Archive for September, 2009

The Zionist experience in Palestine has exposed the Jewish people to a number of modern experiences which were previously unknown. The governance of a state, the construction of an army and the maintenance of a civil society are but a few of the tasks which the Zionist movement has thrust upon the Jewish people. This exposure has come at the cost of state politics, class creation and, in the case of Israel, ongoing violent conflict. Perhaps the most taxing cost of the Zionist experiment is the creation of a new internal Jewish politics, one which does not tolerate challenge to its authority. In the past twenty years, the discourse surrounding the holocaust has reached a point in which any genuine challenge to its position as the single most horrific event in human history is met with attacks and dismissal from the official organs of the Jewish community. The contemporary Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has placed, at the center of his philosophical platform, a discussion of the Jew in European society and the rise of “Zionist anti-Semitism”. By using the Jew to understand modern European politics, Zizek is able to argue that the intellectual roots of Zionist anti-Semitism and the so-called anti-anti-Semitism lie in European modernity.

Using Lacanian discourse Zizek introduces, perhaps, the foundational tension of the European modernity and Jewish inclusion in Europe:

Insofar as the Jews insist on the unsurpassable horizon of the Law and resist the Christian sublation (Aufhebung) of the Law in Love, they are the embodiment of the irreducible finitude of the human condition: they are not just an empirical obstacle to full incestuous jouissance, but the obstacle “as such,” the very principle of impediment, the perturbing excess that can never be integrated. Jews are thus elevated to the objet petit a (“notre objet a” the title of Francois Regnault’s booklet on the Jews), the object-cause of (our Western) desire, the obstacle which effectively sustains desire, and in the absence of which our desire itself would vanish. They are our object of desire not in the sense of that which we desire, but in the strict Lacanian sense of that which sustains our desire, the metaphysical obstacle to full self-presence or full jouissance, that which has to be eliminated to make way for the arrival of the full jouissance; and, since this non-barred jouissance is structurally impossible, that which returns with increasing strength as a spectral threat the more Jews are annihilated. (Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View)

European anti-Semitism has not dissolved with the holocaust rather it has transformed into unfounded critique of the state of Israel. Zizek argues:

Today’s anti-Semitism is no longer the old ethnic anti-Semitism; its focus is displaced from the Jews as an ethnic group to the State of Israel… In this way today’s anti-Semitism can present itself as anti-anti-Antisemitism, full of solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust; the reproach is just that, in our era of the gradual dissolution of all limits, of the fluidization of all traditions, the Jews wanted to build their own clearly delimited nation-state. (The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. Page 253-254)
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