I recall that according to Heidegger the formal structure of the question, of any question, must be composed of three instances: the Gefragte, that which is asked about . . . the Erfragte, that which is to be found out insofar as it is properly targeted by the question . . . finally the Befragte, that which is interrogated, the being that will be interrogated.
– Jacques Derrida
The catch-phrase la question juive first crystallized in the 1840s at the crossroads between images of the 'old' ghetto Jew and newly assimilating Jews and was subsequently used by both antisemites and anti-antisemites, Jews and non-Jews to address the range of issues involved in Jewish emancipation: from civic equality to civic education, from economic rights to concerns about whether Jews could become soldiers, from religious freedom to discussions of whether Jews were a distinctive people, race or nation. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive re-opened this Pandora's box of topics when few dared to address a subject that had become taboo as a result of the Shoah. Written in the months following the Liberation of France and immediately before the Allies entered Auschwitz, Sartre's text was a meditation on the possibility of a liberated Jewish existence in France and on Jewish emancipation generally.
Whether antagonistic or laudatory, whether Jews or non-Jews, French writers in the postwar period often determined their own stance on the issues raised by 'the Jewish Question' relative to Sartre's Réflexions. The Réflexions became an Ur-text not because of Sartre's deep understanding of Jews and Judaism but because his analysis framed the questions of the debate on 'the Jewish Question' in the postwar period: What is the relation between seeing and being 'the Jew'? Is Jewishness for-oneself or for-others? Is judéité imagined or real? Is being Jewish a response to a general human condition or to a particularly Jewish situation? Is it determined by the gaze of the Other or by the specular examination of the Self? In reviews, articles, journals, and books, Sartre's analysis was often the touchstone for a re-examination of the questions that structured the four parts of his study: how does one become an antisemite and how is antisemitism perpetuated?, what defines Jewish alterity and what are the limits of the liberal tolerance of this difference?, what is the relationship between antisemitism and Jewish identity? and how should the French respond to or somehow solve the problem of antisemitism?
Sartre's Réflexions thus served to re-open a genealogy of responses "after Auschwitz" to the array of dilemmas that have haunted la question juive from its inception. These responses included Sartre's own repeated returns to and re-examinations of his Réflexions, most radically in his last published interviews with Benny Lévy. Each of Sartre's interventions were themselves complicated by the biographical accounts of them in Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs and in the biographies of Jeannette Colombel, Ely Ben-Gal and Annie Cohen-Solal, among others. Sartre's Réflexions also profoundly marked the agonized and agonistic effort to (re)imagine the relations between judéitié, judaisme, juiverie, and la question juive after the Shoah in the work of Albert Memmi, Robert Misrahi, André Neher, and in writers of the genereration of May '68 like Benny Lévy, Shmuel Trigano, Pierre Goldmann, and most significantly Alain Finkielkraut. Furthermore, Sartre's anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist thesis that 'the Jew' is a contruct of the specular gaze of the French antisemite and his emphasis on Jewish alterity as the paradigm of the Other in French and Western culture was pivotal for postmodern and deconstructive interrogations of 'the Jewish Question', like those of Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarth, Maurice, Blanchot, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotord and Jacques Derrida.
I will delimit my treatment of this genealogy here to a sample of the early postwar examinations of Sartre's analysis of the antisemite and 'the Jew', focusing on the readings of his Réflexions by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, George Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas and Claude Lanzmann. On the basis of these readings, I indicate four of the primary constellations shaping 'the Jewish Question' in the postwar period. I argue that Sartre's Réflexions not only poses the pivotal questions of the postwar debates, but that in part it structured subsequent responses. Therefore, the problems in Sartre's analysis are often reduplicated in subsequent efforts to pose la question juive. I explore how postwar reflections are haunted by the originary problems of 'the Jewish Question' such that Jews and Judaism are often caught between the aporias of assimilation and difference, trapped in the difficulties of Jewish identity ensnared between excess and lack, and enmeshed in the double-binds of the French-Jewish synthesis. Moreover, I contend that what is different about the postwar reflections on 'the Jewish Question' is a critique of the Enlightenment and the politics of emancipation, I assert that Sartre's Réflexions points to this difference and I indicate why this difference makes all the difference.
I
Louis-Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894-1961), whose nom de plume was Céline wrote one of the earliest responses to Sartre's analysis of antisemitism. Céline first achieved notoriety in French literary circles after the publication of his debut novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), which was an important influence on Sartre's La Nausée (1938). In the late thirties and then during the period of Vichy collaboration, Céline published three antisemitic pamphlets-Bagatelles pour un massacre, L'Ecole des cadavres, and Les Beaux Draps-that are some of the most violent and vituperative antisemitic diatribes ever written. Once the Allies landed in France, Céline realized that he would be called to account. In July 1944, he fled to Germany, joined the Vichy government group in exile in Sigmaringen and then went north to Denmark, where he was denounced, arrested and imprisoned by the Danish police.
While in exile awaiting extradition, he would read Sartre's "Portait de l'antisémite," the first part of the Réflexions published in Les Temps modernes in October 1945, where after castigating Céline's manichean bifurcation between the Aryan and 'the Jew' Sartre wrote: "If Céline supported the socialist theses of the Nazis, it was because he was paid to do so. At the bottom of his heart he did not believe in them. For him there is no solution except collective suicide, nonreproduction, death." For Céline, these lines must have been profoundly ambivalent. Sartre at once offers him exoneration by claiming that he never really believed in collaboration-how could a great French writer who significantly influenced Sartre's own literary modernism believe in collaboration, which Sartre had argued in his "Qu'est qu'un collaborateur" was foreign, un-French and unassimilable to French culture? There was a cost, however, for Sartre's exoneration because in order to accept it Céline must himself assume the role of Judas, the traitor for a price, the war profiteer.
In À l'agité du bocal, Céline responds to Sartre's "Portrait de l'antisémite" as a means to exonerate himself of the charge of collaboration. Céline commences his vicious polemic by suggesting that Sartre's portrait of the antisemite is nothing but the work of a school-boy; it is a "pastiche," un-original, written by an author who is uncreative and who should be called "Lamanièredeux." Celine's literary style is allusive and filled with ellipses-it is dotted with impressions and vulgar expressions in order to challenge the language of the "Portrait," which is Cartesian in its clear and distinct indictment.
In Céline's portrait, Sartre is depicted as atavistic, infected, diseased, corrupt, and degenerate with an ugly and contorted body: "These embryonic eyes? These petty shoulders? . . . this fat little phony. [. . .] He wants to become totally monsterous!" Sartre is represented as unmanly, unvirile, unheroic, and sterile. He is a "malicious, dirty, ungrateful, hateful, ass" who has occupied Céline's "ass-hole." Céline suggests that Sartre seeks only to soil his reputation, to enter him from behind in order to destroy him, to stab him in the back in order to bring about his death. Thus, turning the charge of judaization and collaboration against Sartre, Céline portrays him using the full panoply of the images of the Jewish body. Céline concludes by generalizing from his tirade against Sartre, to implicate other writers naming Eluard and Mauriac who were part of the Comité national des écrivains (C.N.E.) responsible for purging collaborators from the republic of letters, who Céline depicts as nothing but "assassins by signature," machines of self-congratulation, who have "nothing of the true blood!"
Céline's own citation of Sartre's accusation/exoneration is framed by two brief lines that bring the links between writing, language and textuality on the one hand and contamination, pollution and degeneration on the other hand into focus. "What does he dare write. 'If Céline supported the socialist theses of the Nazis, it was because he was payed.' Textual." Sartre's brief indictment apparently penetrated to the core of Céline's literary fascism, which was an effort to turn language against itself in order to purify it of what is unaesthetic, unoriginal, unnatural (that is 'the Jew'). Céline sought to disinfect language of the textual in order to restore the pure, powerful, raw, authentic experience of the spoken language of le peuple (understood as 'Aryan'). This demanded that Céline, like Heidegger, perpetually enter language, ceaselessly dwell within its corrupting power like a victimized subject haunted by the power of a horror he sought to overcome. In short, Céline wrote in order to undo what for him was the degenerative power of textuality. Not unlike Céline, the politics of Sartre's prose was also crucially linked to his response to 'the Jewish Question', which served as the tain of the mirror permitting him to reflect on the foundations of his theory of engagement.
However, a chasm separates Sartre and Céline. Whereas for Céline, "the war he waged against grammar, syntax, and lexical restrictions, against the state of French language in modernity, the dead language French had become in the hands of bourgeois and 'Jewified' professors, journalists, and writers, was the same war he waged against the Jews," for Sartre the utility and function of words, language and literature must be used to demonstrate that "Not one Frenchman will be free so long as the Jews do not enjoy the fullness of their rights. Not one Frenchman will be secure so long as a single Jew-in France or in the world at large-can fear for his life."
II
George Bataille (1897-1962), also transposed obsessions with horror, obscenity and death into writing, but unlike Céline these motifs were deployed to explore the transgression of a pure, homogeneous, authentic self, opening individual identity and community to heterogeneity and alterity. Bataille's review of Sartre's Réflexions appeared in May 1947 in the journal Critique, which Bataille founded in 1946 and where he served as the Directeur of an editorial board that included Blanchot and that would be an important avenue for the presentation of the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Bataille opens his response by stating that Sartre's study of the characters of 'the Jew' and the antisemite is "the direct consequence of one of the darkest actions to mark the account of man" adding that "the image of man is inseparable, from now on, from gas chambers . . ." The quote ends with ellipses, like so much of Céline's writing, here perhaps connoting an abyssal transgression effected by the systematic, bureaucratic, mass destruction of life, following the ultimate logic of an instrumental, utilitarian rationality that was a major target of Bataille's critical project. Clearly critiquing a Célinean mode of antisemitism, Bataille insists that "it does not suffice, if the horror must be surmounted, to transfer the blame onto an abhorrent category of men. One renews in this fashion the cowardice of the antisemite, the sham of the scapegoat. It is necessary to go further and to reflect entirely on the Jewish Question."
Bataille's response is thus generally affirmative since Sartre's portrait of the antisemite provides a "necessary lesson" and his Réflexions aims at comprehending the horizon of problems raised by 'the Jewish Question' after Auschwitz. However, Bataille concludes by making several critical points. Arguing that Sartre's categories are "excessively rigid," he criticizes the parallels Sartre draws between the liberal democrat and inauthentic Jews who both take flight from their existential situation into an abstract universalism. The problem for Bataille is that this makes Bergson, Husserl and Spinoza into inauthentic Jews. While he agrees that "it is true that the universalism of Jewish thought is a flight from origins," he nevertheless insists that "this negation is also the indirect expression of a 'situation', of which it is itself the overcoming." As such, Bataille argues, "Jewish thought coincides with revolutionary thought. Wasn't Spinoza the first of the democratic thinkers?"
Bataille goes futher in questioning a number of assumptions that Sartre makes concering the relation between reason, the universal and the particular. He wonders whether "reason itself becomes, in its turn, particularity" when it opposes 'the Jew' to the rest of the world, whether Sartre's "critique of antisemitism does not itself become . . . a critique of rationalism," and finally, whether in negating his particularity, 'the Jew' doesn't contibute to "the birth of a universal authentic world in which the fight against antisemitism truly gives authenticity to an existence 'in situation.'"
He concludes with an ambivalent statement:
I won't say that Sartre's critique has no value (there is a flight at the base of the universal), but there is an epic of reason and the Jews have written some of its most authentic pages; moreover, doesn't Jewish authenticity consist precisely in the fact that in Auschwitz reason itself suffered through their flesh.
Bataille's conclusion celebrating "the epic of reason" accords a problematic theological significance to the notion of "the Holocaust" avant le mot where the sacrificial Jewish victims suffered in the service of the vicissitudes of reason. Jewish suffering within the logos of this epic serves in the words of Bataille's The Accursed Share to "restore to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane." Bataille's catholic (with a small "c") interpretation of the general economy of sacrifice-explored at length in The Accursed Share where human sacrifice radically questions a world dominated by utilitarian exchange and instrumental rationality-makes the Jewish Holocaust into a moment of sacred communion, in the words of his essay on "The Sacred" into "a privileged moment of communal unity, a convulsive form of what is ordinarily stifled," all the while reiterating the positive stereotype of 'the Jew' who serves to embody reason. Paradoxically, Bataille also suggests that Auschwitz and the Holocaust bears witness to the perennial human perversion of the sacred and the impossibility of permanently purifying the national community through sacrifice. Thus, in Bataille's "review" 'the Jew' "after Auschwitz," embodies a radical excess that goes beyond pure, practical or instrumental reason to become the sacrificial symbol of the epic of reason itself-an epic that in the end has no end. Sartre, however, until the end continued to place hope in a revolution that would eliminate the differences responsible for the divisions within the social body: "distinctions between rich and poor, between laboring and owning classes, between legal powers and occult powers, between city-dwellers and country-dwellers, etc., etc.-they are all summed up in the distinction between Jew and non-Jew."
III
The early readings of Sartre's text by Jews were mixed, generally split between strong praise for Sartre's innovative and insightful understanding of antisemitism and strong criticism of his lack of comprehension of Judaism and the history of Jews. The negative reaction of Jewish readers apparently accounted for the publishing history of Sartre's text, which was divided into two phases. Sartre explains that "Jewish friends asked me to cut out the fifty pages in which I set forth [the distinction on the authentic and inauthentic Jew]." Thus Sartre first published the "Portrait de l'antisemite" in the December 1945 issue of Les Temps modernes and as a result of the interest that the piece generated he published his more extended study, originally entitled "La situation des juifs en France" with the small publisher Paul Morihien in 1946.
One of the earliest responses to Sartre's Réflexions was Emmanuel Levinas' "Existentialisme et antisémitisme" which appeared in Les Cahiers de l'Alliance in June 1947. While acknowledging in passing "how Sartre's theory, in linking Jewish destiny to antisemitism can be disappointing," Levinas' stress is on the fecundity of Sartre's existentialist approach in the battle against antisemitism: "The most striking feature of Sartre's fight resides less in his victory than in the new weapons he deploys. They are wholly new. Antisemitism is attacked with existentialist arguments." Levinas maintains that an existentialist approach enables one to transcend the inherent contradictions that have determined how "the problem of Jewish emancipation [was] formulated before this." He concurs with Sartre's critique of a liberal or Enlightenment "analytical vision of society" which conceives of human-being(s) as independent from milieu, birth, religion, and social status and thus is forced to condemn antisemitism on the basis of the universalist, abstract, "rationalist vocabularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."
Going beyond Sartre's position and intimating his own philosophical project, Levinas suggests that an analytic vision of society fundamentally conceptualizes the relationship between human-being(s) and the world in terms of "structures of knowledge," reifying the subject-object relation, and instituting epistemology or ontology rather than ethics as first philosophy. What is required, Levinas suggests, is "the emphasis . . . on the antinomy facing reason when it tries to specify human rights: personal freedom is inconceivable without economic liberation, while the organization of economic freedom isn't possible without an enslavement of the moral person." Levinas' point stresses the tensions between economic and ethical liberation intimating that the former is a necessary but not sufficient condition of justice and thereby contains a latent critique of the Marxism that would increasingly determine Sartre's position in the postwar period. These points are not developed, however, as Levinas emphasizes the significance of Sartre's effort to think being-human without reducing it to "a mere object for thought. This philosophy recognizes that the mind is tied by commitments that are not structured as knowledge. Commitments that are not thoughts-that's existentialism!" Sartre and Levinas thus converge on an "existentialist humanism" that seeks to oppose antisemitism without recourse to liberalism and the Enlightenment tradition. However, the differences between Levinas's ethics of commitment as a structure of obligation be-fore-the-Other conditioned by the command(s) of responsibility to the Other and Sartre's politics of engagement structured by the exigency to prophetically pronounce the limits and possibilities of liberation for the Other, in the end have different ends.
IV
If Levinas's influence on the postwar discussion of 'the Jewish Question' is remarkable for its invitation to return to reading the Jewish oral tradition condensed in the Talmud, then Claude Lanzmann's contribution is his sense of the significance of the oral testimony of the Shoah. In the wake of Sartre's death in 1980 and in the context of Mitterand's visit to Israel after his election in 1981, Lanzmann testified to the significance of his reading of the Réflexions in the immediate aftermath of the war. Therefore, like his film Shoah, there is a double-horizon that opens Lanzmann's testimony-the difference between memory and history, past and present. In his article entitled "La Reconnaissance," Lanzmann acknowledges in his first line: "The voyage of François Mitterrand to Jerusalem was for me a liberatory act of the same nature and the same importance as the publication of Réflexions sur la question juive of Sartre."
The significance of the Réflexions for Lanzmann was that it responded to the exigencies of the survivors of Vichy who did not know "how to continue to live in this country, amongst . . . our compatriots who we knew had more or less accepted . . . for four year to make us 'Others', excluded from this national community." Haunted by a shame and a fear that did not magically disappear with the Liberation, Lanzmann testifies that "the truth is that we were no longer French and not really Jews." The liberation that Sartre offered was that he "immediately reconciled us with France and with our Jewish situation."
Lanzmann contends that the force of Sartre's text was more significant than all the laws and reparations in enabling Jews to feel French and in reconstituting Jewish pride. In doing so, he reduplicates the logic of the classical French antisemitic distinction which Sartre had analyzed, between "la France réel" and "la France légal." Sartre's words designated an "indivisible France where we recognized ourselves because she recognized us," a politics of recognition that Lanzmann calls a "truly redemptive reciprocity." For Lanzmann, Sartre's gift of the acknowledgement of an authentic French-Jewish existence was extended in Sartre's insistance on recognizing the existence of Israel. This recognition achieved fruition with Mitterand's visit, which was the first time the President of the Republic of France journeyed to Israel. Lanzmann ends his testimony by reflecting on Mitterand's visit to Yad Vashem and in doing so he turns Levinas' abstract critique of epistemology into a historically specific and powerfully ironic point: "'Did they know?' That is the question in effect. The question that is at the heart of the Holocaust and that returns at every stage of the process of destruction. And what does it mean 'to know' when one confronts the unimaginable."
V
For many in France in the postwar period, Sartre's Réflexions was the portal that permitted them to enter the unimaginable edifice of the Endlösung. The responses to his Réflexions by Céline, Bataille, Levinas and Lanzmann intimate four of the defining positions within the constellations of reflections on 'the Jewish Question' after Auschwitz. Céline harkens towards the denial of collaboration and the reinvention of the tradition of antisemitism by the French negationists. Bataille's proto-postmodernism illustrates the significance of Auschwitz in reevaluations of the dialectic of enlightenment and the epic of reason undertaken in the critical theory of poststructuralism and deconstruction.
The Jewish readings of Lanzmann and Levinas point to two pivotal poles in postwar French-Jewish reexaminations of identity: the traumatic memory of Vichy and the Shoah and the process of teshuvah in the return to the Jewish sources of the self.
From its origins, there was a gap between Jewish and emancipation. In the aftermath of the annhilation of 76,000 French Jews amongst the six million, Sartre's Réflexions figured 'the Jew' in terms of the negation, nihilation and the nothingness of his L'être et le néant. 'The Jew' was the instantiation par excellence of Sartre's neologism négatité, a word he uses to name the types of human activity that contain negativity as a part of their structure-experiences involving absence, change, interrogation, and destruction. Sartre's Réflexions voiced the silence separating Jewish and emancipation, while simultaneously seeking to suture that wounded space. His attempt simultaneously reinforced the double binds limiting Jews and Judaism in France even as he sought to liberate them from the strictures of Jewish emancipation. The effort to 'work through' these double binds, often by critiquing Sartre's negative ontology of 'the Jew' by representing the realities of Jewish history and Jewish life and by re-imagining and revitalizing Jewish tradition constitute the most significant trajectories in postwar reflections on 'the Jewish Question'. Nevertheless, Sartre not only framed the terms of the interrogation but his struggle to reexamine the legacy of the Enlightenment, to reassess modernity in light of Jewish experience, and to reformulate the forms of Jewish identity beyond an essence were constitutive of the ongoing problematic of reflections on 'the Jewish Question' in postwar France.
*font> A version of this article will be published in Dynamics of Antisemitism, Harwood Academic Publishers, (forthcoming). I appreciate their allowing me to publish it here and for this occasion. In Pirke Avot, Perek IV, Mishnah 15, it states, "Reb El'azar b. Shammu'a said: Let the honor of your student be as dear to you as your own; and the honor of your fellow be like the reverence due your teacher; and your reverence for your teacher, like the reverence for Heaven [i.e. the Other]." This mishnah remarkably captures my experience as a student of Derrida's.
1 The literature on 'the Jewish Question' is vast. For a history of the construct itself, see Jacob Toury, "'The Jewish Question': A Semantic Approach" in Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, v. 11 (London: Horvitz Publishing, 1966), 85-106. On the juncture between 'old' Jews and 'new' Jews see Steven Aschheim, "Caftan and Cravat: 'Old' Jews, 'New' Jews, and Pre-World War I Anti-Semitism" in Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982): 58-79.
2 Rather than philosemites, I prefer the term anti-antisemites to address the left, 'progressive' intellectuals who have intervened on behalf of Jews and Judaism in contexts of cultural crisis where antisemitism has served a pivotal role within the cultural code for expressing that crisis. Etymologically, the term philosemitism implies a love of Jews and Judaism. However, its usage almost always refers to those who oppose antisemitism. Anti-antisemitism clearly denotes an opposition to prejudices and stereotypes related to Jews, Judaism and Jewishness and anti-antisemites resist the institutionalization of discrimination in ideological state apparatuses and discourse/practices.
Moreover, in insisting on the term anti-antisemitism I am making three further claims. First, I seek to show that tolerance is itself based on 'prejudices' or pre-judgements that reflect a perceptual system that is historically, socially and culturally constructed. The point of focusing on anti-antisemites is to evaluate the conceptual and perceptual 'biases' that animate the opposition to antisemitism. Second, I want to show how anti-antisemitism partially overlaps with philosemitism's imaginary and symbolic idealization of 'the Jew', which is used as a fantasy mirror to construct the philosemite's own identity through a process of identification. Third, I want to elucidate the danger of anti-antisemitism, which often merely reverses the dictums of antisemitism without problematizing the system of values, axiology or doxology that underpins antisemitism, and can thereby end up duplicating aspects of the problem that anti-antisemites seek to resist.
3 For an overview on the problematic of "Jewish Emancipation" within the historiography of Jewish studies, see David Weinberg, "Jewish Emancipation" in The Modern Jewish Experience, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 95-101.
4 On the ways in which the problems of Jewish emancipation were displaced onto the Jewish body, see Sander Gilman, The Jews Body (New York:Routledge 1991).
5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Galimard, 1954); originally published by Paul Morihien, 1946 and translated as Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1948).
6 Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur on March 10, 17, and 24, 1980, the interviews were republished by Benny Lévy with his own introduction and a concluding note under the title, L'espoir maintenant: les entretiens de 1980 (Paris: Éditions Verdier, Lagrasse, 1991); trans. by Adrian van den Hoven with an Introduction by Ronald Aronson as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In dialogue with Lévy, Sartre's final reflections on 'the Jewish Question' stress the relevance of a messianic Judaism as a foundation for rethinking ethics and for reformulating a New Left politics after Marxism.
7 See Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), translated as Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (England: Penguin Books, 1968), 52 and especially her text about Sartre's last years La Céremonie des adieux (Paris: Gallimad, 1981) translated as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O'Brian (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
8 Jeannette Colombel, Sartre: Homme en Situations (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1985/6), 202-206.
9 Ely Ben-Gal, Mardi, Chez Sartre: Un Hébreu à Paris, 1967-1980 (Paris: Flammarion, 1992).
10 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 1987).
11 See also Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) and Bianca Lamblin, Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée (Paris: Editions Balland, 1993).
12 The Sartrean influence marks much of Memmi's work, but is most clearly exemplified in his Portrait d'un juif, translated as Portrait of a Jew, trans. Elisabeth Abbott (New York: Orion Press, 1962). Memmi's Portrait was dedicated to Sartre (along with Memmi's Chalotzim comrades) and serves to redress the limits of Sartre's Réflexions, by considering the role not only of antisemitism, but the impact of the multifaceted dimensions of history and culture on the construction of Jewish identity.
13 Robert Misrahi was a student of Sartre's and a later a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne who wrote a series of articles on Jews and Israel that were published in Les Temps modernes, which was directed by Sartre. His book, La condition réflexive de l'homme juif (Paris: Julliard, 1963) was published in the "Les Temps modernes" collection. All of his writing on "the Jewish Question" including Philosophie politique et l'Etat d'Israël (Paris: Mouton, 1975) and Marx et la question juive (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1972) were significantly influenced by Sartre, even though Misrahi strongly criticized his former teacher. For his critique, see "Sartre et les juifs" in Les nouveaux cahiers, 16, no. 61 (Summer 1980): 2-12. Misrahi's conclusion to La condition réflexive de l'homme juif nevertheless makes clear his indebtedness to Sartre in his own efforts to construe Jewishness: "To be Jewish is not to belong abstractly to the class of Jews, nor to deploy within being an element of Jewish substance, nor to be oneself a substance or a thing of which the essence will be precisely Jewish. Otherwise said being Jewish is evidently not 'biological' nor 'sociological' nor 'metaphysical': being jewish is not being one thing among other things, but it is also not having a belief amongst other beliefs, for example in the rigorous unity of God or in the rigorous necessity of the advent [avènment] of justice. No: being Jewish, in the modern world and notably in France, is first to reflect upon oneself as a Jew and then to act on the reflection" (251-2).
14 While I do not know of a sustained discussion in Neher's work of Sartre's Réflexions, he cites Sartre, along with Memmi and Misrahi as significant sociological contributors in understanding "La dialectique de l'identite juive" in his Clefs pour le judaïsme (Paris: Seghers, 1977), 32. His own approach is far removed from Sartre's, but nevertheless his conceptual vocabulary and existentialism certainly evince traces of Sartre's influence. See for example, his discussion of the "Dialectic of the Jewish Condition" in They Made Their Souls Anew, trans. David Maisel (New York: SUNY Press, 1990), which in part is construed as a dialectic of "Being for Oneself" and "Being With the Others."
15 In addition to L'Espoir maintenant: Les entretiens de 1980 (Paris: Verdier, 1991), see also "Sartre et la judéité" in Etudes Sartriennes II-III (1986): 139-149, as well as Benny Lévy Le nom de l'homme: Dialogue avec Sartre (Verdier: Paris, 1984) and Benny Lévy, Visage continu: la Pensee du retour chez Emmanuel Levinas (Verdier: Paris, 1998).
16 Shmuel Trigano is a leading figure amongst contemporary Jewish thinkers attempting to radically reevaluate the relations between Jewishness, Judaism, antisemitism and the political implications of 'the Jewish Question' outside of the strictures of both the Enlightenment tradition and Sartre's existential-phenomenology. He argues in "The Rebirth of the 'Jewish Nation' in France" for an approach that is critical of "treating Jewish existence as the sediment of outsiders' perceptions" in favor of reintroducing "the Jewish view of things into sociological and historical analysis." See "Rebirth" in The Jews in Modern France, ed. Frances Malino and Bernard Wassertein (Hanover and London: University Press of new England, 1985), 281. Trigano's impact on the French discussions of these issues began when he became the adminstrative secretary for the socialist Zionist group Le Cercle Bernard Lazarre in 1974 and with his first publications, including Le Récit de la disparue (Paris: Gallimard, 1977) and La Nouvelle question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1979) and continued as a founding editor of Traces in 1980 and as one of the founders of the ongoing journal Pardes, as well as in his ever-growing list of publications. For Trigano's early biography, see Judith Friedlander's Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 139-142.
17 Pierre Goldman was most significant as the embodied symbol of the dying spasms of the May '68 generation and as Yaïr Auron argues his death symbolized the death knell of his generation of radical Jews. See Auron, Les juifs d'extrême gauche en mai 68 (Paris: Michel Albin, 1998), 82. Born in 1944 in Lyon, his parents were part of the resistance. In 1963, Goldman joined the Union des édudiants communistes (UEC), and would become one of the leaders of the Nouvelle Gauche. In the 1970s, he was involved in a series of armed robberies and was finally arrested and accused of murder. He always maintained his innocence and his case became a cause célèbre. While in prison, he would write his memoirs entitled, Souvenirs obscurs d'un juif polonais né en France (Paris: Seuil, 1975). He was eventually released from prison in 1976 and served on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes and wrote articles for Libération until he was murdered by neo-Nazis on September 20, 1979. As with Misrahi, it is not only institutional affiliations but also the terms of his discourse that show a clear Sartrean influence: "To be Jewish is not what I have, but my condition. . . . It's a space that I fill existentially with this and that. . . . And why is this so important? Because of antisemitism. Because of the hatred. The only answer to the question of what it means to be a Jew, is Auschwitz." See Catherine Chaine, "Une Interview inédite: Goldman l'étranger," Le Monde, September 30, 1979 as cited by Friedlander, Vilna, 36.
18 Alain Finkielkraut is one of the most visible Jewish intellectuals working on questions of identity-and Jewish identity in particular-in relation to nationalism, the holocaust, French denial and the politics of memory. He is the editor of the journal Le Messager européen and regulary appears in the French media, including on his own radio talk show, Répliques. He is the author of a number of books on these themes, including Alain Finkielkraut, L'Avenir d'un negation: Réflexion sur la question du genocide (Paris: Seuil, 1982); Alain Finkielkraut, La Reprobation d'Israel (Paris: Denoel, 1983); Alain Finkielkraut, La Sagesse de l'amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Alain Finkielkraut, La Defaite de la pensee (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); and Alain Finkielkraut, L'Humanité perdue: essai sur le XXeme siecle (Paris: Seuil, 1996). Finkielkraut first attained notoriety when he published Le Juif imaginaire translated as The Imaginary Jew trans. Kevin O'Neill and David Suchoff (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 1994). Finkielkraut insists in a footnote that "I'm not attacking the book that Sartre devoted to the Jewish problem. This slight work remains a fascinating, fundamental beneficial text" (183, n. 1). However, his own analysis of the dilemmas of Jewish identity after Auschwitz can be read as an effort to show the impossibility of a return to an authentic Jewishness and the traps of asserting that position.
19 The best overarching treatment of "the Jewish Question" in postmodern theory is Elizabeth Bellamy's Affective Genealogies: Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, and "Jewish Question" after Auschwitz (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). For a treatment of how postmodern approaches are reshaping Jewish studies, see my "Mapping 'the New Jewish Cultural Studies'" forthcoming in History Workshop Journal.
20 See the gloss in Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor and trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 162, n. 40. For the connections between this note and the effort to construct a non-coercive community that interrupts myth (and its complicity in allegorizing 'the Jew'), see Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity" in Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993), 693-725.
21 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Nazi Myth," trans. Brian Holmes Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 291-312 as well as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990).
22 Maurice Blanchot, "Being Jewish" in Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
23 Kristeva's most significant discussion is in her Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur l'abjection (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), which centrally concerns her reading of Céline and the relation between the abject and contemporary literature.
24 Jean-François Lyotard has a multiplicity of texts that discuss Jews, Judaism and "the Jewish Question." For an analysis of these texts and their contexts, see my "Bearing Witness to the Differend: Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Intellectual and "the jews" Studies in Contemporary Jewry, v. 16, Gender and Modern Jewish History, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
25 Derrida's entire oeuvre can be read as haunted by "the Jewish Question" and as a systematic effort to deconstruct the terms of this interrogation, especially its interpellation and demand to adhere to an identification that is centered, stable, grounded and unquestioned. Of particular significance in this regard is his readings of Levinas cited below, his discussion of Jabès in Writing and Difference, his analysis of 'the Jew' in Hegel's thought in Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) and in his more autobiographical writings, especially Circumfession in Derridabase, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Monolinguilism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. by Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). In Monolinguilism, Derrida works through his own historicity to problematize "the relationships between birth, language, culture, nationality, and citizenship" (13) in order to disrupt any notion of a 'pure,' 'authentic' 'original' (Algerian/French/Jewish) identity.
26 On the biographical details of Céline, see Patrick McCarthy, Céline (New York: Penguin books, 1977): 170-217. For compelling discussions of Céline's antisemitism, see Allen Thiher, Céline: The Novel as Delirium (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1972): 118-137; George Steiner, "Cry Havoc" in Critical Essays on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, ed. William K. Buckley (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989), 198-204; Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 107-121. Most importantly, not only because of his discussion of the previous literature on the topic but because of his own contribution to the debate, see David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Antisemitism and the Ideology of Culture (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 180-195.
27 Sartre, Antisemite and Jew, 41; Réflexions, 47.
28 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Qu'est qu'un collaborateur?" reprinted in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 43-61.
29 Louis Ferdinand Céline, "À l'agite du bocal" in À l'agité du bocal suivi d'autres textes (Paris: L'Herne, 1995).
30 Ibid., 8
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 12.
33 Ibid., 13.
34 Ibid., 10,11: "Dans mon cul où il se trouve" (10). The figure of Sartre as an asshole, as invading Céline's ass and as a potential threat to the virginal purity of Céline's manhood is an important set of tropic links in "À l'agite."
35 A l'agite, 9-10: "Satanée petite saloperie gavée de merde, tu me sors de l'entre-fesses pour me salir au-dehors! Anus Caïn pfoui. Que cherches-tu? Qu'on m'assassine!" There are number of places where Céline explicitly suggests that Sartre is the true assassin. See pg. 11 in particular. Céline thus reverses precisely Sartre's depiction of the collaborator as effiminate and homosexual in "Qu'est qu'un collaborateur."
36 On the significance of judaization in German discourse, see Steven Aschheim, "'The Jew Within': The Myth of 'Judaization' in Germany" in Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 45-68.
37 On the purge of collaborators in France, see Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968); Herbert R. Lottmann, The People's Anger: Justice and Revenge in Post-Liberation France (London: Hutchinson, 1986); Robert Aron and Yvette Garnier-Rizet, Histoire de l'épuration (Paris: Fayard, 1967-75); Pierre Assouline, L'Épuration des intellectuels: 1944-1945 (Brussels: Éditions complexe, 1985).
38 À l'agite, 16.
39 Ibid., 9.
40 On these themes in Céline, see David Carroll, French Literary Fascism.
41 For the full development of this contention, see my "Jean-Paul Sartre and 'the Jewish Question': The Politics of engagement and the Image of 'the Jew' in Sartre's Thought, 1930-1980" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1997).
42 David Carroll, French Literary Fascism, 193.
43 Sartre Antisemite and Jew, 153.
44 George Bataille, review, Critique 12 (May 1947): 471-73, 471: "à porter au compte des hommes"
45 Ibid.
46 For important critical work on Bataille, see Carolyn Gill, ed., George Bataille: Writing and the Sacred (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Nick Land, The Thirst for Annhilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism: An Essay in Atheistic Religion (London & New York: Routledge, 1982); Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991); Michèle Richman, Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) and Jacques Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve" in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
47 Bataille, 472.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 473.
54 Ibid., 473.
55 George Bataille, The Accursed share, vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 55. In the section on "Sacrifice or Consumption" part of Bataille's account of the "sacrifices and wars of the Aztecs," he continues by explaining that "Servile use has made a thing (an object) of that which, in a deep sense, is of the same nature as the subject." He continues on the following page to explain that "Destruction is the best means of negating a utilitarian relationship between man and the animal or plant. But it rarely goes to the point of holocaust. It is enough that the consumption of the offerings, or the communion, has a meaning that is not reducible to the shared ingestion of food. . . . What the ritual has the virtue of rediscovering is the intimate participation of the sacrificer and the victim, to which a servile use had put an end" (56). He continues in the section on "The Victim, Sacred and Cursed" to explain that 'The victim is surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth . . . Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings" (59). He concludes this section of his discussion of human sacrifice by explaining "the meaning of the ritual. The only valid excess was one that went beyond the bounds, and one whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods. This was the price men paid to escape their downfall and remove the weight introduced in them by the avarice and cold calculation of the real order" (61).
56 George Bataille, "The Sacred" in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Minnesota Press, 1986), 242.
57 On the image of the smart Jew, see Sander Gilman, Smart Jews (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1977).
58 Antisemite and Jew, 149.
59 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Une lettre de Jean-Paul Sartre," Hillel (Organ of the World Union of Jewish Students) 3 (December 1946-January 1947): 29.
60 On the publishing history of the Réflexions, see Michel Rybalka, "Publication and Reception of Antisemite and Jew" October 87 (Winter 1999): 161-182, 168.
61 Levinas' response was recently translated by Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss as "Existentialism and Antisemitism" in October 87 (Winter 1999): 27-31.
62 Ibid., 27.
63 Ibid., 28.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 See Levinas' "Ethics as first philosophy" in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 76-87. On Levinas's thought, see Richard Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Catherine Chalier, Pour une morale au-delà du savoir: Kant et Levinas (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998); Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, eds. Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992) and Jacques Derrida's commentaries on Levinas, especially, "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas" in Writing and Difference and Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1997).
67 Levinas, "Existentialism and Antisemitism," 28.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 31.
70 The locus classicus of Sartre's theory of engagement is Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1948).
71 Mitterand visited Israel the 3-5 of March and in his speech to the Knesset, declared that he was favorable toward the creation of a Palestinian state.
72 Claude Lanzmann, "La Reconnaissance," in Les Temps modernes, v. 38, n. 429, (April 1982): 1709-1715, 1709.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., 1710.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., 1711.
77 On Sartre's stance toward Israel, see my "Jean-Paul Sartre et l'ambivalence de l'engagement" in Les Voyages de l'intelligence, Éditions CNRS, (forthcoming).
78 Ibid. 1713.
79 Particularly in light of the recent revelations about Mitterand's role in far right and pro-Vichy organizations in the thirties and in the early years of Vichy.
80 Lanzmann, 1715: "Et que veut dire "savoir" quand on est confronté à l'inimaginable?"
81 Being and Nothingness, "Key to Special Terminology"