Forgetting souls: Lyotard,Adorno,and the Trope of the Jew

Abstract

In this article, I engage in a criticism of Jean François Lyotard’s tropological approach to Judaism, arguing that his articulation of the “the jew” as figural projection serves to establish and rigidify a number of freighted binaries such as those between reason and myth, philosophy and theology, and modern and postmodern. In comparison, I posit Theodor Adorno’s approach to tropes of Judaism as one which encompasses Lyotard’s productive emphases on the role of forgetting in subject formation while loosening these same binaries.

Keywords

Jean Francois Lyotard Theodor Adorno Antisemitism Jewish Tropes

Introduction

At least since the publication of Jean Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew in 1944, scholars have debated the appropriateness of attempts to theorize the tropes and stereotypes found in anti-Semitic discourse. While Sartre is commonly criticized for reducing the Jew to nothing more than a projection constructed out of an anti-Semitic predilection for hatred, a generation of thinkers after him have simultaneously attempted to reappropriate tropes of Judaism in ways that promote an ethic which can resist anti-Semitism without losing touch with the sociological complexity of “real” Judaism. Thus, for example, Sarah Hammerschlag (2010: 30) has traced what she calls the “revalorization” of tropes of Judaism from Sartre to Derrida, highlighting attempts to cultivate nonidentitarian and deracinating understandings of Judaism among French theorists. Similarly, Judith Butler (2012), Edward Said (2003), and Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (1993) have attempted in different ways to derive resources for a diasporic understanding of identity from within Judaism. Nowhere is this movement from the rejection of tropes to the articulation of counter-tropes more relevant than in a reading of Jean François Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews.” In reading Heidegger and “the jews,” I do not argue that Lyotard’s fault lies in his recourse to the trope, or even in the deploying of binaries. When it comes to communal and individual identity, forms of exclusion are inevitable, and much of what is productive in the tropological analyses performed by Butler, Said, and Lyotard derives from exploring and reconfiguring these exclusions. It is my hope to more finely draw out the nuances of Lyotard’s approach to the trope in order to better understand the rhetorical consequences of his logic—to discern how he reconfigures the boundary between trope and reality. Specifically, I argue that Lyotard’s treatment of “the jews” establishes a primary binary between the Jew and the non-Jew and then maps this first binary onto a more general dichotomy between mystical antifoundationalism and rational enlightenment, with “the jews” standing for the mystic traditionalist and the non-Jew standing for the idealist philosopher. It is this mapping of binaries in the name of reinforcing the division between reason and mysticism, or the knowable and the unknowable, that belies the productive potential of Lyotard’s reading.

In contrast to Lyotard’s deployment of the unnameable as the foundation of a coherent Jewish identity, I argue that the work of Theodor Adorno offers a comparable but more nuanced approach to the unnameable as the foundation of identity. Like Lyotard, Adorno recognizes the importance of the prohibition on the naming of God in Judaism,¹ but unlike Lyotard, he deploys this theology toward entirely different ends, recognizing the unnameable as the foundation of systemic philosophy rather than its antithesis. Where for Lyotard “the jews” represent the antifoundational flip side of western metaphysics, for Adorno the Jew represents one example of the impossibility of extricating the coconstitutive processes of mystification and rationalization as well as the impossibility of purifying identity.

Ultimately, then, this paper is about the trope of “the jews” as it is understood differently by Lyotard and Adorno. Lyotard’s focus on epistemology over subjectivity generates a philosophy in which the trope appears at times more real than the living subject—in which the real Jew can never be anything more than a bad “jew.” To be sure, Lyotard’s object of analysis is always already the trope; his aim is to interrogate a conflation of real Jews with “the jews” in the thought of western modernity. Yet, Lyotard exposes this movement without sufficiently undermining it. He leaves the relationship between trope and reality—between metaphorical “jews” and literal Jews—intact. By contrast, Adorno’s focus on subjectivity rather than epistemology renders a much more flexible and complicated treatment of the trope, in which a productive and strategic figural identity is constructed dialectically with the subjectivity of real Judaism in all of its sociological complexity. In other words, Adorno’s treatment of the unnameable renders a view of the Jew and the non-Jew alike as riven with internal heterogeneity and complexity—a complexity downplayed in Lyotard’s various characterizations of “the jews” in binaristic terms.

What’s in a Trope?

If we define a “trope” as a word or expression used in a figurative or metaphorical sense, then Lyotard’s use of quotation marks serves to indicate “the jews” as trope. He writes, “I use quotation marks to avoid confusing these ‘jews’ with real Jews… ‘The jews’ are the object of a dismissal with which Jews, in particular, are afflicted in reality.” “The jews,” then, in quotations, are first and foremost a metaphor for something shared by all of humanity; they are “Forgetting souls, like all souls, but to whom the Forgotten never ceases to return to claim its due” (Lyotard, 1990: 3). Thus, Lyotard is already engaging with the tropological in the sense that he examines how real people are replaced in thought with an image or representation. This raises the possibility that “real Jews,” capitalized and without quotations, are in some sense themselves always already tropological, as they are only understood in western thought by recourse to a trope that Lyotard wishes to disrupt.

Along these lines, Hammerschlag (2005) has attempted to demonstrate that Lyotard’s tropological method constitutes an attempt to deliberately oppose the idea of Jews in the minds of Europeans to the lived meanings of Judaism. In Hammerschlag’s reading, “the jews” resist western modernity not because of something inherent to Judaism, but because they have been figured that way by European philosophers (namely, Kant, Hegel, and Levinas). Based on a close reading of “Discussions or Phrasing After Auschwitz,” Hammerschlag (386) foregrounds Lyotard’s conception that “the sublimity of Auschwitz leads to the recognition of the impossibility of the collective subject,” leading Lyotard to propose replacing this impossible subject with one based on nonidentity and nonrepresentation—a project enabled by his deployment of the admittedly essentialist trope of “the jews.”

Importantly, for Hammerschlag, Lyotard is aware of the impossibility of constructing a universal collective identity out of something so absolutely particular as “the jews”—a deliberate tension which performs a kind of “exercise in self-critique that functions by performing an operation that destabilizes its own discourse” (395). But it is not clear that Lyotard’s method follows from a conviction that real Jews are unavoidably masked by the trope of “the jews.” In texts beyond Heidegger and “the jews,” we find instead that Lyotard frequently describes Jews and Judaism in ways that reflect his discussion of “the jews” and yet seem clearly nonfigurative. And even if we accept that Lyotard finds it unavoidably necessary to reconfigure “the jews” as a way of “troping the trope” of real Jews, we would still have to ask whether his redeployment of the trope is productive. If we agree with Hammerschlag (389) that Lyotard’s aim is to demonstrate that “the ‘jews’ function as a counter category to the notion of humanity, haunting the very Idea of humanity,” we can begin to analyze the success of his project. While Lyotard clearly sees “the jews” as introducing a nonassimilable heterogeneity into the logocentrism of western modernity, that failure to assimilate nonetheless reinscribes sites of homogeneity between newly constituted binaries. Ultimately, Lyotard’s hope that Europeans become “jews” runs the risk of divorcing myth and reason along temporal lines, such that one is always a European until one becomes a “jew.” By contrast, Adorno’s dialectical method posits a more vigorous kind of “haunting” in which Europeans are always already “the jews.”

Lyotard and the Jew/non-Jew Binary

In Heidegger and “the jews,” Lyotard’s writing of “the jews” in the lower case and in quotations indicates already an intent to describe something like an epistemology rather than a sociological reality. This epistemology, in turn, revolves around an “originary repression” that Lyotard associates with “the jews.” This originary repression refers to the idea that all knowledge is necessarily coded through language, establishing an epistemological limit to understandings of the individual and collective self. Beyond or prior to this linguistic limit, there is that which is experienced but which cannot be known. And because it is unknown, this “immemorial” cannot be remembered or forgotten, in an epistemological sense, even as it nonetheless lingers. “The jews,” then, represent for Lyotard the immemorial—but why? For Hammerschlag, “the jews” are always merely a trope—a symbol of the refusal, according to western stereotypes, to forget their particular traditions and assimilate to European culture.

But Lyotard’s “jews” are not only borrowed from a dominant image for the sake of undermining it, and it is not clear that his real Jews are tropological in any sense. The posited relationship between “the jews” and “originary repression” revolves around the unnameability of God, which for Lyotard, constitutes the very real core of Judaism. Referring to God’s revelation to Moses at Sinai, Lyotard (1990: 21) describes this “originary repression”:

a promise and an alliance that are not the contract and the pact, a promise made to a people who did not want it and had no need for it, an alliance that has not been negotiated, that goes against the people’s interests, of which it knows itself unworthy. And so … this simple people is taken hostage by a voice that does not tell it anything, save that it (this voice) is, and that all representation and naming of it are forbidden, and that it, this people, only needs to listen to its tone, to be obedient to a timbre.

The reference to “the jews” as “hostage” echoes the writings of Immanuel Levinas,² but there is no evidence that Lyotard is here parodying a stereotyped understanding of Judaism; the theological discussion indicates that Lyotard’s trope is based in his understanding of Jewish tradition as much as inaccurate stereotypes. The notion that God has no name and remains unintelligible within human language puts “the jews” in a position of permanent debt or irreconciliation that, for Lyotard, constitutes a radical foundationlessness placing “the jews” in direct confrontation with the systematic philosophy definitive of the Occident. Hence, “Anti-Semitism is one of the means of the apparatus of its culture to bind and represent as much as possible – to protect against – the originary terror, actively to forget it” (23).

It is important to note that this understanding of the foundationlessness of “the jews” follows from a nonfigurative understanding of Judaism. Lyotard invokes a theological phenomenon associated with real Jews to draw a conclusion about the metaphorical import of “the jews.” Already, this description of “the jews” as that which resists the systematization of western philosophy places Judaism within a binaristic relationship with rationality and with the non-Jew. However, from this text alone it is difficult to say that Lyotard rigidifies the distinction between Jew and non-Jew.

Noticing the ambiguity in Heidegger and “the jews” concerning whether the unnameable is something unique or even exclusive to Judaism, Elisabeth Weber engages in an elucidating discussion with Lyotard in “Before the Law, After the Law.” Lyotard’s responses indicate the extent to which his tropological “jews” are rooted in his conceptions of Judaism as a real epistemology. Immediately, Lyotard reiterates his view of the unnameable as “precisely that which seems to me characteristic of the Jewish tradition and its thought” (Bennett et al., 1999: 42). Here, however, he goes on to starkly distinguish this characteristic from anything found, for example, in Christianity: “In the Christian tradition, this problem of voice does not exist; rather, there is a charming simplicity that does not doubt the utterance. In Jewish reasoning, however, great suspicion is placed on the question of who has spoken” (43). Where in Heidegger and “the jews,” there is some indication that the “problem of voice” haunts Occidental thought, here it seems simply absent from Christian epistemology.

This radical mutual exclusivity of Judaism and Christianity is founded precisely on the question of the unnameability of God. For Lyotard, the incompatibility of Judaism and Christianity amounts to an approach to forgetting this unnameability, wherein Jews have simply refused to forget the primary abyss at the origin of tradition: “Only insofar as Judaism recognizes this primary abyss, but Christianity does not, an abyss exists also, as a secondary phenomenon, between Judaism and Christianity” (Van Peperstraten, 2009: 37). This begins already to demonstrate how an initial division—that between the forgetting and remembering of the abyssal—serves for Lyotard to justify a larger system of binaries such as that between Jew and Christian. The appeal to real Jewish philosophy to flesh out the tropological understanding of “the jews” as “forgetting souls” shows that the distinction between the figurative and the real—between “the jews” and real Jews—breaks down in Lyotard’s broader philosophical project. In other words, Lyotard’s figurative “jews” seem to accurately reflect his theological understanding of Judaism; he is not undermining the trope but accepting it. We might be tempted to say that he redeploys the trope toward productive ends, but we must recognize the extent and rigidity of the system of dichotomies predicated on the trope of “the jews.” The question of the unnameable does not only divide the Jew from the Christian; it also comes to separate the mythical from the demystified, the modern from the postmodern, and “the jews” from rationality in general.

Lyotard’s proliferating distinctions

If Lyotard relies on the Jewish prohibition on representing God to highlight the incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism, this theological difference then subtly cascades into a stream of characteristics distinguishing “the jews” from all others. For example, the willingness to recognize the unnameability of God comes to represent a generally Jewish attitude toward tradition. While “the jews” are “the nomadism of thought, not riveted to their roots, but essentially transportable, like books, money, jewels, the violin,” they come to be regarded as evil: “if they are rooted to their book, to the stupor of a covenant, of an immemorial ‘shock’ whose affection they try to reserve against all compromise. This present ‘society’ has no need for this affection nor for its preservation, it forecloses it more than any other” (Lyotard, 1990: 40). Here, society’s foreclosure of the possibility of meaninglessness is opposed to a characteristically Jewish acceptance of the nonfoundational. The Jew/non-Jew binary has quietly shifted to one between those who seek reconciliation of the abyssal origin and those who do not. To the extent that Jews could disagree amongst themselves concerning the role of the name of God, this disagreement would only separate good “jews” from bad Jews.

In “The Postmodern Condition,” (Lyotard, 1984) the distinction between “the jews” as those who accept the unnameable and all others who seek to represent it finds its homology in the distinction between two treatments of the sublime separating the modern from the postmodern. Here, building on Kant, Lyotard identifies two modes of the sublime: the modern, melancholic sublime, in which: “[t]he accent…fall[s] on the inadequacy of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence experienced by the human subject and the obscure and futile will that animates it in spite of everything,” and the novatio, in which:

the accent…fall[s] on the power of the faculty to conceive, on what one might call its ‘inhumanity’ … since it is of no concern to the understanding whether or not the human sensibility or imagination accords with what it conceives—and on the extension of being and jubilation that come from inventing new rules of the game. (13)

Lyotard’s (13) distinction “between regret and experimentation” constitutes his differentiation of the modern and the postmodern attitude, respectively. With the sublime here serving a similar function to that of the unnameable at the heart of Judaism, it would seem that “the jews” are actually postmodern in a way that renders them at odds with the modern Occident. What is important for the sake of the argument here is that the Jew/Christian binary finds its counterpart in the modern/postmodern binary in a way that downplays the possibility of any Jewish attempt to reconcile with the sublime.

In his interview with Weber, Lyotard renders this mapping of binaries more explicit. In response to her insinuation that the Shoah was an instance of violence directed at the self rather than at the Other, in that the sublime is constitutive of thought in general, Lyotard hesitates, claiming that such a view bypasses the question “why it was the Jews who were besieged and apprehended” (Bennett et al., 1999: 45). Such a claim is a valid attempt to generate historical specificity, but immediately Lyotard proceeds from this emphasis on singularity to a flirtation with essentializing the figure of “the jews.” He does this, moreover, by returning to the purported rift in Judaism between those good “jews” who would remain faithful to the unnameable and those bad Jews who would forget it: “For those Jews who have ‘got’ the aleph [qui ont ‘eu’ l’aleph], who have not truly understood and know that they will always be bad Jews, there are two ways of forgetting: either to shut themselves in the tradition, with all the conformism and convention which that means, or to assimilate” (45–46). Here, “bad Jews” are those who seek to forget that they are without foundation, and their mode of forgetting constitutes a division between something like premodern and modern Jews. The unnameable may either serve as a recourse to blind tradition (the premodern option), or the unnameable may serve as a recourse to assimilation with the modern consequence of the dissolution of identity.

Thus, for Lytoard, a uniquely Jewish lack of foundation is the ultimate justification for mindless tradition unless it yields to the impulse of emancipation based on principles of rationality. This lack of foundation serves to permanently sever Judaism from identification with principles like liberty and voluntary reason:

This coming and going between observance and emancipation shows the extent to which this lack remains present as a gaping or an in-between. Which is not to say a go-between; on the contrary, it is an abyss between two errors or faults: either to meld into modern civilization or to attach oneself to the letter of the tradition as if it prescribed a set of ethnic customs among others. (45–46)

This abyss between rationality and tradition, to Lyotard, is one that can only be leapt over and never inhabited. The Jew will always remain torn between two options which are not really options at all, for the side of modern emancipation is already inhabited by non-Jews and to join them would necessarily be to eliminate one’s Jewish identity. Thus, the originally theological division between Jew and Christian comes to stand in for a more general division between tradition and emancipation, myth and reason. In reality, Lyotard has constructed here a quadratic division that masks a more fundamental binary. On one side, there are those bad Jews who forget the unnameable either by blindly embracing premodern tradition or by dissolving into modernity. On the other, there are those good “jews” who remember the unnameable either by mindfully engaging with tradition or by experimenting with the postmodern. The mindful engagement with tradition, however, is actually postmodern in its own right, for “the tradition is to be without tradition, in the strongest sense, since it obliges Jews always ‘to invent’ what the law says” (46). And thus, the only real “jew” is postmodern—the premodern traditionalist and modern assimilationist can always only be bad Jews.

Lyotard and the Trope

In defining “the jews” epistemologically, Lyotard’s tropological analysis masks its ideological function in its purported innocence. By foregrounding an analysis that is always merely tropological, Lyotard enables a continuous conflict between the real trope and bad Jews, such that the repeated and presumably unintentional conflation of the two disguises their more fundamental incompatibility. If the trope of “the jews” serves to provide a new ideal of collective subjectivity, it is one that can only be achieved by shedding those old forms of subjectivity of which Judaism is one example. As Boyarin and Boyarin argue, what is most problematic about this analysis is that the trope at times appears more real than “real Jews.” For example, when Lyotard (1990: 46) claims, “what is most real about real Jews is that Europe, in any case, does not know what to do with them,” it is evident that this treatment of real Jews follows from the foregrounding of the trope of the abyssal. Thus, Lyotard (80) is able to claim: “the Jews (without quotation marks) are not less, but rather more exposed than others (they are ‘stiff necked’) to forgetting the unnameable. Every Jew is a bad ‘jew,’ a bad witness to what cannot be represented, just like all texts fail to reinscribe what has not been inscribed.” The divergence between the trope and the real Jew here is based on the primacy of the trope. To the extent that there are real Jews, they embody a failure to prove the trope. Again, we can conditionally accept that it is precisely the point of Lyotard’s project to demonstrate that the trope of “the jews” has occluded the existence of real Jews and thus to redeploy “the jews” against anti-Semitism, but Lyotard’s unproblematizing recourse to essential characteristics of Judaism suggests that he nonetheless maintains a conviction in the divergence between the trope and the real. In the final analysis, Lyotard appears to believe in real Jews who can be understood apart from the trope of “the jews.” But these real Jews give up something in their divergence from “the jews.” To resist the trope of “the jews,” by exhibiting subjective complexity, especially with regard to the unnameable, would always be to cross the abyssal hyphen into the realm of the Occident, understood primarily as Christian demystification. Put differently, the transition from myth to rationality is precisely also the transition from “jews” to non-Jews and from trope to reality. This move cuts back against the utility of Lyotard’s “jews” as figures of forgetting. The same intellectual process that liberates “the jews” from the strictures of western philosophy locks real Jews within a series of rigid binaries around questions of religion, identity, and modernity. The price for Lyotard’s construction of figurative flexibility is literal obstinacy.

In light of these criticisms, we might explore the productive potential in maintaining an emphasis on the unnameable in Jewish thought without rigidifying the kind of dichotomies that Lyotard constructs. To this end, the work of Theodor Adorno, both alone and with Max Horkheimer, provides one possible treatment of the trope of the unnameable which undermines and complicates, rather than reifying, such binaries.

Adorno and the unnamed

In Heidegger and “the jews,” Lyotard (43) briefly recruits Adorno to his side, claiming that Adorno recognizes the centrality of the unnameable in systems of knowledge. But while it is true that Adorno’s thought is preoccupied with the possibility of representing what cannot be represented, Adorno’s thought does more than accord with Lyotard’s reading of the unnameable. Where for Lyotard, the unnameable is something uniquely Jewish and at odds with western metaphysics, for Adorno it is fundamentally constitutive of rationality in general.

To understand how Adorno treats the nonrepresented at the origin of thought, it is first necessary to show that Adorno’s approach to subjectivity is analogous to Lyotard’s approach to epistemology. Where for Lyotard the unnameable is situated collectively at the origin of a system of thought, for Adorno it is primarily understood individually in the self-effacement of the subject. This is particularly visible in Adorno and Horkheimer’s allegorical reading of The Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Here, a comment made in passing may serve as a starting point for connecting Adorno’s discussion of identification with the Jewish question: “‘Udeis,’ who compulsively proclaims himself to be Odysseus, already bears features of the Jew” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 54).³ In identifying Odysseus with the Jew, Adorno points to the imbrication of a universal function of subjecthood in Jewish thought. To understand this connection, we must consider Adorno’s account of Odysseus’ cunning as it compares with Lyotard’s description of “the jews.”

The story of The Odyssey, for Adorno, is one of a demystification in which Odysseus asserts his subjectivity over nature precisely by embracing a kind of passivity. When Horkheimer and Adorno (46) claim that Odysseus “complies with the contract of his bondage,” echoing the Levinasian/Lyotardian language of being taken hostage, he points to a process by which the subject submits to an insurmountable and dominating relationship with language. Rather than imposing linguistic domination over nature by uncovering the necessary relationship between words and things, Odysseus’ cunning “consists in exploiting the difference” between “word and object” (47). This nominalistic relationship between word and object is, for Lyotard, what Sinai stands for—a realization that language is untethered from reality, which always exceeds and escapes representation. This is evident in the way that Horkheimer and Adorno (47) isolate Odysseus’ revolutionary awareness of nominalism in his treatment of the proper name:

In his extremity, Odysseus becomes aware of dualism, as he discovers that an identical word can mean different things. Since the name Udeis can mean either ‘hero’ or ‘nobody,’ the hero is able to break the spell of the name…From the formalism of mythical names and statutes, which, indifferent like nature, seek to rule over human beings and history, emerges nominalism, the prototype of bourgeois thinking.

This is similar to Lyotard’s claim that the unnameable foundationlessness at the heart of the law is what enables the invention of the law by “the jews.” Put simply, it is an awareness of an inevitable failure of language, which connects Odysseus with Lyotard’s “jews.” What is particularly important, however, is the different treatment of this linguistic failure by Lyotard and Adorno. Where for Lyotard the failure of language places “the jews” at odds with the kind of rationalism inherent to western metaphysics, for Adorno, it is the very process by which enlightenment proceeds, here in a central text of western philosophy. Thus, when Odysseus abandons his own name, declaring himself to be nothing, it is not in pursuit of some kind of Kabbalistic mysticism but, on the contrary, an attempt to preserve the sovereignty of the subject—a dialectic of self-effacement and self-assertion. Thus, Odysseus “declares allegiance to himself by disowning himself as Nobody; he saves his life by making himself disappear” (47–48).

Hence, both Adorno and Lyotard attempt to think the relationship between what cannot be represented and idealist philosophies of representation. For Lyotard, the relationship is primarily one of mutual exclusivity and conflict, where for Adorno the relationship is much more complicated and ambivalent. Rather than establishing a binary between the mystical Jew and the rationalist non-Jew, Adorno’s treatment of the nonrepresentable undermines and complicates this very binary. Before we can understand this effect, however, we must first elaborate on the ways that Adorno’s reasoning undermines Lyotard’s primary dichotomy—that between the Jew and the non-Jew.

Adorno and the dissolution of binaries

In “Studies in the Authoritarian Personality,” Adorno (1970: 450) describes the taboo on imagery as common to both Judaism and Protestantism. While Dan Webb (2009: 520) argues that Adorno “secularizes a key Jewish category—the prohibition against images,” it is perhaps more accurate to say that he rejects the claim that the hesitation toward representation was unique to Judaism. As Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 13) write, “The making of images was proscribed by Plato as it was by the Jews. Both reason and religion outlaw the principle of magic.”

At the same time, this is not to say that Adorno seeks to erase any difference between the Jew and the Christian. While acknowledging difference, Adorno shows that what Odysseus does in embracing the nameless is a process that is constitutive of and not opposed to rationality and that is present in both Judaism and Christianity. Hence, where Lyotard is at pains to resist the claim that anti-Semitism is, to any extent, an ideology (since he denies of self-hatred in that the West shares some affinity with the Jew), Adorno embraces the characterization of anti-Semitism as partially self-inflicted violence. As Porter (2010: 210) writes,

[Adorno’s claim] would render contemporary anti-Semitic Germans into ancient wayfarers and merchants, or else into Nobodies, that is, into Jews. If Adorno’s analysis of modern subject formation is correct, such self-annihilation is a step that the Jew-haters had already taken, whether knowingly or not. In Freud’s words, ‘their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Christians,’ and therefore, a hatred that is self-directed rather than other-directed. Such is the lethal irony of anti-Semitism.

It must be admitted that such a characterization still risks reducing the Jew to a projection of the anti-Semite, but what is productive in this account is that it admits the fact of overlap between—and internal difference among—both Jew and anti-Semite. The fact that anti-Semitism is, at base, self-hatred does not mean, as in Sartre, that the Jew is merely a myth perpetuated by the anti-Semite, but rather that the Jew and the non-Jew are already formed in relation to one another and with internal dissonances: “The human being’s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 43). Neither the anti-Semite nor the Jew come first; they are both formed out of a similar dialectic. “Self-assertion…as in all civilization, is self-repudiation” (53).

We have already seen that, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the process by which Odysseus retreats into the nonverbal in order to reassert his sovereign identity is ultimately a process of demystification. Indeed, the entire project of Dialectic of Enlightenment consists in demonstrating the alternating movement of demystification and mythification. To be clear, this is not to say that Adorno erases the division between myth and enlightenment, but rather that showing how each is predicated on and coconstitutive with the other is characteristic of much of Adorno’s work. Thus, in Negative Dialectics, Adorno (1973: 207) more explicitly connects the ban on representation, which Lyotard equates with a kind of Jewish mysticism, to rational materialism:

The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology.

The most purportedly rationalistic science, in other words, is predicated on the same kind of nonrepresentability as Jewish and Christian theology. Again, in Against Epistemology, Adorno characterizes both philosophical idealism and theology as attempts to make the unknown constitutive of knowledge. Echoing Lyotard’s emphasis on Judaism as a system of unfulfillable debt, Adorno (1982: 26) writes: “The most enlightened epistemology still participates in the myth of the first in the figure of a contract which is never fulfilled and therefore in itself endless, self-repeating without respite.” The whole of Against Epistemology, moreover, revolves around an attempt to demonstrate that the scientific emphasis on methodology relies on an abyssal treatment of an origin whose inaccessibility necessitates systemic rules for the construction of knowledge, just as Lyotard’s “jews” must invent a new tradition. What is different in Adorno’s account is that this process is not restricted to Judaism and is not simply mystical but is a central component of moves toward disenchantment.

For Adorno, reason is always inhabited by the irrational. Odysseus, as the prototypical bourgeois and the prototypical Jew, is always a figure of the “irrationality of reason” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 48). This is true of western philosophy as much as it is of Judaism, as Porter (2010: 205–206) points out: “Judaism and the Enlightenment…both are prone to a dialectic of denial and illusion.” What is crucial is that this dialectical perspective does not merely allow for a greater awareness of internal diversity and complexity within and external to Judaism; it also enables a much more productive take on anti-Semitism than Lyotard’s projectionist account. It is not that the Jew represents the undesirable opposite of western rationality—a mysticism that must be annihilated to enable totalization. Rather, the trope of the Jews is always placed in a double bind between movements toward myth and movements toward rationality. “They are therefore regarded by advanced civilization as both backward and too advanced, like and unlike, shrewd and stupid” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 153).

Elements of anti-Semitism

To better understand Adorno’s treatment of the trope of the Jew as it relates to anti-Semitism, we may ask about the relationship between the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s discussion of Odysseus in “Excursus 1: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” and the extended diagnosis of anti-Semitism in “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightnment.” While the latter chapter is careful to proceed primarily historically rather than to appeal to abstract universals, it serves to generate a historical account of the emergence of the particular “image of the Jew” held up by racial nationalists (137). That Adorno and Horkheimer are concerned with the tropological nature of this image is indicated by the prevalence of language pointing to the representational. Their focus is on “the fantasy of the conspiracy of lascivious Jewish bankers who finance Bolshevism,” “the disowned wishful image of those mutilated by power,” (141) and the Jew as “scapegoat” (142) and as “projection” (153). Thus, for the authors, “there is no authentic anti-Semitism” (140) because the construction and vilification of the image of the Jew is symptomatic of “the destructive urge which the wrong social order spontaneously produces” (137).

Adorno and Horkheimer (143) thus marry tropological analysis with a historical genealogy of that trope’s emergence:

To be sure, in the history of Europe, and even in imperial Germany, baptized Jews had reached high positions in administration and industry. But they always had to justify this with redoubled devotion and diligence, and stubborn self-denial. They were only admitted if, through their behavior, they tacitly adopted and confirmed the verdict on other Jews: that is the purpose of baptism. All the great achievements of their prominent members were not enough to allow Jews to be admitted to the peoples of Europe; having been prevented from putting down roots they were then criticized as rootless.

Here we see one of the clearest points of contact with Lyotard. The portrayal of the Jews as “rootless” echoes Lyotard’s discussion of the Jew as that which cannot be assimilated into systemic philosophy. But here, rootlessness is presented as a sociological strategy of survival rather than a theological necessity. This passage also illuminates the earlier discussion of Odysseus. If Odysseus demonstrates the dialectic of self-denial and self-assertion—the embrace of namelessness as a strategy for conquering the forces of myth—the lesson from this passage is that self-denial is never inherent and always strategic. It is a strategy for achieving the means of self-assertion, and one doomed to replicate systems of domination.

“Elements of Antisemitism” thus combines a discussion of historical and social context with structuralist explanation in order to expose the contingency of the trope of the Jew: “Those who were never allowed untroubled ownership of the civic right which should have granted them human dignity are again called ‘the Jews’ without distinction” (144). The symptomatic nature of the process by which “the Jews” are homogenized in Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis contrasts with Lyotard’s reading of the figural jew, where it is not quite clear where the theological ends and the sociological begins. As a final point of comparison, then, we can turn to Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of theology in “Elements of Antisemitism.”

Judaism, for Adorno and Horkheimer (145) incorporates a certain terror as “the nature demon” originating in “remote preanimist times passes from nature into the concept of the absolute self which, as its creator and ruler, entirely subjugates nature.” In a passage resonant with Lyotard’s theological reading of Judaism, Adorno and Horkheimer highlight the ineffability of the Jewish God. However, they articulate a unique relationship between the ineffability of representation and the process of rationalization:

Despite the ineffable power and splendor in which such alienation clothes it, that ruler is still attainable to thought, which becomes universal through this very relationship to something supreme, transcendental…in its remote abstractness, the incommensurable has at the same time become more terrible, and the pitiless statement: ‘I am who am,’ which tolerates nothing beside itself, surpasses in its inescapable power the blinder and therefore more ambiguous judgment of anonymous fate. The God of Judaism demands what he is owed and settles accounts with the defaulter. (145)

In other words, the unintelligibility of the name of God does not appear to engender the kind of radical foundationless of Judaism that it does for Lyotard. Unlike in Lyotard’s account, God’s incommensurable power here serves to universalize rather than to provincialize or destabilize human thought. Christianity, then, “softened the terror of the absolute by allowing the creature to find itself reflected in the deity: the divine mediator is called by a human name and dies a human death.” Christianity, now “incorporated as cultural heritage” (144) erases the incommensurability between human and deity, enabling the kind of mimesis on which instrumental rationality is based: “To the same degree as the absolute is brought closer to the finite, the finite is made absolute” (145). For Adorno and Horkheimer (145) then, the movement from Judaism to Christianity is not a move toward the rational, but rather toward cognitive dissonance or bad conscience as “a spiritual essence is attributed to something which mind identifies as natural.” Where Judaism learned how to live with incommensurability, Christianity demanded “an intellectual link to something intellectually suspect, a special sphere of culture” (146).

This reading of Judaism and Christianity serves to position the trope of the Jew as an invention necessitated by western society and justified in Christian theology. Again, Adorno and Horkheimer return to the dialectic of self-denial and self-affirmation. Christianity “wanted to remain spiritual even where it aspired to power” and thus adopted an ideology of self-denial, “it repudiated self-preservation by the ultimate sacrifice, that of the man-god, but thereby relegated devalued life to the sphere of the profane.” Thus, both Judaism and Christianity express the dialectical relationship between self-negation and self-affirmation, but Christianity elevates it to the status of an absolute, and “therein lies its untruth: in the fraudulently affirmative interpretation of self-forgetting.” Christianity’s self-forgetting is fraudulent “because the church depends for its existence on people’s belief that they will attain salvation by following its teaching…yet cannot guarantee that goal” (146).

Here we arrive at the theological justification for the association between Judaism and rootlessness. Because orthodox Christianity equated salvation with a possession achieved by the fraudulent celebration of self-forgetting, Christians:

were obliged to confirm their eternal salvation by the worldly ruin of those who refused to make the murky sacrifice of reason. That is the religious origin of anti-Semitism. The adherents of the Son hated the supporters of the Father as one hates those who know better….Anti-Semitism is supposed to confirm that the ritual of faith and history is justified by ritually sacrificing those who deny its justice. (146)

Where for Lyotard Judaism is that which refuses to adopt reason, here it is that which refuses to sacrifice it by engaging in magical salvific thinking. It is not incompatible understandings of the theology of Judaism that manifest this divergence but incompatible understandings of reason. For Adorno and Horkheimer, both Judaism and Christianity engage in self-denial, but the irrationality of Christianity arises in the “fraudulently affirmative” nature of that self-denial. The theological basis of anti-Semitism, then, is that Christianity projects the failure of self-denial onto the Jews precisely because Judaism refuses to absolutize the dialectic between self-denial and self-affirmation. As Adorno and Horkheimer (154) write, “Anti-Semitism is based on false projection. It is the reverse of genuine mimesis and has deep affinities to the repressed; in fact, it may itself be the pathic character trait in which the latter is precipitated. If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself.” If it is difficult to know whether Judaism’s refusal to sacrifice reason is theologically or sociologically based, it is perhaps because one of the symptoms of the failure of Christian reason is precisely the collapse of the trope/reality distinction.

Adorno and Horkheimer (152) ultimately make little attempt to contrast real Jews and the image of the Jew: “It makes little difference whether the Jews as individuals really display the mimetic traits which cause the malign infection or whether those traits are merely imputed.” This is in part due to the difficulty of locating a cultural outside of totalitarian capitalism. “No matter what the makeup of the Jews may be in reality, their image, that of the defeated, has characteristics which must make totalitarian rule their mortal enemy: happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without frontiers, religion without myth. These features are outlawed by the ruling powers because they are secretly coveted by the ruled” (164–165). In Horkheimer and Adorno’s final analysis, it becomes impossible to extricate the theological from the sociological because the very distinction replicates the “fraudulently affirmative” notion that the renunciation of myth can enact the affirmation of reason.

Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer (165) offer a redemptive understanding of the Jew: “Only the liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize the idea which has been unrealized until now: that the Jew is a human being.” Demonstrating the intertwining of the trope of the Jew, processes of self-affirmation and self-denial, and the instrumentality of western reason, they continue:

Such a step would fulfill the fascist lie by contradicting it: the Jewish question would indeed prove the turning-point of history. By conquering the sickness of the mind which flourishes on the rich soil of self-assertion unhampered by reflection, humanity would cease to be the universal antirace and become the species which, as nature, is more than mere nature, in that it is aware of its own image. The individual and social emancipation from domination is the countermovement to false projection, and no longer would Jews seek, by resembling it, to appease the evil senselessly visited on them as on all the persecuted, whether animals or human beings. (165)

This is a call to abandon the project of both self-assertion and self-negation—a project which only becomes possible when we have abolished the economic conditions that give rise to false projection. And thus we return to Odysseus—the originary counterpoint to this affirmative project. “His self-assertion, as in the entire epic, as in all civilization, is self-repudiation. Thereby the self is drawn back into the same compulsive circle of natural connections from which it sought through adaptation to escape” (53). The question at the end is the same as that at the dawn of enlightenment: how to resist participating in the dialectic of self-denial and self-assertion—a dialectic that is fueled by the very distinction between the trope to be denied and the real to be asserted.

We thus see a critical divergence between Lyotard and Adorno’s treatment of the trope—specifically the trope of “the jew.” Where Lyotard pays lip service to a strict division between “the jews” as a mere trope and real Jews, this division breaks down in practice as the real Jew is always merely that which fails to live up to the trope. In Adorno, on the other hand, his refusal to rigidly separate the trope and the real subject results, perhaps surprisingly, in a more properly historical account of European anti-Semitism. When the trope becomes a tool for the undermining of rigid binaries and their replacement with complex and fluid dialectical processes, a recognition of historical and sociological complexity naturally follows.

Conclusion

As a number of scholars seek to derive productive tropes from within Judaism—tropes which predicate subjectivity on a process which is diasporic or nonidentitarian—it may be useful to recognize in Adorno a tropological reading of Judaism which destabilizes the very kind of rigid dichotomies that are reified in works like those of Lyotard and Sartre. I have argued here that Adorno recognizes ahead of his time that tropes are unavoidable but can be deployed in ways that resist dominant narratives. From an Adornian perspective, Lyotard’s fault thus lies not merely in perpetuating a trope in which “the jews” resemble a projection from the mind of the anti-Semite, but in deploying this trope to reify a homologized set of binaries, beginning with a purportedly innocent and theological division between Jewish and Christian treatments of the name of God. This binary in Lyotard, regardless of its theological accuracy, comes to found a whole host of dichotomies in which the Jew finds himself restricted to one side, as the mystic contrary to western enlightenment or the traditionalist contrary to modern emancipation. In Adorno, on the other hand, the trope of the Jew serves as a lever by which these dichotomies are untethered, enabling a greater attention to sociological complexity, an alternative explanation of and response to anti-Semitism, and a far more productive treatment of the dialectical process of subjectivation.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Eric Chalfant is an independent researcher. He received his PhD from Duke University’s Graduate Program in Religion in 2016. His current research focuses on nonreligion and atheism, American media history, and material culture.

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