By VLADIMIR SAFATLE*
Considerations on the recently released book by Bentzi Laor and Peter Pál Pelbart
1.
“At certain times, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse […]. There is a reason that we do not accept, there is an appearance of reasonableness that causes us horror, there is an offer of agreement and conciliation that we will no longer listen to.”
This is a statement by Maurice Blanchot that opens The Post-Jewish Jew: Jewishness and Ethnocracy. It clearly expresses the nature of this book, as unique as it is necessary.
The writing of the work was born out of a refusal. Two Jewish intellectuals, one living in Brazil – known as one of the great names in national philosophy, a rigorous reader of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and an editor with major political interventions in recent years – and the other living in Israel – dividing his time as an engineer working in the high-tech sector and an activist linked to NGOs defending Palestinians.
Two intellectuals who decide to use their analytical capacity and their historical memory to refuse the horror of seeing the name of their community membership used to name the indifference to the violence of the massacre.
The book, in this sense, is not only the fruit of a gesture of refusal. It also arises from a desire to rescue an emancipatory sense of the experience of Jewishness, present in this impressive heretical messianic tradition that goes from Franz Rosenzweig to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, among others, but which currently appears increasingly distant and silenced. This theme is also present in major works by another intellectual linked to such heretical messianism: Michael Löwy.
Hence the pair present in the book's subtitle, “Jewishness and ethnocracy.” He expresses the desire to understand himself as the heir of a history of “suffering, persecution, exile, flight, survival” without such a legacy being consolidated in the defense of an ethnocracy that will use the experience of social trauma to justify the militarization of society and practices of apartheid, in addition to violence against Palestinians described, before the International Court of Justice, as genocidal.
For weeks now, we have seen countries like France narrowly escape being governed, at this very moment, by a far-right party with organic ties to the collaborationism of the Vichy Republic, to colonialism and to openly racist, xenophobic and supremacist discourses and practices.
It is no less a symptom to see this same party mobilize anti-Semitic discourse against its left-wing adversaries, who are largely committed to the Palestinian cause, and to receive open support from significant sectors of the Jewish community in their country. As if, for these sectors, we were facing a “lesser evil.”
There are, however, those who wonder how this inversion was possible, which makes the global far right an objective ally of hegemonic policies in contemporary Israeli society, whether represented by Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro. Those who read Laor and Pelbart's book, instead of following the macabre path that we see in Brazilian political analysts who seek to normalize the far right, may find an important reflection in this regard.
The authors' thesis is that the risk of this alignment with the extreme right was an ever-present possibility in the project to establish the State of Israel and its permeability to agreements with theological-political forces that aimed to consolidate a horizon of ethnocracy through what the book calls an “explosive combination between halacha (religious law) and the State”.
These forces return today as central operators in the political game, which raises important questions about the permeability of our “Western democracies” to the theological-political horizon.
However, far from just serving to describe a specific and dramatic case, the book points to an even more structural problem that concerns the risks and limits of the uses of notions such as identity and social trauma in the field of contemporary politics, especially when these uses are mobilized to justify the existence of a State.
Therefore, the book by Bentzi Laor and Peter Pál Pelbart
It is a fundamental document for us to reflect on other political perspectives that, based on the concrete experience of oppression, believe they can find refuge and a horizon of struggle by continually mobilizing identity and fidelity to irreparable trauma.
In fact, the affirmation of identity may initially appear as a way of defending against experiences of violence and vulnerability. It allows the consolidation of the shared memory of the traumas suffered, the construction of spaces of identification and mourning.
2.
Identity, however, has two stages. There is always the risk that it will gradually become an immunization device, especially when managed by a State that positions itself as the guardian of collective trauma. In this case, everything happens as if the State were beginning to say: “We were violated once, no one looked out for us, so we have every right to use whatever is necessary to guarantee our inviolability and security against anyone who appears to put our integrity at risk again.”
It could be said that this is a premise that constitutes the right of defense inherent to each and every State in the world, but it would be worth remembering, in the case of recent Israeli history, that no right of defense means the right to massacre, that there is an important element to be taken into account when the experience of the systematic massacre of others produces in me only pure indifference and insensitivity, in addition to the desire to define who will occupy my borders.
It would also be worth asking whether the argument of the right to defense continues to be valid when I receive reactions from a territory that I occupied illegally for more than 50 years, sovereignly ignoring any and all international laws that oblige me to immediately evacuate.
Hence such a central statement as this one that we find in the book: “Cohabitation is not a choice, but rather a condition of political life. The events after October 7th indicate that Israel wants to decide which population should not border it, and a movement is already underway to demand the removal of the population from Gaza […]. This has nothing to do with defense, but with dispossession.”
In other words, the transformation of the State into the guardian of social trauma prevents the consolidation of a generic disposition that points to indiscriminate solidarity with any situation of violence similar to that suffered, regardless of who is now the oppressed.
It prevents the understanding that the subject capable of holding the social trauma is not the State, but something like a community to come, whose limits ignore borders and allow for a true monadic internationalism capable of truly engaging with otherness and the multiplicity of voices of its pain.
In this sense, what “The Post-Jewish Jew” shows is how concrete historical situations provide the opportunity for the realization of horizons of political creation. Creation of that which we are not willing to abandon, even if it appears in the present as a mere utopia.
The diasporic and nomadic condition of Jewishness, its historical wandering and deterritorialization are transformed by the authors, following the reflections of Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler, into weapons against the consolidation of a warlike and militarized identity, increasingly strong among us.
They are the power to be recovered for the consolidation of a post-identity politics that we yearn for, that we feel as a dramatic latency, continually silenced by those who have learned to mobilize social fears within a capitalist society in deep crisis and that tries to survive by feeding the idea that we must accept that there is no room for everyone, that it is better to fight to be the restricted group that will cross the flood.
The notion of a post-Jewish Jew shows how reflection, experienced dramatically by subjectivity, on the discomfort faced with the misfortunes of identity, but also on fidelity to belonging to a history buried by the present, is a force for opening up futures.
The same force that once led Isaac Deutscher to say: “Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In no sense, then, am I a Jew. However, I am a Jew by the strength of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my tragedy; because I feel the pulse of Jewish history.”
As the authors point out, this is a utopian force that goes beyond the singular destiny of a people.
*Vladimir Safatle He is a professor of philosophy at USP. author, among other books, of Ways of transforming worlds: Lacan, politics and emancipation (Authentic) [https://amzn.to/3r7nhlo]
Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.
Reference
Bentzi Laor & Peter Pál Pelbart. The Post-Jewish Jew: Jewishness and Ethnocracy. São Paulo, Publisher n-1 editions, 2024, 224 pages. [https://amzn.to/3MA0rih]
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