made of me an introspective Jew, and left me but this single faculty to escape the monotony of the inner gaze: memory. A voluntary, laborious, lacunary, untiring memory, and not the presence in me of two thousand years of History. Judaism is not natural to me: there is between me and the Jewish past an uncrossable distance; with the human collectivity carried off in the catastrophe, I have no common homeland. The imperative of memory is born with the painful consciousness of this separation. An inexhaustible nostalgia for the Jewish life of Central Europe: there is my whole inheritance. Jewishness is what is lacking to me, and not what defines me; it is the infinitesimal burn of an absence, and not the triumphant plenitude of instinct. I call Jewish, in sum, that part of myself that does not resign itself to living with its time, that cultivates the formidable supremacy of what has been over what is today”⁴⁴. Between an abstract and disincarnate humanity, and a lost Jewish identity, Alain Finkielkraut claims a Jewishness that rests on what one could call a “critical memory”: this one precisely articulates his Jewish being to his social role of critical intellectual, which makes of him a disillusioned “conscious pariah” torn between the figure of the “parvenu” and that of the “pariah” — or otherwise said between an impossible “loyalty” and an unthinkable “defection.”

Conclusion

In the final analysis, the conception of Jewishness proper to the author of Le Juif imaginaire has not really changed since the publication of this key work. But it seems, inversely, that the grave recent challenges to the French Jewish intellectuals in general, and to A. Finkielkraut in particular, confirm his own observation, drawn in the aftermath of May 68, of a profound misunderstanding between the political and social modernity of the Western world and Jewish existence. For all that, if there is a misunderstanding, Finkielkraut seems to wish neither to dissipate it nor to denounce it: it is a matter neither of acting as if it did not exist, nor of exaggerating it in the direction of the definitive rupture, but indeed of taking note of it, in a painful and lucid observation that sometimes takes on accents of tragedy in order to attempt to ward off a fatal denouement. Or to say it otherwise, in the terms of the sociologist Albert Hirschman: Finkielkraut neither advocates nor practices personally “defection,” but he exercises on the contrary a form of “taking up of the word” that translates in part a sentiment of “loyalty” disappointed toward Western modernity. One understands that such an ambivalent and complex positioning, which reveals to the surrounding society its own contradictions, cannot fail to earn the intellectual who practices it with such firmness and constancy, for nearly forty years, very numerous, very insistent, and very keen reproaches.

Notes