Note on left and right Jewish thought in France

DRAFT

Notes towards the retrieval of possible sources of a rigorously non-Zioinist “Jewish” thinking.

It is aim here in this essay, in progress, to defend forms of “Jewish” thought whose basis is in philosophical traditions autonomously and entirely. It will be understood that I put “Jewish” in quotes for several reasons that all have to do with its contingent rather than necessary character as an affirmation applicable to the identity, or identifiable being there as a person, of those engaging, as speakers and listeners, or as readers and writers, in the shared inquiry or discussion. That doing this “is Jewish” is not among my purposes here to affirm, as might be relevantly done in some group of Jews concerned about their fragile shared identities as such.

Note: I admit that the ideas in the essay are representations of claims I believe have been established as distinct from new ones to be discovered in a field of historical processes by way concepts invented to model them, which is what some of the most productive philosophical inquiry does, which is distinct from the simpler empirical model of formulating hypothesis about supposed states of affairs that are verified as factually obtaining in some domain of observable objects, which interestingly would assimilate both historical truth to journalism as well as allowing prejudices about what kind of things can be said to exist to be confirmed merely by finding confirmation in observations that fit the unquestionable purposes of the inquirer. To speak in this way is to speak of how we might like to think about whatever it is we are discussing. This is also to place potentially in question the choice of objects.

To place something in question in philosophical discourse means that it may no longer be taken as given. In an important sense this of course means that it places doubt prior to knowledge and belief. There are religious schools of thought that affirm this and others that deny it. A major trend in protestant Christianity has denied this since the Reformation, and the constitutional formation of the United States formally encourages this as a possibility, contested almost exclusively by a religious right that believes secular and scientific thought a dangerous rival to its dogmatic ideology based only on a collectively affirmed affirmation of will legitimated as a right that structurally and logically is one a private property right people have in their persons. This stance of giving primacy to shared beliefs over rational inquiry, which is then limited to the texts and practices property to those shared notions and the commitments they name, is a possibility in Judaism still, certainly augmented by its differences from a Christianity that was centered on dogmatic notions or principles of belief as it is not. This is surely sad, however interesting it also is, for those of us on the left tend to believe, I think necessarily, in some of idea of social order and justice linked not only to our best traditions but also to reason.

Philosophy is only contingently concerned with any type of persons or subjects; it is necessarily concerned with how one might think, about any object of thinking and the very possibility of doing so. I believe that the ‘one’ in question is the one who recognizes themself as a possible addressee of the discourse who understands its propositions. That means it is any one whatever. What is true is true of and for, and can and ‘should’ be affirmed by, this any one, a Kantian idea. Thus in a certain sense there is no such thing as a philosophy that speaks specifically to those who are already bearers of some prior commitment, to a belief, identity, project, or anything else. The validity of its claims is also immanent to philosophical discourse as it claims to decide such matters on the terms proper to it. Philosophical (and scientific) thought is based on propositional statements about what is and that are in principle to be decided. This is a different practice from freedom of opinion and taste about commodities that appear on a market. People who engage in the latter alone are surely more easily liked than the former. I describe a classical image of thought that today is amenable to formalization by automated procedures, though it has not been established that thinking has no other uses, though it seems clear enough that mathematics as much as poetry provide possible bases of philosophical thought, distinct from and irreducible literary and legal hermeneutics, so that to affirm the reduction of the former to the latter is in some sense inadequate and unacceptable to we who affirm the practice of philosophical thought and want it to be a public enterprise as common as other forms of literature and not the province of specialists in a corporate bureaucracy. Talmudism is literary and legal hermeneutics. Its questions are not those of philosophy, though their methods are sometimes, enriching them, informed by it, since it also provides a language of discussion in any domain. In religious contexts, what I am arguing for is an idea of modernity and against its repudiation and forgetting. I am against anti-intellectualism, and am claiming that in certain ways that tendency has deeply infected modern Jewish intellectual life. Indeed to such an extent that for a long time now the most interesting parts of the Jewish world consist of persons who don’t want to think of themselves as Jewish at all, and I believe that so far and for more than two centuries the leadership of that world has done more harm than good whenever it confronts this situation at all. Many efforts have been made over more than a century to address this problem, and we know of more debacles than successes in doing so. This is an interesting situation, whether or not one considers it a problem one would like to solve. Part of the problem of course is that most people concerned with this problem are committed in the first place to making the world of Jewish persons more Jewish in some way, when perhaps, in a salutary irony that is not necessarily an alternative or dilemma, they should have wanted instead to make it more of something else.

I claim these sources I am concerned to better promote lie in the still largely unknown (outside academia) in America (and the Jewish world outside France) field of (more or less academic, by which I mean as developed principally there) philosophy. The principally sources are all figures in the modern European philosophical tradition since Descartes. Spinoza is part of that tradition, as is Levinas, whom I shall mention in passing since his writings are central to French intellectual life in the last century.

This tradition has no recognized role in public intellectual life in the United States as it does in France, where philosophy is a required subject in the final year of secondary public education.

It is not my perhaps here to defend an idea of “France.” It is my purpose here to defend an idea of Jewishness that is characteristic of a philosophical tradition that, since 1933, has been most developed in France, where it is central to public life, and to defend it against what I take to the dominant images of thought in public discourse in the United States. The political character of the ax I am grinding is indeed very much to attack what I believe are principal causal elements of Zionist thought by promoting something that may be polemically positioned as an attractive alternative because it is its contrary. I am à la recherche of something that opposes the dominant tendencies of the American mind, in order to promote the most fully anti-Zionist form not only of Judaism and thought appealing to Jewish audiences, but something perhaps even more fundamental than that, which is committed among other things to ideas that may be recognized as identifiable with that of democratic socialism, the roots of which lie more in events of the French Revolution and ideas associated with it than any other political event in modern world history. A bold claim I can defend elsewhere, though Toussaint l’Ouverture would not have any more than the socialists of my inclination faction. American anti-colonialist liberal proto-fascists would and do, and that includes black nationalism, which is obviously a target for a (quite) related polemic I must begin to undertake elsewhere.

Philosophy as a discipline of thought is, like science, intrinsically indifferent to any commitments it has not examined. Many of us still believe that something like ‘pure reason’ is the basis of any credible statement made among us when speaking philosophically. This is not true of discussions in the public sphere generally, and it is true in communities and gatherings constituted for other purposes.

A life of the mind that is not philosophical is a position not worth speaking from. That would be my strongest claim. A Judaism that validates statements by reference to its foundational texts is an interesting mode of inquiry that must be suited to practices that may be called ethical as they concern the cultivation of a form of life directed by an idea of the good. But nothing positively can be asserted and claimed on such a basis; it becomes of interest in the manner of discussions of literature (Aggadah), law (Halakhah), or both, but is not a philosophical discourse, because a canonical text (let us call it that) is taken as primary, in what today can be recognized as a useful fiction serving ends that are explainable only in terms of a public discourse whose point of departure is the will to assert and examine propositional claims that might be taken as true.

In public life Judaism is a source of two of our dominant traditions of thought (commentary on texts and artifacts that are part of a received tradition or canon, and the practice of arriving at legal judgment based on reasoning applied to cases), but not a third, one that includes both philosophy and science. Modern Jews in the English-speaking world may value science, though Judaism itself may not require them to, and philosophy since the rise of Islamic thought in the ninth century is a possibility but not a necessity, as almost any rabbi will tell you. I think it should be a requirement. Its basis is autonomous as with any mode of discourse we may engage in and value. In set theoretical terms this means being part of a circle defined by the common practice of a social lifeworld or community that intersects with other circles and is a subset of none other. You can be a philosopher and an observant Jew, each separately or both together, but if you are an observant Jew who tests the possible truth of philosophical statements on grounds of rabbinical inquiry than you are a Jewish thinker who reads philosophy but are not acting as a philosopher to whom, when reading, speaking, and writing as such, any other commitment must remain ‘bracketed out’ or secondary. The consequences of this for public discussions are radical indeed. They may yield the public world of thought its only possible liberalism, especially in contexts where commitments are diverse.

A life of the mind that is not philosophical is a position not worth speaking from. That is putting it in philosophical terms. No one denies the validity of non-philosophical practices. Philosophers do not become irrational persons when they go swimming, watch movies, or have sex, but are such only if they claim that such things are important and thinking clearly about the statements one would like to assert as claims is not. (Claims are assertions, ‘validity-claims’. By nature they appeal to what are ultimately enforceable normative social practices considered as worthy only of being such when and as they are established in discourse, something American society does not allow in public life, where opinions are grounded in the private property right of their recognizable bearers, which can only be contested, in legal terms, by attacking their persons, normally as guilty of some scandalous behavior in act or inclination, thus invalidating, for example, Heidegger).

France today hosts the world’s third largest Jewish population among nation-states. The role of Jews in French society is often discussed in the media; less often mentioned is the role in intellectual life not only, and from this latter point of view less importantly, of French citizens of Jewish religion or ethnicity, but of forms of thought that have recognizably Jewish marks of their character, so to speak. That it must seem strange to think this way is a fact that I believe reveals as much as anything the unrecognized predominance or hegemony in the Anglosphere of assumptions cultivated in the media that tend towards overlooking or denying the possibility that the character of a way of thinking, or even form of life, is more important than the identifiable subjective dispositions of the person or set of persons recognizable as authoring the statements that appear in the public spaces of the media, where claims are made to appeal to readers and viewers as attracting forces of possible alignment for the sake of advancing some agenda with or without, normally and usually without, any basis in rational argument.

Certainly this divides today left from both right and (in America the “liberal” and whatever remains of a moderately “conservative”) center. The left (though it certainly does not control it and the power of academics is always subordinated to corporate management concerns) flourished in academia, which is one reason why the latter is being attacked, while the right and center both flourish on television news programs, whose format does not favor reasoned argument (though it is possible there, where programming allows).

In France, “the left,” historically, and particularly since the Revolution when the very concepts of political left and right as we know them today (internationally) were first named as such, is, as a social force, an intellectual as much as a popular one. The reasons for this go back to the early modern period when and involve the relative uniquely centralized and bureaucratic character of the modern French state and the place accorded intellectual life within it.

There is a divide in France between left and right with respect to Jewish thought. This is almost unknown in the United States, despite the work of the philosopher Judith Butler, who authored an important popular study outlining intellectual sources of a non- or anti-Zionist Judaism.

The most influential figure in Jewish thought in twentieth century France by far was Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas helped introduce Husserl and Heidegger to France along with Sartre in the early 1930s. Though hated with a jerking knee by American Jewish liberals and conservatives alike because of his anti-semitism, “Heidegger” in France has remained the author of a corpus one who would think philosophically might learn from.

American political intellectual culture tends to think in legal rather than philosophical terms. (This is because in the United States the universities are not directly foundation to both the public school system and the state, as they are in France, and the field of philosophy does not play an important, and official, role in national public culture. In America, Democratic Party elites are traditionally graduates from one of the top two law schools, while the Republican Party is associated more with business interests pure and simple. Philosophy in the American university is a science of management of people and things, linked to the governmentality of business and the centrality of military uses in the American economy, but legal thinking is the principle means of political contestation when articulated in claims upon government actors at all). That we think in legal terms fits the tendency to base beliefs on what amount to principles of will and faith in chosen orientations that need not be defended, and in notions of personal identity that are associated with communities.

Thus it is commonly said that Jewish philosophy is a philosophy done by Jewish subjects. The assumption is that of a communitarianism that is, necessarily and by definition, a cultural Zionism. Jews engaged in any discussion who have in common the fact that they recognize one another as Jews will endlessly ponder such questions, while people interested in Jewish thought because it is a possibility of modern intellectual life in a republican society shared equally by all its citizens (a somewhat idealized image of modern France for more than two centuries that has been fought over but is recognizably the norm, as is obvious in France, as much as it would surprise most Americans, where Jewish culture in particular is still far more influenced by German than French forms of thought. Germany differed from France in the modern period in that there the assimilation of Jews to national life was far more of a question because in Germany it was understood that the Jewish citizens are a separate religious and ethnic community, a legacy from the middle ages, while in France the revolution explicitly denied this. When modern antisemitism, based on ideas of race rather than religion, whose direct identification with the state the revolution repudiated, arose during the years of the Third Republic after the defeat of the Paris Commune, the principle divide was between ‘republicans’ who insisted on the normality of Jews as French citizens and the ethno-nationalist and Catholic far right, which was antisemitic as a consequence of its opposition to republican equal liberty. This divide remains in France as elsewhere, except that consequent upon the rise of Zionism, whose justification is verifiable empirically in various ways and instances that media intellectuals are constantly reminding people of, including some antisemitic incidents normally blown far out of proportion, now many ‘liberal’ and moderate people in France as elsewhere who worry about living amid social conditions that may be quite dangerous for most citizens and residents of a country like theirs (and ours), now consider that, as is argued similarly elsewhere, the excludability of Jewishness and Judaism from contemporary French and European society is a possibility we may as well accept.

That idea is perhaps what most centrally divides the right from the left in Europe today when this divide is articulated by supposedly liberal (at least not far right and thus also almost by definition antisemitic) interests and voices. Europe as an idea is incompatible with being Jewish as an idea.

To return to intellectual life: Among other divides in the academy and literary fields in France, which are far more popular and influential there, still, is the interesting one between left and right Levinasians.

Left Levinasianism broadly intersects with, when it does not include, most of French intellectual culture since the early writings of Sartre, which like those of Levinas were heavily influenced by the philosophy of Husserl, a secular Jewish German intellectual, the key influence on Heidegger, and a central figure in European intellectual life, including on the left, which was always either Marxist or Marxisant, notwithstanding the internal opposition to official Marxism in Eastern Europe roughly between 1956 and 1989, the intellectual life that is as responsible as any other for bringing down “Communism,” which was normally opposed for reasons quite distinct from English and American liberal (meaning liberty based on markets, with legal guarantees of freedom of speech, association, and religion, as in the American constitution) roots, important as they are.

The central figure in left Levinasianism is probably Maurice Blanchot. His writings are as cogent and lucid as any great French literary writer influenced by and engaged in philosophical discourse with its characteristic rigor, which in France defines the field more than any institutional or professional commitments, let alone communitarian ones, religious or otherwise do or might. Close to and influenced much by Levinas, as well as the surrealist George Bataille’s Nietzscheanism, Blanchot would come to assert among other things a claim to affirm something that in the France field of discourse can be called Judaism, as he called it, though he was not himself a member of the Jewish nation or people either by descent or conversion. His Judaism is not defined by the Torah exactly but by something else. Call it philosophical. Call it, if you will, Judéité.

Jacques Derrida, a very Jewish thinker recognized as such almost universally who have any knowledge of his writings, biographically so in his Algerian upbringing, is influenced by Levinas and Blanchot, and his readings of Heidegger are, as well as by other sources prominent in French intellectual life.

I propose to claim that the modern Jewish left to the extent that it exists at all bases its thinking in philosophy, while the Jewish right, and the moderate center that now is aligned with for better and worse, doubtless contributing in various ways that should be of interest to historians of ideas, to a postwar debacle facilitating a genocide, bases its thinking on, usually vague, and always developed after the fact of the affirmation of the primary sense of belonging, notions of identity linked to notions of community. In spaces of Judaism, this latter is inevitable. In broader philosophical and literary (including journalistic) spaces, it need not be, and in the intellectual life of modern France, cannot be, unless one takes the position that historically was that of the anti-Dreyfusards (and the followers of Herschel’s Zionism).

The Levinisian left is so influential in contemporary French intellectual life it would be of interest to talk about only for American and Israeli Jews who have not heard of it and are surely inclined to find it only curious.

The Levinasian right includes some key figures in the movement of the so called “nouvelles philosophes” of the 1970s, part of a broad media campaign post-1968 to promote anti-Communist American-style market “liberalism” (and neoliberalism). Benny Levy, a close associate of Sartre’s, along with Bernard Henri-Levy, France’s self-appointed Jewish “philosopher,” and Leon Ashkenazi, a central figure in post French Jewish Zionism, are on the Levinasian right.

Ashkenazi opposed European culture as such. He opposed theater. He argued that Hebraic and Hellenic traditions of thought are opposed and irreconcilable. Many American Jews welcome such thinking. It is foreign to the mainstream of intellectual and artistic culture in France.

The most interesting directions in Jewish thought in modern France are part of the culture of modern France and inseparable from it. Of course that is also true of modern Germany. This is debated among Americans. In Europe all liberal and moderately conservative culture refuses this thesis of separation, which modern racial antisemitism uniquely claimed with the consequences we know. Modern Zionism since Herzl affirms this narrative. If it is “true” (meaning in practice what people say, pointing to evident historical fact and news items, they necessarily want), then the Jews must be free of European culture except insofar as they have been able to pack it up and take it with them. Such a peculiar narrative can be made sense of in terms of American history. In Germany and elsewhere, no less than France where it is far less obviously a possible question for anyone to pose, it meets, rightly, with spiteful contempt among anyone outside the neofascist extreme right. Liberal and leftist Jews now are welcome in Berlin as they are in New York and Paris, maybe less so in Tel Aviv. Europe was and is Jewish because communitarian identities to the extent that they exist are potentially open, intersecting, and plural sets, and a community and identity are both cognizable by set theory as ensembles of individuals who share a common property. This view of sets was repudiated in mathematical logic by Russell and Wittgenstein. Identity conferred by group membership and determined in theoretical terms by the identification of a speaking and acting subject with a demographical category, has been variously called into question or repudiated by various thinkers in the philosophical field for roughly a century now. (Someone please tell the American liberals, the Jewish ones especially.)

While I am on the question of philosophy and the “Continental” (largely German and, since 1933, French) tradition within it, and the role within it of recognizably Jewish thought, it is worth also noting in this polemical essay (which I wrote while thinking about my participation in a discussion of Jews who tend to talk about what we are involved with and what it might "mean” in some other sense) that the classical Jewish philosophy of the middle ages draws certainly on specifically Jewish textual and communal sources for inspiration, just as Islamic and Christian philosophy of the period do, it is most fully intelligible within a tradition that is recognizable today as simply the Western philosophical one, of which it is fully a part. (I seem to be talking indeed about the character of domains of interest). Maimonides is a medieval rabbi who was also a philosopher, and his philosophical writings are part of Arabic language philosophy in the middle ages. The European universities when they were first being founded in the high middle ages read avidly these works and Muslim and Jewish philosophers were often as important to them as Christian ones. It should also be noticed that of course the period from roughly late antiquity in Europe and what we now call the middle east was one in religion dominated social life. Yet the literary and philosophical traditions of “the West” that are now part of the heritage of the world’s peoples, an important part of it though only that, and not one that, outside of silly American “progressives,” many serious people anywhere in the world (certainly not in nation states that are former European colonies nor in those that, like China, were never quite that, believes stands in any meaningful way in opposition to the cultures of the noble primitives, as they were once sometimes thought be kindly disposed Europeans who were, rightly to be sure, nervous about their own polity’s treatment of the colonized, though that is the position of much black nationalism, which misrecognizes the way in which with the rise of more sophisticated forms of capitalism in the twentieth century, the polemical attacks on colonial (and patriarchal) mentalities are actually at best a rear-guard activity of embattled liberals, and more accurately considered a kind of straw man quarrel, suited to the corporate media’s figuration of radical politics as performative stances taken up on behalf of Democratic Party affiliated liberals who represent the more tolerance and diversity oriented wing of the American corporate state.

In France, and in the field of philosophy as it is presently constituted as a field of inquiry, there is no such thing as an autonomous Jewish philosophy that would belong to and make sense of specifically Jewish forms of life and appeal to Jewish audiences. I wish to assert the tendentious claim that this is better.

This is why philosophy, like all of the sciences including what in America are called the humanities (in France they are les sciences humaines, which resembles the German Wissenschaften except in tending to a great rigor under a very different image of thought and knowledge (savoir), is not a particular field of inquiry as religious study for practicing members of the particular communities involved, might be. There is at least one other reason: the concept of God in philosophy is a concept, and while there surely is poetry, and thus prayer, which is a way of reciting certain kinds of poetry, is broadly shared by Jews, Muslims, and Christians to the extent that among those who admit of the validity or necessity of philosophical inquiry, as followers of Maimonides do and contemporary Reform Judaism, among other formations, does not (their statements of principles make this abundantly clear if only by omission; I think I can show elsewhere that their movement by its very character is inevitably a form of communitarian identity politics), then it will follow at the very least that the respective discussants can articulate their differences in a common discourse, and they are intelligible, and often of great interest to one another, even as other things are not. That is why all Jewish philosophy is written for a general audience. The addressee of philosophical and scientific discourse is every possible reader who is interested in the inquiry or topic, and it happens that the concept of God is one that Judaism may understand better than the other traditions, but is not unique to it, as some things it embraces are. I consider that the philosophical tradition of the West, like its literary, artistic, and musical ones, is important enough that this fact justifies caring greatly about it, and from the standpoint in which these works make the most sense. Cultural studies exists today (studying art works as documents of a culture that might be affirmed as a possible identity for some persons to embrace - which can then be profitably leveraged in marketing campaigns, especially as, at least when undertaken as such, it challenges nothing, least of all contemporary capitalism), but that is not part of the “ground” (in the sense of either origin and basis or of territory and situation) in which most of these works. Christianity often was, which is another story; it is also one that few people in France and Europe today would important enough to make a claim for the importance of, as something good or bad, except on the far right, which promotes exclusionary national cultural identities. In the modern world, which for the Jews of Europe can be precisely dated in at least one important way to the French revolution which first formally emancipated them, and not as a separate population within the national body but as a set of individual equal citizens considered as such because persons residing on the territory claimed as represented along with its people by the national state, religious traditions have public significance mainly historically. In this way, to be sure, American society is less modern and Jewish American society and culture shares this lamentable backward character, which I remark at an historical moment when nationalism of the kind President Wilson promoted, globalizing an American model of multiple national and religious groupings theoretically embraced as component independent political entities each entitled to its own proprietary claims and truths, after WW1 as a bulwark against the expansionist desires suddenly attributed to the revolution in the Russian empire after originating in the workers' socialist and anarchist movements that developed in France and elsewhere in the decades following the revolution in France of which the Russian revolution was in some ways an ideological relative. That period is past, and today there is no challenge to capitalism. There is presently no specifically Jewish one. There is one that may be called, as it has been since 1792, “the left.” Philosophy played a central role in it. Judaism did not, though persons originating from within it certainly often did, and I believe cannot, as the modern left is necessarily universal and not particular in its aims and therefore basis. Jews who want to be on the left should study Jewish texts when they want to draw on them for the ethical project of living good lives among their family and friends. If they want to be political, they are, by definition, part of some thing or set of things or tendencies that has never been given any other name, nor is another in sight. What we see there is an absence, that of an international social movement on principles of liberty, equality, and social fraternity or solidarity, whatever else they might consider important, such as liberation, an idea that in the West has Hellenic as well as some obviously Hebraic origins, which was also a key idea in modern post-revolutionary France, and that is more than merely opposition to tyranny, an American idea. The Americans created a corporate state in which everyone must be team player, and in principle you can choose your team. Each team member is encouraged to dance in an inspired way that attests to an individuality that is a style of expressing shared norms of practice that are normally enforced with immediacy, in ways that do not allow of being recognized as demands that might be questioned, and intolerance. Our political traditions are mostly practical and not theoretical at all. The poverty of discussions among the participants is often appalling to anyone who might care about what is being proposed rather than the only urgency of acting upon it.

Jews have played a role in modern left politics. They have played important roles in the arts. This makes many of them friendly figures I greatly admire and try to learn from. Judaism is not a very modern thing at all, but it is nice that social forms persist from early and late antiquity that we can draw from, as I do. The problem with a Jewish politics is that it squares two circles, both of which cannot be: particular/universal, and ethical/political. Thus it follows that the idea of a democratic Jewish state is a contradiction, because a state that belongs to a particular national group cannot in the same way belong to all of its residents, and vice-versa. Indeed, modern Jewish nationalism was one horrible consequence of that logical impossibility, which calls for the separation of private from public that the idea of modernity that originated in France affirmed, that American society remained ambivalent about (because its idea of diversity is that of including particularities as a collection of theoretically semiautonomous discrete subsets rather than abstracting from them in public life, bracketing them out as outside the scope of concern, as intimate is separated from public life), and that ethnic nationalism opposed, with the consequences we know that European liberals refused and Zionists continue to affirm, which is a diasporic modernity based on equal liberty. Left politics since Machiavelli, a republican whose thought opposes all metaphysical theology precisely because it reduces the political to the governmental, under the concept of a God imagined as ruler of a centered and singular universe, a medieval figure of thought that is no longer accepted in the scientific world or the modern philosophical one (though Americans who are religious mostly still lay claim to it), separates the political from the ethical. This does not mean evil because evil is opposed or indifferent to the good. The modern ethical/political separation divides the idea of the good. Americans being mostly liberals in the English tradition of thought suppose that the problem there is that it is some individual’s idea of the good, imposing his will on others, violating them, as power can, and that is ethically because morally intolerable. It follows that we are happiest (happiness is classical the aim of ethical thought) if there is no government, which might be true. The principle I uphold favors not princes or them only but factions, including the modern left as a faction. That we on left itself want power is not a problem for us as it might be for liberals, though admittedly a limitation of the concept of the left is that it makes sense in the context of something like a state, which does suppose something like the unitary character of the world that a post-Copernican way of thinking may refuse. The left is a project; since Marx its project has been to abolish, by a revolutionary transformation that preserves what is best in it, capitalism, and its theoretical project is to think both of these objects: capitalism and the possibilities of that transformation. If we call that project “Marxian,” distinct from the particular form of it that was classical Marxism, the modern left remains by definition that, anc centrally nothing else because we believe that the forms of social hierarchy that are not dependent on capitalism are in the process of being undermined by it, and insistence of any of them as primary is to us necessarily a mistaken capitalist liberalism. That this project has Jewish and other roots is undeniable, though not one we on the left will or should allow to be taken as directed us towards being Jewish as some autonomous way of being political, which it has never been shown to be in any positive sense except when attached to political projects defined more precisely in much broader terms because the relevant social forms to be opposed were broader in their effects and causes. There is therefore no specifically Jewish politics worthy of interest. If there were, by grounding itself in religion it would make the political an effect of the ethical, the good life as a project to be instituted, which is governmentality and not politics, asking as theories of government do, how should we intellectuals advise the sovereign princes or representatives of the people how persons and things ought to be governed? This question presumes something other than a radical equal liberty. For those of us on the left, the private/public, ethical/political, and particular/universal divisions stand, valuable as other separations can be, and this in particular: Jewish particularism is in social and political terms an attitude towards concerns that are universal. Those include of course the idea of God, and they include every possible ideal of actual and possible world order and of forms of life. They are formulable in the languages and rhetoric of philosophical discourses, being universal and not particular. Our particularity is a particularly enchanted and wonderfully useful, ethically and practically, as tools to obtain whatever end, window onto that.

Anglo-American Jewish thought accords with its greater proximity to German romanticism that persisted in ‘hermeneutical’ trends of thought that favor ‘interpretation’ above the determination of statements as true in a disclosive or revelatory way, which is how I might define what I think is the characteristically French disposition of thinking. Hence, it favors not only digression, which is indeed Talmudic, if not rhetoric, which is often practiced as a tactic by liberals who believe that “there are no truths but only opinions,” which is Alain Badiou’s definition of sophistry as anti-intellectualism. If nothing is really true, than we may take anything to be, as our perfect right, and since our quarrels cannot be settled by reason, which no one believes in any more….

American deconstructionism was a fad in our universities that was eagerly taken up by young literary scholars looking for interesting careers in scholarship and undergraduate teaching who were normally on the liberal-left in terms that were militant in the characteristically American way that the English and others often find overly self-confident and obnoxious, and were of course quite often feminists. The story of what I call FeminismTM, a corporate brand identity that started with what I believe work in intellectual history may today be in a position to regard as consequent upon some interesting theoretical mistakes explainable largely by the social and political-economic history of the time, is a very interesting one indeed. As with other trends of the time, including black, gay, and Jewish identity politics, which find important points of departure and origination in the mid-1960s, it involves some very vexed debates at the time, surely involving some recognizable political ‘truths’ which may thus serve governmental as binding law and dicta, these are fascinating developments in the history of how we got to where we are today. The influence of Marxism on, and its possible shared territory with, both nationalism and contemporary left-liberal (sometimes turning to an embrace by the far right, as in fascism in its origins as a specifically nationalist departure from the workers socialist and anarchist movement) identity politics, is itself a fascinating question, though those of us who value the tradition that no tyrannical individual or collective will, desire, or project can be thought of as (thus necessarily) improper origin, refuse to relinquish, simply because we know must theoretically target (discuss and want to ‘overcome’) capitalism if only because it targets us (and today the natural planetary lifeworld), as well as because, especially relevant today to people who are claimants of, normally as heir to, specifically Jewish identities, we refuse to be executioners as much as we also do not want to be victims.

Deconstructionism derived from philosophy but is not a form of it. May I call it corrupt? Is that reductive in almost fascist sense, perhaps linked my personal character as obsessionally driven (Shmuckish?) intellectual man? That would have been funny a generation ago. It is not today. I am for philosophy. Obviously, as I have argued elsewhere, I cannot but oppose any ‘feminism’ understood in any terms of identity and community. The reason is that we on the left understand the grounds for the opposition to oppression that is recognizable as the will to liberation as not grounded in a prior recognition of the beautiful soul of an identity to be cultivated happily in some garden, however sited and arranged. The left refuses all identity politics as, rigorously speaking, among our implacable foes.

A close friend observes me that I am so determinedly on the left I could just as well be on the right. In fact, that is the starting point, and why? Because we who side with the victims of capitalism that we also are, are easily angered (in Judaism rightly recognized as a dangerous character trait or bad one, classically called a vice). And we say this is how we should be. The world is so awful today the center does not hold. You may be on the left and right and say interesting things. My desire is to be on the left and in the most successfully useful way. Thus I turn to my available resources in the dangerously problematic tradition I know best: European language in a series of language, all of which except one (Arabic), are classified as Indo-European. Europe was born in Athens and in France the question of “Athens vs. Jerusalem” was not even posed, as in England and American the result of the Protestant reformation and its dissidents is to elevate a religious tradition over our unambiguously intellectual ones.

The modern left owes its origins far more to historically European sources than to specifically Jewish ones, though in ways complicated enough to intrigue an intellectual historian, they did influence it (and continue to), and they might well contain textual and other sources and elements that could be usefully engaged in ways that contribute to the project of transforming American-dominated capitalism into something better, if that is possible. Since so much of what passes for left-liberalism in the United States is really not much more than a defense of that same form of the larger political-economic system that is global capitalism, I don’t see the point in bothering much with its discourses at all, as it simply is not very interesting. To be sure, American capitalism is now manifestly destined by be superseded by other forms that could well be better in some ways. Can Jewish sources contribute to this future as much as Chinese or African ones? I see no reason to worry about that. What the American hegemony eclipsed is something older that will no doubt survive in some form, though I admit I find it hard to imagine the more promising developments of the modern world in the spheres affecting the forms and organization of social life and not only technology, business, and war, in which the Americans triumphed with comparatively little regard for the political values on which their republic was ostensibly and imperfectly based, as reliably flourishing in the absence of the sustained cultivation of a philosophical tradition that began in Greece and rapidly became the lingua franca in the West of public discourse about the good. The Jewish world was most inclined to join this trend in a period that lasted scarcely as century before nationalism took over from the socialist democratic republicanism with which it was somewhat entangled, its rise temporarily checked by the Anglo-American liberalism that was dominant in the decades after the war and may now be in eclipse. If it is, capitalism is the main problem, political liberalism is not a reliable answer, socialism is back on the agenda as the sole possible economic and governmental basis of a society that is not at least horribly anti-democratic, and whatever Jews can contribute that is constructive and not destructive, as official Jewish politics largely is, leading to the current situation that their favored nation that in fact is in geopolitical terms an outpost for wars fought with Israeli bodies driving America pays for to defend its control of a fossil fuel economy, is now deservedly an international pariah, it seems to me the missing medicine intellectually is philosophy as political it can only be some form of democratic socialism. Jews should be as they usually are welcome in this tent, which does not belong to them, a happy fact for everyone. The Jewish world divides today most importantly in no other than between left and right, as the rest of the world does. Politically, it has no autonomy, and I am happy to consider that I definitely recognize that properly understood it can neither claim nor want it. Less in this case is more.

Those trying to build a future should look to the past for the resources culturally or intellectually and otherwise that might prove most useful. Judaism in the modern world, especially in America, tended to embrace the pronounced if relative American Protestant rejection of Hellenism in favor of Hebraism, and this is one cause of the current debacle. The left needs, as fascism might not, the life of the mind. Americans are far more often religious than intellectually serious enough to match the fervor of their arrogance. Most of Judaism has cultivated it very weakly, insisting instead on collective self-interest, a form of private property right, and what implicitly are always forms of nationalism. The horrors of the late modern world are less well ascribed to the hypertrophy of modern European intellectual thought than its hypotrophy. American anti-intellectualism is easily framed in religious terms, and Jewish leaders more often than not follow prevailing trends in ways that suit their interests and are intellectually as lacking in rigor as the professional training of their clerical elites that excludes a grounding in the lingua franca of the modern European and American cultural elites and thus most possibilities of achieving anything of possible public significance in any field of inquiry, which is philosophy, which ceased to be central in the Jewish world after the Spanish expulsion. Since the officially status of Jews in American life is closer to the German than the French model, understandably their leaders tend to worry about their community’s interests more than the success of any broader ideas and purposes they might often have some salutary privileges of relative success in. Those who would differ from this categorical hyperbole will point to much of public life, but it is a public life in which the intellectual tools central to the political life of a democratic republic are largely absent. Judaism contains plenty of valuable stuff in its domains, and as an institution is in America today an obstacle more than aid to any social progress. This is a dangerous circumstance, not least because it requires little more than motivated disdain for recognition of this fact to turn ugly. Unfortunately, the contemplation of said ugliness usually motivates only defensively militant alliances with the most horrifying reactionary forces, leading to the legitimate fear of the historical novelty in the United States of a Jewish-backed fascism, which in many ways we already have. And of course we are well aware of that, only not sure what if anything can be done about it. I have argued for a tradition that has some cultural specificity in linguistic and geopolitical traditions, which are contingent ones, and because my hope is to build on that tradition. I would place it at the center. A related religion did so (and still does), and on grounds far more common than disparate, until, in the centuries following the middle ages, that tradition, philosophical scholarship, outgrew its envelope, tied as it was to religious institutions in loose alliance with the state and close relationship to its ideas of governmentality, to which all religion retains links that modern societies relegated to private life (and sometimes separated communities). But philosophy is not Christian, and in the West is Greek only in origins. Its discourse is in written and sometimes spoken language, involving propositional statements and with roots at once in pure mathematics and poetry, separated from narrative literature and from historical writing insofar as it is that, as well as from myth, however understand, and legal discourse, from which it remains distinguished. In antiquity with the rise of Hellenism, the Jewish world became open to intellectual currents that were distinct from yet not incompatible with it. In the recent history of the Jewish world, that openness is now often questioned, but the assumption behind this move is that an autonomously Jewish collective subject is possible and desirable, when this is a fiction, one that denies precisely both the universal scope of the divine and the priority of events to identities, an assumption whose denial may well be considered idolatrous, since it really supposes that Jewish subjectivity is prior to the divine encounter rather than constituted by it.

In a remarkable section of The Infinite Conversation titled ‘Being Jewish’, Blanchot argues concisely for the essentially exilic character of Jewishness. This refutes every identitarian-communitarian project, and thus all nationalism, even of the anodyne form of collective identity and its considerable and comforting enjoyments. Since the only way to understand something like a Jewish condition is in terms that are at least implicitly universal, the particularities being at most a way of cultivating some separated relationship to what properly is that, the language that enables us to think clearly about such things is a philosophical one. If the principle of discussion is shared enjoyment of what we together have, are part of, or like, than as such it is pastime not to be taken too seriously. But how else than by rigorous philosophical inquiry can we articulate a consistent diasporism? And isn't the greatest scandal that it would be possible for someone to say this because most people are encouraged to care above all about who and what they are, and have, and might or must do because of who and what they are and have, that belongs properly to them, and not what might make the most sense to do because of here where we are now that anyone might be? We do know that anyone can suffer and cause others to. The tacit basis of mainstream American Judaism institutionally and intellectually is the essentially protestant republicanism that expects a ‘spirituality’ that honors the gods of the state in ways left to individual conscience and empowering anyone to say anything so long as no one else’s right to think as they please seems affectively impinged upon. Thus, the intellectual environment is a sophistical nihilism in which the Jewish leadership is complicit because it long ago ceased to be centrally engaged in the broader intellectual life of the society, leaving official rabbinical Jewish philosophy mostly little more than a joke. I am pleased to know of at least one tradition in philosophy, which is not inaccessible to persons educated in Rabbinical Judaism but also is not one of its proper subsets, that is not so irrelevant. My hypotheses include that modern Jewish life was diminished by an intellectual poverty that was very largely deliberate and owing to various conservative forces, and the debacles that have Jewish people and institutions have been involved in both as victims and now obviously perpetrators (two statuses that have in common the evils participated in and what is often the moral luck, good or bad, of such situation, calling at least for thought and not only virtue signaling and parti pris) are to important degrees both cause and consequence of the wide-scale exclusion from Jewish social life in America of rigorous philosophical thought, engaged as it necessarily is in questions that are not framed in terms of the private interest of particular collectivities, of which modern corporations including the non-profit ones that in America religious institutions are, one particular form. Philosophy’s scope of concerns and address of its statements are in principle universal, like scientific ones verifiable by any person who can read them. Judaism has a set of texts and practices that are one excellent particular window onto this universality. It is still less modern that it ought to be. Since nationalism is a communitarianism of shared identity predicates presumed to be the private property of nameable subsets of what is now a global space, my causal hypothesis is that the fault lay in the religion’s failure to combat anti-semitism by opposing hyper-particularism, which French republican thought did depart from while the American form did not. I don’t ask that we adopt a different society’s institutional forms, but I do advocate the centrality of philosophical inquiry and an understanding of it that differs from the dominant image in American life, which is tied to forms of managerial governmentality rather than the idea the flourished in late antiquity of the good life as based on a form of thinking.

To be continued.