Gary, I’m sorry to see that you were subject to a tirade of vitriolic abuse and misrepresentation for republishing cartoons on Sharon and Blair but it is not surprising, for what is taking place at the moment is a propaganda war of massive proportions to back up the violence on the ground. There’s a lot at stake – everything, you could say. But more than this, the tirade is another example of the attack on social criticism of any kind, on which I have been reflecting in relation to my reading group on The Star Of Redemption. It’s the post-modern age, the corporate age, the age where fascism has become wizened to keeps out of sight, if I may paraphrase Benjamin, the age where fascism is next to godliness.
Post-modernism – and by that I mean Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and those gathered around them – is at its very core a rejection of criticism. There are people like Ivan, who have made Foucault’s ideas into a critical theory, but he was immediately attacked and excluded for his trouble. The part of his thesis to attract the greatest ire is his augmentation of Foucauldian ideas with some insights drawn from the early Marcuse (a great Jew). In short, he argued that while the nineteenth century political administration is characterisable in terms of liberal governmentality, the twentieth century represents a different model, what he calls ‘fascist governmentality’. Interestingly, this is about the only chapter of his thesis he has so far failed to get published. I wonder why.
Deleuze and Derrida provide convenient examples of this rejection of negativity but it applies equally to any of the other French writers I just mentioned. In each of these two cases, the goal is to find a way around Hegel’s identity thesis. I’ll put this very crudely and hopefully very simply: the basic idea is that, through negativity, solely through criticism a point will be reached where the process reverses itself and becomes a positive statement – ‘the world is x,’ where x is an idea that no longer encounters nature as resistance. This is the absolute idea, the idea that actually conquers nature and it’s reached without making any prior positive claims. The goal of idealism is reached: I now know the world because it corresponds to my idea. Freedom and necessity are finally reconciled. Adorno is just one, although perhaps the most famous (and Jewish), to point out that negativity can never be anything other than what it is. He thus rejects identity. On the other hand, Deleuze and Derrida try to find a way around this impasse through a positive act of will, as if identity can be achieved just be willing it.
The more positive post-modernists like to think that we’re reached the end of history already. What are Leonard Cohen’s words? (another great Jew) ‘It looks like heaven but it feels like hell. It’s something in between, I guess. It’s closing time.’ How come there’s still resistance if we’ve reached the end of history? Well, the p-ms answer, because after all negativity has been eliminated, a kind of non-negative resistance will continue to exist. You can call it ‘the animal drive’ if you like – it’s the stuff that Bataille talks about. That’s why the end of history seems a fair bit more unpleasant than we might have hoped. It’s just human nature. This smells a lot like a fart to me and it sounds a lot like bullshit. I’m with Cohen, although I still remember what Canetti (yet another great Jew) said about the world remaining young as things go on getting worse and worse, as Dubya calls out, ‘Help me Blair, help me Sharon, help me Howard!’
That great rag of the further-than-far-left, of the get-up-before-dawn-and-flagellate-spartacist-league, the Guardian Weekly – my God! anyone who dares to raise an eyebrow at what’s going on must be a lunatic lefty. Gosh! Golly! What other explanation could there be? Goodness gwatious me! Goodness gwatious, how flirtatious! – published an article by one George F. Will (that’s F. Will, not F. Wit) this week on just the subject of the attack on Gary. According to Mr. F. Will, anti-Semitism is the left’s latest radical chic. He’s got the same view as gary’s detractors. Cartoons are just the thing to express ‘animus against Israel’, just as believing that Israel is a threat to world peace is an example of anti-Semitism, or thinking that the CIA and Mossad organised the September 11 attacks, even ‘a Jewish comedian wearing a Jewish skullcap’ and giving the Nazi salute as ‘Isra-Heil!’ is anti-Semitic, even saying that America is the great Satan is anti-Semitic. People who say they don’t dislike Jews but only Zionists are also anti-Semitic. Although he doesn’t say it, no doubt people who don’t dislike anyone, like Gary, are anti-Semitic because they continue to be negative. That’s all it takes.
I don’t know any of these people so I can’t dislike them but what I dislike in what they do is that they take Judaism away from me. They snatch it away and make it into something I don’t like, something that inspires hatred. But they’re not taking my Judaism. Get your own, you bastards! Sorry. I’m trying to be funny again, just when I ought to be serious. (It must be the left side of the brain that does this. What other explanation can there be?) But seriously, my Judaism is the Judaism of Walter Benjamin, one of the greatest – if not the greatest – intellects of the twentieth century. Benjamin is the only person to come up with a completely different philosophy in the face of the twentieth century, not an abandonment of philosophy such as advocated by the post-modernists, but a completely different philosophy. And before you start, don’t suggest Heidegger or Rosenzweig or the logical positivists, or anybody else. None of them did anything but play with some extant ideas. Hannah Arendt (a greater than great Jew) was right: Adorno is Benjamin’s only disciple.
My Judaism, my Benjaminian Judaism is also the Judaism of those women who have to fill up their supermarket trolleys and then bolt for the door because of the so-called economic reforms in contemporary Israel have driven them into poverty while elite cars become cheaper to buy. In my book, the people who attack Gary are the true anti-Semites, because criticism lies at the very essence of Judaism, for it is forbidden to speak of God but only of the ungodly. Pharisees rule! No thanks.
Posted by at March 8, 2004 11:58 AM | TrackBack